Cemil Aydin was researching Japanese pan-Asianism when, he tells us, amid the flurry of public angst about the roots of a supposed ‘Muslim rage against the West’ that ensued in the wake of 11 September 2001, his attention was drawn to parallels between these contemporary debates and earlier ones focused on anti-Westernism in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century (p. 1). He positions the important book that emerges from this nexus in part as a challenge to two kinds of explanation that have been put forward in recent years for this putative ‘Muslim rage’. One set of arguments has it that the problem is rooted in religion, as either an expression of an atavistic rage at ‘Christian-dominated globalization’ or as a product of a basic incompatibility between some identifiable set of Islamic values and an opposing set of quintessentially modern, Western counterparts. The alternative position is that anti-Western sentiments are the ‘natural’ response of persons and peoples long subjected to colonialism and neo-imperialism (p. 1). Aydin's contribution to breaking through these stale debates, which are so often flawed at the level of the most basic assumptions that underlie them, is to offer a comparative perspective on political antipathies directed at a variously imagined ‘West’. He achieves this through mutually informative discussions of anti-Western critiques elaborated in the context of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thinking from the 1840s up to the end of the Second World War.

The structuring of the book is primarily chronological. The author traces a generation of Ottoman and Japanese reformist thinkers from the first half of the nineteenth century who tended to imagine an Occident built on liberalism, civilization, and Enlightenment, and aspired to promote such values within their own polities. Towards the end of the century, he contends, racial and religious particularisms that lurked behind Western claims to universal humanistic values encouraged a turn to pan-Islamic and pan-Asian solidarities as ‘the means to attain a new world order in which regional blocks … would regain their autonomy and dignity from Western hegemony as equal members of the global commonwealth of modernity’. This vision was often still framed with reference to ‘the proclaimed enlightenment values of the West’ (p. 69). From here on in, Aydin traces the vicissitudes of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism through a chronology marked by further blows to the Eurocentric world order with first the Japanese military victory over the Russians in 1905 and then World War One; the Ottoman state's wartime embrace of pan-Islamism as a basis for mobilization, swiftly followed by the collapse of its empire; unofficial pan-Asianism against the background of the Anglo-Japanese alliance; the rise of new visions of world order offered by socialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and the Wilsonian principle of self-determination; and the endorsement of pan-Asianism from the 1930s through to the end of World War Two by a Japanese regime seeking to legitimize its own regional imperialism.

Key points that the author wishes to highlight along the way include the mutability of ‘civilizational geographies’, not least the category ‘the West’ as applied by actors who see themselves as standing outside the entity it denotes. He also wishes to draw out the suggestion that, where critiques of a Eurocentric world order have been mounted, they have often coexisted with or even been constructed upon frameworks drawn from Western discourses. Such frameworks include not only the fundamental East–West dichotomy itself but also certain liberal post-Enlightenment ideals that played an important role in grounding critiques of Western realities. In the contexts in which he is studying, Aydin argues, ‘anti-Westernism often reflected the global legitimacy crisis of the international system rather than a clash of civilisations’ – a key driver of the phenomenon was not a primordial revulsion at Western values so much as dissatisfaction at ‘the violation of so-called Western values by the Western powers’ (p. 203).

As this overview suggests, notwithstanding the title of the book and the uneasy equivalence that it sets up between anti-Westernism, on the one hand, and pan-Islamism or pan-Asianism, on the other, the author's ambitions are in differing senses both narrower and broader than a consideration of ‘the politics of anti-Westernism in Asia’. They are broader insofar as his treatment of the histories of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism goes far beyond the anti-Western stances taken by representatives of these modes of thinking. This is arguably a book about the rise and fall of certain transnational political imaginaries – which lend themselves to the identification and critique of a Western other as part of their own processes of self-construction – as much as it is about antipathies towards an imagined West.

At the same time, Aydin's goals are narrower than the book's title might imply, in that the anti-Westernisms that he discusses are of course of a very particular kind. His spurning of abstraction in favour of historicized consideration of particular critiques of an imagined West, grounded in particular intellectual and political conjunctures, is a strength. However, the tight focus excludes a great many modes of politics that might otherwise be readily understood as relevant to the puzzle that he seeks to tackle. While Aydin's nineteenth-century Ottoman reformists were celebrating Western liberal ideals, for example, 1858 saw the murders of twenty-two people – Europeans and their protégés – in riots in Ottoman-controlled Jidda, possibly linked to political and economic rivalries between these outsiders and local elites. Episodes of this kind might perhaps be dismissed as expressions of mere ‘anti-foreignism’ rather than anti-Westernism, the latter requiring a coherently articulated conception of an abstract Occident towards which antipathies might be directed. But something important is surely lost in so exacting a definition of anti-Westernism, and it is surely a limitation of Aydin's particular brand of global intellectual history – populated by academics, politicians, bureaucrats, and poets, and with its leaning towards idealism and elitism – that it can make little room for such alternative antipathies, extemporized and acted out at a local level in relation not only to cultural and political ideals but also to the brute forces of global capitalist expansion.

Such points do not in the least detract from the fact that, taken on its own terms, this is an impressive work. Aydin can count himself one of a fairly select circle in his ability confidently to navigate the histories of his two chosen transnational political imaginaries with thoroughgoing reference to secondary and primary materials in Turkish and Japanese, and other languages besides. The comparative perspective that this affords him is quite unique, and important. Furthermore, neat chapter summaries and the author's lucid style help to ensure that a text that covers a great deal of ground remains digestible and easy to navigate.