The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jürgen Osterhammel (review)

With The Transformation of the World (Die Verwandelung der Welt, first German edition, 2009), German historian of China Jürgen Osterhammel emerges as a true master of global history. In a single massive volume of three parts—approaches, panoramas, and themes—and 1169 pages (including two hundred notes, a bibliography, and a sixty-page index), he boldly incorporates and fuses nineteenth century Europe and the world into a global perspective. His commanding theme, which we might associate with the older literature of modernization theory, is that the nineteenth century marks a great transformation of humanity.

In a short prefatory work, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, 2003), Osterhammel and his co-author Neil P. Peter, stake out and periodize their approach to globalization. It focuses on networks and spheres of interaction, suggesting that Europe had worldwide connections in the thousand years prior to 1750. The period from 1750 to the middle of nineteenth century, which is called the Sattlezeit (in accord with German historical scholarship and C. A. Bayly’s equal tour de force, The Birth of the Modern World, 2004) was characterized by spreading commerce and global trade, intensified colonial rivalries, centralizing states, Atlantic superiority, the American Revolution, and European and world revolutions. By midcentury, Europe, the West, and the world, of course with great variance, entered a period of full-scale imperialism, industrialization, and free trade. The period following 1880 was marked by concentrated and intensifying global capitalism up to the First World War. From the First World War to the Second, the “American Century” is characterized by a succession of global crises and conflicts and the veritable collapse of globalism.

True to the dichotomies of post–World War II and the onset of the Cold War, the world was geographically, economically, politically, socially, and ideologically bisected until the mid-1970s when, according to Osterhammel and his colleague, humanity entered a “Global Age,” reaching a point at century’s end when “the trends toward globalization became so dramatic and dominant that we dare to speak of a turning point, of the beginning of a new epoch, of a ‘global age’ (Martin Albrow) or a ‘second modernity’ (Ulrich Beck, Anthony-Giddens)” (5).

The Transformation of the World has justly won Osterhammel praise as being “the Braudel of the Nineteenth Century.” Surveying the forces that shaped his expanded nineteenth-century European life, Osterhammel assesses the growing integrative powers of state, which with growing and diversifying institutions and agencies mobilize, discipline, and command the whole of society. He offers compelling themes relevant for the transformation of everyday life, such as the expansion of energy and industry; paths of economic development and spreading and improving wages; penetrating networks of communications, trade, money, and finance; and the growth of knowledge afforded by museums, libraries, newspapers, literacy, schooling, and the exporting of the European university abroad. Also, nineteenth-century life saw the propagation of ideologies and of “concepts of religion and the religious.” In the broadest sense he bundles diverse quests for freedom and the end of slavery in Europe, the Americas, Russia, the Near East, and Asia into the story of a century of emancipation.

Osterhammel concludes that the nineteenth century was preoccupied with profound alterations of places (both city and countryside), space, and the measuring and distinguishing of time. In that century the world received its first full map and ever more abundant and precise clocks to regulate societies and work, measure transactions, and advance research. Also, the century records in Europe and the world a rise in the standard of living, a widening shift from a status to a class society, the growth of political participation, and a shift in the arts away from the imitation of tradition to innovation.

Osterhammel specifically identifies five driving forces of the transformative century. First, manifest discrepancies of inequality and responding calls for equality were provoked by the asymmetrical growth that came with increased productivity, enhanced industrial...