Andrew Sartori's Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital is an exceptional assessment of Bengal's intellectual history. Sartori sets out to explain why modern Bengali identity has always been articulated through “a problematic of culture” (p. 4). He argues that from the eighteenth century onward, “culture” emerged as a “unitary, if differentiated” concept that was adopted globally as a framework to make sense of the world. It is thus limiting to try to understand the Bengali bhadralok's endlessly discursivized fascination with culture within the limits of Bengal. We can understand the analytics of the culture concept only by examining structures that are themselves global, namely, “the abstract structures of social interdependence that characterize modern capitalist society” (p. 22).

Sartori reminds us that although the roots of culture as a concept lie within the Western intellectual tradition, it is more meaningful to try to understand why people across divergent geographic locations and historical contexts were able to inhabit the culture concept as a socially determined conceptual site from which to gain access to transhistorical truths. Thus, the text spans the entire period of colonial rule in Bengal. It begins with an account of early nineteenth-century Bengali intellectuals who used categories of classic Western liberalism to make sense of their times and to reform “traditional” practices. Similar to the structural foundations of early Western liberalism, Sartori shows Bengali liberal discourse to be undergirded by the “free” exchange of commodities. Leading reformers such as Rammohan Roy could thus reconceptualize “traditional” modes of thought such as Vedantism to make and defend essentially new political ideals because their own regional context had been integrated with and ordered by global capitalist relations.

Bengali liberalism and its attendant idioms of property, rule of law, freedom, and equality (albeit severely circumscribed in practice) ultimately stumbled when the imperial economy underwent deep structural changes beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. As the imperatives of the colonial economy changed, Bengalis were systematically pushed out of circuits of capital accumulation. The Bengali liberal rhetoric of equality and freedom, failing to find any correspondence in the political economy, finally retreated and was replaced from this period onward by an “alternative ideological paradigm centered on the concept of culture” (p. 76).

This culturalist ideology, Sartori carefully shows, developed a strident critique of the older liberalism, equating it at a general level with colonialism but specifically condemning it as falsely proclaiming the “emancipatory potentialities of the sphere of circulation” when such arenas were in reality, by then, all but legally barred to the Bengalis (p. 118). According to Sartori, it was in this period that there developed for the first time a fundamental discursive conflation between “Westernness” and commercialism and “Indianness” and customary society. The anticolonial impulse of this ideology, however, was premised on a severe indigenist turn toward Hinduism. Using the figure of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, who infamously renounced his earlier “liberal” politics to reconfigure a new ethical subject based on the immanence of the Hindu tradition (to the extent of even endorsing Sati). Sartori traces the fate of the culturalist ideology as it developed in the 1880s as a “new regulative principle of ethical conduct” declaring war on the “alien forces of colonial civil society” (p. 23). During the Swadeshi movement of 1905, the culturalist ideology hardened even further against what it perceived as “commercial society” and tried to champion productive activity that were “intrinsically ethical rather than commercial in nature” (p. 137).

The last section of the book discusses the final destiny of the culturalist ideology with the subsequent retreat of the Swadeshi movement. As the ordinary people of Bengal seemed to reject the “desireless practice” that formed the core of the Swadeshi-era culturalist thought, the ideology faced a genuine organic crisis. It was faced with the possibility of having to recognize in the very masses it chose to liberate traces of a “‘western’ propensity for the pursuit of self interest” (p. 24). As a solution, there developed from this period the figure of the selfish and materialist Muslim, a figure who finally actualized the reasons for the failure of Swadeshi and allowed the Hindu bhadralok to morally distance the fanatical Muslim from the constitutive processes of imagining the new nation.

Bengal in Global Concept History is a remarkable contribution not simply to South Asian studies, but to any one who is interested in questions of subject formation under the sign of capital. However, Sartori's implicit claim that generalized commodity production is the sole determinant of modernity itself is somewhat problematic. That liberal pronouncements of freedom and equality were predicated by the “sphere of circulation or commodity exchange” is certainly true (p. 73). But enunciations of liberty and equality against conservatism surely ought to be seen as having more complex conditions of being than straightforward liberalism. To see these universal ideas as simply reflecting “circulation” is to flatten out Marx's far more subtle, what Marshall Berman has called, “enthusiasm and enmity” with modernity. While Sartori brilliantly captures the ensemble of ideas that capitalism generated and sustained globally, he does not go far enough to probe those very ideas for their ability to produce modes of action and dispositions that were against contemporary capitalist interests. While capitalism is shown by Sartori to have the imperative toward totalization, the present reviewer would be interested in seeing the Lukácsian dénouement to that universalizing imperative: namely, some discussion of the revolutionary imagination that produced its universality through the condition of its bias or partiality.