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.
Esmat Elhalaby is Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto.
"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
268 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 map
9780520389274$29.95|£25.00Paper
Sep 2025