Reply

I am grateful to both commentators for taking the time to critique The Birth of the Modern World, whatever their judgments on it. I must also thank them for helping me to clarify what I believe are significant differences about the nature and purpose of historical writing that set apart segments of the historical profession. Judging from these essays (and some of their earlier writings) Gauri Viswanathan and, to a lesser extent, Jan Nederveen Pieterse seem often to be using history to test sociological or philosophical models drawn from outside historiography. In their comments they critique my book on the basis of its perceived failure adequately to engage with theorists who were not historians so much as sociologists, philosophers, and literary critics (such as Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and others). Alternatively, they critique my approach on the basis of very general sociological principles: power, hegemony, charisma, and the like. They say much less about my modeling of historical change, use of historical evidence, or attempts to establish global connections and comparisons, though this is the whole point of the book. I consider the distinctive feature of historical writing to be attention to the origins and nature of—and paradoxes inherent in—change and the interconnected features of human events. History lacking this distinctive feature easily dissolves into a weak, generic social science that does little more than confirm its own assumptions from anachronistic social models and tells us little about humanity in the past. This does not mean that I am "anti-theory." Engaging with theory over the last generation has sometimes enlivened historical writing. But the work of theorists should not be the actual ground of historical investigation. It should merely provide heuristic tools to be employed or quickly discarded, along with other types of tools (econometric and statistical models, for instance), depending on their usefulness. This is neither an empirical nor a conservative position. On the contrary, much of the "theory" fashionable in the 1980s or 1990s now looks decidedly antiquated—the best historical writing of today may be aware of it, but is no longer constrained by it any more than it is constrained by the nineteenth-century liberal or Marxist ideologies that were fashionable at earlier periods.

I will first tackle the more conventional criticisms made by Pieterse. Before answering him, it should be said that an author is not responsible for reviews or publishers' blurbs and that, whatever one thinks of Niall Ferguson's views of "American Empire," he is widely recognized as a significant economic historian. Pieterse chides me for taking a stretch of time, 1780–1914, that makes sense only from a European standpoint. These dates were necessarily arbitrary to some degree. Both, however, encompassed important changes in the non-European as well as the European worlds. A careful reading of the book makes it clear that the patterns of change it proposes resulted from an interaction between major developments in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as much as from purely "European" conjunctures. I was at pains to show that the long Eurasian peace of commerce and statecraft of the later seventeenth century broke down initially in Iran and India and that there were significant conflicts in China. These had common features in that they resulted from the encounter of large world empires with the problems of military finance and challenges from universalizing socio-religious movements (Sikhism, Wahhabi Islam, and millenarian Buddhism in China, among others). Only later did these crises become enmeshed with analogous military-fiscal debacles in Spain, Britain, and France. Similarly, the end of the period (1914) saw rapid transformations within the Ottoman Empire and China and the challenge of Pan- Islamism. The First World War reflected global and not simply European conflicts. The overall analysis was never confined by "European" events. Instead, the book argues that events in Europe were impacted upon by events outside it even at the height of European power.

Why take a global picture at the height of European power, Pieterse asks, if it doesn't shift the essentials of our picture of European dominance? In fact, the whole point of The...