Books by Siraj Ahmed

This book locates the origins of the modern humanities in the philological practices of late 18th-century British scholars in colonial India, offering a radical reappraisal of a range of disciplines and excavating hiddenpre-colonial practices that might well help the humanities move beyond their current methodological and political impasses.

By systematically linking eighteenth-century European writing to the colonial history of India, The Stillbirth of Capital argues that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question, especially our premise that capitalism is the basis of modernity.