List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface I. Two Genealogies of Historical Teleology 1. Introduction: Teleology and History: Nineteenth-Century Fortunes of an Enlightenment Project Henning Trüper (EHESS-CRH, Paris) with Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago, USA) and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) 2. The Politics of Eschatology: A Short Reading of the Long View Sanjay Subrahmanyam (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) II. Botched Vanishing Acts: On the Difficulties of Making Teleology Disappear 3. The ‘Vocation of Man’ – ‘Die Bestimmung des Menschen’: A Teleological Concept of the German Enlightenment and its Aftermath in the Nineteenth Century Philip Ajouri (Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar, Germany) 4. Earth History and the Order of Society: William Buckland, the French Connection, and the Conundrum of Teleology Marianne Sommer (University of Lucerne, Switzerland) 5. After Darwin: Teleology in German Philosophical Anthropology Angus Nicholls (Queen Mary University London, UK) III. Befriending Teleology: Writings Histories with Ends 6. Save Their Souls: Historical Teleology Goes to Sea in Nineteenth-Century Europe Henning Trüper (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Centre de Recherches Historiques, Paris, France) 7. Reading History in Colonial India: Three Nineteenth-Century Narratives and their Teleologies Siddharth Satpathy (University of Hyderabad, India) 8. A Gift of Providence: Destiny as National History in Colonial India Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago, USA) IV. Teleology in the Revolutionary Polis 9. The ‘Democracy of Blood’: The Colours of Racial Fusion in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America Francisco A. Ortega (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) 10. Between Context and Telos: Reviewing the Structures of International Law Martti Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki, Finland) 11. Marxism and the Idea of Revolution: The Messianic Moment in Marx Etienne Balibar (Université Paris 8, France/Columbia University, USA) V. Translating Futures: Eschatology, History and the Individual 12. Religious Teleologies and Violence in the United States: The Case of John Brown Carola Dietze (University of Giessen, Germany) 13. ‘But Was I Really Primed?’ Gershom Scholem’s Zionist Project Gabriel Piterberg (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) 14. Catching Up to Oneself: Islam and the Representation of Humanity Faisal Devji (Oxford University, UK) VI. Historical Futures without Direction? 15. Autonomy in History: Teleology in Nineteenth-Century European Social and Political Thought Peter Wagner (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain) 16. The Faces of Modernity: Crisis, Kairos, Chronos – Koselleck versus Hegel Bo Stråth (University of Helsinki, Finland) Index

For almost two centuries, teleological conceptions of history defined a common condition for humanity with a limited selection of futures. The rich and wide-ranging essays comprising Historical Teleologies in the Modern World excavate teleology's multiple origins, contested pasts, and uncertain future. The book goes well beyond previous studies in its geographical breadth, methodological pluralism, and intellectual rigour and makes a striking contribution to world history, intellectual history, and the history of historical thinking.

It is a global world. Nevertheless, Europe has left its mark – both positive and negative – on many aspects of its politics, its economy and its intellectual life. The series seeks to question some of the ways in which that legacy is commonly assessed by challenging the view of a single, independent, and coherent Europe acting on an equally homogenous outside world. What was ‘inside’ and what was ‘outside’ Europe was continually negotiated both in theory and in practice, and the “European heritage” was embedded in a continual stream of influences and contestations criss-crossing the continents. At the intersection of these multiple cross-currents this series explores what “Europe” may have meant for both insiders and outsiders at different moments of early modern and modern history. The series is focused on Europe’s legacy in the modern world. For this purpose, it seeks to situate European history in a global context as well as in the internal dynamics of ideas, policies and powers that have proposed rival accounts of what “Europe” means or could mean. It seeks to present “Europe” as both global and local, deeply invested in imperial ventures and simultaneously imagining an identity for itself. The time-frame of the series is vast, covering moments from the renaissance to the 19th century and recognising that historical periodisation can itself implicate a story of Europe that may be contested. The purpose, however, is to evaluate these moments in terms of what they have meant for today’s world. The series emphasizes the entanglements between the political, the legal, the religious and the economic and employs techniques and methodologies from intellectual history, the history of events, and structural history. The result is a collection of works that shed new light on the role that Europe’s history has played in the development of the modern world.