Empire Without Flags

Still in her twenties, Rebecca F. Kuang has emerged as one of the most incisive literary voices examining empire’s afterlives. Born in China, raised in the United States, and educated at Cambridge and Oxford, she broke through with The Poppy War, a novel rooted in China’s wars, colonial trauma and organised violence. Its success grew into a trilogy that strips war of romance and exposes power as addiction. Curious about her method, I turned to her book, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence—and found it a bracing, unsettling pleasure.

For over a century, writers have dismantled the gloss of empire. Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul and Amitav Ghosh exposed the violence of imperialism through different lenses: allegory, psychological realism and historical reconstruction. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness revealed conquest as organised cruelty; Naipaul traced the psychic wreckage left behind in A Bend in the River and The Mimic Men; Ghosh mapped the empire’s material machinery—opium, indenture, migration—in Sea of Poppies, The Glass Palace and In an Antique Land. Together, they punctured the myth of imperial benevolence.

Kuang extends this lineage into the present. In The Poppy War, she reframes colonial violence through history-inflected fantasy, denying readers moral comfort. In Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, she advances a sharper thesis: empire is sustained not only by armies and trade, but by language. Translation becomes extraction; scholarship becomes power. Universities and claims of neutrality are revealed as instruments of domination.

Her most contemporary turn comes with Yellowface, where empire sheds territory and reappears as marketplace and algorithm. Conquest no longer requires armies or maps; virality now performs that work, and platforms replace colonies. Visibility becomes power, attention becomes currency, and outrage becomes a business model. Yet the core questions remain unchanged: Who gets to speak? Who profits from that speech? Who controls narrative, memory and legitimacy?

Kuang extends this critique beyond publishing, into the broader media ecosystem that surrounds modern life. Endless commercials peddle consumerism through 24/7 television and digital feeds, training desire and impatience while flattening attention. Fake news, manufactured outrage and algorithmic amplification blur the line between fact and performance. Narrative-setting—once the privilege of imperial administrators and court historians—is now executed at scale by media houses, influencers and political operators.

Propaganda no longer marches in uniform; it arrives as entertainment, a trend, or ‘content’. Yellowface exposes how easily power hides inside these systems, reminding us that while the instruments have changed, the struggle over voice, truth and meaning remains as old—and as dangerous—as empire itself. Kuang collapses the distance between colonial history and modern life. Our universities, publishing industries, supply chains and digital platforms were not built on neutral ground. They arose from hierarchy, violence and selective memory—and now operate invisibly through code and metrics.

A personal aside sharpened this insight. Walking through Oxford in 2016—along streets lined with unhurried teashops, modest eateries, and bookshops that invite lingering rather than consumption, amid its quiet lanes and grand buildings—I noticed a simple statue of an ox outside the railway station. Oxford—ox + ford—began as a river crossing for working animals. The statue is a quiet truth-teller: beneath every veneer lies timber, mud and labour. Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, brought back that memory vividly.

Great cities—London, Paris, New York, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai—have always unsettled me. During my career, I had the opportunity to travel to these great cities and to spend time alone, walking without purpose and observing life as it unfolded. I carried little money in my pockets, and perhaps that very lack gave me the freedom to linger—to watch faces, gestures, shopfronts, subways and silences without the insulation of comfort. Moving on foot and at the pace of ordinary people, I sensed the unseen tensions of these cities: the quiet exhaustion behind ambition, the brittle confidence of power, and the fragile dignity with which millions endure. Those walks taught me more than guided tours ever could, revealing how grandeur and deprivation coexist, and how history, though unseen, continues to press upon the present.

With the internet embedded in mobile devices, everyday life has become fully transactional. Money now moves as data, streaming effortlessly across national boundaries, and the exhilaration of this speed often shades into unease. These cities hum with violence, past and present: wealth beside precarity, power beside struggle. The gig economy, instant hiring and firing by email or algorithm, and lives governed by dashboards and metrics are, at best, unsettling. Technology has not softened old inequalities; it has sharpened them. As we enter a new concentration of influence—often faceless, sometimes personified by prominent individuals, such as Elon Musk—power travels faster than governments can respond. At the same time, intentions and consequences remain disturbingly opaque.

If Joseph Conrad warned us about the moral darkness at the heart of empire, and Amitav Ghosh patiently showed how empire operates through ships, trade, money, and forced labour, Rebecca F. Kuang brings the question sharply into our own time. She asks: what happens when an empire no longer needs colonies, flags, or armies, but survives through language, institutions, platforms and code?

In Kuang’s world, power does not always announce itself. It hides in translation, algorithms, publishing markets, universities and digital networks that appear neutral and open, yet quietly decide who is heard, who is rewarded, and who is erased. This lends particular urgency to her work for younger readers, who grow up within these systems, often unaware of their inherited biases. Her novels are, therefore, not just stories; they are warnings. They urge us to stop moving through life on autopilot, dazzled by convenience and speed. They ask us to pay attention—to question where power comes from, whose interests it serves, and what histories it carries forward. Before the empire hardens again in new, invisible forms, Kuang calls on us to wake up, think clearly, and act with awareness in the world we are actively creating.

What binds Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh and Rebecca F. Kuang is not only their sustained interrogation of power, but also the social worlds that shaped them. All were born into modest, middle-class or working households, raised by parents who laboured, taught, or served rather than ruled. None inherited the empire; they encountered it as something imposed, observed, or studied from the margins. That distance sharpened their vision. Conrad saw the lie beneath imperial grandeur; Naipaul traced its psychological scars; Ghosh reconstructed its material machinery; and Kuang exposed its afterlives in language, institutions and digital culture.

To this lineage belong Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and Wings of Fire, which I co-authored with him. Dr. Kalam also came from an ordinary working family, carrying no inherited privilege—only curiosity, discipline and faith in learning. For a modern teenager, Wings of Fire conveys the same moral values as these writers: greatness does not stem from domination, extraction, or spectacle, but from perseverance, ethical effort and service. Where Conrad warned of moral collapse, Naipaul of hollow independence, Ghosh of systemic exploitation, and Kuang of empire reborn in code, Kalam offers a counter-vision—technology aligned with conscience. In an age racing towards Singularity, this shared inheritance matters profoundly: the human mind must not be numbed by automation or dazzled by power, but awakened to responsibility—so that science and intelligence help heal a crowded, heating planet, rather than deepen the old divide between rags of poverty and velvets of affluence.