The argument in this little book made up of three lectures and an epilogue continues in a direction taken some twenty years ago, but does so at a depth not sounded in my work until now. The critique of elitism in South Asian historiography was central to my concern at the time. In developing that critique I tried to show how the peculiarity, indeed the originality of Britain’s paramountcy in the subcontinent as a dominance without hegemony, required the appropriation of the Indian past and its use for the construction of a colonial state. There was nothing in the structure...

To start with, let us consider the name given to this book. What, one may ask, does the word limit have to do in the title flanked by a referent seemingly so illimitable as World-history? The answer is that it is there precisely to provoke a question like this and bring out in relief the obviousness taken for granted, so that it may be questioned in its own turn. If limit, as defined by Aristotle, is “the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first thing inside which everything is to be found,”¹ its function...

The prose of history comes after the prose of the world as a staging post on Spirit’s road to self-consciousness. Here, no less than in the instance of primal differentiation between poetry and its successor prose, it is the younger that is more developed, more progressive. For, in Hegel’s evolutionary model, the subsequent is distinguished by a higher value. “In the case of spiritual phenomena,” he writes, “higher forms are produced through the transformation of earlier and less advanced ones.”¹ Nothing testifies better to this order of precedence and importance for Hegel than the emergence of the prose of history...

To return to the question of the limit. We have seen it as a line drawn across historicality. The parts so divided may now be distributed in terms of the Aristotelian definition cited in the first chapter. Inside the limit where “everything is to be found,” the everything stands for World-history constituted by the nation-states of Europe, euphemistically called the Germanic realm. Outside, where “there is nothing to be found,” the nothing is the region of Prehistory. The lands and peoples settled here by an imperialist philosophy speaking for Geist have historicality but no history. The excluded are not ethnic...

Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian writer, is known mainly for his literary works. It is less known that he was a most accomplished historian as well. The Indian past has been thematized in many different ways in his narrative poems, plays, and novels. But it is his essays that testify best to a deep and pervasive sense of history. They impress as much by the range of his scholarship as by the skill with which he deploys it in the argument. Taken together, the essays stand for an original vision distanced no less from the colonialist historiography propagated by the...