This book recasts our histories of the last two centuries. Instead of accepting standard national narratives punctuated by radical ruptures—regime changes, state formations, depressions, and especially World War I—Manjapra portrays the period 1815 to 1945 as a unified “age of entanglement,” fashioned by interconnections that traversed state boundaries and ignored political periodizations. For more than a century, he argues, Germans and Indians collaborated across a series of academic disciplines in an effort to “destroy the nineteenth-century world order organized by British power” (1). That power, based on a combination of English enlightenment and empire, gained its greatest prominence from the 1830s through the 1870s, as the entanglements he explores began to take shape. Scores of Germans working in India as “service intellectuals” (17), developed a vibrant Orientalism filled with elected affinities between themselves and Indians, while the British Raj “relied heavily” on their “comparativist methods” to “govern the subcontinent as a whole” (22). During the 1880s, however, British hegemony began to crumble along with “the ideal of Europe as a unifying aspirational category of civilizational status” (4). Projects intended “to destroy the nineteenth-century Anglocentric world order” quickly followed, and they “created unprecedented entanglements between Indian intellectuals and German-speaking thinkers” (5).

Manjapra spends the first half of his book sketching out the origins of these entanglements between Germans and Indians. In his telling, “German cultural and intellectual institutions provided the most forceful brake on the British imperial push for world hegemony” (5), which brought Germans and Indians together. Many Germans, he claims, “used Indians to dispel a vision of nineteenth-century Europe in which they felt themselves subordinated to Anglocentric hegemony.” At the same time, “Indians used Germans to break apart the ideal of empire in which they felt permanently trapped as colonial subjects on a seemingly endless road to imperial citizenship” (6). “German footnotes,” he argues, “were mobilized for an intrascientific war by Indians to stand out in the world” (39). Moreover, “the relationship between dialogic action, epistemic radicalism, and anticolonial intellectual political power” that developed “was not lost on British colonial surveillance.” Indeed, the British “were concerned about Berlin as a crucible for political activism outside empire, against empire” (102).

This is not the usual picture of either Imperial Germany or German Orientalists. Yet in the second half of the book, with chapters devoted to physics, economics, Marxism, geocultural holism, psychoanalysis, and the arts, Manjapra exposes a multitude of connections that benefited people in both nations, and which also produced arguments that effectively undermined British hegemony as it was imagined by German and Indian activists and intellectuals.

The implications of this research are many. Among other things: it provides us with a fundamentally new narrative of German dealings with non-Europeans; it demonstrates that “European and colonial intellectuals had much more in common than we have previously accepted” (7); and it recasts the West's putative “crisis of modernity” as part of an “unprecedented entanglement of intellectuals around the world” who “sought to break free from the ‘enlightened’ concert of nineteenth-century Europe,” and especially “the specter of the British Empire as the harbinger of Enlightenment universalism” (7). These are cogent insights from a book students of modern European colonialism will find well worth reading.