ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the idea of ‘transition’ in history, tracing the origin of the word back to its Latin roots and examining theoretical interventions made to understand the idea of historical and economic change. It deals with temporal shifts in history – from the ‘ancient’ to the ‘medieval’ to finally, the ‘modern’ – and raises the question of whether it was the events by virtue of themselves that define the idea of transition, or was it, in fact, more numerous capillaries of political change that were converging to precipitate the events that defined change in their respective eras. How legitimate is the act of periodization of slices of historical time, and is focussing on regional developments instead of larger changes a sound approach to understand events like the colonization of the nation and the evolution of its currency through the ages?
