ABOUT US
BOOKS
SUBJECTS
SERIES
PUBLISH WITH US
CONTACT
LOGIN
PROFILE
ORDERS
LOGOUT
0
vikramjain@sanctumbooks.com
×
x
x
LOGIN
PROFILE
ORDERS
LOGOUT
x
ABOUT US
BOOKS
SUBJECTS
SERIES
PUBLISH WITH US
CONTACT
Home:
Subjects:
History, Culture & Politics
Middle Eastern Studies
x
Front Cover
Back Cover
Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization
Author:
Esmat Elhalaby
ISBN:
9789395474979
Binding:
Hardcover
Year:
2026
Pages:
267
Size:
16 x 24 x 2 cm
Weight:
555 grams
Price:
INR
1795.00
eBook available at:
Amazon.in:
https://tinyurl.com/4z8ej5zf
Google Books:
https://tinyurl.com/kbjw9xn6
Kobo:
https://tinyurl.com/5fs6uft6
About the Book
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—are intimately linked. In the face of similar imperially created chasms, Arab and Indian intellectuals reinvigorated centuries of shared histories to forge new horizons, new solidarities, new institutions, and new fields of knowledge. In this book, 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 the Third World. 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.
About the Author
Esmat Elhalaby
Esmat Elhalaby is Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto.
Editorial Reviews
“
Parting Gifts of Empire
brilliantly brings to light anti-imperialist forms of knowledge produced by Middle Eastern and Indian intellectuals preceding and following decolonization. Instead of engaging in a customary examination of the bilateral colonizer-colonized relations, it turns its eye on South-South interactions to show that Palestine figured prominently in a range of spheres—in philosophical writings and translations, academic meetings, and political, diplomatic, and women activists’ conferences. This is a timely and much-needed reminder that the question of the colonial oppression of Palestine is not new but has long been an expression of anticolonial thought and politics.”
—Gyan Prakash, author of
Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point
“This remarkable intellectual history uncovers the writings of unjustly forgotten Arab and South Asian writers, academics, and activists who produced a counternarrative opposing colonial and imperial discourse on the non-European world. This book reminds us of the roots of that discourse in inequality and hegemony, and of early attempts to challenge it during the era of decolonization.”
—Rashid Khalidi, author of
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
“A pathbreaking account of intellectual worlds of anticolonial thought that spanned the Middle East and South Asia. Esmat Elhalaby marshals a vast array of ideas about anticolonialism and decolonization produced by scholars, polyglot writers, poets, and feminist intellectuals who imagined new liberatory futures across geographies.
Parting Gifts of Empire
is a stunning history of ideas and a passionate account of a lost network of thinkers, a book that simultaneously reclaims a shared history of knowledge and challenges us to articulate new visions of justice for our present.”
—Durba Mitra, author of
Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought
“
Parting Gifts of Empire
is beautifully written, brilliantly conceived, and replete with exciting ideas and innovative invitations. This is the kind of book that you start and can’t put down.”
—Sherene Seikaly, author of
Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of imperialist propaganda passing as universal knowledge. Esmat Elhalaby’s elegant study proves that anticolonial thought ushered in an intellectual revolution as cataclysmic as the Enlightenment. Arab and Asian thinkers, facing neocolonial reaction, partition, and layers of European condescension, plotted together to create new ideas dedicated to creating a new world. The work remains unfinished, but the gift of this book and its author offers a portal for us to continue our struggle.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Starting from the twin partitions of India and Palestine, memorably called ‘a parting gift of empire’ by Edward Said, Esmat Elhalaby narrates a riveting social history of intellectuals in the colonized world. This brilliant book should be essential reading for all historians of anticolonialism and decolonization.”
—Omnia El Shakry, author of
The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt
Customer Reviews
Books of related interest
Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India...
Myth and History in Ancient Persia: The Achaemenid...
The Book of Monasteries
Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Lit...
Kings and Dervishes: Sufi World Renunciation and t...
Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals...
Religion, Orientalism and Modernity: Mahdi Movemen...
The Center of the World: A Global History of the P...
Shelter for the Night: On Afghanistan, Language, a...
The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and...
The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient...
South Asian Technospaces - Hardcover
Ancient India: Insights into Social & Economic...
Women, Wealth and the State in Early Colonial Indi...
Muslim Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Diversity and...
The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making...
Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri La...
The Divine Names: A Mystical Theology of the Names...
An Environmental History of Postcolonial North Ind...
The Requirements of the Sufi Path: A Defense of th...
The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali
Contemporary Global Governance: Multipolarity vs N...
Decolonization and the Struggle for National Liber...
Between Life and Death: Governing Populations in t...
The Rules of Logic
Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern Sout...
Federalism and Second Chambers: Regional Represent...
South Asian Technospaces
The Physics of Capitalism: How a New Political Eco...
US Hegemony Global Ambitions and Decline- Emergenc...
Iran to India: The Shansabānīs of Afghanistan, c. ...
Civilisation, Education and School in Ancient and ...
Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert
Female Militants in South Asia: Fighters and Facil...
Visions of Empire and Other Imaginings: Cinema, Ir...
A Story of Ambivalent Modernization in Bangladesh ...
Die Rani von Jhansi – Rebellin wider Willen: Biogr...
City of Lyrics: Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popu...
License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passp...
Warriors after War: Indian and Pakistani Retired M...
Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in...
Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional F...
"The Ethos of Britain": Delderfieldʼs Sw...
Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature...
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and ...
The Discovery of Insulin: Special Centenary Editio...
Earthquake Disaster Management: Focussing on the E...
A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poet...
The Road to Empire: The Political Education of Kha...
Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labo...
Origin and Growth of Satī in Early Medieval India:...
Pakistan and the New Nuclear Taboo: Regional Deter...
Killing in the Name of the State: State-Sponsored ...
Independent Kashmir: An Incomplete Aspiration
Haram in the Harem: Domestic Narratives in India a...
Remembering Empire: Power, Memory, & Place in ...
J.S. Mill's Encounter with India
The Political Economy of Education in South Asia: ...
Education, Labour & Science: Perspectives for ...
The Essence of Reality: A Defense of Philosophical...
Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglement...
Strategic Dynamics and Nuclear Weapons Proliferati...
The Rise of a Multipolar World: Papers presented a...
Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of ...
Sufism and Power in the Ottoman Empire: The Writin...
Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature...
In Deadly Embrace: Arabic Hunting Poems
Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional F...
The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytell...
Meditation, Vol. I: History And Present Time
Turning Wind into Power Effects of Stakeholder Net...
India in the World since 1947: National and Transn...
Asians ahead after the first round?: Indo-British ...
Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bern...
A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poet...
Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the I...
Education and Training in a Globalized World Socie...
Outsiders and Insiders: Perspectives of Third Worl...
Fictionalising Trauma: The Aesthetics of Marguerit...
Determinants, Consequences and Perspectives of Lan...
Machiavelli on War
Un-Disciplining Literature: Literature, Law, and C...
Images of India in British Fiction: Anglo-India vs...
Literary Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Univers...
Indian Agents: Rulers of the Reserves
Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identities and Body Po...
The Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Str...
Ireland: Looking East
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World Histor...
Literarische Selbstverortung als historische Handl...
The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives
Rule-extension Strategies in Ancient India: Ritual...
Comparative Constitutional Traditions
L’idee separatiste dans la presse anglo-musulmane ...
The Retrospective Raj: Medicine, Literature and Hi...
The Socialist Opposition in Nehruvian India 1947–1...
Globalisation and the Changing Face of Port Infras...
The Politics of Muslim Identities in Asia
Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian Decolo...
Economic Dimensions of Buddhism in Early India: Fr...
Global South Rising?: BRICS and the Reconfiguratio...
ADD REVIEW
Review Title
Review
Reviewer Name
Email