The Transformation of the World (17 page)

Fourth
. After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, a new climate of intense imperialist expansion became perceptible. While the instruments of financial control were perfected and the collaboration between European governments and private capital became ever closer, claims to occupy and, as far as possible, to rule overseas territories came increasingly to the fore. This was the quintessence of the “new imperialism” or “high imperialism.” Indirect influence and access to bases and coastal enclaves were no longer enough. Africa became divided on paper and then soon on the ground, and Southeast Asia, with the
sole exception of Siam (Thailand), was also incorporated into the European colonial empires.

Fifth
. After a time of persistent unrest, new political orders were consolidated in a number of large countries around the world. The process differed in both its character and its causes: the provisional conclusion of nation building (Germany, Japan), a retreat from earlier reforms (the United States after the end of Reconstruction in 1877; the return to strict autocracy in Russia under Tsar Alexander III in 1881 and in the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1881); a transition to regimes geared to top-down reform (Mexico under Porfirio Díaz, Siam under King Chulalongkorn, China under the Tongzhi Restoration, Egypt under the proconsul Lord Cromer); or a refounding of parliamentary democracy (France in 1880 after the internal pacification of the Third Republic, Britain after the electoral reform of 1884). The results, however, were astonishingly similar: until the new outbreak of revolutionary unrest in 1905, the systems of rule around the world were more stable than they had been in the preceding decades. It is possible to view this negatively, as a hardening of state apparatuses, but also positively, as a revival of the state's capacity for action and a safeguarding of internal peace. It was this period, too, that witnessed the first attempts at state provision of essential services, over and above mere crisis management. The roots were being laid for the welfare state in Germany and Britain, and even in the United States, where the long-term humanitarian consequences of the Civil War had to be grappled with.

Sixth
. The standing of the 1880s as a decade of cultural renewal in Europe is probably undisputed. The transition to “classical modernism” was not an all-European but a Western European, or indeed French, phenomenon. It began in painting with the late work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, in literature with the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, and in music, a little later with Claude Debussy's
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
.
⁷³
In philosophy, German authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche (especially his major works of the 1880s) and Gottlob Frege (his
Begriffsschrift
, first published in 1879, is the foundation of modern mathematical logic) offered new approaches that were as varied in content as they were influential in their impact. In economic theory, the Austrian Carl Menger (1871), the Englishman William Stanley Jevons (1871), and above all the Swiss Léon Walras (1874) had a worldwide impact in the 1880s that laid the foundations for twentieth-century thinking. Outside the West there seem to have been no artistic or philosophical innovations of comparable radicalism and impact. But meanwhile the press grew in weight—palpably in Europe, North America, Australia, Japan, China, India, Egypt, and elsewhere—while tending to disseminate the latest cultural trends around the world.

Seventh
. What was most striking in the non-Occidental world around 1880 was a new critical self-assertiveness, which may be regarded as an early form of anticolonialism or a renewed attempt to draw on indigenous resources in the encounter with the West. Breaking from the sometimes uncritical fascination
with which local elites greeted European expansion in the Victorian age, this reflective attitude differed from spontaneous xenophobic resistance, but it would be too simple to describe it as “nationalist” at that time. It expressed itself most clearly in India—where the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885), though remaining loyal to the Raj, campaigned in support of a series of grievances, reminiscent in many respects of the Italian Risorgimento—and in Vietnam, where 1885 is still commemorated as the year that saw the birth of a coherent national resistance to the French.
⁷⁴
In the Muslim world, individual scholars and activists—for example, Sayyid Jamal al-Din (“al-Afghani”)—advocated an up-to-date Islam as the basis for self-assertion vis-à-vis Europe.
⁷⁵
And in China a young literatus by the name of Kang Youwei formulated in 1888 a kind of reformed Confucianism, thoroughly cosmopolitan and not at all defensive toward the West, that was meant to revitalize the Chinese Empire. Ten years later it would acquire political significance within the ambitious, though ultimately futile, imperial initiative called the Hundred Days of Reform.
⁷⁶

Such anticolonial stirrings occurred simultaneously with new forms and levels of protest that emerged among the laboring classes and women in many parts of the world. Obsessions with authority faded, new objectives were set for the protest movements, and more efficient organizational forms were devised. This was equally true of the great waves of strikes of the 1880s and 1890s in the United States and of the contemporaneous movement for freedom and political rights in Japan.
⁷⁷
The forms of agrarian protest also began to change. In many peasant societies—the entire Middle East, for example—this period witnessed a shift from the premodern militancy of spontaneous uprisings (
jacqueries
) to peasant leagues or organized rent strikes that mounted a strong defense of economic interests.

Subtle Processes

Nevertheless, one must not be too naive or one-sided in looking for watersheds or historic shifts. World history is even less amenable to precisely defined time frames than the history of a nation or continent. An ability to recognize epochal changes comes not from deep insight into a essentialized “meaning” of the age but from study of a number of superimposed time grids. Epochal thresholds are condensations of such fine dividing lines, or, to use another image, derive from a coincidence of clusters of intensified change. At least as interesting as the crude division into epochs are those subtler periodizations that have to be developed anew for each spatial entity, each human society, and each sphere of existence from climate history to the history of art. All these structures help to provide bearings for the layperson's sense of history as well as analytic instruments for the historian.

In his theory of temporalities, Fernand Braudel shows that overlapping histories develop at quite different tempos—from the hourly precision of
l'histoire événementielle
in a battle or a coup d'état to the slow, glacier-like changes of
climate or agrarian history.
⁷⁸
Whether a process is faster or slower is a question of judgment: the answer depends on the purpose behind the observer's argument. Historical sociology and conceptually kindred ways of writing history often proceed very freely with time. In a typical example of this habit, the sociologist Jack Goldstone writes that “within a very short time,” between 1750 and 1850, most countries of Western Europe arrived at economic modernity.
⁷⁹
However, such off-the-cuff statements should not lead analysts of world history to dismiss as pedantic the meticulous chronology of years and months. They need to keep their temporal parameters flexible and, above all, to account for the different speeds and directions of change.

Historical processes do not only unfold within different time frames—short, medium, and long term. They also vary according to whether they are continuous or discontinuous, additive or cumulative, reversible or irreversible, decelerating or accelerating. There are repetitive processes,
⁸⁰
and there are unique processes with a transformative character. One interesting class of the latter are those that unfold causatively between different fields that are usually kept apart. Here historians, for example, refer to environmental effects on social structures or to effects of mentalities on economic behavior.
⁸¹
If processes unfold in parallel, they often relate to one another in a nonsimultaneous manner; they are classified and evaluated differently within the same natural chronology by the measure of non-chronological phase models.
⁸²
When compared with the challenges of describing such finer temporal structures, the division of history into “centuries” is no more than a necessary evil.

5 Clocks and Acceleration

Cyclical and Linear History

The temporal structures that historians enlist as aids are never created entirely out of the perception of time that historical subjects can be shown to have had. If that were the case, there would be not a binding chronology but a chaos of different cultures of time, each one self-sufficient in relation to the others. Only when astronomical-mathematical reconstruction plus the linear succession of narratives provide the twin bases for a secure chronology can the perception of time contribute to internal differentiation within history and histories. Temporal regularity is necessary to experience acceleration.

World history often involves unusually long chains of consecutive effects. Industrialization, for example, can be dated to a period of several decades in each individual European country, but as a global process it still has not come to an end. Despite many national peculiarities, the impetus of England's “Industrial Revolution” is still detectable in a number of Asian countries; China today displays some of the side effects of Europe's early industrialization, such as ecological depredation and untrammeled exploitation of human labor.

The idea of historical movement as “round-shaped” rather than linear-progressive should by no means be written off as the expression of a premodern vision. Nor is it analytically worthless. Economic historians work with models of production and trade cycles of varying length, the discovery of which was an important theoretical event in the nineteenth century.
⁸³
And “long waves” of imperial control and hegemonic supremacy have proved an illuminating idea in studies of the global distribution of power.
⁸⁴
The West has known both linear and cyclical historical movement, but since the eighteenth century it has adopted progress, no matter howoften blocked or even reversed, as its guiding temporal template.
⁸⁵
Other civilizations only later took this over from Europe. Some—like the Islamic world—stuck to their own ideas of linearity: history not as constant development but as an interrupted succession of moments.
⁸⁶
It should at least be considered whether the modern science of history can accept such conceptions as appropriate for the reconstruction of historical reality.

Let us take the example of Michael Aung-Thwin, an American expert in Burmese history who postulates a spiral shape for the social history of Southeast Asia until the second third of the nineteenth century. What led him to this hypothesis—for him it is no more than that—was the conflict between the historian's assumption of evolution, progress, and cause-effect relations and the anthropologist's reliance on structure, analogy, homology, and reciprocity. Historians are liable to conclude prematurely that the changes they observe in a particular period of time are
permanent
transformations. Aung-Thwin's account, by contrast, sees the history of Southeast Asia in terms of “oscillation” between an “agrarian-demographic” cycle (in countries focused on their internal economy) and a “commercial” cycle in coastal cities and political entities. Burmese society, for instance, after many changes in the middle of the eighteenth century, returned to a situation very similar to that which had obtained in the glorious Pagan dynasty of the thirteenth century. This was possible because of the strength of Burmese institutions.
⁸⁷
British colonization, which subjugated Burma in stages between 1824 and 1886, undermined this strength, but it was only the coming of revolution and national independence in 1948 that invalidated the old model of historical movement for good.

We do not need to form an opinion about how much of this stands up as a general interpretation of Burmese and Southeast Asian history. Another example would have served the same illustrative purpose. What is at stake is a general argument: from around the 1760s onward, European philosophers agreed on the idea that Asia was “stagnant” or “stationary” in comparison with the dynamic societies of Western Europe.
⁸⁸
Hegel elaborated this view at considerable length and with a great deal of sophistication in his lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in Berlin in the 1820s. Not long afterward a cruder version gained currency, and European authors routinely spoke of “peoples without history,” among which some of them included not only “savages” without a written language or a state but even the Asiatic high cultures and the Slavs. This refusal to
accept that different cultures can participate simultaneously in a common spacetime has been rightly criticized as a crude instance of “binary simplification,”
⁸⁹
which sees in Asia's past only the eternal return of the same or merely superficial dynastic-military complications. But the other side of this view is no less problematic: to bathe the whole of history—if only “modern” history—in the uniform glow of European concepts of progress. The sociological modernization theory of the 1960s fell into this trap with its vision of history as a competitive race, with the efficient North Atlantic out ahead and other regions as stragglers or late developers. Keeping open at least the possibility of nonlinear historical movement frees us from the false alternative of binary simplification or Eurocentric homogenization.

Reforming Time