The fall and rise of Asia

Book review of 'Asia Reborn: A Continent Rises from the Ravages of Colonialism and War to a New Dynamism'

Asia Reborn 

A Continent Rises from the Ravages of Colonialism and War to a New Dynamism

Prasenjit K Basu

Aleph; 680 pages; Rs 1,999

This weighty book describes in great detail the history of the colonisation of East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia by England, France, Russia, Spain, Holland, Portugal, and United States of America, the latecomer and principal coloniser and exploiter of Asia in the twentieth century, and by one Asian country, imperial Japan. The major theme of this book is the long colonial shadow over Asia and the anti-colonial liberation movements. Author Prasenjit K Basu appropriately describes these independence struggles – from 1900 to 2017 – as the birth or emergence of new Asia in the twentieth century.

The author has presented the story of Asia in seven chapters, the titles of which are self-explanatory: (1) In Europe’s Shadow: Asia’s Political Landscape in 1900; (2) The First Stirrings of Nationalism: (1901-1913); (3) The First European Civil War and Its Aftermath (1914-25); (4) The Nascent Clash of Imperial Ties and New Ideologies (1924-1939); (5) The Great Asian War and The Ebb of European Empire (1940-1946); (6) Freedom, Revolution and Japan’s Miracle and the Cold War (1947-1971); and (7) Epilogue; Japan and its Flying Geese: The Acrimonious Colonial Legacy Further West. 

This comprehensive history would be useful for students of the continent, but the broad conclusions Mr Basu has drawn from his study are open to question.  He starts out by describing how Asia, which had largely surrendered by 1800 “would rise anew by the year 2000” and that “many of the great currents that swept the world during the twentieth century had huge reverberations in Asia”. So far, so unexceptionable. Then he makes the surprising and historically untenable statements that the twentieth century in Asia “was largely Japan’s century” and that “Japan’s economy dominated Asia in the twentieth century”.  

The premise for this judgement is European Russia’s famous defeat at the hands of Japan, an Asian country, in 1905. Mr Basu correctly points out that this Japanese victory had a huge positive impact on every Asian country. The message that went out was clear: That Europe could be defeated by an Asian country. But it is hard to see how this fact should lead to the conclusion that “East Asia is dynamic and independent today because Japan stood tall against western imperialism between 1905-1945 [sic]”. If on one hand, the author writes about Japan’s pioneering role in Asia, he fails to reconcile this statement with Japan’s conquest of Korea or China and its many atrocities in those countries. 

In fact, the author’s obsession with Japan clouds his judgement on the role of Japan during India’s struggles for independence too. It induces him to make Subhas Chandra Bose a hero of the Indian national movement for relying on Japanese support and, in the process, presents Jawaharlal Nehru in a poor light. This amounts to a biased writing of history by a scholar who has otherwise made a great contribution in writing this book. 

Mr Basu is right in saying that the first decades of the twentieth century was “characterized by the flowering of nationalism” and linked with it is the story of repressions, such as by the Dutch in Indonesia or the role of American colonizers in the Philippines. He characterises the First World War as “the first European war” and traces developments like the Russian revolution of 1917 and the gradual emergence of the US on the world scene as a new player in Asia. 

Again, the narrative is satisfactory but the analysis is flawed. He talks about the divide-and-rule efforts of colonisers against national movements everywhere, including the British in India. “As has been evident since 1909, the British colonial authorities were determined to keep India divided into many smaller units as possible, starting with creating a Hindu-Muslim divide…,” Mr Basu writes. He records “... the British determination to hold on to parts of northwestern India that were essential to British control over the oil of Iraq, Iran” and that “the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that by 1945 Britain was committed to creating Pakistan before departing the Indian subcontinent”. If this were the case, it is astonishing that he should say “Nehru capitulated to British” in 1947. “In his unseemly haste, Nehru has sacrificed all that Congress had stood for steadfastly over the previous twenty-five years,” he writes.

The author’s evaluation of post-World War II developments is also skewed. He traces the end of the Pacific war with the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the decline of British imperial power (once it became clear that it relied heavily on its exploited empire to defeat Germany and Japan) and the rise of popular leaders such as Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and the emergence of the US playing dubious games in oil-rich West Asia.  Japan became, or was compelled to become, inward-looking, concentrating on economic development, and China, in 1949, became an independent communist state under Mao. 

Then the author pronounces that Japan’s economic miracle after World War II was possible because of its “cultural autonomy” and this made it a formidable “military and economic power”. This causal relationship between “culture” and “economic” development does not carry much conviction among serious scholars. He says the whole of East Asia – Singapore, Malaysia et al – developed economically because it followed the Japanese economic model. 

Japan looms so large in the author’s writing on Asia that it detracts from the worth of what could have been an authoritative treatise on the most significant continent on the planet today.