Dipesh Chakrabarty is the historian whose distinction between the global and the planetary sits under my whole idea of planetarity. What I take from him is that we can't tell the human story apart from the planet's story anymore. His collision of histories is also behind my planetary durée.
How the word moved
I quoted his theses on the climate of history in the third part of PAPE in November 2025, where the global is the world scaled up by human systems and the planetary is something else entirely. In March 2026 I went back to him for mismatched temporalities: global warming makes three histories collide that usually run at very different speeds, the Earth system's among them.
In my words
"As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, we can no longer tell our story as if it were separate from the planet’s."
from Bhumics: Weekly Planet #12. Metabolic Sovereignty Revisited, 10 Nov 2025
Related
- Related Planetarity - His global versus planetary is where my planetarity starts.
- Related Planetary Duree - Three colliding histories is the problem the durée tries to hold.
- Related Anthropocene - His theses on climate and history are how I read the Anthropocene.
- Related Gayatri Spivak - I read the two of them as a pair on the planetary.