History at the Limit of World-History
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003
Language: eng
Number of pages: 128
ISBN-13: 9780231505093
Subjects: World history; Historiography; History, philosophy
Description: The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral reco.