East of Empire

Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars

Erin M.B. O'Halloran

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781503641440, 9781503640542
• eBook ISBN: 9781503641457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Maps
• Introduction
• Part I: Imagining the East
• Part II: Capital of the East
• Part III: Ambassadors of the East
• Part IV: The East at War
• Epilogue: Midnight in Delhi
• Dramatis Personae
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List