Books like The Middle East from Empire to Sealed Identities — picked by fans

What motivated the great Asian desire to rebuild and revitalize their societies? The simple answer is centuries of humiliation at the hands of the West. Pankaj Mishra tells remarkable stories of how Asians were both humiliated and educated by the West. Every Western policymaker should read his story about how the British and French forces looted and burned the Summer Palace, destroying more ancient treasures than the Taliban ever did.

Pankaj Mishra describes well the emergence of a key generation of Asian intellectuals inspired by Japan’s naval triumph over Russia in 1905, including Rabindranath Tagore and Liang Qichao. American policymakers who engage in a contest against China without understanding these centuries of humiliation do so at their own peril. 

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory.

Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.

He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

This is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces… show more.

I love the way this book moves between Scotland and Sudan, as told from the perspective of a devout Muslim woman working as a translator for a Scottish academic at Aberdeen University. The story itself is a work of translation and a highly original rewriting of the encounter between East and West, Islam and Christianity, English and Arabic.

All those binaries break down: the English, for example, is Scottish, and the way to pronounce Arabic turns on a difference between Arab-speaking regions so that in both speech and writing, the reader encounters subtleties of translation usually overlooked in the tiresome cliches about “West” and “East.”

I love teaching it to learn with my students the politics of translation. The book has my favorite rewriting of that famous map-pointing scene at the beginning of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—Aboulela restores as Arabic names the blank spaces on the map of… show more.

A book that deconstructs shibboleths of Britons’ patrician identity and their romantic urge to escape modernity in the Arabian desert, A Barren Legacy reorders and erases the imperial world of From Empire to Orient. The author has spent decades working as a civil servant in Oman and has written several Lonely Planet Guides about Middle Eastern countries. Here, she reviews the Arabian journeys of some media-savvy contemporary British travellers and articulately delivers the genre of Arabian travel-writing into the post-modern era. 

Few historians have brought eighteenth-century British culture and politics alive like Linda Colley in this study of how British identity was created between the 1707 union of England and Scotland and the early nineteenth century.

This book is filled with a sense of continuing relevance as Britain continues to struggle with its identity and place in the world. In the eighteenth century this identity was built around Protestantism, commerce, empire, and the nation’s lonely struggle against Napoleon on the European continent.

But can the peripheries of in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland really be persuaded to adhere to this vision of a unified Britain? In pondering this question, Collier’s book strikes me as essential reading.

I first encountered this book as a series of lectures in Oxford in 1978 and was riveted.

Lyons faced head-on the themes of cultural and sectarian antagonism in Ireland from the death of the constitutionalist nationalist leader Parnell in 1891 to independent Ireland’s decision to remain neutral in World War II, using sources that were as much literary as political, and at the end projecting the divisions in Irish society forward to the then-current violence in the North. The tone was notably acerbic, even verging towards despair, but also employing bitter humour.

A great historian, he died prematurely a few years later when just embarking on his projected but unwritten biography of Yeats. He had written many books, but this is the one that left the loudest echoes–notably in nailing the psychological gulf of understanding between Ireland and Britain that became so apparent in the early twentieth century.

This book was recommended to me in graduate school and was a natural fit for the kind of comparative research I was then busy with concerning the global dispersion of national ideas among cultural elites in the nineteenth century. That story is contextualized here through an examination of the life and thought of Yen Fu (1854-1921). Shwartz's work was immediately praised as a model for such a study and continues to appear frequently in bibliographies and course reading lists.

This is fun to read.

Kedourie passionately hates nationalism, which he sees as an irrational millenarian movement born of Enlightenment intellectuals who debunk religion and tradition. He disparages it as a "children’s crusade" on the part of a new group of educated young excluded from power that they see as their right. They promise that the overthrow of the existing order will deliver liberation and earthly salvation but this produces only revolution, war, and tyranny.

It is vividly written, with brilliant characterisations of individual nationalists. This unbalanced critique proposes that wrong ideas, such as national self-determination, have disastrous consequences. But it contains important insights into the "dark side" of nationalism.

Tagore (1861-1941) is generally known as a Nobel Prize-winning poet, but he was also a frequent commentator on contemporary political affairs and the crises of his age. Nationalism, which was composed over the years 1916-17, features long ruminations on imperialism, modernity, and the question of Indian independence, among other subjects of pressing interest to Tagore and his contemporaries. Each chapter affords the reader with an opportunity to experience in full the author’s talents as he strives to put into words his vision for a future shaped neither by "the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship." Instructors may find the work to be an especially valuable resource for stimulating class discussions.

I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.

More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.