Progress across empire: entanglements between Indian and European reformers before the First World War

This article argues that the field of social reform was a flourishing sphere of encounter between progressive Indian and European intellectuals in the years leading up to the First World War. By building personal networks, sharing intellectual reference points and exchanging information in internationally oriented journals, reformers could develop the sense that they belonged to a globe-spanning vanguard of like-minded intellectuals who, by identifying and addressing social issues in a local context, were allied to a range of analogous initiatives abroad. The expectation of a mutually beneficial bridging of ‘East’ and ‘West’ stimulated the personal entanglements of these intellectuals, yet they would become harder to maintain after the mechanized violence of the First World War cast doubts on the civilizing offensive.