Andrew Sartori

The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission

Uday Singh Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire has been enthusiastically received by a surprisingly broad range of scholars of empire as a powerful contribution to the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. Mehta’s carefully argued and impressively limpid discussion gives articulate voice to themes that have gained significant footing in recent scholarship: a suspicion of abstraction and universalism and a correlative assertion of cultural difference and the power of representations. Yet, viewed from the perspective of a historian, his argument provokes some fundamental questions about how we are to interpret the emergence of modern ideologies that identify “empire”— and, for the purposes of both Mehta’s text and this essay, the British Empire specifically—as a vehicle for both the maintenance and the dissemination of modern “civilization.” In this essay, I shall begin by examining Mehta’s core proposition: that liberal abstraction contains within its basic argumentative structure an immanent propensity for colonial domination. In parts 2 and 3 of this essay, I will draw on some recent interventions in British intellectual history to suggest that this irreducibly his-

Robert Redfield's Comparative Civilizations Project and the Political Imagination of Postwar America

In August 1945, Wendell Clark Bennett submitted his history and appraisal of the activities of the Ethnogeographic Board to its sponsors. Established in 1942 under the joint auspices of the National Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the Smithsonian Institute, the board was “a sample of broader activities” on the part of the scholarly community to establish bodies that would mediate between academic institutions and government agencies to aid in a “successful execution of the war.”2 Bennett, a member of the board, noted and applauded the “marked increase in area consciousness on the part of academic institutions”3 since the beginning of World War 11. He emphasized the

Beyond culture-contact and colonial discourse: ”Germanism” in colonial Bengal

This essay will explore the presence of Germany as a key trope of Bengali nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. It will problematize the exhaustiveness of a conventional spectrum of interpretation in the analysis of colonial intellectual history that has been defined at one extreme by the cultural violence of colonial interpellation and at the other by a hermeneutic conception of authentic intercultural encounter across the limits of great traditions. When Bengalis actually began to interact directly with Germans and German thought, it was an encounter whose parameters had already been deeply determined in the course of the preceding forty or fifty years. But I shall also argue that this appeal to the trope of Germany emerged from within a more complex, multilateral configuration in which “Germany” was itself a key figure of Victorian discourses in Britain itself.

The Resonance of “Culture”: Framing a Problem in Global Concept-History

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “culture” achieved the status of a truly global concept. We find discourses of “culture” emerging to prominence in the German-speaking world during the second half of the eighteenth century (with the closely associated linguistic arenas of the Netherlands and Scandinavia rapidly following suit); in the English-speaking world starting in the first half of the nineteenth century; in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia starting in the second half of the nineteenth century; and just about everywhere else in the course of the twentieth century. “Culture” began to circulate far beyond the European sites of its modern genesis, sometimes through the direct transfer of lexical items from Western European languages (e.g., Russian kulءtura; the use of kalcar in various South Asian languages); and more often through the construction of new translative equivalencies with preexisting words or concepts most often signifying purification, refinement, or improvement (e.g., Japanese bun-ka; Chinese wen-hua; Bangla and Hindi sanskriti; Urdu tamaddun).

Introducing Critical Historical Studies

W e launch Critical Historical Studies with a sense that critical understandings of politics, culture, economy, and social life need renewal and deepening. Over the past few decades, most critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences has utilized the tools of the cultural or linguistic turns as a privileged analytic lens and has broadly focused on questions of identity—that is, on inequities structured by gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and postcoloniality. An earlier style of critique, largely grounded in Marxist analysis of class inequities, has dwindled proportionally. We recognize the important analytical, political, and moral gains achieved by the cultural and linguistic turns. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the problems besetting the contemporary world cannot be grasped adequately without renewed attention to questions of political economy. Since the 1970s, during the very period when the humanities and social sciences were caught up in the linguistic and cultural turns, world capitalism has undergone fundamental and irreversible transformations—transformations that pose profound challenges to our understanding of both the past and the present. Critical Historical Studies aims to develop an innovative approach to historical transformations that is adequate to this challenge, an approach strongly influenced by a critical appropriation of Marx but that remains in open and vigorous dialogue with other theoretical currents. The journal encourages systematic exploration of connections between cultural and political change on the one hand and overarching transformations in socioeconomic contexts on the other. The current deep crisis of the world economy has significantly revived the question of capitalism in contemporary scholarly and popular debates, for example, about the legitimacy of neoliberalism, the threat of ecological crises and global climate change, or the causes and consequences of widening economic inequal-

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF DUTY IN AUROBINDO'S ESSAYS ON THE GITA

Aurobindo Ghose was a major nationalist intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who rose to prominence as one of the most radical leaders of the Swadeshi movement before retreating to the French colony of Pondicherry to dedicate his life to spiritual exercises and experiments. Aurobindo, like so many others of the nationalist period, produced a major commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. I will argue that his appeal to the Gita in the late 1910s represented, however, not a continuation of his nationalist project, but rather a radical reformulation of it in the wake of the defeat of the Swadeshi mobilization of 1905–8.

From Statecraft to Social Science in Early Modern English Political Economy

With the elaboration of the concept “commercial society,” political economy identified the social as an object of analysis proper to its inquiry. But the development of a discourse of political economy in the seventeenth century centered on the role of extraterritorial, maritime, and interstate commerce in underwriting the funding of state power and in augmenting the collective wealth of the polity. While political economy emerged in response to accelerating processes of early modern commercialization, it was slower than contemporary discourses of natural law and moral skepticism to formulate a conception of “commercial society.” When in the later seventeenth century an inchoate conception of commercial society did emerge in political economy, this was achieved through the internalization of models of maritime commerce as the basis for reimagining domestic society as radically commercial and for understanding this fact as a new, endogenous basis for the expansion of the aggregate wealth of the polity.