The printed matter of the modern Arab or Indian or Chinese mind was simply the bearer of sedition and rebellion or a vehicle for propaganda and profit, never an arena of theory or thinking. Therefore, to write a new history of these ideas, a new archive must be raised. How to raise this new archive, much of it now decaying in Third World libraries that are themselves crumbling under the conditions of structural readjustment or withering away thanks to a growing chauvinist disregard for particular pasts, is the task before us.