GLOBAL POWER

Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: A History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the Preface: "This book braids two histories: a little and a grand one. The little history is local, tracing the career of the English East India Company's fortified settlement in Bengal from the eighteenth century. In the the nineteenth century, Fort William and the city of Calcutta that surrounds it became the capital of the British Empire in India. In the twentieth century, Calcutta also became a major place where nationalist modernity was fashioned and mass politics was organized. The conspiracies, ambitions, alliances, resistances, and confrontations that mark this local history of Fort William and its environs constitutes one strand within this book. The grand history, on the other hand, is about the global phenomenon of modern empire from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. This history, I claim, was fundamentally shaped by the unprecedented problems posed by the fact of modern Europeans states ruling over Asiatic and African peoples, shaping in turn the norms and practices of the modern state itself. Modern empire was not an aberrant supplement to the history of modernity but rather its constituent part. It will continue to thrive as long as the practices of the modern state-form remain unchanged, The continuing global history of the norms and practices of empire constitutes the second strand of the narrative." Id. at xi.).