The Transformation of the World (15 page)

“Early Modern Age”—Worldwide?

The
political
beginning of the nineteenth century can therefore scarcely be identified chronologically. To equate it with the French Revolution would be to think too narrowly, with France, Germany, or Saint-Domingue in mind. Ancien régimes tumbled down all through the nineteenth century. In a large and important country such as Japan, the modern age began politically as late as 1868. What should we make, then, of periodizations that have Troeltsch's social and cultural “basic forces” as their criterion? This question takes us back to the category of the “early modern age.” The more convincingly we manage to define the early modern age as a rounded epoch, the more solid is the foundation on which the nineteenth century can be inaugurated. Here the signals are contradictory, however. On the one hand, a combination of specialist research, intellectual
originality and academic politics has led to a situation in which many historians simply take the existence of an early modern age for granted and adjust their own thinking to a framework that extends from 1500 to 1800. The result is what inevitably occurs when routine use gives period schemas the appearance of a life of their own: transitional phenomena drop out of sight. It may therefore be not unwise to place major events—“1789,” “1871,” or “1914”—at the middle rather than the edge of their period, so that they are seen from a temporal periphery both before
and
after.
³⁰

On the other hand, it seems more and more compelling that both outer dates of the customarily defined early modern age should be left more open, if only for the sake of the continuities with previous and subsequent periods.
³¹
The only break that long went undisputed, at least for European history, is the one of 1500—although many historians insert it into a transitional period from roughly 1450 to 1520. It is obvious that a number of far-reaching innovative processes occurred together at this time: (late) Renaissance, Reformation, beginnings of early capitalism, emergence of the early modern state, discovering of maritime routes to America and tropical Asia; even, going back to the 1450s, the invention of book printing with movable type. Numerous authors of world histories have taken 1500 as the key orientation date.
³²
But even the momentousness of 1500 is now in dispute: an alternative approach speaks of a very long and gradual passage from the medieval to the modern world, so that the boundary between the Middle Ages and the early modern age falls away. The German historian Heinz Schilling has emphasized the
slow
emergence of early modernity in Europe and has downplayed 1500 in comparison with the turning points around 1250 and 1750. He attributes the vision of a sudden dawn of the modern age to the nineteenth-century cults of Columbus and Luther.
³³
Earlier, in an account of Europe's institutional structures between 1000 and 1800, Dietrich Gerhard held back from the categories “Middle Ages” and “modern age” and employed the term “Old Europe” for the entire period.
³⁴
Analogies with the concept of “late imperial China” are easy to detect.

Paradoxically, historians of non-European civilizations have recently taken up and experimented with the classical Eurocentric designation “early modern age.” Few of them actually intended to force alien concepts onto the history of Asia, Africa, and the Americas; most were looking for ways to incorporate these parts of the world into a general history of modernization and to translate the experiences of each into a language intelligible to a European readership. The historian who departed most from prevailing dogma was Fernand Braudel, who in his history of capitalism and material life from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century actually treated the
whole
world as if this were a matter of course.
³⁵
Braudel was careful not to be drawn into a debate about the periodization of world history. What interested him were not so much the great transformations in technology, trade or worldviews as the functioning of societies and intersocietal networks within a given time frame.

Braudel's panoramic vision has found surprisingly few imitators. Recent discussions on the applicability of the term “early modern age” have tended to focus on particular regions. In the cases of Russia, China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, India, Iran, Southeast Asia, and, of course, colonial South and North America, historians have looked for similarities and dissimilarities with contemporaneous West European forms of political and social organization. There is certainly much scope for comparing England and Japan, and there are striking parallels between the processes that Braudel described for the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II and those that Anthony Reid analyzed for the similarly multicultural world of Southeast Asia during the same period: growth of trade, deployment of new military technologies, centralization of the state, and widespread religious unrest (though introduced to Southeast Asia from outside, by Christianity and Islam).
³⁶

Insofar as the discussion is also about chronology, some agreement has been reached that the period from 1450 to 1600 was one of especially big changes in large areas of Eurasia and the Americas. There is much to be said for an approximately simultaneous transition to an early modern age in many different parts of the world. With the exception of Mexico, Peru, and certain Caribbean islands, incipient European expansion was not yet a major determining factor. Only in a “long” eighteenth century, whose beginning may be dated to the 1680s, did European influence become plainly visible
worldwide
and not simply in the Atlantic area. Then even China, still closed off and resistant to any attempt at colonization, was drawn into global economic flows of silk, tea, and silver.
³⁷

Up to now there have been no comparable reflections on the
end
of a possibly worldwide early modern age. For some regions the evidence seems clear-cut: in Hispanic America, the national independence gained by some regions by the late 1820s marked the end of the early modern era. Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 not only toppled the Mameluk regime dating from the Middle Ages but shook the political system and culture of the suzerain Ottoman power; the French body blow became the trigger for the early reforms under Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39). It has therefore been suggested that we should speak of an Ottoman “long nineteenth century” (1798–1922) or a “reform century from 1808 to 1908.”
³⁸
Things stand quite differently in Japan, which experienced much social turbulence between 1600 and 1850 but no sweeping changes comparable to those that followed the opening of the country in the mid-nineteenth century. If the term “early modern Japan” has any meaning, it must stretch well into the 1850s.
³⁹

The beginning of European colonization, at very different points in time, represented an epochal break in nearly all parts of Asia and everywhere in Africa, although it is not always easy to establish when the European presence really became tangible; overall, certainly not before 1890. Since the British conquest of India unfolded in stages between 1757 and 1848, while the French took from 1858 to 1895 to establish control of Indochina, a political-military periodization
would have little relevance. In the case of Africa, leading specialists extend the Middle Ages as far as the period around 1800 and avoid using the term “early modern age” to characterize the first three quarters of the nineteenth century.
⁴⁰
The decades until the European invasion remain without a name.

4 The Age of Revolution, Victorianism, Fin de Siècle

It is thus even more difficult in a global perspective than a European one alone to date the beginning of the nineteenth century in terms of content rather than formal calendar. There is much to be said for conceding an epochal character to what the great German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck once termed the
Sattelzeit
(“saddle period”), a time of transition to modernity from roughly 1750 to roughly 1850 (sometimes 1770–1830) when, in Koselleck's words, “our past becomes our present.”
⁴¹
That period of dissolution and renewal may be variously seen as involving a forward extension of the eighteenth century or a backward extension of the nineteenth. It led into a middle period that, at least for Europe, articulated in a condensed way the cultural phenomena that are considered with hindsight as most characteristic of the nineteenth century. Then in the 1880s and 1890s such a jolt passed through the world that it is appropriate to describe those decades as the beginning of a further subperiod. We might call it the fin de siècle, as it was known at the time: not
a
termination of any given century but
the
fin de siècle.
⁴²
Its end has traditionally been identified with the outbreak of the First World War, but, as we argued earlier in this chapter, 1918–19 seems a more appropriate date, since the war itself realized certain potentials of the prewar period. There is also much to be said for the even longer “turn of the century” suggested by a group of German historians, whose richly illustrated work has focused on the years from 1880 to 1930.
⁴³
In many ways 1930 makes sense as a terminal date for such a protracted turn of the century. Particularly strong support for such a periodization comes from economic history.
⁴⁴
One might also take it as far as 1945 and characterize the whole period from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War as “the age of empires and imperialism,” since at root both world wars were clashes of empires.
⁴⁵

At the risk of an inadmissible Anglocentrism, the decorative word “Victorianism” might be considered for the nameless years between Koselleck's
Sattelzeit
and the fin de siècle: that is, for the “real” nineteenth century. It would relieve one of the embarrassment of having to choose from a variety of narrower, content-based terms: “the age of the first capitalist globalization,” “the golden age of capital,” or perhaps “the age of nationalism and reform.” Why Victorianism?
⁴⁶
The name reflects the remarkable economic and military—and to some extent, also cultural—supremacy that Britain exercised in the world during those decades (not before or after). It is also a relatively well established category, which in most uses does not coincide precisely with Queen Victoria's years on the throne. G. M. Young, in his famous portrait
Victorian England
(1936),
referred only to the years from 1832 until the point when “the dark shadow of the eighties” descended.
⁴⁷
Many others have followed his lead and treated the years from the mid-1880s until the First World War as a sui generis period—a transmogrification of “High Victorianism.”
⁴⁸

A Global
Sattelzeit
?

Which factors are the most important for giving coherence to a global
Sattelzeit
? What follows from Rudolf Vierhaus's suggestion that the eighteenth century should be freed from its narrow association with the “classical” early modern age and opened up as “the threshold to the modern world.”
⁴⁹
Which aspects of that period of world history permit us to consider the roughly six decades around 1800 as an epoch in its own right?
⁵⁰

First
, as C. A. Bayly in particular has shown, the global relationship of forces changed dramatically during this period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an age in which the most successful large organizations of European origin (Spain's colonial empire and the intercontinental trading networks of the Dutch and English chartered companies) were unable to gain clear superiority over China and the “gunpowder empires” of the Islamic world (Ottoman Empire, Mogul India, and the Iranian empire of the Safavid shahs). Only the advent of the fiscal-military state in England and elsewhere, organized for conquest on the basis of rational resource use, gave Europe a significantly greater punch in the world. This conqueror state appeared in various guises in Britain, in the Russia of Catherine II and her two successors, and in revolutionary-Napoleonic France. All three empires expanded with such force and on such a scale that the period between 1760–70 and 1830 may be described as a “first age of global imperialism.”
⁵¹
The Seven Years' War (1756–63), fought in both hemispheres, had already been a war for hegemony between England and France, in which North American tribes and Indian princes had played a significant role on either side.
⁵²
The great conflict of empires between 1793 and 1815 ranged even farther beyond Europe. Fought on four continents, it was a genuine world war that had a direct impact as far away as Southeast Asia, and in 1793 even affected China, when Lord Macartney traveled to Beijing to put out the first diplomatic feelers to the imperial court.

After 1780 two new factors joined the “mix” of the Seven Years' War: on the one hand, the struggle for independence on the part of settlers in British North America and (later) Spanish South and Central America, as well as of black slaves in Haiti; on the other hand, a weakening of the Asiatic empires, partly for reasons specific to each one, which for the first time caused them to fall behind Europe in military capability and in the game of power politics. The interplay of these forces changed the political geography of the world. Spain, Portugal, and France disappeared from the American landmass. The expansion of the Asiatic empires finally ground to a halt. Britain built a position of supremacy in India as a springboard for further assaults, established itself securely in Australia, and covered the globe with a network of naval bases.

Whereas earlier historians spoke of an “Atlantic revolution” all the way from Geneva to Lima, thereby correcting a fixation on the European twins (political revolution in France and industrial revolution in England),
⁵³
we can go a step further and grasp the European “Age of Revolution” as only part of a
general
crisis and shifting of power that also made itself felt in the American settler colonies and the Islamic world from the Balkans to India.
⁵⁴
The general crisis of the decades around 1800 was at the same time a crisis of the Bourbon Monarchy; of British, Spanish, and French colonial rule in the New World; and of such once-mighty Asiatic powers as the Ottoman and Chinese empires, the Crimean Tatar Federation, and the Mogul empire's successor states in the South Asian subcontinent. The French invasion of Algiers in 1830, when that “pirates' nest” was still
de jure
a part of the Ottoman Empire, and the defeat of China in the Opium War of 1839–42—the Qing Dynasty's first military setback in two hundred years—dramatically illuminated the new relations that had taken shape during the
Sattelzeit
.