First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well—a translation of existing worlds and their thought—categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3
PART ONE: HISTORICISM AND THE NARRATION OF MODERNITY
Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27 Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47 Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History 72 Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97
PART TWO: HISTORIES OF BELONGING
Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117 Chapter 6. Nation and Imagination 149 Chapter 7. Adda: A History of Sociality 180 Chapter 8. Family, Fraternity, and Salaried Labor 214 Epilogue. Reason and the Critique of Historicism 237
Notes 257 Index 299
What People are Saying About This
Lynn Hunt
Chakrabarty offers a fundamental rethinking of the most important and misunderstood of all historical categories--time itself. Never facile,always willing to confront the most intractable dilemmas,Chakrabarty forces us to reconsider our deepest historicizing impulses. His work is must reading for anyone with an interest in the future of historical studies.
Ranajit Guha
The idea of provincializing Europe has been around for some time,but mostly as an insight waiting for elaboration. In this book,Dipesh Chakrabarty develops the idea into a project informed massively by fact and brilliantly by theory. A work of exemplary scholarship,it is a call to raise the level of current debates about modernity and the colonial experience and reexamine our approach to histories and cultures on both sides of the colonial divide. A formidable challenge.
