Sugata Bose, "Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Feb 15, 2026

Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard and author of Asia after Europe, explores how Asians imagined continental bonds across the long twentieth century. He discusses colourful versus abstract cosmopolitanisms, competing nationalisms, elite and popular networks, overlapping Islamic and socialist universalisms, art as cross-Asian imagination, and moments when Asian solidarity gained or lost momentum.

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INSIGHT

Colourful Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism in Asia combined love of homeland with anti-colonial solidarity rather than being 'colorless' abstract reason.
Sugata Bose argues this "colourful cosmopolitanism" better captures Asian universalism in the early 20th century.

INSIGHT

Two Kinds Of Nationalism

Distinguish old-style patriotism from modern state-seeking nationalism and also between territorial and universalist nationalism.
Bose shows some Asian nationalisms exceeded borders and sought broader solidarities beyond the state.

ANECDOTE

Tagore's Java Discovery

Rabindranath Tagore's 1927 travels to Java led him to honor Southeast Asian versions of the Ramayana as equally original.
Bose recounts Tagore resisting Indian colonization of Southeast Asia and acknowledging local authorship.

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The balance of global power changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, above all with the economic and political rise of Asia. Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century (Harvard UP, 2024) is a bold new interpretation of the period, focusing on the conflicting and overlapping ways in which Asians have conceived their bonds and their roles in the world. Tracking the circulation of ideas and people across colonial and national borders, Sugata Bose explores developments in Asian thought, art, and politics that defied Euro-American models and defined Asianness as a locus of solidarity for all humanity.
Impressive in scale, yet driven by the stories of fascinating and influential individuals, Asia after Europe examines early intimations of Asian solidarity and universalism preceding Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905; the revolutionary collaborations of the First World War and its aftermath, when Asian universalism took shape alongside Wilsonian internationalism and Bolshevism; the impact of the Great Depression and Second World War on the idea of Asia; and the persistence of forms of Asian universalism in the postwar period, despite the consolidation of postcolonial nation-states on a European model.
Diverse Asian universalisms were forged and fractured through phases of poverty and prosperity, among elites and common people, throughout the span of the twentieth century. Noting the endurance of nationalist rivalries, often tied to religious exclusion and violence, Bose concludes with reflections on the continuing potential of political thought beyond European definitions of reason, nation, and identity.

Sugata Bose is Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

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