The Long Nineteenth Century Is Too Short

In this forum, we invited Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Gauri Viswanathan to explore issues raised in:

The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, by C. A. Bayly; pp. xxiii + 540. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004, £18.99 paper; $34.95 paper.

C. A. Bayly was then asked to respond.

Christopher Bayly's book, broadly canvassed and richly textured, offers ample fine detail of less-known episodes and reasonably new angles on familiar episodes. It also presents us with some immediate problems. It is a long read that revisits the most studied period in all of evolution: the nineteenth century, the great period of European accomplishment and Eurocentric narcissism. It is reasonable to ask what else we need to know about this time. It is inauspicious that the book comes with an endorsement by Niall Ferguson who calls it "A masterpiece of distance-annihilating synthesis....At a stroke, all other general histories of the nineteenth century have become parochial." Coming from a historian who thinks the British Empire was a good idea and offers advice to Americans on how to run their empire better, one would think that for a new study of the nineteenth century this is a kiss of death. So despite the various endorsements from British sources that accompany it ("brilliant," "remarkable," "masterful") one enters this terrain with some foreboding.

Bayly revisits the nineteenth century equipped with familiar insights from economic history, anthropology, and sociology. Benedict Anderson on print capitalism, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm on nationalism and the state, the dispute between David Landes and Andre Gunder Frank on economic history, Arjun Appadurai on hybridity, Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere, all make appearances. Rather than industrial revolution Bayly posits industrious revolution or industrial evolution. This is what one would expect, the nineteenth century revisited in light of recent social science. Since this is history, not social science, it doesn't come with theoretical problematization but with historical problematization that measures ideas against historical sources and trends. Bayly's approach is multidimensional; he parts company with structural approaches such as world system theory and argues instead for an interactive account of political, economic, and cultural changes. This too is now common fare in social science. Fair enough. This is not the raison d'être for a new volume nor for the massive praise that accompanies it.

What distinguishes Bayly's book is that it offers a global history account of the nineteenth century. The author cautions that "world history is no more than one among many ways of doing history," and yet he also notes "all historians are world historians now, though many have not yet realized it" (468, 469).

This in itself is a paradoxical undertaking: why offer a global history account of precisely that period when Europe was center stage? Well, first, why not? A global history will be superior to a regional or parochial account. Yet, will not a global history merely confirm, in more roundabout ways, the cliché of European centrality and supremacy? Don't we already know the outcome—qualified Western supremacy— before the journey begins? The work comes with the tediously familiar maps of the nineteenth century world with the British ruled parts of the world colored in a different shade.

What is the added value of Bayly's approach? Interesting parts of the study are the many vignettes in which Bayly maps global parallels and connections in geographies wide apart, for instance: "Jews attracted violence just as did the bania moneylenders of India in 1857 and the moneylending gentry in Taiping China" (157). The American Civil War was an episode similar to the unification of Italy and Germany and the Meiji revolution in Japan (163). Of interest too are the occasions when he notes causal flows that do not invariably go from the West outward, for instance: "British industrialization was a response to efficient artisan textile production in other parts...