How the East Was Won
Barbarian Conquerors, Universal Conquest and the Making of Modern Asia

The epic story of how Mughal, Manchu and English East India Company 'barbarians' laid the foundations for today's Asian superpowers.

Andrew Phillips (Author)

9781107120976, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 October 2021

358 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.66 kg

'How the East Was Won presents a novel theory on the origins and governance of empires, focusing on the nexus between cultural variety and international order. … Through the use of three significant imperial international regimes in Asian history, this study advances our understanding of the mechanisms of hierarchy in global politics.' Zheng Chen, China International Strategy Review

How did upstart outsiders forge vast new empires in early modern Asia, laying the foundations for today's modern mega-states of India and China? In How the East Was Won, Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj. Vastly outnumbered and stigmatised as parvenus, the Mughals and Manchus pioneered similar strategies of cultural statecraft, first to build the multicultural coalitions necessary for conquest, and then to bind the indigenous collaborators needed to subsequently uphold imperial rule. The English East India Company later adapted the same 'define and conquer' and 'define and rule' strategies to carve out the West's biggest colonial empire in Asia. Refuting existing accounts of the 'rise of the West', this book foregrounds the profoundly imitative rather than innovative character of Western colonialism to advance a new explanation of how universal empires arise and endure.

Introduction
1. From the rise of the west to how the east was won
2. The Eurasian transformation
3. The rise of Asia's terrestrial empires
4. European infiltration and Asian consolidation in maritime Asia
5. The great Asian divergence – Mughal decline and Manchu consolidation in the eighteenth century
6. The East India Company and the rise of British India, 1740-1820
7. Crises of empire and the reconstitution of international orders in south and East Asia, 1820-1880.

Subject Areas: Geopolitics [JPSL], National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Asian history [HBJF]