I. Micro-Macro Oscillations and the Neglect of Small Spaces

Historian Lynn Hunt argued in 2014 that it was the “Dissatisfactions with … cultural historians’ focus on the micro-historical [that have] fueled a reactive propensity for the macro-historical.”Footnote ²² But note that the microhistorical, or microhistory,Footnote ²³ itself grew in the 1970s and the 1980s “in opposition to … [the] macroscopic and quantitative models that dominated the international historiographical scene between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, primarily through the activity of Fernand Braudel and the historians of the Annales school.”Footnote ²⁴ Microhistory was also a response to, and set itself off against, “ethnocentric abstraction of theories of modernization.”Footnote ²⁵ Thus, the sub-field has always been in a tension with received understandings of macrohistorical processes. In practice, however, microhistory has leaned heavily on the side of disrupting our notions of macrohistory, and especially modernization theories, than building them anew.Footnote ²⁶

In South Asian historiography, the tradition I am most familiar with, the task of presenting micro-challenges to the macrohistorical was carried out admirably by the Subaltern Studies Collective. In its early phase (early to mid-1980s), this collective bore an unacknowledged family resemblance to Italian microhistory and focused on dismantling elitist biases within modern Indian historiography.Footnote ²⁷ The collective was heavily invested in anthropology, and rural in orientation.Footnote ²⁸ Given this, while Italian microhistorians still researched small towns and issues pertaining to real estate,Footnote ²⁹ the subaltern school, for the most part, did not engage explicitly with spatial and scalar issues.Footnote ³⁰ In its later, more internationally acclaimed phase, that began from the late 1980s, the collective, unlike Italian microhistory, also internalized postcolonialism and postmodernism. Subsequently, as the move to “provincialize Europe” became the norm among many historians of the global South, especially in the West, problems of fragmentationism in the discipline of history began to surface. In a 1993 article, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggested that historians were reluctant to embrace “difference,” or fragmentationism, primarily because it threatened the very idea of history.Footnote ³¹

Fragmentationism in history engendered two kinds of responses. One called for a more robust and renewed engagement with “methodological niceties” so that historians could develop some “guideposts” and “common standards of evidence, evaluation, and explanation” in a discipline that had been left all but exhausted by the epistemological challenges launched against it during the so-called “cultural turn.”Footnote ³² The other, far more popular response was a turn to global history. This global turn was epitomized by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s connected histories (more on that later) and the inaugural editorial of the Journal of Global History. The editorial noted, “Historians have expressed increasing concern about the segmentation of their discipline’s scholarly expertise into discrete compartments, whether defined by place, period, theme, or sub-discipline” and that a “deluge of monographs” was obscuring the “landscapes of historical knowledge, even in relatively neglected parts of the globe.” Global history could help “overcome this fragmentation in historiography, while avoiding pitfalls that have emerged in earlier attempts to achieve this goal.”Footnote ³³

On paper, the attempt at overcoming fragmentationism in the discipline of history through global history offered an opportunity for historians of South Asia and elsewhere in the global South to participate in a new project as equal members of the discipline. However, as the field of global history developed, it came to share a tenuous relationship with single-site case studies, place-based knowledge, and the academy in the global South. This is why, “[t]here is [now] an acute worry on the part of some scholars” notes John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “about the methodological downgrading of place-based knowledge and expertise in the writing of global history.”Footnote ³⁴ As Lara Putnam has argued, this downgrading is co-constituted by the progressive prominence of digitization in historical research that has allowed several global historians to “‘side-glance’ and ‘term-search’ their way through research fields that are very far from their own expertise.” It has not only meant that historians make “rookie mistakes,” but has also jeopardized research requiring multi-dimensional knowledge of small sites or locales, and deep immersion.Footnote ³⁵ Further, as Jeremy Adelman has reminded us, “High hopes for cosmopolitan narratives about ‘encounters’ between the Westerners and Resterners [has] led to some pretty one-way exchanges about the shape of the global.”Footnote ³⁶

It should therefore come as little surprise that the Subaltern Studies Collective wound down in 2012, when the global turn in history peaked. In a remarkably self-reflexive move, Partha Chatterjee called for an end to the collective, which he had co-founded with Ranajit Guha and others in the early 1980s. Chatterjee admitted that “as an intellectual project, Subaltern Studies was perhaps overdetermined by its times. Given today’s changed contexts the tasks set out by it cannot be taken forward within the framework and methods mobilized for it.”Footnote ³⁷ Building from Shahid Amin’s observation that subaltern studies “do not travel well,” Chatterjee observed that “It is undoubtedly true that the weaving of a local historical narrative with detailed ethnographic description of local practices requires immersion in a seemingly bottomless pool of names, places, and events that are unlikely to be familiar to readers outside the immediate geographical region.” This difficulty “was circumvented by establishing strong connections between the ethnographic account and the relevant conceptual formations or theoretical debates in the discipline,” and therefore, “in the end theory dominated.” However, it was “more difficult to achieve the same result when the main modality of the work is the narrative flow of history.”Footnote ³⁸ That is to say, to the extent subaltern studies was an intervention in historical scholarship, it had started to suffer from “defanged empiricism.” Critics say this tendency had become apparent much earlier. Sumit Sarkar, for instance, argued in 1997, “Once the initial excitement had worn away … work of this kind could seem repetitive, conveying an impression of a purely empiricist adding of details to confirm the fairly simple initial hypothesis of subaltern autonomy in one area or form after another.”Footnote ³⁹

Partha Chatterjee, however, concluded his call for an end to the subaltern studies project on a hopeful note: if “history students all over the world could read about daily life in a single village in the French province of Languedoc in the fourteenth century or about the mental world of a solitary Italian miller in the sixteenth century, then in principle, there is no reason why they should not do the same with a book about subaltern life in a village or small town in South Asia.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Chatterjee made a fair point. What he neglected to mention is that—leaving aside the fact that scholars of the global South are compelled to engage with histories of the global North but not vice versa—both the French and the Italian microhistory traditions relate the particular to the general in customary ways that make them accessible to readers from other parts of the world.Footnote ⁴¹ The French microhistorical tradition assumes that a single microcosm offers a window into a “total history,” and therefore “an opportunity to see the world in a grain of sand.” The Italian microstoria, on the other hand, relies on the notion of exceptional-normal and unravelling “the teleology and triumphalism of the grand narratives.”Footnote ⁴² The French option, which remained at home in the social sciences in the French academy,Footnote ⁴³ is at odds with the postmodernist impulse of the subaltern school.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Italian option, on the other hand, as the end of the Subaltern Studies collective suggests, has clearly run its course insofar as South Asian history is concerned. Further, Italian microhistorical tradition “repeatedly argued against relativist positions, including the one that … reduced historiography to a textual dimension, depriving it of any cognitive value.”Footnote ⁴⁵ But the later phase of subaltern studies embraced postmodernism, a celebration of the fragment, and a “repudiation of post-Enlightenment ideology of Reason and Progress.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This unwittingly made it even more difficult to address what Chatterjee has correctly identified as the challenge of devising forms of writing that will “preserve the integrity of the study as well as make it accessible outside the region.”Footnote ⁴⁷

To be sure, the charge against Eurocentrism was necessary. Further, it is obvious that hyper-real Europe does not pose the same problems to the historian of Italy as it does to the historian of South Asia. But History I of Eurocentric assumptions and metanarratives was meant to be locked in an inadequate but necessary relationship with History II of fragments.Footnote ⁴⁸ Now that the goal of provincializing Europe has entered academic common sense, in the humanities at least, the most dominant strand of non-global South Asian historiography in the United States and elsewhere has little left to argue for or against. It has therefore lost much of its radical charge. Paradoxically, then, the problem of writing “non-anthropologized” and “post-Orientalist” histories that can travel well and change the way we understand broader concepts has become more acute in the age of global history, which emphasizes travel, connection, and mobility.

With the retreat of “Europe” to the “West,” the task of relating the “particular” to the “general” has become even more difficult for histories of the non-West. Take for instance “new histories of capitalism,” birthed in the United States in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis. In this context, the critique by Edwards, Hill, and Neves-Sarrigui is pertinent. They have observed that historians associated with this approach agree that “the process of discovering the history of capitalism … would be inductive rather than deductive.”Footnote ⁴⁹ And that since there is no agreement on what capitalism is, the rule of thumb to be applied, if only for the time being, is that whatever happened in the United States, Germany, France, and England was capitalist.Footnote ⁵⁰ But where does this move leave the rest of the world? How is this approach, the authors ask, more inclusive, promising, or exhilarating than earlier deductive approaches in vogue between 1950s and 1980s in which “the Global South not only formed a major focus of … discussions [about capitalism] … [but also] … the source of central theoretical contributions”?Footnote ⁵¹

It is broadly in these contexts that one can appreciate the significance and appeal of the “connected histories” approach that Sanjay Subrahmanyam laid out in his seminal 1997 article. Through connected histories, Subrahmanyam sought to offer a way for historians to break free from their national, regional, and civilization silos and engage with the discipline of history in a more inclusive and global manner. As importantly for the present analysis, he emphasized how in this approach, “we cannot attempt a ‘macro-history’ … without muddying our boots in the bogs of ‘micro-history.’” Overall, connected histories, Subrahmanyam argued, could be a solution to the “methodological fragmentationism … proclaimed from the rooftops by some … postmodernist colleagues to be the only alternative to the Grand Narrative of Modernization.”Footnote ⁵²

Subrahmanyam’s approach “came to full fruition” in his Three Ways to Be Alien. Footnote ⁵³ This was “the case study, bridging as it were the gap between microhistory and world history.” How did he bridge this gap? Subrahmanyam conducted microhistory of “large spaces” through individual actors. These “large spaces” encompassed oceans and continents and approximated the planetary scale, or in other words, the world “made by the Iberian empires of the early modern period.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Missing here in the oscillation between the macro and the micro, however, is a consideration of small spaces.

Subrahmanyam’s essay has been hugely influential in the field of global history. However, perhaps due to the very nature of global history and the fecundity of his approach, there is now an “obsession with mobility and movement” in the field.Footnote ⁵⁵ This obsession has now bled into unexpected terrains. For example, as Alexia Yates has noted, even “historians of capitalism tend to privilege … capital flows over the more fixed terrain of land, patrimony and real property.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The over-emphasis on mobility and circulation is not surprising, but it is unfortunate since Subrahmanyam also attached much importance to “friction and discomfort, at both the existential and conceptual levels,” and the need for striking a balance between incommensurability and perfect malleability of cultures.Footnote ⁵⁷

Recently, microhistory has embraced the “global,” too. Either independently or as part of scholarly conversation, some scholars have started to write “global microhistory.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In a 2010 article, Tonio Andrade argued that “World History has tended toward the social science side of history” and as a result has “neglect[ed] the human dramas that make history come alive.” Given this, “we should adopt microhistorical and biographical approaches to help populate our models and theories with real people, to write what one might call global microhistory.”Footnote ⁵⁹ A few years later, Sebouh David Aslanian made a similar point. He argued that instead of over-relying on published primary sources as global historians tend to, historians will be better served if they “choose to adopt a multiscopic lens and combine a micro focus and attention to detail (either by limiting their study to a specific community, an individual biography in the tradition of Italian microstoria, or even a ‘commodity chain’ or material object) with a macro view of global connections and comparisons.”Footnote ⁶⁰

A few observations are apposite here about this sub-field. First, given that microhistory was always concerned with connecting the micro and with the macro, the novelty of global microhistory is not self-evident. Second, the drive to add humans, communities, and agency to global history models gives the flawed impression that (micro)history is an exercise in accretion and that the discipline of history serves an “idiographic” function.Footnote ⁶¹ Third, in the elements that constitute Sebouh’s “micro focus and attention to details,” “space” is conspicuous by its absence.

A more spatially sensitive approach to global microhistory has been deployed by Adam Mestyan. In a 2018 article, he conceptualized global microhistory as a methodology that “focuses on the effects of worldwide transformations in a single locality and through an axial moment.” He admitted, however, that this was “not the standard form of global microhistory, which studies how objects, individuals, and ideas traveled in order to decentralize Europe. Nor is it about the ‘cosmos’ of one individual in one locality, village life, or a fascinating event.”Footnote ⁶² What is worth noting here are the kinds of qualifications that Mestyan has to make to call his history of a small space a “kind of” microhistory,Footnote ⁶³ which reveal the tension between traditional microhistory, global history, and histories of small spaces. Further, his approach is likely to sit at odds with Bell’s, for it is less focused on how small spaces can generate large-scale changes.

Mark Gamsa has recently made a valiant attempt to overcome the limitations of global microhistory and address some of the concerns I am raising in this article. He suggests that global microhistory is an approach through which “lives” may be used as means of “bridging the particular and the general, or combining the micro and macro levels in historical analysis.” But interestingly, to do this Gamsa sets his microhistory of a person, Baron Roger Budberg—a physician of Baltic German origin—within a biography of the city of Harbin in northeast China, where Budberg arrived during the Russo-Japanese war and stayed for the rest of his life. The biography of Harbin here helps in “navigating the layers between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ layers of enquiry.”Footnote ⁶⁴ But the question is, can a history of Harbin, or any other city for that matter, perform the role of navigating between the micro and macro layers within the confines of the disciple of history as it stands now? I now turn to this question.

II. Urban History as a History of Small Spaces and “Defanged Empiricism”

In section I, I showed how the discipline of history has experienced micro-macro oscillations and how this has led to the scholarly neglect of small spaces. In this one I will show that urban history, too, an otherwise promising sub-field that generally focuses on small spaces and single city case studies, has suffered from “defanged empiricism,” a problem reflected in the anxiety that urban historians themselves have expressed about the intellectual value of their endeavors.

Since its inception as a distinct sub-field in the UK, urban history has sought to relate itself to the general and, in so doing, distinguish itself from “local history.” In a 1966 lecture, H. J. Dyos, the founding figure of the sub-field of urban history in the UK, stated, “The study of urban history must mean not merely the study of individual communities, fixed more or less in time and space—what might be called urban aspect of local history; but the investigation of altogether broader historical processes and trends that completely transcend the life cycle and range of experience of particular communities.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Dyos thus argued that urban history was different from local history because it engaged with “pervasive historical process” and that it was different from municipal history “in being [interested in] vastly more [topics] than certain types of local government.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The very thin lines that often separate urban history from local history, however, can be appreciated when we consider that Dyos’ landmark 1961 monograph Victorian Suburbs: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell, seen as the first conscious work of urban history in the UK, was originally intended for the series “Occasional Papers in Local History.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Urban history, therefore, has consciously tried to distinguish itself from local and municipal history, but it has not found an easy home in global history. “Until recently,” even accomplished urban historians like Guy Ortolano “went urban to escape [rather than embrace] the global.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Urban history has been a late entrant into the global fold—the “Global Urban History Project,” which is “based on a broad understanding of global urban history as encompassing any effort to think of cities as creations or creators of larger-scale or global historical phenomena,” came into existence only in 2017.Footnote ⁶⁹

I suspect there are two major reasons for the late turn to the global by urban historians. First, most urban histories are dense and detailed studies of a single city. This mode of history writing is not well-aligned with the ethnographic approach of “following” the same thematic question or individuals across sites—popularized by anthropologist George Marcus—that has become the staple of global history.Footnote ⁷⁰ There are, of course, some outstanding examples of thematic global urban history, but they are and will necessarily be limited to certain themes and heavily dependent on single-site studies.Footnote ⁷¹ Would thematically focused global urban history be even possible if scholars stop producing grounded and deep historical research on specific cities?

The second reason urban history may have been a late entrant to the global fold is that once the city is placed in a global context, issues of connectivity and mobility begin to dominate. We lose a sense of concrete place and time as well as that of capital and human immobility, except insofar as that immobility enables further connections and circulations. All this begins to give the impression that the urban and especially the cityscape are epiphenomenal, or as Dyos himself put it, a “dependent variable, the outcome of larger forces.”Footnote ⁷² The point to be considered here is that if the city/the local as a product of history is invariably only acted upon; if the urban “is a field of knowledge” and “not a form of knowledge itself”;Footnote ⁷³ and if processes intrinsic to the urban, even if they exist, are impossible to disentangle from processes that are merely incidental, then intellectually, as historians like David Cannadine and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar have pointed out, urban history stands for very little.Footnote ⁷⁴

The anxiety around the intellectual value of urban history reveals that the sub-field suffers from “defanged empiricism.” For many scholars this became apparent even before the cultural turn, in the 1970s, the halcyon decade of urban history. As Cannadine has informed us, while the editors (including Dyos) of the ambitious two-volume The Victorian City: Images and Realities “hoped that the logic of the book’s structure and of the links between the contributions, would become apparent as the reader made his way through its pages,” according to several reviewers, including E. P. Thompson, “no structures or links emerged,” and the “contributions did not add up to anything coherent.”Footnote ⁷⁵ A variant of the same problem also emerged in the United States. As “the various populisms of the 1960s, which had borne with them great hopes for systematic history from below,” faded away, urban history started to suffer, according to Tilly, “from diminishing returns … because no one figured out how to get a firm grip on city-to-city and year-to-year variation.” Consequently, publishers lost interest in printing “yet another study of Irish or Italian workers’ social mobility—or the lack of it—in yet another middle-sized city.”Footnote ⁷⁶

It is no surprise, then, that questions like “what good is urban history” have been raised by the sub-discipline’s practitioners. As a way out, urban historians have often wished for a comprehensive frame of reference to help link various aspects of what might otherwise be consigned to the remits of local history to larger and more relatable processes. In his 1966 lecture, Dyos recognized the need for having “some means of relating the work being done on the small-scale with that on the large; some comprehensive frame of reference capable of embracing studies, however microscopic, of individual towns or even of single streets or particular houses within them, as well as those macroscopic sweeps which cross centuries of change or cultural divisions within or across political frontiers.”Footnote ⁷⁷ However, Dyos also wondered, “How far can [such attempts] go?” For while he was in favor of finding unifying themes, he rejected grand accounts of urbanization, and that is why he was extremely critical of Lewis Mumford.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the absence of unifying themes, Dyos proposed another move: he wished that “urban historians would find themselves getting enmeshed to a greater extent with the new kinds of thinking about … [urban] phenomena that are being developed by other disciplines, especially … those concerned with contemporary problems.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This was partly because justifying researching on and about the past is vastly different from research focused on the present: “It is all very well to suggest that what we want to be able to make, say, are comparisons in terms of the structure of the labor force and the level of real wages, between London and Singapore or Paris and Timbuctoo at the present day,” but “it is quite another … to compare, for example, the occupation structure of Soho and Spitalfields in 1851 or between 1851 and 1951.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Dyos’ desire for urban history to get more involved in making sense of contemporary urban issues, however, remains unfulfilled. This is apparent in the fact that almost half a century after his speech, urban historians of India, for instance, were being urged by some of their colleagues to move beyond a focus on the long nineteenth century and turn their attentions to the middle decades of the twentieth, because, among other things, it would enable them to participate in contemporary urban policy debates.Footnote ⁸¹

III. Deep Order and Critical Realism

The anxiety around generalization and intellectual value that Dyos expressed in the initial stages of the sub-discipline in the 1960s continues to haunt the sub-field even today. This should give pause, since it suggests that urban history remains stuck between the two extremes that Tilly warned against: time-place particularism (localism and defanged empiricism), and the positivist quest for concept independence and causal regularity as the only legitimate generalization (timeless, spaceless causation). Urban history is susceptible to “defanged empiricism.”

To get around these problems urban historians have aligned their agendas to the demands of global history;Footnote ⁸² focused on certain paradigmatic cities that have produced large-scale impacts;Footnote ⁸³ tried to make their research more relevant to contemporary urban issues; or, occasionally, sought to spatialize concepts.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, all their attention has been spent on trying to make urban history “travel better” in order to escape “localism.” But they have done precious little to question and rethink the other end of the problem: the validity of causal regularity and concept independence as the only legitimate theory or benchmark for generalization. Could it be that to rescue histories of small spaces of the global South from “defanged empiricism” and “descriptive particularism,” on one hand, and “unhistorical thinking” on the other, we need to rethink our ontological commitments? One scholar who raised this point implicitly was Tilly, who, after all, urged urban historians to participate more centrally in epistemological and ontological debates.Footnote ⁸⁵

Tilly thought, “The search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics … a waste of time.”Footnote ⁸⁶ However, this did not mean that all that could be said was that human and social life is endlessly “complicated, varied, and unpredictable.” For Tilly, human and social life, despite its apparent chaos, still conformed to a “deep order.”Footnote ⁸⁷ To be sure, he was not the only one to notice this “double condition” between chaos and order. Raymond Williams had noted how a city like London “could not easily be described in a rhetorical gesture of repressive uniformity. On the contrary, its miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness of movement, were the most apparent things about it, especially when seen from inside.”Footnote ⁸⁸ And yet, as Ranajit Guha has observed, Williams recognized that “underlying” this randomness, “was a deep structure embodying a system.”Footnote ⁸⁹ For Williams, this paradoxical coexistence between “apparent randomness” and a “hidden” “determining system” could only be resolved outside the remits of the discipline of history—as Charles Dickens had done in the mid-nineteenth century, “by the creation of a new kind of novel.”Footnote ⁹⁰ For Guha, too, this “double condition” was irresolvable through history because it subsumed the “order of things” by the “order of times.”Footnote ⁹¹ Where Tilly differed from Williams and Guha was in his insistence that the “double condition” between order and chaos can be best captured by urban historians and within the disciplinary modes of history via a “thoughtful” or “reflective historicism.”Footnote ⁹² In fact, for Tilly, it was this very “double condition” that made urban history intellectually meaningful. Now, we must ask, if Tilly indeed makes a point that is worthy of our attention, what ontological commitments might this position entail?Footnote ⁹³And how, if at all, can his insights be extended to fulfil his grand ambition that urban historians emerge at the forefront of the discipline of history by showing how large-scale phenomena articulate with small-scale social life and by contributing to the development of what he called “local theory”? The rest of this section will focus on these questions.

Tilly’s rejection of grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian physics may be immediately taken as a rejection of positivist epistemology, which, according to Steinmetz entails “a search for ‘invariant laws’ or ‘constant conjunction of events’ that link two or more phenomena (or, in a widespread positivist realist variant, linking a conceptual/theoretical mechanism to phenomenal events in a universal conjunction of the ‘if A, then B, sort’).”Footnote ⁹⁴ At the same time, Tilly argued against the impulse to highlight the endless complexity, variety, and unpredictability of social life. In his view, social life generated an order; human action and activities invariably resulted in the reproduction of durable social structures. This shows that Tilly also rejected poststructuralist epistemology that often recoils at generalizations, comparisons, and rejects the possibility of systemization of knowledge in the social world. Indeed, Tilly had argued elsewhere that postmodernism is fundamentally dependent on the health of the “host” or the master narrative. When the host dies, postmodernist scholarship loses its edge and “shrivels”; its “methodological, rather phenomenological, individualism … [was] a reduction that makes systemic history impossible.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Given so, even if he did not articulate his stance fully, Tilly was, we may infer, trying to find an alternative to positivist and poststructuralist epistemologies.

The idea that Tilly was looking for an alternative to both positivism and poststructuralism is bolstered when we consider that for him order was “deep.” Through this concept of “deep order” Tilly seems to be making an important ontological point. Both causal regularity and concept independence—positivism, and the impulse toward time-place particularism; broadly poststructuralism—share the same ontological commitment to an empiricist ontology. An empiricist ontology is flat. It does not consider the world as is beyond our perceptions. It supports the view that there is no difference between phenomenon and essence, and that scholars of the social sciences should “only concern themselves with observables.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Given so, neither positivism nor poststructuralism can admit of a “deep order”; the ontological position that can is the one that is committed to a layered or stratified ontology.

Further, by invoking “thoughtful” and “reflective” historicism, in which he made a compelling case for path dependence of social life, how actions generate durable structures, and how the past frames the possibilities of the future even if we do not necessarily recognize them, Tilly also seemed to accept a realist position which argues that even if the social world is a product of human imagination and action, there are aspects of the social that are mind-independent and function regardless of how we conceptualize them. It is these durable structures that make the world knowable, and wrench open the possibility of limited time- and place-specific generalizations and comparisons between cases.Footnote ⁹⁷

To sum up: Tilly was, at the very least, committed to a layered and realist ontology as well as an epistemology that was historicist. His position, then, was congruent with what I call a soft critical realist position. It has three main components, which Alex Callinicos has identified as critical realism “with a small ‘c’ and ‘r’.” The first is that reality is “conceived as complex, structured, and multi-leveled,” with its apparent workings—the workings that are visible to observations, for example—“the outcome of interaction between the powerful particulars that underlie them.” The second component is that in the social world “operation of the underlying powers is dependent on the activity of human subjects,” or as Tilly puts it, purposive social action, which, even if generative of unintentional consequences, engenders durable structures. The third is that in social life we do not and cannot find “grand laws” because the social is an “open system” whereas, “critical to scientific practice is the creation of a closed system in which as far as possible the operation of one particular power is isolated from the operation of all the others.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The advantage of soft critical realism, as I hope to convince readers, is that it might serve as a philosophically robust framework that enables scholars to focus on multiple layers of enquiry simultaneously; that is, to interrogate the surface or the observable in all its complexities and, at the same time, turn to the layer underneath for order. In other words, soft critical realism may allow scholars to focus both on the “order of things” and the “order of time” without sacrificing one for the other. Moreover, it may enable them to mount comparison with other cases. Potentially, all this could help generate a fresh wave of mid-level, time-specific generalizations that can also critically engage with past social scientific practices. Such a position on social theory, it must be remembered, is congruent with Tilly’s, for he “heartily” agreed with the idea that scholars must stress “the obdurate particularity of historical experiences” but at the same time “use history” to build more generalized explanations of the past and present.Footnote ⁹⁹

The following further clarifies Tilly’s position:

Steinmetz has pointed out that many of Tilly’s methodological formulations seem to “have been lifted almost directly” from the writings of critical realist philosophers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Indeed, Tilly’s insistence that the key to building local theory lies in history (initial conditions, sequence, and combination) is closely aligned with Roy Bhaskar’s position in that social life is ascribed a special “geohistorical” character, which means social theory “is also history and geography.”Footnote ¹⁰² However, Tilly was not a traditional critical realist. This is because, among other things, as Steinmetz has highlighted, Tilly drew a line between meaningful and objective social mechanisms, whereas for critical realists “all social mechanisms are inherently conceptual, that is always co-constituted by the meanings with which actors imbue them.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Further, it is unclear whether Tilly would have agreed to the tripartite ontological schema—the empirical, the actual, and the real—that traditional critical realists adhere to. Steinmetz, therefore, refers to Tilly’s philosophical position as “relational realism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But labels apart, both Steinmetz’s analysis and the one I offer here make it amply clear that Tilly, like critical realists of all hues, based his epistemological arguments for a thoughtful historicism on a prior ontological commitment to a realist and layered/stratified ontology, the openness of the social system, the difference between causal mechanisms and the empirical events, and the possibility of generating a “local theory” in which explanatory mechanisms themselves operate “quite” broadly but never universally.

It is at this point, I contend, some insights from traditonal critical realism can be taken on board to extend and further clarify Tilly’s ideas. Following Bhaskar, critical realists argue that our only access to causal mechanisms that lie underneath the empirical or observable layer of reality is through a close study of events, individuals, or groups. But what we observe at the empirical level is itself a product of underlying (explanatory/causal) social mechanisms, and random contingencies. However, mechanisms never appear to us in a pure form, but always as intertwined with other mechanisms. Nevertheless, to use Tilly’s language, mechanisms “operate broadly,” which makes time-place specific generalizations about the social world possible. That said, since social systems are open, the same causal mechanisms can lead to different results in different contexts, and different causal mechanisms can also result in the same outcome. Translated to the concerns of urban historians (and scholars of urban studies), the case study then emerges as the best way to identify and examine “mechanisms” that operate broadly. These mechanisms, then, can be compared across contexts or be used to understand other cases, all with the aim of generating a fresh set of “local theories” (note: all theories are time- and place-constrained) that emerge just as legitimately from the experiences of the global South as from the global North, from the past as from the present, and from cities that are paradigmatic, or big (but non-paradigmatic), or small, or obscure.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

IV. A Non-Global Small-Scale History of Calcutta

I began my on-going research on Calcutta with a “discovery.” I found that in the early 1960s, the Ford Foundation, in alliance with the Government of West Bengal and the Government of India, and with informal backing from the World Bank, initiated the first and perhaps only urban renewal program in the global South. It aimed to help local and regional authorities draw up and implement a new urban blueprint that would relieve the city’s many infrastructural bottlenecks that were impeding both business operations and the quality of urban life. Furthermore, the plan envisaged transforming Calcutta in a way that would boost the local and regional economy. There were other fascinating aspects to this program that need not detain us here, but for our purpose, it suffices to know that this program failed to materialize, let alone achieve its objectives. Given India’s record with urban planning, this failure is not at all surprising. But what is surprising is that, although Calcutta’s businesses recognized that the city’s urban condition was beginning to impair their operations and deter new investors, they refused to offer meaningful support to this program. Why did businesses not support a program that was prima facie in their own interests?

My first move was to extrapolate insights from the existing business and economic history of Calcutta to help explain business resistance. I found, though, that existing historical analyses of counter intuitive business behavior in Calcutta (in other contexts) were inadequate since they invariably took one or more of these three steps: they placed Calcutta outside the historical geography of capitalism; focused on firm-level cultural peculiarities; and emphasized fractious race relations in the city. But it was not all clear to me why Calcutta of the 1960s—with a substantial section of its population being employed as factory workers, and a massive concentration of capital, could not be treated as a capitalist city, or how organizational peculiarities of India’s businesses as a whole could help explain differences between Calcutta’s business community and Bombay’s far more activist business community. Further, I could find little evidence of racial acrimony among Calcutta’s businesses in the 1960s.

My next move was to focus on the contexts in which businesses were operating in Calcutta. I found, however, that the business world of the first half of 1960s, when the Ford Foundation and the Government of West Bengal made their first effort to draw Calcutta’s businesses into civic-business partnership, was vastly different from that of the late 1960s, when the second formal attempt to draw them in was made. In the first half of the decade, business confidence was high and the economy was booming by India’s standards. In the second half, Calcutta’s business and economy were both shattered by an India-wide depression, reductions in government spending, a collapse of the planned economy, and massive labor troubles. Yet, across this 1960s divide, businesses’ responses to urban transformation plans remained the same; in the words of a Ford Foundation planner, Calcutta’s business community was “civically inert.”

After realizing that neither “culture” nor “context” was going to help explain business attitudes toward large-scale urban transformation of the city, my third move was to look at how businesses had responded to similar large-scale programs in Calcutta in the past. Here I found that business’ reluctance to support the Ford Foundation program was not an isolated event. Calcutta’s business communities had also opposed two of the most significant large-scale urban infrastructural programs in the late colonial era. They had scuttled the Grand Trunk Canal Scheme, a project aimed at connecting Calcutta with its jute and rice growing hinterland to the east via a shorter, safer, and faster water route; and the cantilever Howrah Bridge, that connects the city to its prinicpal railway station and industrial zone across the river Hooghly. In all the three examples—the canal, the bridge, and urban renewal—I found that Calcutta’s business community privileged their existing landed and other spatially sensitive investments within Calcutta over new opportunities.

Having reached this stage, I had to deal with a major question. There was some ground for considering that the three events I excavated from the archives were part of a “trend.” After all, all three happened in the same city, business groups and chambers involved were broadly the same, and urban historians of South Asia now consider the twentieth century’s middle decades (ca. 1920–1970s) as a period when many urban processes remained intact and transcended the colonial-postcolonial divide.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At the same time, there were equally good grounds for arguing that each of the three events were discrete in the sense that they were different projects, mooted by different government departments, and pushed by different types of states (colonial and postcolonial) and “experts” (British and then American). Given so, to consider these three events together as part of a trend would be to construct, as historian Gyan Prakash has argued in another context, a “fable”; it would be akin to falling to the spell that “history” casts on us,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ or as social scientists might say, it would be to give in to “selection bias.” It is at this stage that the conceptual repertoire of critical realism helped me resolve this dilemma—following Lawson, I could identify the three events in question as a “demi regularity.”

The relatively enduring tendency here was business resistance to large-scale urban infrastructural programs in Calcutta. The patterning was less than strict; the observable/empirical level events were that the Grand Trunk Canal and the Ford Foundation urban program were shelved but the Howrah Bridge project went through because of certain contingent/countervailing factors. The question was, how could one account for the mechanisms that constituted the tendency or the demi-regularity?

The archival materials that gave me access to the specific events under consideration as well as the demi-regularity provided no clues as to why businesses privileged their landed interests over new opportunities that fresh urban infrastructural investments could provide. Surely, then, businesses must have been responding to something that they did not articulate, at least in the debates and correspondences pertaining to those programs. Here again, insights from critical realism were useful. As Steinmetz points out, critical realism is willing to deploy theoretical concepts that may or may not map onto the conscious views of the subjects but uses the conscious or expressed meanings as points of entry in order to discover the latent sense.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Further, it enables comparison across mechanisms and across events.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Since Calcutta’s businesses were privileging their landed and other spatially sensitive interests over new opportunities infrastructural investments could open, I realized that I had to gain a good sense of Calcutta’s land and housing market during the period. For this, I turned to the files pertaining to the Rent Act that, following World War I, was imposed almost simultaneously in Calcutta and Bombay (and elsewhere) but worked out locally.

Here I found that ever since the enactment of the Transfer of Property Act in 1882, local financial and legal systems in colonial Calcutta discouraged the use of mortgages and debentures—land-based financial instruments—for industrial and housing finance. This land-finance articulation, I found on subsequent research, persisted well into the 1970s, through the period of three instances of business resistance. In fact, I found that Calcutta’s relatively disarticulated land market came to suit and even benefit existing British businesses operating from the city, because in Calcutta, capital sunk into urban land, building, and built environment was by and large owned by a distinct social group—Bengali landowners—whose principal source of wealth came from rural landholding. This meant that British businesses, instead of investing their own resources, could “purchase the use values which attach themselves to the capital embedded in the land” by paying a service fee or an annual rent.Footnote ¹¹¹ In return for a fee or rent they could keep the bulk of their investments mobile. Bengali landowners, on the other hand, could get a steady return on their landed investments. This is why, while these two groups ordinarily shared a racially charged relationship, this racial bitterness did not stop them from acting against groups (such as Marwaris, a merchant community from Rajasthan) that had the potential to combine business and landed interests, and hence upset the balance of political and economic power in the city.

In this way, the Transfer of Property Act 1882 both reinforced and was in turn reinforced by a structure of urban landownership in Calcutta—that had started to emerge from the 1850s—in which the most dominant urban landowning group, the Bengali gentry, had little stakes in commerce, and the most dominant business group, the British, rarely invested in urban property. This structure of Calcutta’s land and mortgage market further combined with Calcutta’s hyper-primacy in eastern India, certain peculiarities of the jute processing in mills, and the impact of the Permanent Settlement of 1792 on Calcutta’s suburban lands. The result: through the period under study, spatial interests compelled businesses to promote a low tax, low expenditure, status quoist urban regime. As part of this strategy, businesses allied with the city’s landlords to push local taxation to the lowest possible levels and oppose any major restructuring of the urban built environment. This is why, right through the middle decades of the twentieth century, Calcutta had the lowest rate of property taxes of all major Indian cities; it was the only important Indian city to not impose octroi; and it experienced a continuously declining per capita expenditure in urban improvements from 1921 to the late 1950s. Hence, I could show that businesses were themselves responsible for creating many of the conditions that resulted in Calcutta’s postcolonial urban-economic woes and also explain why they could not support the Ford Foundation-led urban renewal program in the 1960s.

Surely, this is not a global history. And it is not a microhistory either since it is not about individuals or objects. Further, no insight from this study is generalizable in the positivist sense; no “finding” about businesses, or the city, or business-city relations in Calcutta between 1910 and 1970 can decenter or displace existing ideas about business-urban relationship under capitalism, such as Logan and Molotch’s “Growth Machine Thesis” and the Harveyian-Schumpetarian idea of the private enterprises led “creative destruction of the urban built environment”—both borne out of the experiences of the global North.Footnote ¹¹² Was this research, then, going to be a local history and suffer from “defanged empiricism”?

It is here that soft critical realism helped me focus on the ontological layer below the empirical/observable. As I have pointed out, Calcutta’s actors never mentioned land-finance disarticulation when registering their opposition to large-scale infrastructural improvements in the city. However, it was clear from my research that land-finance disarticulation in Calcutta in the twentieth century’s middle decades was a significant mechanism shaping businesses’ status quoist relationship with the city. That said—and this is important—there is no one-to-one (if A then only B) relationship between business attitudes toward urban infrastructural investments and transformations, on one hand, and land-finance articulation, on the other. If land-finance disarticulation contributed to business resistance to urban transformations in Calcutta, then in New York and London, Mumford has long informed us, the reverse took place: as mortgages on metropolitan real estate became a mainstay of saving banks and insurance companies—that is, as the land and financial markets became more enmeshed—they began to actively combat any attempt to lessen congestion via infrastructural improvement, for that would deflate the values that were based on congestion.Footnote ¹¹³ This suggests that while the nature of land-finance articulation is a causal mechanism operating beneath the surface-level, its effect is only perceptible to us at the empirical level in combination with other mechanisms, processes, and contingent events. This is to say, in the social world, as critical realism argues, meaningful causal mechanisms usually do not appear in a pure or disentangled state; they always appear to us at the empirical level as inextricably combined with other mechanisms because social systems are always open, and irreducible to their constituent properties.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Put another way, the nature of land-finance articulation is like a “factor” which is neither neutral to businesses responses to urban form nor locked in a definite and identifiable law-like relationship.

As a causal mechanism, the nature of land-finance relations/articulation operates quite broadly, but not universally, and in many cases underneath the level of the empirical as mind-independent reality (i.e., businesses in Calcutta did not evoke this feature of the city when opposing the three projects). It is, therefore, the building block of comparisons and a local theory of business-city relations.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In Calcutta’s rival Bombay, I found in my research, land markets and the industrial economy became closely intertwined due to the location of cotton mills within city limits; the fact that the Original Jurisdiction of the Bombay High Court, where exceptions to restrictions in mortgages applied, kept expanding with the city; and the possibilities of reclaiming freehold from the city. This may have contributed to, as Sheetal Chhabria has shown, the aggression with which, even in times of acute distress at the start of the twentieth century, local business elites joined forces to secure the interests of urban capital,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and promoted speculative infrastructural investments. In this way, critical realism enabled my study of Calcutta to enter into an explicit comparison with Bombay at the level of causal mechanism and implicit comparisons with other cities without compromising on the specificity and intricate details of Calcutta’s history. In the process, I could offer a different perspective to business-city relationships than that forwarded by Logan and Molotch’s growth machine thesis, and question the Harveyian idea that the desire of urban capital lies in the creative destruction of the urban built environment. Further, in their place—though this is beyond this essay’s scope—I could offer a more open-ended conception of the relationship between the imperatives of capital accumulation, private enterprises, and cities, which can potentially account for a wider variety of urban experiences across capitalist time and space.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In this way, my research, which would otherwise have struggled to escape the descriptive particularism of local history, managed to, at the very least, enter into conversations with a wide range of urban experiences and contexts, while remaining faithful to narrative, and to Calcutta’s business and urban history.