Pankaj Mishra retells the story of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the perspective of Asian intellectuals who watched Western imperialism reshape their societies and struggled to formulate responses. The period that Europeans narrate as an age of progress, enlightenment, and liberal expansion was experienced across Asia as military humiliation, economic exploitation, and cultural devastation. Mishra organizes his account around three remarkable thinkers: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an itinerant Muslim intellectual who traveled from Afghanistan to Egypt to Paris promoting pan-Islamic solidarity against European encroachment; Liang Qichao, a Chinese reformer who sought to modernize China after the catastrophic defeats of the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion; and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and philosopher who warned against imitating the West's nationalism and materialism. Through their journeys, debates, and disappointments, Mishra traces how Asian intellectuals grappled with an agonizing dilemma: whether to adopt Western ideas and institutions in order to resist Western power, or to reject them entirely in favor of indigenous traditions. Japan's victory over Russia in 1905—the first modern military defeat of a European power by an Asian nation—electrified intellectuals from Istanbul to Beijing, but it also revealed the dangers of the nationalist path when Japan itself became an imperial aggressor. Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist, argues that understanding these intellectual currents is essential to making sense of contemporary movements from Chinese nationalism to political Islam, all of which carry echoes of debates that began when Asian thinkers first confronted the reality of Western dominance.