Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization

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.