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Title: vintage Cooper - magisterial, synthetic and critical
Review: 1st of all, the reviewer below who claims that Cooper sees colonialism as an exclusively European phenomenon can't have read much of the book....the Ottoman Empire, e.g., appears 15 times in the book.This is an important work, which I'll be putting on my syllabus for an anthropological theory course (though Cooper's an historian) because of its thoughtful, well-documented and forceful critiques of the concepts of identity, modernity and globalization. Cooper's reluctance to follow trends, his insistence upon the details of historical encounters, his attention to history of colonial studies prior to the rise of postcolonial theory, and his illustration of the questions that are closed off by postcolonialist texts like Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, all make this an essential read for anyone working in the social sciences or humanities.
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