David Ludden, John MacAloon, Achille Mbembe, Ashis Nandy, Gyanendra Pandey, Peter Pels, Roy Porter, Moishe Postone, Paul Rabinow, Bruce Robbins, Roger Rouse, Marshall Sahlins, Lee Schlesinger, Terry Smith, Stanley J. Tambiah, Charles Taylor, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Greg Urban, Ashutosh Varshney, Toby Volkman, Myron Weiner, and Geoffrey White. To those l have inadvertently overlooked, my sincere apologies. A few persons deserve special mention for their more general and generous support. My teacher, friend, and colleague Bernard S. Cohn started me on a journey involving anthropology and history in 1970 and has been a steadfast source of ideas, friendship, and critical realism ever since. Nancy Farriss kept me always alert to the challenges of historical comparison and to the meanings of fidelity to the archive. Ulf Hannerz has been my partner in the study of things global since 1984, when we spent a year together at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto). Peter van der Veer, in both Philadelphia and Amsterdam, has been a steadfast source of friendship, wit, and engaged debate. John and Jean Comaroff, through both their scholarship and their stimulating presence in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, contributed in many ways to the shaping of this book. Sherry Ortner encouraged the project from the start and provided one of two careful, suggestive readings of the manuscript for the University of Minnesota Press. I am grateful to the second, anonymous reader as well. Dilip Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee (coeditors of the series in which this book appears) have been friends, colleagues, and interlocutors in more ways that l can easily describe. Homi Bhabha, Jacqueline Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Steven Collins, Prasenjit Duara, and Sheldon Pollock provided a community of ideas which, even as it forms, has helped me complete this book and imagine many futures.