ABSTRACT
Dipesh Chakrabarty was born in Calcutta, India, in 1948. He attended Presidency College at the University of Calcutta where he completed his undergraduate degree in physics. Chakrabarty believes that in distinguishing between these separate logics of history, he can dispel the notion that history works as a waiting room for capitalism, instead showing that there are limits to the “historical” as separate from theory and structure. While Eric Wolf similarly wanted to decenter the West from his historical research, he took a markedly different approach from Chakrabarty. Eric Wolf was known as a critical and politically engaged scholar, and in 1965 organized one of the first teach-ins in the United States against the War in Vietnam. Both Chakrabarty and Wolf build on Marxian concepts of history and capitalism to change the way their discipline does and thinks about historical research.
