“Difference” in History and Theory: An Interview with Andrew Sartori
in conversation with Rohan Basu and Soumyadeep Guha
In this piece, Rohan Basu and Soumyadeep Guha speak to Andrew Sartori on his approach to modern history as the history of capitalism, and the emergence of the modern world as tied to its ideological imaginations. Through his engagement with (and simultaneous departure from) subaltern studies and the question of 'difference', this conversation approaches history as a discipline to understand the present, where the threat against democracy emerges in similar forms across the world.
"Pondicherry" by Aleksandr Zykov is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Rohan Basu: Professor Sartori, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. Now, we would like to start by getting to know a little bit about how you came around to doing your project. Could you tell us a bit about your intellectual journey? How did you become a historian? What made you choose the discipline?
Andrew Sartori: I wish I had an interesting story to tell about that. But honestly, I don't. It's a process that's probably best described in terms of calculus rather than in terms of anything else. I was an undergraduate student in law in Australia. And after one year, I very quickly discovered that I definitely didn't want to be a lawyer. And so I switched to a Bachelor of Arts. And I don't know, I just kept landing on history. But while I was doing my undergraduate degree in history at the University of Melbourne, I sort of wandered into a class called Modes of Power in Indian Society that was being taught by Dipesh Chakrabarty. And it was super exciting. So that's basically the key moment. I had no specific interests. I was just a 19-year-old wandering through the undergraduate university system, going, ‘What will I do?’ And it was basically just that. I realised Dipesh was asking interesting questions. It was the first time that I read Discipline and Punish. It was the first time I read Mary Douglas and Louis Dumont. And I was just really interested. And so it was more than anything else. And then that led me to a field of scholarship that, at that point in time, this was the late 80s, was just booming. This was where there was just so much happening. So it just felt like a really exciting field to be interested in. I was reading Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, and so much more.
I don't want to suggest that I had any sense of purpose in any of this. I was just following my nose one step at a time. But at some point, you take enough steps. And then you fall off the cliff. And so at some point, I'd fallen off the cliff. And I guess the fall off the cliff was that I realized that if I wanted to do a doctorate in history, two things were necessary. One was that it kind of had to be in South Asian history. And the second thing was that I needed to leave Australia because there was no way I could do a PhD in Australia and then get a job in South Asian history. So that's when I came to Chicago.
The thing about Dipesh and that generation of scholars with whom obviously I have had various kinds of disagreements, but they were basically the people who took a certain kind of developmentalism and demonstrated its exhaustion. And that, I think, opened a huge amount of intellectual space. And so when I got to Chicago, I continued on that trajectory. But then I also encountered, again, fairly non-purposefully, Moishe Postone, who taught a class on Capital. I'd been interested in social theory for a long time, and Marx had always been a part of my intellectual journey, but that class introduced me to really thinking much more seriously about his work.
I realised that if we're willing to engage in a reflexive interrogation of social scientific concepts in the wake of the exhaustion of a trajectory of those social scientific concepts coming out of the 20th century – and that is a trajectory that Dipesh put me on – then the question was, well, can Marx be a way of thinking through that problem? In rethinking concepts, what can Marx do for us in the light of that exhaustion, rather than as an attempt to recuperate some kind of developmental tradition? And so that's the conversation that set me in motion. Then it was just a matter of trying to figure out how to do that as a historian, which, you know, was not an easy task.
Soumyadeep Guha: You mentioned the Subaltern studies, particularly Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, and Partha Chatterjee, and we know about the political context within which they were writing. Much has been written now about the Subaltern Studies, how they came out of the Naxalite Movement in India, the post-Emergency politics, and so on. Your own work draws heavily from thinkers of what broadly has been called the New Left. We also know the context within which their intellectual tradition came out. So, I wanted to ask you about your own political context as you became a historian. What was your path into the intellectual traditions you work with right now? Were there political moments inside the academy or outside that shaped the historical questions that you were asking?
Andrew Sartori: There are two huge answers to that before you get to anything as tedious as biography. The two huge answers to that would be that, on the one hand, the engagement with critical social theory is obviously premised on the fact that if you look at the historiography of South Asia down to somewhere around 1983-84, there are still conversations taking place around the relationship between the history of South Asia and the categories of critical social theory. When Partha Chatterjee published that essay in Past and Present, he was still arguing with Jairus Banaji on the latter’s Deccan essay. Dipesh’s first book, too, is still engaged in those sorts of questions. And then, within a very short period of time, after 1983-84, there is a profound disjuncture between what it means to think those questions in the academy and what it means to think those questions in the world politically. And I think that it's an exercise of self-delusion to imagine otherwise. I mean, how I engage with Marx is premised in some sense on the fact that this is an intellectual exercise, and what the meaning of that intellectual exercise is open, but it is first and foremost that. There isn't some universe in which the way I'm posing these questions resonates with some kind of actual social movement or political movement. So, I think that's a huge fact that needs to be grappled with. That's not an apology or anything. It's actually just a statement of the state of affairs. That is a constitutive fact, not merely an accidental fact of what it means to do the kind of work I do. To pander to rhetoric otherwise is, in a sense, an act of not engaging seriously in the intellectual task. So that would be the first huge fact I would say.
Secondly, I think part of my interest in critical social theory emerged from the fact that the trajectory of subaltern studies didn't really seem to point towards any kind of normative vision. I'm not saying this empirically because, of course, the various members of subaltern studies have quite robust normative commitments. So this is not a claim about the people involved or their politics, which are often admirable. I just mean that the intellectual structure of the project didn't seem to me to lay any obvious groundwork. So, at some level, my interest was in trying to find a pathway in which it was possible to think about how historical actors engaged with the normative possibilities of their own historical moments, and how that should inform our understanding of the past. So, in a sense, to think about their reflexivity as historical actors, conscious or otherwise, as a point of departure for our reflexivity as people writing histories of those moments seemed to me to be an important task.
So, ultimately, if I wrote a book about the concept of ‘culture,’ it was because I wanted to problematize the self-evidence of that category, and not just in the way that anthropologists had, of course, been doing for 30 years, but really in a structural kind of way. I also then wrote a book about liberalism, and it wasn't a recuperative effort. It was to suggest that we should take the normative impulses seriously, but that taking them seriously might well involve showing the way in which they end up in all sorts of contradictions and conflicts. That doesn't mean we don't take them seriously; [it is taking them seriously]. Therefore, that attempt to think about the normative significance of historical action was, at some level, the core of what it meant for me to sort of think in terms of the tradition of critical social theory.
Rohan Basu: Speaking of critical social theory, it’s interesting that you bring up this point, something which we have also noticed through our own readings - that there was this question about how South Asian history relates to this. During my MA in Sociology, for instance, one of the questions that I was confronted with was how we should do theory in a country like India. Is there a need to reimagine it? This is because there was this suspicion about ‘the theory’ being rooted in an ‘elsewhere,’ and it being imported into ‘another’ reality. So the idea is that perhaps it’s incomplete. We cannot use it.
What I’m trying to ask is that across the 19th century, if you look at it, we find certain similarities and commonalities, things like urban design with the introduction of modern cities or with religious revivalisms trying to recuperate the past. Or even with literature where you see an excavation of myth being pursued all across the world. That makes me think, given these realities and the question of theory, how do we as historians from anywhere, like India for example, grapple with something such as Marxian theory? What would it mean to read him and try to use him in our work, given that he’s located within a European intellectual tradition and industrial Britain in the 19th century?
Andrew Sartori: Let’s think about the conditions of possibility. The first thing is that we have to rethink entire swathes of the reception of Marx in the various traditions that have travelled under the name of Marxism. If we think that the history of capitalism originated in seven counties in southern England, then that conditions what kinds of stories we can tell about it. If we think that the history of capitalism is something we have to establish region by region or nation by nation – when did we become capitalist? How successfully did we become capitalist? Why didn’t we become capitalists? These sorts of basic questions of everyday Marxist political discourse come up, right? Then I think that also radically conditions what’s possible. Also, the question of what sort of historical theory Marxist categories represent is enormously important. I espouse a reading in which those concepts are radically historical. They’re highly contingent and conditional. And if that’s the case, then they work differently than if you think that there is some kind of general theory of history embodied in those concepts.
So in some ways, I still think the critique that Banaji levied against Patnaik and Bhaduri in the 1977 essay, on the Deccan, the basic methodological point is right, that we cannot have a checklist to determine what makes the categories of political economy relevant [in a particular time and place, so that] the task is just to determine whether [those conditions are present] or not. I think that kind of approach, that kind of modular approach, will always lead to a stalemate. So the real question is not to ask how these categories apply in a kind of scientistic sort of way. But rather to ask that question as a historical question, which is how do these categories [of political economy] come to gain purchase in these historical contexts. So it's not a constructivist problem in the sense of, we need to understand how we're going to use these concepts to understand that society, but rather to ask questions which always have to be nuanced and incredibly conditional. For instance, one can ask how it is that it doesn't seem to be possible to make sense of a society without these concepts. It's not just for me, but for social actors in the subcontinent. If you want to tell that story only as one of colonial epistemic violence, then you run up against real problems, because ultimately, you begin to sound very condescending at a certain point, you begin to say things like these people just don't know what they're talking about. It's because these people, the historical actors we're talking about, don't seem to understand that they shouldn't be talking about themselves or their world through these concepts. Instead of beginning from a kind of a priori understanding that social theory is a product of Europe [which of course it is consequentially], the real question is not one of method, as it were, but one of history. So it's to transpose the problem from a nominalist vein, the burden of the scientist, to a realist vein, which is to ask how did these concepts actually come historically to have purchase upon the historical context we're talking about? That seems to me to be a much more fluid, indeterminate, and nuanced way of posing the question. So, of course, these concepts aren't going to do all the work for every explanatory task we want them to do, but there is something inescapable about engagement with these concepts. That is itself an interesting historical fact.
We may disagree about what the condition of that necessity is, but acknowledging that it is a historical condition, that is part of what it means to investigate the historical past in South Asia. So it seems to me a crucial task for any kind of theoretical analysis, whether it's Marxian, or whether it's theory from the South. Ultimately, the question is, if I want to say theory from the South is going to be my central problem, the question becomes, how is it that theory from the South is somehow engaged in the same conversation [as canonical theory]? In other words, we have to re-establish our understanding of how there can be these seemingly universal conversations which can speak to each other, across wild diversities of experience. So that's the historical problem that I think is at the core of any answer we want to give to your question about the status of theory. It's a historical problem. I, at some level, understand that to be what that Deccan essay is trying to get at, which is to say, this is a historical problem. It's not a theoretical, abstract problem. We can't resolve this formalistically with a better method. We actually have to think, not about whether or not this context is part of capitalism, but about how new forms of relationship are emerging, which make it impossible to understand collective life outside of those relationships and outside of the categories [of political economy] that make those relationships thinkable.
Soumyadeep Guha: Since you were talking about South Asian history in particular, and you were talking about how your own usage of Marx is different from, let's say, from somebody who is using Marx to write history in the 1950s-60s. I was wondering if you could unpack that a little bit more, because the field of South Asian history has predominantly, from 1980s onwards, as I just mentioned, emphasized the question of difference and identity, but still not completely ignoring Marx. I mean for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty uses Marx in his work, but then he's also talking about History 1 and History 2. History 1 - that is a history of abstractions emanating out of Europe that results in epistemological violence, and History 2 that is rooted in the local, the province, the region, the nation, or any other iteration that suggests the particular. So in this characterization, he doesn't excuse Marx from History 1, right? He criticizes Marx, although seeing a generative potential in his thought, like many others from his time and afterwards. One of the criticisms that I can think of is that Marx was teleological because he assumed the ‘death of the peasant’ in the onward march of capitalism. So, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about how you have in your own work, while using Marx or writing through Marx, reflected on that particular tradition of Marxism, let's say from the 1950s. Why did they read Marx in that particular way, which resulted in the criticism that was made by the Subaltern Studies or the post-colonial theorists?
Andrew Sartori: First thing, I would say, is that it's not a wrong reading of Marx. To be clear, Marx says a lot of stuff, and there's a lot of ambivalence and ambiguity in Marx's writings. As I have argued, part VIII of Capital Volume 1, is riven with all sorts of problems. The empirical Marx is potentially a lot of different things. The first thing to note is that the reading of Marx is deeply informed by the party-political Marxisms that emerged in South Asia and elsewhere. These were obviously fragmented. There's no way to characterize the history of party-political Marxisms in South Asia, or anywhere else, as being one thing, but at some level, 20th-century Marxisms were overwhelmingly developmental in their trajectory. Whether in the [form of] a Menshevik concern that we're not ready yet versus a Bolshevik concern that we can do it anyway. That's about as crass a contrast as they come, sorry. So that's the first thing, and the point you're making is actually very old, right? It's actually Gramsci's point. You know, Gramsci wrote this newspaper article called the revolution against Capital, which was both the revolution against capital and also the revolution against the book Capital, which he understood as a kind of a Menshevik text, I guess. So there are a lot of reasons to understand Marx that way. I mean, it's not how I read it, but it's not as if there's not plenty of warrant for that reading in those texts, and you know it's not like anyone is going to say that Lukacs or Gramsci did not read Marx carefully, even if one may disagree with them.
To answer the other part of your question, the first thing for me is: what does it mean to foreground the problem of difference as the central [theoretical] problem. There are two ways of thinking about this problem. One is to think that difference represents the starting point, and then concepts work in relation to a kind of dispersal of possibility. And the other possibility is to think that difference emerges from concept[-use]. So how do we decide between these two methods? That's a philosophical question. However, I do understand that the second approach was pre-emptively set aside as part of that process of laying down the burden of developmentalism, and the result is a kind of epistemological deficit. This is because the obvious problem with difference as the point of departure for analysis is, first of all, that it is a kind of just-so set of stipulations with a kind of normatively enforced claim that this is how the world is. Then, on top of that, it says that that set of circumstances is sublime.
Now, that kind of condition where you make extraordinarily strenuous presuppositions about what the world is like, and then immediately follow it by saying, but we can't really ever know the world, is, in some ways, I would say, the central problem that Provincializing Europe was honestly trying to grapple with. So now, my approach is not that approach primarily, but I do think that Provincializing Europe was an honest attempt to think through what the implications of that approach are. Instead, what I want to say is, what about if we think about it the other way? What if we think of difference as something that emerges out of practices, rather than something that is the premise of those practices? In that sense, it's interesting, if you read those early, not particularly easy to read essays by Homi Bhabha, both gestures are actually being proposed. On the one hand, he wants to say there's a confrontation of different symbolic orders. At the same time, he also wants to talk about the production of differences. I guess [as a historian], I'm more interested in seeing what happens when you explore the production of differences, rather than when you explore the ontological condition of difference. So that's how I would answer that question in very broad terms. Yet a certain amount of philosophical modesty is not out of order here, which is to say that, even though I think the approach I'm taking has possibilities that the other one doesn't, including, crucially, ways of thinking normatively. We know we are supposed to be respectful of differences, but we don't really have any way of understanding why or how, because any such attempt to justify it would immediately enter the realm of concepts, which then gets us into that uncertain, muddy water. It's not like I can warrant in any clear way that this is the right way to think about the social universe, but I do think it allows us to think about things that the other way doesn't. Given that we've spent the last 50 years doing one project, I would like to see what happens when we do the other project.
Rohan Basu: In the first chapter of your first book, ‘Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital’, you introduce and explain your usage of the concept ‘misrecognition’ (borrowing from Moishe Postone)- you argue that Bengali culturalist discourse was ‘grounded in a systematic misrecognition’ of the global structures of capitalist society. You suggest that they mistook the forms of appearance through which these structures manifested themselves into actuality. You also suggest that this misrecognition you identify in Bengali society can by implication be recognised elsewhere in a similar time in a different part of the world, say Germany. Could you please tell us a bit more, especially in terms of how you distinguish this from false consciousness - a concept that has been understood by scholars as robbing the agency of the historical actor?
Andrew Sartori: This is deep Marxology, but I'm going to dive into it for a moment. The key difference is that false consciousness is a theory of ignorance, and misrecognition is a theory of knowledge. When you misrecognize things, you know things. In Capital, the categories that Marx is using all proceed from forms of appearance. The attempt to grasp essence is always through forms of appearance, because that is the only way that essence appears. So in some sense, to say that historical actors misrecognize is not to say they don't know, because actually, fetishes are real and the basis of [conscious] social action. In that sense, it is not at all a kind of dismissal to say that social actors in the past “misrecognized.” It's to say that, like all of us in all of our lives, all the time, we proceed on the basis of experiential categories. We don't really need to understand what those experiential categories are or what they mean in order to act on them. I don't need to understand what money is in order to use it. There are [many] people who are much better at using money than I am who have no understanding of what money is.
The theoretical categories I'm interested in are ones that only appear through forms of appearance. The question is not whether those forms of appearance are false—because they're not. It's more like, imagine you're standing in the middle of a giant dark room, and you have a torch. Social experience is what you can see with that torch, and it is, of course, a highly distorted representation of what's around you. Now, what that means is that to actually figure out what is around me, I would have to do a series of investigations, to deduce through conceptual work what must be around me to account for what I can see. That's the work of theory. It's basically saying we live in a very peculiar form of social relation, all of us now pretty much, in which it isn't possible to understand our social experience on the basis of experience directly. We need to use concepts to understand what makes our experience possible in the form that it is.
So, misrecognition. People do not like this word for the reasons that you've stated. They think that it's basically a code word for false consciousness, but it really isn't. It's an epistemological category whose primary valence, as I was using it in that first book especially, was to say these people did know their social world. When they used these concepts, they were talking about something. Now, was this the best way to talk about it? No. But this concept was a way of talking about the social world. It did do interpretive work. It was meaningful. The purpose of using misrecognition was actually to say that, rather than to say they don't know what they're talking about.
I think that's the central thing, but it does involve a certain kind of Marxological engagement to understand why this concept doesn't mean what it seems to mean, because the fetish is not a form of false consciousness. It's a form of true consciousness, but incomplete true consciousness. It's what presents itself in experience.
Soumyadeep Guha: There are these abstractions of political economy: rent, profit, labor, or whatever other category one uses. From what I understand, to you, they are foundational to the development of the social, the political, and the economic. They are not separate; they have been historically made into three discrete, separate domains. So what I wanted to ask you is: why do you think a ‘world history,’ as we understand you are trying to write, through a focus on these abstractions, enables us to engage more generatively with the historical questions that are asked of the modern world? Again, going back to engaging with, let's say, ‘modernity’ as a broad category, many have engaged it through notions such as culture, which often has been assumed to be unmediated by capital, and thus treated as a separate domain of historical inquiry altogether. So how do you actually approach that division in your first book, and then even later on?
Andrew Sartori: Why do I think that the categories of capital are a way of thinking about this? At some level, the primary alternative doesn't seem to me to be culture, because that kind of 1980s—well, really 1990s—globalization model, is something that is built on a historical narrative that precedes it, which is essentially state-centered. It's the colonial model. And so that then leads us back to the agency of colonial states, which of course is very substantial. But I don't see how you can have an account of modernity in the way that people might want to talk about it in the late 20th century, without having an account of the constitution of a set of worlds within which culture circulates. And in the end, I think if you scratch that itch, you will find a fairly conventional set of arguments born out of 1980s colonial studies and 1990s postcolonial studies, which center on colonial domination. Which again, is not something I disagree with, per se; I just think that it is a limited way of understanding the larger political and social processes that characterize the 19th and 20th centuries.
The really powerful European states could exercise a huge amount of local power, like the Dutch could wipe a population off an island and replace it with slaves. That's not how they ran their empires though [as a whole]. The question is how plausibly does, say, the power of the British colonial state reach into people's lives on a very broad scale? The answer is: consequentially? Yes. But adequately to do all the explanatory work that we seem to want it to do? No. So my aim at no point—I think I could be easily misunderstood on this point—is not to say that the colonial state doesn't do things and that it’s not important. My point is really to say that there's a larger ecology of social action within which the colonial state is operating as an actor, as a very important actor, but just an actor, more important in some places, less important in others. At some level, we need to expand the framework of analysis, because at the moment everything beyond the colonial state appears as difference. I think at some level, while that's a good form of historical modesty—that's the advantage of having unloaded the developmentalism that was so central to 20th-century social science—we then have to say, okay, well, we're not going to assume that concepts simply are there. We're not going to assume that political economy just works. We are going to at least open the historical question of whether it is possible that those concepts do come to have salience there.
Is the colonial state an adequate singular actor to explain the emergence of that? No. This may or may not be an adequate answer, but it is my best bet.
Rohan Basu: But speaking of colonialism as a kind of project, I have a question about the word empire. Because in recent times, ‘Empire’ has become a very important category of historical inquiry.
I have come across works of some scholars who have drawn parallels between the processes of the British Empire and those of the USSR, which is described as the Soviet Empire. This is despite the fact that the Soviets did not identify themselves in imperial terms. There is also historical scholarship that categorizes the US as the American Empire, while the US obviously does not, in fact, speak of Pax Americana in the same way as the British did with Pax Britannica. Now, do you see empire as a generative, total category to analyze the modern world? Because it is a concept that can be attached to non-Western state formations across different and overlapping time periods, such as the Mayans, the Mughals, and the Ottomans. And the Ottomans, in turn, in line with the Habsburgs, saw themselves as inheritors of the legacy of ancient Rome, which transcended the categories of East and West.
Now, if this is the case, then how do we understand empire conceptually and temporally, especially? Can it be used properly as a concept of historical analysis?
Andrew Sartori: It can definitely be used as a concept of historical analysis. The question is, how and for what purposes? I agree with the premise of your question, which is that the concept of empire has diminishing returns as it is endlessly stretched. I understand that if I were in Central America, talking about US power in imperial terms would make a great deal of sense. If the attempt however, is to describe US power after World War Two in imperial terms, I am not sure that is a useful characterization of the kind of power the US exercised after World War Two. This is not to say that it did not exercise vast amounts of extraterritorial power, but I am not sure that calling it empire is not just a reflex of a world that was emerging by the 1960s, where nation-states were becoming a normative—never fully actualized, but normative—model of what states were supposed to be. In that sense, any form of extraterritorial power is a residue of empire. There are different projects of thinking about power. For example, Burbank and Cooper argue that what is at stake is large states that govern differences, versus what they would point out as the relatively short-lived model of nation-states as the counterpoint.
I do not know what it would mean not to use the concept of empire, but it is a concept that is very easy to overextend. Its overextension is best understood as a reflex of the persistence of a nation-state norm model of decolonization. As Fred Cooper would point out, this was hardly coextensive with ambitions to decolonization. Nonetheless, that is what emerged from the 1960s onwards. Otherwise, we face the problem we see in French history, which is also a theme in Indian history: internal colonialism. Is the nation-state itself an empire? At that point, are we just talking about the state? What work is the concept doing for us? Another complication is the distinction between colonialism and imperialism. While they may overlap as concepts, they do different kinds of analytic work. Within the Leninist tradition, they clearly do different work. More generally, colonialism describes a relationship across the colonizer-colonized divide, whereas imperialism describes a systemic problem across [capitalist] space. These are different concepts. Empire and colony already represent different sets of problems. To think in terms of empire as the central problem might lead to arguments about reconstituting the French empire in the process of decolonization, or reimagining forms of polity not necessarily as nations.
In the history of socialist movements, there is much of this. European socialists were empirically, overwhelmingly, content with empire. Conversely, it was possible to imagine working-class/colonial solidarities in which the aim was not to liberate the colony but to break the power of empire. This was a common theme in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Empire can subsume the problems that characterize colonial and postcolonial studies, or it can represent a different set of problems.
It is one of those concepts, like culture, liberalism, or capitalism, that has a supernova tendency. Half the time when we argue about how to interpret capitalism, we are not even arguing about the same thing, because we are talking about different phenomena but using the same word to name them. Braudel’s capitalism, Marx’s capitalism, and Weber’s capitalism are three different things. Add “commercial society,” and we are off to a great start. “Empire” has the same supernova tendency built into it.
We need to ask two different questions. One is methodological: when should we use empire? The other is historical: what work has empire done, and why are we naming certain things empire? The first, methodological question should be subordinated to the second, historical one. Perhaps the reason we tend to name things empire is because of the reception of a history of the work the concept of empire has already done. That tells us something about our own inclination to use this concept to do so much explanatory work.
Soumyadeep Guha: One of the things I wanted to add to what Rohan asked and said is that I think the conflation of terms like empire, capitalism, and other categories we use to write modern history occurs primarily because, within the academy, particularly within the social sciences, there exists a division of labor. This is often addressed by claims of doing interdisciplinary work, but in practice, it means little, because epistemologically we still think in terms of the established division of labor, which can be historically traced back at least to the late 19th century.
In your own work on political economy as social science, we see how thinkers like Adam Smith had a theory of the social that cannot be separated from his ideas of commerce and the role of the state. How do you genealogically trace this separation as it developed through the liberal social sciences, which we continue to practice today?
Andrew Sartori: I keep returning to political economy because, at some level, it was the first social science, and in many ways the most indeterminate. It is difficult to define what political economy was, because it traversed so many domains: sociology, international relations, economics, politics, geography, demographics. In some sense, we inherit the disintegration of that knowledge project. This disintegration is not reversible; we cannot return to being political economists in the early-modern sense. The real question is why it is no longer possible to inhabit the analytic space of political economy.
That said, I am conceptually committed to the idea that we must not presume as ontologically given the structural separation of politics, economics, ethics, ideology, or the person. To do so is dogmatic—it presumes we already know what we do not. I would rather ask: is it really possible to understand the forms of the state as structurally separate from practices of the person, the economy, or ideology? Or, should we think of these practices as connected? That is the project of social theory. But social theory is no longer political economy; it is a different task. We may now be sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians, or literary scholars. The crucial point is that what came to be called economics became a form of analysis that puts the realms of “preference content” into brackets, while other knowledge projects that emerged to study what economists would describe as “preference content” developed in disjuncture.
We must proceed from the epistemological world we inhabit, not an imaginary one. Our assumption should be that we are situated in the present, in all its multiplicity, and our knowledge projects must follow from that. This is akin to the category of misrecognition. We cannot develop theories that ignore how people live and experience their social world. We must proceed from the recognition that people do experience their social world, and that this is our best clue to understanding it. Our disciplinary capacities should be used to question the assumptions that carve up the social world.
Soumyadeep Guha: I also wanted to ask you about epistemology—the concepts that drive us, how we inhabit the world, and so on. I’ll speak for myself: I recognize the privilege you give to ideas over practices, and you might disagree. How does your method approach history, which in the historiography confronted this dualism in the archives? The archives tell you more about practices than, say, the epistemology itself. It is difficult to trace the epistemology of historical actors in the archives. How do you generatively deal with this dualism?
Basically, how do you think of your project alongside, for example, those writing the history of the long 19th century, like Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System or C.A. Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World, which predominantly focuses on practices, even when discussing ideas such as liberalism and their global life?
Andrew Sartori: I understand this as part of a change-over-time problem. But at no point in my career have I understood myself to be privileging ideas over practices. I understand the project primarily as follows: you may have heard that the archive in South Asia is pretty problematic, the rumor is out. The question, then, is how to pose questions that the archive isn't always well suited to answer.
I think it is possible to approach the history of concepts without assuming that the central problem is intellectual history. That’s how I think of my own work. Generally speaking, I am not primarily driven to understand intellectual histories. I think of intellectual histories as an archive that allows us to ask questions that are otherwise difficult to pose. That, of course, has changed over time. My first book was very much intellectual history. The second book was less so. The trajectory has been to look more at social actors who aren’t obviously or traditionally recognizable as intellectuals—or, if they are, they are very minor ones. At the same time, I recognize that there is no archive capable of capturing the cognitive or conceptual universes of most social actors in South Asia, or, if there is, it is extremely limited. So there has been an expanding scope of inquiry. I don’t think the fundamental problem has changed: how can we use textual evidence to approach historical questions and interpretations that the colonial archive might not have been interested in telling us? Just because something is the most prominent thing in the archive doesn’t mean it was the most important thing, it simply was the most important thing to the actors gathering information and writing reports. Entire historiographies have been built on that. Generations of scholarship were written on the revenue structure, for instance, and then entirely new literatures emerged asking whether the revenue structure was really the only thing that mattered in [agrarian] society. It’s a point we have to keep returning to because it’s easy to lose sight of.
That’s how I think about intellectual history: as a different way in. It makes some things visible that might otherwise be harder to get at. Whether you can ultimately reach your goals with it, that remains to be seen. It takes some risks, obviously, but I still think it’s worth taking them. The worst that happens is you’re wrong, and there are worse things than that.
Rohan Basu: From what I have understood about the ‘field’ of global history, there have been two defining moments that have shaped the kind of questions we ask. The first is 1991, the year of the fall of the Soviet Union and the imagined total victory of Western liberal democracy. Incidentally (or not), it's also very important for me because this is the year when India adopted the liberal reforms, as well as the year when the Central European University was established (in response to the fall of the Socialist Bloc as a Western-modeled yet distinctly central European institution that would foster the values of ‘open society’ across the region). Global history and its questions were shaped in this moment of triumph for ‘globalization’ - from some of the trends I have recognised, some focusing on its intellectual genealogy, some on the focused detail of connections through which we see the global, and some who critique the concept to show its limits. The global recession of 2008 raised political concerns about the assumptions created after 1991 - this was reflected in history by a renewed focus on broader structural analysis as seen, for instance, by the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate, or in recent works of economic and social history such as the volume - ‘The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire’, co-edited by David Motadel, Christof Dejung, and Jürgen Osterhammel. On the other hand, there is also a renewed focus on questions of decolonization, trickling outside the academy, accompanied by the rise of conservative nationalist governments across the world, such as that of Modi, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, and their likes. What, then, does it mean to do global history now?
Andrew Sartori: The first thing I want to say is that I think you were correct to characterize global history as essentially, in some sense, a kind of connection–comparison duality. It is also framed in terms of languages and the sheer difficulty of doing this kind of work, which, in the 1970s, was central to the social history project. Back then, the idea of an industrial model of academic output was very important: collaborations that built together, and so on. But at some level, that’s not really what I do.
For me, what’s interesting about global history is that I am drawn to the “itch” that Subaltern Studies wants us to scratch. At some level, I don’t want to make big connections in that sense. I don’t want to say, “This is like that.” It is more interesting to me, successfully or not, to pursue something closer to what Shahid Amin did with sugarcane. His whole career has basically been about one district. Could you tell a global history that’s really just about one district? I’m not that person, but that, to me, would be the most ambitious version of global history—not the one that covers three continents and fourteen languages. Not that that’s bad, but that would be my threshold. That approach gets at all the questions you asked earlier. That makes the question, “What are we doing with these concepts?” central. The bigger the scale, the easier it is to slide past those kinds of questions.
The second thing is, what is global history? Global history emerged in a sense after the collapse of one theme of world history, which was developmental. Global history picked up at that point. So what does it mean to do global history? For many people today, it means emphasizing that you can’t understand the chauvinistic and violent politics of this historical moment outside a framework that those politics are hostile to. That’s the corrective project.
But the real issue, which I don’t have a definitive answer for, is that global history is a corrective to nationalist frameworks, but it’s not clear what kind of an alternative project it represents. It’s not like the world history of the 1940s and 50s, the great world history projects, which had a kind of humanist accumulative model. That’s not global history. Global history is, ultimately, a different language.
I don’t know the full answer to your question, except to say that global history either reposes questions from world history, but at some peril, or becomes a project with uncertain purposes, where you uphold difference but don’t necessarily have a framework you’re comfortable with. Viewed in terms of connection and difference, the project is in a state of uncertainty. That uncertainty, however, isn’t always experienced because there’s so much short-term work to do: correcting nationalist frameworks and showing that the reasons we think a nation or people is “special” are rooted in a world of connections. That corrective work is important, but it’s really a prolongation of a less urgent, yet more fundamental set of questions: what is global history? What is the “global” it takes as its object of analysis? And why is it important? I have an answer to that, but global history as a field doesn’t always provide one beyond saying that it’s fruitful. That’s an unsatisfying answer, but it’s a huge and important question.
Reactions that close doors and narrow horizons aren’t just political; they’re also academic. In history, for instance, there have been strong critiques of the global framework. These critiques often don’t take the form of questions about scale or method; instead, they’re framed as, “What about French history?” This isn’t necessarily a right-wing position, but it reflects anxiety about restoring a different framework for historical analysis. So, global history remains important in the short term, but it hasn’t really found a clear purpose. Then again, it’s academia.
Soumyadeep Guha: I have a final question for the sake of my own curiosity and colleagues who read your work. What is the project that you are engaging in right now? What kind of questions are you dealing with?
Andrew Sartori: Very briefly, after a period of various administrative obligations, I am working on a project again, and I am writing about the history of money. I am trying to write about the history of money in the 18th century and, specifically, a fairly typical set of questions: What was money in a world where nothing could actually represent money because both measures and currencies were bewilderingly plural? How does something like a uniform, more homogeneous money begin to emerge from that context, and why is the state at the center of it? That is the bundle of questions. What was monetary pluralism? How did it work? What did money mean? And what kind of transformation was set in motion out of that universe?
Soumyadeep Guha & Rohan Basu: Thank you so much.
Andrew Sartori is professor of history at New York University. He is the author of two monographs, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (2008) and Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (2014). He is also the co-editor of several volumes, including (with Samuel Moyn) Global Intellectual History (2013), and of the journal Critical Historical Studies.
Rohan Basu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Historical Studies at Central European University, Vienna. His interests lie at the intersection of science, religion, imperialism, and nationalism in the long nineteenth century. His work examines the Jesuit mission in late nineteenth/early twentieth century Calcutta and their involvement with Indian 'national science' and Hindu revivalism, as a part of the global history of the Roman Catholic Church and it's engagement with science and nationalism.
Soumyadeep Guha is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. His research interests include agrarian history, history of capitalism, and the history of science and technology. His current research explores the formation of new peasant subjectivities in India in the context of growing integration of its countryside into global circuits of trade during the colonial period.