Pankaj Mishra, acclaimed novelist and historian of Asia’s modern development, would have none of it. In a scathing essay published in the London Review of Books, Mishra gutted Ferguson for his dishonestly humanitarian portrait of Western imperialism and solipsistic lament of Western decline. Those charges, and the suggestion that Ferguson had a literary analogue in The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan (who, also fearing his civilization was in danger, expressed white-supremacist ideas), launched a literary feud that culminated in Ferguson threatening to sue Mishra for libel.