The Transformation of the World (195 page)

What other picture of the nineteenth century results if the vantage is not purely European? The first point to make is that a long nineteenth century, from the 1780s to the First World War, remains a useful assumption or auxiliary construction, but it should not be taken as a natural or globally valid form of the past. Even if one does not stick pettily to the European outer dates of 1789 and 1914, whole national and regional histories elude this framework. It may be applicable elsewhere, but sometimes for reasons that have little to do with Europe. The fact that Australia's recorded history begins in 1788, with the first penal convoy, is not related in any way to the French Revolution. And if the years between the abdication of the Qianlong Emperor in 1796 and the Revolution of 1911 have a certain unity within the political history of China, this has reasons internal to the dynasty and cannot be attributed to European activities in East Asia. There are numerous instances in which a different periodization should be preferred. In Japan, the years between the opening of 1853 and the collapse of the empire in 1945 constitute a complete historical cycle. Latin America's nineteenth century stretches from the independence revolutions of the 1820s (whose causes go back to the 1760s) to the eve of the Great Depression of 1929. As far as the United States is concerned, the Civil War of the 1860s ended a first era that had begun with the transatlantic crisis of the 1760s, and the new epoch of political and social history certainly did not end in 1914 or 1917–18 but rather in 1941 or 1945 or, from the important point of view of race relations, as late as the 1960s. For the whole of Africa—with the exception of Egypt and South Africa—neither the years between 1800 and 1900 nor the “long” nineteenth century seem a relevant
time frame. The colonial invasion of the 1880s opened an age that lasted beyond the First World War to the peak of decolonization in the 1960s. It follows that a global historical periodization cannot work with precise cutoff points like those that mark particular national histories or the history of Europe. The beginning and end of the nineteenth century must remain open.

Yet the various narrative threads of this book do yield a pragmatic solution. A new era gradually began in the 1760s with a multiple political crisis throughout the Atlantic space, Britain's colonial implantation in India, and the development of new production techniques. It ended in the course of the 1920s, as the manifold consequences of the First World War (some of them positive in East Asia and Latin America) became visible, and movements for national autonomy arose all over the colonial world (except for tropical Africa) and other regions held down by the West. Another process with far-reaching implications was the transformation of the Soviet regime from a center of world revolution to a neoimperialist power. Over a vast territory, the most important nineteenth-century current of dissident ideas—socialism—crystallized into a state with no precedent in history, introducing new polarities into world politics and, in the initial period, a new kind of revolutionary ferment.

The First World War had disenchanted the West and placed a question mark over its claim to rule over, or at least to act as a civilizing guardian for, the rest of humanity. Many global interrelations of the prewar period had thinned out.
¹⁵
The new order that emerged from the peace conferences of 1919–1920 was not totally misconceived, but it was not capable of fulfilling many expectations; Wilson had not brought about perpetual peace. The forces of capitalist regeneration seemed to be stretched beyond the limit, at least in Europe. Liberalism in all its four aspects—moral/individual-ethical, constitutional-political, international, and economic—was under strong legitimation pressure and losing influence worldwide.
¹⁶
The 1920s marked the decisive passage from the nineteenth century to another age.

4 Five Characteristics of the Century

How should this long nineteenth century, open at either end, be characterized from the point of view of global history? We cannot try to summarize the content of this book in a few sentences, nor will it advance our knowledge to repeat the headings conventionally, and accurately, used to describe the main trends of the age: industrialization, urbanization, state building, colonialism, globalization, and a few more besides. Instead, let us propose five less common angles of vision.

(1) The nineteenth century was an age of
asymmetrical efficiency growth
. An overall gain in efficiency manifested itself in three spheres. First, the productivity of human labor increased in a degree that outstripped growth processes in earlier
epochs. Even if statistics cannot meet the challenge of quantification, no one disputes the fact that in 1900, material value creation per capita of the world population was considerably higher than a century before. Per capita income had risen, humanity had become materially richer, and long-term growth, with conjunctural fluctuations oscillating around a steady upward trend, had been achieved for the first time in history. One of the two factors underlying this was the spread of the industrial mode of production, marked by an extensive division of labor, factory organization, and coal-powered machinery—a process with a very uneven regional distribution, even in the most developed industrial heartlands of northwestern Europe and the northern United States. It rested to some extent on scientific principles known for some time. Innovative routines, together with new market structures and legal conditions capable of making them worthwhile, developed in a few countries in Europe and North America and, as the century wore on, gave rise to self-reproducing systems of knowledge production and “human capital” formation, both in public or private higher education and within industry itself. “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century,” as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead trenchantly remarked in his Lowell Lectures of 1925, was “the invention of the method of invention.”
¹⁷

The other source of increased wealth was the opening up of new frontiers in every continent: from the American Midwest to Argentina, from Kazakhstan to Burma. This, too, was bound up with particular visions of modernity; not every kind of nineteenth-century modernity was placed in an industrial frame. A kind of agrarian revolution preceded the Industrial Revolution, above all in England. Later, accompanying the uneven and often less-than-revolutionary spread of industrialization, there was a much wider extension of land use, resulting in higher productivity for individual producers in some frontier areas. The typical products of these frontiers were geared not to local consumption but to intercontinental trade, which was no longer simply trade in luxury goods. The application of industrial technology in the form of steamships and railroads rapidly lowered transport costs, thereby boosting the export of classical frontier items such as wheat, rice, cotton, and coffee. The opening up of agrarian frontiers was linked to industrialization insofar as demand grew for raw materials, and food had to be found for the industrial workforce newly released from the land. But only in the twentieth century do we see an industrialization of agriculture itself and the global rise of agroindustry.

A third domain clearly displaying efficiency growth was the armed forces. The killing capacity of an individual soldier increased, not as a direct result of industrialization but in close parallel to it. Along with innovation in weapons technology, advances in organization and strategy were an independent factor in efficiency gains—another precondition being the political will to divert government resources to the military. International discrepancies in these respects became noticeable in the German wars of unification, the numerous colonial wars of the time, and the Russo-Japanese War. In 1914, military apparatuses
scarcely susceptible to political control entered into open conflict with one another. These apparatuses with their real or imagined inherent dynamism—one famous example of such a clockwork-like autonomous logic was the war plan of Alfred von Schlieffen, the chief of the Imperial German General Staff—made an incompetent or irresponsible foreign policy even more dangerous than in the past. The potential destructiveness of the instruments multiplied the risks of political folly.

The World War itself created the occasion for further efficiency gains at several levels, including the organization of a war economy in Germany, Britain, and the United States. At the end of the century, the unevenness of the distribution of military power around the world was without precedent. It had become identical with industrial might, in a way that had not been the case at all in 1850. There were no longer any nonindustrial great powers. Although Afghans, Ethiopians, and Boers scored some momentous victories in passing, no non-European military player—bar Japan—could withstand the armored powers of “the West.” This military “great divergence” gradually receded again only in the early 1950s, when China resisted the United States in the Korean War and the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

A fourth field of increased efficiency was the greater control of state apparatuses over their own population. Administrative regulations became denser; local authorities took on additional powers; official agencies registered and classified the population, as well as its ownership of land and fiscal potential; taxes were skimmed off more fairly and with greater regularity from a growing number of sources; police forces were strengthened in both depth and breadth. On the other hand, there was no straightforward correlation between the political system and the intensity with which government steered people's lives. Up to today, a democracy may be densely administered, while a despotic regime may have only a weak presence at the base of society. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of new technologies of local governance—prerequisites also for universal conscription and state education and welfare systems. The state began to develop into a new Leviathan, but one that did not necessarily have to be a monster.

This increase in the effective reach of the state was also very unevenly distributed: Japan was more thoroughly penetrated by the state than China; Germany more than Spain. Almost everywhere, the colonial state had the will to register and regulate its subjects, but often it lacked the financial resources and the personnel to carry it out. The idea of the nation-state that emerged in the nineteenth century, involving a coincidence of state form, territory, and culture (language), stood in a mutually determining relationship with state intervention. Members of a nation wanted not to be subjects but rather free citizens treated equally within a homogeneous collective; they strove for their country to be recognized internationally and to be held in high esteem. Yet, in the name of national unity, national honor, and the national interest, people endured a regulation frenzy that they would have opposed in earlier times.

Partial efficiency increases occurred in many places around the world. In no way was industrialization an independent variable or a demiurge unleashing all other kinds of dynamic: agrarian frontiers were more widely spread than industrial heartlands; Washington and Suvorov, Napoleon and Wellington conducted preindustrial wars. Nor did the three spheres of growing efficiency—the economy, the armed forces, and the state—reinforce one another in a predictable manner. In the Ottoman Empire, a “modern” state bureaucracy began to develop without a significant industrial backdrop. The United States in the decades after the Civil War was an economic giant but a military dwarf. Russia industrialized and had a huge army, but it is questionable how deeply its state penetrated society before 1917, especially in the countryside. In fact, only Germany, Japan, and France remain as models of a modern nation-state in every conceivable dimension. Britain, with its modest territorial army and relatively nonbureaucratic local government, was as much a case on its own as the United States.

Nevertheless, the rise of Europe, the United States, and Japan in comparison with the rest of the world was more than ever before or since an incontrovertible fact. There were a whole series of reasons for this. At least until the First World War, their success story was self-sustaining. The dominant countries profited from a liberal world economic order of their own creation, which in turn supported economic growth that could be profitably steered in such a way as to finance a position of power in the international arena. Imperialism could also be a good investment. Although colonial expansion may not in every case have directly yielded monetary gains to the national economy, military superiority meant that it was relatively cost-effective to conquer and administer a colony. Imperialism was politically worthwhile so long as it cost the state little or nothing; and it called forth vested interests prepared to lend it political support.

(2) Less need be said about the epochal marker of increased
mobility
, since the relevant chapters above speak for themselves. The whole of recorded history is rife with movement: travels, mass migration, crusades, long-distance trade, spread of religions, languages, and art styles. Three things were new in the nineteenth century.

First, the scale of human mobility sharply increased. Earlier history knows no examples on a par with the emigration to North and South America, Siberia or Manchuria, nor has the magnitude of permanent relocation during the years between 1870 and 1930 been repeated since. It is a striking global characteristic of that period. The circulation of goods reached a new level too, when the luxury businesses of early modern merchants trading in silk, spices, tea, sugar, and tobacco were overshadowed by mass transfers of food staples and industrial raw materials. Aggregate figures for the expansion in world trade, far exceeding increases in output, clearly demonstrate this point. Capital in general was mobilized on a large scale only during this period. Before the middle of the century, wealthy individuals had lent money to princes and certain others who needed
it. The early modern chartered companies had been, by the standards of their time, complex financial operations. But it was only after 1860 or thereabouts that something like a capital market came into being. Driven even more by railroad construction than by the industrial factory economy, paper capital “flowed” for the first time around the globe—no longer (or not only) as actual bullion in ships' bellies. The age of liquidity was dawning. The steamship and the railroad increased the mobility of people and goods, while the telegraph, and later the telephone, facilitated the communication of information.