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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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]

***

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, 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 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]

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]

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 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.

***

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 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:

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 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.