 Yn y bwysig amddai gwybodol yn iawn. Mae'n fwy o'ch mynd i'n gweithio'n ffwrdd. Mae'n gwirioneddau'n gweithio. Yn y bwysig amdano'n gweithio, am ychydig i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell ac mae'n gwych iawn i chi i gydig i'w gweithio'r cwmpasatio. Mae yna yma yma yma cyngor yma o ffordd yma yn cael ei ddweud i bob ei amser o'r exibisiol mogl. Ac y gallwch chi'n gweithio'n gweithio ac yn gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n fawr o'r llwyddiad a llwyddiad o gweithio'r cyntaf yn ymgyrchol. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'r prysgwys, wrth i'r gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'n Michael Wood, oedd y gallwch yn ymddiad o'r ffordd yma, mae'n ddysgu'r cyffredin, drosan, i maen nhw'n golygu ynghyd, fel y golygu eich gwyllion yn y pryd, ac yn ddigonol o'r neidio anglo-saxon cylŵr. A'r tŷa philm, rydych chi arddangos nhw'n mynd i'r pwyl o ymddill yn ystwyfi nutrition ac oedd yn cy sleidio'r gwneud hynny yn y Ffordd Sfwylo, yr Alexander Y Grad. Michael wedi bod yn ni yma'r cyffredin yma, pan ychydig i Gweithiau Paanca女? The title of this evening's conversation is called The Ruins of Empyre, which relates to the author's most recent book, which I'm in the middle of reading with huge interest and enthusiasm, and I think if you look at the celebratory reviews that it's had, you'll gather some of the interest it's aroused. And a little bit of controversy somewhere because it starts to tell the stories of people who are little known in the western narrative of imperial history, a largely celebratory narrative. And this book presents some counter arguments to that and presents us with a range of fascinating and important figures who have been ignored or downplayed in previous history. I'm not going to say any more because I believe Michael is going to make a few introductory remarks about our guests, so I will ask you to welcome our two speakers today and hand over to Michael. Thank you. Thanks very much, John. It's a really great pleasure and a privilege to be here to welcome Pankaj tonight and to listen to him. His books and journalism, it seems to me, constitute the most powerful and eloquent commentary on our times. And if I can put it so crassly, the post-colonial, the post-imperial tradition, the dilemmas of the great traditional civilisations of Asia when faced with the impact of the West in technology and values and so on. And those are things we'll talk about tonight. I just wanted to say one word, being a fan, as it were, that among Pankaj's many writings, and you may not all be familiar with them, are a trilogy of books which really should be on everybody's bookshelf, I think. An End to Suffering, which I can remember taking with me gosh eight years ago, was it Pankaj? You've published it and reading it in India, which is really one of the great modern memoirs of travel, history, contemplation, many things. Temptation of the West are fabulous travel, political, well thriller as well, actually an extraordinary series of essays. And our main theme tonight, which John's already spoken about, the Ruins of Empire, all of these books mix autobiography and travel and history and politics and historiography too. We'll talk about that. Underpinned by rigorous historical analysis, the new book's a great work of history, it seems to me, but also what makes them so appealing is actual experience. They're all informed by tenacious, on-the-ground observation, the willingness to put yourself right in the middle of things and to hang out there for as long as it takes to get the kind of answers that you're looking for. But at the same time, they've all got a really deep sympathy for people, especially those downtrodden middling sort of people who never get written about in travel books with their anxieties and their aspirations. Mr. Sharma in Pankaj's Landlord in this wonderful book and even Rajesh, the fellow student at Benares, who turns out to be a hit man for criminals and gangsters. Anyway, Hilary Mantel called Pankaj an intrepid, endlessly questioning spirit, and the new book is an absolutely audacious historical sweep. It focuses on the period which we're all taught to see as the heyday of the western empires, the Victorian empires, peace and prosperity and self-confidence and so on, but a time which Asian peoples experienced as catastrophe. I was reminded recently reading a book on Victorian war poetry that every year of Victoria's reign, 63, nearly 64 years, the Brits were fighting a war somewhere in the world. And the rediscovery of Asia over the next hundred years as Pankaj shows in the book is not just economic, but intellectual. That's the core of the book and that's the template that he's offering to us all to see that history from a different viewpoint. The book has three great characters, mesmerising characters that most of us perhaps were unaware of and I'd really like to start off by asking you Pankaj to give us a few thumbnail portraits of these astonishing people, starting with Jamal al-Afghani. I'll try. Well, thanks for the incredibly kind introduction, the opposite of what the Hitman does, he just did. It's nice to have you as a friend. Al-Afghani, incredibly versatile character, he was born in Iran, Shiite origin, but disguises origins when he travelled through mostly Sunni countries, Sunni Muslim countries, and became hugely influential in most of the societies he travelled through. He was such a, I mean he was sort of the first activist of his time in the sense that he was the first to diagnose the incredible challenge Western imperialism, British imperialism in particular, posed to Muslim societies in South Asia and the Middle East, and he did this because he was in India soon after the suppression of the mutiny from which we can see some poignant pictures at the at the exhibition in the library, and he was there immediately after that, and the lessons he drew from that experience, he amplified wherever he went in Egypt, Turkey, Iran of course, because people there you have to remember hadn't really been that exposed to imperialism, Western imperialism at that point to the same degree as India and South Asia. So he went out there and said, look, if you don't strengthen yourselves, if you do not build strong enough institutions, if you don't educate your women, if you don't educate your citizens, you're going to suffer the same fate that I saw these poor Indians suffer in 1857. So this was a sort of basic simple message, and then he of course elaborated, he spun various elaborations on what Muslims need to do, and not just Muslims, he was working with Syrian Christians from Damascus, he was working, one of his main collaborators was a Jewish Arab, who he worked with also in Paris, he also spent some time in Paris, a great travel actually. So extremely cosmopolitan figure at a time when the word cosmopolitan hadn't really come into the world, traveling, being exposed to many different cultures, learning a lot, and picking up languages, picking up different, picking up, making contacts with all kinds of people, but also incredibly restless, moving from one idea to another, and he was forced to because he was faced with this very, this very increasingly serious threat all through the 19th century, because the Europeans were gaining and expanding so rapidly, dramatically in the second half of the 19th century, and he was witnessing all this, and so he was, at one point he was saying, let's embrace liberal constitutional democracy, Hindu-Muslim unity in India, that was one message he was amplifying in India, and then towards the end of his life he embraced a version of what we now call pan-Islamism, very different thing back then. So he was constantly trying to work up a response to what do we, people in the Muslim countries, people in Asian countries, need to do in order to survive with dignity in a world that is increasingly dominated by a really small number of Western countries, Western European countries. This was also the message that someone like Liang Chichao, who is the second figure I talk about in the book, the sort of first, China's first modern intellectual in the sense that he was the first one to start publishing, one of the first Chinese to start publishing periodicals for a mass audience, for a general audience, start publishing history books, writing articles, educating a Chinese public that was coming into being at that time, and again telling them that China is under threat and China is about to be subjugated, and these are the things you need to do, and this is what other countries are doing, this is the fate other countries are suffering at this point. And so he takes on, I mean he really sort of starts to write and travel in the late towards the end of the 19th century, Al Afgani is dead by that time, and so all across East Asia, Liang Chichao becomes this sort of major figure, huge influence on the Chinese next generation of Chinese intellectuals and activists, and also Al Afgani I forgot to mention was a huge influence on the second and third generation of Muslim thinkers and activists, the first nationalist icon of the father of the Egyptian nation was a disciple of his. Various Iranian liberals, constitutionists were disciples of his. Even the Iranian revolutionaries of the 1970s, they also, exactly, exactly. It's a very mixed, interestingly mixed legacy that left-wingers in Turkey, hardline Islamists in Iran, all of them could draw inspiration from this figure. But Al Afgani's not a hardline Islamist but he does believe that in Islam lies a source of regeneration. Islam lies also, I think his relationship with religion with Islam was pragmatic. He saw Islam as a source of solidarity. You're looking at societies where there are no trade unions, there are no NGOs, there are no, there's no civil society as such. So if you want to politically organise, if you want to mobilise the masses, then the one thing that they all share the masses is Islam and belief in the ideals of Islam. So if you want to have a strong political movement in those countries, it was very straightforward, it's very obvious to someone like Al Afgani, then you have to invoke Islamic notions against Western realism, which is not to say that you have to reject everything the West has to offer to you. He was very much in favour of learning from the West and, you know, actually was constantly denouncing various obscurantist tendencies within Muslim societies at that time, including Mullahs, and he was very much against the kind of learning that was being imparted in madrasas, for instance. He very much wanted some aspects of Western style education, particularly in the sciences and mathematics. His speeches are full of these exhortations to the Muslims that he spoke to. So he's situated in a different area from, I mean, post the First War of Independence, the Great Indian Rebellion, you've got a, you have got a day-of-bandy people and so on. I mean, some of the people that the Brits arrest call themselves Talibs, don't they, back then? They represent one Islamic reaction. He's got a pan-Islamic reaction which is rather different. Which is very different and, you know, in all Muslim societies or major Muslim societies at that time, whether it's Turkey or Egypt, there's a very strong liberal tradition of people actually, you know, diagnosing this peculiar nature of Western power and saying, well, we need to learn from the West and we need to also strengthen ourselves in these ways, whether it's by modernising our army, by having a constitution or having an elected parliament, all these things we have to adopt, whether it's the young Ottomans in Turkey, whether it's the young, you know, whether it's the young Turks in Turkey later on or the liberal constitutionists in Egypt. So I think the liberal tradition at that point is very much dominant. Of course, you have, you know, the fanatics and the fundamentalists too, people talking of jihad. But even pan-Islamism, you know, it's not really this thing that we now associated with, which is with Osama bin Laden. It's a completely different thing at that point. This is very much, pan-Islamism is a very much a response developed in Ottoman Turkey to what they perceive quite correctly as pan-Europeanism, you know, all the European powers pressing down very hard upon the Ottomans. And they say, well, if they can invoke racial and religious solidarity, why can't we do the same? And mind you, at the same time, I've been reading the history of Java, you know, people in Java back in the 1830s and 40s are beseeching the Ottoman Sultan, you know, please save us from these Dutch imperialists. You know, can you do something about this? People in Xinjiang later on in the 1860s. And these appeals are finally reaching the Ottoman emperor. And that's where Al of Ghani comes in and says, well, I'm your man, you know, I can actually, you know, create this particular unity you're looking for pan-Islamic. I'm such a traveller and I have these contacts. That's towards the end of his life. So, you know, he travels through a whole range of political tendencies and ideas in his short life, which we see, you know, manifested in different forms in over the next hundred years. And Liang Tu, before we turn to your third great character in this book, Liang Tu was a great traveller. And all these people have seen more of the world than almost any Western intellectual at that time that you could mention, haven't they? They really are. Absolutely. I mean, they are very, and for that reason, they are unconventional thinkers. I mean, when we think of intellectuals, we think of people who very much confined to one place and institution, academic institution or library, university and all the great figures of, for instance, modern Western intellectual tradition, you could say, these are people who spend their lives, you know, particular areas and and basically not being travellers or it certainly haven't derived most of their ideas through travel or through exposure to other societies. I mean, whether it's Macaulay or Hegel, you know, spinning all these completely absurd ideas about India and China sitting in Germany or James Mill. I mean, any number of people who can think of very limited exposure to other societies and yet... Let me interrupt you and just read your wonderful epigraph on Hegel, Western views of the history of China, 1820. The history of China has shown no development. So we cannot concern ourselves with it any further. China and India, as it were, lie outside the course of world history. This is like Macaulay's announcement that one shelf of European literature was worth the whole of the literature of the subcontinent. Exactly. Not that he knew any of the literature of the subcontinent, but... He didn't need to. So people like Al-Afghani and Liang are seeing the world from a... They're standing in a different position. They're standing and they are thinking on the run, you know, these are people under tremendous pressure because their societies are threatened and they know that they will sink if they don't devise solutions to them in immense problems they face. So they are travelling. They're constantly comparing their societies to other societies. I mean, Liang goes to America in 1903 and has some incredible perceptions on the state of America at that time about the state of American democracy, about the state of American capitalism, the huge inequalities he sees there, for instance, you know, how a small percentage of people have cornered a disproportionate share of the national wealth and, you know, and the rest have been left to fathom for themselves. Yeah. What does he say? Can you remember? He doesn't need to talk about 200,000 people owning... I can't remember... Owning. I mean, he also has actually stricited some statistics. I wonder where you got them from about... Owning about 80% of the national wealth, which is not actually... Things haven't changed much. But also the way American democracy works and how it's been corroded from within by special interests, by corporate interests, by lobbyists. This is also... Gosh, things haven't changed then. Exactly. I mean, it's really remarkable the way, you know, we've been so accustomed to Asian societies being looked at or being judged in these kinds of harsh ways, Hegel or Macaulay, or even people travelling there and saying, you know, and actually completely misdiagnosing. You could say so much of intellectual endeavour in the last 50 years has been aimed at removing the misconceptions created by people like Hegel and, you know, created by 19th century European thinkers about China or India. In that sense, compared to that, I mean, you know, someone like Al-Aqqani or someone like Liang was incredibly perceptive about the societies they were travelling through. But as I said, I mean, they were also... They had to... They were great, you know, risk in getting things wrong at that point. They just had to focus very hard on... They just couldn't cost on the national power of their respective societies. You spoke about Al-Aqqani's attitude to Islam. What's Liang's attitude towards traditional Chinese civilisation? Because those who follow him will just destroy it, won't they? What's his take on the path China should take? He went through several phases. You know, he was originally very much a Confucianist brought up in the traditional Chinese system of education and very much set on that path of joining the civil services. He was, in fact, travelling to Peking to sit for his civil service examinations when his ship was stopped by Japanese and he and his mentor, and they both witnessed the humiliation of China by this upstart new power, Japan. And that sort of set them on this different path altogether, analysing why China's so weak, why have we and people like us who've been in the centre of East Asia for such a long time? Why are we being pushed around and bullied and humiliated in this fashion? And perhaps what we need to do is modernise the imperial system, the monarchy. So he started off very much as a kind of conservative reformer. So let's hold on to the monarchy. Let's hold on to the imperial system. Do some changes to it. Introduce a new western style educational system. Let's do away with this old imperial system of education, this bureaucracy. But the way in which China was humiliated over beginning the Boxer Rebellion, that brought home to him the possibility that something much more radical might be needed and that we might actually actually overthrow this whole imperial system or this system of monarchy altogether and what China needs to be is a liberal republican country. So he embraced western ideas of democracy, western ideas of liberalism, but then he went through another phase where he saw and the trip to America was an eye-opener for him, thinking that liberal democracy is no good for a country like China. Liberal democracy in its own original setting in a country like America is being corrupted and corroded. And in a country like China, which needs to urgently strengthen itself and become powerful enough to face the challenge of the west, liberal democracy will drag us down. What we need is a kind of enlightened autocracy. What we need is state capitalism. We need the state to support our businessmen and to build industrial strength. So again, you know, responding to particular situations and devising. So he became and then subsequently he witnessed the immense slaughter of the first world war or the after effects. And that completely broke his faith in western ideas of science, of democracy, of liberalism. And he thought, you know, these people who claim to be paragons of civilization, they've just ended up slaughtering each other for four years in a war nobody knew how to end completely pointlessly. We have nothing to learn from them and that are confusion ways that talk of harmony, that talk of brotherhood, much, much better. So he retreated into, you know, highly conservative position towards the end of his life, which is the point at which he meets and strikes a friendship with the third figure in the book, Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore, who we think of as an Indian poet, as a Bengali poet, but he was also a great thinker, a commentator, a great traveller. He travelled everywhere. I mean, there's some travels that I haven't written about in the book. He travelled to Cairo, any metal of Gandhi's disciple, and they had an exchange of letters. He travelled to Baghdad, he travelled to Iran, he travelled to China, Japan, Java, Indonesia, everywhere. And again, assessing, you know, these particular societies, also comparing them to India and wondering what India needs to do again, you know, in this world that where Western-style politics, Western-style economy was held as a supreme model, as a thing that everyone should adopt. And that's where he sort of starts talking to Liang. And Liang is hugely influenced by Tagore at that point. And, you know, they both sort of start telling the Chinese, and Tagore goes on this famous visit to China in 1924, where he wants to tell the Chinese that, look, don't imitate the West. I know you've been humiliated, and I know, you know, that makes you want to develop the kind of military power that the West has accumulated. I know it makes you want to create these nation states and to inculcate a strong sense of Chinese nationalism. But look, this is a terrible mistake you're making, because that's just going to lead to a lot of violence. And he already is seeing Japan, you know, going down that path, and he's also telling the Japanese that, look, your attempts to imitate the West is going to end in disaster, which of course it did. But Japan's initial astonishing success, for instance, over the Russian Empire at Tsushima in 1905, this had electrified people across Asia. I mean, just take us back to that moment. It had a huge galvanising effect on a range of people. In fact, the book begins for this moment in 1905, with Japan defeating Russia at the Battle of Tsushima, and the news spreads around the world, and a range of people from, you know, Gandhi, who was an unknown lawyer in South Africa at that time, to Suniat Sen, who happens to be in London, and Atatork, who's just a little soldier in Damascus, a very young soldier. They all received this news, and in far of Java, Malay Peninsula, everywhere this news is greeted with great excitement that for the first time a non-white country has defeated a major Western European military power. And if the Japanese can do this, if they can modernise themselves fast enough, then surely we can do the same, and we can also live a dignity in this world where we are constantly humiliated by European power. So it's a great message that's sort of likely possible national regeneration that all of these people, the Egyptian nationalists and Nehru, I forgot to mention, he's a sort of public school boy at that point. He's travelling to his public school in the UK when the news reaches him, and he's tremendously elated. So the message that took was that we can all become strong nation states, like Japan, and again hold our heads up with dignity, but Tegor sees the dark side of that, and he goes around alerting people to it that, look, if you start doing this, then you're just basically going to do to your own people and to your neighbours what Western powers have been doing to you. And this is a message he sends out in Japan. It's much ridiculed. He's called the man from the lost country, the poet from the lost country, and both the Japanese and the Chinese have a very contemptuous view of India at that point. It's a completely defeated, conquered, subjugated country that lost their culture, the British have completely overwhelmed them. And so who are you to give us lectures about this? And also in China, when he gets there in 1924, the Communist Party has been formed, and the Chinese radicals, the second generation of Chinese thinkers and activists who initially followed Liang, who were hugely inspired by Liang Chechaw, and now they are turning their back on him. I think he's just a furry daddy guy who's gone crazy embracing Confucianism in his old age. What China needs is science, democracy. We need to have a proper political movement. We need to construct a strong nation state. So they are embarking on a different journey altogether, which, as we know, goes in a very different direction altogether. So they are simply not prepared to receive or take those messages. So he's ridiculed, heckled, and booed. He has to cut short his trip and return to India. But he plays, I think, a crucial role in the book by simply showing how so many Asian countries were, in one sense, under the pressure of events, forced to adopt certain Western techniques, whether it's the nation state. I think that nation state is the most important of them. And that experiment, that adventure, was not going to end well. The idea, the Western idea of the nation state was not suited to these multi-ethnic, multi-religious societies of Asia. That basic message, I think, remains true to this very day. So I think it was incredibly prescient figure in sort of seeing this very clearly. I mean, one of the things you speak about, and perhaps which links those three fascinating characters, is that all of them have a sense that in the richness of the cultures, of their great civilisations to which they belong, there is a resource for remodeling the future. You're not leaving that behind. But in a sense, the traumas of the 20th century, perhaps, suggests that some of their fondest hopes were defeated or lost and are only now we're still living with the consequences, do you think, Pankaj? I mean, I'm just, you know, that myself is from Mao and the Iranian revolution. Absolutely. I mean, look at the calamities in places like China. I mean, China is a very garish example of that. The kind of human costs that have been paid to make China the strong power it is today. The innumerable victims of the cultural revolution, the great leap forward, the millions of people who died in famine, all for what? To make China the strong nation state. The cost, the human cost of so many other countries have been well concealed, well suppressed, whether it's Turkey or Taiwan or South Korea or India, for that matter. The immense effort and energy, the resources we've invested in the last 64, 65 years into holding on to this territory that we know as India, holding on to these minorities and not just holding on, actually suppressing them in many instances, going to wars, building up a huge military. Look at Pakistan, same story there. When we, in our own histories, I mean, these are very old societies, the nation states of India and Pakistan are very young, but the societies are much, much older. Over centuries and centuries, we had developed resources, forms and means of coexistence. Otherwise, these societies would have perished a long time ago. Those forms of knowledge have been largely lost to us. This is what Tagore's lament at a very early stage in this process, that look, don't give up, don't turn your back on these histories, on these traditions. What you're looking at, what you're seeking to adopt, this particular nationalism which is so glamorous and which is so attractive, because it comes to you from the West, look at what it is doing to European powers themselves, look at the wars they've been fighting, look at the violence and bloodshed there. Of course, the 20th century, I mean, he died too early to see some of the more ghastly events of the bloodier century ever, but this 20th century fully confirmed his message in the ethnic cleansings, the two world wars, and not to mention the unaccounted for crimes of post-colonial nation states all across Asia, whether it's Indonesia or any number of places. Just about every country with Thailand, Burma has been struggling, basically, to impose this idea of the nation state upon these very old multi-ethnic societies. Everywhere, I mean, there is an ethnic or more than one insurgency or something or other going on. How do you think that'll, I mean, it's impossible to say, isn't it? But when you look at British India, for example, and you look at that map in the Murray's Guide for 1929 or something like this, a patchwork of 675 small states, large states, princetums, a couple of them as big as big European countries, and you look at what you call the great disaster of partition in your book, and the still continuing struggles in different parts of the country. Any signs as to how the next phase of that will pan out? I mean, 60 years is only a short time, isn't it, from those catastrophes? Any thoughts on that legacy? Does the past still contain clues to the future? I probably should refrain from saying, probably should I just confine myself to providing a somewhat accurate accounting of the past. The future is always risky because you always made to look foolish by what happens next. But there are multiple possibilities. There are multiple possibilities, you know, and I think so much is still in play. They're the fact that we have these histories, we have these archives, these memories, these traditions, and the fact that we can drop on them anytime we want to, that we haven't actually lost sight of them. They're always there. Well, in a moment I'm going to throw it open to the audience because so many terrific and important ideas have come out of this already. Just a brief sort of sum up on your three extraordinary characters. Fascinating. Every one of them worth almost a feature film of their own, aren't they? I mean, one thinks of Afghani's amazing, that amazing face and those extraordinary journeys. What an extraordinary character he is and how little we know of these people. Do you know it was the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birthday last year and I approached the BBC to do a commemorative documentary about this fascinating figure, not about his poetry but about his politics and his journeys, and I was told that he didn't figure enough to put on British television. Can you believe it? That's another black mark against the BBC. It's a black mark, isn't it? You know, these are, and it only underlines, it seems to me, what you're trying to say in the book, which is also about historiography, isn't it? It's about how we have been taught to see our history and by focusing on these three extraordinary figures, you situate yourself in another position to see these great events of history, don't you? Well, I think it's, I suppose it is, history is a way of orienting ourselves to the world we live in and defining for ourselves our place in the world, our place, our relationship with events in the past, with the political configurations in the present, and I think, I've thought this for some time now, that so much of the history we are taught in our respective nation-states. I grew up in India, weaned on a particular version of nationalist history in which the Indian National Congress, the Indian Nationalist Movement, was the greatest thing on earth and the British were terribly wicked and we scored a major victory over them. Then there was this villain called Jinnah who stole Pakistan away, really sort of unpleasant figure, and then, you know, the other history you have access to is the history, the mainstream history authored in London and New York, the sort of old and the new imperial centres and they give you this, you know, sort of glowing picture of how the west made the world and how people should really ought to be grateful to the west for being made in the image of the west and neither of those histories really account for our place in the world. I mean, you know, the history of the nation-state, whether it's India or Pakistan or Sri Lanka, it doesn't tell you about, for instance, the links between Tagore and Leanne Chachow, this whole cosmopolitan world that existed 65 years ago and had existed for centuries and centuries. You had Persians from Persians going all the way to Banaras and setting up a centre of Persian literary culture that, you know, all the way down south, Indians travelling all the way to Indonesia, the codes of Java and Sumatra, acquiring symbols of Sanskritic culture, you know, all of this history is lost to us and has been lost to us in these histories of the nation-state. And so I think what we need now and I feel increasingly are global histories that in some ways speak to where we are living in a globalized world with all these many layers of identity. You know, neither of us belonged to one particular nation-state anymore. I mean, the ways in which our, that was always a fiction, you know, the ways in which our identities are infused, layered and informed by, you know, so many different histories. And I think that's where histories that, you know, in some sense, you know, transcend these, at least the sectarianism of the nation-state histories become so important. Tremendous. I did an interview not long ago with Jim O'Neill, who's the bricks guy for Goldman Sachs, who showed me on his computer their attempted reconstructions of what the world's GDP had been going back into the Renaissance period and estimated, and it is only an estimate that, for instance, India had at least 20% of the GDP of the world in 1600, but was 3% in 1900. And I said to him, you know, come on, what's the future, Jim, you know, and all that. And he said, well, of course, you know, the pattern of history, apart from these moments where a technological leap was gained by the Atlantic seaboard countries and, of course, that crucial thing of them being able to take the whole of the new world and its natural resources and dispossess its people and put their surplus people in there, as well as take their resources. He said, you know, the crucial thing is population. And of course, the great traditional civilisations of India and China will inevitably rise again to the position they were then. And, you know, we are watching it now as here in Goldman Sachs on Fleet Street, you know, which only underlines that this perspective you've given us, Pankajad, is just, I think, thrilling, you know, when you read the book, to rediscover the lineaments of other ways of seeing the world with such a truly fascinating characters is great. So I'd like to thank you very much and we'll throw it on to questions. Questions. Yes, gentlemen. I'll relay the question. Gentlemen, first on the left, that, yeah. For the question is based purely on this conversation. I think it's easy to become starry eyed about the civilisation histories of different countries like India and China and assume that we can only, you know, borrow from the past and some people will eulogise their the golden past and therefore you can know what the modern world, the technology, the military, the science and industry, all that goes with it. Now, the behaviour of states is determined by the structure of international relations and how they operate. And at the time of independence, it was a dominance for the two superpowers, you know, with accessory power like great business and minor accessory. Therefore, what should a country like India do or China for that matter if they were not to invest in industry, in science, in technology and inevitably military power because after all it was a lack of military power and technology which left, led to the decline and the collapse of the mobile empire as did the Ottoman empire and they met you in gymnastics. Let's put that, let's put that question. So the question therefore is what is the alternative that Tagore and presumably countries you are endorsing that, what was the alternative open to countries like India and China? It's a very important question because I think someone like Tagore was just beginning to witness how countries, how many people in Asian societies in order to match, in order to simply survive in this world as you say international relations come for a lot in those situations in order to survive as functional societies, they were forced to do a lot of things that the West had done previously and adopt those models. And this is part of the whole tragedy of this history, this is part of the tragic arc of the history that even this book describes is that people were forced to constitute themselves to organize these political movements whether in China or India and there were internal debates whether it's between Gandhi or Nehru or Gandhi in Tagore about what shape or what direction and these debates by the way happened in practically every country that was faced with this challenge from the West but at some point those debates were settled often by external events, by the pressure of external events. In China's case it was 1919 and the humiliation at the Paris Peace Conference where generation decided enough is enough we need to have a proper political movement and unify China through force and that of course played itself out over the next few decades. But at the same time I think one doesn't have to look at it as a question of either or because there's so many other things that could have been done that were possible. There are certain ways in which you could have developed your economy. The idea that industrialization was going to make you very, very powerful at that time which was an idea embraced by practically every post-colonial country which committed these countries with huge agrarian populations to particular trajectory now. Initially they adopted socialism in recent years and the last 20 years they've started to embrace some forms of capitalism but again the trajectory remains the same industrialization, urbanization but when you step back you have to recognize that large countries like India and China or even Indonesia for that matter cannot become carbon copies of Western European countries or the United States. The world simply doesn't have the resources to provide for the urban consumer oriented lifestyles of 2.6 billion people. Everything is against you, the maths is against you, the metrics are everything is against you, it's just not going to happen. So what people like Tagore or Liang, any number of people at that time, what basically saying was that look we have to divide, we have to do certain things and in the end even someone like Gandhi who was a great critic of Western modernity was also nationalist, he was also in the end he settled for the nation state and there are certain things you have to do but there are certain things you don't have to do and certain things you can do in a certain way. So all these debates which are impossible to summarize in a short reply, those ideas, those ideas that were thrown up at that time they are still in play and they remind us of our contemporary predicament which is of countries which have been set this impossible standard and failing, constantly failing to achieve those standards and as a result building up a lot of political disaffection, having a lot of fundamentalist movements internally full of disaffected angry people who feel they're being left out, feel they're being given a raw deal. So you have this cycle of violence, of conflict whether it's socialism or capitalism in some ways you could say that last 20 years of globalization by raising expectations has created more scope for conflict and have actually exposed many more societies to violence and conflict by simply by promising a lot but delivering very little and so people like the figures I talk about were warning against that situation. Let's take another question. Somebody put their hand up. Yes here in Europe we see some of the previously unified countries like Spain and Italy and even the UK having increasing pressures to unravel some of that long standing unity from internal pressures and I wonder if you had any view of what your protagonists might have made of that about Europe? Well about the unraveling or the pressure for unraveling the some of the unified nation states that we have of Europe. Yes well I mean European Union is such a new idea that it's hard to you know think of it as something that has been existing for a long it's such a rickety thing as increasingly as is shown right. Yes yes I see what you mean yes yes absolutely well you know I think the the basic thing that you know if you if you want to boil it down into something something very basic and simple what people like Liang or Tagore were warning against was that this whole idea of money making as a central concern of societies of human society the idea of greed being enshrined as a central principle of human societies the idea of competition that is going to lead to conflict disorder stability this is fine all this is okay as long as you are powerful you're strong and you have the world entire world at your disposal which was a case for the small societies of western Europe when they went what this guy was telling you the the man who coined bricks Jim O'Neill that these people got out early conquered the world conquered Latin America got access to those resources then went out and used the strength they had accumulated to subjugate other people's other societies and have access to their resources and their success was built upon that that sort of that early start and early success so we can't aid these weaker societies cannot hope to emulate this whole process I mean it's practically it's impossible to do that because the world has already been dominated and there are no spare continents to to conquer when now when you look at what what's happening in so many these smaller countries that were once very powerful is that they are relatively weaker you know and they don't have the same access to resources they don't that so the whole political philosophy the whole worldviews that were built on the basis of imperial conquest they have been they prove themselves to be completely unsustainable when that basis is taken away and and so if you take if you want to take a long-term picture this is what is happening is that you know countries that derive their power from certain advantages that they've accumulated uh over at a certain period in history when that power is not there then those advantages leak away and then you left to fend for yourself you're as exposed as any asian third world society to conflict and that's what I suspect is going to happen more and more the buddha was right then he was another question yes lady there having to deal with things like diversity in our own cultures and populations that the countries that you are talking about have always had to live with and have had to traditionally found ways of dealing with um and is it the case that something needs to be done to ensure that we actually learn from other countries and and increase the understanding of how we can actually live in a more unified um and harmonious as opposed to existence i'm all for europe learning from other countries um i mean i i you you put your finger on it i think um the fact is that europe itself had a very long tradition of you know accommodating various minorities uh the hapsburg empire uh is a is a classic example of that and when it started to shatter josef wrth who wrote beautifully about the fading of that old order a jewish person who realized that although there was a lot of anti-semitism of an old sort in the hapsburg empire what was going to come next was going to be much worse and so right he was in the early 20th century so even within europe the whole tradition of coexistence or dealing with difference cultural difference religious difference even here that has been lost you know a great deal and i think that's where the experience of you know for instance the ottoman empire or the ching empire which had it's it's it's important not to romanticize the experience but they also had they had devised certain means of managing of accommodating that kind of religious ethnic diversity uh so people persecuted in europe could flee to the ottoman empire and find refuge there for centuries and centuries um i think we've kind of because we've been so focused on you know this history of a very small part of the world and absorbing all its lessons whatever lessons you know we can we can get from it we've forgotten that there are many many other histories out there um and that you know this whole process of creating political institutions of managing diversity of dealing with economic distress you know other societies have a lot of experience of that as well um so i think you know to to basically retrait what you implied in your question we we definitely need we need to learn from you know other societies at this point take what didn't really go into you know very specific deal i mean he was not a policy maker neither was he a think tank wonk um he wasn't prescribing you know what we should do in a in a particular situation he was offering a fairly broad critique of nationalism and the main and what he saw is a sort of basically the idea of organizing societies because so that those societies become internationally competitive and have access to the best resources and all that he was he was very much against this idea that societies should be organized in that way around the idea of greed and exploitation and expansion um if you you know if if one were to think of an alternative to that um you know any number of examples come to mind including very recently if one were to start citing an alternative the autonomy principle that was signed an agreement that was signed very recently in the philippines between the central authority and the secessionist there the muslim secessionist there which is a kind of ideal document for how so many states in asia could conduct their domestic relations with various ethnic religious minorities is that you know here is a or even indonesia for that matter i mean there was a lot of violence a lot of conflict and horrific violence but in the end you know east Timor was given independence archa province again you know outstanding problems but there are ways in which you can conceive of a more federal structure greater autonomy you know for minority dominated regions and there's no i mean there's enough compelling reason to be extremely suspicious of this old model of the centralized nation state i mean the biggest is the self interest isn't it isn't it doesn't the nation state almost inevitably involve us in the destruction of the planet the environment and everything else i mean we're we're totally on that trajectory aren't we in a competitive growth directed global economy there's no way out on that is there everything shows that so we do have to think as tagore and the others thought decentralization you know giving giving people more scope to devise their own economic political solutions gentlemen right at the back with your hand up do you want to sorry could you just elaborate on on why this link between the nation state and going to hell in the handcart if you like um i mean we have to organize our societies in some way um globally whatever what what is why is the nation state wrong in that sense well the way uh the uh figures in the book saw it and the saw it very clearly because they could they could see how small number of people starting out in western europe had managed to conquer the world had managed to become extremely strong by embracing the idea of the organized society and i mean in some sense the french revolution is the beginning of that and nipoli and and and then the french being so successful in dominating other societies in europe then universalize this model of the nation says everyone else in europe starts to imitate the french and thinking their success lies in developing this model of the nation state and they in turn become an example to a lot of people in asia who think well this is the way to strength to national strength and to dignity and to power but the problem is which it's impossible again to explain this in five in in in two minutes or five minutes or even ten minutes but the problem with the whole idea which a lot of people pointed out was that the whole history of the nation state is built upon endless violence and endless expansion that it involved you know a lot of imperial conquest and violence and that uh this model of success was built upon a lot of blood so this is in the end quite unsustainable for many other societies which didn't quite have the access to resources in latin america in north america in various parts of asia and we cannot adopt this particular model because it's completely unsuited for us it's all right for these small predatory societies very predatory at one point in their in their historical evolution to go out and do these things and build up their strength but it doesn't work for us and furthermore it is extremely tainted this particular model by the violence that has been committed in order to make this so successful let me just ask john have we got time for another question or two yeah terrific um gentleman in the middle has had his hand up for a while haven't you there yeah um you mentioned decentralisation and federalism as potential solutions to these um issues of multi-nation states as they really are in the east but would you not say that they're really traditionally western solutions to western problems no i think that's it's a it's a good point um because in the end what we're doing is we're putting a band-aid on the on the on the problem um on the wound which is a big one gaping one um because what really will get away get us away from this whole idea and the violence it involves is a much much much larger shift intellectually politically a much larger shift than we are able to contemplate at this point you know to go back to the previous question uh you know why is the nation state become you know this this is a completely demonised entity in the course of the last hour or so here it's it's because you know here we are witnessing the beginning of yet another scramble for Africa yet another scramble for Latin America i mean don't we all feel a sense of deja vu when we when we look at the headlines in the newspaper all this has happened in the past and it involved a lot of violence and a lot of exploitation maybe the violence and the exploitation won't happen the same way but it still you know requires it still requires a lot of people to be exploited a lot of people to be pushed down a lot of people to be suppressed before some people can become prosperous and successful and so in order to completely move away from that we'll have to you know we'll have to have a larger shift and that's beyond i mean that's you know entering a realm of speculation at this point but you know these were some of the things people like Tagore and Liang were talking about you know what do we need here we are an agrarian society what are our needs how does one define economic growth these are questions now being taken up of course um as economic growth uh you know is is is sort of declining in many countries we people are being you talk of zero economic growth new indexes of happiness how do we measure contentment human contentment maybe it's not to be found in GDP growth you know a lot of our orthodoxies are being dismantled at this point but these people were saying this very early on were questioning this whole particular model now if you want to shift from that then one has to make that larger shift and not just you know talk about you're right not just talk about federalism and autonomy there's a book called how much is enough which is on in everybody's christmas recommendations in the sunday newspapers these are interesting gentlemen there yeah today you mean uh sorry i didn't get the last bit in your book to describe how much China was the greatest navy which was then destroyed by chinese empire well compared to that the western navies were raised from us and the west has since expanded because of the navy the supermissile global supermissile because of navy and now China is time to expand its navy and of course americans will receive reasons for basically yes well the chinese were playing i mean they were not interested in you know expansion at that point where they had this navy and chinese sailors could travel very far down deep into the version gulf but they were not interested in an empire they were not interested in overseas conquests at that time and most of that trade was conducted over land so they did not invest in a massive navy and at some point you know decided to basically completely shut off any kind of naval exploration although mind you a lot of chinese still went out and traded and overseas chinese communities expanded all across southeast asia so you know all of that went on but the official line was that we don't do these things and then of course the europeans arrived the portuguese and put these new technologies of europe to new users altogether i mean the chinese are also made massive advances in you know it's all kinds of scientific advances that are being made in china but it was europeans who put them to a new use altogether using them for instance you know superior armaments and using that using that using them in actual wars against many many of the asian peoples they encountered so they were very quickly successful and were able to you know beat back any kind of domestic challenge to them in these places it's interesting isn't it the do you remember there was a an advert for mcdonald douglass wasn't that full page advert in one of the times or whenever it was back in the 70s which said that in 1422 1433 whenever it was the chinese stopped their voyages and dismantle their fleets this would be like stopping at apollo eight or something like that you know and it was a peon to western inventiveness and to the chinese closing down their their view of the world if you like but i think most writers on this and theodore de barry wrote an absolutely brilliant series of essays on this was that the chinese bureaucrats and thinkers having spent i think there were five or seven major voyages when they're the biggest of them with 27 000 men on board and huge ships they went down as far as east africa um that they simply they had no intention of conquering other nations not they they were interested in showing the flag and and obviously extending their rule over people of chinese peoples of chinese origin on the fringes of china but otherwise they really were um you know showing the flag and bringing exotica back to um beijing but um they simply stopped those voyages and broke up those huge ships and even destroyed the logbooks because they deemed the true goal of their government was to cultivate the um life of the nation within the borders of jung war you know that that was it so it wasn't it wasn't their business to go sailing off and doing those things so they simply put a start to it all so it is different from modern navies and military expansiveness isn't it pardon not the same well i mean to the to the degree that they're going off to east africa and impressing people but they weren't um taking giraffes back to beijing but it's not quite the same as buying up the natural resources of entire countries is it one more time for one more one more lady there i'll relay your question oh we've got the microphone there yeah in resources for your sources for your research and in what languages mostly english um and you know all over i mean i kind of read completely randomly because very few models for um book like this and i had a kind of freedom which was both liberating but also oppressive in the sense that there were few models but at the same time i could you know travel across disciplines which for instance the trained academic would find it hard to do because you have to you know satisfy different protocols linguistic do a lot of work in a one area for a long time before you venture out into another as an amateur i could happily disregard those protocols and just do my own thing and read randomly you know i think of myself as a maker of narratives um and that helped me write this book i did not for a moment think of myself as a historian i think it would be presumptuous to do that um i think of a thought of myself as putting together these stories you know drawing from whatever source i could find wherever and there's a there's a very helpful bibliographical essay at the back actually for all of us who are you know excited by these tales and you want to look elsewhere i mean i knew some of nikki keddie's books on persian culture but i hadn't realised she'd written a political biography of of afghani himself or a hodd from her she was she was very pleased yeah you know so these like like all really fascinating books it just sparks you off wanting to know more and that's that's great isn't it shall we uh where i should call a halt i'm i'm sure that raised many more questions than can be answered but um it's wonderful to have a book that shifts the focus both geographically intellectually and culturally in looking at um history of imperialism and i would echo the um your remarks about the bibliographical essay i see in that you have john graze after tamilain which is um i shouldn't plug another author's books today but that is another great work where the cultural focus is shifted and i think it's quite an exciting period of history to to live in to be starting to look at it not from the very selfish western perspective so i believe there are copies of the book for sale outside and if i could just bring this part of the proceedings to a close and ask you once more to thank michael yn pancoge for their discussion tonight thank you