An award-winning intellectual reconsiders the role of historians in political debate and the legacy of the British Empire.
Priya Satia is the award-winning author of Spies in Arabia and Empire of Guns. The Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of British History at Stanford University, she has written for the Financial Times, The Nation, Washington Post, and other outlets.
Much of the best scholarship today is distinguished by a vigorous
and sustained challenge to old imperialist verities. Priya Satia's
Time's Monster, which comes out of a long, if little-noticed,
intellectual counter-tradition in Asia and Europe, bracingly
describes how our moral and political imagination became so
constrained and how it could be liberated
*New Statesman, Books of the Year*
Vital. . . a coruscating and important reworking of the
relationship between history, historians and empire
*Observer*
Phenomenal . . . in asking how British men felt able to justify
running an empire rooted in violence and systemic inequality,
Satia's discussion of this ethical conundrum runs into wonderfully
imaginative, even astronomical and spiritual spaces
*BBC History Magazine*
Priya Satia's book dazzles by its brilliance but also points to
other enigmas and mysteries that historians have to confront and
unravel
*The Wire*
Turns the lens on history as a subject, asking how we have told the
story of empire in the past. Satia offers a scholarly and
analytical interpretation of how historians themselves have framed
the ways that empire is understood in British history writing -
from John Stuart Mill to EP Thompson
*BBC History Magazine, Books of the Year*
A meditative, intensive and sweeping critique of the discipline of
history . . . an important book
*History Today*
Fearless . . . A book that puts the historian's craft to brilliant
use in examining the philosophical and conceptual foundations of
the discipline of History
*Amitav Ghosh*
Not only a sweeping account of the British Empire over the past
three centuries, but also an ambitious intellectual history,
touching on everything from the Mahabharata to Marx, and from
Shakespeare to Said. . . This urgent and compelling book encourages
us to listen to different voices, to tell different stories, and
ultimately to rethink what it means to be a historian and to engage
critically and imaginatively with the past
*Kim Wagner, author of Amritsar 1919*
In this searing book, Priya Satia demonstrates, yet again, that she
is one of our most brilliant and original historians. Time's
Monster casts new light on the British Empire by homing in on a
fundamental question --how did 'good' men, acutely concerned with
their consciences, preside over systematic exploitation and
repeated atrocities? Satia shows that only if we grapple with the
complicity of historians in assuaging their moral qualms can we
confront empire's darkest legacies in our troubled world
*Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters*
Deeply thought-provoking and incisively argued, Time's Monster is
sure to become a classic for anyone interested in European empires
and the role of history in shaping human behaviour. In this
extraordinary book, Priya Satia weaves wide-ranging evidence into a
lively narrative, proving incontrovertibly why she is one of the
most important historians of our time.
*Caroline Elkins, author of Imperial Reckoning*
A pathbreaking study of the historical imagination's founding in
colonialism. Moving from historical counternarratives to
anti-historical thinking and poetry, Priya Satia guides us through
important new ways of understanding the imperial past and its
effects on our shared future.
*Faisal Devji, author of The Impossible Indian*
A deeply insightful account of the way historical thinking informs
the exercise of power. If historians are to play a positive role in
the struggle to bend the arc of human history away from tyranny and
toward justice, the lessons of this book should weigh heavily on
our collective conscience. But more than that, this work is
indispensable for anyone who wants to understand how the way we
know the past shapes our future possibilities
*Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt*
A magisterial account of the role of history in the making of the
British Empire. At a moment of chronic hand-wringing over the
decline of the historical profession and the crisis of the
humanities, Time's Monster is an especially welcome addition for
understanding how history can be used and misused.
*Dinyar Patel, author of Naoroji*
History writing once burnished the monument of imperial progress,
and continues to do so for many audiences today. In her brilliant
and coruscating account of the uses of history in the making and
unmaking of the British empire, Priya Satia offers a striking new
way of confronting the problems that continue to plague
contemporary societies. This is a bravura performance
*Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough*
As people around the globe struggle against a world order that owes
its existence to rampant resource exploitation and dehumanizing
beliefs about racial hierarchies, Priya Satia has given us a timely
and powerful reminder about the complicity of history, as a
discipline, in the making of that order.
*Jacob Dlamini, author of The Terrorist Album*
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