Books by Dipesh Chakrabarty

Combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. This book examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" ' action from 1890 to 1940.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. This book examines Sarkar's career - and poignant obsolescence - as a way in to larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life.

In "Habitations of modernity" Dipesh Chakrabarty explores the complexities of modernism in India and seeks principles of humaneness grounded in everyday life that may elude grand political theories. These issues are pursued in a series of closely linked cultural essays.

First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.