Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T02:31:47.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Anthropocene and the Triumph of the Imagination: An Environmental Perspective on C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2019

Sunil Amrith Open the ORCID record for Sunil Amrith [Opens in a new window]
Sunil Amrith*
Affiliation:
Sunil Amrith ([email protected]) is Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of History at Harvard University.
Get access

Extract

Having had the privilege of being taught by Chris Bayly as an undergraduate, I can hear Remaking the Modern World in his voice. I can hear it in the form of the dazzling lectures—never showy, but perspective-shifting week after week—that were the kernels from which this book and its predecessor on the nineteenth century both grew. In the late 1990s, that course was still called “The West and the Third World since 1914.” Notwithstanding its then already outmoded title, it was a progressive course: a perspective on global history building out from the detailed study of South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. It was clear even then that Bayly's long immersion in the study of Indian history was not incidental but rather vital to Bayly, the global historian.

Keywords

Anthropoceneclimate changeconsumer cultureenvironmental historyglobalizationintellectual historysustainability
Type
Forum—C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Interpretations from Asian Studies
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 837 - 848
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bayly, C. A., Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Blackwell, 2018)Google Scholar.

2 Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar.

3 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 200Google Scholar.

4 Bayly, C. A., Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

5 Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 212–16Google Scholar.

6 Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222, 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ibid.; Steffen, Will, Crutzen, Paul J., and McNeill, John R., “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Steffen, Will, Grinevald, Jacques, Crutzen, Paul, and McNeill, John, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369, no. 1938 (2011): 843–45CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Palsson, Gisli et al. , “Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities in Global Environmental Change Research,” Environmental Science & Policy 28 (2013): 3–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Latour, Bruno, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Lewis, Simon L. and Maslin, Mark A., “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015): 171–80CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

10 Mikhail, Alan, “Enlightenment Anthropocene,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 2 (2016): 211–31, 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Moore, Jason W., “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, Jason W., “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy,” Journal of Peasant Studies 45, no. 2 (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” op. cit. note 9; Lewis, Simon L. and Maslin, Mark A., The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (London: Pelican, 2018)Google Scholar; Crutzen, Paul J. and Stoermer, Eugene F., “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18Google Scholar.

12 Ellis, Erle C., “Ecology in an Anthropogenic Biosphere,” Ecological Monographs 85 (2015): 287–331CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Scott, James C., Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

13 Steffen, Will, Broadgate, Wendy, Deutsch, Lisa, Gaffney, Owen, and Ludwig, Cornelia, “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McNeill, J. R. and Engelke, Peter, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene,” ibid., 13.

15 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, op. cit. note 3, chap. 9; Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene,” op. cit. note 13, 11.

16 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, op. cit. note 3, 8, 288.

17 Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ghosh's book was itself the subject of a JAS roundtable: Thomas, Julia Adeney, Parthasarathi, Prasannan, Linrothe, Rob, Fan, Fa-ti, Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Ghosh, Amitav, “JAS Round Table on Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 4 (2016): 929–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ghosh, Great Derangement, ibid., 87, 111.

19 Bayly, C. A., “The Ends of Liberalism and the Political Thought of Nehru's India,” Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 3 (2015): 605–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zachariah, Benjamin, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–50 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, op. cit. note 2, 11, 451–87.

21 Hofmeyr, Isabel, Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guha, Ramachandra, Gandhi before India (New York: Vintage, 2014)Google Scholar.

22 Gandhi cited in Ghosh, Great Derangement, op. cit. note 17, 111–12.

23 Mukerjee, Radhakamal, “Social Ecology of a River Valley,” Sociology and Social Research 12 (1928): 341–47, 342Google Scholar. Bayly first wrote about Mukerjee in Recovering Liberties, op. cit. note 4, 283–90.

24 Bashford, Alison, “Anticolonial Climates: Physiology, Ecology, and Global Population, 1920s–1950s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 4 (2012): 596–626CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

25 Kaviraj, Sudipta, “Ideas of Freedom in Modern India,” in The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, ed. Taylor, Robert H. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 97–142Google Scholar.

26 Yat-sen, Sun, The International Development of China (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1922)Google Scholar; Yat-sen, Sun, “Third Principle of the People: People's Livelihood,” cited in Chetham, Deirdre, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 117Google Scholar.

27 Jawaharlal Nehru to B. J. K. Hallowes (Deputy Commissioner, Allahabad and President of the Famine Relief Fund of Gonda), June 26, 1929, in The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, eds. Gopal, S. and Iyengar, Uma, 2 vols. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:12Google Scholar.

28 Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Basis of Society,” Presidential Address to Bombay Youth Congress, Poona, December 12, 1928, in ibid., 1:8–10.

29 Bayly's discussion of the war and its aftermath draws on the two brilliant books he wrote with Tim Harper, which were strangely neglected in most of the career retrospectives and tributes published after Bayly's death: Bayly, Christopher and Harper, Tim, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2004)Google Scholar; Bayly, Christopher and Harper, Tim, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain's Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007)Google Scholar.

30 Engerman, David C., The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macekura, Stephen J. and Manela, Erez, eds., The Development Century: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Mehta, Uday S., “The Social Question and the Absolutism of Politics,” Seminar 615 (2010)Google Scholar, https://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_uday_s_mehta.htm (accessed June 3, 2019).

32 World Health Organization, Southeast Asia Regional Office, Report on the Third Asian Malaria Conference, Delhi, 19–21 March 1959, SEA/Mal/16, Annex 3, WHO Library, Geneva, Opening Address by Jawaharlal Nehru.

33 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6Google Scholar.

34 Indira Gandhi, “Man and Environment,” speech at the Plenary Session of United Nations Conference on Human Environment, Stockholm, June 14, 1972; I discuss her speech at length in Amrith, Sunil, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History (New York: Basic Books, 2018), chap. 8Google Scholar.

35 From different perspectives, see Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I,” op. cit. note 11, and Malm, Andreas and Hornborg, Alf, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Gabrielle Hecht, “The African Anthropocene,” Aeon, February 6, 2018, https://aeon.co/essays/if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we (accessed June 3, 2019).

37 Ghosh, Great Derangement, op. cit. note 17, 87–114.

38 See also Amrith, Sunil S., “Eugenics in Postcolonial Southeast Asia,” in Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, eds. Bashford, Alison and Levine, Philippa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 301–14Google Scholar.

39 Agarwal, Anil and Narain, Sunita, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991), 1Google Scholar.

40 Ghosh, Great Derangement, op. cit. note 17, 91.

41 Ferguson, James, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

42 Shanbhag, Vivek, Ghachar Ghochar, trans. Perur, Srinath (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 21, 39, 52–53Google Scholar.

43 Duara, Prasenjit, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2Google Scholar.

44 Bayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, op. cit. note 29.