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...

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...