Empires, Modernisation and Modernities

In examining four recent books, this essay explores some key facets of contemporary scholarship on empire and the making of the modern world. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s arguments about the often contingent relationship between modernisation as a set of material and institutional transformations and modernity as a cultural sensibility, it argues that the unfolding of the modern was messy, uneven, and remained in process until the age of decolonisation. The essay suggests that the range of modern formations that emerged out of empire-building were profoundly imprinted by local socio-political patterns and the weight of precolonial cultural traditions, meaning that modernisation never played out as an entirely homogenising force.