BOOK REVIEW
By Abhishek Kaicker
Abhishek Kaicker is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and most recently the author of “The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi.”
June 6, 2025
Worried the World Is Falling Apart? That’s OK. It’s Happened Before. In “The Once and Future World Order,” by Amitav Acharya, and “The Golden Road,” by William Dalrymple, our best hope might be that history repeats itself.
For readers of The New York Times who are disheartened by the world’s prospects in a moment of American retreat, ancient history may seem an unlikely consolation. And yet, Amitav Acharya, a professor of international relations at American University and the author of “The Once and Future World Order,” thinks looking to the past will reveal that the ongoing collapse of the economic, political and cultural organization of the globe today is no cause for despair.
While the present world order was imposed by the West through colonial conquest, Acharya tells us, “a kind of arrogance and ignorance” has led us to forget that “the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations” has existed for a long time and in many places.
Beginning with Sumer and ancient Egypt, Acharya offers an erudite overview of 5,000 years of world history to show how different cultures developed varying but comparable ideas of empire, great power politics and intellectual exchange that mediated relations across continents until the relatively recent and disruptive rise of the West to global dominance.
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