The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914

"This book is not simply about empire. It’s a very successful attempt at writing a global history in the phase where we turned from a pre-industrial age to an industrial age, while also being aware of the dynamics in the non-industrialised portions of the planet. Bayly taught me that I needed to embrace Hegel somehow, because what is characteristic of Hegel’s philosophy is his capacity for combining opposites, to see how they can coexist and maybe even to synthesise them at a higher level. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . No one would like to write history as Hegel writes philosophy. But Chris taught me something very important for the historian: the capacity to bridge contradictions—because human society is full of contradiction. It is, in fact, not a logically coherent, Kantian universe. It is much more a universe of very different forces, and often mutually conflicting, and contradicting, and yet forming patterns together. And this is an ideal which I have learned from Bayly and I’m trying to learn from it, but it is a very high art. One can only aspire to it. Chris was also a good friend, so I’m probably biased, but I’m not the only one saying this. The basic claim is that classic modernisation theory will tend to see modernity simply as an outgrowth of either England or maybe Europe while the rest of the world is then left just standing there, passively on the sidelines. Bayly was able to show in this book that actually Europe and Britain might have been at the centre of modern development, but part of the energy was driven by the capacity of this centre to enter into collaborations with, and tap the energies of, societies around the planet that might not necessarily have been on course for modernity, but nevertheless had strong dynamics of their own. Modernity arose from this merger, rather than simply something internal to ‘the West’. The ability to tap the energies of India was very, very important in shaping the modern world. So, some of the things that we would tend to think of as purely internal European developments were already connected with the rest the world. Bayly overcame that old-fashioned way of thinking about the West and the rest. He has a brilliant discussion of the Indian liberal thinker Ram Mohan Roy, who was formulating liberal principles for India , long before they came to many European countries. Around the 1820s. The idea that Europe was just confronted with this totally static inert ‘rest of the world’ does not hold water. He shows how this period of colonialism actually also meant an energising of other groups in other parts of the world and produced huge transformations, which also contributed to the transformations that were taking place in Europe. It was a constantly dialogical feedback process. But of course—which is very important also to remember, in these days, where we actually like to hear about how countries are super nicely interconnected with each other—it was a hierarchical process. Power was exercised and Europe was the main beneficiary of that power, and also able to exercise that power for a period. It wasn’t a cosy, nice, multicultural society where everyone was happily engaging with each other. There was lots of engagement and mutual learning, but it went together with power, oppression and exploitation. It was the combination of these things that was so brutally efficient that it left human society utterly transformed. I suppose the current debates are a reflection that empire, both current imperial powers and the legacies of past ones, continue to inform and shape our world in important ways. After decolonisation there was perhaps a period when people tended to think of empire as a thing of the past, a stage in human history which had been left behind. Eric Hobsbawn, the great historian, published a book in the 2000s arguing from this position. But the wars in the Middle East, the rise of China, and our discussion of lingering inequalities and racism show that empire is anything but a thing of the past. As an ancient historian I might be considered quite a radical. I always remind my Roman colleagues who wax lyrical about the blessings of the Roman peace, that the Romans were also pretty good at raping and plundering. Slavery belongs as much to the picture as the prosperous growth of provincial cities. For good and bad, empire has been a formative force in human history for the last five millennia. I believe that thinking about Rome in a purely European way is often too limiting. We need a world history framework for thinking about Rome. We should perhaps shed some of the baggage from the age of European empires in order to understand Rome better, and take a less Eurocentric view. As an empire, Rome wasn’t simply European, it spanned three continents and depended on tapping and exploiting the energies of the entire greater Mediterranean region. One of the things that the current debate about empire sometimes misses is that we thought that decolonisation meant the end of empire. But it actually led to the emergence or re-emergence and re-birth of two or three big imperial powers. This is so political because empire is a bad word, but what is America if not an empire? It basically took over and expanded the network of bases that the British Empire built up. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And the Soviet Union—wasn’t that an empire? Of course it was. That is one of the things which Lieven is very good at showing. And, when we think of decolonisation as the dissolution of empire, for the Chinese decolonisation was the salvation of the Qing Dynasty’s empire. Right now, it looks as if there is a pretty strong empire there, which has weathered the storms of the 20th century, and is going to be a very strong force in shaping the future of our planet. That is not surprising when you think of it, because the long-term view is that states and empires go together. States are never equally strong and that’s why empires form. I know it sounds as if nothing ever changes, but empire is simply a reflection of the fact that some states are stronger than others and so they exercise their power. Yes. I’ve actually written extensively about this. I don’t think that the European Union is in fact an empire. This kind of multinational, polyethnic construct has imperial features. It often ends up with imperial problems. But it has not been created on the basis of a strong army. It has all the weaknesses of empire, but it does not have most of the oppressive strengths of empire. This is something that the British should remember in talking about the bureaucratic monster of Brussels. The great German 17th century student of Thomas Hobbes and his ideas of sovereignty, Pufendorf, remarked that the Holy Roman Empire was a somewhat irregular body politic, much like a monstrosity. But the monstrous appearance of Europe was precisely not an overwhelming Leviathan, it was a weak, jumble of arrangements, the thing that British elites have always thought it in their interest to maintain."