1 - Introduction

Summary

One can see how a conception of the state–society relation, born within the parochial history of Western Europe but made universal by the global sway of capital, dogs the contemporary history of the world.

Chatterjee 1993: 238

The project of provincializing “Europe” therefore cannot be a project of “cultural relativism.” It cannot originate from the stance that the reason/science/universals which help define Europe as the modern are simply “culture-specific” and therefore only belong to the European cultures. For the point is not that Enlightenment rationalism is always unreasonable in itself but rather a matter of documenting how – through what historical process – its “reason,” which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look “obvious” far beyond the ground where it originated.

Chakrabarty 1992: 23

In the summer of 1643, fearing for his son's safety in the face of the Civil War violence then swirling around Oxford, John Aubrey's father summoned him home from his beloved university to the family estate at Broadchalke, in the south of Wiltshire. Young John languished in rustic isolation for three long years; he describes his sojourn in the country as “a most sad life to me … not to have the benefitt of an ingeniose Conversation.” For Aubrey, whose company was widely valued in his later life for his skill and grace as a conversationalist, it was a special hardship to have “none but Servants and rustiques” – he terms the local inhabitants “Indigenae, or Aborigines” – with whom to converse (Aubrey 1847 [1969]: 11).