How in modern times did Indian and Middle Eastern authors write about China? What enabled their ventures of inter-Asian understanding? And what mechanisms, barriers, and misapprehensions shaped the contours of these South and West Asian Sinographies? This lecture addresses these questions across the century between 1840 and 1940, when empire, steam, and print brought these different regions of Asia into closer contact than ever before. But connection is no guarantee of comprehension, as shown through a survey of texts that by the 1930s culminated in translations of Confucius into Arabic and Urdu. The richly illustrated lecture draws on How Asia Found Herself, which was a Foreign Affairs best book of 2023 and winner of the Bentley Prize from the World History Association.
Nile Green is Professor of History at UCLA, where he holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History. A former Guggenheim Fellow, his ten monographs include Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (Norton, 2024), which was reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Review of Books; How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale, 2022), which won the Bentley Book Prize from the World History Association and was selected as a Foreign Affairs best book of 2023; The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Princeton, 2015), which was a New York Times editors’ choice; Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 2012), which won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award and the Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Book Award); and Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction. He has also edited eight books and is host of the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam. Having travelled and researched among Muslim communities from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran to Morocco, Syria, Yemen, China, and Sri Lanka, his work brings Islamic history into conversation with world history.
Co-hosted by the HC and the Center for Global Islamic Studies.
