The Postcolonial turn: Chakrabartys legacy and the great divergence

Global history belongs to the most difficult tasks historians can shoulder.
It is not for beginners.
- Jrgen Kocka

Ruben Peeters
University of Antwerp
Posthumus Institute
Debates in Global Economic and Social History, Part I and II
Word count (footnotes and bibliography not included): 6372
Ruben Peeters University of Antwerp Posthumus: Final Paper

Introduction
Global history, as it exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, it
quickly grew in this day and age of buzzwords such as globalization, connectivity and
networking. As continents appear to be more connected than ever, some academics even
talk about a world-convergence. Looking at life expectancy and GDP per capita,
countries have indeed been converging in the last decades. 1 Kishore Mahbubani, a
Singaporean former diplomat and current university professor, went even further in his
book The Great Convergence.2 He spotted the emergence of a global community, with
more and more people adhering to norms and values that have seeped into every
society.3 He distinguished five of them: acceptance of the frameworks of modern
science, reliance on logical reasoning, embrace of free-market economics, transformation
of the social contract between ruler and ruled, and increasing focus on multilateralism.4
Remarkably, all of these norms and values are part of the European enlightenment ideas
that shape Western modernity. Non-Western societies have recently come to accept them,
converging towards a European form of modernity.
The great convergence, of course, refers to the great divergence, a phrase promulgated
mostly by Kenneth Pomeranz. Ever since Europe and its offshoots discovered the secret
to sustained economic growth, they have been leading the way for other nations. This
has given rise to a question that still stands today: why did the West become rich and the
Rest did not? From its outset, the debate has been influenced by a perceived general
superiority of the West over the Rest, which derived from its exceptional economic
achievements. Often this caused the question to be rephrased into: why did the West leap
ahead, or why did the Rest fail? Until recently, these rewordings were considered to be
on an equal par.
Authors such as Weber and Wallerstein, Marx and Smith and even contemporary
ones, such as David Landes, have explained the rise of the West through grand
historical narratives, falling to teleological temptations5 and placing Europe in the
center of the debate. Lately, this approach has come under debate within the academic
community and scholars have shunned the meta-narrative, taking on a more diachronic
and micro-historic approach. 6 World history, and by extension global and universal

1
Gapminder, Gapminder: Wealth and Health of Nations, 2015, www.gapminder.org, date of entry:
15/12/2015.
2
Kishore Mahbubani, The Great Convergence: Asia, The West, and the Logic of One World (New York:
Public Affairs, 2013).
3
Ibid., 33.
4
Ibid.
5
Barbara Weinstein, History Without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History, and the Postcolonial
Dilemma, International Review of Social History 50, no. 1 (2005): 73.
6
Ibid., 2.

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history, have consecutively gone through intensive debates about the essence of their
conception and the role they ought to play in wider academia.7
The aim of this paper is to analyse the problem of Eurocentrism and teleology in the
great divergence debate and how more recent contributions to the debate have taken note
of the critiques directed towards world history.8 I will argue that criticism originating
from the postcolonial studies has found its way into general historical research. When
looking at the direction global history has been going, it appears a postcolonial turn has
occurred. I use this term in analogy with the linguistic and material turns. The idea of
the Postcolonial Turn is that there is a larger process of Provincializing Europe in
(global) history. Historians are becoming more aware of the problem of Eurocentrism and
the proclaimed universality of Western thought. The phrase Postcolonial Turn has been
used by anthropologists and Africanists to name a project, similar to what I think has
been taking place in the great divergence debate, ever since Edward Saids Orientalism
and Dipesh Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe (hereafter PE) started getting traction.
Ren Devisscher, editor of the book The Postcolonial Turn, called both of them scientists
who seek to unconceal the colonial unconscious, a wording which, in my opinion,
blankets the idea of a postcolonial turn.9
I will briefly analyze the debate about Eurocentrism conducted within the discipline of
world history and discuss the framework provided in Chakrabartys PE as a possible
solution to the problem. Provincializing Europe was a widely influential book that
contained and elaborated on many of the ideas that came from postcolonial historical
research and theory. Therefore I deem it a useful reference point for the broader subaltern
and postcolonial schools. After a short introduction into the debates and the concepts of
PE, I will look into two recent books that have left a mark on the great divergence debate:
Prasannan Parthasarathis Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic
Divergence, 1600-1850 and Timur Kurans The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law
Held Back the Middle East, and how both authors have incorporated Chakrabartys ideas
into their research. The main aim of this paper is not to find an answer to the central
question of the great divergence debate, but to critically look at how these authors have or
have not taken Chakrabartys call for provincializing Europe and the wider criticism
against Eurocentrism into consideration.

7
Dominic Sachsenmaier, World History as Ecumenical History?, Journal of World History 18, no. 4
(2007): 46589.
8
The phrases world and global history will be used interchangeably. This is because many historians do not
make a clear distinction between both disciplines. Further more, the great divergence debate is located on
the interception of both world and global history, as it fits within the larger framework of world history, but
also makes use of global approaches. Therefore, critiques expressed in the debates about both world and
global history apply to the great divergence debate, which is central in this article.
9
Renaat Devisch and Francis Nyamnjoh, eds., The Postcolonial Turn: Re-Imagining Anthropology and
Africa (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2011), 200.

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The discussion of Provincializing Europe

World history in general was conceived as a way to break free from national
frameworks, take on a wider perspective and connect different historiographies with each
other in order to reach a better understanding of the world.10 Jrgen Kocka recently
wrote: global history responds to the cultural and intellectual needs of communities,
societies and cultures which are increasingly interconnected.11 The idea in itself is
highly admirable, but its realization soon gave rise to debate. Two problems are currently
at the core of it: the problem of an inherent teleology in meta-narratives and the problem
of Eurocentrism.12 Both are intrinsically entangled with one another.
The history of the world economy, which includes the great divergence debate, is one
of the most visible and well-known branches of global history, looking into how the great
divergence came about. Why did the West experience economically sustainable growth
for such an extended period of time and how come it did not happen other parts of the
world until very recently? These are questions that can only be solved by comparative
research and explained by a compelling meta-narrative. Yet meta-narratives, which were
the main tool of explanation, had gone out of use in many historical disciplines since the
1990s. According to Barbara Weinstein, this could be explained:
in part, by the skepticism of todays historians with regard to grand narratives in
general and, the ample criticism of the historian who positions him/herself as the
omniscient narrator, imposing (his/her) narrative order upon the disorder and
multiplicity of histories, and by that token ignoring or erasing other narratives and
silencing other voices.13
Nevertheless, overarching disciplines such as global and world history need meta-
narratives to structure their arguments and deliver a coherent explanation. Without any
meta-narrative the added value of global history would remain limited to an amalgam of
micro-historic case studies with a global perspective. Aspiring to even find an answer to
the great divergence debate would be out of the question. This is why recent interest in
meta-narratives has been renewed mostly from within the fields of global and world
history. With reason, many historians tackling the great divergence have been struggling
with a crucial problem: how to construct a coherent narrative without falling into the
teleological temptation?14 How to structure the whole without distorting it?
This teleological trap in global history is narrowly entangled with Eurocentrism. The
latter is not necessarily nested in teleology but rather in the concepts that are used to

10
Jrgen Kocka, Global History: Opportunities, Dangers, Recent Trends, Culture and History Digital
Journal 1, no. 1 (2012): 2; Sachsenmaier, World History as Ecumenical History?, 469.
11
Kocka, Global History: Opportunities, Dangers, Recent Trends, 3.
12
I am using Eurocentrism and Western-centrism interchangeably. The former is the most common one,
the latter, however, is more encompassing and therefore more correct. The meaning of both terms will be
that of Western-centrism.
13
Weinstein, History Without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History, and the Postcolonial Dilemma,
72.
14
Ibid., 73.

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construct a meta-narrative. Those are based in Western thought and more specifically in
Europen modernity, causing it to become a teleological narrative (with the European
modernity as the goal) independent of the scholar who writes it. Arif Dirlik wrote that:
Intellectual and cultural values expressive of Eurocentrism are no longer confined to
Europeans and North Americans, but are a fundamental part of the experience of
modernity, lodged in the consciousness of all who have been participants in modernity
globally. History is very much part of this consciousness.15
He went even further and stated that history is the most fundamental location of
Eurocentrism. 16 Dirlik is right in saying that history, as it evolved out of the Western
modernity, institutionalizes Eurocentrism; but how does one solve this? What happens if
one drives Dirliks logic to the end? Eckhardt Fuchs thought: If Eurocentrism is
inextricably linked to modernity, then rejection of Eurocentrism must also entail
surrendering concepts of modern provenance. Ultimately, this means giving up the
concept of history as a science.17 This way of thinking clearly offers no solution.
Sachsenmaier buttressed this statement and wrote that authors such as Arif Dirlik and
Vinay Lal got a lot of attention, but failed to offer realistic alternatives.18 Carola Dietze
noticed the dilemma that had arisen out of the discussion and that many scholars now
face: on the one hand, they denounce the Eurocentrism inherent in history writing; on
the other, they adhere to its acknowledged prerogative: modernization theories and the
concept of modernity.19 According to Dietze, the Subaltern Studies group managed to
solve the dilemma by deconstructing the discipline of history.20
Chakrabarty, as a part of the subaltern studies collective, was quoted frequently in
these debates thanks to his idea of provincializing Europe. While he is referred to and
recognized by many, most cameos remained very superficial and the maximum potential
of his claims and insights was rarely achieved or even attempted. That is unfortunate,
because Chakrabarty, in my opinion, did formulate a coherent solution to the
aforementioned epistemological problems.21

15
Arif Dirlik, History Without a Center? Reflections on Eurocentrism, in Across Cultural Borders:
Historiography in Global Perspective, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (Rowman & Littlefield,
2002), 248.
16
Ibid., 263.
17
Eckhardt Fuchs, Introduction: Provinciallizing Europe:Historiography as a Transcultural Concept, in
Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 15.
18
Sachsenmaier, World History as Ecumenical History?, 467.
19
Carola Dietze, Toward a History on Equal Terms: A Discussion of Provincializing Europe, History
and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 70.
20
Ibid.
21
My reading of Chakrabarty is of course based on his book PE, but also on additional insights provided by
Henk De Smaele, Dipesh Chakrabarty: Een Handleiding Voor Het Departement Geschiedenis, 2011;
Ajay Skaria, The Project of Provincialising Europe: Reading Dipesh Chakrabarty, Economic and
Political Weekly 44, no. 14 (2009): 5259; Viren Murthy, Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong
Places? Chibber, Chakrabarty, and a Tale of Two Histories, Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 1 (2014):

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The project of PE largely builds on critiques formulated by the subaltern studies

collective. 22 The central problems that Chakrabarty tackles in PE are these of
asymmetrical power relations, Eurocentrism and the teleology that originated in it. He
took a step back and spotted one of the symptoms: scholars of Asia (and with extension
to Africa and Latin America) always pay attention to European scholarship and
intellectual developments, for if they do not, they seem provincial. European academics,
however do not return the favor. Their works are ignorant of non-Western histories, yet
it does not affect the quality of their work.23 This has the following consequences:
Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the
ones we call Indian, Chinese, Kenyan, and so on. There is a peculiar way in
which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that
could be called the history of Europe.24
The problem is that other histories are interpreted as an emulation of the history of
Europe, following a path set by Europe. Any deviations from this path are seen as a lack,
or a failure. Europe in this, becomes a silent referent - the ultimate goal.25
Chakrabarty thus came to the same conclusion that Dirlik and Lal would later
problematize: Western concepts are recognized as having universal explanatory power
and use, whereas categories from outside the Western world are seen as traditional or
archaic. The idea of modernity implies a hierarchy based on chronology.26 This finds its
expression in a historicist writing of history which implies a master narrative of transition
from the pre-modern to the modern. It is historicism that makes everything, which does
not conform to the standard of European modernity, appear archaic, otherworldly and
backward. In a theoretically well-founded manner, Chakrabarty proposed not to reject
European thought, as Dirlik did, but to go beyond historicism.27

Beyond Historicism
In order to go beyond historicism, we have to unlearn to think of history as a
developmental process in which that which is possible becomes actual by tending to a
future that is singular.28 This first step seems logical, but in itself is already problematic
in the great divergence debate wherein the rise of capitalism and the supposedly linked
economic growth is postulated as the only possible future. Capitalism in this sense is
presupposed as a universal history that is to develop everywhere, but (for debated

11353; Dipesh Chakrabarty, In Defense of Provincializing Europe : A Response to Carola Dietze,

History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 8596.
22
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15.
23
Ibid., 28.
24
Ibid., 27.
25
Chakrabartys uses Europe and India not as indications of geographical locations, but in a hyperreal
sense as a as though they were given, reified categories, opposites paired in a structure of domination and
subordination. (PE p.27)
26
De Smaele, Dipesh Chakrabarty: Een Handleiding Voor Het Departement Geschiedenis, 7.
27
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 249.
28
Ibid.

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reasons) started in the West. This is the narrative of transition; first in the West and later
in the Rest. The problem is not in the history of capital or that of the West, but in
presenting these histories as universal.
In order to avoid this historicist writing of history, Chakrabarty returned to Marxist
theory of capital and labor to arrive at what he calls History 1 and History 2. According
to Chakrabarty, Marx himself had felt this duality in history, but he and the scholars that
followed in his footsteps have paid more attention to History 1. The concepts of Histories
1 and 2 were described broadly but vaguely in PE and were in need of further
clarification.
In his defense of Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty wrote: [History 1] referred to
the universal historical logic around which Marx built his philosophico-historical
category of "capital" - a history posited by capital itself.29 This is the basis of the
historicist transition narrative which was problematized in the debate. History 1 is
totalizing and abstract and refers to a future that will be, which is the universal and
necessary history posited by the logic of capitalism.30 Through the abstraction (of labor),
a third measure is introduced enabling societies and concepts to be compared and
European history to be universalized.31 Through this, it becomes the history that at its
most democratic and radical can include minorities histories.32 This inclusiveness of
history is what destroys these minority histories and makes History 1 so easily
presentable as if it was universal. According to Dirlik, this inclusiveness is the
distinguishing feature of Eurocentrism.33
For the antidote to this universal reading of History 1, Chakrabarty referred to
Heidegger and his hermeneutic, affective and fragmentary reading of history, which he
called History 2.34 He further specified:
History 2 referred to numerous other tendencies in history that did not necessarily
look forward to the telos of capital but could nevertheless be intimately intertwined
with History 1 in such a way as to arrest the thrust of capital's universal history and
help it find a local ground, as it were. 35
History 2 disrupts the unity of History 1, but does not necessarily have to be against the
logic of capitalism. Skaria interpreted History 2 as to: consist of the histories that capital
cannot subsume within itself, which remain heterogeneous to it.36 It presents the futures
that already are, which are fragmented and plural but not additive. These fragments are
external to the logic of capitalism, but do not represent another whole either.37

29
Chakrabarty, In Defense of Provincializing Europe : A Response to Carola Dietze, 92.
30
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 250.
31
Ibid., 254.
32
Skaria, The Project of Provincialising Europe: Reading Dipesh Chakrabarty, 56.
33
Dirlik, History Without a Center? Reflections on Eurocentrism, 252.
34
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 22.
35
Chakrabarty, In Defense of Provincializing Europe : A Response to Carola Dietze, 92.
36
Skaria, The Project of Provincialising Europe: Reading Dipesh Chakrabarty, 56.
37
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 250251.

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This is why:
The idea of History 2 allows us to make room, in Marxs own analytic of capital, for
the politics of human belonging and diversity. It gives us a ground on which to situate
our thoughts about multiple ways of being human and their relationship to the global
logic of capital.38
The constant modification of History 1 by History 2 takes away the universal claims of
History 1, for:
No global (or even local, for that matter) capital can ever represent the universal
logic of capital, for any historically available form of capital is a provisional
compromise made up of History 1 modified by somebodys History 2s. The universal,
in that case, can only exist as a place holder, its place always usurped by a historical
particular seeking to present itself as the universal.39
The expansion of Histories 1 happens through the process of translation. History 1 is
analytical and abstract and is translated through tertiary abstract concepts such as labor
and capital. The abstractions allow other contexts to translate the European History 1
into their own. This permits historians to compare everything to concepts of the European
modernity and vice versa and thus rank it hierarchically. This type of analysis legitimizes
radical critique on other societies and constructing blueprints for the future.40 History 2,
on the other hand, which is hermeneutic and affective, is composed of histories of
belonging, being translated through barter, without a third term necessary.41
This approach to history hands historians the necessary tools to write meaningful
global history.42 By paying attention to the various History 2s, one can escape the
transition narrative presented in History 1. Writing histories that do not take Europe as a
model, yet do not neglect or deny the European push to modernization either.43 This
acknowledges the fact that European thought has now become everybodys heritage; but
by renewing it from the margins, Europe can still be provincialized.44
By making visible the structures of the narrative forms, European concepts can be at
the same time universal and limited to a place. The modification of History 1 by History
2 allows continued use of the gift of European modernity without falling into the
teleological, Eurocentric trap. In this case, Dirliks critique that: Eurocentrism has
become such an intrinsic part of historical consciousness that even most anti-
Eurocentrisms resort to Western concepts such as "civilization" or "culture" is not
valid.45 The concepts are presented both as subjects shaping history (History 1) and as
products of a specific history (History 2).

38
Ibid., 67.
39
Ibid., 70.
40
De Smaele, Dipesh Chakrabarty: Een Handleiding Voor Het Departement Geschiedenis, 11.
41
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 71.
42
Ibid., 247.
43
De Smaele, Dipesh Chakrabarty: Een Handleiding Voor Het Departement Geschiedenis, 14.
44
Skaria, The Project of Provincialising Europe: Reading Dipesh Chakrabarty, 58.
45
Sachsenmaier, World History as Ecumenical History?, 466.

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In short, Chakrabarty further developed postcolonial theory, and offered a

comprehensive theoretical framework to both contextualize and handle the perturbation
caused by the problem of Eurocentrism. He does so while acknowledging the reality of
existing power relations and keeping the usefulness of European thought, largely solving
the debate. However, a large part of the debate was conducted after the publication of PE,
showing the limited exhaustive reading it has enjoyed. Most academics, at least in
analytical philosophy of history, only used his contextualization of Eurocentrism without
taking into consideration the solutions that he offered. Was his influence that limited?

Provincializing as a practice
The concept of provincializing Europe as shown by Chakrabarty was surely noted in
the analytical philosophy of history, but how did it influence historical practice on the
ground? If one looks at the contributions that have been made to the great divergence
debate in the last decade, it is visible that although most historians have not set out to
actively provincialize Europe, many of them have (implicitly or explicitly) done so.
Awareness of the problems vocalized by Chakrabarty and other (subaltern) historians has
found its way into the great divergence debate. Of course postmodern critiques had
already attacked the problems surrounding history as a modernist invention. However,
beyond deconstructing Eurocentrism, postmodernism had offered few solutions to solve
the problem. 46 This is where postcolonial theory and mostly Chakrabartys PE added to
the debate. Yet, the value of such theories is only seen when it is put into practice.
Due to spatial constraints I am not able to discuss all works that have appeared in the
great divergence debate in the last years. This is why I will limit myself to the two works
by Timur Kuran and Prasannan Parthasarathi that I introduced earlier. Both of them are
considered important in the recent great divergence debate, partially because they
incorporated new regions into the debate. Parthasarathi did this for India, Kuran for the
Middle East. This geographical expansion of the debate and new comparisons gave better
insight into why the West achieved sustained economic growth. Because of their
comparative approaches, which are much favored in the great divergence debate, they are
prone to Eurocentric and teleological interpretations, but at the same time have the
potential to avoid it.47 When looking at both books, several differences emerge.
Servaas Storm wrote that Parthasarathis book must be read as an attempt to
provincialize Europe.48 According to Storm, Parthasarathi refutes the universalization of
capitalism and liberalism omnipresent in Eurocentric approaches. He denaturalized
Europes growth path in two ways. Firstly by arguing that both Britain and India were
economical equals until the 1750s, which took away the argument of European cultural

46
Patrick Joyce, The End of Social History?, Social History 20, no. 1 (1995): 7391.
47
Michael Werner and Bndicte Zimmermann, Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croise and the Challenge
of Reflexivity, History and Theory 45, no. 2 (2006): 3335.
48
Servaas Storm, Why the West Grew Rich and the Rest Did Not, or How the Present Shapes Our Views
of the Past, Development and Change 44, no. 5 (2013): 1200.

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and institutional superiority and introduced the driving force of competition. Secondly,
by showing how the coordinated, mercantilist interventions of the English State
stimulated economic growth.49
Kuran, on the other hand, did no such thing. He failed to go beyond historicism as
Chakrabarty posited. Even more, Roger Owen accused him of following a traditional
Weberian path, focusing on European institutions and positing the West as dynamic and
the East as static.50 Kurans main argument was indeed that the development of superior
institutions, which only took place in Europe, lead to economic growth and divergence.
He applies a meta-narrative of rising complexity, which implicitly equals increasing
superiority. This idea of increasing complexity is teleological in itself; assuming that
greater complexity will naturally occur when certain goldilock conditions are met. The
conditions for further development were met in Europe, but not in the Middle East,
causing it to remain static. The idea of increasing complexity forms the foundation of
natural sciences and big history, and has found its way into in new institutional history as
well.51 In this sense, his underlying structure does not differ from earlier normative
views, with the difference that it is based on a natural scientific assumption. This takes
away the original claim of cultural superiority, but unwillingly reintroduces it afterwards.
Theoretically, this position seems highly defendable. However, according to Parthasarathi
the historical evidence goes against it, showing that the European economy and
institutions were not superior until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, at least not
compared to Indian and Chinese ones.52
Additionally, the institutional approach, championed by Kuran and others, failed to
explain how the industrial revolution came about. Kuran paid no attention to the rise of
the industrial society in Europe, but tacitly assumed the industrial age to have been the
product of good institutions. Logically, it is impossible to make the connection between
the development of the steam engine and the existence of optimal institutions. While
good institutions most certainly had the means to further support the expansion of new
inventions, the latter did not originate from the former; sustained economic growth is not
the same as industrialization. Parthasarathi also thought along these lines and wrote: to
assume that industrialization was the path in which economies were moving in earlier
periods unless it was blocked or the proper preconditions were missing is
anachronistic.53
Besides being implicitly Eurocentric, there are problems with the books scope.
According to critics some things, such as the geography and demography of the Middle
East, should have been taken into consideration in order to explain certain
49
Ibid.
50
Roger Owen, Review: Timur Kuran The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle
East, Middle East Report 260, no. 9 (2011): 47.
51
Fred Spier, Complexity in Big History, Cliodynamics 2 (2011): 14666.
52
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 59.
53
Ibid., 8.

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developments. 54 Regardless of these inherent flaws, the book still contains valuable
insights. Most interestingly, when writing about the interactions between the East and the
West, Kuran implicitly utilized the dualistic interpretation of history proposed by
Chakrabarty.
Kuran told the story of History 1 through his traditional view of institutional
development and comparisons between the Middle East and the West. The implicit belief
in naturally increasingly complex institutions that serve needs more efficiently resembles
the logic of developing capitalism. However, it is when he turns to the question: how did
the Middle East enter the Modern age? that History 2 becomes visible. He answered, not
from a viewpoint of European superiority, but considering possible different paths. That
led not to different versions of modernity but formed a general modernity made up of
interaction between actors in the same time frame. While paying enough attention to the
changing balances of power and giving agency to non-European actors, he told the story
of the Middle Easts institutional change and increasing conformity to European
institutions. While many scholars turn to Western imperialism (History 1) to explain the
Middle Easts conformity to the West.55 Kuran on the other hand, noted that the Middle
East did not simply copy Western institutions, and that the European modernity was not
merely transposed to the Middle East, but that institutions borrowed from the West were
used also to limit Western influences, preserve old customs, and even invent new
traditions.56 This process, which Kuran called creative borrowing, seems very similar
to the cultural translation described by Chakrabarty. Non-Western societies would take
over some parts of European modernity, but would translate it into the local context. The
changing of Western institutions according to local customs, needs and ideas worked in a
fragmenting way on the general development of institutional capitalism (as it was
supposed to unfold in the light of to History 1).
Kuran did define Islamic institutions as backward, but portrayed the people living in
Islamic societies with equal agency or rationality as Europeans.57 By doing so, he applied
History 1 and the traditional story of the natural development of capitalism. He
incorporated non-European people into European history, and placed them in the same
time frame without making them appear backward. Kuran attached a lot of importance to
path dependency, using it as an explanation why Islamic institutions stayed unchanged
until Europeans arrived, displaying Muslims as modern people who were trapped in a
non-modern surrounding. Their rational side, however, made them accept Western
institutions, which offered them new globally optimal institutions when their own
institutions were not sufficient anymore. Nonetheless, the Middle Eastern modernity that

54
Nelly Hanna, Review-The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, Journal of
Economic Literature 50, no. 1 (2012): 21618.
55
Owen, Review: Timur Kuran The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East 47.
56
Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 12.
57
Ibid., 30.

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arose out of the creative borrowing was not fixed. Kuran still sees modernity as a catch-
up race. To achieve full modernity is to have full economic potential unleashed by
globally optimal institutions that happen to be Western. The Middle East still has not
achieved its full economic potential, which is proof that it has not fully entered
modernity.58 By doing so, Kuran clinged to a teleological and normative interpretation of
modernity.
The manner in which Parthasarathi handled the topic was completely different. Above
all, Parthasarathis book was much more theoretically grounded than Kurans and made
explicit references to postcolonial thinking, mostly that of Edward Said. In his
introduction, Parthasarathi broadly discussed the problem of Eurocentrism and the
traditional teleological explanations that had been offered in the great divergence
debate.59 Besides that, in almost every chapter, he gave a rendition of the traditional
arguments concerning the rise of the West, to break them down subsequently; replacing
Eurocentric views with a new history, rewritten from the margins.
In the fourth chapter, for instance, Parthasarathi discusses the dominance of the
Smithian interpretation of the English industrialization and showed how this Eurocentric
view that many scholars adhered to for so long was actually a post-factum ideological
construct with little grounding in reality.60 According to Parthasarathi, the main driving
force behind invention was competition resulting from an inferior quality of British
cottons compared to Indian ones. He persuasively argued this by showing how
contemporaries in the eighteenth century identified this competition as the reason for
industrialization and linking it to the economic policies taken by the British government.
Nonetheless, an increasingly influential Smithian ideology made the process be
interpreted as a problem of quantity as opposed to quality when the latter was how
contemporaries saw it. In this example Parthasarathi debunked the all-encompassing
Smithian story (History 1) of good institutions, free markets and supply and demand
(general capitalism), and showed how factors outside of the logic of capital (History 2)
influenced the course of history. Even in Parthasarathis version, the unfolding of
capitalism is still central, causing History 1 to remain the dominant history. This allows
Parthasarathi to keep the unfolding of the industrial revolution and the great divergence
as the central points in his book, yet constantly counteracting it with examples of
History 2.
Nevertheless, it stays unclear whether the extra factors he took into account, such as
mercantilist state intervention and competition are inherent to the logic of capital. Could
they exist outside of the logic of capital in a way that for example money and
commodities do?61 While both sides can be argued, I believe they can. According to Bas
van Bavel, market societies with competition have existed for example in Baghdad and

58
Ibid., 294.
59
Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 7.
60
Ibid., 107114.
61
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 64.

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Ruben Peeters University of Antwerp Posthumus: Final Paper

the Roman Empire, long before capitalism came into being.62 Mercantilist and imperialist
state intervention, on the other hand, could be argued to be a part of the logic of capital. It
reinforced the capitalist mode of production and violently took hold of markets for the
marketing of its goods. In this sense, however, it is de facto linked to the logic of
imperialism, which according to Lenin is the highest stage of capitalism.63 This link
remains debatable, but is most surely defendable in Marxist theory. Nonetheless, there
are several examples of state intervention that were not capitalist in nature; for example
the various interventions by the Ottoman Sultan in the eighteenth century.64 Whether
these interventions were imperialistic in is still under debate. What exactly qualifies as
History 2, and where History 1 officially ends also requires further clarification. This is
still one of the weak points of Chakrabartys theory. More practical research must be
done to resolve this uncertainty.
Most importantly, Parthasarathi showed how, for a long time, the great divergence had
been interpreted as a historicist reading of History 1, which was not even rooted in
history. Now he depicts a global story with History 2 interrupting, counteracting, or
sometimes even cooperating with History 1. As Storm stated it is impossible to explain
Western success in isolation from Restern failure.65 In this, colonialism and power-
relations play a decisive role, but it was the coming together of global competitive
pressures, ecological shortfalls and a mercantile state that defined the British path.66 It
was the lack of this combination in other contexts that, according to Parthasarathi,
explains the divergent paths into the future that various societies have taken. This
conception is not modernist per se, and at the same time acknowledges the later spread of
modernity from Europe to the world, which planted the seeds of Eurocentrism.
In the debates it was articulated that Eurocentrism is inherent to history as a practice
and that the power structures reproducing Eurocentrism are still in place. Chakrabarty,
Kuran and Parthasarathi do not reside outside these structures. They are not subaltern
voices but part of a group of foreign-born academics, located in the nodes of the
intellectual network that institutionalized Eurocentrism: Anglo-Saxon and European
universities. Interestingly enough, they are using their positions to expose the repressive
aspect of European modernity in the Western view of history. 67 According to
Sachsenmaier, they are a first sign of the fading power of the West and the emergence a
worldwide Ecumenical community of scholars. Having enjoyed training outside of
Western contexts, they are aware of local cultures and historiographies and use them in
their works. Accordingly, they use their positions in the power structures to add

62
Bas van Bavel, Guest Lecture: Institutions, markets and economic development in the long run, VUA,
9/10/2015.
63
Vlaimir Iljitsj Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Sydney: Resistance Books, 1999).
64
Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 125+259.
65
Storm, Why the West Grew Rich and the Rest Did Not, or How the Present Shapes Our Views of the
Past, 1194.
66
Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 263.
67
Sachsenmaier, World History as Ecumenical History?, 480; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 43.

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Ruben Peeters University of Antwerp Posthumus: Final Paper

viewpoints from the periphery, further integrate different historiographies on a global

scale, and spread these new insights throughout the structure that was previously used to
spread Eurocentrism.68 By doing so they truly provincialize Europe from within, tackling
Eurocentrism through the system itself.
Dirlik and Lal, however, reject such an Ecumenical scholarly community on the
grounds that it will always be a colonial act and that it legitimizes the global capitalist
order.69 Jerry Bentley and Jrgen Kocka have argued against it, stating that world and
global histories are an antidote for national and Eurocentric ones. 70

The province strikes back

The general mentality shift in academia towards a more globally integrated and less
Eurocentric history has encountered some resistance. At the start of this millennium,
Tony Judt and David Landes decried the tendency to de-centralize Europe and the
West.71 But even more recently such positions have been defended. Niall Ferguson, for
example, presented a notoriously Eurocentric version of history in his book Civilization:
The Six Killer Apps of Western Power.72 Fergusons claims were quickly discredited by
Servaas Storm as a grand-narrative scheme, set up due to the lack of a coherent
argument.73 On top of that, Ferguson is often teleological in his views, further allowing
Storm to dismiss his argumentation.74
The best advocate of the recent resurgence of a belief in a Western cultural superiority
is Ricardo Duchesnes book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.75 Duchesne put a
lot of effort into researching and arguing that Europe is indeed extraordinary. Contrary to
Ferguson, Duchesne is not teleological, because he does not assume that there is a certain
ending point to which history is evolving. He is nonetheless heavily Eurocentric. As the
scientific and industrial revolution both took place in Europe, Duchesne assumed that
there must be a deeper reason for this. While making several points, his most important
ones were that:

68
Sachsenmaier, World History as Ecumenical History?, 474.
69
Trevor R. Getz, Towards an Historical Sociology of World History, History Compass 10, no. 6 (2012):
485486.
70
Ibid., 487; Kocka, Global History: Opportunities, Dangers, Recent Trends, 5.
71
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Eurocentrism and Its Discontents, Perspectives on History 39, no. 1 (2001).
72
Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power (London: Penguin Publishers, 2012).
73
Storm, Why the West Grew Rich and the Rest Did Not, or How the Present Shapes Our Views of the
Past, 1183.
74
Ibid., 11831184.
75
For my understanding of this book I have based myself on parts of the book itself: Ricardo Duchesne,
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Studies in Critical Social Sciences (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011).
reviews by: Edward Wang, Review of Duchesne, Ricardo, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, H-
Net Reviews April (2012): 12; Mark Elvin, Confused Alarms: Duchesne on the Uniqueness of the West,
Canadian Journal of Sociology 36, no. 4 (2011): 36177. And an interview with the author: Joshua
Blakeney and Ricardo Duchesne, On The Uniqueness of Western Civilization: An Interview With Prof.
Ricardo Duchesne, The Real Deal, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdjQpQWyff0.

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Ruben Peeters University of Antwerp Posthumus: Final Paper

European actors were more dynamic in the higher degree to which they were able to
reflect upon their actions and thus discursively give reasons for them. European actors
were less passive or more reflective than non-Europeans in their acculturation to the
conventions and beliefs of their society. [] This greater disposition on the part of
Europeans to engage discursively with their mediating surroundings was due to their
rootedness in an aristocratic warlike culture which encouraged the pursuit of
individual recognition through ones heroic deeds.76
This argument is based in culture, but also takes into account surroundings in which
people lived and the outside linkages the society had.77 Duchesne relied on a tremendous
amount of secondary sources to argue his points and refute previous criticisms towards
Eurocentrism. Mark Elvin countered many of Duchesnes points, which were sometimes
too simplistic, however, even he admitted that:
One can definitely make a good case, though one more circumscribed than Duchesne
allows, for the exceptional character of Europe during the last half of the second
millennium CE, with modern science and its associated attitudes of mind, as the
strategic core.78
Eurocentrism then is not necessarily wrong, taken into account that Duchesnes stands
would not hold for the really longue dure.79 We should therefore not blindly dismiss
Duchesnes work because of its Eurocentrism, but continue to go into debate about the
extent to which Eurocentrism could be a viable position in the great divergence debate.
According to Mark Elvin, this is already happening in the debates between
restorationists and revisionists.80
Additionally, taking an anti-Eurocentric standing point did not solve all problems, but
even created some more. Duchesne purposefully fulminated against the cultural
relativism in academia, which repudiated the idea of the uniqueness of the Western
civilization, and attacked the idea of the Wests cultural superiority.81 He considered this
to be the most negative outcome of the anti-Eurocentric tendency in recent times. He
delivered ample evidence of this problem in his book.82 Carola Dietze, in her answer to
PE, did write that Chakrabarty propagated multiple modernities, which would
subsequently lead to cultural relativism.83 Chakrabarty, however, answered that she had
misread PE as cultural relativism was something he tried to avoid by writing PE.84 When
looking at Chakrabartys theory, it seems indeed that cultural relativism can be easily
avoided, in part by preserving the idea of History 1. Even more so, Chakrabarty wrote:

76
Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, 9293.
77
Ibid., 177.
78
Elvin, Confused Alarms: Duchesne on the Uniqueness of the West, 375.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid., 363.
81
Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, 52.
82
Ibid., 2327.
83
Dietze, Toward a History on Equal Terms: A Discussion of Provincializing Europe, 72.
84
Chakrabarty, In Defense of Provincializing Europe : A Response to Carola Dietze, 92.

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Ruben Peeters University of Antwerp Posthumus: Final Paper

we need universals to produce critical readings of social injustices. 85 Weinstein

supported Chakrabarty against the accusations of cultural relativism.86 I also agree that
the criticism of cultural relativism does not apply to the form of anti-Eurocentric history
proposed by Chakrabarty.
When looking at the examples studied here, Parthasarathi and Kuran both wrote about
paths, but never implied that they could lead to multiple modernities. They avoided
cultural relativism by implicitly adhering to subaltern theory. They (Parthasarathi in
general and Kuran partially) wrote history following Chakrabarty: the plurality of
modernity and its paths are made up of Histories 2, shattering and modifying History 1
within the same time frame. In this way there is only one modernity existing out of
History 1 that is constantly being modified by various History 2. According to
Chakrabarty it is about holding in perpetual tension conceptions of (political) modernity
- which are universal - and historical differences on the ground.87 Eurocentric and anti-
Eurocentric scholars should be able to find each other in this kind of history writing that
avoids inherent teleology and cultural relativism.

Conclusion
I am aware of the fact that I did not refer to many of the postcolonial thinkers and
mostly reduced postcolonial theory to the work by Chakrabarty. Nevertheless, by
touching upon the problems of meta-narratives, Eurocentrism and teleological views, and
discussing, in my opinion, a good solution to them, I hope to have given enough
background to be able to support my claim of a postcolonial turn.
Chakrabarty, by theoretically formulating the existence of two histories that are in
constant interaction with each other, found a way to open the Eurocentric, teleological
narrative that dominated history for so long. He was not the first one to problematize this,
but offered an elegant and, more importantly, applicable solution to the discussed
problems. His propositions were widely read and commented upon, but few had looked at
the way his (and by extension the postcolonial and subaltern) approach had found its way
into practice.
I have shown that even though Kuran and Parthasarathi did not explicitly refer to
Chakrabarty, they have, at least implicitly, worked along the lines that he prescribed and
have to some extent provincialized Europe. Kuran did start from a traditional and
partially Eurocentric viewpoint, but I have shown that in the execution of his book he did
implement Chakrabartys framework of a dual history and paid a lot of attention to
History 2. Parthasarathi was much more explicit in his undertaking of provincializing
Europe and did so to a much greater extent. Still, Kurans attitude was not as blatantly
Eurocentric as Duchesnes. Considering the amount of criticism that authors such as Niall

85
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 254.
86
Weinstein, History Without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History, and the Postcolonial Dilemma,
9293.
87
Chakrabarty, In Defense of Provincializing Europe : A Response to Carola Dietze, 92.

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Ruben Peeters University of Antwerp Posthumus: Final Paper

Ferguson and Ricardo Duchesne received and the complaints the latter uttered against de-
centering Europe, a Postcolonial turn genuinely appears to have taken place in the general
mentality of academia. Especially in global history, Eurocentrism appears to be no longer
en vogue, and is even seen as bad history writing. This does not mean Eurocentric works
are worthless at all, but that they should be reread with postcolonial theory in mind.
The postcolonial turn made scholars more aware of Eurocentrism and teleology, but
also gave them the tools to handle it in a constructive manner. The Restored confidence
coincides with a new surge in universal history, world history and global history,
accompanied with a need for larger patterns and meta-narratives. 88 However, it is crucial
that the old Eurocentric and teleological approaches are not simply replaced by the idea
of big history and rising complexity. Here again, the postcolonial framework could bring
solace, and to some extent already has done so. According to Kocka, in contrast to most
forms of universal history (much stronger in previous decades and centuries), global
history today is not teleological.89 To me this seems a step in the direction towards a
better and more complete history of the global with attention to the multiple voices that
constitute it.

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