She applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars, and reported the following:
Conveniently, page 99 begins with the opening of a new sentence, albeit in the middle of a thought. The page is situated toward the end of a chapter on Indian and Arab reactions to Italy’s highly illegal invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, often referred to in the historical literature as the Abyssinian Crisis. The invasion, which violated the League of Nations Charter, provoked widespread outrage across much of the world (East and West), and is often identified as the moment at which the post-WWI international legal order began to cave in. The subheading of this particular section is “Enemies in Common”.Visit Erin M.B. O'Halloran's website.
As the page opens, we are discussing the small but important minority of Indian and Arab anti-colonial leaders, thinkers and activists who warmed to Mussolini in the mid-1930’s: men like Shakib Arslan, Subhas Chandra Bose, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and Anis Daoud. In the middle of the first paragraph I introduce another sub-set of Mussolini’s Middle Eastern admirers: the ‘Revisionist' Zionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. At the height of the crisis in late 1935, page 99 recounts, "the rightwing movement’s official newspaper, HaYarden, published multiple editorials celebrating the prospect of 'an Ethiopia conquered by Italy, which would thrive and prosper like any other European colony', and warning that reversals in policy would amount to 'a failure for the white race’.”
The next paragraph contrasts the cynical manoeuvring of fascist Italy and its Arab, Indian, and Jewish nationalist allies with the Eastern humanism of the Egyptian author Muhammad Lutfi Goma’a, who rallied his countrymen to the Ethiopian cause, and Indian Muslim internationalists like Shawkat Ali, who had called for the Army of India to intervene against Italy's aggression.
In the page’s final paragraph, I evoke Mattias Olesen’s observation that "the Abyssinian Crisis became a ‘quilting point’ at which national and transnational debates over liberalism and fascism, nationalism and pluralism, and the ongoing struggle against colonialism converged.” I argue that the crisis created a common front across a wide range of Arab and Indian thinkers, "whether expressed in the language of anticolonialism, antifascism, antiracism, or universal ethics. Mobilized in defense of Christian Africans, this was the East at something approaching its most expansive, universal-humanist frontiers. It was equally telling who fell beyond the Eastern consensus: a minority of Islamists, anticolonial nationalists and militant Zionists all perceived in the Italian invasion a classically Machiavellian opening for advancement of narrower agendas.”
The Page 99 Test is pretty successful. Page 99 gives readers a decent overview of some of the key themes and arguments my book makes about Easternism and its discontents. My one reservation is that page 99 might give readers the impression that East of Empire is mostly engaged in text analysis or parsing out competing strands of political thought. I’d like to think there is much meatier storytelling going on in most of the book than you happen to encounter on this particular page.
Intriguingly, several readers have recently told me that Chapter Four, where page 99 is situated, is when the book “really takes off”. This is gratifying, as for some time during the drafting and review process, my editor and I were both less than certain what it was “doing” for the overall argument. That changed in the fall and winter of 2023-4, as I sat down to revise the manuscript. Suddenly, I felt I had new, visceral, and to my mind much more compelling set of insights into what the Abyssinian Crisis meant. The research, the material was all already on the page, and had been for years. But now I finally understood why it mattered to the rest of the story I was telling.
--Marshal Zeringue
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