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Long 19th Century? Long 20th? Retooling that Last Chunk of World History Periodization
Peter N. Stearns
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
| PERIODIZATION,1 as any involved teacher knows, is one of the key ways we manage the world history enterprise. Increasingly—though probably still less uniformly than one might wish—it has replaced the random juxtaposition of civilizations as part of the basic organizational structure of courses, textbooks, and hopefully of ways we really think about world history overall. As in any historical endeavor, periodization is an attempt to manage change, and present it coherently, by noting points where key breaks in framework occur. In world history, periodization has come to convey, particularly, shifts in the pattern of interactions and contacts among many, though not always all, major societies. |
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We are also enjoined, of course, and quite properly, to talk about periodization explicitly with students, to make them see that it is a heuristic, not part of an inexorable divine plan, and subject to contestation depending on data, choice of priorities among types of change, and so on. This can be an important part of opening up a course—in world history or any history—to a greater sense of student involvement and a higher level of analysis of the complex processes of change and continuity. |
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In the case of world history, amid all sorts of interesting and increasing scholarly debates, a standard periodization has, in the main, proved widely accepted. Most of us deal with a classical period, and contrast it with earlier civilizations and societies, and then a postclassical period of some sort. There's a bit of debate about the best point at which to begin the postclassical, but this is not fundamental, and whether to divide it into two differently labeled segments around 1000 with the advent of more intense connections among different parts of Afro-Eurasia. Certainly, the transition centuries after 1300 deserve attention. And historians do wonder whether 1450 or 1500 best launches the early modern period. But while these issues embrace legitimate concerns, they don't rock the fundamental periodization boat. |
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The same should not be the case, I wish to contend, for the current conventions about the long 19th century and the contemporary era.2 To be sure, world historians have not really paid as much imaginative attention to the recent centuries as they have to postclassical and early modern, which is where the field has particularly altered the ways we should look at the past. Indeed, a new debate about modern divides might help galvanize a bit more chronological balance, in a field that on the whole displays more excitement about the world's earlier past than about its past-present connections. |
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Here's the situation: almost all world history periodization takes a break around 1750 or 1800, and then tools along until 1914. This is, among other things, the Advanced Placement format. When the start is 1750, one has to make apologetic noises for the lack of any particularly decisive development in 1750 itself, but of course the turmoil of 1914 more than compensates on the other end. |
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There's no question that this periodization serves a widespread sense of how things were. It allows the many world historians with European history backgrounds to see a clear path, with attention to the early stages of the industrial revolution but more obviously the age of Atlantic revolution. On a personal note, an effort of mine once to combine the early modern period with the long 19th century in one supplementary text failed, partly because of the sheer force of convention but also (as I now see) because the result would have focused too strongly on the rise of the west through the whole span, and not just the last part. |
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For there is more than routine involved. The long 19th century does allow a focus on the industrial revolution as a major new component in the human experience. It does allow a clear distinction from the early modern period in terms of the West's power in the world. Limited in the early modern period, as we know, by some constraints on military technology and by the ongoing vitality of the Asian economies, China at the forefront, the Western exercise of power encountered fewer trammels by the late 18th century thanks to military innovations, the internal problems of some of the Asian empires, and the economic rebalancing that accompanied even early British industrialization—including rapid deindustrialization in places like India and Latin America. Then, at the other end, World War I, with its catastrophic impact on European power and its stimulus to new resistance outside Europe, can legitimately be taken as the point at which the same surge of Western dominance begins, though gradually and with many complications, to come to an end. During the long 19th century, dealing with growing Western assertiveness constituted a key issue for all major societies, setting up a whole variety of comparative exercises that form a legitimate framework for analysis in the world history course at this point. There's no question that using the long 19th century as a period has real validity and that it can work well in an effective course. |
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There are, however, some problems, which in my judgment invite a bit more active debate than we've had thus far over these final segments of the world history survey. The lack of a particularly decisive beginning point is an issue, though as suggested not an overwhelming one. And while launching more clearly with the revolutionary era would make great sense for the Atlantic world, it would be cumbersome and misleading on a global basis (new, revolutionary principles would have global impact, but only later). While signs of new Western muscle do emerge in the later 18th century, with British gains in India and the brief conquest of Egypt and the power signals it sent to that region, overall increases in Western power really await the later 19th century; it was only in the 1840s, for example, that the Western balance of trade with China shifted decisively. |
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We do have a new framework available—admittedly, presentist and complicated and not initially devised by historians—that can allow a new look at the whole periodization scheme. The idea that globalization began in the later 19th century—historians' increasingly vigorous contribution to the analysis of the contemporary phenomenon—calls attention to the desirability of using this, rather than the cruder insistence on new levels of Western power though the two topics overlap, to frame a new period.3 |
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The suggestion, in sum, is to eliminate the long 19th century, despite its usability for European history per se and for aspects of imperialism, in favor of an early modern period of 1450–1850 (through Europe's first stage of industrialization and, coincidentally, the end of the Atlantic revolutionary period), and a new, contemporary era that launched in the later 19th century and continues today and into the indefinite future. |
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Early modern, now, would continue to focus on the rebalancing of several societies including the rise of the West and Russia; the related establishment of some new, frontier/settler societies; the Columbian exchange, whose most vivid imprints decline after about 1700 but linger in global population trends and whose characteristics are reechoed in the late 18th through early 19th centuries through the demographic changes in Pacific Oceania and the American northwest; the emergence of a new kind of world economy, now literally global and with more unprecedentedly intense effects depending on world trade position, with due account for the complexities of East Asia; and the establishment of new, gunpowder empires, both land-based and overseas. The last fifty plus years of this period do see more marked Western power claims than earlier, along with the growing decline of some of the land-based multinational empires. And the Western role in the world economy surges, as against the greater equilibrium of the bulk of the period. But these developments are easily handled as part of an end-of-period transition. The periodization would allow much better treatment of the origins and nature of settler societies, now typically obscured in world history, and greater attention to developments in the Pacific. It would capture the first phases of industrialization, but as part of ongoing world-economic changes, not initially so much in terms of a massive new, global departure. While 1850 is a date of convenience, its situation near the opium wars, the "opening" of Japan and new challenges to Russia (and not too far away, the literal opening of Suez) actually works rather well in terms of a further shift in world power balance and the more important ultimate theme, the emergence of new levels of global interconnection. |
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For the real focus of the new periodization is to call attention to the great increase in global exchanges that began in the later 19th century. With new technologies and the new canals, trade and population exchanges reached new levels, arguably different in kind from the interconnections of the early modern period. The global impact of industrialization became more vivid—indeed the new periodization allows clearer discussion of the "industrialization of the world," complex and regionally inegalitarian as it remains, rather than the isolated industrial revolution in one spot. Global political structures are implied by new agreements such as the Universal Postal Union or the first Geneva convention, while an initial set of global NGOs arises as well, through anti-slavery and then, in the 1880s, the first stirrings of global feminism. The unprecedented international exchange of sports created the initial modern outcropping of a global popular culture.4 |
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All of this was, of course, under largely Western control; the power disparity of the later 19th century, and then its progressive decline from World War I onward, can and should still be conveyed. The larger story, though, involves the clear ebb of Western-dominated globalization during the middle decades of the 20th century; then the emergence of the Cold War as a transitory effort to redefine globalization in a different and bimodal fashion (complicated of course by the concomitant surge of decolonization); all to yield to a new round of globalization from the 1970s onward, based on dramatic new communications technologies but also on key new policy decisions in countries like China (1978) and Russia and the decline of the Cold War. Globalization, then, but also resistance and oscillation become the major theme of the contemporary era, around which other key themes, from changes in the nature of the war to massive population surge, can be organized. |
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Recently, historians have begun talking, pace Eric Hobsbawm, about a "long 20th century," a conversation that takes account of the clear pre-1914 origins of enduring trends and structures, plus the fact that basic contemporary themes easily survive the shorter-term oscillations of world war, cold war, and post-cold war. The term is infelicitous in one clear sense: we don't know when the period will end—and world history periods tend to last a fair amount of time—so pinning a numerical label is probably miscast. But the idea the a clear, ongoing era started not with the great war, but with deeper trends a century and a half ago, is truly appealing, allowing a more sensible characterization of the larger themes of our own time, a better means of connecting current trends to the past. World War I hardly disappears in this formulation by the way, but becomes a point at which the first round of globalization clearly begins to fail, with new opportunities for regional retreats that would last for several decades. |
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Not surprisingly, this same kind of recasting meshes with what some groups are suggesting about redoing American history periodization. Seeing the global power role of the United States,5 and the resultant global context from the 1890s onward as an overarching framework for recent U.S. history cuts through the distressing thicket of short-term, decadal periodizations that defy any sense of larger trends for the nation's recent past. It's a national translation of the larger realization of fundamental, global-scale innovations from the later 19th century onward.6 |
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The idea of the 19th and 20th centuries as periods is deeply ensconced, and while it partly reflects a modern and substantively irrelevant fascination with centuries, it does, as we have seen, have some merits beyond convention. Historians' definitions of periods, correspondingly, change only slowly—as witness the amazing number of social history projects that developed imaginative new topics while using the most conventional, often inappropriate periodization. Changing the early modern, long 19th, and contemporary divisions and definitions would involve lots of rethinking, and some conceptual courage. Textbooks would have to shift (easiest will be a redefinition of purely 20th-century treatments, already underway; world history tomes would be far more challenging), committees like Advanced Placement would have to ruminate; individual teachers would have to figure out how comfortable they are with some modest retooling. Fortunately, the resulting recasting would hardly involve destruction of the entire old lecture (sorry: class participation) notes. It would, however, shake things up a bit in some fruitful directions. |
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There are, to be sure, partisans of a different, even more novel approach, that call for a "new global history" periodization in the later 20th, rather than later 19th centuries, sometimes seeing the whole span of 1500–1970s as a basically uniform "preglobal" period. Their ideas deserve attention as well, but the larger periodization proposed here can encompass the desirable debate until when and if the partisans of the far more recent basic divide win out. For the moment, in the historical formulations of globalization discussions, it seems to me that the advocates of a late 19th century inception, followed by retreats and resurgences, have the better of it, which argues for a world history periodization accordingly centered on a somewhat earlier break, greatly enhanced of course by developments in the past several decades. The point is that we need a framework in which this kind of discussion, about the levels of magnitude of global change and their timing, can occur; the current divide, rooted more conventionally on Western developments and power politics, does not do the trick.7 |
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At this juncture, the main point is to urge that a new debate be opened. We know we have to get rid of 20th century, regardless: our students are now firmly in the 21st, and unless we are content with a really undesirable amount of choppiness that would have a brand new period open in the 1990s, we have to relabel a bit, at the very least. I believe that the opportunity exists to do rather more, to use world history, and globalization, to provide the same breath of analytical fresh air that has been applied so successfully, by world historians, to earlier eras like the postclassical. |
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Notes
1. I always note that fact that my spellchecker does not acknowledge periodization as a word, a (deplorable? amusing?) sign of the gap between historical convention and larger American technological culture.
2. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (New York: Random House, 1987).
3. Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. and Thomas Zeiler, eds., Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
4. This same period would of course see the global spread of nationalism, beyond its initial, largely Atlantic breeding ground, as a means of resisting too much Western and global pressure. The interplay between nationalism as a means of identity, and larger global themes, forms a clearly recognizable tension from the mid-19th century to the present, another reason to consider the newer kind of world-historical periodization.
5. This is not to suggest the American superpower status is an essential element of a larger contemporary era in global terms; it may well prove far shorter in duration. The greater impingement of the global context on the United States over the past 120 years is the larger and more fundamental point.
6. Noralee Frankel and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Internationalizing the American Survey Course (American Historical Association, forthcoming).
7. Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (London: Routledge, 2006).
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