Europe's Indians

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

“’To suggest that history can be unmade’ might be a light undertaking were it really just a suggestion. In Vanita Seth’s exciting work of comparative political theory, the suggestion is not merely made but shown to be a real possibility given her meticulous, complex, and perceptive reading of the production of racial difference over roughly four hundred years of European thought.” - Mindy Peden, Theory and Event, “Vanita Seth’s Europe’s Indians is an intellectual history of the highest order. . . . Europe’s Indians is a sophisticated and intellectually courageous work that significantly contributes to the intellectual history of Europe’s encounter with the rest of the world. . . . [S]cholars of European thought and colonial encounters must give this work serious consideration for its sophisticated and original analysis.” - Charles V. Reed, Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians, “Seth has synthesized an impressive range of materials to generate a wide-ranging, compelling, and important analysis.” - Kevin Bruyneel, Perspectives on Politics, “Seth provides intriguing material for scholars studying European ways of thinking about difference. She puts her finger on a fundamental conundrum within the historiography of European race: how can all within a nation,a continent, or any other group whose members seem to share a physical quality be alike despite myriad ostensible differences, while other peoples with an equal share of myriad differences are perceived as so fundamentally different?” - Joshua Goode, American Historical Review, “Seth’s knowledge of the literatures of postmodernism and postcolonialism is comprehensive and illuminating, and her diverse readings of historical texts, myths, legends and systems of thought and reasoning provides innumerable insights into the shifts in European bodies of knowledge.” - Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World

Vanita Seth is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.