This chapter reexamines the theoretical contributions of an early anticolonial and ecological sociologist, Radhakamal Mukerjee, as a way of (1) provincializing early twentieth century Anglo-American social thought and (2) integrating anticolonial and ecological theorizing in the social sciences. It shows that Mukerjee engaged in a uniquely promiscuous form of scholarship that drew eclectically, yet rigorously, on both Anglo-American mainstream and Indian sources of knowledge to address the ecological challenges of his time, largely rooted in his observations of the social and ecological devastation of British colonialism in India. Further, Mukerjee was an active, if underrecognized, critic of metropolitan thought and epistemologies, especially in economics and sociology. If we take planetary environmental crisis to be one of the core challenges of the twenty-first century, a reconsideration of Mukerjee’s claims, often involving thinking in totalities of interconnectedness between humanity and nature, may help us rethink our own theoretical dilemmas.

This short conclusion pulls together the implications of tracing this cohort’s work and thought, through the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, for our understanding of the social and intellectual processes that accompanied legal-constitutional decolonisation. It focuses on the broader and less state-centric picture that emerges, on the importance of a regional framework to arrive at this ‘distributed’ history, and on the merits of microhistorical methods for revising heroic narratives of both national liberation and global solidarity projects. A new intellectual history of anticolonialism could thus make more room for social histories and collective labour.