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

What is global history? It has been more than a decade now since global history has made a wider appearance in the form of PhD programs, special journals, and programmatic-methodological forums and discussions about the necessity to broaden the focus of historical inquiry to encompass the histories of cross-regional, transnational, and indeed worldwide developments. Accordingly, the answers as to what global history should be and should do are varied. Yet in practice, one type of work in particular has come to stand in for “global history”: it is the synthesis that is based on existing literature and takes a bird’s eye view in surveying major developments in different parts of the world over long stretches of history. The late Christopher Bayly set the stage for such accounts with The Birth of the Modern World (Malden, Mass., 2004). The multi-author volume A World Connecting: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), edited by Emily S. Rosenberg, followed. Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World, first published in German in 2009, falls into this category as well.

Osterhammel, who is trained primarily in the history of China and European imperialism, has assembled and analyzed a stupendous amount of information drawn from secondary literature in fields that are both far apart and far beyond his own area of specialization. The result is a stunning, erudite, insightful, and sometimes highly original portrait of an epoch.

The first—shortest—part of the book termed “approaches” lays the groundwork by anchoring the global nineteenth century in time, space, and its own self-perception. Osterhammel convincingly shows that any periodization of the nineteenth century will have to vary according to what, in particular, is being periodized, and where. His nineteenth century therefore does not have a uniform beginning and end; nor is it a long or short century that maps onto the artificial unit of 1800– 1899. Next follows the most comprehensive part of the book, devoted to “panoramas.” Here, Osterhammel tackles some of the big themes that dominated the nineteenth century, such as (rising) standards of living, mobility, and empires and nation-states, each divided into further shorter essays that cover different forms of mobility, empires, and so on. The wonderful chapter on cities illustrates what the book overall does best: It offers up juxtapositions and parallel readings of seemingly familiar (or unfamiliar) phenomena that upon comparison come into sharper relief and suddenly appear strikingly unfamiliar (or familiar). Osterhammel reminds us that dockworkers in European port cities mostly stood at the lowest end of the jobs hierarchy even among the already lowly professions, whereas in China they belonged to the political, often anti-imperial vanguard. In many colonial port cities, dockworkers later played a leading role in the struggle to end colonial rule. The last part, “themes,” is made up of shorter chapters on race, science, civilizing missions, among others. One is struck in this section by the relatively limited engagements with economic history. The author is more interested in the social consequences of economic developments and theories about the industrial revolution than, say, the changing nature of global capitalism in the nineteenth century, the integration of markets and prices, the rise of finance, and the emergence of modern economics as a field—even though these developments would come to shape the twentieth century in crucial ways.

This is not a book for those in search of a smooth read. At an impressive (imposing?) 919 pages of small-print text, plus a short introduction in fine print, it is more a book to browse through, stopping to linger at one of the many chapters. Osterhammel owes much to the tradition of German historical sociology and Max Weber in particular. Several chapters therefore contain attempts at defining typologies and characteristics (in the form of bullet points or numbered lists), which tend to distract from the flow of the text...