Introduction
Using the term “legacy” for a career as productive, insightful, and pathbreaking as Chris Bayly's is doubtless an understatement. The movement in his publications from the transitional world in the Indian subcontinent leading to British imperialism, through aspects of high empire in India, to world history through both case studies and broader context for grasping the implications of a changing world, provides valuable analyses for all of us, if not a pattern many could replicate. Perhaps what ought to be noted here is the experience, common to many of us working across a very broad range of problematics and focal points, to have found Bayly there, before us.
Bayly's Legacy for South Asianists
To situate Remaking the Modern World requires us to look at Bayly's larger corpus; this not only enables a reader to understand his conceptual and writing “design,” but also ensures that we do not misread his intent in his final volume.Footnote 1 For me, the backdrop to his approach is especially located in three books, all of which moved deftly from a discussion of what the British were doing to an analysis of the interactions of Indians with each other and the British, each emphasizing the ways that local values informed rationalities shaping Indian actions. All of these have the trademark Bayly design that also shaped Remaking the Modern World: the integration of extraordinary amounts of local detail with original, overarching analysis to give us convincing characterizations of big-picture patterns.
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars shows us how local urban society operated during the early era of colonial rule according to its own dynamic.Footnote 2 The problematic Bayly addresses here not only exposes significant restructuring of patterns of urban centers across North India; it also traces the emergence of two patterns of social networks and power structures internal to particular cities. The composition of the first was marked by a predominantly Hindu-merchant style and set of relationships. The second built on Muslim courtier connections and models for behavior as they relocated from Mughal centers. Resulting patterns deeply affected the ways that particular urban places met new challenges under the British. Consequently, the inheritance of these patterns of urban social organization and related power networks have made Bayly's analysis immensely helpful for those of us trying to understand archival materials on many different subjects, ranging from riots to new formulations of community and evocations of collective identity narratives.
The Raj is a very different sort of work—an exhibition catalog.Footnote 3 But it is so much more than this. Though it relies in part, as such catalogs do, on essays contributed by specialists in various modalities of visual and material culture, it also captures Bayly's distinctive approach to history. Readers so inclined to work through Bayly's captioned analyses for the hundreds of items that were on display at Britain's National Portrait Gallery—I cannot be the only one!—are treated to an encapsulated if remarkably broad and coherent vision connecting across media over centuries of production. Again, one of the striking characteristics of this overarching, big-picture analysis is the extent to which Bayly's implicit narrative—especially drawing from a collection that doubtless had an imperial motivation throughout—also draws attention to the agency of actors operating from deep within indigenous values and motivations.
Empire and Information was the most exciting for me, even of these three strikingly original, innovative, and pathbreaking studies.Footnote 4 Its insistent focus on the state and local-society practices that enabled flows of information and agency by Indians at many levels challenges significantly many of the historical interpretations of the impact of the British Empire on India both during the imperial time period and afterwards. Indeed, the dynamics presented in this study connect in important ways to the larger analyses of imperialism that had begun to provide the scholarly context for this work of Bayly's (for instance, overview analyses by Ranger and Smith of the interactions between rulers and ruled under imperialism).Footnote 5 This scholarship (including Bayly's) insists that the form imperialism could take on the ground required rulers to shape their responses, and even their policy, to indigenously informed interactions both negative and positive. While studies examining this period have for good reason focused on the negative impacts that empires imposed, few have succeeded in nuancing those impacts by recognizing the agency of a range of local participants in the dialogic processes that marked the imperial experience.
That is, while Bayly's frame incorporates British imperialism, his emphasis throughout these studies is on how so-called “responses” are not just reactions to the British. Rather, he focuses on internal logics and patterns that emerge within local cultures. These, he shows us, themselves derive from older civilizational patterns while representing creative negotiations with challenges posed by change in localities (as in the culture of Hindu bankers and Muslim ashraf). Readers see this point through detailed evidence juxtaposed with much larger patterns into which local developments fit.
From South Asia to the World
How does this overarching design Bayly has used, in his most successful South Asia–focused studies, hold up with the full-on shift to world history? As noted, his trademark approach is still employed in linking the details of localized developments to larger analytical conclusions. Yet we have three difficulties in evaluating this shift. First, we have some indication of how he will use comparison within a larger frame—for example, in his essay treating the Java War and India's 1857 uprising.Footnote 6 Here he uses both similarities and differences to underscore a broader finding about the nature of rural/agrarian society in each place and its relationship to unrest. These indicators do produce a revealing outcome; this is, nevertheless, a focused case study that is still narrower than the broad world history he will attempt in later work.
Can this comparative approach lay the groundwork for a much larger scale? That is the second difficulty: that the scale is massively different in Bayly's two books in the Blackwell series on world history suggests the larger challenge of expanding his analytical design.Footnote 7 At the same time, however, it also calls out the underlying tensions (discussed at the JAS Roundtable held at the Association for Asian Studies meetings in March 2019), with which he grappled throughout his career; as others suggested, there is embedded within his treatment the intellectual genealogy regarding the role of capitalism in the developments he examined at various levels. Moreover, this scale, as well as what we will call the “polish” of this final work, are also implicated in one of the major criticisms of the book: what is seen as its Eurocentric focus. In part this connects to the chronological frame Bayly has imposed—that is, the grounds he uses in identifying the most critical moments to emerge across the century.
My argument, however, relates to what I would identify as our third difficulty in evaluating this scholarship: the fact that Remaking the Modern World does not reflect the “final revision” polish of Bayly's earlier books, a drawback discussed at greater length in the next section of this essay.Footnote 8 Indeed, I would argue that the heart of these challenges lies in the unfinished nature of the last eight chapters, given the crucial role he wants them to play.Footnote 9 The expansion and refinements needed in these chapters may well have enabled Bayly to successfully support his insistence that world history is not shaped by Europe or the West more generally. Indeed, he argues that world history is shaped by the central interactivity in the specific realms that he treats in the last chapters—realms all too often defined as outside the political narrative. These related points—that we must look at realms assumed to be outside “the political,” and that such an examination underscores Bayly's emphasis on interactivity among parts of the world (not a Eurocentric frame)—prompt me to examine the concluding synthetic chapters in the remainder of this essay.
That is, whatever else we may explore in terms of these three difficulties in evaluating the degree of success of Bayly's shift to the broad array of world history, we must credit his argument (again, consistent with his design) that we cannot understand twentieth-century world history without grasping the fundamental interconnections between histories of “the West” and the larger world in which it is located. This is an application of the earlier emphasis, in the three works discussed above, of the focus on Indian actors and their agency in shaping the world of British India. Indeed, this continued insistence on the fundamental interconnections of developments across the world is crucial and vitally important for the field. It is worth referencing Lauren Benton's blurb that “Christopher Bayly's signature moves are all here: Remaking the Modern World places seemingly peripheral conflicts and small wars at the center of world history, probes inequalities in global capitalism, and highlights changing perceptions of self and community.” We therefore turn now to explore what refinements and revisions might have been accomplished, had Bayly been given the opportunity for more development and polish.
Structuring the Narrative
For those who have not yet read Remaking the Modern World, we should begin by observing that the very structure of the book also insists in an interesting way on the complexity of what is often presented as a political narrative or chronology in world history. The introduction and the first nine chapters provide that essentially political and economic overview, with brief excursions into how other arenas matter to, and nuance, our understanding. This provides a ground to connect this narrative focus with the last eight chapters (if we consider chapter 18 as the conclusion) that consider these other arenas in more depth; this also enables Bayly to insist on their centrality to the narrative line and analytical patterns he lays out. These last chapters deal with themes such as self and society, arts and literature, killing and crime, religion, internationalism and transnationalism in theory and practice, the “shadow” of empire, and the pressure of people. The last chapter (18), serving as a conclusion, treats that chronological “phase” connecting the end of the twentieth century with the beginning of the twenty-first, in which Bayly emphasizes economic liberalization and political fragmentation.
Indeed, the most challenging aspect of this world history of the twentieth century—how to bring readers along through extraordinary arrays of detailed examples while keeping their focus on the big-picture themes and how they demonstrate significant change over 100-plus years—is achieved through a visible outline in each chapter. This includes a gray block at the chapter's opening that lists each of the sections in the chapter, with detail to show how each case study demonstrates the larger patterns, followed by introductory paragraphs providing an essential overview. Concluding sections of each chapter serve as more than conclusions; they generally are structured to connect to overview points made in preceding chapters or to point toward new analytical themes, and in the process help tie multiple chapters together.
Within this structure, there are several arguments and analyses that are especially striking and that affect my own understanding:
• The advance of the nation and the developmental state perhaps ironically hardened local identities, which became ethnicized and, in the course of time, inflected universalist religion's ideas. (Not least, this is a convincing expansion of Smith's earlier insistence that within every nationalist movement lay the seeds of civil war.Footnote 10)
• There is a shift through and after World War II to “ideological imaginaires” that, significantly, replaced the preceding patterns—especially in the West—moving from pragmatic alliances to ideological justifications through ostensibly shared values. These “ideological imaginaires” sharply distinguished one group from the other and tried to force many nations to be identified within one or other of the two dominant, contesting ideological identities or blocs.
• When these two sets of developments are joined, they lead to the state becoming stronger in many countries and to patterns where ideological conflicts meld with local struggles; these alignments reinforce the understandings of local identities, sometimes despite their labels.
• Indeed, Bayly's “tipping point” discussion (in chapter 9 and the concluding chapter) urges the reader to see the real rupture from earlier patterns. His argument shows how the underlying themes he has identified lead to different patterns in different places but are all subject to the basic dynamic (identified in my preceding bullets) that shape them and lead to the recurrent outcome of fragmentation.Footnote 11
• Also important is how Bayly ties together neoliberalism (with his tag “possessive individualism”) and various quasi-religious ideologies of liberalism. Clearly, he also perceives the importance of treating capitalism's connections to globalism in detailed ways that help us see how these forces play out in particular places, over time. Once again, his design simultaneously suggests both local distinctiveness and larger patterns over time.
What More We Would Have Wanted
As this brief overview suggests, Remaking the Modern World is unique, inspired, and challenging in its focus and ambitious aims. Other blurbs on the book's back cover make this point as well—the study “avoids all clichés” (Ruth Harris) and “simplistic ‘lessons from the past’” (Jurgen Osterhammel). From my perspective—especially in terms of the great value contributed by the three South Asia–focused studies I described in my opening—the problems have little to do with the complex organization and treatment of the themes Bayly calls out, which provide a plausible and compelling framework for thinking about the twentieth century. Instead, my concerns focus on what we have lost by Bayly not having sufficient time to expand, deepen, and polish those crucial chapters 10 through 18, given the importance he attributed to this range of topics in conveying the complexities of his overall analysis.
In my experience, refracting evidence related to developments that have not been understood to be “political” accomplishes several purposes. Such evidence allows us to see with fresh eyes the critically important patterns of the “political” narrative, recognizing and crediting the agency of many actors previously assumed to be captive within certain hegemonic power frames. Perhaps most important for Bayly's purposes, this highlights the importance of simultaneity, encouraging us to see similar spaces for action and influence across a range of cultures and historical experiences. It is here that Bayly's structure had the potential, not fully realized, to offer a less Eurocentric set of dynamics than the book currently develops. Such discoveries, in turn, might well have underscored original new insights, provided new methodologies, and helped to delineate the values of new kinds of historical evidence. All of these contributions fit with the interests Bayly expressed throughout this book, including ruminations on historiography and its intellectual trajectories. Moreover, had he been able to deepen the discussions around each of the chapters’ topics, it seems likely that this would have shifted to some extent the political narrative in the first nine chapters as well. To demonstrate this potential, we explore here some of the inherent possibilities, including an expanded consideration of popular-culture contributions, more specific examples of the power of local identity narratives, and the much more widespread impact of consumption on twentieth-century patterns.
Cultural Production
Chapter 12 starkly illustrates the promise of Bayly's intention and the shortfall of its accomplishments, as it focuses on arts, literature, and entertainment. His opening observations seem to point the way to a much-expanded consideration of “the arts” with the comment that “the irony was perhaps that, as artists and writers attempted to become more ‘anti-bourgeois’, anti-state and anti-representational, their work had less popular impact.” He calls our attention, then, to “popular music, cinema, television and dance” (pp. 215–16) as examples of this. Yet he largely ignores the connections—and tensions—between elite and popular culture, in a wide range of countries around the world, as a key to the understanding of cultural conflict and integration, as well as the implications of these patterns for other phenomena he calls out, including fragmentation, ethnic conflict and other forms of civil war, and the like.
Popular visual culture provides a good example. Both elite and popular visual cultures (and their overlaps) utilize related iconic visual language, similar themes and values, shared stories, and central figures. Not least, in many places they participate in a cultural whole that connects to those media he calls out—music, cinema, television, and dance. Those inherent connections not only reinforce but also encompass, through reiteration and cross-referencing, the values and messages built into each medium. Studies recognizing many visual-culture and literary efforts in different parts of the world, as they grapple with the challenges of twentieth-century life, point the way to what might have been explored here. Yet the larger context of those efforts—encompassing as it does a range of popular constellations both consistent and contestatory with the patterns and actors he identifies—is missing here, leaving us with an abbreviated and possibly misleading set of characterizations. To this point, Bayly's observation later in the chapter that “as conventional political resistance widely declined, cultural resistance became more pervasive” (p. 228) calls out for connections to late twentieth-century patterns of populist and anti-immigrant “nationalist” political movements across much of the world. In turn, this connects to implications for Bayly's argument regarding the stronger states that emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. These outcomes are treated in the opening chronological and political chapters, but significant explanatory patterns for why these developments emerged, and who helped shape them, are missing.
Directly related to these issues is the broader implication across Bayly's various discussions of “locality,” as that informs identity formation as well as production of identity narratives, both individual and collective. These developments around “locality” connect directly to his major analytical points regarding “self” and the shift to ideological constructs in political patterns writ large. As much research has recently proposed, invocations of place feature front and center in both individual and collective senses of locality.Footnote 12
Such invocations may perhaps best be discerned through materials not considered sufficiently in Remaking the Modern World around visual and material artifacts: that of photographic representations.Footnote 13 Indeed, the development of photography provides a good example of representing place around the world where built environments, collective activities, and symbol-laden statements capture the character of specific locales. Yet they do so in a medium where consistency of composition and materiality also implies that each place is similar to every other place, like pieces of the same puzzle. Local photography studios run by Indians, as well as some studios established by Europeans in the larger Indian cities, for instance, were accompanied by the production of itinerant photographers who brought to rural and lower-class consumers opportunities to stage photographs at fairs, pilgrimage centers, and the like. This work produced scenes for photographs that would be included in albums and newspapers, but also adapted them for postcards picturing significant monuments, local landscapes, and iconic scenes (including the graduating classes of local educational institutions, for instance). Many of these images were purchased by European military personnel and tourists, but there was also a robust indigenous market. Indians sent images of their localities to friends and relatives but also framed and exhibited them on the walls of their dwellings. These walls thus combined local scenes with other images, such as family portraits and posters of gods or religious stories, revealing personal statements of what was significant to the inhabitants. Indeed, the personal narratives expressed through the composition of such wall displays underscored the underlying connection between “locality” and identity of self, and enabled adjustments to these understandings as circumstances changed over time, both for the family and affecting the external contexts in which the family lived.
Exploring this dynamic would have much deepened and strengthened Bayly's argument about “the self.” The concept of self and its scientific examinations, in this twentieth-century development, are crucial in framing not only larger global interactions but also the relentless fragmentation and localized identity narratives that shaped intra- and inter-sociopolitical conflict. It is clear that Bayly's intention for these final chapters was to show that such developments (as concepts of the self) contributed significantly and distinctively to the bigger-picture patterns he had called out. Given his earlier close attention to the visual in The Raj, and his ability there to tie even the captions of individual pieces of visual evidence into his larger narrative, one can but regret that he had not tied the varied work on the visual and evidence of other cultural production more into his larger narrative.
Popular Participation and Its Broader Implications
Part and parcel of the value for Bayly's study of the kinds of evidence one would have wanted to see analyzed relates to the popular-culture aspects of religious change and revival. Indeed, these materials provide a critical window on the dynamics of “religion” that he discusses in chapter 13, highlighting similarities and differences across a variety of countries. Even more important, such attention would also call out similar responses and patterns of use along with influences on change in different parts of the world. This could have led to significant explorations about flows of ideas, practices, and perhaps revealing reinterpretations of key narratives. These might well instantiate—or contest—some of the broader generalizations made in chapter 13 about the emergence of “world religions” and the local divergences or characteristics in the midst of these consolidations. We cannot know how extended discussion of scholarship on popular religion across the world might have altered a master narrative regarding the processes pitting local concerns and larger assertions of significance on behalf of certain “world religions.” Certainly the very localized reconceptualizations of such “world religions” suggest different dynamics bubbling at the popular level, some of which doubtless strengthened the drive to a global status, and others that tailored teachings to localized (even now, individualized) needs and understandings. Had Bayly been able to juxtapose some of these popular-culture patterns from different parts of the world, we might have seen a more nuanced narrative of the recurrence of “religion” as a major characteristic of the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
In much the same way, extended examination of constructions of both localities and local identity narratives could have significantly rooted chapter 14's discussions of “ethnic cleansing,” followed by the transformation of world wars and decolonizing wars of independence, into “smaller wars and fragmentation.” Bayly does insist on the connections, but without this chapter being preceded by the broader, inclusive discussion of who participates in these efforts, we miss key characteristics of the emerging patterns. Perhaps more important, we miss seeing some of the fundamental connectors across all of these chapters to support his insistence on the coherence of the bigger patterns I have called out in the five bullets above.
It may be helpful here, then, to underscore popular participation more generally. Incorporating evidence and analysis of the participation of ordinary people, often through their everyday actions, would, in turn, emphasize the coherent interconnections of larger patterns. Moreover, conceptualizing cultural production across many forms and media as an overlapping, even possibly shared, set of spaces inhabited not only by elite artists but also by those involved in popular culture is crucial for another kind of analysis of “public” discourse in its most encompassing frames. These products and individual interactions with them provided spaces to “talk about” key issues of current concern. That is, the ambiguity and inclusivity of these cultural objects, formats, and media formed a revealing world within which to debate contesting interpretations and emphases relating to the wide world Bayly examines. That capacity to channel debate, in turn, suggests a realm of evidence and processes that could have been tracked through examples from a number of the countries. Yet that kind of implicit “discussion” (where we can gauge viewpoints of, for instance, viewers-consumers by whether they embraced or rejected representations in their selection of images to display) finds no place here, although the dynamics involved drew in virtually all classes of people.Footnote 14 Again, had Bayly been able to incorporate this kind of evidence and its analysis, he could have applied his signature approaches of comparison and big-picture overlay, resulting at least in more nuanced, and likely somewhat different, analysis of the patterns involved.
Consumption as a Crucial Context for Ruptures
Consumption (what Bayly calls “acquisitiveness”) underlies much of the central significance of both local identity narratives and popular-culture practices, one reason I have devoted attention to them. Narrowing this to simple “acquisitiveness” sells far short the profoundly distinctive phenomenon involved here, which is not only (merely?) an economic characteristic of the twentieth century, as Bayly suggests. Instead, the very substantial literature on consumption explores the underlying connections among and across a cluster of experiences that structure relations, ranging from family membership to neighborhoods to much larger constructed perceptions of “Other” and “self.”Footnote 15 At the same time, not surprisingly, these acts of desire and “acquisition” also signal status, as well as imagined signs of personality modes and commitments.Footnote 16 Bayly is, of course, absolutely correct to identify the emergence of twentieth-century consumption as a phenomenon both distinct from and central to twentieth-century developments and overarching patterns. Here I would like to suggest why consumption needs to be recognized and dealt with as a much more encompassing process than “acquisitiveness” suggests.
For focused discussion of consumption itself, Daniel Miller's extensive work may stand in for the very broad literature developed in various academic disciplines on this subject.Footnote 17 Most revealing is the frame he ultimately proposes: under “the wider transformations of modernity,” participants “desire to create through consumption itself” identity narratives that position them within their understandings of a world beyond even the market and the state. Especially important for our purposes is Miller's definition of “shopping” that encompasses possibilities that shopping can function as a practice (1) that might have ritual structure, (2) that might be involved in the creation of value and relationships, and (3) that might manifest elements of cosmology.Footnote 18 This analytical frame is also relevant because of Miller's insistence that the particulars for each of these aspects are historically contingent and culturally specific, thus removing the twin dangers of Western-centric analyses being regarded as universal and a dominant culture's capacity to efface minority or other alternatives within a given society. Once again, this extends and assists Bayly's efforts to move beyond Europe in his big-picture framings and the specific details he deploys to support those. Miller's analysis, combining theorizing and ethnographic treatments of the processes of consumption, makes clear the breadth beyond “acquisition” involved in the twentieth century. Indeed, this examination supports Bayly's conclusions about significant ruptures with the past. There is, thus, a much broader context into which consumption needs to be situated.
Providing fundamental building blocks for understanding this broader phenomenon of consumption—especially along lines consistent with Bayly's own analyses—is Christoph Asendorf's argument that what most characterizes viewing experiences, and links them to offerings of the museum and exhibitions, has been the “encyclopedic offering” of “social or historical reality” in ways that demanded of the viewer a new way of looking or absorbing information on offer.Footnote 19 This new way included both concentration and diffusion: what Asendorf calls “a new perceptual task” in which the nervous system has to “operate selectively and not simply collapse under the assault of impressions.” This points us to one connection with Bayly's analytical points relating to the psychological breakthroughs in understanding the challenges presented to those living in the twentieth century. Moreover, this task becomes one in which viewers’ selectivity becomes the basis for how identity narratives, expressing the meanings constructed through visual interactions, are communicated.Footnote 20 Mastering this perceptual task, that is, enables the act of consumption in these changed circumstances, making of the viewer's gaze something simultaneously linked to the processing of information and the possessing of it. Asendorf implicitly links this development in entertainment and popular culture to the larger context of industrialization and the expansion of capitalism, calling our attention to Marx's observations and once more demonstrating his analytical connections to Bayly's arguments as well. For it is in the process of changing perception that we can locate the fundamental shift that makes possible the amalgam of imagined communities (fostered by nationalism) with consumption, “the transformation of materiality into abstraction.” Thus philosophic, scientific, and commercial interests coalesced around an “abstraction of the world of things and social relations in commodity circulation.”Footnote 21 Once again, what might have seemed to be attention paid to processes remote from Bayly's arguments is brought into close alignment with the larger patterns he has identified.
Christopher Pinney has also suggested an important element in this process, when he notes that “popular Indian visual semiosis creates instead what might be termed a sense of the ‘elsewhere’ and it is this which allows many Indians to ‘think’ their nation.”Footnote 22 Pinney is proposing an alternative to Benedict Anderson's characterization in Imagined Communities of the process by which the nation becomes imagined.Footnote 23 Pinney's formulation begins by broadening in important ways Anderson's understanding of print capitalism as being limited to text, especially newspapers (which has also limited understanding to middle-class or bourgeois participants). As much work on visual materials has made clear, the twentieth-century technological innovations for the production of images ensured a very wide dissemination of statements asserting certain values. These became accessible to a very wide audience, variously “literate.”Footnote 24 To that broadening of distribution and appeal, a crucial new element in Pinney's argument about the “imagined elsewhere” draws our attention to the ways in which much of what is imagined is not tied to locality or even to what is called out as shared, overarching cultural characteristics (of language, ethnicity, or the like) that has been implicated in assertions of nationalism.Footnote 25 Instead, this formulation of an imagined elsewhere also helps to support Bayly's efforts to show the linkages to a dialogic interrelationship between locally constructed identities and larger ideological impulses.
Finally, we note that, taken together, these various contributions underscore the ambiguity and multivalent possibilities in visual evocations. They are central to understanding Bayly's big-picture patterns because of how their nature, relying heavily on the viewer's exercise of the gaze and the viewer's ability to bring other understandings to viewing, contribute to processing and constructing meaning.
With these three scholars’ fundamental extensions of the significance of consumption, we may see how fundamentally this phenomenon fits within Bayly's broader analysis rather than the narrowed “acquisition” he discusses. Taken altogether, these works, once again, could have assisted Bayly's efforts to move beyond Europe in his big-picture framings and the specific details he deploys to support those. Once more, it seems highly likely that inclusion of this expanded understanding of the profound change introduced by the nature of twentieth-century consumption not only ties Bayly's “world” more closely together, but also contributes significantly to the new importance accorded to several patterns Bayly has called out. These include distinctive practices in many parts of the world; in the shaping of a sense of the modern; as well as in a situating of local communities within a recognized, larger whole. And it pulls in Bayly's focus on “the self” and its place in a simultaneously integrated yet fragmented world of European and non-Western life, brought together analytically and experientially.
Conclusion
From these explorations, we begin to see the extent of our loss through the sadly unavoidable posthumous publication of Bayly's final book. While the expansions explored here relate directly to the final, synthetic chapters, they also make clear that such extended discussions in these chapters almost inevitably would have led to refinements in Bayly's vision as expressed throughout the earlier chronological and political chapters. Lacking the next iteration of Bayly's sophisticated and innovative approaches, this is a real loss for which there is no compensation. And we are left with no real answer to the question asked directly in this essay: could one author, even one as creative and visionary as C. A. Bayly, have produced the kind of study we have wished for, dealing on a world-history scale?
One wonders if, to underscore the promise of this work, it might be possible to convene scholars of different world areas to address this challenge posed by Bayly's last contribution to world history. There is a model that might help address the present shortfall: in perhaps similar circumstances, Alfred Gell introduced a new theoretical approach in his posthumously published Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory.Footnote 26 Given that Gell had no time to reconsider or revise this seminal work, an essay collection by his colleagues was produced in 2001 that in part extended and in part challenged his proposed conclusions.Footnote 27 That work essentially expanded an initial think-piece volume into a series of case studies that have served to capture the promise of Gell's initial work, establishing what can even be recognized as a “school” dedicated to the anthropology of art. Could Chris Bayly's explorations, in this final application of his design, merit a parallel recognition, perhaps expanding out beyond this forum discussion?
