Over the past three odd decades, history has globally undergone a quiet reversal of its centuries-old certitudes. Until the turn of the 21st century, it was a given that the world we inhabit today – characterised by “modernity” most manifest in global capitalism with its constituent features of reason, science, technology, progress, individualism, democracy etc. – originated spatially and temporally in Europe from around the 17th century on. It then spread to the rest of the world with European expansion.Today, it is rare to hear of modernity in the singular with its spatial and temporal provenance; instead ‘modernities’ of various modes have come centre stage. The consensus is that the world we inhabit has evolved cumulatively over centuries with contributions by every society and civilisation in every which way, whether through material culture, ideas, religions, forms of state, trade, travel, migrations and so forth.The rise of capitalism as an exclusive European phenomenon too has been brought under serious scrutiny since the 1990s. The hegemonic view till then that Europe had been moving toward capitalism ever since the 15th century was lent immense support by the massive three-volume Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th to 18th Centuries by a colossus among historians, Fernand Braudel, even if the movement was not in a straight line.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The revision was initiated by Andre Gunder Frank with his provocative book, Re-Orient, which inverted the view of Europe leading the rest of the world to modernity and capitalism and posited that it was the Orient which was the global economy’s lead player until the late 18th century.Several other historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Sanjay Subrahmanyam (with his felicitous coinage “Connected Histories”) and others demonstrated that capitalism evolved through global interactions down the centuries, long before Europe became its primary home. Giorgio Riello now heads an international project on “The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism”.Indeed, this is a brief summary of what is now the current ‘given’.But then what happens to the concept of periodisation in history that was a European construct beyond doubt? It came as a milestone in the evolution of the discipline, formally towards the end of the 17th century, though starting earlier. In some decisive ways it inverted the very mode of the study of history: instead of looking at the present from the vantage of the long past, it began by looking at itself from the vantage of its own modernity equated with rationality, looked back to the past and created the other “periods”, the medieval and the ancient.The “medieval” came in as a special counterpoint to its modernity with the derisive nomenclature of the “Dark Age” of irrationality and superstition equated with religion and religiosity; the equation between the “medieval” and the derisive nomenclature has endured in popular perception, regardless of all the qualifications introduced by professional historians!An absolute justification of colonialismPeriodisation indeed was the premise of the notion of “modernity” as Europe’s gift to the world. Once Europe had created its self-image of the “modern”, it became inevitable for it to eradicate its own legacy of the dark medieval age to move forward with creation and the spread of knowledge, state intervention and, not least, violence.Having done that, and having registered “progress” and amassed enough resources to expand into the rest of the world, it assumed it was its obligation to eradicate the darkness from those parts of humanity that, in its view, were still living in the medieval era: its “civilising mission”. An absolute justification of colonialism here.Underlying periodisation is the assumption of definitive breaks in history, each with singular characteristics, self-contained, distinct from the preceding and the succeeding breaks also known as “stages”. In other words, a denial of history as a cumulative process similar to the way we are now looking at the world we inhabit or the evolution of capitalism. Indeed, another colossus of a historian, Jacques Le Goff, has questioned the very legitimacy of studying history in “tranches”.Let us remember that periodisation is not a “fact” of history but an imagined construct in a given context; its contours have been mutating ever since and qualifications such as late antiquity, early medieval, late medieval, early modern and even post-modern have been introduced. At any rate, because of being an imaginary construct, it is by definition transient.How valid or even valuable would periodisation remain when the context is changing? For instance, when, say, a century from now the period we cherish as modern will most likely no longer be hailed as such, what would be the appropriate periodisation schema for history? Perhaps a new schema would be imagined. Or, perhaps no schema would be in place which might facilitate a less fractured way of looking at the past.Harbans Mukhia taught history at JNU.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.