ABSTRACT
The aim of this anthology is to initiate a conversation on questions of marginality, citizenship and history among historians and social scientists working on different parts of the world, South Asia and North America – scholars who rarely address one another. Our purpose is to generate a community of scholarship and debate across what have been constituted as different world areas, in the hope that their very juxtaposition will produce new conversations about each and beyond both. The interaction between discrete bodies of scholarship and differing debates should help to bring about a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of the particularities and features of individual histories and societal conditions that experts on these separate areas have simply assumed as being well understood, and hence taken for granted. By that means, it might make for a new kind of comparative history: one in which we deal not in universals already understood, but in the assumptions that underlie our individual histories – and thence our ‘universals’.
