CA Bayly on Global History

CA Bayly on Global History January 1, 2005

In a brief article in the Feb 2004 issue of History Today , C. A. Bayly describes the current state of global history. He points out that even postmodern historians who stridently oppose history as told by the colonial victors, are beginning to write a new form of global history of their own. He adds these wise and important comments:

A related problem that arises from post-colonial studies is the fashionable emphasis on the wholly destructive effects of Western “colonialism.” Famine, the disruption of local communities, the exacerbation of religious and racial tensions: these are all attributed to the Western impact as vigorously by contemporary cultural critics as by the earlier socialist historians. There is no question that huge areas of land were expropriated from native peoples in the nineteenth century and that populations in parts of Australasia and the Pacific were substantially reduced as a result of colonisation, the spread of disease and frontier wars. If anything the slave trade reached its peak between 1780 and 1840 and thereafter the indentured labour system created “a new system of slavery.” Yet even at its most violent and intrusive European colonialism was friable in its impact and ambivalent in its results. The systems it created left room to local elites, and even peasants and labourers, to exploit conflicts and contradictions among their rulers. Much of Asia and north Africa had thrown up national movements by 1900. Japan’s breakthrough to modernity was echoed on a small scale even in those apparently static societies, the Ottoman empire or China. India had a larger textile industry than Russia in 1914, despite its inheritance of rural poverty. Historians need to keep in mind the multi-centred nature of change even at this time of Western domination. Non-European peoples appropriated and adapted the ideological and political tools of the West.”

To put my own theological spin on this: Insofar as nationalism is a (corrupt) product of the Christian West, the history of nationalist opposition to Western empires is still part of the story of the spread of Western, Christian ideas.

Bayly further comments:

Asian elites were already looking to Japan for inspiration by the end of the nineteenth century. If writing world history calls for a nice balance between a stress on subordination and on indigenous agency, it also needs to find a balance between homogeneity and exceptionalism. In its lack of a peasantry and its decentralised political institutions, the USA was indeed exceptional. Britain’s level of industrialisation was exceptional during the nineteenth century. The Chinese mandarinate did differ substantially from the Japanese samurai class. World history should not work by crushing difference through the use of vague analogies. As a heuristic exercise, it should reflect on difference as well as similarity. But while avoiding homogenisation, historians should not avoid the delineation of connections. The American civil war, for instance, was a unique event, not really comparable with contemporary rebellions and wars in Europe. Yet it was also one aspect of a broader movement that saw the emergence of larger states protecting their own national political economies. The War also created economic and ideological ripples which spread across the whole world. The boom and slump in cotton production in Egypt and India during the late 1860s and ’70s, and all the manifold political consequences of this, were its direct result. Astonishingly in view of the vast number of books on its domestic implications, no single history has been written on the international consequences of the American Civil War. American history, though not the American historical profession, remains resolutely parochial. More understandably, it is only in the last few years that Indian historians have begun to depict the subcontinent not only as a colonial possession and nation in making, but as a global centre of commerce, emigration and latterly industrial activity.

Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World includes a detailed and fascinating portrait of the rise of world religions during the nineteenth century, and he summarizes a few of his points in this article:

Despite these problems, it is clear that the contemporary fascination with globalisation and educational changes will continue to give an impetus to the writing of world history. Its most valuable contribution may not even lie on the obvious areas of political and economic history, but in the fields of cultural, social and ideological history. The nineteenth century, for instance, has been seen pre-eminently as the high point of nationalism and capitalism. But equally it was a period when “religion” in the sense that we now use the term came into being across much of the world. Priests, jurists and lay people created more authoritative sources of power and bodies of doctrine. Pilgrimage expanded along the new lines of communication. The world religions began to look more like each other as Buddhists and Hindus adopted the methods of control and evangelisation that had long been common among Christians and Muslims. The new “imagined communities” of the world religions vastly outpaced the growth of national communities based on the printed word.

The rise of “world religions” was above all a set of multi-centred transformations in which events in the regions impacted on the centre and the non-West influenced the West. The consolidation of domestic Christian churches in Europe and North America resulted in important cases from the needs of missionary activities overseas. But Christian churches were often themselves reacting to the prior expansion of Islam in Africa or Asia. Religious building shows how modernity was diffused from several cultural centres. This was certainly an era when the neo-gothic church style of northern Europe spread across the world. But the period also saw Middle Eastern styles of mosque building and the tenth century Hindu temple style appear in places as distant as the Caribbean and Fiji, displacing local forms of religious architecture. A growing uniformity of aspirations, styles of behaviour, ideology and bodily practice ?Ethe way people dressed, ate and deported themselves could be seen across the world, could be seen across the world. Yet this uniformity had origins in the non-European world as well as ill the West, even at the high point of colonial domination.


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