This essay argues that recent scholarship in world history has accrued data calling for changed analytical models in postcolonial, Marxist and cultural studies. Documenting transcontinental interactions in ancient and medieval periods, scholars have rewritten longstanding narratives of finance, trade, labour, science and religion, with crucial implications for the arts as they operate within a (post)colonial and world-systems terrain. The data reveal a dialectic of historical materialism encompassing multi-directional interactions over a very longue durée: dynamic and uneven, yet systemic and accretive – and formative for ‘modern’ history. The essay offers one theoretical framework – of ‘inter-imperiality’ – for analysing this data so as to highlight dialectics in the material, the political and the cultural fields, which pre-date and prepare western European states' entry into an Afro-Eurasian world-system. An inter-imperial model on the one hand expands the relevance of postcolonial models, and on the other hand it transforms them – encompassing, as it does, a political–economic field of several empires operating simultaneously in every period since ancient eras, and in relation to capitalist formations. The essay argues finally that such a model clarifies how elite and non-elite actors occupy an ‘inter-imperial positionality’ from which they variously shape the emergence of economic, material and cultural infrastructures.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 139 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.