Mishra & Ali
popularity despite resorting to authoritarian tactics. In your most
recent book, Age of Anger (2017), you argue that this troubling trend
is the inevitable afterbirth of modern progress. Contrary to Francis
Fukuyama’s prediction, Western liberal democracies did not herald
the “end of history.” Instead they seem to have contained within them
the seeds of our destruction. Is there any hope for these systems and
institutions? Or, in their place, is absolutism—whether from the right
or the left—the inevitable result?
pm: As a writer I am more interested in describing the past accurately
than in outlining the future; we need a new past if we are to make sense
of our intolerable present or work to change it. One of my favorite histo-
rians, Carl Becker, wrote that “in periods of stress, when the times are
thought to be out of joint, those who are dissatisfied with the present
are likely to be dissatisfied with the past also.” In that vein, I have been
trying to advance a story of the past that helps us understand the deep
roots of our global crisis, the present outbreaks of demagoguery—in the
heart of the modern West as well as in Asia and Africa, where it had
been too easy to blame religion and culture for the failings of postco-
lonial societies. In the book, I am pushing back against the dominant
narrative that presents grotesquely unjust societies, built on violence
and dispossession, as the best possible world.
Boosting Western-style democracy and capitalism, and ignoring
their long history of complicity with imperialism, the end-of-history
narrative has made it too easy to deny the simple fact, as Orwell put
it, that “the European peoples, and especially the British, have long
owed their high standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of
the coloured peoples.” Those of us who grew up in places despoiled by
capitalist imperialism—India, Nigeria, China—were left in no doubt by
our history textbooks that it brought our world into being and made it