Locating the Global South in Planetary Histories

Is Anthropocene history necessarily Eurocentric? How do the diverse histories of the Global South fit within the grand narrative of rising anthropogenic impacts on the Earth’s systems? This paper provides one answer from the vantage point of India during the crucial years of the late 1960s and 1970s, exploring how contemporaries themselves located the postcolony’s development trajectory within emergent conceptions of planetary history. Indian thinkers had long recognized a qualitative, world-historical transformation in the global energy regime from which colonized India had largely been excluded. By the Indira Gandhi era, with its impassioned debates over alternative energy futures, the very “lateness” of postcolonial development was explicitly articulated as both pathology and opportunity. At one level, these debates demonstrate the remarkably early resonance of nascent planetary histories—and awareness of what would come to be called Earth System science—at the highest tiers of Indian politics. Yet late development also visibly diverged from American and European precursors. It brought to the fore an alternative cast of historical agents: the postcolonial state, the precociously democratized society, environmental critics, and the recalcitrant climate itself. It was through a planetary-scale critique of Western industrialism that the very idea of the Global South began to take shape. Rather than calling for the abandonment of the Anthropocene as a Eurocentric historical framework, I argue that the politics and economics of late development have decisively remade the new epoch.