Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #165619 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
Chakrabarty's work gives us a richer, more penetrating language to deal with modernity and the colonial encounter. . . . It is the ambiguity of Chakabarty's own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that gives his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility.
(Amit Chaudhuri London Review of Books )

The great value of this book lies in Chakrabarty's exceptional ability to bring to light what constantly gets glossed over and forgotten when we can only speak the standard languages of the academy. To do this requires the kind of bilingual consciousness which can bring into illuminating relation Adam Smith and Tagore. Chakrabarty makes you regret that so few are capable of doing this with a high degree of eloquence and insight.
(Charles Taylor IWM Newsletter )

This masterful re-examination of rationality, universality, and difference in the postcolonial world should prove inspiring for serious historians of all lands.
(Alice Ballard Theory and Society )

A slow, detailed, careful reading of the author's positively provocative style will be rich in rewards, generating, in the reader's mind, new ideas with new questions pointing to interdisciplinary, inter-cultural research, dialogue. As a reference reading text, it is rich in direct and implied questions on intricate inter-cultural interactions, gaps in communication, etc. As a discourse on basic themes of socio-political modernism and cultural diversity, it is more a starting point than a store of conclusions on debate dealing with cardinal themes pointing to research in inter-cultural and intersocietal studies. His dialectic, constructive discourse is keen on generating lasting questions and not dogmatic, ephemeral answers.
(Wahe H. Balekjian Online Journal on International Constitutional Law )

[T]he analysis of the processes and mechanisms of destruction are well worth reading.
(Joyce Apsel Human Rights Review )

Giovanni Federico . . . has compiled an exhaustive and impressive array of historical socioeconomic data heretofore unavailable in one source. . . . One of the book's strengths is the remarkable level of detail and the carefully assembled historical data. It is a rare sort of book and Federico tells the story of agriculture in a very interesting way. His mastery of the subject is plainly visible throughout the book. . . . This is not a text that can be used in undergraduate courses; rather, it is an analysis of economic performance and the history of agriculture that should be core reading for advanced students of agriculture and researchers. It will be a major reference for the foreseeable future and should be on the shelf of every agricultural scientist and anyone else interested in the historical and economic aspects of agriculture.
(Krishna Prasad Vadrevu Development and Change )

From the Back Cover
"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." (Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles)

About the Author
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".

Customer Reviews

A lucid & clever polemic in postcolonial historical theory
Chakrabarty manages to unite quite elegantly several old and new essays into a meaningful and directed book. This is not the first theoretical book on postcolonialism and history, but it is one of the only to deal with history as an idea and discipline in a deeply interrogative manner, rather than just with cliched discussions of 'the nation'.

The author's project, to 'provincialize Europe', is an important and interesting banner under which historical writing could march, while also providing ample room for critique. His take on Marx remains evident, incisive and well-justified, and his idea of the 'inequality of ignorance' between East and West is attractive. While I had problems with his definitions of 'historicism', and the way he sometimes seems to caricature contemporary historical writing ignoring some of its more recent and interesting manifestations, its broad range and dilligent scholarship serve very well in forming a point about which to consider ideas and contest such issues.

But most of all, I was impressed with Chakrabarty's general awareness of the cliches and dead alleys of present postcolonial academic writing. All in all, it is an important and pathbreaking text which should please fans of high theory and concrete examples equally, as well as bring relief to those frustrated by the writing styles of a Spivak.