In the twenty-first century, terms such as globalization, global, and world function as key words at the cusp of new frontiers in both historical writing and literary criticism. Practitioners of these disciplines may appear to be long time intimate lovers when seen from pre and early modern time periods, only to divorce with the coming of Anglophone world history in the twenty-first century. In recent years, works such as Martin Puchner’s The Written World, Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, or the three novels that encompass Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, have rekindled a variant of history and literature’s embrace in a global register. This book probes recent scholarship concerning reflections on global history and world literature in the wake of these developments, with a primary focus on India as a site of extensive theoretical and empirical advances in both disciplinary locations. Inclusive of reflections on the meeting points of these disciplines as well as original research in areas such as Neo-Platonism in world history, histories of violence, and literary histories exploring indentured labor and capitalist transformation, the book offers reflections on conceptual advances in the study of globalization by placing global history and world literature in conversation.
Neilesh Bose is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global and Comparative History at the University of Victoria. With a focus on modern South Asian history, the history of modern migrations, and global history, his most recent book is the edited volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives (Bloomsbury, 2020).
This is an innovative and welcome collection of essays on a challenging yet broad topic. The editor (and the Press) deserve praise for the interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars of literary studies and historical studies, which once published will certainly attract researchers in both fields and be a standard reference volume for future work.
Auritro Majumder, Associate Professor of English, University of Houston
The edited volume is an important contribution to the new literature on world history and world literature. In particular, the essays bring together research at the intersections of global history and “world” literature.
Rama Mantena, Associate Professor of History and Global Asian Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
