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More than a century and a half before Columbus’s voyages, a Malian ruler named Abu Bakr II was said to have equipped an expedition involving two hundred ships that attempted to discover “the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean.” The expedition failed to return save for one vessel, whose survivor claimed that “there appeared in the open sea [as it were] a river with a powerful current…. The [other] ships went on ahead but when they reached that place they did not return and no more was seen of them.” Some modern historians (Michael Gomez, Toby Green, and John Thornton, among others) have interpreted this to mean that the Malian ships were caught in the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Current, which sweeps everything in its path westward at about the same latitude as Mali.Abu Bakr II supposedly responded not by abandoning his dreams of exploration but by equipping a new and far larger expedition, this time involving two thousand ships and with himself in command. That was the last that was seen of him. We know of this story only because when Abu Bakr’s successor, Mansa Musa, was staying in Cairo in 1324–1325 on his pilgrimage to Mecca, the secretary of the chancery of the Mamluk Dynasty asked him how he had come to power and recorded his reply. There are no other traces of Abu Bakr’s attempt.

Mansa Musa, however, who took power in 1312, left such a powerful stamp on his time that it is remarkable how little known he is today. Recently it has been claimed that he was the richest person who ever lived. Speculation over the size of his fortune (“Mansa” means ruler) is based almost entirely on his three-to-twelve-month stay in Cairo on his way to Mecca. The Arabic-language sources vary on many of the details but leave an unmistakable impression of lucre the likes of which have rarely been seen anywhere. Badr al-Din al-Halabi wrote that Musa “appeared [in Cairo] on horseback magnificently dressed in the midst of his soldiers” with more than 10,000 attendants. Another source claims that he “brought with him 14,000 slave girls for his personal service.” A third spoke of the “great pomp” of the pilgrimage, saying that Musa traveled “with an army of 60,000 men who walked before him as he rode. There were [also] 500 slaves, and in the hand of each was a golden staff each made from 500 mithqāls of gold.”

the Malian leader’s huge slave entourage may have cemented the image of Sudanic Africa as an inexhaustible source of black labor in lastingly harmful ways

Between the money handed out and that spent extravagantly in the markets of the city, the value of gold in the region dipped sharply, and according to some accounts remained depressed for years. Musa was so profligate that he had to borrow funds to finance his return voyage

Gomez speculates that the grand geopolitical gambits of Abu Bakr and Mansa Musa shared similar motives: both were looking for a way for Mali to escape the threatening political interference and costly economic control of the Berber middlemen of North Africa through whose territory their gold passed on its way to Europe and elsewhere

the Sahara has long been miscast as a barrier separating a notional black Africa from an equally notional white or Arab one. In reality, it argues, the desert has always been not just permeable but heavily trafficked, much like the ocean, with trade as well as religious and cultural influences traveling back and forth, and with world-shaping effects

early in the European encounter with Africa there was a tremendous fluidity and confusion over the labels the newcomers applied to the indigenous peoples they met, with the newly explored lands of West Africa being variously fancied as Guiné, Ethiopia, and even India. Blackness, however, was essentialized from the very beginning

when they crossed the Senegal River on their way south down the coast of West Africa, they found that they lacked the means to prevail militarily over the confident and capable African kingdoms they encountered. The Portuguese thereafter made a pragmatic turn away from an approach that relied on surprise raids to one based instead on trade and diplomacy.

a pattern in which the Portuguese obtained slaves not from unclaimed territories inhabited by stateless societies but rather from African kings with legitimate sovereignty over their lands, as when they sold captives won in wars with their neighbors

Of the broader interactions in the region between these early Portuguese seekers of fortune and local sovereigns, Bennett writes:While both sides constantly struggled to impose their traditions on the commercial formalities, the African elite usually dictated the terms of trade and interaction. Portuguese subjects who violated African laws quickly risked stiff fines or found their lives in danger. Here we are clearly a very long way from the view—commonly propagated in the ascendant West after the transatlantic slave trade had increased dramatically and European colonization and plantation agriculture had taken firm hold in the New World—that Africans were mere savages who subsisted in a near state of nature.

At the core of Bennett’s book is the argument that the fierce competition between Portugal and Spain over the African Atlantic, which was significantly mediated by the Church, was crucial to the creation of the modern nation-state and of what became modern European nationalism. Early national identities in Europe were forged, to a substantial extent, on the basis of competition over trade and influence in Africa. And this, Bennett says, gets completely lost in Western histories that fast-forward from the conquest of the Canary Islands to Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. “We lose sight of the mutually constitutive nature of fifteenth-century African and European history…whereby Africa figured in the formation of Iberian colonialism and thus the emergence of early modern Portugal and Castile,” he writes.

the often surprising success that Africans had throughout the first four hundred years of their encounter with Europe

That Africans themselves participated in the Atlantic slave trade is by now widely known, and Green by no means skimps on the details. What is less well known in his account is the determined and resourceful ways that a number of major African states struggled to insulate themselves from the slave trade and resist Europe’s rising dominance

Faced with Kongo’s resistance to expanding the slave trade, in 1575 Portugal founded a colony adjacent to the kingdom, at Luanda (now in Angola), which it used as a base to wage an aggressive destabilization campaign against its old partner. Kongo resisted the Portuguese doggedly, eventually turning to Holland as an ally, because that country was not yet engaged in slaving and was an enemy of the then unified kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. The 1623 letter by Kongo’s King Pedro II initiating an alliance with Holland requested “four or five warships as well as five or six hundred soldiers” and promised to pay for “the ships and the salaries of the soldiers in gold, silver, and ivory.” Holland soon entered into the proposed alliance, hoping that by cutting off the supply of slaves from this region, which alone supplied more than half of those sent to Brazil and the Spanish Indies, Brazil itself, a plantation society and at the time Portugal’s leading source of wealth, would become unviable.

What ultimately undid Kongo, the horrific demographic drain of the slave trade that followed its defeat by Portugal in 1665, was a vulnerability it shared with some of the other important late holdouts against European encroachment—powerful and sophisticated kingdoms like the Ashanti Empire and Benin—which was a loss of control over its money supply. In Kongo, a locally made cloth of high quality was the main traditional measure of value and means of exchange, alongside a type of seashell, the nzimbu, harvested along the nearby coast. The Dutch, discovering the local fixation on cloth, flooded the region with its early industrial textiles, wiping out the market for Kongo’s own manufacture. After they gained control of Luanda, the Portuguese similarly flooded the region with shells, both local ones and others imported from the Indian Ocean. Similar monetary catastrophes befell the few big surviving West African kingdoms—mostly as a result of the fall in the price of gold following New World discoveries of gold and silver.

“For several centuries, Western African societies exported what we might call ‘hard currencies,’ especially gold; these were currencies that, on a global level, retained their value over time.” In return, Africans received cowries, copper, cloth, and iron, all things that declined in value over time. All the while, Africa was bled of its people, as slave labor was being put to productive use for the benefit of the West

the root causes of many of the problems of the present lie precisely in this more distant past

If the ideology of “cultural appropriation” were correct, it would mean that traditionally white-dominated philosophy departments have been entirely right in their long avoidance and ignoring of non-Western philosophy. It would mean white people shouldn’t be studying the philosophies that “belong to” people from other cultures. They shouldn’t be “taking” and “appropriating” this property, they should stay in their lanes and remain as narrow and parochial and hidebound and Eurocentric as they always have been. The idea of cultural appropriation effectively tells white people to be more Eurocentric – to drop even that far-too-limited exploration of other cultures that they have already engaged in. Intellectual diversity, learning from other cultures and their ideas, is – according to cultural-appropriation ideology – a bad thing. The ideology of cultural appropriation is a way of telling white people to make their culture even whiter.

Cultures are not property.

if the appropriators are in a position of geopolitical/cultural dominance or hegemony, they may greatly alter the nature, form etc of those aspects of culture for the originating communities themselves. Such influence can show up as coercion under many circumstances, thereby interfering in problematic ways with the (dynamic) capacity of the originating communities for cultural reproduction

it is problematic when appropriation is facile – such as using the bindi without interest in or knowledge about what it means and its history in the originating communities

I do think respect for others’ sacredness can be a helpful norm in cultural interaction – though I would agree that exceptions must be made for the likes of art and comedy

concerning your point about the neoliberal conception of knowledge, an eye-opening moment for me was when I asked whether we can agree that knowledge is a common quest (therefore, it is empowered when it is shared) and not a treasure (which can only diminish). The reply was: it is a treasure. This kind of feeling generates the anxiety which then leads to thinking that cultural appropriation is a crime

If one is left with a nagging sense of a debt unpaid, perhaps that’s the way to look: to the moral challenges that now arise

The freer global capital becomes, the harder national borders become. Colonialism needed to move large populations of people—slaves and indentured labor—to work in mines and on plantations. Now the new dispensation needs to keep people in place and move the money—so the new formula is free capital, caged labor. How else are you going to drive down wages and increase profit margins? Profit is the only constant.

The assertion of ethnicity, race, caste, nationalism, sub-nationalism, patriarchy, and all kinds of identity, by exploiters as well as the exploited, has a lot—but of course not everything—to do with laying collective claim to resources (water, land, jobs, money) that are fast disappearing

So many kinds of entrenched and unrecognized colonialisms still exist. Aren’t we letting them off the hook? Even “Indian English fiction” is, on the face of it, a pretty obvious category. But what does it really mean? The boundaries of the country we call India were arbitrarily drawn by the British. What is “Indian English”? Is it different from Pakistani English or Bangladeshi English? Kashmiri English? There are 780 languages in India, 22 of them formally “recognized.” Most of our Englishes are informed by our familiarity with one or more of those languages. Hindi, Telugu, and Malayalam speakers, for example, speak English differently.

In the Obama years, you had to ferret out information and piece it together to figure out how many bombs were being dropped and how many people were being killed, even as the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was being eloquently delivered. However differently their domestic politics plays out on home turf, it is a truism that the Democrats’ foreign policy has tended to be as aggressive as that of the Republicans. But since 9/11, between Bush and Obama, how many countries have been virtually laid to waste?

I don’t think in some of the categories in which your question is posed to me. For example, I don’t understand what a “global” novel is. I think of both my novels as so very, very local. I am surprised by how easily they have traveled across cultures and languages. Both have been translated into more than forty languages—but does that make them “global” or just universal?

I wonder about the term postcolonial. I have often used it, too, but is colonialism really post-?

You once wrote that George W. Bush “achieved what writers, scholars, and activists have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.” What did you mean by this, and ten years and two presidents later, is the American empire’s apocalyptic nature still so transparent?

In India today, storytelling is being policed not only by the state, but also by religious fanatics, caste groups, vigilantes, and mobs that enjoy political protection, who burn cinema halls, who force writers to withdraw their novels, who assassinate journalists. This violent form of censorship is becoming an accepted mode of political mobilization and constituency building. Literature, cinema, and art are being treated as though they are policy statements or bills waiting to be passed in Parliament that must live up to every self-appointed stakeholders’ idea of how they, their community, their history, or their country must be represented.

I recently saw a Malayalam film in the progressive state of Kerala called Abrahaminde Santhathikal (The Sons of Abraham). The vicious, idiot-criminal villains were all black Africans. Given that there is no community of Africans in Kerala, they had to be imported into a piece of fiction in order for this racism to be played out! We can’t pin the blame for this kind of thing on the state. This is society. This is people. Artists, filmmakers, actors, writers—South Indians who are mocked by North Indians for their dark skins in turn humiliating Africans for the very same reason. Mind-bending.

we are buying more weapons from Europe and the United States than almost anyone else. So, India, which has the largest population of malnutritioned children in the world, where hundreds of thousands of debt-ridden farmers and farm laborers have committed suicide, where it is safer to be a cow than it is to be a woman, is still being celebrated as one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

The word “empire” has often been invoked as a uniquely European and U.S. problem. Do you see India and other postcolonial nations as adapting older forms of empire in new geopolitical clothing?

How can we think of empire now in the Global South, especially at a time when postcolonial nations are emulating the moral calculus of their old colonial masters?

India transformed from colony to imperial power virtually overnight. There has not been a day since the British left India in August 1947 that the Indian army and paramilitary have not been deployed within the country’s borders against its “own people”: Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir, Jammu, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand. The dead number in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands. Who are these dangerous citizens who need to be held down with military might? They are indigenous people, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, communists. The pattern that emerges is telling. What it shows quite clearly is an “upper”-caste Hindu state that views everyone else as an enemy. There are many who see Hinduism itself as a form of colonialism—the rule of Aryans over Dravidians and other indigenous peoples whose histories have been erased and whose deposed rulers have been turned into the vanquished demons and asuras of Hindu mythology. The stories of these battles continue to live on in hundreds of folktales and local village festivals in which Hinduism’s “demons” are other peoples’ deities. That is why I am uncomfortable with the word postcolonialism.

When you think about the grandeur of the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti–Vietnam War protests, it makes you wonder whether real protest is even possible any more. It is. It surely is. I was in Gothenburg, Sweden, recently, when the largest Nazi march since World War II took place. The Nazis were outnumbered by anti-Nazi demonstrators, including the ferocious Antifa, by more than ten to one. In Kashmir, unarmed villagers face down army bullets. In Bastar, in Central India, the armed struggle by the poorest people in the world has stopped some of the richest corporations in their tracks. It is important to salute people’s victories, even if they don’t always get reported on TV. At least the ones we know about. Making people feel helpless, powerless, and hopeless is part of the propaganda.

I think we all need to become seriously mutinous

We fool ourselves into believing that the change we want will come with fresh elections and a new president or prime minister at the helm of the same old system. Of course, it is important to bounce the old bastards out of office and bounce new ones in, but that can’t be the only bucket into which we pour our passion

as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing.

In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the “human rights” discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.

How might we challenge dominant voices, such as Niall Ferguson, who put so much faith in thinking with the grain of empire? On the flipside, how might we speak to liberals who put their faith in American empire’s militarism in a post–9/11 era? Do you see any way out of the current grip of imperial thinking?

The “managed populations” don’t necessarily think from Ferguson’s managerial perspective. What the managers see as stability, the managed see as violence upon themselves. It is not stability that underpins empire. It is violence. And I don’t just mean wars in which humans fight humans. I also mean the psychotic violence against our dying planet.

I don’t believe that the current supporters of empire are supporters of empire in general. They support the American empire. In truth, captalism is the new empire. Capitalism run by white capitalists. Perhaps a Chinese empire or an Iranian empire or an African empire would not inspire the same warm feelings? “Imperial thinking,” as you call it, arises in the hearts of those who are happy to benefit from it. It is resisted by those who are not. And those who do not wish to be.

Empire is not just an idea. It is a kind of momentum. An impetus to dominate that contains within its circuitry the inevitability of overreach and self-destruction. When the tide changes, and a new empire rises, the managers will change, too. As will the rhetoric of the old managers. And then we will have new managers, with new rhetoric. And there will be new populations who rise up and refuse to be managed.

he thinks the current predicament says more about the continuities with colonial history than it does about some ruptured future. For some people in the world, the catastrophe has already happened. 

"I come from a part of the world where we didn't have very rosy expectations of the world or the future," says Ghosh. "We knew there would be a lot of upheavals, and we witnessed these upheavals at first hand, so in that sense I think Westerners had a belief in stability and the promise of the future that I didn't share."

a massive-scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider: The end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.  "The people who saw the climate crisis first are at the absolute other end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they've already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods," says Ghosh. "And indigenous peoples have already lived through the end of the world and found ways to survive."

Ghosh thinks it's no coincidence that the constraints of the bourgeois novel began to form at the same time as the West began to use fossil fuels to project its power around the world.

"Climate change is absolutely an aspect of empire," he says. "The British Empire was essentially built on fossil fuels: It was the British mastery of coal that gave it a huge military advantage over the rest of the world."

"If renewables really were adopted at scale, it would completely shake up the global political order." He argues that oil and gas have to flow through maritime chokepoints controlled by the US, Australia, Britain and Canada, giving them a complete geopolitical advantage.

in the Eastern hemisphere, the issue of historical injustice is central to the issue of climate change. "If you go to any Indonesian, or Indian, or Chinese, even people who are perfectly well aware of the climate threat, and say to them: 'why don't you immediately cut all your emissions?' What will you hear? The answer is always profoundly political, it's: 'The West made this problem, let them give everything up first. This is the terrible dilemma in which we're caught."

"We're always told that rich countries will adapt better: I don't think that's actually true. I think countries with very complex systems, like the United States and in Europe, are in many ways much more fragile. Just consider food distribution."

a wide array of initiatives have emerged as a direct response to China’s Belt and Road to undermine and dilute China’s infrastructural prowess: the U.S. International Finance and Development Corporation, the EU’s “Asia Connectivity Initiative,” the EU-Japan “Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure,” the U.S.-Japan-Australia “Blue Dot Network,” the India-Japan “connectivity corridors” and myriad other coalitions. None of these existed even three years ago. Roads have always been the pathways of conquest; now they are the battlefield of competitive connectivity. 

in dozens of visits to Beijing, I have found my interlocutors unable to grasp this basic psychological fact. While many societies admire China’s success and are grateful for China’s role in their development, none want to be like China, nor be subservient to it. It’s an argument that’s fallen on deaf ears in Washington, too. And as with America’s experience of benevolent nation-building, China’s policy of intimidating neighbors into feebly muting their own interests has predictably backfired

Bogging down the adversary while moving stealthily towards one’s objective has been an axiom of Chinese diplomacy for generations. But there is little stealth anymore in China’s land grabs, island-building and wolf-warrior diplomacy

With China’s suppression of information about the coronavirus painting it into a corner, Beijing no longer feels it has anything to lose and is going for broke: moving on Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Senkaku Islands, India’s borders and other disputes while the rest of the world is off-kilter, girding itself for a new Cold War with America. China’s leadership has convinced itself that West-leaning powers seek to encircle it militarily, splinter it internally and destabilize the Communist Party. This is the classical psychological spiral at the heart of any security dilemma in which each action taken by one side elevates the perceived insecurity of the other. 

A repeat of the Cold War would surely not play out as favorably for the U.S. as the last one. America is politically polarized and is the world’s largest debtor nation. Its most recent major wars have been disasters and its military needs time to rebuild and adjust to new adversaries and tactics. And many of its erstwhile allies from Europe to Asia are far more vested in China than America is and don’t trust it to lead a consensus-based global coalition.

What the U.S. and Europe do have in their favor is that they are territorially secure while China is not. China has 14 neighbors, all of which harbor deep suspicions of its motives even as many (especially Russia) cooperate with it.

Around the time China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it suddenly found itself the world’s largest importer of raw materials as well as one of the largest exporters of consumer goods. Yet still, it was subject to the “Malacca trap”: Most of its trade passes through the narrow Strait of Malacca, the world’s busiest waterway, which it does not control. Building road and rail infrastructure across neighboring states was thus something of a defensive measure to reduce dependence on a single chokepoint.

Despite the immense economic leverage China has accrued vis-a-vis the many states along its perimeter, it is the complexity of having so many neighbors that constrains China more than its increasingly sophisticated military arsenal suggests. Maintaining global influence is much harder when you are fighting a 14-front war in your own neighborhood. 

From Malabar to Pearl Harbor, the U.S., Japan, Australia, India and numerous other countries have been deepening their coordination in the Indo-Pacific maritime domain. The “quad” coalition features joint strategic patrols and hardware support for the navies of Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia in the South China Sea. This summer, ASEAN foreign ministers finally graduated from their usually limp communiques watered down by Chinese pressure and reaffirmed that the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea must be the basis for arbitrating maritime disputes. 

Boundary agreements are rarely perceived as fair by both sides, yet such settlements have the virtue of enabling counties to mature towards functional cooperation.  

Precisely because the U.S. and EU have imposed such stiff restrictions on Chinese investment, China has redirected its outbound capital portfolio ever more towards its more proximate Asian domain. And in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, once fast-growing countries face capital outflows and weak global demand amid ruptured supply chains. The West may be squeezing China out of some markets, but China’s balloon is inflating across Asia as it lowers tariffs on all its Belt and Road trading partners

Laos and Cambodia, two of Asia’s poorest countries, have become all but wholly owned subsidiaries of China, even as China’s Mekong River dams have ravaged their agriculture through volatile water flows and chemical pesticides. With stronger technical and diplomatic assistance, these countries could demand that Chinese investments reinforce their sustainability and local businesses. 

It was always going to be an uphill battle for China to be perceived as a benevolent superpower. Unlike America or the European Union, China is wholly unconvincing as a multiethnic empire. It systematically squelches diverse identities rather than elevating them. Furthermore, though China is an ancient and rich civilization, it coexists with other Asian civilizations with equally respectable glory. None will ever bow to the others, as Japan learned the hard way in the 20th century. Every time China gains an inch of territory, it loses a yard of credibility. The essence of geopolitical stability is equilibrium, and the pathway to it follows the logic of reciprocity. 

China’s assertiveness signals neither an inevitable new Cold War nor a new unipolar hegemony. Rather, it is one phase in Asia’s collective story and the global shift towards multipolarity.

Never has Eurasia been ruled by a single hegemon. The Mongols came closest 700 years ago, but the 14th-century Black Death fractured its disparate khanates, and the Silk Road fell idle. Today again, a pandemic has emerged from China, but rather than shut down the Silk Road, we should build many more of them among dozens of Eurasian nations rather than in and out of China alone. All roads need not lead to Beijing.