| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 301. Cloth $55.00, paper $16.95.

This book on the task of representing and understanding historical experiences in South Asia is organized into two main parts entitled "Historicism and the Narration of Modernity" and "Histories of Belonging." The eight chapters, including four with material from previously published articles, are bracketed by an introduction that sets out the meaning of "provincializing Europe" and a conclusion that counsels us to address the "universal narrative of capital" and "multiple life worlds." The "Europe" that Dipesh Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize is an "imaginary figure," not that geographical space conventionally denoted by the term but the propositions about human life generalized out of accounts of European history. These ideas, the author suggests, are both necessary and insufficient for sorting out the meanings of politics and history in India. The challenge for him is twofold: first, to deploy categories of European thought to discern the development of capitalism and the meanings of political modernity in "non-European life-worlds," and second, to expose the intellectual poverty of such exercises unable to make clear the range of possibilities available to us, if only the dominating themes of citizenship and nation-state can be diminished in our presentations of history. . . .

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