The Climate of History in a Planetary Age*

For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals. ‘one of the first thinkers to reckon with the concept of the Anthropocene and its relation to humanism and its critics, Chakrabarty forges new territory in his account of the planetary. If globalism was an era of human and market interconnection, the planetary marks the intrusion of geological forces, transforming both the concept of “the human” and its accompanying sense of agency. This is a tour de force of critical thinking that will prove to be a game changer for the humanities.’ —Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State Universit