Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference - New Edition Paperback - 2007

First line

IT HAS RECENTLY BEEN SAID in praise of the postcolonial project of Subaltern Studies that it demonstrates, "perhaps for the first time since colonisation," that "Indians are showing sustained signs of reappropriating the capacity to represent themselves [within the discipline of history]."

From the jacket flap

"The idea of provincializing Europe has been around for some time, but mostly as an insight waiting for elaboration. In this book, Dipesh Chakrabarty develops the idea into a project informed massively by fact and brilliantly by theory. A work of exemplary scholarship, it is a call to raise the level of current debates about modernity and the colonial experience and reexamine our approach to histories and cultures on both sides of the colonial divide. A formidable challenge."--Ranajit Guha

"Chakrabarty offers a fundamental rethinking of the most important and misunderstood of all historical categories--time itself. Never facile, always willing to confront the most intractable dilemmas, Chakrabarty forces us to reconsider our deepest historicizing impulses. His work is must reading for anyone with an interest in the future of historical studies."--Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles