How the East Was Won

'Andrew Phillips has done it again - this book will completely change how you think about empires, as well the competition between the East and the West.' Ayse Zarakol, Reader in International Relations, University of Cambridge 'How the East was Won brilliantly shows how peripheral groups overcame more powerful polities to create universal empires. Andrew Phillips demonstrates how these groups created such empires not by assimilating subject peoples but by a strategic process of cultural differentiation. They established diversity regimes that maintained the unique identity of the dominant elite, while simultaneously yoking culturally diverse indigenous elites to the conquest elite. In comparing the British Raj to Manchu and Mughal rule, he challenges the preconception that Western colonial empires differed fundamentally from the Asian empires. Instead of displacing indigenous practices, the British layered on to existing practices. Rather than see the current international order, as propelled by the Rise of the West, we might thus conclude that order has been infused with the hybridization of West and East from its infancy.' Hendrik Spruyt, Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations, Northwestern University, Illinois