Inside Out, Outside In takes familiar historical narratives and provides alternative readings for them. The work expands the parameters of comparative history by focusing on the economic, social, political and historiographical connections among societies, and by observing these intertwined histories from different vantage points. Viewing American history from the outside, it questions assumptions of American exceptionalism and some of the nationalist narratives on which these are based. Gazing outwards from inside the United States, it re-examines the emergence of social history, following its genealogy back through E. P. Thompson's work on the English working class to that of his father on British India. Simultaneously looking outwards and inwards, it considers the imperial assumptions underlying C. L. R. James's anti-colonial text, Beyond a Boundary. Iconoclastic, provocative and quirky, Inside Out, Outside In takes us beyond culture and society into the imperial webs of association found inside and outside the discipline of history.

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