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.