An IMF report from 2011 suggested that by 2016, the United States would no longer be the largest economy in the world. This is, as the historian Ferdinand Braudel put it, the "sign of autumn" for Atlantic hegemony. Signals of decline are visible from Athens to Detroit, with fervent hopes placed on the Captains of Finance to stem the collapse by some mathematical wizardry. The spokesperson of this Atlantic financial class is the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, whose book Civilisation: The West and the Rest (2011) bemoans "our own loss of faith in the civilisation we inherited from our ancestors." This ethnocentric worry was shared by his late Harvard colleague Samuel Huntington, whose books celebrated the cultural superiority of "Anglo-Protestant society" and bemoaned its loss with the rise of the East (The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996) and the entry of Latin Americans into the United States (Who Are We?, 2004). The demise of the West was put down to a crisis within the cultural world of Anglo-Protestantism. 'How have we failed?' seemed to be the refrain, and this failure was studied in cultural terms.
The writer Pankaj Mishra offered a stern rebuke to Ferguson in the London Review of Books (November 2011). Mishra compared Ferguson to the racist writer Lothrop Stoddard, whose The Rising Tide of Color (1920) worried that "the white man, like King Canute, seats himself upon the tidal sands and bids the waves be stayed. He will be lucky if he escapes merely with wet shoes." Stoddard worried about the faltering confidence of white supremacy, which today seems vulgar. Ferguson's register is not so obviously biological, but masks its racism through culture. He longs for the "'thrifty asceticism' of Protestants of yore", and he shudders that "empire has become a dirty word." The defence of imperialism and of cultural primacy defines Ferguson's world, which is why Mishra accused Ferguson of "nostalgia for the intellectual certainties of the summer of 1914." This critique so irritated Ferguson that he took legal action against the LRB.
In his review, Mishra points to Jamal-al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) – political activist and one of the champions of pan-Islamic unity – and Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) to indicate voices of the 19th and 20th centuries who crafted powerful accounts to explain the defeat of their worlds by European imperialism. Such intellectuals were not misled by empire's false promises or its mischievous stories of its own triumphs. In 1903, for instance, the Chinese intellectual Tang Tiaoding called such accounts "white people's histories", where the explanation of why Egypt or India fell under European sway was that the "people deserved to be conquered". Nor were these thinkers deluded about the limitations in their own societies, about the need to articulate their futures in light of the advances of science and rationalism, and about the importance of putting their intellectual careers at the service of political movements to overthrow imperial dominion.
These were sophisticated thinkers, whose exertions have been lost through two processes: first, imperial nostalgia's continued ability to restore its own shop-worn priorities to the forefront; second, the important push by historians of the colonised lands to recover and emphasise the history of the working people and peasantry, often through the exclusion of the intellectual histories that would have included intellectuals such as al-Afghani, the 19th century's original peripatetic man of mystery.