From the History of the Empire to World History. The Historiographical Itinerary of Christopher A. Bayly Edited by Maurizio Griffo and Teodoro Tagliaferri Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II Clio. Saggi di scienze storiche, archeologiche e storico-artistiche 24 From the History of the Empire to World History. The Historiographical Itinerary of Christopher A. Bayly Edited by M. Griffo and T. Tagliaferri Federico II University Press fedOA Press From the History of the Empire to World History : The Historiographical Itinerary of Christopher A. Bayly / edited by M. Griffo and T. Tagliaferri. – Napoli : FedOA- Press, 2019. – 168 pp. ; 24 cm – (Clio. Saggi di scienze storiche, archeologiche e storico-artistiche ; 24). Accesso alla versione elettronica: http://www.fedoabooks.unina.it ISBN: 978-88-6887-056-0 DOI: 10.6093/ 978-88-6887-056-0 ISSN: 2532-4608 On the front cover: Embroidered Map Shawl of Srinagar, Kashmir (detail). Comitato scientifico Francesco Aceto (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Francesco Barbagallo (Uni- versità degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Roberto Delle Donne (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Werner Eck (Universität zu Köln), Carlo Gasparri (Università degli Stu- di di Napoli Federico II), Gennaro Luongo † (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Fernando Marías (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Mark Mazower (Columbia University, New York), Marco Meriggi (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Giovanni Montroni (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Valerio Petrarca (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Anna Maria Rao (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), André Vauchez (Université de Paris X-Nanterre), Giovanni Vitolo (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II) © 2019 FedOAPress - Federico II University Press Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II Centro di Ateneo per le Biblioteche “Roberto Pettorino” Piazza Bellini 59-60 80138 Napoli, Italy http://www.fedoapress.unina.it/ Published in Italy Prima edizione: agosto 2019 Gli E-Book di FedOAPress sono pubblicati con licenza Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Index Foreword 7 1. Maurizio Griffo, The British Roots of Indian Politics: Bayly and the Cam- bridge School 15 2. Michelguglielmo Torri, India from the Pre-Colonial to the Colonial Era: the Shaping of the Indian Middle Class and the Roots of Communalism. Thinking back on Bayly’sRulers, Townsmen and Bazaars 29 3. Guido Abbattista, Information, Communication and Knowledge in the Government of the Empire. Reflections on Bayly’sEmpire and Information 61 4. Teodoro Tagliaferri, Bayly’s Imperial Way to World History 69 5. Maurizio Isabella, Liberalism and Globalization 115 6. Marco Meriggi, The Local and the Global: Bayly’sBirth of the Modern World 121 7. Laura Di Fiore, The Origins of Indian Nationalism 137 Teodoro Tagliaferri, A Bibliography of Christopher A. Bayly 149 Index of names 161 About the authors 165 Foreword This volume collects the proceedings of an international conference on the historical work of Christopher Bayly, held in Naples on 10 March 2016 by the joint initiative of the Departments of Political Sciences and Humanities of the Federico II University (“From the History of the Empire to World History: The Historiographical Itinerary of C.A. Bayly”).1 At less than one year from his un- timely death, the convenors intended to promote a first survey of the rich and complex scientific legacy of the English historian, calling on a group of specialists in the several disciplinary areas in which Bayly distinguished himself to collabo- rate on this challenging and necessarily multifarious task. The conference did not pretend to cover the whole of Bayly’s many-sided work, but, more realistically, it aimed to offer a general outline of his intellectual achievement by focusing on his foremost contributions to the different scholarly fields in which he pioneered innovative approaches throughout his academic career.2 The resulting map is far from exhaustive, but the papers published in this volume provide an almost com- plete account (the most relevant exceptions being Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars, the diptych on the collapse of the English domination in Asia written by Bayly with Tim Harper, and the posthumous Remaking the Modern World, 1900-2015, that appeared in 2018) of the extraordinary sequence of great books by which he made repeated breakthroughs, over a period of five decades, on some of the most advanced research fronts of international historiography: the 1 A shortened Italian version was published in Passato e presente. Rivista di storia contemporanea, 35 (2017), no. 100: 97-130. 2 For a brief overview of Bayly’s intellectual biography see C.A. Bayly, “Historiographical and Autobiographical Note”, in idem, Origins of Nationality in South Asia. Patriotism and Ethi- cal Government in the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 307-322, and C. Clark, S. Bayly, “Christopher Bayly and the Making of World History,” in C.A. Bayly, Remaking the Modern World, 1900-2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Ho- boken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), xiii-xviii, which are now complemented by the bibliography annexed to the present volume (below, 149-160). 7 From the History of the Empire to World History local roots of the Indian nationalist movement, the transition from pre-colo- nial to colonial India and the role of indigenous society in the establishment of European domination in the subcontinent, the nature and limits of colonial power, the rise of the Second British Empire, the history of globalization and the nineteenth-century turn towards planetary modernity, the transregional devel- opment of nationalism and liberalism. The contributors do not give an univocal reading of the texts they analyze, but diverge at times also with respect to Bayly’s interpretation of central historical issues (i.e. the forms and ways of European expansion in Asia, the coexistence be- tween Hindus and Muslims in the Mughal and in the colonial ages, the essential character and periodization of modern and contemporary world history). Such differences not only enrich the discussion, but confirm the multifacetedness and fecundity of his work. The common aim of the participants in the Neapolitan meeting, however, was to highlight the stages of the path through which Bayly emerged, by virtue of the success achieved with The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, as a key figure in the contemporary revival of world history.3 As already pointed out by previous authors,4 the most immediate intellectual prem- ise of Bayly’s approach to the long nineteenth century has to be identified in a proposal of conceptualization of the history of globalization he had advanced in the early 2000s. On the other hand, the categorical apparatus adopted by Bayly, who was inclined to define the ‘global’ as a specific geohistorical space generated by the dynamic interaction between large regional societies, besides testifying to his substantial agreement with coeval developments in the North American New World History movement, reflected changes that had been affecting for a long time his original area of ​​specialization —British colonial history—, whose post-decolonization practitioners have shown a marked propensity to consider the Empire as a particular network of interregional connections.5 3 In 2016, in recognition of his outstanding services to global history, Bayly was posthumously awarded the Toynbee Prize conferred by the Foundation of the same name affiliated to the American Historical Association since 2010 (http://toynbeeprize.org/toynbee-prize/sir-christo- pher-bayly-named-2016-toynbee-prize-winner/). 4 B. Bongiovanni, T. Detti, and P. Ginsborg, “L’alba di una globalizzazione imperfetta,” edited by B. Bongiovanni, Passato e presente, 27 (2009), no. 1: 11-29. 5 T. Tagliaferri, “L’espansione europea nella prospettiva della nuova storia globale,” Il mestiere di storico, 11 (2019), no. 1: 5-26. 8 Foreword The following pages show, first of all, through which thematic, conceptual and documentary options Bayly contributed to the reorientation of the imperi- al and ‘European expansion’ studies. The historiographical path that emerges appears to be characterized by a growing complexity of the object investigated, by a progressive enlargement of its spatial and chronological boundaries. In this way, Bayly developed the conviction that only world history offered an analytical context suitable for the reconstruction of the vicissitudes of an expanded, com- posite imperial system as ubiquitous as the British one. The road to a more direct engagement with world history was neither short nor predetermined. The results of the Neapolitan conference make it clearer, we hope, the fundamental assump- tions on the basis of which Bayly took this further momentous step. The seven essays collected here can be classified in two general categories that also summarize a chronological development in Bayly’s research work. To begin with, there are the essays concerned with the Indian, imperial and colonial his- tory; secondly, the contributions devoted to world history. As is known, though, there is not a clear-cut division between the subjects that are closely interwoven. In other words, the historiographical path followed by Bayly never supersedes the original themes, but has extended them and developed them into a wider frame. The essay by Maurizio Griffo (“The British Roots of Indian Politics: Bayly and the Cambridge School”) studies the first works of Bayly, dedicated to the emergence of Indian nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bay- ly’s approach to Indian nationalism came in the wake of the so-called Cambridge School. This historiographical orientation aimed to show that Indian national- ism was not an idealistic aspiration to independence and self-government, but was more easily understandable as a selfish commitment to place and office. From this angle, the Indian nationalistic movement had not to be studied ac- cording to its ideological profile but according to the utilitaristic rationale of its promoters. These were not indomitable rebels, but were in some way connected with the colonial power.