The Ills Of Empire

In the new New Yorker, Pankaj Mishra reviews Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer, using the space to reprise the events leading up to Independence, and ending with an attempt to connect that event with the state of the world today: "Meeting Mountbatten a few months after partition, Churchill assailed him for helping Britain’s 'enemies,' 'Hindustan,' against 'Britain’s friends,' the Muslims. Little did Churchill know that his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades."