The State of the World

Christopher Bayly has performed a seemingly impossible feat in writing a book of astonishing ambition and range, the erudite scope of which most readers might only expect from a multi- author format. To his credit Bayly never succumbs to a textbook approach nor resorts to the compulsions of obligatory coverage—the bane of most writers aiming for such a broad sweep of historical material. This is a book with an argument, a purposeful agenda for the writing of history following the major historiographical interventions of the late twentieth century. Despite the broad historical period considered (1780–1914), the wide geographical regions covered (not only Britain, but the rest of Europe, the United States, and the nations colonized by Europe), and the very breadth of the topic itself (the emergence of modernity), the book is amazingly unified by a single method and purpose: to consider the segments of time within which major change can be identified in terms of social and political processes. This is an important goal for Bayly, because it re-introduces a historiography that he wants to see return to academic practice after the descriptive, symptomatic readings inaugurated by Foucault and followed by a generation of historians who were less interested in documenting social and political change than in tracing the genealogies of pivotal social institutions like the prison, the clinic, and the asylum.

The "linguistic turn" Bayly derides as a legacy of the poststructuralist boom of the 1970s and 1980s has, through its descriptive methodology, diverted attention from what he identifies as pivotal periods of world crisis, occurring primarily between 1780 and 1820. It is during this period that he believes moral discourses acted conjointly with social processes to bring about political outcomes, and not merely as instances of institutionalized power. In one crucial respect, Bayly's deliberate move away from sites of state power is intended to illuminate the efforts of private citizens to create civic spaces parallel to state formations. (At the same time Bayly disagrees sharply with Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere, which he sees as not particularly novel, even though much of his own description resonates with Habermas's). A central part of Bayly's argument is that real changes were occurring in these civic spaces, which included networks of information and entangled lines of communication. Indeed, this argument continues the important line of thinking introduced in Bayly's earlier book, Empire and Information, which pointed the way to understanding how both empire and opposition to it depended on the creation of new channels of communication, codes, and signals.

Bayly notes that critical changes in communication, like the electric telegraph, helped states to deploy their new military and political power—he cites, for instance, the telegraph's role in the defeat of the 1857 rebels in India and the Zulus in Africa. But far more interesting, in my view, is the use of the telegraph in both blurring and accentuating the divide between colonizer and colonized, indeed even shifting the relationship between the two. Where the slowness of communication in preceding years allowed European entrepreneurs to strike deals with native rulers and merchants behind the backs of their superiors back home in Europe,¹ the advent of instant forms of communication appeared to give almost telepathic powers to the British, enabling them to control both their own agents in the empire and potentially rebellious subjects. Moreover, immediate access to information allowed British rulers to penetrate the inscrutable minds of their subjects in an apparent display of their own magical powers. Kipling was a master in exploring the occult dimension of the imperial enterprise, detailing in story after story the convergence of modern technology and psychic powers (see, for instance, his story "Wireless" [1904]). At the same time, it was Kipling's genius to sense that technology catalyzed psychic abilities deemed unknown or impossible, and that the most mundane bureaucratic communications could be the setting for the unearthing of buried histories and memories—histories often repressed by Western rationality and resurfacing in unsettling ways to reveal the blurred cultural space in which colonizers and colonized lived (see, for instance...