In the politics of twentieth century India, Jawaharlal Nehru is a familiar name. During the nine years he spent in prison, he wrote at length about Indian and world history. His ideas on history are not without distinction: he was the only major political leader of Asia or Africa to have written anything resembling a world history, for instance. The patterns and possibilities he saw in history were informed by what can be termed as his philosophy of history. He believed that how we write histories is directly related to the present we find ourselves in and the future we want to imagine. As such, a finer understanding of our past would not be possible without a more nuanced evaluation of our present and a more careful imagination of our future. The aim of this book is to understand Nehru in a new light as a philosopher of history by assembling his scattered reflections on the meaning of history and establishing a relationship between them. How did he argue for his specific historical-philosophical claims – and why?