THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER PIERRE-SIMON BALLANCHE (1776–1847) likened every period in history to a sphinx whose riddle is resolved, and posed again, at moments of social transformation. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) later famously paraphrased Ballanche, declaring that every epoch is “a sphinx that plunges into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.”1 It is no coincidence that this image was coined by two romantic skeptics at a moment when modernity’s march through Europe, and the world, seemed more assured than ever.2 The image of a sphinx with a riddle is an apt one for modernity, particularly when historians of areas other than Europe come to this period, which, no matter how theoretically sophisticated we try to be, always exudes a hint of exceptionalism or specialness. The mythical sphinx from Thebes used to ask travelers a riddle whose answer, as we eventually learned from Oedipus, was about periodization—about the ages of man. The sphinx devoured all those who got the answer wrong. Thus Ballanche is inspiring and perhaps cautionary. He was deeply concerned with questions pertaining to global historical times (the “ages of man” as opposed to divine times), the coming into being of “periods” and “epochs,” and the differences between them. Moreover, he was concerned with the “transition from a static to a dynamic world view” and with “the role of historical awareness in this transition.”3 This perception of dynamism has implications for historians of modernity as well. Modernity appeared to non-Europeans, and historians of non-Europe, as a sort of sphinx. But unlike the sphinx in the myth, which simply posed a question, modernity seems to have solved its own riddle about the ages of humankind and then imposed the answer on history. Moreover, modernity presented historians of areas outside Europe with a new riddle, what Frederick Cooper identifies as modernity’s “powerful claim to singularity.”4 As is well known, this singularity relates to both the