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 anti-colonial 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 weaves a story about the ends of empire across the Middle East and South Asia. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar, but no less intriguing historical personages-Eastern feminists, pro-Palestinian activists, Egyptian surrealists, Italian spies, Arab poets, and British propagandists-and demonstrates their role in shaping political developments on three continents during a moment of profound global entanglement and political upheaval. 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 anti-colonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.