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Inter-area/Border Crossing
Roundtable Session
This roundtable is organized around the posthumous publication of C.A. Bayly’s Remaking of the Modern World, 1900-2015 (2018), his sequel to his seminal text Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (2003). Bayly was committed to writing histories of the non-Western world, in which historical processes in Asia were at the center of history. He began his career as a social historian of nineteenth century north India, and later expanded his work into the eighteenth century to examine the mercantile roots of economic and social change, while paying attention to the circulation of knowledge in the region. Bayly argued for “beating the boundaries” of the discipline as a way to reinterpreting historical processes anew. As a result, he urged scholars to move beyond their respective temporal and spatial specializations as a way to rethink normative interpretations of economy, society, culture, and politics, as he did with his own work that now covered comparative Asian empires, British imperial history, and histories of warfare in Asia. He continued to emphasize the intersections between social and intellectual history, while also contributing to the emergent field of global intellectual history and the history of ideas. The Birth of the Modern World brought together his diverse interests in the connected histories of empires, nationalisms, religions, and warfare across the globe. Remaking of the Modern World marks another shift in Bayly’s oeuvre by considering the dynamics of the histories of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Our panelists, Robert Travers, Sandria Freitag, Antoinette Burton, Sunil Amrith, and Bin Wong come together to discuss the ways each has engaged in Bayly's work. Their perspectives span Asian Studies, Global Studies, Histories of Empire, Gender Studies, and World History, demonstrating the impact of Bayly’s Remaking of the Modern World on historiography today, while offering possibilities for future research for scholars of Asia. The results of this roundtable will be published in the Journal of Asian Studies.
Jennifer Munger
University of California, Irvine
Robert Travers
Cornell University
Antoinette Burton
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
R. Bin Wong
University of California, Los Angeles
Sandra Freitag
North Carolina State University
Sunil Amrith
Harvard University