Local Roots, Imperial Meridians, Global Connections: the History of Colonial India from a Global Perspective in the Works of C. A. Bayly

Abstract

C. A. Bayly is the single most influential scholar in the field of Indian history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His work is accessible to Spanish-speaking readers thanks to El nacimiento del mundo moderno, 1780‒1914: Conexiones y comparaciones globales (2010), the Spanish translation of The Birth of the Modern World, 1780‒1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004). This book, his only contribution that has been translated into Spanish, is the work for which he is best known in Latin America and Spain. The volume, however, represents a single chapter in a long career of contributions to the historiography of colonial India, the British Empire, and global history. The aim of this article is to examine C. A. Bayly’s intellectual production as a whole for a non-specialist Spanish-speaking audience, highlighting the links he established between colonial India, the British Empire, and the rest of the world.