ANU Press

Chapter Title: Putting the nation in its place?: world history and C. A. Bayly’s The Birth
of the Modern World
Chapter Author(s): Tony Ballantyne

Book Title: Connected Worlds

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Different Modes of Transnational
History

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2. Putting the nation in its place?:
world history and C. A. Bayly’s The
Birth of the Modern World
Tony Ballantyne
History writing and the nation state have a symbiotic relationship. From the
eighteenth century, the development of professional historical writing has been
entwined with the elaboration and consolidation of national identity. Professional
historians have typically worked in archives created, funded and policed by the
state and have been employed by institutions that are either financed or regulated
by the state. The stories that historians have most often told are national ones;
the nation state remains a key, probably the key, unit for historical analysis and
narrative. This is true not only in the ‘West’, where history has been a primary
intellectual tool for nation-makers over the last two centuries, but also in most
‘non-Western’ contexts. An intimate relationship between history and the nation
– which Sudipta Kaviraj identifies as a ‘narrative contract’ – has characterised
the development of history as a discipline in Asia, Africa, Latin America and
the Pacific, where history has been central in both anti-colonial nationalism and
in postcolonial debates over the intersections between ethnicity, religion, and
the nation.1 In those parts of Asia that were not colonised, history has also
become a potent servant of the nation as long-established genres of historical
writing were re-crafted under modernity to produce national narratives.2
As teachers, professional historians also frame their classroom narratives and
arguments around the nation. National surveys – ‘Australian History’, ‘Indian
History’ or ‘The History of the United States’ – remain the staple of
undergraduate curricula. Even though history departments might offer their
undergraduates various thematic courses – medical history, environmental
history, or women’s history – that seemingly break away from national histories,
many of these courses are delimited by a focus on a particular national experience
or present narratives in which nation states are the key actors. Moreover, while
post-graduate students pursue finely-grained archival research, often relating

1
Sudipta Kaviraj 1992, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in Shahid Amin and Gyanendra Pandey
(eds), Subaltern Studies VII (Delhi), pp. 1-39.
2
Prasenjit Duara 1995, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press); Brian Moloughney 2001, ‘Nation, Narrative and China’s
New History’, in Roy Starrs (ed.), Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization (Richmond: Japan
Library), pp. 205-22; Stefan Tanaka 1993, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press).

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 to a very particular place and time, they are frequently encouraged to think
about where their material fits within the national ‘story’ and agonise over how
representative their research is of the national ‘pattern’. Upon completion of
their doctorates, these students enter job markets that remain predominantly
organised around national histories, as most history departments continue to
search for experts in particular national fields. When job searches are shaped
more thematically, for example around gender history or the history of science,
the fine print of the job advertisement typically stresses the desirability of a
particular national focus.
Thus, the centrality of the nation to historical practice is reaffirmed at every
significant stage in the training and professionalisation of historians. Not
surprisingly, this constant reiteration encourages historians to see the nation as
the normative, even natural, site for historical analysis and to formulate their
own professional identity in reference to the nation state. This is strikingly clear
when historians get together at workshops or conferences, where they typically
define themselves by their national expertise (‘Hi, I’m Pat and I’m a historian
of Ireland’).
However there are, of course, important forms of historical analysis that use
analytical frameworks other than the nation state, many of which are explored
or demonstrated in this volume. This essay examines one long-established form
of writing history that has produced a range of narratives that transcend the
nation state: world history. In exploring world history’s distinctive approach
to the past – one that examines the encounters, exchanges, networks and
institutions that bring communities into contact, co-dependence and conflict –
this essay is divided into three parts. The first part offers a short and general
overview of the development of world history as a research field. It begins by
briefly discussing a popular variety of world history in the early twentieth
century, when efforts to create historical narratives that went beyond the nation
were enthusiastically received by a large international readership, but were
rejected by professional historians. I then trace the emergence of new and
professionalised versions of world history after World War II and map a range
of important frameworks for historical analysis that were developed from the
1950s. This section of the essay then concludes by discussing the ways in which
more recent world history research has offered new challenges to Eurocentric
histories and fashioned a vision of a multi-centred world. In the second part of
the essay, my focus shifts to examine one important and lauded work of world
history: C. A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2004). Here I examine how
Bayly’s vision of modern history works within the framework of recent world
history research and highlight his volume’s key innovations that push world
history as a field in new and important directions. The final and briefest part of
the essay offers a critique of two significant aspects of Bayly’s volume (his use
of the body as a site of analysis and the ‘geography of modernity’ that shapes
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key points of his argument), before assessing the relationship between world
history and postcolonial histories of the kind examined in Angela Woollacott’s
chapter.
***
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a point when national history traditions
were well established within Europe and were calcifying in many European
colonies as well as in much of Asia, a diverse group of historians were searching
for new models of historical writing that reflected the strong sense of global
interconnectedness that was a key product of the nineteenth century. H. G.
Wells, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee produced world histories within
an intellectual and political context charged by the global reach of European
imperial power and a widespread conviction that the ‘West’ was both modernity’s
natural location and the key vector for its transmission. Within this milieu and
given the locations where these authors wrote from, it is hardly surprising that
these texts played a central role in consolidating Europe and North America at
the heart of understandings of global history. Wells and company articulated
powerful narratives that moulded the complex, fragmentary and heterogeneous
nature of the human past into striking accounts of the creation, consolidation
and extension of the power of the ‘West’ and the crisis ‘Western Civilisation’
faced in the early twentieth century.3 While this narrative appealed to a broad
readership, ‘world history’ had little intellectual authority in universities and
among university-based historians.4 As a result of world history’s marginal
position in academic culture in the first half of the twentieth century, Michael
Geyer and Charles Bright have noted that world history was typically seen as
an ‘illegitimate, unprofessional and therefore foolish enterprise’ associated with
dilettantes and figures at the margins of academic life.5
After World War II, world history slowly and unevenly began to gain in
credibility. In the wake of global war and the conflicts surrounding
decolonisation and the onset of the Cold War, the project of world history took
on new relevance. UNESCO formulated a plan to produce a six-volume set of

3
Oswald Spengler 1922, The Decline of the West (London: Allen and Unwin); Arnold J. Toynbee
1934–1954, A Study of History, 10 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press); H. G. Wells 1920,
Outline of History (London: Cassell). Spengler certainly recognised the significance of non-Western
civilisations, but for him only ‘Western Civilisation’ had fulfilled its potential and the crisis that he
diagnosed in the early twentieth century reflected the instability born out of the decline of ‘Western
Civilisation’.
4
Gilbert Allardyce 1990, ‘Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World
History Course’, Journal of World History, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 25.
5
Michael Geyer and Charles Bright 1995, ‘World History in a Global Age’, American Historical
Review, vol. 100, no. 4, p. 1034.

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 textbooks to serve as standard texts for international education. This collection,
UNESCO hoped, would record the richness of the civilisations that had shaped
the world and rematerialise the common bonds that united humanity.6 Under
the editorship of the Yale historian Ralph E. Turner, the UNESCO project was
dedicated to turning history into an instrument for peace and cross-cultural
understanding. The UNESCO history was not to be simply a history of ‘Western
Civilisation’ masquerading as global history, but rather a truly collaborative
effort drawing upon scholars from all corners of the world and committed to the
equitable treatment of the world’s various cultural traditions. As Gilbert
Allardyce has argued, as an exercise in history writing by committee, the
UNESCO project was riddled with conflict.7 Arriving at a consensus over
interpretations of previous international conflicts was difficult and there was
widespread dispute over the weight to be attached to certain historical events
and actors. This was made abundantly clear when the University of Chicago’s
Louis Gottschalk suggested that his volume on the 1300–1775 period should be
entitled The European Age. This title was rejected by the UNESCO Commission
that oversaw the project and the Commission president, Pablo E. DeBerredo
Carneiro of Brazil, reminded Gottschalk that ‘world history’ was not simply
‘European’ history writ large but rather that all global regions, not just Europe,
were central to understanding any given period of the global past. Gottschalk’s
work, like the other volumes in the series, was the product of extensive
collaboration and consultation with over 350 scholars, religious authorities, and
national representatives reading either part or whole of his text. As Gottschalk
searched for compromises, his analysis was weakened and his work became
increasingly descriptive.8 In turn, the revisions he settled on alienated other
scholars and when his work finally appeared in 1969 it received hostile reviews.9
By the late 1960s, the limitations of the UNESCO project became clear: no
historian could produce a narrative that would please all scholars, let alone all
religious, ethnic and national communities. In struggling to produce a vision of
the past that sought to attach equal weight to all societies and to use history as
a tool for peace, the UNESCO world history in fact revealed the centrality of
conflict in human history and made it clear that historical writing is as likely to
produce enmity as amity.
While many reviewers dismissed the UNESCO volumes as lacking coherence
and attaching too much weight to the ‘Third World’, the vision of world history
developed by W. H. McNeill was warmly received by ‘general readers’ and

6
Leonard Wooley 1963, History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development: Vol. I: The
Beginnings of Civilization (London: George Allen and Unwin), pp. xvii-xxiii.
7
Allardyce 1990, ‘Toward World History’, pp. 23-76.
8
ibid., pp. 28-39.
9
See Franklin L. Ford 1972, review in American Historical Review, vol. 77, no. 5, pp. 1406-7.

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began to gain some academic respectability for world history. McNeill produced
a punchy rendering of the global past that was organised around two key
arguments. Firstly, McNeill suggested that it was encounters with strangers that
provided the main impetus for change in human history. In focusing on
cross-cultural encounters as conduits for the transmission of ideas and technology,
McNeill formulated a vision of history that in many ways was an updated
rendering of older cultural diffusionist arguments. Secondly, he suggested that
the key story in world history was the emergence of Europe and its rise to
dominance in the early modern period. In 1963, McNeill published his
paradigmatic The Rise of the West, a work that had sold over 75 000 copies by
1990, which continues to be popular with the public and is still widely used in
tertiary classrooms. The subtitle of McNeill’s work (A History of the Human
Community) reduced human history to a narrative of the ‘rise of the west’, a
model that he now recognises as ‘an expression of the postwar imperial mood’
and a ‘form of intellectual imperialism’.10 McNeill was working in the wake of
Toynbee (he later produced a biography of the pioneering world historian), but
in comparison to Toynbee’s work, he produced a secular rendering of world
history with a stronger and clearer argument. In many ways, McNeill’s vision
of the ‘rise of the west’ actually marked a retreat from the detailed and often
nuanced analysis of Toynbee. Where Toynbee saw nineteen civilisations acting
as meaningful units in world history, McNeill’s work was built around just four
civilisations: Europe and the Mediterranean, China, India and the Middle East.
Other societies, such as the pre-Columbian Americas, the islands of the Pacific
and most of Africa were of little importance in this framing of global history.
Even in the 1990s, when McNeill recognised that his Rise of the West gave ‘undue
attention to Latin Christendom’ and was blind to the ‘efflorescence of China’,
he continued to assert that ‘sub-Saharan Africa . . . remained peripheral to the
rest of the world, down to and including our own age’.11
McNeill’s narrative quickly provided an influential and remarkably durable
framework for understandings of the global past in undergraduate lecture halls,
graduate seminar rooms, and faculty lounges. From the 1970s, sociologists and
area studies specialists cemented the centrality of the ‘West’ in world history,
for although world system and dependency theories offered staunch critiques
of capitalism they confidently located Europe and North America as the ‘core'
of the modern world.12 But we must guard against seeing world history between

10
McNeill 1990 and 1998, reflects critically upon the ‘rise of the West’ model in his essays ‘The Rise
of the West after Twenty-five Years’, Journal of World History, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-22 and ‘World
History and the Rise and Fall of the West’, Journal of World History, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 215-36.
11
McNeill 1990, ‘The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years’, pp. 5, 7.
12
Wallerstein’s work can be read as Eurocentric critique of capitalism. Mignolo notes that the essential
difference between world systems theory and dependency theory was that ‘Dependency theory was

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 1950 and 1990 as an intrinsically Eurocentric approach because of the prominence
that McNeill enjoyed; other analytical traditions emerged alongside and in
competition with the ‘rise of the west’ model. While a careful reconstruction of
the transnational production of world history as a research field is beyond the
scope of this essay, here we might note three significant clusters of research that
have taken shape since World War II and have helped to establish the foundations
of world history as a serious and respected field of study: histories of ‘Eurasia’,
‘Atlantic History’, and work on the ‘Indian Ocean World’. These larger regional
or oceanic units have been the prominent structures in shaping research within
the field of world history; while much teaching within the field is conducted
on a truly global canvas, research is more typically organised around a particular
set of networks and exchanges within a regional, imperial or oceanic unit of
analysis.
From the 1950s, historians working on a range of issues began to explore the
unity of Eurasian history, moving beyond narrow national, civilisational, and
continental frameworks. This work on Eurasia roamed over a wide range of sites
and periods. Whether the research focused on the development of long-distance
trade, the expanding reach of Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity, the interaction
between nomadic and sedentary peoples, or the rise and fall of empires, historians
of Eurasia highlighted the porousness of the boundaries that supposedly marked
‘India’, ‘China’, ‘Central Asia’ and ‘Europe’ and the interdependence of these
regions prior to the growth of European maritime empires during the early
modern period. Marshall S. Hodgson’s work was particularly significant in
formulating the history of ‘Eurasia’ as a meaningful and important unit of
analysis. Hodgson, a leading Chicago-based historian of Islam, was critical of
the common tendency to see ‘the modern West’ as the ‘only significant end point
of progress’ and saw world history as a powerful instrument to be deployed
against Eurocentrism.13 Hodgson warned against any privileging of Europe and
the tendency of history as a discipline to naturalise European perceptions and
intellectual traditions. He instead insisted that for the period between 1000 BCE
to 1800 CE, ‘Afro-Eurasia’ was a more appropriate and particularly powerful

a political statement for the social transformation of and from Third World countries, while
world-system analysis was a political statement for academic transformation from First World
countries.’ Walter D. Mignolo 2002, ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’,
South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 1, p. 63. Key entry points into world systems and dependency
theory are: Immanuel Wallerstein 1974–1989, The Modern World System, 3 volumes (New York,
NY: Academic Press); Andre Gunder Frank 1971, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America:
Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
13
Marshall G. S. Hodgson 1993, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World
History, Edmund Burke III (ed.) (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press), p. 290. Also see his
1974–1977, The Venture of Islam, 3 volumes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

28  Connected Worlds

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frame of analysis. While it was possible to identify distinctive civilisational
traditions within ‘Afro-Eurasia’ – Europe, the Middle East, India and East Asia
– Hodgson suggested that the ‘cleavages’ between these had been overestimated
and that it made more sense to conceive of them as ‘a single great complex of
historical developments’ underpinned by complex inter-regional connections
and the gradual growth of a common store of human knowledge.14 These
connections and unities have been subsequently explored by many historians,
including those based in the former Soviet Union and China. While significant
bodies of scholarship have focused on the silk roads and the role of religion in
the integration of Eurasia, it is widely accepted that the cohesiveness of Eurasian
history reached its apogee under the Mongol Empire. According to this
scholarship, the Mongol Empire was characterised by a remarkable
cosmopolitanism and multi-ethnic make-up; in the imperial capital, Chinese and
Scandinavian traders rubbed shoulders with Uighur scribes, Parisian goldsmiths
and Afghani administrators.15 As a massive land-based Empire that reached
from eastern Europe to China, the Mongol state enabled the economic,
demographic and even biological integration of Eurasia and established political
and cultural patterns that profoundly shaped the subsequent development of
East, South and Central Asia. The substantial body of work that has highlighted
the pivotal role of the Mongols in shaping the history of Eurasia underpinned
Janet Abu-Lughod’s influential work on the ‘world system’ between 1250 and
1350 as well as S. A. M. Adshead’s provocative assessments of European-Chinese
relationships and the place of Central Asia in world history.16
Where this work on Eurasia has focused on the movement of missionaries and
pilgrims, caravan routes, and the elaboration of imperial structures that integrated
the disparate societies of Europe and Asia before 1500, ‘Atlantic History’ is
structured around the ocean. Its key structures are the shipping routes, markets,
and communication networks that connected Africa, Europe, the Americas and
the Caribbean into a highly interactive system from the late fifteenth century
through to the early nineteenth. ‘Atlantic History’ is now perhaps the best
established variation of ‘world history’ and enjoys particular standing in the
United States, but as a field it slowly took shape out of research on both sides
of the Atlantic. A key spur was the work of the Annales school, especially
Braudel’s research on the Mediterranean, together with Pierre Chaunu’s

14
Hodgson 1993, Rethinking World History, p. 10.
15
Thomas T. Allsen 1997, ‘Ever Closer Encounters: The Appropriation of Culture and the
Apportionment of Peoples in the Mongol Empire’, Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 1, no. 1,
pp. 2-23.
16
S. A. M. Adshead 1993, Central Asia in World History (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press); Adshead
1988, China in World History (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press); and Adshead 1997, Material
Culture in Europe and China, 1400–1800 (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press).

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 pioneering work on both the place of Seville and Latin America in the Atlantic.
This French research produced models that demonstrated the richness of work
organised around large regional units, even oceans, and foregrounded the
relationship between history and geography.17 In North America, Bernard
Bailyn, perhaps the key American figure in the emergence of ‘Atlantic History’,
was precocious in his engagement with the Annales school.18 Bailyn’s research
on migration and political culture within ‘colonial America’ placed the American
colonies within a larger north Atlantic frame. Bailyn’s enlarged vision of the
early history of United States was also moulded by work on early modern British
history. Of particular importance here was the work of historians such as David
Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny which examined British rule in Ireland and
mapped how models of rule and colonisation developed in Ireland were
subsequently transplanted to North America.19 Of course, historians of the
African diaspora and the Caribbean have also played a pivotal role in shaping
this field, which is not surprising as slavery is frequently identified as the key
institution that undergirded the ‘Atlantic world’. But the history of the ‘black
Atlantic’ is not simply a history of slavery: C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins
stands at the head of an important sequence of work on resistance and revolutions
within the Atlantic and has provided a touchstone for many scholars who have
tried to push Atlantic history into a stronger engagement with cultural history
and critical theory.20 While Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, disappeared
from McNeill’s vision of world history, it is a central presence in Atlantic history

17
Pierre Chaunu 1955–1960, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), 12 volumes (Paris: SEVPEN); and
Chaunu 1953, ‘Économie atlantique, économie mondiale’, Cahiers d’historie mondiale, vol. 1, no.
1, pp. 91-104.
18
Bernard Bailyn 1951, ‘Braudel’s Geohistory. A Reconsideration’, Journal of Economic History,
vol. 11, pp. 277-82; and Bailyn 1977, ‘Review Essay’, Journal of Economic History, vol. 37, pp.
1028-34.
19
Nicholas P. Canny 1999, ‘Writing Atlantic History; Or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial
British America’, Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 3, pp. 1093-114; Canny 1978, ‘The
Permissive Frontier: Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia 1550–1650’, in K.
R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and Paul Edward Hedley Hair (eds), The Westward Enterprise:
English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press), pp. 17-44; and Canny 1973, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’,
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 575-98; David Beers Quinn 1958, Ireland
and Sixteenth Century European Expansion (Tralee: The Kerryman); Quinn 1991, Ireland & America:
Their Early Associations, 1500–1640 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).
20
C. L. R. James 1938, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(London: Secker & Warburg); Paul Gilroy 1993, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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and Atlantic historians have revealed the centrality of Africa and Africans in
the making of both the Americas and Europe since the fifteenth century.
Scholarship on the Indian Ocean is long-standing and although some American
and European-based scholars have been prominent in this sub-field, many of its
leading practitioners have been based in South Asia and Australia. The
historiography of the Indian Ocean explores the complex interactions of empires,
merchants, and communities from East Africa to Southeast Asia and China. This
scholarship has stressed the historical importance of the long-established trading
systems that developed across the Indian Ocean long before the intrusion of
Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century. In tracing this ‘traditional’ world
of trade, scholars have reconstructed some of the histories of merchant
communities that thrived in the region’s port cities and the complex flows of
prized commodities along its shipping lanes.21 One of the real challenges posed
by Indian Ocean as a unit of analysis is the sheer diversity of significant agents
in its modern history: from the sixteenth century on, scholars are confronted
by Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, and Danish agents as well as merchants
from East Africa, the Islamic World, Gujarat, the Malabar and Coromandel coasts,
Bengal, Southeast and East Asia. Perhaps the most influential model of this work
is K. N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, which
communicated a strong sense of the interconnections created by travel, commerce,
and intellectual engagement from 700 CE to 1750 CE. After reconstructing the
intricate threads that linked communities around the rim of the Indian Ocean
in the wake of the rapid expansion of the Islamic world, Chaudhuri’s volume
traced the comparatively late entry of Europeans into this cosmopolitan world
and the gradual emergence of European power in the middle of the eighteenth
century. This identification of the mid-eighteenth century as a point of rupture
reflects one abiding concern of the scholarship on the Indian Ocean, the very
slow initial growth of European power before 1700 but the fundamental shifts
in the structure and culture that accompanied the growth of European territorial
empires in the late eighteenth century. From the late 1940s, Holden Furber
produced a crucial sketch of the nature of European enterprise in the region and
his work on imperial competition complemented C. L. R. Boxer’s landmark
studies of both Dutch and Portuguese enterprise in the region.22 More recent
work by Sugata Bose and Mark Ravinder Frost has begun to reshape the field,
stressing the persistence of crucial trans-oceanic connections into the early

21
Colin G. F. Simkin 1968, The Traditional Trade of Asia (London: Oxford University Press).
22
Holden Furber 1948, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the Late
Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Furber 1976, Rival Empires of
Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press); C. R. Boxer
1965, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (New York, NY: Knopf); and Furber 1969, Portuguese
Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson).

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 twentieth century and the important role of various non-European elites in
creating expansive political and cultural networks across the ocean within a
context of colonial modernity and the rise of the nation state.23 Equally
importantly, Tansen Sen and Sanjay Subrahmanyam as well as Joseph Fletcher
have produced arguments that have reconstituted some of the key connection
between the Indian Ocean world and the broader history of Eurasia.24
Even the most cursory reading of any of these bodies of scholarship quickly
reveals the limitations of ‘national’ histories, particularly when they are projected
back into the period before the emergence of nation states. The best work in
world history pays close attention to ‘bundles of relationships’ that shape any
given object of study and is sensitive to the complex interplays between different
layers of the analysis: the local, the regional, the inter-regional, the national, the
continental, and the global. The nation state is not cast aside entirely, at least
for the modern period, but rather it is put firmly in its place, as one, albeit an
often significant, structure that governs human action and cross-cultural
engagements.
Moreover, in interrogating ‘Europe’ and its place in the world, recent work in
the field has also exposed some of the older models of analysis that are organised
around European exceptionalism or the ‘rise of the west’. Since early 1980s,
world historians have explicitly challenged the primacy attached to Europe or
the ‘West’ as the prime historical agent of cross-cultural integration, a project
whose political and intellectual significance must not be overlooked.25 Janet

23
Sugata Bose 2002, ‘Space and Time on the Indian Ocean Rim: Theory and History’, in Leila Fawaz
and C. A. Bayly (eds), Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean,
1890–1920 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press); Mark Frost 2002, ‘“Wider Opportunities”;
Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, 1870–1920’,
Modern Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 937-67; and Frost 2004, ‘Asia’s Maritime Networks and
the Colonial Public Sphere, 1840–1920’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, pp.
63-94.
24
Joseph F. Fletcher l985, ‘Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern
Period, 1500–1800’, Journal of Turkish Studies, vol. 9, pp. 37-58; Sanjay Subrahmanyam 1992,
‘Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation’, Journal of Asian
Studies, vol. 51, no. 2 , pp. 340-63; and Subrahmanyam 1997, ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards
a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 735-62; Tansen
Sen 2003, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400
(Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press).
25
As Micol Seigel has suggested, the ‘radical social context’ of world history is obscured by the
conservatism of the World History Association (established in 1982) and the Journal of World History.
Micol Seigel 2004, ‘World History’s Narrative Problem’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol.
84, no. 3, p. 432.

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Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony, for example, called into question the
belief that Europeans were central in driving cross-cultural exchanges, by
drawing attention to the complex circuits of long-distance trade that integrated
Eurasia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.26 The particular weight
Abu-Lughod attached to the dynamism and significance of central Asia – an
important blow to the notion that world history is the story of the development
and significance of ‘civilisations’ – has been extended by other scholars who
have identified the ‘Mongol explosion’ in this period as marking the emergence
of the first truly ‘world empire’.27 Most importantly, however, it has been work
on China and its connections with inner Asia, Southeast Asia, the rest of East
Asia, and Europe which has radically transformed our understandings of the
basic pattern of world history. China had emerged as the key centre of
‘civilisation’ within Eurasia and its economic hub for most of its history before
1700 CE: the key markers of Europe’s modernity – urbanisation, intensified
production, complex bureaucratic state structures, and print culture – were well
established in China by 1000 CE. At the same time, work on the economic history
of South Asia has both revised the long-dominant image of a corrupt and
weakening Mughal Empire, an understanding inherited from British colonial
discourse, and has emphasised that the Indian Ocean was the centre of a series
of interlocking commercial networks that reached out as far as East Africa and
Indonesia. It was only as a result of the militarisation of trade during the
eighteenth century and the growing colonial aspirations of European East India
Companies after the British East India Company became a territorial power in
1765, that Europeans gradually came to dominate the long-established markets
and commercial hubs around the Indian Ocean.
In effect, this work on Asian economic history and Asia’s trade with Europe has
both called into question the exceptional status so frequently accorded to Europe
and recast our understandings of the chronology of world history.28 One of the

26
Janet L. Abu-Lughod 1989, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250–1350
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
27
Adshead 1988, China in World History; Adshead 1993, Central Asia in World History; David
Christian 1998, A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia (Oxford: Blackwell).
28
Much of this work is synthesised in the Cambridge History of China. For a collection of work that
explores the connections between the development of the Chinese economy and global trade see
Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez (eds) 1997, Metals and Monies in an Emerging Global Economy
(Aldershot: Variorum). Also see the provocative arguments forwarded in Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo
Giraldez 1995, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World
History, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 201-21; on South Asia and the Indian Ocean see Satish Chandra 1987, The
Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics (New Delhi: Sage); K. N. Chaudhuri
1985, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to

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 key debates that continues to exercise world historians is the relationship
between Europe’s rise to global dominance, empire building and the emergence
of global capitalism. While some historians, such as David Landes, continue to
attribute Europe’s rise to power to supposedly intrinsically European cultural
qualities (‘work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity’), recent research has tended
to underscore the centrality of imperialism in the new world in both allowing
Europe to escape from its ecological constraints and constituting the very nature
of European culture itself.29 Moreover, where McNeill might have given shape
to history by discerning the rising dominance of the ‘West’, what has emerged
out of recent world historical research is an image of a multi-centred world
during the period between 1250–1800, where China was perhaps the single most
powerful region. In the century from 1800, it seems that Europe did exercise
increasing power at a global level as a result of the military-fiscal revolution
which consolidated its military advantage over non-European nations, its
harnessing of its natural resources – especially coal – to its industrial revolution,
and a sustained period of imperial expansion beginning from the 1760s.30 But
the thrust of much recent work has shown that although European ascendancy
profoundly transformed the world, particularly through its imperial projects,
it was short-lived. The United States, Russia and Japan emerged as both industrial
forces and imperial powers around the turn of the twentieth century, while
Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Bombay emerged as new commercial, cultural,
technological and migratory centres. World history research on migration,
economics, empires and ideologies suggests that history cannot be imagined as
an inexorable march to Western dominance and global homogeneity, but rather
as a more complex and ambiguous set of interwoven and overlapping processes
driven from by diverse array of groups from a variety of different locations.31

1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Kenneth McPherson 1993, The Indian Ocean: A
History of People and the Sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press).
29
David Landes 1998, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor
(New York, NY: W. W. Norton), p. 523.
30
Kenneth Pomeranz 2000, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik
1999, The World That Trade Created: Culture, Society, and the World Economy, 1400–the Present
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe); and the essays in the forum on the ‘great divergence’ in Itinerario, vol.
24, nos 3/4, 2000.
31
e.g. Arjun Appadurai 1996, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press); Michael Geyer and Charles Bright 1995, ‘World History in a
Global Age’, American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 4, pp. 1034-60; Akira Iriye 1989, ‘The
Internationalization of History’, American Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 1, pp. 1-10; Adam McKeown
2001, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press).

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***
This vision of world history provides the basic framework for C. A. Bayly’s The
Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Comparisons and Connections. This
volume, which was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm and acclaim on its
publication early in 2004, is shaped by Bayly’s expertise as both a leading South
Asianist and an influential historian of the British Empire and extends the
provocative vision of world history he had sketched in earlier publications.32
At the heart of Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World is the emergence of ‘global
uniformities in the state, religion, political ideologies, and economic life’ between
1780 and 1914.33 According to Bayly, these uniformities manifested themselves
in numerous ways, from the emergence of the census as a key technology of
governance for almost every state by 1914 to the international popularity of the
Western-style suit as a marker of sobriety, seriousness and status, or from the
rise of municipal government at a global level to the profound transformations
enacted by the rigorous time-keeping central in the ‘industrious revolution’.34
At the same time, however, Bayly traces the ways in which various forms of
connection worked to ‘heighten the sense of difference, and even antagonism,
between people in different societies’, highlighting how ‘those differences were
increasingly expressed in similar ways’.35 The most obvious example of this
paradox was what Bayly terms the age of ‘hyperactive nationalism’ after 1890
which witnessed the consolidation of European nation states, the emergence of
settler nationalism within the British Empire, the rise of the significant
anti-colonial movements in Egypt, India, French North Africa and Indochina as
well as the emergence of the ‘Young Turk’ movement within the Ottoman Empire
and the Chinese revolution of 1911.36 Each of these nationalist movements
stressed the distinctiveness of their own community, yet the symbolic repertoire
and historical vision of these imagined communities were in many ways
remarkably similar.37 This reminds us that despite the fact that each nation is
defined by its supposedly unique character, nationalisms share powerful
characteristics and that they are also produced transnationally. For Bayly,

32
C. A. Bayly 1998, ‘The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760–1830’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 28-47; Bayly 2002, ‘“Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization
in the Eurasian and African Arena, ca. 1750–1850’, in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World
History (New York, NY: Norton), pp. 45-72.
33
C. A. Bayly 2004, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons
(Malden, MA: Blackwell), p. 1.
34
ibid., pp. 13-4, 474, 478.
35
ibid., pp. 1-2.
36
ibid., p. 462.
37
ibid., pp. 199-244, 462-4.

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 however, nation states were not the sole anchor of identity even in an age of
‘hyper-active nationalism’; rather he insists one of the markers of modernity
was the range of identities, often overlapping and frequently competing, that
were produced out of a range of collectivities: class, ethnicity, race and religion.
At the heart of The Birth of the Modern World are two theses. The first of these
asserts that a central precondition for the emergence of modernity was the growth
of internal complexity within most societies between 1780 and 1914. Bayly
argues that during this period we can trace a significant shift in most large scale
societies as professionals of various types began to displace older knowledge
traditions and geographies of expertise. Networks of kinship and
marriage-alliance were jostled aside by professional associations and interest
groups. During the nineteenth century distinct legal professions, for example,
emerged in many colonised lands, in Japan and in the Chinese Treaty Ports. At
the same time, Western medicine was increasingly globalised and doctors trained
in Western methods enjoyed increased social influence even as increasingly
systematised forms of non-Western medicine retained significant cultural
authority in the Islamic World, South and East Asia. In the economic domain,
Bayly argues, it is in this period that we see ‘specialist bodies of managers,
accountants and insurers’ becoming a key feature of the global economy as they
spread out to major urban centres across the globe from London, Amsterdam,
and Paris.38 In terms of economic production, global industrialisation reshaped
long established labour patterns as a ‘kind of international class structure was
emerging’, where workers in Europe, the Americas, India or Japan were subjected
to similar pressures and began to articulate increasingly shared aspirations.39
Bayly’s second thesis is that during the long nineteenth century there was a
shift towards ‘outward uniformity’ at a global level. In other words, the profound
differences that marked off originally disparate cultural formations were softened
and even undercut due to the integrative work of imperial political systems,
global technological change, and the globalisation of religion and race as
‘universal’ languages. Between 1780 and 1914, for example, Hinduism, which
had confounded many early European observers with its innumerable gods,
devotional paths, and little traditions, was increasing systematised and outwardly,
at least, began to look like other ‘religions’ (like Islam and Christianity). This
transformation, Bayly suggests, was by no means unique, as during the long
nineteenth century many ‘traditions which had once been bundles of rights,
shamanistic practices, rituals and antique verities’ were reshaped into coherent
‘religions’ with ‘their own spheres of interest and supposedly uniform
characteristics’. For Bayly, the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago

38
ibid., p. 21.
39
ibid.

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in 1893 is a potent symbol of the outcome of these systematising processes. This
event would have been incomprehensible a century before, as in the late
eighteenth century the notion of ‘religion’ remained largely unknown outside
the West and Europeans had a limited understanding of Hinduism, a thin grasp
of Islamic traditions in Southeast Asia, and virtually no knowledge of Buddhism.
Over the following century the power of print, the reforming efforts of elites in
the Pacific, Asia and Africa, and the entanglement of various devotional paths
with imperial power meant that ‘the claims of the great standardizing, religions
were much more widely known and acted on’ by 1914.40
Bayly develops these arguments on a truly global scale over a wide range of
different domains – the economic, the political, the social, the cultural and so
on – and they are underpinned by a growing body of work within world history
that has questioned the Eurocentrism of social theory as well as Europe’s
privileged position in both historical and theoretical accounts of modernity. The
long-established tendency to treat European patterns as either ‘natural’ or
‘universal’ (in the way that say Marx, Talcott Parsons, or David Landes have
done) and thereby reducing China or India, or the Islamic world to being cases
of failed or stagnated development has been undercut by recent work on
economics and state building within Eurasia. Most importantly, Kenneth
Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong have demolished many of the arguments that have
been used to highlight European exceptionalism (whether we are talking about
patterns of agricultural production, fertility patterns and family structures, the
development of transportation networks, or the workings of the market or
‘culture’). Wong traces a broad set of similarities within ‘Eurasian’ economic
history as well as a key set of divergences in the history of European and Chinese
state-making, especially in terms of the capacities they developed and both the
internal and external threats they faced. His work suggests the particular rather
than universal nature of European models and has been central in reorienting
ongoing debates over the history of the state, the path of capitalist development
and the nature of Chinese history itself.41 In a similar vein, Pomeranz suggests
that Europe enjoyed little or no advantage over East Asia before 1800. The ‘great
divergence’ that emerged between Europe and Asia during the nineteenth
century was ultimately the product of ‘windfalls’ from the New World (precious
metals, but also slave labour, food plants and various commodities) and the
tapping of Europe’s, but especially Britain’s, coal deposits to maximise production
and save the land.42

40
ibid., pp. 364-5.
41
R. Bin Wong 1997, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
42
Pomeranz 2000, The Great Divergence, pp. 57-62 and 264-97.

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 The work of Wong and Pomeranz are key elements of the overall scaffolding of
Bayly’s work, shaping, in particular, his rendering of the world around 1800.
In their wake, Bayly recognises both the connections between China and Europe
and some of the key similarities between their economic and social development.
Bayly suggests that modernity was the product of a ‘complex parallelogram of
forces’ that were driven from a variety of different centres, not just the ‘West’.43
This vision of a multi-centred world certainly echoes Pomeranz’s argument and
the drive of the last generation of world historians to break away from the rather
mechanistic approach of world systems theory. In fact, in this regard the core
arguments articulated in The Birth of the Modern World could be read as a
response to R. Bin Wong’s warning that ‘History often seems to reach
non-western peoples as they come into contact with Europeans …. modern
histories are conventionally constructed along the axis of native responses to
Western challenges.’44
But it is important to recognise that in several important ways Bayly’s vision of
world history is significantly different from not only the work of Wong and
Pomeranz but recent research within the field more generally. In contrast to the
Sinocentrism of Pomeranz and Wong, Bayly’s vision of modernity places
particular emphasis on both the Islamic world and South Asia. This is not
surprising given the trajectory of Bayly’s research: his early work reconstructed
the transformation of the economic fortunes and social lives of north Indian
towns and merchant dynasties in the 1770–1870 period and it still stands as a
crucial contribution to a heated debate over the transformation of South Asia
during the late Mughal period. 45 In addition, his under-appreciated Imperial
Meridian (1989) located the rapid expansion of the British Empire between 1780
and 1830 in the ‘hollowing out’ of the great Muslim Empires – the Ottomans,
the Safavids and the Mughals – as the result of peasant resistance to taxation
regimes, the rise of religious revivalism, the growing power of regional rulers,
religious conflict and factional disputes at the imperial courts. Imperial Meridian
was not simply a rehabilitation of the Robinson-Gallagher thesis (which suggested
that the British Empire grew rapidly during the nineteenth century as a result
of a succession of local crises in the periphery), but rather the provocative
marriage of new perspectives on the rise of the military-fiscal state in
eighteenth-century Britain with a nuanced understanding of the culture and
politics of the Islamic world.46

43
Bayly 2004, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 7.
44
Wong 1997, China Transformed, p. 1.
45
Most importantly: C. A. Bayly 1983, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the
Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
46
C. A. Bayly 1989, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London:
Longman).

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It is also not surprising given Bayly’s prominence in debates over both the
Mughal and British Empires that the Birth of the Modern World places empire
building at the heart of modernity. This sets Bayly apart from the Sinocentric
vision of much recent world history. Imperialism is not a problematic that is
central in the work of Wong and Pomeranz, in part because European empires
struggled to maintain anything more than a fingertip grasp on China and in part
because both Wong and Pomeranz frame their studies as comparative economic
histories of Europe and China. Where empire building does intrude, in
Pomeranz’s ‘new world windfalls’ for example, it is framed in essentially
economic terms rather than as a larger set of unequal power relations.47 For
Bayly, however, there is no doubt that empire building is profoundly entangled
with, and deeply suffuses, modernity. Not only was the new age of global
imperialism that emerged in the late eighteenth century one of the engines that
transformed various ‘old regimes’ across the globe, but during the nineteenth
century empires played a central role in reshaping material culture, in moulding
the modern state, in the crafting of new visions of nations and ethnicities, in
dictating the food people consumed and the languages they spoke.
What is also striking and salutary about Bayly’s vision of empire is that he does
not shy away from confronting the violence of imperial orders. Where Niall
Ferguson and David Cannadine have downplayed the significance of race in the
world of empire and underplayed imperialism’s violence and human cost, Bayly
is clear on the connection between race, empire, and violence.48 Chapter 12 of
the Birth of the Modern is entitled ‘The Destruction of Native Peoples and
Ecological Depradation’ and it traces the ravages visited upon indigenous peoples
by Eurasian diseases, the ‘white deluge’ of migration, and the deployment of
‘sheer violence’ of colonialism, as well as the profound changes wrought by
broader shifts in technology, communication networks, and global markets.49
Given the brute power of European empire building, Bayly suggests that the
nineteenth century did witness the rise of north-western Europe to global
dominance. This dominance might have been contested, provisional and fleeting

47
A significant body of scholarship has begun to emerge over the past few years: James L. Hevia
1995, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press); and Hevia 2003, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in
Nineteenth-century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); Lydia H. Liu 2004, The Clash of
Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press).
48
David Cannadine 2001, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Oxford
University Press); Niall Ferguson 2003, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London:
Allen Lane). Also see From Orientalism to Ornamentalism: Empire and Difference in History, special
issue of Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 3, no. 1, 2002.
49
Bayly 2004, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 432-50, quote is at p. 440.

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 in many areas, but in Bayly’s view it did mark a key moment when the
multi-centred world invoked by Pomeranz was reconfigured. In suggesting that
‘efficiency in killing other human beings’ was an important element of Europe’s,
and especially Britain’s rise, Bayly is a long way from Cannadine’s bloodless and
deracinated vision of empire or Ferguson’s identification of the British Empire
as an exemplary model of global governance.50
Here we can identify one further concern that places Bayly’s work at odds with
much recent work within world history. Throughout The Birth of the Modern
World he locates his narrative of connection, convergence and conflict in the
social and cultural domains as well as in the world of economics that remains
the chief concern in world history research. In particular, Bayly puts a good
deal of emphasis on what he terms ‘bodily practice’: dress, bodily decoration
and grooming, food and drink, sport and leisure. While it is true that Bayly’s
discussion of the history of the body supplements rather than transforms his
approach, there is no doubt that it marks an important challenge to traditional
approaches to world history. Key works within world history over the past
twenty years have been grounded in economic history or have adopted an
explicitly materialist approach to the past (most obviously: Janet Abu-Lughod’s
Before European Hegemony; Philip Curtin’s, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History;
K. N. Chaudhuri’s Asia before Europe; Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism and The
Columbian Exchange; Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient; Pomeranz’s Great
Divergence; Wong’s China Transformed; and David Christian’s Maps of Time).
The title of Pomeranz’s collection of essays co-authored with Steven Topik, The
World That Trade Made, is particularly indicative of the outlook of world history:
that modernity is essentially the product of a particular set of economic
innovations and structures.51 These concerns remain the stock in trade of the
Journal of World History, which has been a crucial site for these ongoing debates
over global trade and the history of capitalism. In a recent essay, Antoinette
Burton and I have argued that the Journal of World History and world history
more generally seems to have functioned as a redoubt against the cultural turn.52
One of features that sets world history apart from either postcolonial studies, or
the new transnational research within the humanities, is that it has not
systematically engaged with questions of race or more particularly gender and
sexuality.
***

50
ibid., p. 468.
51
Pomeranz and Topik 1999, The World That Trade Created.
52
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton 2005, ‘Postscript: Bodies, Genders, Empires: Reimagining
World Histories’, in Ballantyne and Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters
in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 409-10.

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In this regard, Bayly’s stress on ‘bodily regimes’ is a welcome innovation that
begins to break down the economistic tendencies of world history. However,
the way in which Bayly deals with these ‘bodily regimes’ feeds my major
reservation about this volume – the constancy of its gaze on the macro, on the
global overlay, on the big processes. While this analytical gaze certainly helps
us appreciate the ‘big picture’ of the shaping of modernity, it produces a
relatively thin treatment of subjectivities and meaning making. These questions
are frequently occluded in the writing of world histories, especially big synthetic
histories like this one. But knowing the richly detailed work Bayly has produced
on the encounter between British and South Asian knowledge traditions and
the emphasis he places on bodily regimes in the introduction to The Birth of the
Modern World, I had hoped that the ‘big’ stories that are at the heart of the
volume – empire building, international trade, the rise of the nation state and
so on – would be given texture and nuance through some detailed discussion
of particular movements, locations, and individuals.
There is no doubt that The Birth of the Modern World strives to be comprehensive,
to present a rich analysis of the making of our world. As a result, however,
individual actors (especially women), marginal social groups, and dissenting
voices are either ignored or folded into the grand narrative at the heart of the
volume. Unfortunately, his treatment of ‘bodily regimes’, which might have
provided one key space for exploring ‘small’ stories or voices, does not offer a
distinctive level of analysis. Where Kathleen Canning has argued that the ‘body
as method’ offers a challenging and distinctive site for historical analysis, for
Bayly the history of the body is simply another domain, no different in kind
from economics or politics, where he can trace the emergence of modernity.53
In other words, Bayly’s analytical position and focus remains essentially fixed
and unmoving throughout the volume – the Birth of the Modern World offers
an assured and masterful analysis of the making of global modernity, but at
times its lacks the texture and richness that a more rigorous examination of the
history of the body might have given the text.
One other aspect of The Birth of the Modern World that is troubling is what we
might term its ‘geography of modernity’. Bayly’s account of modernity diverges
markedly from the visions of colonial modernity that have been produced out
of some of the best new work on empire. Even though Bayly stresses that
modernity was shaped from a variety of centres and was fashioned out of
encounters between a wide range of peoples, The Birth of the Modern nevertheless
tends to encode modernity as the product of an unproblematised Europe. Modern
financial services, science, medicine, and even the nation state emanate from

53
Kathleen Canning 1999, ‘The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender
History’, Gender & History, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 499-513.

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 Europe, from where they disseminate outwards, often conveyed by agents of
empire. In stressing the coterminous history of the ‘great acceleration’ of
modernity and the rise to global dominance of European empires in the after
1820, Bayly’s vision of the geography of modernity is very traditional. In effect,
Bayly frequently frames European modernity and global modernity in a
segregated and neatly sequential relationship. Here The Birth of the Modern
World resolutely ignores one of the key insights of postcolonial criticism: that
slavery and empire building were central in the very creation of ‘Europe’ prior
to modernity and that these entanglements in many ways provided the very
basis for Europe’s modernity. This, of course, has been a particular thrust of the
‘imperial turn’ in British historiography, where the research produced by James
Walvin, Kathleen Wilson, Catherine Hall, Mrinalini Sinha, Antoinette Burton,
and Angela Woollacott has undercut the rigid distinction between the history
of the imperial metropole and Britain’s various colonies. In this regard, Bayly
also elides some of the important recent work on colonial modernities that stresses
both the particularity of, and in-process nature of, specific formations of
modernity in various colonial sites.54
Of course, much of the recent work on ‘colonial modernity’ is inflected by
postcolonialism. In the past Bayly has been quite critical of postcolonialism, not
least in part because he sees it as marking the ‘Americanisation’ of British and
British imperial history. However, he does recognise that the weight of
postcolonial criticism and the cultural turn has necessitated the creation of new
forms of historical writing. He has recently suggested that:
the postmodern and post-colonial [sic] writers who have dominated the
last decade or more have tended to be sceptical of ‘grand narratives’ such
as these, arguing instead for the study of the ‘fragment’, the individual
resister or subaltern. But ironically, the postcolonial sensibility has had
the countervailing effect of requiring the construction of a new type of
world history to replace the old histories of ‘Western civilisation’ in that
greatest of academic marketplaces, the United States.55
In fact, we should see Bayly’s volume as a response to this need for new
narratives. Even though Bayly’s vision of modernity is not as decentred as recent
postcolonial writing suggests, The Birth of the Modern World produces a powerful
analysis of the global nineteenth century that will challenge undergraduates
and maybe please scholars sympathetic to postcolonialism. After all, this is a
world history that places empire at the heart of modernity and violence at the
heart of empire building, two points that seem particularly apposite at this
moment in global politics. More broadly, in The Birth of the Modern World Bayly

54
e.g., Antoinette Burton (ed.) 1999, Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge).
55
C. A. Bayly 2004, ‘Writing World History’, History Today, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 36-40.

42  Connected Worlds

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attaches significant weight to South Asia and the Islamic world, draws upon the
recent historiography on China, and certainly escapes from any tendency to see
the European experience as normative. R. Bin Wong has recently argued that
‘we should exceed the limitations of historical explanations derived from
European experiences’ by exploring ‘[t]he plurality of historical pasts’ and
expanding ‘the capacities of social theory through a more systematic grounding
in multiple historical experiences’.56 Bayly’s volume is a very significant
contribution to that vital project.

56
Wong 1997, China Transformed, p. 293.

Putting the nation in its place?  43

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