East of Empire

In the years following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia began to proliferate, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of these increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces a series of intersecting narratives between 1919 and the mid-1940s as anti-colonial nationalism gained momentum across the East, and political crises mounted within Europe. Historian Erin M.B. O'Halloran documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges and shifting political alliances which came to animate the interwar project of "Easternism" a humanist, cosmopolitan vision of the world whose centre of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo.
Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sa'ad Zaghlul, this book introduces other historical personages: Eastern feminists, pro-Palestinian activists, Egyptian surrealists, Italian spies, Arab poets and British propagandists. In revealing their layered relationships with one another, the book also demonstrates their role in shaping political developments on three continents during a moment of profound global entanglement and political upheaval. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anti-colonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.