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Book Review
| The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. By C. A. BAYLY. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004. 512 pp. $73.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).
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This book, by one of the foremost scholars of modern Indian history, is a sprawling smorgasbord of world history in the long nineteenth century. Readers may grow weary at times of its rambling structure, but they will be well rewarded for their endurance by a set of stimulating ideas and brilliant aperçus. |
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Bayly aims to provide both a survey and an interpretation of world history over the span of about 140 years. He begins with a few declarations of his positions with respect to economic causation, postmodernism, the nature of modernity, and so forth. The historical treatment begins with an account of old regimes around the world and the gradual growth of links among them, something he calls "archaic globalization." The next twelve chapters mix chronological and thematic structures, taking up subjects such as revolutions in the years 1780–1820, industrialization, nationalism, empire, the state, liberalism and socialism, religion, the arts, the hidden continuities from the old regime, the fate of indigenous peoples, among others. Each chapter takes the reader on a world tour, sometimes at seemingly supersonic speed. Some paragraphs begin in the Ottoman Empire but move to India and Japan before coming to a stop. It would be a very difficult book to skim. Many chapters include comment on historiography, usually noting how scholars since the 1960s and 1970s have come to see a given subject differently. |
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