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This paper challenges the common opposition between periodizations as a heuristic means for historians, on the one hand, and as a political element in narratives of groups and origins on the other. It conceives periodizations as elements within wider social uses of time and, thus, the symbolic production of the political. I demonstrate this by analysing the works of the Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui (*1933) on modernity, historical representation, time and difference. First, I look at how Laroui spells out the relation of particular and general periodizations. Then I compare his approach to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s in his book Provincializing Europe. I interpret their discussion of time and temporalities as a response to a general problem in the theory of history, as well as an expression of a certain way of experiencing a globalised modernity in (post)colonial contexts. I argue that the core of their critique is the challenging of hegemonic representations of time and the breaking up of unified time into multiple temporalities. Finally, I look closer at the various articulations of this Denkfigur (figure of thought), especially regarding the postcolonial context and Walter Benjamin’s notion of empty, homogenous time.

This essay is the first stage in a larger project that investigates an inter-imperial history of knowledge production through the prism of Baḥrī's activities and networks at various imperial sites in the Dutch, British and German empires as well as the French imperial nation-state. In this essay, I begin by asking how we can tell the history of the nationalist, journalist, author and traveller Yūnis Baḥrī (ca. 1901-1979) - once known in Arab-speaking populations from Europe across the Middle East to South East Asia as the "Iraqi traveller" (Arabic al-sāʾiḥ al-ʿirāqī) - by acknowledging his inter-imperial life and activities. Taking the archives of the German Foreign Office as examples, I seek to render these inter-imperial coordinates of his life visible. Previous research on Baḥrī has neglected these inter-imperial connections. Due to this reduction, Baḥrī's case could be described as a dualistic story of "Middle Eastern-German" relations. Thus, he could be a symbol for an ideological proximity of Arab nationalists and National Socialism. In this essay, I want to move away from the civilizational lens underlying such arguments by developing a broader methodological outlook. If Baḥrī's story forms part of the historical relationship between Arab nationalists and National Socialism, it is also an element of wider inter-imperial histories. To bring out these histories requires reading practices of the archives that do not follow civilizational or national logics. I therefore take what the archives of the German Foreign Office tell about Baḥrī as a starting point to tease out how his activities transgress civilizational historio graphical frameworks. In conclusion, I explain how the conceptual shift involved in my argument leads to a both broader and denser account of the politics that governed Baḥrī's life and other actors like him.