Parting Gifts of Empire: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Esmat Elhalaby

For this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Esmat Elhalaby about his first book, "Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization" (University of California Press, 2025), which offers a pathbreaking perspective on the under-explored relationship between Arab and Indian intellectuals throughout the twentieth century and the era of decolonization. Their conversation charts the various forms of knowledge production that arose from these two regions and their shared experiences of imperialism, contemporary critiques of cosmopolitanism, and how else scholars might write global intellectual histories in the present.