THE BLACKWELL HISTORY OF THE WORLD

General Editor: R. I. Moore

The Birth of the
Elements of World History
R.I. Moore
*The Origins of Human Societies
MODERN WORLD
Peter Bogucki
The Beginnings of Civilization
1780-1914
Robert Wenke
A History of Africa Global Connections and Comparisons
Paul Lovejoy
The Islamic World
David Morgan
A History of the Ancient Mediterranean C. A. Bayly
Ian Morris
A History of the Mediterranean World
David Abulafia
A History of Western Europe
Robin Briggs
*A History of Russia and Central Asia and Mongolia: Volume I
David Christian
A History of Russia and Central Asia and Mongolia: Volume II
David Christian
*A History of India
Burton Stein
A History of South-East Asia
Anthony Reid
A History of China
Morris Rossabi
*A History ofJapan
Conrad Totman
*A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific
Donald Denoon, Philippa Mein-Smith and Marivic Wyndham
*A History of Latin America
Second Edition
Peter Bakewell
The Early Modern World
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
*The Birth of the Modern World
C. A. Bayly
*Denotes title published

fiJ Blackwell
Publishing
 -,

© 2004 by C. A Bayly
CONTENTS
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First published 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Reprinted 2004 (four times) List of Illustrations Xll

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List of Maps and Tables XVlll

Series Editor's Preface XIX

Bayly, C. A (Christopher Alan)
The birth of the modern world, 1780-1914: global connections and Acknowledgments xxii
comparisons I C.A Bayly.
p. em.- (Blackwell history of the world)
Notes and Conventions xxiii
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-631-18799-5 (alk. paper)- ISBN 0-631-23616-3 (alk. paper) Introduction 1
1. Revolutions-History-18th century. 2. History, Modern-19th century. 3. History, Modern-20th
century. 4. Globalization. I. Title. II. Series.
The Organization of the Book 3
Problem One: "Prime Movers" and the Economic Factor 5
D295.B28 2003 Problem Two: Global History and Postmodemism 8
909.8-dc21 Problem Three: The Continuing "Riddle of the Modem" 9
2003001453 Conforming to Standards: Bodily Practice 12
Building Outward from the Body: Communications and
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Complexity 19
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vii
CONTENTS CONTENTS

New Patterns of Afro-Asian Material Culture, Production, 6 Nation, Empire, and Ethnicity, c.1860-1900 199
and Trade 55 Theories of Nationalism 199
The Internal and External Limits of Afro-Asian "Industrious When was Nationalism? 205
Revolutions'' 58 Whose Nation? 206
Trade, Finance, and Innovation: European Competitive Perpetuating Nationalisms: Memories, National Associations,
Advantages 59 and Print 208
The Activist, Patriotic State Evolves 64 From Community to Nation: The Eurasian Empires 212
Critical Publics 71 Where We Stand with Nationalism 218
The Development of Asian and African Publics 76 Peoples without States: Persecution or Assimilation? 219
Conclusion: "Backwardness," Lags, and Conjunctures 80 Imperialism and its History: The Late Nineteenth Century 227
Prospect 82 Dimensions of the "New Imperialism" 228
A World of Nation-States? 234
3 Converging Revolutions, 1780-1820 86
The Persistence of Archaic Globalization 234
Contemporaries Ponder the World Crisis 86
From Globalization to Internationalism 236
A Summary Anatomy of the World Crisis, 1720-1820 88
Internationalism in Practice 239
Sapping the Legitimacy of the State: From France to China 100
Conclusion 242
The Ideological Origins of the Modem Left and the Modem State 106
Nationalities versus States and Empires 112
The Third Revolution: Polite and Commercial Peoples PART III STATE AND SOCIETY IN THE AGE OF
Worldwide 114 IMPERIALISM 245
Prospect 120 7 Myths and Technologies of the Modern State 247
Dimensions of the Modem State 247
PART II THE MODERN WORLD IN GENESIS 121 The State and the Historians 249
Problems of Defining the State 252
4 Between World Revolutions, c.1815-1865 125
The Modem State Takes Root: Geographical Dimensions 254
Assessing the "Wreck of Nations" 125
Claims to Justice and Symbols of Power 261
British Maritime Supremacy, World Trade, and
The State's Resources 265
the Revival of Agriculture 128
The State's Obligations to Society 271
Emigration: A Safety Valve? 132
Tools of the State 274
The Losers in the "New World Order," 1815-1865 134
State, Economy, and Nation 277
Problems of Hybrid Legitimacy: Whose State Was It? 139
A Balance Sheet: What had the State Achieved? 281
The State Gains Strength, but not Enough 143
Wars of Legitimacy in Asia: A Summary Account 148 8 The Theory and Practice of Liberalism, Rationalism,
Economic and Ideological Roots of the Asian Revolutions 151 Socialism, and Science 284
The Years of Hunger and Rebellion in Europe, 1848-1851 155 Contextualizing Intellectual History 284
The American Civil War as a Global Event 161 The Corruption of the Righteous Republic: A Classic Theme 285
Convergence or Difference? 165 Righteous Republics Worldwide 288
Reviewing the Argument 168 The Advent of Liberalism and the Market:
Western Exceptionalism? 290
5 Industrialization and the New City 170
Liberalism and Land Reform: Radical Theory and
Historians, Industrialization, and Cities 170
Conservative Practice 295
The Progress of Industrialization 172
Free Trade or National Political Economy? 300
Poverty and the Absence of Industry 177
Representing the Peoples 302
Cities as Centers of Production, Consumption, and Politics 183
Secularism and Positivism: Transnational Affinities 307
The Urban Impact of the Global Crisis, 1780-1820 186
The Reception of Socialism and its Local Resonances 308
Race and Class in the New Cities 188
Science in Global Context 312
Working-Class Politics 191
Professionalization at World Level 320
Worldwide Urban Cultures and their Critics 194
Conclusion 322
Conclusion 198

viii ix
CONTENTS CONTENTS

9 Empires of Religion 325 The White Deluge, 1840-1890 439

Religion in the Eyes of Contemporaries 325 The Deluge in Practice: New Zealand, South Africa, and the USA 441
The View of Recent Historians 329 Ruling Savage Natures: Recovery and Marginalization 444
The Rise of New-Style Religion 330
13 Conclusion: The Great Acceleration, c.1890-1914 451
Modes of Religious Dominion, their Agents and their
Predicting "Things to Come" 451
Limitations 333
The Agricultural Depression, Internationalism, and
Formalizing Religious Authority, Creating "Imperial Religions" 336
the New Imperialism 455
Formalizing Doctrines and Rites 340
The New Nationalism 462
The Expansion of "Imperial Religions" on their Inner and
The Strange Death of International Liberalism 464
Outer Frontiers 343
Summing Up: Globalization and Crisis, 1780-1914 468
Pilgrimage and Globalization 351
Global Comparisons and Connections, 1780-1914: Conclusion 469
Printing and the Propagation of Religion 357
What Were the Motors of Change? 4 73
Religious Building 359
Power in Global and International Networks 475
Religion and the Nation 361
Contested Uniformity and Universal Complexity Revisited 478
Conclusion: The Spirits of the Age 363
August 1914 486
10 The World of the Arts and the Imagination 366
Arts and Politics 366 Notes 488
Hybridity and Uniformity in Art across the Globe 367
Bibliography 514
Leveling Forces: The Market, the Everyday, and the Museum 371
The Arts of the Emerging Nation, 1760-1850 374 Index 533
Arts and the People, 1850-1914 380
Outside the West: Adaptation and Dependency 381
Architecture: A Mirror of the City 384
Towards World Literature? 385
Conclusion: Arts and Societies 389
Prospect 392

PART IV CHANGE, DECAY, AND CRISIS 393

11 The Reconstitution of Social Hierarchies 395
Change and the Historians 396
Gender and Subordination in the "Liberal Age" 399
Slavery's Indian Summer 402
The Peasant and Rural Laborer as Bond Serf 410
The Peasants that Got Away 415
Why Rural Subordination Survived 417
The Transformation of "Gentries" 418
Challenges to the Gentry 419
Routes to Survival: State Service and Commerce 420
Men of Fewer "Broad Acres" in Europe 424
Surviving Supremacies 426
Continuity or Change? 430
12 The Destruction ofNative Peoples and Ecological
Depredation 432
What is Meant by "Native Peoples"? 432
Europeans and Native Peoples before c.1820 434
Native Peoples in the "Age of Hiatus" 437

X xi
NOTES AND CONVENTIONS

clear that historians working in different regions are often unaware that
specialists in other fields are making similar arguments and, indeed, that the
sets of historical processes they depict were connected. In other cases, histor-
ians are well aware of the analogies and connections with developments in INTRODUCTION
other subject areas - let us say, between state building in nineteenth-century
Japan and Vietnam - but have not felt the need to incorporate a broader
context in their work. Above all, this book tries to start conversations between
historians and historiographies in order to better understand similarities and
differences between social processes.
Large numbers of individual names inevitably appear in the book. To give
them all birth and death dates would have created a kind of "date soup," so I
have only supplied dates sparingly for some major figures.
The work uses the word "society" a good deal. It is not only conservative
politicians but many sophisticated anthropologists who have denied the exist-
ence of "societies," or at least cautioned against resort to the term. The word
is not intended here to refer to essentialized, hard-edged cultural entities, so
much as broad clusters of historically defined traits of human behavior which THIS book is a thematic history of the world from 1780, the beginning of the
can be observed within a given geographical area. The use of the term allows a revolutionary age, to 1914, the onset of the First World War, which ripped apart
broad analysis beneath the level of the global and above the level of the local. It the contemporary system of states and empires. It shows how historical trends
would be theoretically possible, of course, to break down every social entity to and sequences of events, which have been treated separately in regional or
the village level or to individual networks within each village in the world. As national histories, can be brought together. This reveals the interconnectedness
the classical philosophers said, however, there are atoms "all the way down." and interdependence of political and social changes across the world well before
the supposed onset of the contemporary phase of "globalization" after 1945.
On the one hand, the reverberations of critical world events, such as the
European revolutions of 1789 or 1848, spread outwards and merged with
convulsions arising within other world societies. On the other hand, events
outside the emerging European and American "core" of the industrial world
economy, such as the mid-century rebellions in China and India, impacted
back on that core, molding its ideologies and shaping new social and political
conflicts. As world events became more interconnected and interdependent, so
forms of human action adjusted to each other and came to resemble each other
across the world. The book, therefore, traces the rise of global uniformities in the
state, religion~ political ideologies, and economic life as they developed through
the nineteenth century. This growth of uniformity was visible not only in great
institutions such as churches, royal courts, or systems of justice. It was also
apparent in what the book calls "bodily practices": the ways in which people
dressed, spoke, ate, and managed relations within families.
These rapidly developing connections between different human societies
during the nineteenth century created many hybrid polities, mixed ideologies,
and complex forms of global economic activity. Yet, at the same time, these
connections could also heighten the sense of dijference, and even antagonism,
between people in different societies, and especially between their elites.
Increasingly, Japanese, Indians, and Americans, for instance, found strength
in their own inherited sense of national, religious, or cultural identity when
confronted with the severe challenges which arose from the new global econ-
omy, and especially from European imperialism. The paradox that global

1
xxiv
 INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION

forces and local forces "cannibalized" or fed off each other, to use words of the Physical domination was accompanied by different degrees of ideological
social theorist, Arjun Appadurai, is well known to the contemporary human dependence. Social concepts, institutions, and procedures honed in the fierce
sciences. 1 But this ambivalent relationship between the global and the local, conflicts and competition between European nations became controllers and
the general and the specific, had a long history before the present age. So, in exemplars for non-European peoples. Those peoples, however, were not
the nineteenth century, nation-states and contending territorial empires took passive recipients of Western bounty or, alternatively, simply the West's supine
on sharper lineaments and became more antagonistic to each other at the very victims. Their reception and remolding of Western ideas and techniques for
same time as the similarities, connections, and linkages between them prolifer- their own lives set limits to the nature and extent of their domination by
ated. Broad forces of global change strengthened the appearance of difference European power-holders. At the beginning of the period considered by this
between human communities. But those differences were increasingly ex- book, the world was still a multi-centered one. East Asia, South Asia, and
pressed in similar ways. Africa retained dynamism and initiative in different areas of social and eco-
The book argues that all local, national, or regional histories must, in import- nomic life, even if powerful competitive advantages had already accrued to
ant ways, therefore, be global histories. It is no longer really possible to write Europeans and their overseas colonists. By the end of the period, following the
"European" or "American" history in a narrow sense, and it is encouraging rise of Japan and the beginnings of extra-European nationalisms, Europe's
that many historians are already taking this view. In the 1950s and 1960s the "lead" had been significantly challenged. A history of this period, therefore,
French "Annales" school of historical writing, led by Fernand Braude!, pion- has to demonstrate a number of different and apparently contradictory things.
eered a form of global social and economic history for the early modern period. 2 It has to chart the interdependence of world events, while allowing for the
The need to transcend the boundaries of states and ecological zones is even brute fact of Western domination. At the same time it has to show how, over
clearer for the nineteenth century. This particularly applies to the history of the large parts of the world, this European domination was only partial and
imperial states of Europe, both the land-empires, such as Russia, and the temporary.
seaborne empires of Britain and France. Historians such as Linda Colley3
and Catherine Hall 4 for Britain and Geoffrey Hosking 5 and Dominic Lieven 6
for Russia have been in the forefront of efforts to show that the experience of THE ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
empire in the broadest sense was central to the creation and form of these
national states. Meanwhile, R. Bin Wong/ Kenneth Pomeranz, 8 Wang Gung The Birth of the Modern World is a reflection on, rather than a narrative of,
Wu/ and Joanna Waley-Cohen 10 have begun to write Chinese history as global world history. Chapters 3, 4, 6, and the final chapter attempt to construct a
history, taking close account of the Chinese diasporas which predated and history of world events for chronological sections within the long period from
persisted under the surface of Western imperial hegemony. 1780 to 1914. They contrast periods of relative stability with periods of
What were the critical driving forces that account for the world's growing worldwide crisis. Their aim is to select and emphasize certain connections
interconnectedness and growing uniformity in the course of the "long" nine- between broad series of political and economic changes. Chapter 3, for
teenth century? No world history of this period could possibly sidestep the example, reemphasizes the ideological and political links between the revolu-
central importance of the growing economic dominance of western Europe tionary age in Europe and North America in the generation after 1776 and the
and North America. In 1780, the Chinese Empire and the Ottoman Empire contemporary surge forward of European dominance over non-Europeans in
were still powerful, world-class entities, and most of Africa and the Pacific the "first age of global imperialism." Recent reinterpretations of the 1848
region was ruled by indigenous people. In 1914, by contrast, China and the revolutions in Europe have made it possible to view other great events, such as
Ottoman states were on the point of fragmentation, and Africa had been the convulsions in mid-century China and the great rebellion of 1857-9 in
brutally subjugated by European governments, commercial firms, and mine- India, from related vantage points. Chapter 4 considers the American Civil
owners. Between 1780 and 1914, Europeans had expropriated a vast area of War as a global event, not simply as an American crisis. In chapter 6, late-
land from indigenous peoples, especially in northern and southern Africa, in nineteenth-century nationalism, imperialism, and ethnic exclusions are con-
North America, central Asia, Siberia, and Australasia. If the gross domestic sidered within the same field of analysis, rather than separately, as has often
product per head in western Europe and the seaboard of North America was, been the case.
at most, twice that of South Asia and only marginally more than that of coastal These chapters reemphasize the proposition that national histories and
China in 1800, the differential had widened to ten times or more a century "area studies" need to take fuller account of changes occurring in the wider
later. Most parts of the world which were not directly controlled by Europe or world. Ideas and political movements "jumped" across oceans and borders
the United States were now part of what historians have called "informal from country to country. For instance, by 1865 the end of the Civil War
empires," where disparities of power between locals and outsiders existed, allowed American liberals to give support to the radical Mexican government
but had not yet led to direct annexation. of Benito Juarez, which was under assault from French-backed conservatives.

3
2
 INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION

The Mexican radicals had already received enthusiastic support from The writing of world history raises many acute questions of interpretation
Giuseppe Garibaldi and other revolutionaries who had been the heroes of and presentation. We consider three of them here, before opening the discus-
the 1848 rebellions against authority in Europe. 11 Here, common experiences sion by considering the growth of uniformity in one particular area, the realm
gave rise to a united front across the world. But, equally, exposure to global of human bodily practice.
changes could encourage literati, politicians, and ordinary people to stress
difference rather than similarity. By the 1880s, the impact of Christian mis-
sionaries and Western goods, for example, had made Indians, Arabs, and
PROBLEM ONE: ''PRIME MovERs'' AND
Chinese more aware of their distinctive religious practices, forms of physical THE ECONOMIC FACTOR
deportment, and the excellence of their local artisans. In time, this sensibility
of difference itself also created further global links. Indian artists looked to Most professional historians still have at the back of their minds the question
their Japanese contemporaries as inheritors of a pure aesthetic tradition and of "why things changed." Historians and philosophers who lived in the
incorporated their style into their own works. The aim throughout the book is nineteenth century tended to think that history was moved along by big
to combine what might be called "lateral history" of this sort - the history of spiritual and intellectual changes. They believed that God, or the Spirit of
connections - with "vertical history," the history of the development of Reason, or the Urge for Liberation was moving in the world. Some of them
particular institutions and ideologies. believed in a European Christian "civilizing mission." Others thought that
Chapters 1, 2, 5, and the second half of the book, therefore, are more races and civilizations moved up and down according to natural laws of
thematic in approach. These chapters consider the great social concepts competition, survival, and decline. In the twentieth century, materialist ex-
which have been used by historians, as they were by nineteenth-century writers planations of change came to the fore. By 1950, many leading historians had
and publicists, to characterize the dominant changes of the nineteenth century. been influenced by socialist theories and saw the logic of industrial capitalism
Among these concepts, the rise of the modern state, science, industrialization, as the dominant force explaining changes in human affairs after 1750. This
liberalism, science, and "religion" appear to be the most important. The perspective remains central. At one level, it must be true that the critical
purpose of these chapters is to bring together material from a range of regional historical change in the nineteenth century was the shift of the most powerful
and national histories in order to demonstrate how these institutions and states and societies towards urban industrialism. The desire of capitalists to
ideologies became rooted and empowered in different places and at different maximize their income and to subordinate labor was an inexorable force for
periods of time. They attempt to provide a history of connections and processes change, not just in the West, but across Asia and Africa.
without retreating to a simple view of the diffusion outward of modernity from a The most powerfully written and consistent of all the English-language world
13
dominant, "rational" European or American center. Here again, the book histories in print, Eric Hobsbawm's great four-volume work, makes this
insists on the importance of the activity of colonized and semi-colonized non- explicit, especially his The Age of Capital. However, as Perry Anderson remarked
European peoples, and of subordinated groups within European and American when Hobsbawm's autobiography was published in 2002, the great political and
society in shaping the contemporary world order. So, for instance, the reconsti- intellectual developments of the nineteenth century did not necessarily work on
tution of the European Roman Catholic hierarchy after 1870 was part of a a time scale which directly reflected the underlying growth of the power of
much wider process of constructing "world religions" which was taking place in industrial capital. 14 The movements of economies, ideologies, and states were
the Hindu, Confucian, and Buddhist worlds as much as the Christian. This is not always synchronous. They tended to be interactive. The French Revolution,
not just a matter of analogy, but of direct causation. Christian churches often the dominant political event of the period, occurred before significant industri-
began to cooperate and create new organizations at home precisely because alization had occurred even in Britain, and few historians now see the revolution
they needed solidarity in overseas mission activity, where they found themselves as a triumph of the "bourgeoisie." Certainly, many lawyers and "middling
under pressure from a revived Islam or other religious traditions spreading people" took part in the revolution, but they were hangers-on of nobles and
amongst their formally dependent subjects. regional assemblies, rather than incipient capitalists. Even in 1870, the high age
The book ends with a view of the period before the First World War, when of capital, according to Hobsbawm's interpretation, landowners and aristocrats
diplomatic rivalries and international economic changes were facing the remained the power-holders in most societies. The later nineteenth century was
system of states and empires with unexampled pressures. The First World indeed "the age of capital," but even this period cannot be "reduced" to capital.
War, as Hew Strachan emphasized, 12 was decidedly a world war, even if it It was also the age of nobles, landowners, and priests, and, over much of the
started as a civil war within the European core of the world system. That world, an age of peasants.
conflict was not "inevitable," but its explosive force, which was to echo down In view of these problems, some historians towards the end of the twentieth
through the twentieth century, resulted from the flowing together of multiple century cast the state and "governmentality," particularly the domineering,
local crises, many of them originating outside Europe itself. categorizing, Western-style state, as the "prime mover" in their historical

4 5
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

dramas. But this does not really solve the problem either. The career of the of the new connections and the turbulence they unleashed. It was in this
modern state was evidently causally connected with the great economic context that many localized conflicts spun out of control across the world
changes of the era at some level, even if it was not rigidly determined by between 1720 and 1820, and especially after 1780. The aggressive French
them. Besides, to stress the rise of the state or of govemmentality in a wider revolutionary state itself engendered many fierce enemies. The European
sense still leaves the underlying question: why, indeed, did the modem state state, its colonial offshoots, and adjacent non-European states, notably the
develop at all? The puzzle is even less tractable if we remember that the most Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire, and Tokugawa Japan, were forced to
novel political project of the era, the United States of America, had scarcely widen their scale of ambition. The leaders of these states had to appropriate
begun to industrialize before the 1830s, and its structure and constitution and modify the new ideologies. They had to trench into areas of society that
represented a successful revolution against the domineering European state. had formerly been autonomous.
This book is not designed centrally to address such issues of deep causation. The political and ideological changes of the revolutionary era were, there-
It does, however, suggest that any world history needs to posit a more complex fore, "catastrophic," in the sense that they could not be predicted or ac-
interaction between political organization, political ideas, and economic ac- counted for simply on the basis of the contradictions and conflicts of the old
tivity. The economy certainly retains an essential role in the argument. Pat- regime, or even, ultimately, on the development of capitalism alone. The state,
terns of local economic intensification were leading motors of change even now powered by the new ideologies which crisis had generalized, developed a
before full-scale industrialization. Chapter 2 suggests that the economic his- kind of elephantiasis. Elites battled for much of the early nineteenth century
torian Jan de Vries's concept of the "industrious revolution" can be usefully with the problems of order and legitimacy that this caused. Ideological and
expanded to track many forms of economic intensification which had been political conflict had, in fact, achieved a global scale, before economic uniform-
occurring across the world since at least 1650. Over the eighteenth century, ities were established across much of the world. The rise of capital was not,
"industrious revolutions" were continuing to reorder society in a variety of therefore, a force in itself. It spread in a social ecology which had already been
different locations. Capital and labor were being made to work harder from created by wider aspirations to power, ownership, justice, and sanctity.
south China to Massachusetts. Small-scale technological innovations were It was only after about 1840, in fact, that the patchy, but now relentless shift
matched by modifications in the distribution of goods and people's material toward industrialization began to "kick in" at a global level. It did so at the
habits. Peasant families became prosperous farming families. Petty shopkeep- time when another series of crises had shaken the world order: the 1848
ers became urban burghers in Amsterdam, Malacca, and Fez. They wanted revolutions in Europe, massive rebellions in Asia, and the American Civil
better-quality food and clothing, more honor and status. War. Ruling groups worked to stabilize the social order by promoting indus-
Yet to stress the importance of industrious revolutions, as this book does, is trialization, or at least providing a framework for it. Industrialization provided
not necessarily to give priority in historical causation to just another type of new resources for the state and new weapons for its armies. The age of capital
economic motor. For industrious revolutions were not simply brute changes in had indeed arrived by the 1870s, as Hobsbawm surmised. But the men of
the distribution of material forces. They were also revolutions in "discourse," capital could still only acquire status and respectability by sharing influence
to use today's jargon. People's horizons of desire changed, because informa- with kings, aristocrats, landowners, and bureaucrats who staffed the offices of
tion about the ideals and life-styles of ruling groups was already circulating the new, hard-edged nation-states. The age of capital was therefore also a
faster. "Middling people" wanted to emulate the consumption of royal courts, period when hierarchy was perpetuated and religions became more forceful
which were representing themselves in more pleasing and persuasive ways. It and demanding, as chapters 9 and 11 attempt to show.
was this prior set of conceptual shifts which empowered the shopkeepers, In the broadest terms, then, historical development seems to have been
created new demands for labor, and sent merchantmen across the oceans in determined by a complex parallelogram of forces constituted by economic
search ofluxuries. In tum, new, more aggressive states, particularly in western changes, ideological constructions, and mechanisms of the state. Develop-
Europe, took advantage of these changes and began to link the industrious ments in the world economy do not really seem to have been "prior" to the
revolutions together across the world with armed shipping and monopoly ideological and political structure in any straightforward sense. These
companies. The slave system of the Caribbean represented the ultimate, domains penetrated and influenced each other to different degrees and at
forced, industrious revolution. different times. So there were periods when the state and the powerful narra-
These social and economic changes were uneven and unsettling. They tives people created about it were the "driver" of historical change. There
opened up differentials between groups and between different societies. were periods of flux and fluidity, as for instance between 1815 and 1850.
They spawned lust for wealth, envy, and distrust of neighbors. They led to Again, there were indeed periods when significant economic restructuring
overseas wars, unequal taxation, social turmoil, and the questioning of estab- cumulatively determined the direction of govemmentality and its ideologies.
lished authority, royal and religious. The turmoil was worldwide. French And just as it differed over time, so the balance of these elements differed from
philosophers and religious teachers in central Arabia felt equally the impact society to society across the continents.

6 7
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

concern of historians. For this reason, it remains important to consider the

PROBLEM Two: GLOBAL HISTORY AND resources and strategies, and mutual collisions of dominant groups and their
supporters, at a world-historicallevel, as well as to chart the experience of the
POST MODERNISM 16
people without history.
This is not to argue that histories of the experience of individuals and groups
A second problem in writing world history, however, derives from the recent
isolated from the main centers of the production of history are unimportant.
rise to prominence of some historians who do not think in this way at all and
The marginal has always worked to construct the grand narrative as much as the
tend to reject all "grand narratives" of capital, the state, and even ideological
converse has been true. Especially before the mid-nineteenth century, it was
change. After about 1980, some historians were influenced by a trend of
common for people on "the fringes" to become historically central. Nomads
thought t~~t has been called postmodernist 15 or postcolonial. Writers taking
and tribal warriors became imperial generals. Barber-surgeons became scien-
these posltlons are often hostile to broad comparative histories, or so-called
tists. Dancing women became queens. People easily crossed often flexible
meta-narratives, which, they argue, are complicit with the very processes of
boundaries of status and nationality. Historical outcomes remained open.
imperialism and capitalism which they seek to describe. The narratives of the
Certainly, to do no more than insist on the rise of capitalism, the modern
state or of capital, described above, would constitute two of the targets of such
state, or the concept of the nation hides and excludes much of what was really
authors. Instead, historians writing in this style try to recover the "decentered"
interesting about historical change. Yet it is difficult to deny, and few, even
narratives of people without power. These disempowered people are held to
amongst postmodernist historians, do deny, the importance of the weight of
have been subordinated by the European and American male capitalists who
change towards uniformity over the "long" nineteenth century.
wrote the political speeches and government minutes of the time. Conse-
Of course, in 1914, the heterodox, the transgressive, and the fluid were still
quently, their voices have been systematically expunged from the grand narra-
everywhere in view. The triumph of modern Christianity was challenged by
tives of world history constructed by later historians. The postmodernist turn in
the efflorescence of spiritualism and esoteric healing cults even in its European
some history writing has therefore created an area of tension. The academic and
heart. The rise of orthodox Islam was challenged by a pervasive ambiguity
popular demand for world histories seems to be expanding enormously as
which still allowed Hindus, Buddhists, or African tribal healers to mingle at
"globalization" becomes the most fashionable concept of the day. Yet some
shrines with Muslim worshippers. New centers of power proliferated to deny
of the basic assumptions of world history writing have been subjected to
victory to the modern state and nationalism, not least the powerful phalanx of
stringent criticism by postmodernists on the grounds that they homogenize
organized labor. All the same, these unpredictable and unstandardized forms
human experience and "airbrush out" the history of "people without power."
of human life and thought were increasingly marked by the imprint of
There is no reason why the human sciences should all adopt the same
common forms of governmentality. They were influenced by common ideas
methodology. Controversies of this sort can be quite productive. History has
about the nation and the workings of international capital markets. Seers and
always flourished when different types of historical writing are available on the
spiritualists came to use the printing press, while the protagonists of organized
same bookshelf, when questions about "what happened" are challenged by
labor kept bank balances and updated their minutes and memoranda like the
the questions "Who said so?" and "What did it mean?" This was true in the
great corporations. This book therefore rejects the view that any type of
1970s and 1980s, when a still influential Marxist school was challenged by
contradiction exists between the study of the social fragment or the disem-
neo-conservative historians in Europe and North America. One thing is clear,
powered and the study of the broad processes which constructed modernity.
howev~r. Even when writing of the particular experiences of the poor, the
subordmated woman or the "native," the postmodernist and postcolonial
historians make constant reference to the state, religion, and colonialism, all PROBLEM THREE: THE CONTINUING
broad phenomena, but ones which are sometimes taken for granted in such ''R IDDLE OF THEM ODERN''
accounts. The postmodernist works, therefore, usually conceal their own
underlying "meta-narrative," which is political and moralizing in its origins
It is now worth directly addressing the issue of "the modern," a word which is
and implications. For example, many of these accounts appear to assume that
used in the title of this book and in all the contemporary human sciences. In the
a better world might have evolved if such historical engines of dominance as
1950s and 1960s, S. N. Eisenstadt 17 and others used the word to denote a clutch
the unitary state, patriarchy, or Western Enlightenment rationalism had not
of global developments, which combined to create a step-change forward in
been so powerful. All histories, then, even histories of the "fragment" are
human organization and experience which they called "modernity." The
implicitly universal histories. Writing world history can therefore help to
~hanges they charted affected many different domains of human life. These
uncover a variety of hidden meta-narratives. This is particularly the case
mcluded the replacement of big, extended families with small nuclear families,
when causation is at issue. Why things change has always been a predominant
a change which was often associated with urbanization. They encompassed

8 9
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

industrialization, the notion of individual political rights, and secularism, the because poorer and subordinated people around the world thought that they
supposed decline of the religious mentality. In many ways their model built on could improve their status and life-chances by adopting badges of this mythical
the seminal work of Max Weber, the German sociologist, written 50 years earlier. modernity, whether these were fob watches, umbrellas, or new religious texts.
Weber himself always had Karl Marx in mind, even though he emphasized the This statement does not imply that people before the nineteenth century
independent role of ideological change in his theory. Consequently, the chron- had never perceived epochal changes in human history. They had done so, but
ology of Eisenstadt and other liberal writers of this period had a lot in common in general they explained and described these changes in two ways which did
with that of Marxist writers. All of them tended to locate the origins of the not imply the same type of step forward in secular human affairs essential to
modern in the sixteenth century, but saw the nineteenth century as its critical the idea of the modern. These earlier commentators generally understood
phase. All of them tended also to privilege the West as the source of all global changes in human society as "renovations." The scholars of Renaissance
change, the non-West as a mere recipient which would eventually "catch up." Europe, for instance, believed that the perfect learning of classical antiquity
By the 1980s, the postwar "modernization theorists" had come under was being restored even while they were changing the way people understood
attack from a number of mutually hostile quarters. Demographers became history and diffusing their ideas in the novel medium of print. Equally,
wary of the idea of the shift from the extended to the nuclear family. Economic Chinese scholars of the eighteenth century believed that the pious and learned
historians began to doubt that human evolution "needed" to have gone world of earlier reigns was being restored under the aegis of the transcendent
through a phase of industrialization. Sociologists invoked the Islamic revolu- rule of the contemporary Qing dynasty, even though the scale of that dynasty's
tion in Iran in 1979, or the onward march of evangelical Christianity in the rule was much greater than that of earlier monarchies.
USA, to challenge the idea of the triumph of secularism. After about 1980, A second way in which people had thought about major changes in human
scholars began to talk of "multiple modernities," implying that a Western history was the millenarian mode. In this sensibility, people believed that in
modernity might be quite different from, say, a Senegalese or an Indonesian some way the supernatural or the heavenly had "leaked" into human history,
one. In this, of course, they were arguing along similar lines to politicians and bringing a new age of godliness or virtue or prophecy. This again differed from
intellectuals in Germany, Russia, and China who, even in the nineteenth the idea of a secular shift toward modernity which obsessed many thinkers and
century, argued for "modernity in our own way." In the first decade of the statesmen after about 1760. These two earlier styles of thought persisted into
twenty-first century, the issue remains confused. The postmodernist philoso- the nineteenth century, tincturing the idea of the modern. Indeed, one of the
pher Bruno Latour stated, "We were never modern," pointing to the resilience most intriguing aspects of the period is the way in which these sensibilities all
of sensibilities, emotions, and apprehensions of magic, which contradicted the bonded together. So, for instance, scientific, modernist Marxism still had a
idea that the bourgeois individual subject is yet dominant. Meanwhile, other whiff about it of the idea of the restoration of Paradise on earth. Equally,
social theorists, notably Ernest Gellner, 18 Alan Macfarlane, 19 and David resolutely millenarian leaderships with old-style ideologies, such as those of
Landes/ 0 resolutely insisted on the reality of the "riddle of the modern," the mid-century Taiping rebels in China, tried to get hold of gunboats and
the once-and-for-all step forward of mankind. telegraph lines, as symbols of modernity as much as because they were
In the first place, this book accepts the idea that an essential part of being practical tools. The aspiration to modernity was indeed something novel.
modern is thinking you are modern. Modernity is an aspiration to be "up with Yet, for historians, it is surely not quite enough to say that something was
the times." It was a process of emulation and borrowing. It seems difficult to the case only because people in the past thought it was. How far do recoverable
deny that, between about 1780 and 1914, increasing numbers of people de- political, social, and economic trends "out there," beyond the overtly stated
cided that they were modern, or that they were living in a modern world, ideologies, discourses, and texts, bear out the impression that something that
whether they liked it or not. The Scottish and French philosophers of the could be designated the modern was coming into being over this time period?
eighteenth century believed that a good deal of all previous human thought This book takes the view that contemporary changes were so rapid, and inter-
could safely be dumped. By the end of the nineteenth century, icons of technical acted with each other so profoundly, that this period could reasonably be
modernization - the car, the aeroplane, the telephone - were all around to described as "the birth of the modern world." It encompassed the rise of the
dramatize this sensibility. By 1900, many elite Asians and Africans had similarly nation-state, demanding centralization of power or loyalty to an ethnic solidar-
come to believe that this was an age when custom, tradition, patriarchy, old ity, alongside a massive expansion of global commercial and intellectual links.
styles of religion, and community were eroding and should erode further. On The international spread of industrialization and a new style of urban living
the other side, a minority of thinkers was beginning to deplore these develop- compounded these profound developments. The merging of all these trends
ments, though they believed equally strongly in the deluge of the modern. does point to a step-change in human social organization. The scope and scale
At one level, then, the nineteenth century was the age of modernity precisely of change broadened dramatically. Modernity, then, was not only a process, but
because a considerable number of the thinkers, statesmen, and scientists who also a period which began at the end of the eighteenth century and has continued
dominated the ordering of society believed it to be so. It was also a modern age up to the present day in various forms.

10 11
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

Where, then, was this modernity born? Nineteenth-century thinkers tended

to argue that societies evolved into more complex organisms almost like living
creatures. The more complex societies, the Western ones, would therefore
survive, because they were the "fittest." This book accepts the argument that
some Western societies retained a competitive advantage in the medium term
because of the way they did business, made war, and publicly debated policies.
These were not inherent advantages, however. They were contingent, inter-
active, and relatively short-lived. States and societies outside Europe quickly
adapted new forms of political and social action. This book therefore relativizes
the "revolution of modernity" by showing that many different agencies and
ideologies across the world empowered it in different ways and at different
times. Thus old-style Chinese family firms were as important as the gentle-
manly capitalists of Hamburg or New York in bringing about the expansion
of world trade in the China seas and Southeast Asia. Islamic teachers in
West Africa, looking to the days of the Prophet, were the agents who brought
rule by law and the written word to the region. The shift to modernity certainly
occurred somewhat earlier, and initially much more powerfully in western
Europe and its North American colonies. Before 1914, people in most parts
of the world were grappling in very different ways with this common modernity
and were not simply imitators of the West. For a time the West was both an
exemplar and a controller of modernity. By the mid-nineteenth century, there
were many new controllers and exemplars around the world, among which
Japan's partially self-fashioned modernity was the most important.
Over the 140 years covered by this book, then, the societies of the world ILLUSTRATION 1 Dressing uniformly: Japanese woman in Western dress at a Singer
became more uniform. Comparable processes of change had been proceeding sewing machine. Nineteenth-century Japanese print.
for millennia, of course. The spread of the world religions had itself entailed
significant shifts towards uniformity, particularly in bodily practice. After need for people to represent themselves publicly in a similar way. In 1780, the
about 1750, however, the scale of social organization and aspiration became most powerful men in the world were dressed in a large variety of different
vastly wider in the course of perhaps only two generations. More rapid types of garments which ranged from Chinese mandarin robes, through
communications, larger political entities, and more ambitious ideologies of French embroidered frock coats, to ritualized undress in the Pacific and
"civilization," Western and non-Western, powered this change. At the same parts of Africa. By 1914, a growing number of the most important men
time, societies became internally more complex and more stratified. Differ- operating in public arenas wore Western-style clothes wherever they lived.
ences of wealth and power between societies became more glaring. This is the Chinese nationalists and the leaders of the new Japan dressed in the top hat
phenomenon which people in many different societies have understood in and black morning coat which had come into favor with the early-nineteenth-
many different ways as "the modern." These broad statements provide a century evangelical Christian revival in Britain and white North America.
starting point for an analytical history which attempts to bring together polit- This sobriety expressed responsibility and self-discipline, as opposed to the
ical, cultural, and economic change and show how they influenced each other, luxurious complexity of the dress of males of the old aristocracy and contem-
without giving any one of them overriding weight. porary women. It went along with the abandonment of practices like dueling
and riotous feasting. It is important that this change was registered not only in
the adoption of explicitly Western dress, but also in the growth of analogous
CONFORMING TO STANDARDS: BODILY PRACTICE uniformities within "non-Western" or hybrid forms of dress. In China and
Japan, dress reform movements attempted to provide models for the making
This chapter now takes as an example uniformity in one obvious sense: dress and wearing of robes and kimonos. Here again, growing uniformity in dress
and bodily deportment. Of course, people can think and believe totally differ- Went along with the discouragement of all sorts of erotic and transgressive
ent things, even when they dress and deport themselves in similar ways. Yet, at behavior. Indian reformers, for instance, tried to stop people singing bawdy
the very least, the creation of uniformity in this sphere speaks to a powerful songs in public during the Holi festival.

12 13
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

This uniformity came in subtly modulated guises, of course, because people worldwide in the course of a century by drab operational garments. Typical of
still wished to mark their distinctiveness for a variety of reasons. Uniformity is these was the dun-colored clothing which the British Indian army called
not the same as homogeneity. Uniformity means adjusting practice to create "khaki"; this had given British soldiers some cover against sniper bullets
similarities on a larger scale. The paintings of the Maori chiefs of the later dunng the South African War of 1899-1902. At the same time, the so-called
nineteenth century which gaze down from the walls of the National Gallery in traditional dress of elite men was itself becoming more uniform. Reformers in
Auckland, New Zealand, still display their variegated ritual tattoos, but several Egypt, Algeria, and Malaya wore the Ottoman fez. This was an adaptation of
of the chiefs wear a black coat and white bow tie (see illustration 2). Contem- the Western hat. It was still appropriate for Islamic prayer, but made of a single
porary photographs of the great American Indian war chief Geronimo piece to avoid the tedious process of tying the traditional turban in place.
(Goyathlay) show him dressed in a suit and jacket as well as specially posed, The trend towards uniform clothing was less evident among working-class,
rifle in hand, as a warrior. In his later years, he made a living selling such peasant, and subaltern men. The historian Richard Cobb's study of the poor
autographed pictures. 21 dead of Paris at the time of the revolution22 showed that they dressed in bits
Military clothes were also moving toward a uniform, but internally modu- and pieces of different styles and eras, cast-offs and elaborately patched
lated, style. The padded armour and metal helmets of samurai, Ottoman garments. In 1900, most of the poor could still not afford much better. Yet
palace-guard janissaries, or Austrian mounted cuirassiers began to be replaced factory conditions and the influence of social reform and religious movements
had ensured that men in public arenas were beginning to dress more and more
like each other, regardless of differences of region and culture. Leather shoes,
cloth cap, shirt, and trousers had begun to replace the profusion of skirts,
dhotis, pyjamas, kimonos, and smocks which had prevailed in 1780. Uniform
markers of working-class status had spread to African and South American
Indian workers in the mining industries. Conversely, in some parts of the
world, especially the Pacific and Africa, settlers and colonial administrators
had deliberately set out to mark the inferior racial and civil status of non-white
populations by insisting that they retained "indigenous dress." British civil
servants in Nyasaland objected to Africans wearing shoes, for instance. But
such legal impositions themselves disregarded the resourcefulness of older
dress customs and imposed their own type of servile uniformity.
The clothes of elite women had not yet converged to quite the same degree.
Many male reformers proposed modified forms of traditional dress for their
women, rather than Western styles. Modernity, both a dangerous process and
a dangerous aspiration, was thought to be more appropriate for men than for
women. In many societies, women were expected to inhabit a domestic space
which was, if anything, more rigorously demarcated from the world of men
and their affairs than it had been in 1780. The idea of the domestic was in
itself a product of public uniformity. Women's clothes remained ornamental
and impractical. In this, Chinese foot binding resembled the European use of
stays and corsets. Even for women, though, the trend was towards uniformity.
In 1780, modesty required many women throughout the world from Bengal to
Fiji to keep their breasts bare. By 1914, Christian missionaries and indigenous
moral reformers had made sure that bare breasts were associated with in-
decency. This was itself an extraordinary reversal of bodily practice. In the
Muslim world, the Islamic burkah, the full body covering of Muslim women,
was growing in popularity. Often wrongly regarded in today's West as a mark
of medieval obscurantism, the burkah was actually a modern dress that
ILLUSTRATION 2 Formality and individualism: Tomika Te Mutu, chief of the allowed women to come out of the seclusion of their homes and participate
Ngaiterangi tribe, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. Painting by Gottfried Lindauer, to a limited degree in public and commercial affairs. Even in this insistence on
c.l880. tradition, therefore, one glimpses the mark of growing global convergence.

14 15
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

much as the regulation of the local court system, gradually made hoary local
justices appear in court in regular gentlemen's coats. Uniformity of dress
denoted an outward display of the uniformity of bureaucratic procedures
and an inward mark of trustworthiness and respectability.
Not everyone applauded the growth of uniformity. It was the essence of the
process that it was always controversial and contested. Westerners lampooned
"natives" who mimicked them, 24 while cultural nationalists objected to the
servile imitation offoreigners. A Muslim Ottoman conservative objected in the
1880s: "The fallacy that everything seen in Europe can be imitated here has
become a political tradition. For example - by simultaneously introducing
Russian uniforms, Belgian rifles, Turkish headgear, Hungarian saddles, Eng-
lish swords and French drill - we have created an army that is a grotesque
parody of Europe." 25 He might have added that it was ironic that the most
exemplary piece of Ottoman clothing which the world knew, the fez, was
generally manufactured in Austria until a boycott in 1908 revived the manu-
facture of camel-hair hats in Syria. 26
The body is a site on which anthropologists and social historians chart the
influence of the state and methods of social discipline which became global
norms in the course of the nineteenth century. 27 Alongside uniformity of
clothing, another significant bodily discipline was the practice of timekeeping.
Already in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the small pocket
timepiece or fob watch had spread across Europe and her colonies of settle-
ment. Slave plantations, where so many of the methodical practices of labor
control had been brutally invented, were controlled by bells sounded to the
time of the master's watch. By 1750, small farmers and skilled workers in the
Thirteen Colonies and in the wealthier parts of Europe such as England,
northern Germany, and Holland could afford watches. Across the world, the
time that these watches and clocks displayed was also itself converging.
Russian imperial expansion into Siberia and eventually to northern China
required that schemes of local time had to be coordinated. As the nineteenth
century progressed, more exact and synchronized timekeeping was also re-
quired in dependent non-European societies. The spread of the electric tele-
graph made possible the standardization of time systems across the world and
ILLusTRATIoN 3 Embodied standards: American Indian woman in Western clothes.
within populous societies such as China and India, where local systems of time
Photographed by the Royal Engineers on 49th Parallel, c. 1870.
still prevailed as late as the eighteenth century. Here, as in Indian and Chinese
coastal cities, municipal grandees began to build great clock towers to regulate
This trend towards uniformity had been brought about partly by fashion the rhythm of bazaars and offices where once they would have put their money
and advertising. The spread of manufacturing and expansion of western into temples or mosques.
European and American overseas trade aided the diffusion of common styles. By 1900, human languages, another aspect of bodily practice, were also
But the action of the state and its agencies, 23 and a more general aspiration to coming to resemble each other. Western administrators, missionaries, and
modernity, was just as important as these economic imperatives. Uniformity educationalists wanted languages reduced to easy transparent rules, which
registered an intellectual change in the aspirations of the self as much it did the Would, if possible, follow the pattern of western European languages. So did
expansion of industry and empire. In Japan in 1894, for instance, the new indigenous statesmen and educators who desired their own national lan-
Meiji regime, asserting its place amongst modern imperial nations, ordered its guages. The sentence structure of the emerging Indian common languages -
functionaries to come to work in Western dress. Even in a lightly governed Hindi and Urdu, for instance- began to follow that of the English language.
society such as the United States, the spread of the idea of respectability, as Even newly formed hybrid languages which reflected migration, slavery, and

16 17
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION

globalization - Creole, Swahili, and Pidgin - were armed with their own had been made "effeminate" by imperialism and bad domestic habits. He and
books of grammar and rules. As the public man staked his place in politics, his generation later came to reject that idea. All the same, Indians were quickly
religion, and science across the world, he needed a public voice. The political adapting to the use of tomatoes, potatoes, and chilli peppers, all of which had
speech and the sermon took on common forms from Philadelphia and Rome origmated in the Americas and been spread across the world by their Spanish
to Kyoto and Fiji. The models were not only Christian and Western, but also and Portuguese conquerors in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth
Muslim sermons on the life of the Prophet and pro forma block prints telling centuries.
stories of the Buddha. This last example is a further reminder that it was not simply a question of
Another consequence of growing global uniformity can be seen in the the one-way adoption of European foods or bodily practices. Empires and
practice of naming. Personal names became more standardized as printed commercial expansion had created multilateral links between different world
media and movements of religious and cultural change spread across societies, societies which tended towards greater uniformity. So, for instance, eight-
erasing differences in local naming patterns. The state was a powerful influ- eenth-century Caribbean and American slaves were fed on Asian white rice
ence, because administrators wanted increasingly to tag and docket people for and clothed in Indian cotton goods. West African chiefs prized printed cloths
the purposes of taxation and military service. But it was not simply a matter of from the same continent. This connection between Asian commerce and the
coercion; ordinary men and women needed to use the forms of the state to Atlantic slave plantation system had been created by European expansion.
obtain parochial relief, education, or passages as emigrants. Religious belief Indian weavers and African entrepreneurs became active agents in the com-
also played its part. More and more Indians were named after the various merce as time went on.
attributes of the great god Vishnu, especially his avatars or reborn forms, Ram By the end of the nineteenth century, uniformity had expressed itself in one
and Krishna. In Islamic societies in Asia and Africa the personal names of the Pr- further area: sport and leisure. The haphazard and ad hoc nature of many
ophet and his consort, Ayesha, were increasingly adopted as a more standardized earlier games had been reduced to order and rules, now increasingly sanc-
form of Islamic practice was once again propagated by teachers and govern- tioned by world bodies. Even the form of those quintessential British exports
ments. Their efforts were reinforced by the global contacts generated through to the rest of the world - football, rugby, and cricket - seemed to bear the
pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. The twin levelers of slavery and Christian hallmarks of this powerful desire to discipline the body, seen equally on the
evangelization spread European "Christian" names, most themselves once battlefield and in the factory. Even games which moved from Asia to the West,
Jewish, of course, to millions of Africans, American Indians, and dwellers in such as hockey and polo, gave up their original appearance as genial melees
the Pacific in the course of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the and became orderly competitions. Meanwhile, French patterns of disciplined
working of government and the courts demanded that everyone have a stand- and orderly cooking and eating, French patterns of polite diplomacy, and
ard personal and family name for official purposes. This had some anomalous German concepts of the proper ordering of scientific and humanist knowledge
outcomes. In Scandinavian countries it meant that hundreds of thousands of moved across the world in similar trajectories.
people were called "Johanssen" and "Christiansen," for instance, while in
Burma the practice of birthday naming meant that much of the population
was called after the Burmese days of the week and a small number of astro-
BUILDING OUTWARD FROM THE BODY:
logical signs. COMMUNICATIONS AND COMPLEXITY
People's food in different parts of the world became similar. Wheat bread
and beef had become the standard meal of the British and north Germans in This growing uniformity at the level of bodily practice, and in external markers
the early modern period. This fare was exported to Britain's American col- of personal identity, was mirrored at the level of ideas. Systems of ideas and
onies, and later to Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. Indigenous the discourses generated by economic and political power began to converge
peoples who came into contact with missionaries or began to live in European across the world. The nineteenth century -variously called the "age of indus-
towns took up the food of northwestern Europe partly because this was what try and empire" - was also the age of global communication. There was a
was available in the market, partly because they were forced to conform to the massive expansion of book printing worldwide. Societies that were not highly
standards of their new masters. In the later nineteenth century, as reforming literate by standard measures became sensitive to printed forms of communi-
governments came to power or Westernized elites became influential in Asia cation. It was not always Europe itself which was in the forefront. In 1800,
and Africa, new pressures to food conformity emerged. The Japanese began to more printed titles were produced in Calcutta than in St Petersburg and
eat beef, whereas previously their Buddhist faith had forbidden it - hence the Vienna. In 1828, it was estimated that 3,168 newspaper titles were published
appearance of beef sukiyaki. This, it was thought, would enhance their racial around the world, nearly half of them in English-speaking countries. But as
fibre and help them to confront Western imperialism. Mahatma Gandhi also early as 1831, Le Moniteur Ottoman stood side by side with The Times of
briefly considered the idea of a meat diet to build up Indians whom he thought London. By 1900, the total of newspaper titles had reached 31,026, the

18 19
 INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION

print runs of many being in the hundreds of thousands. The 1900 total the Islamic Middle East, where soldiers still held much influence, had created
included 600 in India, 195 in Africa, and 150 in Japan. 28 The almost geomet- cliques of civil administrators who stood somewhere between the military and
rical progression in the expansion of standardized information across the the men of religion, the two poles of authority in the older society. A distinct legal
world can be appreciated if we remember that people begged, borrowed, profession had emerged in most colonial territories, in the Chinese treaty ports,
and stole copies of the newspapers. In some societies men read out pages to and in Japan, where, a century earlier, legal argument had been conducted by
illiterate people. In others, scribes reduced them to manuscript form in religious functionaries or varieties of articulate middlemen employed individu-
numerous copies. ally by families. Medical systems had been written down and formalized. Even
The electric telegraph became an international system following the traditional forms of Asian, North African, and Middle Eastern medical practice
opening of the Europe-Asia cable in 1863 and the two Atlantic cables in had their own academies and certified practitioners. The world was increasingly
1866. The railway, the steamship, and, later, the telephone revolutionized governed by sets of discrete, though interrelated expertise.
the speed of communication. It would be wrong to deny the sophistication of In the domain of economic life, specialist bodies of managers, accountants,
pre-print and pre-telegraph communication in Asia and Africa. Yet the new and insurers had come into existence in all the major urban centers. Manage-
density of messages did make possible an unparalleled diffusion of common ment had widely been separated from ownership and marketing. Special
ideas. Modem nationalism - a product of the French Revolution and subse- classes of financial speculators, limited to London, Paris, and Amsterdam in
quent wars- was itself "globalized" in the generation after 1850. Irish, Indian, 1780, hr.d come into being in cities such as Shanghai, Tehran, and Nagasaki.
Egyptian, and Chinese nationalists corresponded along the telegraph lines and For ordinary people, work itself had become more specialized. In particular,
met together in Paris, Tokyo, London, San Francisco, and Shanghai. Scien- the millennia-old link between seasonal agricultural work and urban labor had
tific and medical ideas spread round the world with equivalent speed. been broken across much of the industrializing world for those living and
The argument should not, of course, be pushed too far. Close inspection working in major cities. In fact, a kind of international class structure was
reveals that formal similarity and mutual translatability still often masked emerging. This greater specialization gave rise, paradoxically, to an impression
significant difference in intrinsic style. The rising trend towards uniformity of uniformity. The ruling groups, professions, and even working classes of
was contested, partial, and uncertain in its outcome, therefore, rather than an different societies looked more and more similar, were subject to similar types
all-powerful force for homogeneity. Even in 1880, Americans meant rather of pressure, and began to harbor similar aspirations. Convergence, uniformity,
different things by "liberty" than did Europeans, though parties dedicated to and similarity did not mean, again, that all these people were likely to think or
the concept and articulating apparently similar philosophies held sway on both act in the same way. At the very least, though, they could perceive and
sides ofthe Atlantic. In Islam and Hinduism, religious uniformity meant more articulate common interests which breached the boundaries of the nation-
often a common religious rite, rather than the doctrinal uniformity that Chris- state, even if they were profoundly influenced by it.
tian churches sometimes sought. All the same, I shall suggest that Islam and In order to chart these broad trends, the book takes as a bench mark
Hinduism seemed more like Christianity in 1914 than they had been in 1780, if the world of the mid-eighteenth century. It is not intended to suggest that
only because these "faiths" were now more easily distinguishable from each this world was static or parochial. On the contrary, powerful forces for change
other. And in the meantime, representatives of the world's "religions" had met and globalization had been working on human societies for centuries. This
and conversed at the famous World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in was only a world of old regimes or archaic social organization because people
1893. What they said to each other was probably less important than the fact later came to differentiate it from their own times so sharply. It is from this
that traditions which had once been bundles of rights, shamanistic practices, time, however, that the forces for change outlined above began to pick up
rituals, and antique verities could now be formally ranked as "religions," with speed dramatically, as contemporaries noticed as clearly as later historians.
their own spheres of interest and supposedly uniform characteristics. Chapter 1 considers in broad terms the organization of political and economic
The second major theme which will run through the book is the growth of life in the mid-eighteenth century. Chapter 2 goes on to show how develop-
internal complexity in the world's societies which developed within this trend ments in material and political life across the world were beginning to unsettle
towards outward uniformity. This complexity of function was quite different these patterns before the onset of the world crisis of 1780-1820.
from the local cultural variety of the old order. By the later nineteenth century,
most large societies had a wide range of specialist professions and occupations,
with their own forms of training and rites of solidarity. Associations of this sort
were now doing much more of society's "work" than solidarities created by
kinship and marriage. Administration had been separated off from military
prowess in a way which had not been the case in most of the world in 1780
outside China and, to a lesser extent, Europe. Even societies such as those of

21
20
 NOTES TO PP. 9-31

17 S. N. Eisenstadt, Modernisation, Protest and Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966).

18 Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (London,
1988).
NOTES 19 Alan Macfarlane, The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality
(Basingstoke, 2000).
20 David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London, 1998); idem, Favourites
of Fortune: Technical Growth and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolu-
tion (Cambridge, 1991).
21 "Spirit capture: the native Americans and the photographic image," International
Herald Tribune, 25-6 Aug. 2001.
22 R. C. Cobb, Death in Paris: The Records of the Basse-Geole de la Seine (Oxford,
1978).
23 The role of the state in this process was studied in the work of Norbert Elias
(tr. Edmund Jephcott), The Civilizing Process: voi. 2: State Formation and Civiliza-
tion (Oxford, 1994).
24 Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: W7zat to Wear in Colonial India (London, 1998).
25 Ismail Hami, cited by Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London,
1961), p. 231.
INTRODUCTION 26 Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the
Ottoman Empire 1908-18 (Berkeley, 1997), p. 63.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization 27 E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj c.1800-1947
(Minneapolis, 2000). (London, 2001).
2 Fernand Braude!, Civilisation materielle, economie, capitalisme xve-xviiie siecle 28 "Newspaper," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th edn (London, 1911), vol. 19, pp.
(Paris, 1979). 19-20.
3 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-183 7 (London, 1992).
4 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination
1830-67 (Cambridge, 2002). CHAPTER I OLD REGIMES AND "ARCHAIC
5 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia, People and Empire, 1552-1917 (London, 1997). GLOBALIZATION"
6 Dominic C. B. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (London, 2000).
7 R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European
John Komlos, Stature, Living Standards and Economic Development: Essays in
Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997).
Anthropometric History (Chicago, 1994).
8 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the
2 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World
Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
Civilisation, 3 vols (Chicago, 1974).
9 Wang Gung Wu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for
3 Joseph Fletcher, "Turko-Mongolian tradition in the Ottoman Empire," in
Autonomy (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
I. Sevcenko and Frank E. Sysyn (eds), Eurcharisterion, voi. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.,
10 Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History
1978), pp. 240-1.
(New York, 1999). .
4 Pamela Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology
11 Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley (eds), The Oxford History of Mexzco
(Berkeley, 1999), compares China with Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 380-93.
(New Haven, 1992).
12 Hew Strachan, The First World War, voi. 1 (Oxford, 2001).
5 W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and
13 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution; The Age of Capital; The Age of Empire;
Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1988).
The Age of Extremes (London, 1988-98).
6 I. M. Kunt, The Sultan's Servanls: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Govern-
14 Perry Anderson, "Confronting defeat," London Review of Books, 24, 20 (17 Oct.
ment 1550-1650 (New York, 1983).
2002).
7 Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford, 1998); but see John F. Richards, The
15 For an initial discussion and references, see Patrick Joyce, "The return of history:
Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1995), and Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of
post-modernism and the politics of academic history in Britain," Past and Present,
Mughallndia (1556-1707) (Bombay, 1963); Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern
158 (Feb. 1998), pp. 207-35.
South Asia: Culture, Political Economy (Delhi, 1998).
16 The most recent body of writers stressing the people and their resistance is the
8 Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York, 1990), pp. 112, 144,
Indian Subaltern Studies Collective, which has been influential among Latin
157.
American historians. For the debates surrounding their work see Vinayak
9 Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions
Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London, 2000).
(Berkeley, 1998).

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