In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the British Empire faced a rising tide of nationalist and anticolonial fervor. Simultaneously, authoritarian and expansionist powers began to emerge on the European continent and in the Pacific. Against this fraught international landscape, East of Empire documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges and shifting political alliances which emerged among Egyptians and Indians in the era immediately preceding decolonization. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa al-Nahas, the narrative introduces less familiar but no less intriguing individuals: Eastern feminists, pro-Palestinian activists, Egyptian surrealists, Italian spies, Arab poets and British propagandists. Together they shaped social, cultural and political developments on three continents, inspired by a vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe-somewhere East of the imperial world system which had defined the lives of generations. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Pakistani, Arab and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the many possible ends of empire across the Middle East and South Asia, and how they gave way to more rigid forms of nationalism and territorial partition post-1945.