C.A. Bayly - The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914
C.A. Bayly
The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons
Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishing, 2004,
pp. xxiv + 540, ISBN 0-613-23616-3 (pbk)
Few scholars could be better qualified to write this book than Christopher Bayly. Professor of Imperial History at Cambridge, he has an exceptional grasp of the comparative history of empires and he wears his learning lightly. The present work develops the approach of his earlier overview, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (Longman, 1989), in which he set the British Raj in India not so much in the comparative filter of rival European projections upon the wider world, but rather within the context of the rhythms of rise and contraction among other Asian empires. The result is a giant of a book that will remain a landmark study.
Bayly begins by playing down the notion of ‘prime movers’, pointing out, for instance, that American independence preceded industrialisation and so could not have been its by-product. Smiling politely upon the post-modernists, he defends the continuing utility of ‘grand narrative’. He is even agnostic about the label of ‘modernity’, preferring to search for elements of uniformity, a term which enables him, through a slight play on words, to work outwards from the presentation of the human body towards the systematisation of structures and philosophies. Thus it is clear from the outset that this is no minor intellectual skirmish but a massive assault delivered on a wide intellectual front, a Normandy invasion of a book.
The story begins in the late eighteenth century with the crumbling of old regimes all across Europe and Asia (sub-Saharan Africa is harder to accommodate, the Americas are still subordinate). Thanks to ‘archaic globalisation’, the world of muskets and sailing ships was already beginning to cohere into a single community. In many societies, work patterns were increasingly harnessed to market economies, and these ‘industrious revolutions’ imposed the discipline that would facilitate factory production. Here is the ‘Age of Revolutions’ in an interconnected, global perspective. However, the new world order that emerged after 1815 was fragile, and the next half century was ‘a period of flux and hiatus’. Its chief achievement, the centrality of the state, prompts a discussion of the definitions and dimensions of that strange creature. On balance, Bayly concludes, the notion of the state acquired sufficient legitimacy to dazzle the minds of contemporaries, but its manifestations (especially in China) could not always mobilise sufficient force to impose effective central control. Moreover, this mid-nineteenth century world was still one shaped by archaic globalisation, and only gradually moving towards full internationalisation. Bayly argues for the importance of the state ─ only then does he move to industrialisation and large-scale urbanisation as a prelude to consideration of nationalism. Twenty years ago, a book of this kind would have focused upon ‘imperialism’, but Bayly relegates this intellectual by-road to half a dozen pages, insisting that its manifestations are simply part of a chicken-and-egg, cause-and-effect circular process of nationalisms in conflict.
By the late nineteenth century, Bayly is ranging even more widely, into the realm of ideas such as liberalism and socialism, the rise of science and the emergence of global idioms not merely in art and architecture but even in literature. In such a world of rationality and naked power, how did religion survive? Bayly dismisses the condescending marginalisation that sees religion as a form of primitive protest against change, arguing rather that the great faiths themselves embraced elements of modernity, using printing, mass education and systematisation of doctrine, to become ‘Imperial Religions’, often in partnership with local states and helping to articulate the nationalisms that they fostered: even the Church of England inflated itself into the Anglican communion.
From 1880 onwards, everything speeded up. Elements of the old regime, such as monarchy and racism, died hard ─ one half-suspects that Bayly blames their obstinate survival for the First World War. Unfortunately, the cumulative and accelerating pace of change created an atmosphere of decay and crisis beyond the control of burgeoning internationalism, both economic and intellectual, and so it was that in August 1914 the guns shattered the remaining barriers to a single, integrated and unambiguously modernised world. How had it happened that north-western Europe and its American projection had come to drive the whole planet? Bayly acknowledges that they were more successful than the rest of the world, but he dismisses explanations that assert European ‘exceptionalism’, let alone assume innate European superiority or pronounce verdicts of failure elsewhere.
‘Historians keep themselves in a job by overthrowing received wisdom once a generation or so,’ Bayly remarks. Indeed, ‘they think they are at their best when challenging orthodoxy’. But this is no mere cussed inversion of previous dogma. Rather it is the conflation and extension of much recent scholarship to produce what the author terms ‘a reflection on, rather than a narrative of, world history’. Paradoxically, I have found it an extraordinarily difficult book to read, and my assessment is of necessity admiring rather than profound. Without doubt the block must be traced to shortcomings in the reviewer. Bayly writes well and, unlike more ponderous polymaths, he does not seek to humiliate the reader with the grinding force of his knowledge. Better surely to have this global grand sweep rather a historiography of empire composed of endless monographs on the inshore fisheries of the Marzipan Islands. Whence, then, my unease? Primarily it stems from one of Bayly’s undoubted strengths: he is a master pattern-maker. If patterns are made by joining up the dots, then everything depends on the selection of those dots. The problem is that, in any period, empires will be in the process of reforming centrally while they advance and retreat at the periphery, states will exhibit simultaneous symptoms of decadence and renewal. A broad and visionary intellect will identify contemporaneous similarities and parallels at opposite ends of the planet, but whether these represent trends or coincidence it is hard to know. Indeed, Bayly’s predominant unifying theme for much of the nineteenth century is one of transition, in which resilient survivals resist change in a stewing pot of flux and fluidity. Indeed, notwithstanding the book’s title, even modernity is a muted and almost tacit concept.
This in turn leads to two areas of unease about the terminal date, 1914. First, was the modern world born at or before Sarajevo? If modernity boils down to uniformity, to an interrelated planet, then surely the touchstone must be China. For much of the twentieth century, China was somehow relegated to the international sidelines, a cordoned-off and peeping spectator of external events. Only at the start of the twenty-first century has the Chinese economic boom, dreamed of for two hundred years, finally lured outside investment and impacted upon world raw material prices. It seems almost ungrateful to raise the second problem: Bayly has come closer than most historians to tackling the secret of the universe, and it is hardly fair to demand that he should have thrown in the causes of the First World War as well. But if a scholar can look back and so beguilingly discern the origins of our world today, surely the same hindsight ought to be able to trace the sub-text that led to Tannenberg and the Somme. Somehow, 1914 doubles as unexpected disaster and logical culmination. Perhaps Bayly will emulate Hobsbawm, whose work he admires, and give us a sequel for the twentieth century.
The text is enriched by unusually well integrated and thought-provoking illustrations, plus a dozen maps which are helpful but not totally reliable. One dealing with religion has shunted Quebec City into Manitoba and eccentrically appears to equate Wellington with Lourdes and Mecca, an example perhaps of the overlap between pattern-making and shoe-horning. (If the aim was to avoid a blank space around New Zealand, why not select Anglican Christchurch or Free Kirk Dunedin?) Be in no doubt, you will read, mark and learn a great deal from The Birth of the Modern World. But the full process of inward digestion may require more than one journey through this intriguing text.