The European social sciences tend to absorb criticism that has been passed on the European approach and re-label it as a part of what the critique opposes; criticism of European social sciences by “subaltern” social sciences, their “talking back”, has become a frequent line of reflection in European social sciences. The re-labelling of the critique of the European approach to social sciences towards a critique from “Southern” social sciences of “Western” social sciences has somehow turned ...

While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West, this book seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', as well as question its geographical split into two irreconcilable trajectories: the European and the non-European. The book examines shared experiences of modern transformation or modernity in three regions -- China, India and the Ottoman Empire -- which c...