Sublime

Thus, not only did European state-building depend heavily on resources and technologies – such as silver, textiles, tea, spices and gunpowder – from the rest of the world, but also these discursive practices contributed to state formation and sovereign territoriality in Europe. Territorial states and modern imperial power emerged from the competiti

Over the years, I picked up other scattered pieces of information that began to coalesce into a remarkable history of circulations. For one thing, the New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profu

As such, a principal goal of this chapter is to explore the relationships between circulatory historical ideas and practices and Cultural anchors of transcendence.

It is undeniable that premodern imperial states, civilizational or religious elites, and even populations also rejected and misrecognized circulatory forms with different degrees of vehemence and violence depending on the source and time.

The relationship between circulatory history and transcendent authority is a fundamental historical problem I probe in this work. As we have noted, transcendent movements are also historically prone to become congealed or institutionalized in orthodoxy or high Culture – such as Christianity, Hinduism, state Marxism, modernization theory, etc. – unt

(Chow 1997; Duara 1995:4 and chap. i…

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while contemporary histories have yet to join theirs with the cosmic imperatives of our times.

The point, however, is that these views did not become hegemonic as they did later in Europe and with nationalism in Asia. Rather, we are interested in their coexistence with more reversible and open-ended cosmological conceptions. This coexistence becomes more troubled when linear time itself became cosmologically hegemonic.

Given, as I will argue later in the book, that all nations originate in and remain deeply embedded in global norms and institutions, this is a welcome recognition of the necessity of aligning the global and circulatory conditions of national welfare.