The Anthropocene and the triumph of the imagination: An environmental perspective on C. A. Bayly's remaking the modern world, 1900-2015

Abstract

HAVING HAD THE PRIVILEGE of being taught by Chris Bayly as an undergraduate, I can hear Remaking the Modern World in his voice.1 I can hear it in the form of the dazzling lectures-never showy, but perspective-shifting week after week-that were the kernels from which this book and its predecessor on the nineteenth century both grew.2 In the late 1990s, that course was still called “The West and the Third World since 1914.” Notwithstanding its then already outmoded title, it was a progressive course: a perspective on global history building out from the detailed study of South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. It was clear even then that Bayly's long immersion in the study of Indian history was not incidental but rather vital to Bayly, the global historian.