"A revelation in the text—new to this reviewer and perhaps to other readers—is that the pan-Arab women’s movement that included these Egyptian representatives had its origins in the Palestinian national struggle of 1936–39."
“Elhalaby, a historian, explores the many ways Arab intellectuals engaged with India during the twentieth century, when peoples across Asia struggled under European colonization and then threw it off. . . . The book has a tragic tone. According to Elhalaby, the question of Palestine was central to Arab thinkers who sought solidarity with India, and the future of the Palestinians remains extremely precarious.”
“Parting Gifts of Empire succeeds in highlighting urgent debates about how anti-colonial knowledge was produced, circulated, and constrained by imperial structures. The book’s challenge to methodological nationalism and attention to intellectual exchange is an important intervention that will undoubtedly shape future conversations on decolonization, internationalism, and the legacies of empire.”
"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
