THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD ORDER: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West, by Amitav Acharya
THE GOLDEN ROAD: How Ancient India Transformed the World, by William Dalrymple
For readers of The New York Times who are disheartened by the world’s prospects in a moment of American retreat, ancient history may seem an unlikely consolation. And yet, Amitav Acharya, a professor of international relations at American University and the author of “The Once and Future World Order,” thinks looking to the past will reveal that the ongoing collapse of the economic, political and cultural organization of the globe today is no cause for despair.
While the present world order was imposed by the West through colonial conquest, Acharya tells us, “a kind of arrogance and ignorance” has led us to forget that “the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations” has existed for a long time and in many places.
Beginning with Sumer and ancient Egypt, Acharya offers an erudite overview of 5,000 years of world history to show how different cultures developed varying but comparable ideas of empire, great power politics and intellectual exchange that mediated relations across continents until the relatively recent and disruptive rise of the West to global dominance.
Acharya doesn’t claim that a future world order is necessarily going to be a huge improvement, but he believes that “the decline of Western dominance could alleviate the conflicts and injustice it had caused.” He is rightly critical of the “widespread tendency” to judge progress by the standards of a Western tradition rooted in Greece and Rome alone. He extols the achievements of ancient India, China, Persia, the Mongols, Native America and the Islamic world, many of which he argues were swept away or subsumed without credit after colonial conquest.
On this score, one of India’s finest popular chroniclers, the Scottish historian William Dalrymple, agrees. In “The Golden Road,” Dalrymple argues for the enduring importance of ancient and medieval India’s interactions with the world. To make his case, he resurrects the idea of the Indosphere, a zone of Indian cultural and linguistic influence that stretched far beyond the subcontinent in the period roughly between 250 B.C. and A.D. 1200.
The power of the Indosphere initially emerged with the dynasty that produced India’s first great ruler: Ashoka, a third-century-B.C. Buddhist convert who repented the violence of his conquests. Dalrymple offers a bravura account of how Mahayana Buddhism took hold in China through the efforts of peripatetic Chinese scholars and translators who returned from many years in India to serve leaders back home.
By the fourth century A.D., Sanskrit had become the language of royal power from Kandahar to Java, helping Buddhism to percolate from Central Asia to Japan. Tantric Buddhists carried esoteric doctrines and magical paintings east to Java, Cambodian kings took Sanskrit names and erected great temples to Indian gods, and south Indian merchants set up guilds across the Malay Peninsula and intermarried among the Khmer of Cambodia.
To India’s west, recent converts to Islam from Buddhist Central Asia became the first viziers of the youthful Abbasid Caliphate and contributed to the steady flow of Indic knowledge — the concept of zero, the game of chess. One of their intellectual inheritors, the ninth-century mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, has his name preserved in his invention: the algorithm.
Over centuries, these scholars’ ideas also entered the Western world as Catholic kingdoms fought to retake land conquered by Arab armies in Iberia. Beneath the fray, Muslim and Catholic thinkers worked together to make concepts derived from Indian advances a familiar presences in the expanding libraries of Christian monasteries. Dalrymple’s story ends in the early 13th century — just as Fibonacci’s “Liber Abaci” brought algebra and Indian numerals to the universities of Italy, and the Ghurid conquest of north India led to the creation of a Muslim sultanate in Delhi.
Although the story that Dalrymple tells has long been the stuff of college classrooms, his great achievement is in assembling the disparate fragments of early India’s engagements across the continent into a delightfully readable whole.
The latest in a distinguished line of British admirers of India, Dalrymple puts one in mind of those irrepressible if unofficial guides encountered at the gates of the Taj Mahal. Hacking his way through Indian history, he runs the dutiful tourist from one grand vista to the next.
He is at his best when he takes us along in person. In the ruins of a seafront temple outside Chennai, he spots the carving of a cat “who used to preach to the local mice about his enlightenment,” he writes, “only then to feast upon his credulous audience.” In Northumberland he finds a Roman auxiliary’s writing tablet recording a small order of Indian pepper “to make palatable his stodgy Romano-British dinner, something to cheer him up as he peeped over the battlements at the naked, painted, spear-waving Picts.” Such stories are testaments to an ancient world that seems, from the vantage of our fracturing present, improbably interconnected.
Like any unofficial guide, Dalrymple prefers to tell the most colorful and charming version of the story, generally sweeping away the reservations and ambiguities of modern scholarship to his endnotes. Readers incautious enough to ignore them might derive from this book with more certainty than is warranted the idea that both Baghdad and Borobudur were built on the plans of mandalas, and that, centuries after their abandonment, the Buddhist monasteries of Central Asia find an echo in design and spirit in the “clipped quads and courts” of Oxford.
Dalrymple argues that scholars have gone too far in reducing India’s position as a beacon of civilization, while China has wrongly acquired a pre-eminence in Asian history through the “seductively Sinocentric concept of the Silk Road.” But in trying to edge in India as “one of the two great intellectual and philosophical superpowers of ancient Asia,” what he proposes ends up looking quite a lot like the “highly nationalistic and Sinocentric” claims to which he objects.
So while Dalrymple tells us in reverent tones of the transmission of Buddhism to China, he doesn’t tarry on the question of why that religion vanished almost entirely from its birthplace, the answer to which would lead us to a rather more unsavory vision of religious intolerance and caste supremacism stretching across the very era he lauds. Dalrymple rarely permits such darker aspects of India’s history to shade the sunny vistas of “The Golden Road.” Rather than examining the internal causes of the waning Indosphere, he prefers to look to the future. India’s ideas once “transformed the world,” Dalrymple concludes. “Could they do so again?”
For the author of “The Once and Future World Order,” the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. Acharya believes that a new “multiplex” order may yet emerge, one that will be led productively in different dimensions by Moscow, Delhi, Beijing, Brussels and, yes, Washington, D.C.
And while Acharya does not sketch out anything like a clear vision of how all these power centers would work in concert, his history, along with Dalrymple’s, suggests the possibility of a future not of endless war, destructive resource competition and paranoid power plays, but of a world where, as in other times and places, people coexisted despite violence and warfare, trading their wares and joining in the shared pursuit of knowledge across political and religious boundaries.
Yet, by the same token, these books are unlikely to alleviate anxieties in Kyiv, Islamabad, Ottawa or Taipei. The problem with making history the handmaiden of moral examples is that history is always liable to dish up an equal number of counterexamples. After all, it was the ancient Indian political philosopher Kautilya who observed that what invariably obtained in the absence of a single ruling power was matsyanyaya, a Sanskrit phrase that means “the law of the fishes”: The big ones eat the little ones.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD ORDER: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West | By Amitav Acharya | Basic Books | 455 pp. | $32.50
THE GOLDEN ROAD: How Ancient India Transformed the World | By William Dalrymple | Bloomsbury | 413 pp. | $32.99
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