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. He traces how Asians imagined continental solidarity across the twentieth century. Conversations cover anti-colonial cosmopolitanisms, competing nationalisms, Islamic and artistic networks, and why expansive Asian imaginaries rose, faltered, and might be revived through culture and civil society.

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INSIGHT

Colorful Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism in Asia often blended love of homeland with broader solidarity against colonialism.
Sugata Bose calls this 'colorful cosmopolitanism' to challenge abstract, 'colorless' Western models.

INSIGHT

Three Strands Of Nationalism

Nationalism split into emotional patriotism and modern state-seeking nationalism in Asia.
Bose highlights a third strand: nationalist projects that exceeded territorial boundaries toward universalism.

ANECDOTE

Tagore's Southeast Asian Voyage

Rabindranath Tagore refused Indian colonization of Southeast Asia and celebrated local authorship of shared epics.
Bose recounts Tagore's 1927 travels and his willingness to accept Javanese versions of the Ramayana as original.

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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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