Parting Gifts of Empire

Parting Gifts of Empire narrates an untold story of how Arabs and South Asians in the twentieth century sought to decolonize their minds. The histories of Palestine and India—both partitioned by the British Empire—were intimately linked. In the face of the same imperially created chasm, intellectuals in Africa and Asia reinvigorated centuries of shared histories to forge new horizons, new solidarities, new institutions, and new fields of knowledge. Esmat Elhalaby traces the forgotten lives of scholars like Wadi’ al-Bustani, revisits Arab and Indian feminist meetings, highlights gatherings such as Delhi’s 1947 Asian Relations Conference, and argues for the centrality of Palestine to the rise of Third Worldism. This book breaks new ground to unfold a global intellectual history of anticolonialism, Asian unity, pan-Islamism, and nonalignment in the making of what became known as the Global South.