How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding
Nile Green
Yale: 2022
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It is the whiggish conceit of a certain kind of cosmopolitan that cultural exchange breeds understanding. But it can just as well occasion contempt. A product of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Enoch Powell could competently chat about the scansion and prosody of Urdu poetry before later becoming Britain’s leading Cassandra of migration, prophesying race riots and “rivers of blood”. Likewise, six years in sunny California proved a scarce prophylactic against xenophobia for Yan Xuetong, China’s Kissinger, who, after his Berkeley doctorate proclaimed his homeland a “benign hegemon”; for unlike empires of old, contemporary China is “making the world more civilised”.

Asia’s self-discovery in the age of steam, Nile Green argues in How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding, was plagued by just such unprofitable encounters. His book’s subtitle is misleading: the story he tells is a riot of intercultural misunderstanding, misperception and mindless solipsism. It is a powerful corrective to the boosterish accounts of Pan-Asianism now fashionable among historians. Truth be told, latent pretensions to supremacy have frequently underpinned calls for Asian unity.

• Tags: India, Issue 30, Nile Green, Pratinav Anil, Solipsism