The Rag and Bone Shop of the Mind

It has been lovely over the past two days to have so many people kindly respond to the publication of Provincializing Global History. The book will have to stand on its own two legs as a contribution to the field, but I thought it might be interesting to write something about the background of concern that it emerges from. At a workshop around the book kindly organised by Sophus Reinert, my old friend and colleague John Shovlin asked me what was the predicament that we were in that I wrote in this particular way, and I've been thinking about that as a really interesting question for me.  I'm taking John's "we" in this circumstance to refer to the scholarly community and I think John is right, we are in a predicament, but that is no bad thing. John's question brought me back to a moment very early in my scholarly life when Patrice Higonnet gently intimated that if I was that committed to praxis and saw scholarly work as a projection of more profound issues then why didn't I go and directly address them. That stopped me dead in my tracks, but again in a really useful way because it made me get past an unhelpful idea about what it was to research and write history, particularly history of the changes in the use of ideas. And that is why on my PURE profile I have my tongue a little in my cheek when I refer to myself as an applied eighteenth-century historian. We have not, I feel, fully appreciated how our work uncovers latent possibilities and resources to address our current moment. Every day in my work in Dundee I see how just allowing what I know from my work and experience as an historian to inform my work with partners, has transformative effect. So our predicament, I feel, is that we are not open enough to the radical consequences of historical practice, and the kinds of hopeful, but awkward, places following the consequences of our own practice might take us. And for me that late eighteenth century moment, in which so many of the institutions and ideas that structure contemporary reality were constructed, is the most challenging and disturbing of places to do historical work. Seeing the past as full of possibility, most of which is lost, rather than as a simplified or immature version of the present and future, completely changes the way in which one approaches the archive.

The nagging question that drives the book is around the conditions of possibility of stable modern  life. Why and how did and do ordinary (a tricky word) families and individuals commit themselves to the risk and danger of social experiment, rather than relying on the reproduction of known structures and authorities? I am continually struck that over the past 250 years, despite the horrors of imperialism and slavery, the anxieties attendant on market economies, the catastrophic revolutions against modern life, and the even more damaging barbarisms inflicted by modernist utopians, the everyday miracle of a self-organising society reasserts itself, as well as its demotic virtues of equality and kindness. The hypothesis I advance in the book is that European provincial life created the context within which specific, particular experiences, of the acquisition of knowledge, of economic life,  of material culture, could be abstracted and represented in universal terms, and that in consequence a culture of reason shared between elites and subalterns emerged. And that, I think, is the key to understanding how the thread of civilisation is spun, out of reason. Since I wrote this I've been thinking about, and writing about, other contexts where models of demotic reason emerged. Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, and his notion of double consciousness is more and more compelling to me, and I'm hoping to extend my work in his direction. My colleague Undine Sellbach has driven me to think much harder about feminist critiques of the idea of critical rationality that structures my understanding of reason. So I understand that any specific definition of reason in the book is open to challenge, but I think that does not invalidate the observation around the historical experience of the community and its significance. The book is also in dialogue (if not evidently) with James Scott's work and his wonderful notion of a popular reason that escaped the neolithic revolution, let alone the industrial. His sensitivity to the paradoxes of coercion and the importance of agency to understand stability, is, I hope, reproduced in my thinking.

This book is the first of a pair, the second being on how demotic reason relates to capitalism. One of the reasons the book took so long was the impact that Chris Desan and Sven Beckert's seminar on capitalism had on me. I kept trying to align the story about the Languedoc and capitalism in a narrative, and I just couldn't. Eventually (it takes time but I do catch on) I realised it was because they are not continuous so I have been working for a while on the hinge between the commercial societies of the eighteenth century and the emergence of capitalist globalism in the nineteenth. As Patrice says, no great work is ever finished, merely abandoned.....