East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars

by Erin M.B. O'Halloran

Overview

From the outset of the twentieth century, Egyptian and Indian leaders understood their movements for self-determination as linked and part of a shared project. Following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia proliferated, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces how anticolonial nationalism gained momentum across the East and documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges, and shifting political alliances that came to animate the interwar project of Easternism: a cosmopolitan vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo.

Erin O'Halloran offers a compelling new account of the era immediately preceding decolonization and the epochal partitions of India and Palestine. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar but no less intriguing personalities: feminists, diplomats, and poets; surrealists, socialists and spies. Each dreamed, wrote, organized and fought for the liberation of the East—a space universally evoked, though seemingly impossible to pin down. 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 anticolonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503641440
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Series:	Stanford British Histories
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Erin M.B. O'Halloran is Marie Sklodowska Curie European Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Maps
Introduction
PART I Imagining the East
1. Morning in Cairo
2. Whose Caliphate
3. The Poetic East
PART II Capital of the East
4. Abyssinia in the Headlines
5. Palestine HQ
PART III Ambassadors of the East
6. The Diplomats
7. The Delegation
8. The Feminists 167Contents
PART IV The East at War
9. Hearts and Minds
10. No Way Back
Epilogue Midnight in Delhi
Dramatis Personae
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Joining Indian and Middle Eastern history, Erin O'Halloran follows activists, poets, painters, and feminists who explored the political and cultural possibilities of belonging to a common 'East.' She shows how these dream palaces were built on the British Empire's fracturing bedrock—then demolished by the nationalist architects of the postcolonial order." —Nile Green, author of How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding

"A model of comparative scholarship, East of Empire shows how the British Empire made for a new internationalism among its subjects. Bringing together Indian and Egyptian nationalisms, as well as the movements for Pakistan and Palestine, Erin O'Halloran rewrites their histories into a new narrative about the making of the postcolonial world." —Faisal Devji, author of Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea

From the Publisher