The essays in this volume contest the temporal and spatial divisions-between past and present, modernity and tradition, and Europe's progress and Asia's stasis-which the conventional narrative of modernity creates.

Part I: Transcultural Asian Modernities Introduction Sanjay Kumar, Satya P Mohanty, Archana Kumar & Raj Kumar 1. European Self-Making and India's Alternative Modernities Arjun Appadurai 2. Circulatory and Competitive Histories Prasenjit Duara 3. Connected Histories: The Asian Roots of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions Arun Balasubramaniam 4. Dominant and Counter-imaginaries: Analysing India's Modernities Martin Fuchs Part II: China & Southeast Asia 5. A Perspective on Confucian Democracy in Cultural China Tu Weiming 6. Chinese Maritime Economy: Historical Globalizing Forces Mayfair Yang 7. Southeast Asia in the 15th Century: Early Modern or What?? Geoffrey Wade Part III: India 8. Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy Satya P Mohanty 9. Vernacular Modernity and the Public Sphere of Bhakti Purushottam Agrawal 10. Before the Great Divergence: The Early Modern South Asian Agrarian Economy in a Global Perspective Rajat Datta 11. Revisiting the Early Modern Merchant: Caste, Power and Politics of Transition Lakshmi Subramanian 12. Modernity as Renewal Mechanism: Alternative(s) to Modernity in India Avadhesh Kumar Singh. Index