The Transformation of the World (14 page)

Nor is historical time everywhere reckoned in terms of “Anno Domini” (or today's “Common Era”). Our linear dating system, capable of situating any point in time from a year 1 (
annus domini
), was originally conceived in the sixth century, further elaborated by the Jesuit Dionysus Petavius (Denis Pétau) in 1627, and propagated soon afterward by the great Descartes.
¹⁹
It spread worldwide in
the nineteenth century but has never completely supplanted the alternatives. In Taiwan, one of the most modern societies in the world, the dating system begins with the revolutionary year of 1912, when the Chinese Republic (Minguo)—which the present regime claims to embody—put an end to the imperial era; the year 2000 was therefore “Minguo 88” on the island. Just as the counting of years in Imperial China began anew with each change on the throne until the Communists went over to the Western calendar, so too in Japan each new ruler ushered in a new sequence (1873 was thus “Meiji 6”). But in 1869—in a fine example of invented tradition—a succession of emperors uninterrupted by dynastic change was enshrined in a parallel dating system, so that 1873 became year 2533 since the mythical first emperor, Jimmu, ascended to the throne. This was thought to link Japan to the Western linear conception of time.
²⁰
Despite the cautiously worded objections of many historians, this archaic reference to 660 BC as the fictitious year 1 of imperial rule remained a founding myth of Japanese nationalism after 1945 and received unmistakable endorsement in 1989 with the coronation of Emperor Akihito.
²¹

The new chronology served the manifest political purpose of entrenching the emperor at the center of the mental world of the new nation-state. It is true that in 1873—nearly half a century before Russia—Japan introduced the Gregorian calendar and the previously unknown seven-day week. On day 9 of month 11 in the lunar calendar, an imperial edict decreed that day 3 of month 12 would be redefined in accordance with the solar calendar as January 1, 1873. Yet for all the modernization rhetoric, which attacked the lunar calendar as a sign of superstition and backwardness, the abrupt reform of 1873 had the main function at the time of preserving the state treasury from bankruptcy. For an intercalary month had been due under the old system, and the extra month's pay that this would have meant for all officials could not have been supported in the alarming budgetary situation of the time. So, the New Year was suddenly brought forward by twenty-nine days, allowing desperate housewives no time to prepare for it with the traditional house-cleaning. Japan's alignment with the most influential global calendar meant that court astronomers would no longer be necessary for working out the correct date.
²²

Epochal Chronologies

The relativity of chronology is even clearer if we consider the various appellations given to historical epochs. Nothing like the triad of antiquity, Middle Ages, and modern times—which Europe had gradually adopted since the 1680s—came into use in any other civilization that could look back at a continuous and comparably documented past. There were periods of renewal and rebirth, but before contacts with Europe it rarely occurred to anyone that they were living in an age superior to the past. Only the Meiji system change, promoted by Ōkubo Toshimichi and other energetic young nobles, brought that future-oriented rhetoric of new beginnings that is an essential component of any
“modern” consciousness.
²³
However, it immediately became trapped in traditionalism, as Japanese officialdom reemphasized the sacredness of imperial rule (even though there was no past model for Meiji political practice) and strove to invent an indigenous “middle ages” that would link the country to Europe's prestigious history.
²⁴
The idea of a “medieval period” played a certain role in traditional Muslim historiography, but not in its Chinese equivalent. Nor did the importing of Western conceptions change this in any way: the term “medieval” is used neither in the People's Republic nor in Taiwan to refer to China's own history. Not only traditionalist historians preferred dynastic periodization; those working today in the People's Republic follow the same principle, as does the
Cambridge History of China
, the flagship of Western China studies published in a series of volumes since 1978.

The first variations from this rule emerged in relation to the nineteenth century. Marxist orthodoxy dates the beginning of China's “modern history” (
jindai shi
) to the Anglo-Chinese treaty of Nanjing in 1842, and of its “recent history” (
xiandai shi
) to the anti-imperialist protest movement of 1919. Thus, a nineteenth century with a content-based definition starts only in the 1840s. In today's China studies, however, both in the United States and increasingly in China itself, historians have begun to use the term “late imperial age,” referring not simply to the final decades of the empire (usually known as the “late Qing period”) but to the period between the mid-sixteenth century and the end of the long nineteenth century; some even go as far back as the eleventh century, which in China was an age of political consolidation, social regeneration, and cultural blossoming. This “late imperial China” stretches until the end of the monarchy in 1911. It has a formal affinity with the European concept of an “early modern age” or, in updated variants, with the idea of an “Old Europe” that began in the Middle Ages. But it does not share the emphasis on the period around 1800 as the end of a historical formation. The general view now is that, despite a number of innovative elements, the calendar nineteenth century represented a decadent final phase of an incomparably stable ancien régime. But China represents only one possible variant in the quest for a substantive definition of the nineteenth century.

3 Breaks and Transitions

National and Global Turning Points

Unless one accepts the mystical notion that a single zeitgeist expresses all aspects of life in an epoch, historical periodization must face the problem of the “temporal diversity of cultural domains.”
²⁵
In most cases, a break in political history does not also mark a turning point in economic history; stylistic periods in art history do not generally begin or end at points when new developments are thought to be emerging in social history. Whereas social history is often free of
periodization debates because it tacitly takes over the usual division into political epochs, other writers warn against placing too much value on the history of events. Ernst Troeltsch, himself an important German theologian and intellectual historian of the early twentieth century, was unable to make much out of it. From a discussion of the non-event-based models of historical epochs to be found in Hegel, Comte, or Marx or in Kurt Breysig, Werner Sombart, or Max Weber, he drew the conclusion that “a truly objective periodization” was possible “only on social, economic, political, and legal foundations,” only on the prior basis of “the great basic forces.”
²⁶
Troeltsch did not believe, however, that such basic forces enabled a sequencing of history that was unambiguous and clear-cut.

Troeltsch was concerned with the history of Europe as a whole, not of individual nations. Whereas a particular national history still finds safety in a general consensus about its key dates, it becomes all the more difficult for Europe as a whole to agree on the epochal shifts of common importance. The political trajectory of Britain, for instance, where not even the Revolutions of 1848 played a major role, has been such that popular historians are not alone in using the term “Victorian” for the period between 1837 and 1901—a term derived from the reign of a constitutional monarch. England experienced its profound political break considerably earlier, in the two revolutions of the seventeenth century, and the shock waves of the French Revolution after 1789 were by no means as powerful there as they were on the Continent. British history books today tend to situate the decisive turning point not in 1789 but in 1783—the year when the North American colonies were finally lost—and therefore attach much less significance to 1800 than one commonly finds in France, Germany, or Poland. In Britain the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is less dramatic, sidelining the rupture of the Napoleonic Wars that were fought on the other side of the Channel.

If the temporal shape to be given to European history is far from uncontroversial, how much more difficult is it to agree on a periodization for the world!
²⁷
Political dates scarcely help. Before the twentieth century, not a single year can be regarded as epoch-making for the whole of humanity. The French Revolution may be seen in retrospect as fraught with significance for world history, but the deposal and execution of the ruler of a medium-sized European country did not have the shattering impact of a world-historical event. In East Asia, the Pacific, and southern Africa it went largely unnoticed. The French philosopher and cultural historian Louis Bourdeau remarked in 1888 that the French Revolution did not exist in the minds of 400 million Chinese—hence his doubts about its true significance.
²⁸
It was not the revolutionary program and its application within the borders of France but its expansion abroad by military means that had radiating consequences. The revolution had no impact in India or the Americas—with the exception of the French colonies in the Caribbean—until war broke out between Napoleon and the British. Even the First World War initially left large parts of the globe untouched; only its end in 1918 triggered a worldwide
crisis, including a deadly influenza pandemic.
²⁹
The Wall Street crash of 1929 was the first
economic
event of truly global weight; producers and consumers on every continent were reeling from its consequences within a few months. Not long afterward, the Second World War began in stages: in July 1937 for China and Japan; in September 1939 for Europe west of Russia; and in 1941 for the rest of the world, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on the United States. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, however, were less affected by it than they had been by the First World War. So we may say that before 1945 not a single date in world
political
history had an immediate or near-immediate impact on the whole of humanity. Only in the second postwar period did a shared “event history” begin for the entire world.

Let us now consider what historians (and, following them, probably the public at large) in individual nation-states have seen as the key moments of
domestic
politics in a “long” nineteenth century. The years around the turn of the century had an epochal impact wherever Napoleon's armies toppled or irrevocably weakened the ancien régime. This was the case in the mosaic of Germany's western statelets, in Spain and Portugal, in colonial Saint-Domingue (soon to become Haiti), and in Egypt—but not in the Tsarist Empire, for example. There were also indirect effects. Had the Spanish monarchy not collapsed in 1808, the revolutions that won independence for Hispanic America would have begun
later
, not in 1810. The French occupation of the Ottoman province of Egypt in 1798—a short-lived affair that ended within three years—delivered a shock to the ruling elite in Istanbul that triggered a many-sided modernization drive. In a longer time perspective, however, the defeat of 1878 in the war with Russia represented a more serious blow to the sultan, since it led to the loss of some of the richest areas of the empire: the Balkan peninsula was 76 percent Ottoman in 1876, but only 37 percent in 1879.
That
was the great political turning point for the Ottomans, the key moment in their slide into decline. The deposal of the autocratic sultan by the “Young Turk” officers in 1908 was the almost inevitable revolutionary sequel. Lastly, indirect effects of the Napoleonic Wars were also felt in areas where Britain intervened militarily. The Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) were severed from the Dutch state, then part of the Napoleonic empire, and subsequently remained under British rule. In Indonesia, a brief British occupation (1811–16) led to deep changes in the restored system of Dutch rule. In India the British made a bid for supremacy in 1798, under the most successful of the colonial conquistadors, the Marquess of Wellesley, and by 1818 at the latest it was securely in their hands.

In other countries, the main political breaks—more important than those around the year 1800—came well into the new century. Many states came into being only in the calendar nineteenth century: the Republic of Haiti in 1804, the republics of Hispanic America between 1810 and 1826, the kingdoms of Belgium and Greece in 1830 and 1832 respectively, the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the German Reich in 1871, and the Principality of Bulgaria in 1878. Today's New Zealand
began its existence as a state with the Treaty of Waitangi, which representatives of the British Crown concluded with Maori chieftains in 1840. Canada and Australia were converted by acts of federation (in 1867 and 1901, respectively) from groups of adjacent colonies into national states. Norway severed its union with Sweden only in 1905. In all these cases, the foundational date divides the nineteenth century into a time
before
and a time
after
the achievement of unity and independence. The structuring power of these slices through time is greater than that of the approximate calendar periods that we happen to call “centuries.”

There is no lack of further examples. Britain's internal politics was unsettled but not thrown off course by the age of revolution, and the country entered the nineteenth century with a highly oligarchic political order. The Reform Act of 1832 eventually expanded the number of active citizens entitled to vote and brought to an end the peculiar British form of an ancien régime. The year 1832 thus marks the most extensive change within post-1688 British constitutional history, perhaps even greater at a symbolic level than in reality. Hungary, which remained off the campaign routes of the Napoleonic armies, underwent its first major political crisis in 1848–49—but then it was more intense than anywhere else in Europe. For China, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 represented an epochal challenge of revolutionary dimensions, the first internal crisis on such a scale for more than two hundred years. Political system changes in the world became more frequent in the 1860s. The two most important—each revolutionary in its essence—were the collapse of the Southern Confederacy and the restoration of national unity at the end of the American Civil War (1865), and the fall of the shogunate and the beginning of Japan's intensive state-building effort in 1868 (the Meiji Renewal). In both cases, system crisis and a reform drive swept away structures of rule and political practices that had survived from the eighteenth century: the feudal federalism of the Tokugawa dynasty (in power since 1603) and the slave system of the Southern states of North America. In both Japan and the United States, the transition from one political world to another took place
in midcentury
.