Dipesh Chakrabarty is awarded the 46th European Essay Prize on the occasion of the French translation of his latest essay Après le changement climatique, penser l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2023).

The jury of the European Essay Prize wishes to pay tribute to this highly valuable essay, which provides a better understanding of our era and our responsibility in this world of climatic change. The jury particularly appreciated the global approach of this work, and the fact that reading it transforms and enables a new perception of time, and therefore of history.

The jury also emphasized the politicization of the earth described by Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Dipesh Chakrabarty was born in 1948 in Calcutta, where he grew up and studied. Now based in Chicago, he is considered one of the leading theorists of postcolonial studies since the publication of his essay Provincializing Europe in 2000, in which he succeeded in bringing the two registers into dialogue: the universal (or what claimed to be universal) and the local.

According to François Hartog, who signs the preface to this essay: “His attention to place and his practice of the distant gaze have enabled him to build a strong, open and ever-changing body of work.”

This essay highlights the change in the historical discipline itself, the change in human’s relationship to time and the world, and ultimately the change in the human condition.