Book Launch
East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars
by Erin O’Halloran
Sponsored by the Bill Graham Centre, the International Relations Program at Trinity College, and the Trinity College Office of Development and Alumni Affairs
Date: Monday, March 31, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm-6 pm, EST
Location: Seeley Hall, Trinity College, University of Toronto | 6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 1H8
Join Cambridge historian Erin O'Halloran and bestselling author and former Trinity College Provost Margaret MacMillan for a discussion of Dr. O'Halloran's new book.
Register Here:
About the Book:
From the outset of the twentieth century, Egyptian and Indian leaders understood their movements for self-determination as linked and part of a shared project. Following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia proliferated, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces how anticolonial nationalism gained momentum across the East and documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges, and shifting political alliances that came to animate the interwar project of Easternism: a cosmopolitan vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo.
Erin O'Halloran offers a compelling new account of the era immediately preceding decolonization and the epochal partitions of India and Palestine. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar but no less intriguing personalities: feminists, diplomats, and poets; surrealists, socialists and spies. Each dreamed, wrote, organized and fought for the liberation of the East—a space universally evoked, though seemingly impossible to pin down. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British, and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anticolonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.