The Līḷācaritra, the first literary text in Marathi, is a prose biography of Cakradhar compiled by his followers in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. The close attention to place in the Līḷācaritra is key to understanding not only this text from long ago and far away but also the attachment to particular places in other highly mobile worlds, including our own. The Līḷācaritra follows Cakradhar's ascetic peregrinations, as well as journeys made by the many people who came to see him or attempted to return to his presence (his sannidhān). The text's attention to the details of Cakradhar's daily life, including the places he visited, is motivated by bhakti (devotional love). In order to soothe the pain they felt at his absence, the community of Cakradhar's followers practiced remembrance of the things he had said and done, and made pilgrimages to the places where he had stayed.

In light of the emergent “history of capitalism” field in Euro-American history, this article reviews and critically situates how the category “capitalism” has been debated within the historiographies of China and South Asia. In discussions paralleling European historiography, Sinologists and Indologists explored whether the “prime mover” of capitalism was changes in production or in circulation. The example of South Asian studies shows how, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the dominant production-centered approach—drawing upon Marxist theory—produced stories of economic “failure” in Asia. The example of Chinese history since the 1990s points to the resurgence of a Smithian circulation-centered approach that challenges the Eurocentric story of failure. Each of these approaches emerged out of distinct eras of capital accumulation in the twentieth century: mid-century state-supported industrialization and late-century deregulated globalization. The tension between these approaches points towards a more integrative reinterpretation that sees the core dynamics of capitalism as a cyclical process of “capital accumulation,” one that integrates both production and circulation-centered approaches and also challenges Eurocentric histories of capitalism. This article's conclusion provides speculative thoughts on writing the histories of capitalism for China and South Asia today.

Drawing on archival sources in Britain, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States, this article explores late-colonial anxieties about the influence of Chinese nationalism in Malaya (and especially among students in Chinese-medium schools) in the lead up to self-government in 1957. It demonstrates that the colonial fear of communism in Malaya was not always synonymous with the fear of cultural influence from “new China” and that the “rise of China” in the mid-1950s was viewed as a challenge to colonially sanctioned programs for “Malayanization.” More importantly, in exploring some of the ways in which the colonial state mobilized anti-communist cultural workers from Hong Kong to help counter the perceived threat from China, the article argues that more focus should be placed on the role of colonial agency in shaping “Sinophone” cultural expression in Southeast Asia during this period.

This article focuses on the 1935 discovery of what is now believed to be a selenium deficiency disorder in the Japanese client state of Manchukuo. The epicenter of this disease had served as pasture for Oirat Mongols until the late nineteenth century. Opening up the land for reclamation by Chinese migrants put greater pressure on each acre to produce food. With a limited supply of selenium in the soil, the intake of this mineral by crops decreased over time, especially under the extractive conditions of the soybean industry during the Japanese occupation. Japanese theories on climate and hygiene made legible the consequences of transforming this nomadic borderland into an agrarian heartland on colonized bodies. By bringing attention to the understudied Mongol territories in Manchukuo, this essay goes beyond environmental histories bound by the nation-state to reveal the corporeal costs of settler colonialism and ecological imperialism.

Having had the privilege of being taught by Chris Bayly as an undergraduate, I can hear Remaking the Modern World in his voice. I can hear it in the form of the dazzling lectures—never showy, but perspective-shifting week after week—that were the kernels from which this book and its predecessor on the nineteenth century both grew. In the late 1990s, that course was still called “The West and the Third World since 1914.” Notwithstanding its then already outmoded title, it was a progressive course: a perspective on global history building out from the detailed study of South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. It was clear even then that Bayly's long immersion in the study of Indian history was not incidental but rather vital to Bayly, the global historian.

Teachers of world history will welcome this book as an important addition not just to our store of knowledge about the remaking of the modern world, but to our repertoire of methods for understanding how the global emerged as a condition of colonial and postcolonial modernity. For in addition to being an attempt to explain how the global crises of the early twentieth century helped to “engender a revival of the parochial” (p. 326) in the present, C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 offers a set of design principles for how to imagine that historical process through a combination of diachronic and synchronic approaches.

Commenting on Christopher Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 is a bittersweet exercise. My assignment for this forum is to consider Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 from the vantage point of China studies. I will do so by framing my remarks with respect to some of the ways this major South Asia historian took his expertise into larger projects, the last of which is the volume under discussion.

Using the term “legacy” for a career as productive, insightful, and pathbreaking as Chris Bayly's is doubtless an understatement. The movement in his publications from the transitional world in the Indian subcontinent leading to British imperialism, through aspects of high empire in India, to world history through both case studies and broader context for grasping the implications of a changing world, provides valuable analyses for all of us, if not a pattern many could replicate. Perhaps what ought to be noted here is the experience, common to many of us working across a very broad range of problematics and focal points, to have found Bayly there, before us.