The critiques of modernity advanced since at least the 1980s have seldom focused on North Africa/the Maghrib, where Europe and non-Europe impinge so closely on each other. Nor have they often allowed us to recover an historical account of the making of modernity as a global condition, beyond the largely dichotomous or bifurcating categories introduced by modern relations of power and unequal exchange themselves. As an introduction to this collection of articles, this essay sketches what I call a “tectonic” approach to modernity as an historical process, with the aim of recapturing the dynamics by which, between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, differently located people and places came to occupy divergent positions both in socioeconomic and political structures and in narratives of “modern” history.

中文翻译：

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“古国”的现代性

至少从1980年代开始，对现代性的批评就很少集中在北非/马格里布（Maghrib）上，在那儿，欧洲和非欧洲之间的碰撞如此紧密。除了现代权力关系和不平等交换本身所引入的大体上二分性或分歧性的范畴外，他们也常常没有使我们重新获得将现代性作为全球条件的历史描述。作为对这一系列文章的介绍，本文概述了我所说的现代性作为历史过程的“构造”方法，目的是重新捕捉十八世纪后期至十九世纪中叶位于不同地点的动力。人们和地方在社会经济和政治结构以及“现代”历史叙述中都占据着不同的位置。