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On July 1, 1909 in a professed act of patriotism to his Indian motherland, Madar Lal Dhingra, a nationalist revolutionary studying in England, assassinated Sir William Curzon Wyllie, political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State of India. Twelve days later, Stefan Zweig responded to this event in the Viennese newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, in an essay titled, "Die indische Gefahr für England" ("The Indian Threat to England"). As with much of Stefan Zweig's published works with political undertones, his public response is less an overt political statement—less a disapproval or sanction of Dhingra's act—than a quest to understand it: its motivations and ramifications. For a young Zweig developing his commitment to a postnational, Paneuropean ideal, the end of Empire was troublesome for it delineated foremost the fracturing of Europe along nationalist lines.

Is it possible to be a postcolonial critic without being an historical materialist? In other words, is it possible to articulate a critique from a postcolonial perspective of various colonial discourses without taking into account the specific nature of the material conditions, the exact quality of the oppressions, repressions, cajolings, brutalities, pleasures, and desires which these discourses represent? Can one assume an appropriate position of critical authority from which to critique and make after-the-fact judgments on the discourses of western colonists, hangers-on, visitors, journalists, travel writers, and the like, without taking into account the specifics of the practices that these discourses describe, praise, celebrate, ignore, or elide?