The Victorian period, viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe in which the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire, burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, and humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the Ottoman Empire. Pankaj Mishra explores how the Asian resistance, a powerful, contradictory and ultimately unstoppable series of ideas now lies behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda.