A historian offers a unique look at the pandemic, climate change, and the human versus nonhuman.
 
Climate change represents a deep conundrum for humans. It is difficult for humans to give up the unequal and yet accelerating pursuit of a good life based on an insatiable appetite for energy sourced mainly from fossil fuel. But the same pursuit, scientists insist, damages the geobiological system that supports the existence of interrelated forms of life, including ours, on this planet. The planet, seen thus, is one. The global sway of financial and extractive capital connects humans technologically, but they remain divided along multiple axes of inequality. Their worlds are many and their politics still global rather than planetary. In the narrative presented here, Chakrabarty continues to explore the temporal and intellectual fault lines that mark the collapse of the global and the planetary in human history.
 

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. His many books include The Crises of Civilization, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, and Provincializing Europe.
 

Preface
Introduction: The Planet and the Political
1. The Pandemic and Our Sense of Time
2. Modernity and The Historicity of Things, including Humans
3. Entanglements: The Modern, The Late-modern, and the Non-modern