From the Foreword (M. Griffo and T. Tagliaferri)
This volume collects the proceedings of an international conference on the historical work of Christopher Bayly, held in Naples on 10 March 2016 by the joint initiative of the Departments of Political Sciences and Humanities of the Federico II University (“From the History of the Empire to World History: The Historiographical Itinerary of C.A. Bayly”).
At less than one year from his untimely death, the convenors intended to promote a first survey of the rich and
complex scientific legacy of the English historian, calling on a group of specialists in the several disciplinary areas in which Bayly distinguished himself to collaborate on this challenging and necessarily multifarious task. The conference did not pretend to cover the whole of Bayly’s many-sided work, but, more realistically, it aimed to offer a general outline of his intellectual achievement by focusing on his foremost contributions to the different scholarly fields in which he pioneered innovative approaches throughout his academic career.
The resulting map is far from exhaustive, but the papers published in this volume provide an almost complete account (the most relevant exceptions being Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars, the diptych on the collapse of the English domination in Asia written by Bayly with Tim Harper, and the posthumous Remaking the Modern World, 1900-2015, that appeared in 2018) of the extraordinary sequence of great books by which he made repeated breakthroughs, over a period of five decades, on some of the most advanced research fronts of international historiography: the local roots of the Indian nationalist movement, the transition from pre-colonial to colonial India and the role of indigenous society in the establishment of European domination in the subcontinent, the nature and limits of colonial power, the rise of the Second British Empire, the history of globalization and the nineteenth-century turn towards planetary modernity, the transregional development of nationalism and liberalism.
The volume is available in open-access here