the transformation of the world a global history of the nineteenth century - jrgen osterhammel

The Transformation of the World

The Transformation of the World

A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
Jürgen Osterhammel
Translated by Patrick Camiller
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
First published in Germany by C. H. Beck under the title Die Verwandlung der Welt
© Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München 2009
English translation copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
Jacket illustration: Harbor at Shanghai, China, 1875, © Getty Images. Cover design by Faceout Studio, Charles Brock.
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osterhammel, Jürgen.
[Verwandlung der Welt. English]
The transformation of the world : a global history of the nineteenth century / Jürgen Osterhammel.
pages cm. — (America in the world)
“First published in Germany by C.H. Beck under the title Die Verwandlung der Welt, Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, Munchen 2009.”
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-0-691-14745-1 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. History, Modern—19th century.
I. Title.

D358.O8813 2014
909.81—dc23
2013025754
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International-Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences
from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT
and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association)
This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sabine and Philipp Dabringhaus
_______________________________________________
CONTENTS

Preface xi
Introduction xv
PART ONE: APPROACHES

I
Memory and Self-Observation: The Perpetuation of the Nineteenth Century 3
1 Visibility and Audibility 5
2 Treasuries of Memory and Knowledge 7
3 Observation, Description, Realism 17
4 Numbers 25
5 News 29
6 Photography 39
II
Time: When Was the Nineteenth Century? 45
1 Chronology and the Coherence of the Age 45

2 Calendar and Periodization 49
3 Breaks and Transitions 52
4 The Age of Revolution, Victorianism, Fin de Siècle 58
5 Clocks and Acceleration 67
III
Space: Where Was the Nineteenth Century? 77
1 Space and Time 77
2 Metageography: Naming Spaces 78
3 Mental Maps: The Relativity of Spatial Perspective 86
4 Spaces of Interaction: Land and Sea 94
5 Ordering and Governing Space 104
6 Territoriality, Diaspora, Borders 107
PART TWO: PANORAMAS

IV
Mobilities 117
1 Magnitudes and Tendencies 117
2 Population Disasters and the Demographic Transition 124
3 The Legacy of Early Modern Migrations: Creoles and Slaves 128
4 Penal Colony and Exile 133
5 Ethnic Cleansing 139
6 Internal Migration and the Changing Slave Trade 144
7 Migration and Capitalism 154
8 Global Motives 164
V
Living Standards: Risk and Security in Material Life 167
1 The Standard of Living and the Quality of Life 167
2 Life Expectancy and “Homo hygienicus” 170
3 Medical Fears and Prevention 178
4 Mobile Perils, Old and New 185

5 Natural Disasters 197
6 Famine 201
7 Agricultural Revolutions 211
8 Poverty and Wealth 216
9 Globalized Consumption 226
VI
Cities: European Models and Worldwide Creativity 241
1 The City as Norm and Exception 241
2 Urbanization and Urban Systems 249
3 Between Deurbanization and Hypergrowth 256
4 Specialized Cities, Universal Cities 264
5 The Golden Age of Port Cities 275
6 Colonial Cities, Treaty Ports, Imperial Metropolises 283
7 Internal Spaces and Undergrounds 297
8 Symbolism, Aesthetics, Planning 311
VII
Frontiers: Subjugation of Space and Challenges to Nomadic Life 322
1 Invasions and Frontier Processes 322
2 The North American West 331
3 South America and South Africa 347
4 Eurasia 356
5 Settler Colonialism 368
6 The Conquest of Nature: Invasions of the Biosphere 375
VIII
Imperial Systems and Nation-States: The Persistence of Empires 392
1 Great-Power Politics and Imperial Expansion 392
2 Paths to the Nation-State 403
3 What Holds Empires Together? 419
4 Empires: Typology and Comparisons 429
5 Central and Marginal Cases 434

6 Pax Britannica 450
7 Living in Empires 461
IX
International Orders, Wars, Transnational Movements: Between Two World Wars 469
1 The Thorny Path to a Global System of States 469
2 Spaces of Power and Hegemony 475
3 Peaceful Europe, Wartorn Asia and Africa 483
4 Diplomacy as Political Instrument and Intercultural Art 493
5 Internationalisms and the Emergence of Universal Norms 505
X
Revolutions: From Philadelphia via Nanjing to Saint Petersburg 514
1 Revolutions—from Below, from Above, from Unexpected Directions
514
2 The Revolutionary Atlantic 522
3 The Great Turbulence in Midcentury 543
4 Eurasian Revolutions, Fin de Siècle 558
XI
The State: Minimal Government, Performances, and the Iron Cage 572
1 Order and Communication: The State and the Political 572
2 Reinventions of Monarchy 579
3 Democracy 593
4 Bureaucracies 605
5 Mobilization and Discipline 616
6 Self-Strengthening: The Politics of Peripheral Defensive 625
7 State and Nationalism 629
PART THREE: THEMES

XII
Energy and Industry: Who Unbound Prometheus, When, and Where? 637
1 Industrialization 638

2 Energy Regimes: The Century of Coal 651
3 Paths of Economic Development and Nondevelopment 658
4 Capitalism 667
XIII
Labor: The Physical Basis of Culture 673
1 The Weight of Rural Labor 675
2 Factory, Construction Site, Office 685
3 Toward Emancipation: Slaves, Serfs, Peasants 697
4 The Asymmetry of Wage Labor 706
XIV
Networks: Extension, Density, Holes 710
1 Communications 712
2 Trade 724
3 Money and Finance 730
XV
Hierarchies: The Vertical Dimension of Social Space 744
1 Is a Global Social History Possible? 744
2 Aristocracies in (Moderate) Decline 750
3 Bourgeois and Quasi-bourgeois 761
XVI
Knowledge: Growth, Concentration, Distribution 779
1 World Languages 781
2 Literacy and Schooling 788
3 The University as a Cultural Export from Europe 798
4 Mobility and Translation 808
5 Humanities and the Study of the Other 814
XVII
Civilization and Exclusion 826
1 The “Civilized World” and Its “Mission” 826
2 Slave Emancipation and White Supremacy 837

3 Antiforeignism and “Race War” 855
4 Anti-Semitism 865
XVIII Religion 873
1 Concepts of Religion and the Religious 873
2 Secularization 880
3 Religion and Empire 887
4 Reform and Renewal 894
Conclusion: The Nineteenth Century in History 902
1 Self-Diagnostics 902
2 Modernity 904
3 Again: The Beginning or End of a Century 906
4 Five Characteristics of the Century 907
Abbreviations 921
Notes 923
Bibliography 1021
Index 1119
PREFACE

This book was first published as Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
by C. H. Beck publishers in Munich in January 2009. It rapidly went through five editions and two
unnumbered special editions and is now being translated into Chinese, French, Polish, and Russian.
For the American edition the manuscript was revised and brought up to date as far as that could be
done without adding to the book’s considerable length.
For a single author to tackle a one-volume global history of a “very long” nineteenth century
borders on the foolhardy and may require if not an apology, then at least some explanation. Several of
my previous books have been crisp and concise, and I fully appreciate the value of collaborative
work, having the privilege of being, with Akira Iriye, one of the editors-in-chief of a multivolume
“New History of the World” that is written by a distinguished group of scholars from several
countries. Thus, The Transformation of the World should not be seen as a product of solipsism and
conceit.

My own research experience has focused on two different fields: the final phase of British
informal imperialism in China, and the role of Asia in the thinking of the European Enlightenment. I
never wrote a source-based monograph on any aspect of the nineteenth century, but I have long been
involved in teaching its history, and the present book draws on a lifetime of reading about the period.
Two other ingredients went into the making of this book: One of them is a deep respect for historical
sociology, especially the tradition going back to Max Weber, with whose works I was made familiar
by two of my teachers: Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wilhelm Hennis. Later, I had the chance to discuss
issues of historical sociology with S. N. Eisenstadt on the occasion of his visits to the University of
Konstanz, and today I enjoy the regular exchange of ideas with Wolfgang Knöbl at Göttingen, a
sociologist with a deep understanding of how historians think. The second formative influence has
been an interest in the history and theory of world history writing kindled by yet another of my
teachers: Ernst Schulin at the University of Freiburg. A collection of my articles on historiographical
topics was published in 2001. However, theorizing about world history can never be more than a
preparation for historical analysis. In this sense, the present book is an attempt to put my own recipes
into practice.
The book is an experiment in writing a rich and detailed but structured, nontrivial, and
nonschematic account of a crucial period in the history of humanity. It was not commissioned by a
publisher and has therefore been written oblivious to marketing constraints. Though easily accessible
to students, it was never intended as a textbook. It does not disguise personal idiosyncrasies such as a
special interest in animals, the opera, and the old-fashioned—though, as I hope to show, highly
important—field of international relations. Uneven coverage would be an inexcusable sin in a
textbook, whereas this work does not deny the fact that its author is more familiar with some parts of
the world than with others. General and summary statements, frequent as they have to be in this
particular kind of synthesis, derive from the logic of analysis and not from a pedagogical urge to
simplify complex things for the benefit of the reader.
Work on the manuscript began in 2002 when I was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute of
Advanced Study (NIAS) at Wassenaar, an excellent institution whose rector at the time, H. L.
Wesseling, counts as one of the godfathers of the project. A first sketch of some of my emerging ideas
was presented in November 2002 as the Sixteenth Annual Lecture at the German Historical Institute
in Washington, DC (and later published in the institute’s bulletin), given at the invitation of its then

director, Christof Mauch. During the following years, regular teaching duties, relatively substantial as
they are at German universities, slowed down work on the manuscript. Unsurprisingly, the
publication of C. A. Bayly’s magisterial The Birth of the Modern World early in 2004 caused me to
reassess the project and threw its continuation into doubt. Ultimately, I wrote a review essay on
Bayly and decided to carry on. There are already several world histories of the “age of extremes”
(Eric Hobsbawm)—why not two of its predecessor, the nineteenth century? I was able to complete
the manuscript when Heinrich Meier invited me to come to Munich for a year as a fellow of the Carl
Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, whose far-sighted director he is.
The German edition owes its existence to the confidence and courage of the great publisher
Wolfgang Beck and his editor-in-chief, Detlef Felken, both of whom learned about the unwieldy
manuscript—any publisher’s nightmare—at an advanced stage of writing. Contact with Princeton
University Press had already been established on the occasion of a previous book with the help of
Sven Beckert, and I am most grateful to him and Jeremi Suri for including The Transformation of the
World in their prestigious series America and the World. At Princeton University Press, Brigitta van
Rheinberg, Molan Goldstein, and Mark Bellis did everything in their power to turn the revised
manuscript into an attractive volume. Patrick Camiller’s translation was funded by the program
Geisteswissenschaften International–Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from
Germany.
As this book is based on secondary literature, my main debt is to the marvelous historians and
social scientists in many countries who have, almost within one generation, hugely increased our
knowledge, deepened our understanding, and thus radically transformed our view of the global
nineteenth century. I only managed to sample a tiny fraction of their work, and in this I had to limit
myself to the small number of languages that I am able to read. Among numerous reviews of the
German edition, those by Steven Beller, Norbert Finzsch, Jonathan Sperber, Enzo Traverso, Peer
Vries, and Tobias Werron were particularly useful in pointing out errors of fact and problems with
the overall conception. Etienne François, Christian Jansen, and H. Glenn Penny provided critical
comments that describe my methods and literary stratagems much better than I could have done it
myself. Folker Reichert and Hans Schneider gave detailed advice on how to improve the accuracy of
the book.
Not every suggestion could be heeded. A pervasive disregard of gender issues remains a serious

drawback that will, hopefully, be remedied in a forthcoming attempt to expand chapter 15 of this book
into a global social history of the period from the 1760s to the 1880s. A certain weakness of
explanatory power may rest at the heart of the project, although in principle I disagree with a
postmodernist aversion to causality. Readers who were—and are—vainly looking for insights into
literature, music, the visual arts, and philosophical thinking may like to know that I am now doing
some work on the social and cultural history of music. A more general response would be that world
history should avoid the mirage of encyclopedic completeness and that the danger of superficiality
never looms larger than when the historian is confronted with works of art and philosophy that
require careful and elaborate interpretation.
At the University of Konstanz, the revision of the manuscript benefited enormously from the
atmosphere of intellectual excitement created by the members of the Research Unit “Global Processes
(18
th
to 20
th
Centuries)” that I was able to establish with generous funding from the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). I mention only Boris Barth, Franz L.
Fillafer, Stefanie Gänger, Jan C. Jansen, and Martin Rempe. New work by these young scholars, by
several PhD students, and also by myself, is emerging out of this stimulating context.
My family has been living with the book ever since our year at NIAS. It is a great joy to renew
the original dedication to my son Philipp Dabringhaus and to add the dedicatee of a previous book,
my wife Sabine Dabringhaus, an accomplished historian of China.
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION (2009)

All history inclines toward being world history. Sociological theories tell us that the world is the
“environment of all environments,” the ultimate possible context for what happens in history and the
account we give of it. The tendency to transcend the local becomes stronger in the longue durée of
historical development. A history of the Neolithic age does not report intensive contacts over long
distances, but a history of the twentieth century confronts the basic fact of a densely knit web of
global connections—a “human web,” as John R. and William H. McNeill have called it, or better

still, a multiplicity of such webs.
1
For historians, the writing of world history has particular legitimacy when it can link up with
human consciousness in the past. Even today, in the age of the Internet and boundless
telecommunications, billions of people live in narrowly local conditions from which they can escape
neither in reality nor in their imagination. Only privileged minorities think and act “globally.” But
contemporary historians on the lookout for early traces of “globalization” are not the first to have
discovered transnational, transcontinental, or transcultural elements in the nineteenth century, often
described as the century of nationalism and the nation-state. Many people living at the time already
saw expanded horizons of thought and action as a distinguishing feature of their epoch, and
dissatisfied members of the middle and lower strata of society in Europe and Asia turned their eyes
and hopes toward distant lands. Many millions did not shrink from undertaking an actual journey into
the unknown. Statesmen and military leaders learned to think in categories of “world politics.” The
British Empire became the first in history to span the entire globe, while other empires ambitiously
measured themselves by its model. More than in the early modern period, trade and finance
condensed into integrated and interconnected worldwide webs, so that by 1910, economic vibrations
in Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, or Tokyo were immediately registered in Hamburg, London, or New
York, and vice versa. Scholars collected information and objects from all over the world; they
studied the languages, customs, and religions of the remotest peoples. Critics of the prevailing order
—workers, women, peace activists, anti-racists, opponents of colonialism—began to organize
internationally, often far beyond the confines of Europe. The nineteenth century reflected its own
emergent globality.
As far as the nineteenth century is concerned, anything but a world-history approach is something
of a makeshift solution. However, it is with the help of such makeshifts that history has developed
into a science, gauged in terms of the methodological rationality of its procedures. This process of
becoming a science, through the intensive and possibly exhaustive examination of sources, took place
in the nineteenth century, so it is not surprising that the writing of world history receded into the
background at that time. It appeared to be incompatible with the new professionalism that historians
embraced. If this is beginning to change today, it certainly does not mean that all historians wish to, or
should, take up the writing of world history.

2
Historical scholarship requires deep and careful study
of clearly definable cases, the results of which form the material for broad syntheses that are
indispensable for teaching and general orientation. The usual framework for such syntheses, at least in
the modern age, is the history of one nation or nation-state, or perhaps of an individual continent such
as Europe. World history remains a minority perspective, but no longer one that can be dismissed as
esoteric or unserious. The fundamental questions are, of course, the same at every level of spatial
scope or logical abstraction: “How does the historian, in interpreting a historical phenomenon,
combine the individuality given by his sources with the general, abstract knowledge that makes it
possible to interpret the individual in the first place? And how does the historian arrive at
empirically secure statements about larger units and processes of history?”
3
The professionalization of history, from which there is no going back, has entailed that history on
a larger scale is now often left to the social sciences. Sociologists and political theorists who retain
an interest in the depths of time and the vastness of space have assumed responsibility for engaging
with major historical trends. Historians have an acquired predisposition to shy away from rash
generalizations, monocausal explanations, and snappy all-embracing formulas. Under the influence of
postmodern thinking, some consider it impossible and illegitimate to draw up “grand narratives” or
interpretations of long-range processes. Nevertheless, the writing of world history involves an
attempt to retrieve some interpretative competence and authority, visible in the public eye, from
minutely detailed work in specialist fields. World history is one possible form of historiography—a
register that should be tried out once in a while. The risk falls on the author’s shoulders, not on that of
the reading public, which is protected from spuriousness and charlatanry through the alertness of
professional criticism. But the question remains of why it should be the work of a single hand. Why
should we not be content with multivolume collective products from the “academic factory” (Ernst
Troeltsch)? The answer is simple. Only a centralized organization of issues and viewpoints, of
material and interpretations, can hope to meet the constructive requirements of the writing of world
history.
To know all there is to know is not the key qualification of the world historian or global
historian. No one has sufficient knowledge to verify the correctness of every detail, to do equal

justice to every region of the world, or to draw fully adequate conclusions from the existing body of
research in countless different areas. Two other qualities are the truly important ones: first, to have a
feel for proportions, contradictions, and connections as well as a sense of what may be typical and
representative; and second, to maintain a humble attitude of deference toward professional research.
The historian who temporarily slips into the role of global historian—she or he must remain an expert
in one or more special areas—cannot do other than “encapsulate” in a few sentences the arduous,
time-consuming work of others. At the same time, the labors of global historians will be worthless if
they do not try to keep abreast of the best research, which is not always necessarily the most recent. A
world history that unwittingly and uncritically reproduces long-refuted legends with a pontifical
sweep of the hand is nothing short of ridiculous. As a synthesis of syntheses, as “the story of
everything,”
4
it would be crude and tiresome.
This book is the portrait of an epoch. Its modes of presentation may in principle be applied in
the case of other historical periods. Without presuming to treat a century of world history in a
complete and encyclopedic manner, it offers itself as an interpretative account rich in material. It
shares this stance with Sir Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World, a work published in
English in 2004 and in German two years later, which has rightly been praised as one of the few
successful syntheses of world history in the late modern period.
5
The present volume is not an anti-
Bayly but an alternative from a kindred spirit. Both books forgo a regional breakdown into nations,
civilizations, or continents. Both regard colonialism and imperialism as a dimension so important that
instead of dealing with it in a separate chapter, they keep it in view throughout. Both assume that there
is no sharp distinction between what Bayly, in the subtitle of his book, calls “global connections” and
“global comparisons”;
6
these can and must be combined with each other, and not all comparisons
need the protective backup of strict historical methodology. Controlled play with associations and
analogies sometimes, though by no means always, yields more than comparisons overloaded with

pedantry can do.
Our two books often place the emphasis differently: Professor Bayly’s background is India, mine
China, and this shows. Bayly is especially interested in nationalism, religion, and “bodily practices,”
which are the themes of superb sections of his work. In my book, migration, economics, the
environment, international politics, and science are considered more broadly. I am perhaps a little
more “Eurocentrically” inclined than Bayly: I see the nineteenth century even more sharply than he
does as the “European century,” and I also cannot conceal a fascination for the history of the United
States, a topic I discovered in the course of writing. As regards our theoretical references, my
closeness to historical sociology will become apparent.
But the two most important differences between Christopher Bayly and myself lie elsewhere.
First, my book is even more open than Bayly’s to the chronological margins of the period. It is not a
compartmentalized history of a certain number of years sealed off from what went before and what
came after. This is why there are no framing dates in the title, and why a special chapter is devoted to
issues of periodization and temporal structure. The book anchors the nineteenth century variously “in
history,” allowing itself to look back far beyond 1800 or even 1780 as well as ahead to today’s
world. In this way, the significance of the nineteenth century is triangulated in longer periods of time.
Sometimes the century is remote from us, sometimes it is very close; often as the prehistory of the
present, but on occasion as deeply buried as Atlantis. The determination must be made on a case-by-
case basis. The nineteenth century is viewed in terms not so much of sharply defined hiatuses as of an
inner focal point, stretching roughly from the 1860s to the 1880s, when innovations with a worldwide
impact came thick and fast, and many processes running independently of one another seemed to
converge. The First World War does not therefore appear as a sudden, unexpected falling of the
curtain, as it does in Bayly’s historical staging.
Second, the narrative strategy I have chosen is different from Bayly’s. There is a kind of
historiography that might be described as time-convergent; and it has allowed some historians—
operating with fine judgment, huge experience, and a lot of common sense—to present whole eras of
world history in the main and secondary lines of their dynamic momentum. John M. Roberts’s global
history of the twentieth century, which he offers as an account of “what is general, what pulls the story
together,”
7

is a perfect example of this. It is world history that seeks to identify what is important and
characteristic in each age, shaping it into a continuous narrative without any preconceived schema or
big guiding idea in the background. Eric Hobsbawm, with a pinch of Marxist rigor and therefore a
compass that I cannot claim to possess, achieved something similar in his three-volume history of the
nineteenth century, working his way back from each digression to the major trends of the age.
8
Bayly
takes a different road, which may be described as space-divergent; it is a decentering approach, not
so uninhibited in allowing the current of time to carry it forward. It does not make such nimble
headway as a Roberts type, drifting along with the flows of history, but goes into the detail of
simultaneity and cross section, searches for parallels and analogies, draws comparisons, and ferrets
out hidden interdependences. This means that its chronology is deliberately left open and vague: it
manages with few framing dates and keeps the narrative on course without too much explicit
organization into subperiods. Whereas someone like Roberts—and in this sense he may represent the
mainstream of older world-history writing—thinks within a dialectic of major and minor and
constantly asks what of significance, whether good or bad, each period produced, Bayly concentrates
on individual phenomena and examines them within a global perspective.
One case in point is nationalism. Again and again, we read that it was a European “invention”
that the rest of the world took on in a cruder form and with many misunderstandings. Bayly takes a
closer look at this “rest of the world” and arrives at the plausible idea of a polygenesis of forms of
nationalist solidarity: that is, before nationalist doctrines were imported from Europe, “patriotic”
identities had already taken shape in many parts of the world, which could then be reinterpreted in a
nationalist sense in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
9
Bayly’s historiography is primarily
horizontal—or “lateral,” as he aptly calls it
10
—and spatially determined, whereas that of John Roberts
or Eric Hobsbawm is more “vertical” and temporal in its emphasis. All three authors would insist
that they combine the horizontal and vertical dimensions, and that is certainly correct. But the

relationship between the two approaches seems to display a kind of unavoidable fuzziness, rather like
that which is found in the well-known tension between narrative and structural accounts: no attempt to
marry the two achieves complete harmony.
The design of the present volume leans more in Bayly’s direction, but it goes further than he does
and may therefore be said to take a third road. I doubt that it is possible, with the historian’s cognitive
tools, to fix the dynamic of an epoch in a single schema. World system theory, historical materialism,
or evolutionary sociology may contradict. But since it is the business of history to describe change
before it ventures explanations, it soon runs up against remnants that stubbornly resist integration.
Bayly is well aware of this, of course, yet he overcomes such scruples when he tries to define the
distinguishing feature of an age. His main thesis is that between 1780 and 1914 the world became
more uniform but also more internally differentiated;
11
the “birth of the modern world” was a slow
process that only came to completion with the “great acceleration” after 1890, a process that one
hopes Bayly will analyze more comprehensively in future work.
12
Since Bayly eschews any more-or-
less clear dividing line between areas of historical reality, he cannot be really interested in the
independent logic governing each of them. Only industrialization, state building, and religious revival
feature in his account as discrete processes. A general “master narrative” for the world of the
nineteenth century rises out of a cosmos of particular observations and interpretations, which are
always stimulating and mostly convincing.
I experiment with a solution in which “grand narratives” are even more resolutely defended.
Postmodern critiques have not rendered such overarching constructions obsolete but made us more
conscious of the narrative strategies their authors deploy. To be sure, a grand narrative may establish
itself at various levels: even a history of worldwide industrialization or urbanization in the nineteenth
century would be passably “grand.” This high level of generality, at which we are nevertheless still
talking of subsystems of a scarcely discernible totality of communal life, gives the book its basic
structure. It appears encyclopedic only at first sight but is actually made up of successive orbital
paths. Fernand Braudel once described a similar procedure: “The historian first opens the door with

which he is most familiar. But if he seeks to see as far as possible, he must necessarily find himself
knocking at another door, and then another. Each time a new or slightly different landscape will be
under examination.… But history gathers them all together; it is the sum total of all these neighbors, of
these joint ownerships, of this endless interaction.”
13
In each subarea, therefore, I look for the
distinctive “dynamics” or “logics” and the relationship between general developments and regional
variants. Each subarea has its own temporal structure: a particular beginning, a particular end,
specific tempos, rhythms, and subperiods.
World history aims to surmount “Eurocentrism” and all other forms of naive cultural self-
reference. It shuns the illusory neutrality of an omniscient narrator or a “global” observation point,
and it plays consciously on the relativity of ways of seeing. This means that it must not be forgotten
who is writing for whom. The fact that a European (German) author originally addressed European
(German) readers cannot fail to have left its mark on the text, whatever the cosmopolitan intentions
behind it; expectations, prior knowledge, and cultural assumptions are never location neutral. This
relativity also leads to the conclusion that the centering of perception cannot be detached from
core/periphery structures in historical reality. This has a methodological and an empirical side.
Methodologically, a lack of adequate sources, and of historiography based on them, hampers many a
well-intentioned effort to do historical justice to the voiceless, the marginal, and the victimized.
Empirically, proportions between the various parts of the world shift with the long waves of
historical development. Power, economic performance and cultural creativity are distributed
differently from epoch to epoch. It would therefore be capricious to sketch a history of the nineteenth
century, of all periods, that disregarded the centrality of Europe. No other century was even nearly as
much Europe’s century. It was an “age of overwhelming, and overwhelmingly European, initiatives,”
as the philosopher and sociologist Karl Acham aptly put it.
14
Never before had the western peninsula
of Eurasia ruled and exploited larger areas of the globe. Never had changes originating in Europe
achieved such impact on the rest of the world. And never had European culture been so eagerly
soaked up by others, far beyond the sphere of colonial rule. The nineteenth century was a European

one also in the sense that other continents took Europe as their yardstick. Europe’s hold over them
was threefold: it had power, which it often deployed with ruthlessness and violence; it had influence,
which it knew how to spread through the countless channels of capitalist expansion; and it had the
force of example, against which even many of its victims did not balk. This multiple superiority had
not existed in the early modern phase of European expansion. Neither Portugal nor Spain nor the
Netherlands nor England (before approximately 1760) had projected their power to the farthest
corner of the earth and had such a powerful cultural impact on “the Others” as Britain and France did
in the nineteenth century. The history of the nineteenth century was made in and by Europe, to an
extent that cannot be said of either the eighteenth or twentieth century, not to speak of earlier periods.
Never has Europe released a comparable burst of innovativeness and initiative—or of conquering
might and arrogance.
Nevertheless, “Why Europe?” is not the big question posed in this book, as it has been for so
many authors, from the Enlightenment to Max Weber down to David S. Landes, Michael Mitterauer,
and Kenneth Pomeranz. Two or three decades ago, a history of the modern world could still blithely
proceed on the assumption of “Europe’s special path.” Today, historians are trying to break with
European (or “Western”) smugness and to remove the sting of “special path” notions by means of
generalization and relativization. The nineteenth century deserves to be looked at again in the context
of this debate, because a strong current among comparative historians now considers that
socioeconomic differences between Europe and other parts of the world in the early modern period
were less dramatic than previous generations used to think. The problem of the “great divergence”
between rich and poor regions has thus been shifted forward to the nineteenth century.
15
Yet this is not
the central issue of the book, and no novel interpretation will be added to the many that already try to
account for Europe’s ephemeral primacy. To approach the historical material through the lenses of
exceptionalism would be to focus from the start more on what distinguishes Europe from other
civilizations than on what civilizations and societies have in common with each other. There are
dangers in both possible kinds of a priori assumption: namely, an a priori contrastive option that
privileges difference in all possible ways but also, at the opposite extreme, an equally one-sided a
priori ecumenism that rarely lowers its sight below the human condition in general. It makes more

sense to find a way out from the well-worn “West against the rest” dichotomy and to measure again,
on a case-by-case basis, the gap between “Europe” (whatever that may have been at the time) and
other parts of the world. This can best be done in relation to particular areas of historical reality.
The book is divided into three parts. The three chapters of Part One (“Approaches”) outline the
presuppositions or general parameters for all that follows: self-reflection, time, and space. The equal
treatment of time and space will counter the impression that the writing of world history is
necessarily bound up with temporal dedifferentiation and a “spatial turn.” The eight chapters of Part
Two then unfurl a “panorama” of eight spheres of reality. The term “panorama” refers to the fact that
although no pedantic claim is made to represent all parts of the world equally, an attempt is made to
avoid major gaps in the field of vision. In the seven chapters of Part Three (“Themes”), this
panoramic survey gives way to a more narrowly focused, essay-style discussion of discrete aspects,
which deliberately refrains from trying to include everything and uses examples mainly to illustrate
general arguments. If these themes had been developed in a “panoramic” scope, the requisite scale of
the book would have made excessive demands on the reader’s patience as much as on the author’s
stamina. Moving on from “panoramas” to “themes,” the book shifts the weight from synthesis to
analysis—two modes of investigation and presentation that do not stand in sharp opposition to each
other. The chapters of the book are meant to hang together as a coherent whole, but they may also be
read separately. Once readers have entered the book, they should not worry: they will easily find an
emergency exit.
PART ONE

APPROACHES
CHAPTER I

Memory and Self-Observation
The Perpetuation of the Nineteenth Century
What does the nineteenth century mean today? How does it present itself to those who are not
professionally involved with it as historians? Our approach to this age begins with the face it turns to
posterity. This is not simply a question of our “image” of it, of how we would like to see it, of how
we construct it. Such constructs are not entirely random, not unmediated products of contemporary

preferences and interests. Today’s perceptions of the nineteenth century are still strongly marked by
its own self-perception. The reflexivity of the age, especially the new media world that it created,
continues to shape how we see it.
It was only a short time ago that the nineteenth century, separated from the present by more than a
full calendar saeculum, sank beneath the horizon of personal recollection. In June 2006 even Harriet,
the giant tortoise that in 1835 may have made the acquaintance of the young Charles Darwin in the
Galapagos Islands, finally departed this life in an Australian zoo.
1
No one remains to reminisce about
the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900–1901 or the solemn obsequies of Giuseppe Verdi and Queen
Victoria, both of whom died in late January 1901. Neither the funeral procession for Japan’s Meiji
emperor in September 1912 nor the mood when the First World War broke out in August 1914
remains within the memory of anyone alive today. In 2009 the ultimate survivor of the Titanic
shipwreck passed away; the last German veteran of the Great War died in May 2008.
2
Remembrance
of the nineteenth century is no longer a matter of individual recall but rather of media information and
book reading. The traces are to be found in academic and popular history, in the collections of
historical museums, in novels and paintings, old photographs and musical sounds, cityscapes and
landscapes. The nineteenth century is no longer actively remembered, only depicted. It has this in
common with earlier ages. In the history of the representation of cultural life, however, it occupies a
distinctive place that already sets it apart from the eighteenth century. Indeed, many of the forms and
institutions of current cultural life are inventions of the nineteenth century: the museum, the national
archive, the national library, statistical science, photography, the cinema, recorded sound. It was an
era of organized memory, and also of increased self-observation.
The role of the nineteenth century in today’s consciousness is by no means a matter of course,
either for the aesthetic canon or for the formation of political traditions. China may serve as an
example of this. The nineteenth century was disastrous for China politically and economically, and
has remained so in the minds of most Chinese. They think back reluctantly to that painful age of
weakness and humiliation, and official propagandistic history does nothing to raise their appreciation

of it. At the same time, indictments of the West’s “imperialism” have become more muted, since the
newly rising nation does not recognize itself in that earlier role of victim. Culturally, too, the century
counts for them as decadent and sterile: none of China’s artworks or philosophical texts from that
period can stand alongside the classical works of a more remote past. For today’s Chinese, the
nineteenth century is much more distant than the splendors of many a dynasty down to the great
emperors of the eighteenth century, who are constantly evoked in popular histories and television
serials.
The contrast between China and Japan could not be greater. In Japan the nineteenth century
enjoys incomparably higher prestige. The Meiji Renewal (often known as the Meiji Restoration) that
began in 1868 is conventionally seen there as the founding process not only of the Japanese nation-
state but of a distinctive modernity. Its role in the consciousness of today’s Japanese is comparable in
many respects to that of the Revolution of 1789 for the French.
3
The aesthetic evaluation of the century
is also different. Whereas in China a modern literature cannot be said to have begun before the 1920s,
Japan’s “1868 generation” was already producing modern works in the 1880s.
The historical memory of the nineteenth century casts a similar spell in the United States, where
the Civil War of 1861–65 stands alongside the formation of the Union in the late 1700s as the
constitutive event of the nation. The descendants of victorious white Northern settlers, defeated white
Southerners, and newly emancipated slaves have each ascribed quite different meanings to the
conflict and composed their own “useful past.” But there is agreement that the Civil War represents a
common “felt history,” as the poet and literary critic Robert Penn Warren put it.
4
For a long time it
operated as a collective trauma, which still has not been overcome everywhere in the South. As
always with historical memory, we are dealing not simply with a quasi-natural formation of identity
but also with an instrumentalization advantageous to identifiable interests. Southern propagandists,
foregrounding “states’ rights,” made every effort to gloss over the fact that the war was centrally
about slavery and emancipation, while the other side grouped around a mythologization of Abraham
Lincoln, the president murdered in 1865. Not a single German, British, or French statesman—not

even Bismarck, more respected than cherished, or the ever-controversial Napoleon I—enjoyed such
veneration after his death. In 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt could still publicly ask, “What
would Lincoln do?”—the national hero as helper to posterity in its hour of need.
5
1 Visibility and Audibility
The Nineteenth Century as Art Form: The Opera
A bygone age lives on in revivals, archives, and myth. Today the nineteenth century has vitality
where its culture is staged and consumed. Its characteristic aesthetic form in Europe, the opera, is a
good example of such revival. The European opera came into being around 1600 in Italy, only
decades after the rise of the urban music theater in southern China, which marked the beginning of a
development wholly independent of European influence that would reach its peak after 1790 in what
we know today as Beijing opera (jingxi).
6
Despite the existence of a number of outstanding
masterpieces, it was a long time before the cultural status of European opera became unassailable
outside Italy. Only with the contributions of Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart did it become the paramount genre in the theater. By the 1830s it was generally considered to
be at the top of the artistic hierarchy.
7
This progression was paralleled in the Beijing opera, which at
mid-century entered its period of artistic and organizational maturity. Since then European opera has
triumphantly maintained its position, whereas its distant sister in Beijing, following radical breaks
with tradition and the penetration of a Western-tinged media culture, has persisted only in folklore
niches.
The opera houses that sprang up between Lisbon and Moscow in the nineteenth century are still
in full swing, with a repertory that largely goes back to a “long” nineteenth century beginning with
Mozart’s masterpieces. Opera underwent globalization early on. In the mid-1800s it had a clear
radial point: Paris. Around 1830, Parisian musical history was global musical history.
8
The Paris

Opera was not only France’s foremost stage. Paris paid composers the highest fees and outdid all