Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (review)

Historians who wish to gain a deeper appreciation of the task of writing histories in our contemporary and postcolonial world should take special note of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. The wide range and clarity of Chakrabarty’s essays makes the important insights and contribution of the Subaltern Studies Collective accessible to historians of all periods and regions.

One essay deserves particular attention. Anyone who may have been wondering whether Marxist theory really is dead and buried would do well to examine “Two Histories of Capital.” For, where one might presume that Marx’s writings are inapplicable to the post-foundational world we now inhabit, we find in this essay that Marx’s analysis is sufficiently flexible to appreciate its nuances. Where some European theorists have offered a structuralist interpretation of Marx, and others (E.P. Thompson, for example) have pushed for more atheoretical and historicist appropriations, Chakrabarty shows how Marx employed both approaches.

He accomplishes this by outlining two understandings of history (1 and 2) found in Marx’s writings. History 1 is the story of capital becoming or making itself. This is not a teleological perspective that might propose that everything coming before capitalism is in a process of becoming capitalist. It is rather the process by which capital appropriates things that may or may not be its antecedents. It is about archive formation, the formation of a past that is retrospectively posited by capital, or, in short, the process of rewriting history so that it fits. History 2, by contrast, is resistance to 1, or life itself. For Marx, Chakrabarty suggests, capital can never be universal: “No global capital can ever represent the universal logic of capital, for any historically available form of capital is a provisional compromise made up of History 1 modified by somebody’s History 2s.”[70] As such, Marx’s analysis can be as applicable to places where it has been considered irrelevant owing to particular economic conditions as to those places where it has long been applied (industrialized Europe).

With a title as provocative as “provincializing Europe,” however, the reviewer must turn to an examination of this concept. Doing so, means necessarily slighting the formidable scholarship evidenced throughout the volume, but, I would argue, it is an imperative that Europe, as it is laid out for us here, forces upon us.

Provincializing Europe denotes at least two different things. At one level, it is something that is occurring before our eyes, with the dominance of Europe, embodied in colonialism, on the wane. Europe is a victim, in part, of its own success. Two of its offspring — modern imperialism and third-world nationalisms — have grown in its place, so much so that we now see “the possibility of an alliance between metropolitan histories and subaltern peripheral pasts” at the expense of the universals presented through the Enlightenment and Europe.

But provincializing must mean more besides this, otherwise the historian would require only the use of the “factual register.” The author could record the details of this provincialization, producing the kinds of “affective histories” that Chakrabarty places in the second half of this book, which provide “a loving grasp of detail in search of an understanding of the diversity of the human life-worlds.”[18]

So, Provincializing Europe explores the “theoretical register” also. Chakrabarty’s purpose in the first half of the volume is “to explore the capacities and the limitations of certain European social and political categories in conceptualizing political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds.”[18] Since social science is the product of Europe and is so tied to concepts of modernity forged in the crucible of European colonialisms, he contends, we need to be aware that it may not be a good guide for us as we attempt to interpret these new histories that are coming to the fore.

If not exactly a call to arms, this work is certainly a call to retheorize some of the central categories in social and historical analysis. Chakrabarty wants to lead the way in this process...