05 September 2013

Chapter II

Time: When Was the Nineteenth Century?

1. Chronology and the Coherence of the Age

Calendar Centuries

When was the nineteenth century? One speaks of a ‘century’ as if it were a self-

explanatory term, implying that everyone connects it with a precise, perhaps the same,

meaning. What is it if not that which is contained between the years 1801 and 1900,

for example? Yet that time span does not correspond to a tangible experience: the

senses do not perceive when a new century begins, as they do the daily cycle or the

seasons of the year. The century is a creature of the calendar, a calculated quantity,

which was introduced for the first time in the 1500s. For historians it is, as John M.

Roberts put it, ‘only a convenience.’1 The less they believe in the ‘objective’ coherence of an age, and the more they see dividing-lines between epochs as pure conventions, the fewer objections there can be to a simple chronology that operates with chunks of a hundred years. In the case of the nineteenth century, however, the lusterless boundary dates underscore the formal character of this procedure: neither

1 the beginning-year nor the end-year of the calendar century coincided with a major

turning point. Years with two or three zeroes are often not the watershed that remains

fixed in the memory of a nation. It is not 2000 but 2001 that is engraved in the mind.

All this can be an advantage for the writer of history. A tight border means

that there is less of a distraction from the picture itself, and the whole problem of

periodization can be solved in one decisionist swoop. Blind justice marks out a

spatially and culturally neutral frame of reference, capable of encompassing all kinds

of change around the world, which frees the historian from difficult debates about the

major landmarks. Only this kind of photographic ‘frame’ takes in various histories

without treating one as a yardstick for the others. Books have been written about what

took place in a certain year – 1688 or 1800, for example – in the world’s diverse

theaters,2 producing a panoramic effect whose formal simultaneity brings out the

substantive non-simultaneity of many phenomena. Synchrony spread over a whole century can have the same result. But, of course, change becomes visible in the span of a hundred years. Snapshots at the beginning and the end of a calendar century reveal processes at different stages of maturity in different parts of the world. Other temporalities emerge alongside the familiar narrative of Western progress.

Nevertheless, such formalism does not satisfy so easily: content-blind periodization achieves its clarity of focus only at the price of contributing little to historical knowledge. That is why historians shy away from it. Some regard periodization as ‘the core of the form that historiography gives to the past’ and therefore as a central problem for historical theory.3 Those who would not go so far

readily join in discussions about ‘long’ and ‘short’ centuries. Many historians are

partial to the idea of a long nineteenth century, stretching from the French Revolution

in 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Others prefer to operate with

2 a short century – one, for example, that embraces the period in international politics

from the European new order of 1814-15 (the Congress of Vienna) to America’s entrance into the global arena in the Spanish-American war of 1898. The choice of a content-based temporal framework always involves a particular interpretive emphasis.

The length and shape of a century is therefore by no means a pedantic question. Since every historian must answer it willy-nilly, he or she might as well do so explicitly right at the start. So, how should the nineteenth century be situated within the temporal continuum? The question is all the more pressing if it cannot be assumed that Europe’s political events, economic cycles, and intellectual trends are the only ones that structure the continuum.

A century is a slice of time. Its meaning is given only by posterity. Memory structures time, arranging it deep down into echelons, sometimes bringing it close to the present, stretching, shrinking, or occasionally dissolving it. Religious immediacy often leaps across time: the founder, the prophet, or the martyr may be fully present here and now. Only nineteenth-century historicism locked them up in the past. A linear chronology is an abstraction, which seldom corresponds to how time is perceived. In many non-Western civilizations, the problem of the precise dating of past events first presented itself only when a time continuum made up of years following one after the other gained general recognition. Only linearity arranges historical knowledge into a before and an after, making a narrative possible by the standards of historicism.

Issues of dating were everywhere central for ‘modern’ history and archeology.

In Japan, an extra-European pioneer in this respect too, it was only after the turn of the twentieth century that a satisfactory national chronology was developed for remote periods in the past;4 whereas in China, whose rich historiographical tradition

3 went as far back as Europe’s, the necessary work of source criticism began in the

1920s, and it took decades before a reasonably dependable chronology of ancient

times was established.5 In many other countries, especially in Africa or the South

Pacific, archeological finds confirmed a wide range of human activity but did not enable precise dating even for the modern age. In the case of Hawaii, scholars posit a

‘proto-historical’ period that lasted until 1795, the date of the first written records.6

In this book I have opted for the following solution. ‘My’ nineteenth century is

not conceived as a temporal continuum stretching from point A to point B. The

histories that interest me do not involve a linear, ‘and then came such and such’

narrative spread over a hundred or more years; rather, they consist of transitions and

transformations. Each of these has a distinctive temporal structure and dynamic,

distinctive turning points and spatial locations – what one might call regional times.

One important aim of this book is to disclose these time structures. It will therefore

contain many dates and repeatedly call attention to finer points of chronology. The

individual transformations begin and end at particular moments, with continuities in

both directions on the arrow of time. On the one hand, they continue developments

from the past – let us say, from the ‘early modern age.’ Even the great revolutions

cannot be understood without the premises that led to them. On the other hand, the

nineteenth century is the prehistory of the present day; characteristic transformations

that began then rarely came to a complete stop in 1900 or 1914. I shall therefore, with

a deliberate lack of discipline, repeatedly look far ahead into the twentieth century, or

even to the present day. What I wish to conjure up and comment on is not a sealed-

off, self-sufficient history of the nineteenth century, but the insertion of an age within

longer timelines: the nineteenth century in history.

4 What does this mean for the temporal framework of the account? If

continuities are emphasized more than sharp breaks between epochs, it will not be

possible to base definitions on precise years. Instead, I shall move nimbly between

two modes of macro-periodization. Sometimes I shall refer to the bare segment of

time, approximately from 1801 to 1900, without specifying content: that is, the

calendar century. Elsewhere I shall have a long nineteenth century in mind, one

beginning perhaps in the 1770s, that emerges only through contextual analysis. If one

were to select a single ‘world-historical’ event as emblematic of the period, it would

be the revolution that led to the founding of the United States of America. At the other

end, it would be convenient, dramatically effective, and conventionally acceptable to

close the long nineteenth century with the sudden fall of the curtain in August 1914.

This makes sense for certain transformations – in the world economy, for example –

but not for others. The First World War was itself a time of colossal transition and

greatly extended chains of effects. It began as a military confrontation in the space

between northeastern France and the Baltic, but soon spread to West and East Africa

and subsequently turned into a world war.7 Conditions within almost all countries involved changed dramatically only in 1916-17. 1919 became the year of political restructuring in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and of revolutionary or anti- colonial upheavals from Ireland through Egypt and India to China and Korea.

Disappointment that the peace did not live up to its promise was widely shared around the world.8 Or, to put it more pointedly: only when the war was over did humankind

realize that it was no longer living in the nineteenth century. In many respects, then,

the long century that began in the 1770s should be thought of as having ended in the

1920s, with the transition to a world in which new technologies and ideologies

established a deep gulf between the postwar present and the pre-1914 past.

5

Constructing Epochs

One among several ways of shaping historical time is to condense it into epochs. To the modern European mind, at least, the past appears as a succession of blocks of time. But the terms used to describe epochs are seldom crystallizations of raw memory; they are the result of historical reflection and construction. Not infrequently it is a major historical work that first calls an epoch into being: whether it be

‘Hellenism’ (Droysen), the ‘Renaissance’ (Michelet, Burckhardt), the ‘late Middle

Ages’ (Huizinga) or ‘late antiquity’ (Peter Brown). In many cases, academic neologisms have scarcely trickled through to a wider public: ‘early modern age’ is a good example. This was first proposed as the name for an epoch in the early 1950s.

The term soon won recognition in the historians’ fraternity, being seen almost as the fourth epoch of world history on a par with the previous three – and thus fulfilling the apocalyptic fourfold vision of world empires in the Old Testament.9 Confusion reigns when it comes to ‘modernity,’ a concept applied indiscriminately and with a host of arguments to every century in Europe since the sixteenth and even to ‘medieval’

China in the eleventh; social history has employed it for the period since the 1830s, cultural-aesthetic theory only for one not earlier than Baudelaire, Debussy, and

Cézanne.10 The ubiquitous talk of modernity, postmodernity, and ‘multiple modernities,’ nearly always without even an approximate chronological definition, naturally indicates that the sense of epochs has been steadily weakening. It may be that ‘early modern age’ is the last construction of its kind that commands general acceptance within university faculties.11

6 Whatever its precise dates, the nineteenth century appears to almost all

historians as a freestanding epoch that resists naming. Whereas, for earlier times,

several centuries are readily grouped together into an epoch (as many as ten in the

‘middle ages,’ or three in the ‘early modern age’), the nineteenth century remains

alone. No one has ever seriously proposed using the obvious term, ‘late modern age.’

German historians are not even sure whether the nineteenth century should be

classified under ‘modern’ (neuere) or ‘recent’ (neueste) history: the former would

define it as the culmination of developments that began before 1800; the latter as the

prehistory of an age that began with the First World War.12 Eric Hobsbawm, the author of one of the best general histories of Europe since the French Revolution, does not give the nineteenth century (which for him is ‘long’) a single overarching name but divides it into three: the Age of Revolution (1789-1848), the Age of Capital

(1848-1875) and the Age of Empire (1875-1914).13 Nor has the history of ideas yet

managed to come up with a single appellation, along the lines of ‘the Age of

Enlightenment’ that is sometimes used for the eighteenth century. So, we are left with

a nameless and fragmented century, a long transition between two ages that seem

easier to identify. Perhaps a quandary.

2. Calendar and Periodization

In large parts of the world, people did not notice in 1800 or 1801 that a ‘new century’

had begun. Official France did not want to know, because it dated the years from the

beginning of the Republic (1792 = Year I), and in 1793 it had arbitrarily introduced a

new organization of the year that was observed with diminishing enthusiasm until the

7 restoration of the Gregorian calendar in 1806. A new counting of the months meant that on January 1, 1801 the French people found itself on the eleventh day of the fourth month (Nîvose = ‘snow month’) of Year IX. Muslims, for their part, woke up on an ordinary day in the middle of the eighth month of the year 1215, in a calendar that went back to the flight (hijra) of the Prophet Muhammad to Medina on July 16,

622; the new century, the thirteenth, had already begun in 1786. In Siam and other

Buddhist countries, people were living in the 2343rd year of the Buddhist era, which was the year 5561 in the Jewish calendar. In China, January 1, 1801 was the day of the second of the Ten Heavenly Stems and the eighth of the Twelve Earthly Branches, in the fifth year of the rule of Emperor Jiaqing; and other calendars were also in use within the vast Chinese empire, Muslims, Tibetans and the Yi and Dai minorities each having one of their own. In China the turn of 1801 did not mark an epochal change; the only one that counted had taken place on February 9, 1796, when the glorious

Emperor Qianlong, after sixty years on the throne, had handed over to his son

Yongyan, who as ruler had taken the name Jiaqing. In Vietnam, earlier than in other

Asian countries, the unification of the country in 1802 brought a switch to the

Western calendar for certain official purposes, although people continued to use the calendar of the Chinese Ming dynasty (which had fallen in 1644).14 These and other possible examples add up to a colorful picture of calendar pluralism. Their message is clear: the magic of the turn of the century was limited to the areas where Christianity had spread. The ‘West’ was to be found wherever people noted the passing of the old century and the coming of the new. ‘Our’ nineteenth century began only in the West.

Pope Gregory’s Calendar and the Alternatives

8 Anyone who finds this surprising should consider that even in Europe a uniform calendar was achieved only slowly and in stages. It took all of 170 years for England, and with it the whole British empire, to adopt the Gregorian calendar that had been introduced in 1582-84 in the Catholic countries of Europe, soon afterwards in Spain’s overseas territories, in 1600 in Scotland, in 1752 in Great Britain.15 In Romania it became official only in 1917, in Russia in 1918, and in Turkey in 1927. The

Gregorian calendar – not a radical innovation, but a technical refinement of Julius

Caesar’s calendar – was one of modern Europe’s most successful cultural exports.

Initiated by a Counter-Reformation Pope, Gregory XIII (r. 1575-85), it reached the farthest corners of the planet along the routes of Britain’s Protestant world empire.

Outside the colonies, it was imported voluntarily rather than being foisted upon

‘other’ civilizations through the dictates of cultural imperialism. Where it remained controversial, it was often for scientific or pragmatic reasons. Auguste Comte, the positivist philosopher, made a great effort in 1849 to secure the adoption of his alternative calendar, which divided the year into thirteen months, each of 28 days, resulting in a total of 364 days plus a kind of bonus day outside the system. In this proposal, the conventional names of the months would have been replaced with dedications to the benefactors of mankind: Moses, Archimedes, Charlemagne, Dante,

Shakespeare, and so on.16 In terms of calendar technology, it was not devoid of refinement. Different variants would later often be suggested.

The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the unreformed Julian calendar from

46 BC, which Julius Caesar, in his capacity as Pontifex Maximus, created against a rich backdrop of thinking about time among Greek and Egyptian astronomers: an instrument tried and tested over the centuries, but one that had eventually accumulated a few extra days. The situation in the Ottoman Empire (and later Turkey)

9 was especially complicated. Although the Prophet Muhammad had made the moon

the measure of time and declared that only the lunar calendar should be considered

valid, relics of the Julian solar calendar remained from the Byzantine period. The

Ottoman state accepted that this was more practical for its purposes and geared its

financial year to the four seasons. This was important in order to establish the point in

time when the harvest would be taxed. There was no direct correspondence between

the solar and the lunar calendar; overlaps, desynchronization, and time differences

were inevitable. In many Muslim countries, the rural population continued for a long

time to observe the lunar calendar, while the cities used the international (Gregorian)

calendar.17 Chinese all over the world, even the pioneers of globalization, continue to celebrate the New Year in February, in accordance with the lunar calendar. And lastly, apart from ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ calendars, there were and are specially created festive calendars that mark national holidays, commemorations of national heroes, and so on, or in some cases an entire separate system for the arrangement of time. The Bahai religion, for instance, has a calendar made up of 19 months with 19 days in each, and calculates the years from the divine inspiration received by its founder in 1844.18

Nor is historical time everywhere reckoned in terms of ‘Anno Domini’ (or today’s ‘Common Era’). Our linear dating system, capable of situating any point in time from a Year One (annus domini), was originally conceived in the sixth century,

further elaborated by the Jesuit Dionysus Petavius (Denis Pétau) in 1627, and

propagated soon afterwards by the great Descartes.19 It spread worldwide in the

nineteenth century, but has never completely supplanted the alternatives. In Taiwan,

one of the most modern societies in the world, the dating system begins with the

revolutionary year of 1912, when the Chinese Republic (Minguo) – which the present

10 regime claims to embody – put an end to the Imperial era; the year 2000 was therefore

‘minguo 88’ on the island. Just as, in Imperial China, the counting of years began anew with each change on the throne, until the Communists went over to the Western calendar, so too in Japan each new ruler ushered in a new sequence (1873 was thus

‘Meiji 6’). But in 1869 – in a fine example of invented tradition – a succession of emperors uninterrupted by dynastic change was enshrined in a parallel dating system, so that 1873 became Year 2533 since the mythical first emperor, Jimmu, ascended to the throne. This was thought to link Japan into the Western linear conception of time.20 Despite the cautiously worded objections of many historians, this archaic reference to a fictitious Year One of imperial rule, 660 BC, remained a founding myth of Japanese nationalism after 1945 and received unmistakable endorsement in 1989 with the coronation of Emperor Akihito.21

The new chronology served the manifest political purpose of entrenching the emperor at the center of the mental world of the new nation-state. It is true that in

1873 – nearly half a century before Russia – Japan introduced the Gregorian calendar and the previously unknown seven day week. On Day Nine of Month 11 in the lunar calendar, an imperial edict decreed that Day 3 of Month 12 would be redefined in accordance with the solar calendar as January 1, 1873. Yet for all the modernization rhetoric, which attacked the lunar calendar as a sign of superstition and backwardness, the abrupt reform of 1873 had the main function at the time of preserving the state treasury from bankruptcy. For an intercalary month had been due under the old system, and the extra month’s pay that this would have meant for all officials could not have been supported in the alarming budgetary situation of the time. So, the New

Year was suddenly brought forward by 29 days, allowing desperate housewives no time to prepare for it with the traditional house-cleaning. Japan’s alignment with the

11 most influential global calendar meant that court astronomers would no longer be

necessary for working out the correct date.22

Epochal Chronologies

The relativity of chronology is even clearer if we consider the various appellations

given to historical epochs. Nothing like the triad of antiquity, middle ages and modern

times – which Europe had gradually adopted since the 1680s – came into use in any

other civilization that could look back at a continuous and comparably documented

past. There were periods of renewal and rebirth, but before contacts with Europe it

rarely occurred to anyone that they were living in an age superior to the past. Only the

Meiji system-change, promoted by Ōkubo Toshimichi and other energetic young

nobles, brought that future-oriented rhetoric of new beginnings which is an essential

component of any ‘modern’ consciousness.23 However, it immediately became

trapped in traditionalism, as Japanese officialdom re-emphasized the sacredness of imperial rule (even though there was no past model for Meiji political practice) and strove to invent an indigenous ‘middle ages’ that would link the country to Europe’s prestigious history.24 The idea of a ‘medieval period’ played a certain role in

traditional Muslim historiography, but not in its Chinese equivalent. Nor did the

importing of Western conceptions change this in any way: the term ‘medieval’ is used

neither in the People’s Republic nor in Taiwan to refer to China’s own history. Not

only traditionalist historians preferred dynastic periodization; those working today in

the People’s Republic follow the same principle, as does the Cambridge History of

China, the flagship of Western China studies published in a series of volumes since

1978.

12 The first variations from this rule emerged in relation to the nineteenth century. Marxist orthodoxy dates the beginning of China’s ‘modern history’ (jindai shi) to the Anglo-Chinese treaty of Nanjing in 1842, and of its ‘recent history’

(xiandai shi) to the anti-imperialist protest movement of 1919. Thus, a nineteenth century with a content-based definition starts only in the 1840s. In today’s China studies, however, both in the United States and increasingly in China itself, historians have begun to use the term ‘late imperial age,’ referring not simply to the final decades of the Empire (usually known as the ‘late Qing period’) but to the period between the mid-sixteenth century and the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth century; some even go as far back as the eleventh century, which in China was an age of political consolidation, social regeneration, and cultural blossoming. This ‘late imperial China’ stretches until the end of the monarchy in 1911. It has a formal affinity with the

European concept of an ‘early modern age’ or, in updated variants, with the idea of an

‘Old Europe’ that began in the middle ages. But it does not share the emphasis on the period around 1800 as the end of a historical formation. The general view now is that, despite a number of innovative elements, the calendar nineteenth century represented a decadent final phase of an incomparably stable Ancien Regime. But China is only one of the possible variants that present themselves when it is a question of substantively defining the nineteenth century.

3. Breaks and Transitions

13 National and Global Turning Points

Unless one accepts the mystical notion that a single Zeitgeist expresses all aspects of

life in an epoch, historical periodization must face the problem of the ‘temporal

diversity of cultural domains.’25 In most cases, a break in political history does not

also mark a turning point in economic history; stylistic periods in art history do not

generally begin or end at points when new developments are thought to be emerging

in social history. Whereas social history is often free of periodization debates because

it tacitly takes over the usual division into political epochs, other writers warn against

placing too much value on the history of events. Ernst Troeltsch, himself an important

German theologian and intellectual historian of the early twentieth century, was

unable to make much out of it. From a discussion of the non-event-based models of

historical epochs to be found in Hegel, Comte or Marx, Kurt Breysig, Werner

Sombart or Max Weber, he drew the conclusion that ‘a truly objective periodization’

was possible ‘only on social, economic, political, and legal foundations,’ only on the

prior basis of ‘the great basic forces.’26 Troeltsch did not believe, however, that such

basic forces enabled a sequencing of history that was unambiguous and clear-cut.

Troeltsch was concerned with the history of Europe as a whole, not of individual nations. Whereas a particular national history still finds safety in a general consensus about its key dates, it becomes all the more difficult for Europe as a whole to agree on the epochal shifts of common importance. The political trajectory of

Britain, for instance, where not even the Revolution of 1848 played a major role, has been such that popular historians are not alone in using the term ‘Victorian’ for the period between 1837 and 1901 – a term derived from the reign of a constitutional monarch. England experienced its profound political break considerably earlier, in the

14 two revolutions of the seventeenth century, and the shock waves of the French

Revolution after 1789 were by no means as powerful there as they were on the

continent. British history books today tend to situate the decisive turning point not in

1789 but in 1783 – the year when the North American colonies were finally lost – and

therefore attach much less significance to 1800 than one commonly finds in France,

Germany, or Poland. In Britain the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is less dramatic, sidelining the rupture of Napoleonic Wars that were fought on the other side of the Channel.

If the temporal shape to be given to European history is far from uncontroversial, how much more difficult is it to agree on a periodization for the world!27 Political dates scarcely help. Before the twentieth century, not a single year

can be regarded as epoch-making for the whole of humanity. The French Revolution

may be seen in retrospect as fraught with significance for world history, but the

deposition and execution of the ruler of a medium-sized European country did not

have the shattering impact of a world-historical event. In East Asia, the Pacific and

southern Africa, it went largely unnoticed. The French philosopher and cultural

historian Louis Bourdeau remarked in 1888 that the French Revolution did not exist

in the minds of 400 million Chinese – hence his doubts about its true significance.28 It was not the revolutionary program and its application within the borders of France, but its expansion abroad by military means, which had radiating consequences. The

Revolution had no impact in India or the Americas – with the exception of the French colonies in the Caribbean – until war broke out between Napoleon and the British.

Even the First World War initially left large parts of the globe untouched; only its end in 1918 triggered a worldwide crisis, including a deadly influenza pandemic.29 The

Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the first economic event of truly global weight;

15 producers and consumers on every continent were reeling from its consequences

within a few months. Not long afterwards, the Second World War began in stages: in

July 1937 for Chinese and Japanese; in September 1939 for Europe west of Russia;

and in 1941 for the rest of the world, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union

and the Japanese attack on the United States. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa,

however, were less affected by it than they had been by the First World War. So, we

may say that before 1945 not a single date in world political history had an immediate

or near-immediate impact on the whole of humanity. Only in the second postwar

period did a shared ‘event history’ begin for the entire world.

Let us now consider what historians (and, following them, probably the public at large) in individual nation-states have seen as the key moments of domestic politics in a ‘long’ nineteenth century. The years around the turn of the century had an epochal impact wherever Napoleon’s armies toppled or irrevocably weakened the

Ancien Regime. This was the case in the mosaic-like of Germany’s western statelets, in Spain and Portugal, in colonial Saint-Domingue (soon to become Haiti), and in

Egypt – but not in the Tsarist empire, for example. There were also indirect effects.

Had the Spanish monarchy not collapsed in 1808, the revolutions that won independence for Hispanic America would have begun later, not in 1810. The French occupation of the Ottoman province of Egypt in 1798 – a short-lived affair, over within three years – delivered a shock to the ruling elite in Istanbul that triggered a many-sided modernization drive. In a longer time perspective, however, the defeat of

1878 in the war with Russia represented a more serious blow to the Sultan, since it led to the loss of some of the richest areas of the empire: the Balkan peninsula was 76 per cent Ottoman in 1876, but only 37 per cent in 1879. That was the great political turning point for the Ottomans, the key moment in their slide into decline. The

16 deposition of the autocratic Sultan by the ‘Young Turk’ officers in 1908 was the

almost inevitable revolutionary sequel. Lastly, indirect effects of the Napoleonic Wars

were also felt in areas where Britain intervened militarily. The Cape of Good Hope

and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) were severed from the Dutch state, then part of the

Napoleonic empire, and subsequently remained under British rule. In Indonesia, a brief British occupation (1811-16) led to deep changes in the restored system of

Dutch rule. In India the British made a bid for supremacy in 1798, under the most successful of the colonial conquistadors, the Marquess of Wellesley, and by 1818 at the latest it was securely in their hands.

In other countries, the main political breaks – more important than those around the year 1800 – came well into the new century. Many states came into being only in the calendar nineteenth century: the Republic of Haiti in 1804, the republics of

Hispanic America between 1810 and 1826, the kingdoms of Belgium and Greece in

1830 and 1832 respectively, the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the German Reich in 1871, and the Principality of Bulgaria in 1878. Today’s New Zealand began its existence as a state with the Treaty of Waitangi, which representatives of the British Crown concluded with Maori chieftains in 1840. Canada and Australia were converted by acts of federation (in 1867 and 1901 respectively) from groups of adjacent colonies into national states. Norway severed its union with Sweden only in 1905. In all these cases, the foundational date divides the nineteenth century into a time before and a time after the achievement of unity and independence. The structuring power of these slices through time is greater than that of the approximate calendar periods that we happen to call ‘centuries.’

There is no lack of further examples. Britain’s internal politics was unsettled but not thrown off course by the age of revolution, and the country entered the

17 nineteenth century with a highly oligarchic political order. The Reform Act of 1832

eventually expanded the number of active citizens entitled to vote and brought to an

end the peculiar British form of an Ancien Regime. The year 1832 thus marks the

most extensive change within post-1688 British constitutional history, perhaps even

greater at a symbolic level than in reality. Hungary, which remained off the campaign

routes of the Napoleonic armies, underwent its first major political crisis in 1848-49 –

but then it was more intense than anywhere else in Europe. For China, the Taiping

Rebellion of 1850-64 represented an epochal challenge of revolutionary dimensions,

the first internal crisis on such a scale for more than two hundred years. Political

system-changes in the world became more frequent in the 1860s. The two most

important – each revolutionary in its essence – were the collapse of the Southern

Confederacy and the restoration of national unity at the end of the American Civil

War (1865), and the fall of the shogunate and the beginning of Japan’s intensive state- building effort in 1868 (the Meiji Renewal). In both cases, system crisis and a reform drive swept away structures of rule and political practices that had survived from the eighteenth century: the feudal federalism of the Tokugawa dynasty (in power since

1603) and the slave system of the Southern States of North America. In both Japan and the United States, the transition from one political world to another took place in mid-century.

‘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 regimes tumbled

18 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 one manages 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 moveable type.

Numerous authors of world histories have taken 1500 as the key orientation date.32

19 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 cult 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 world-views as the functioning of societies and inter-societal 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

20 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

In so far 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

21 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 for Europe 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

22 historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck once termed the Sattelzeit

(literally: ‘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 decomposition 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 which, 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 sub-period. 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,

23 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, 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 him in this 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 are the most important factors 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 world history at the time 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

24 ‘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 conquest-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 Even less did the great conflict of empires between 1793 and 1815 remain limited to Europe. Fought on four continents, it was a genuine world war,

which 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 striving 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

militarily 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 land mass. 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,

25 securely established itself 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 one and the same time a crisis of the Bourbon monarchy, of British,

Spanish, and French colonial rule in the New World, and of such formerly mighty

Asiatic powers as the Ottoman and Chinese empires, the Crimean Tatar Federation,

and the successor-states to the Mogul empire in the South Asian subcontinent. The

French invasion of Algiers in 1830, when that ‘pirates’ nest’ was still de iure 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.

Second, the provisional political emancipation of settler societies in the

Western hemisphere around 1830 (with the major exception of Canada which

remained in the British Empire), together with the colonization of Australia around

the same time, led to a general strengthening of the ‘white’ position in the world.55

While the American republics remained tied to Europe economically and culturally and assumed functional roles within the world economic system, they acted more aggressively than in colonial times toward the hunting and pastoral societies in their midst. In the United States, this reached a point in the 1820s when ‘native Americans’ were no longer treated as negotiating partners but regarded as objects of military and

26 administrative compulsion.56 Australia, New Zealand, and Russia too, and in some respects South Africa, fit into this picture of repressive, land-grabbing colonization.57

Third, one of the major novelties of the Sattelzeit was the emergence of inclusive forms of social solidarity and a new ideal of civil equality. This

‘nationalism’ stabilized the we-collective and demarcated it from neighboring countries and distant ‘barbarians.’ In its early period, until around 1830, it was especially successful where it could serve as an integrative ideology of an existing territorial state and where it coincided with a missionary sense of cultural superiority.

This was the case in France and Britain and – at the latest by the time of the victorious war against Mexico (1846-49) – in the United States. Everywhere else in the world nationalism was initially – things would change later – a reactive force: first in the

German and Spanish resistance to Napoleon and the Spanish-American liberation movements; then, after 1830, in other continents too.

Fourth. It was only in the USA that the ideal of civil equality translated into broad popular involvement in political decision-making – albeit with the exclusion of women, Indians, and black slaves – and a system of checks on the country’s rulers.

The presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) had given a particular impetus in this direction. When President Andrew Jackson took office in 1829, the USA found its way to the form of anti-oligarchic democracy that would be the distinctive feature of its civilization. Elsewhere democratic modernity was in a sorry state before 1830.

To be sure, the French Revolution was not as innocuous, conservative or downright irrelevant as a ‘revisionist’ historiography fixated on continuity claims it to have been.

But nor did it lead to Europe-wide democratization, let alone world revolution.

Napoleon, its executor, ruled at least as despotically as Louis XV, and the restored

Bourbon monarchy (1815-30) was a caricature of bygone times. Until 1832

27 aristocratic magnates ruled Britain unchallenged. Absolutist reaction held sway in

large parts of Southern and Central Europe and Russia. Only around 1830 did a

constitutionalist trend gradually begin to take shape, although even that halted at the

‘colored’ colonies of the European powers. Politically, the Sattelzeit did not witness

the breakthrough of democracy in either Europe or Asia; rather, it was the last fling of

aristocratic rule and autocracy.58 The political nineteenth century began after it was over.

Fifth. Periodization is more difficult in social history than in political history.

The transition from a society dominated by ‘estates’ to a class society is clearly discernible in countries such as France, the Netherlands, or Prussia – and a few decades later in Japan. But it is not easy to find estates in eighteenth-century Britain, and in the United States and the British dominions, and a fortiori in India, Africa, or

China, they existed only at a rudimentary level. The model ‘from estates to classes’ therefore lacks universal validity. For several countries or even continents, at least of similar importance was the end of the Atlantic slave trade and, in 1834, the emancipation of the slaves in the British Empire. Over the next five decades, slavery slowly disappeared from Western civilization and overseas regions under its control.

A different way of putting this would be to say that this relic of extreme coercion from early modern times went virtually unchallenged until at least the 1830s.

In terms of social history, a distinctive feature of the Sattelzeit was the growing contestation and subversion of traditional hierarchies. It remains to be proven whether the years around 1800 were also a period of agrarian change and rural unrest outside Western and Central Europe; there is a lot of evidence that they were.59

Notwithstanding the revolutions in France and Haiti, this was a period when social

traditionalism was shaken but not yet overthrown. With a handful of exceptions the

28 ‘rise of the bourgeoisie,’ and more generally the emergence of new social forces, would be a feature only of the subsequent period. Fully fledged ‘bourgeois societies’ remained in a minority throughout the nineteenth century. A growing tendency towards class formation was a direct consequence or accompaniment of the gradual spread of industrial capitalism around the world, which did not begin until 1830 and reached the most advanced country in Asia, Japan, only after 1870.

Sixth. Economic historians must address the question of when the dynamic of

England’s ‘industrial revolution’ spilled over into one of general growth beyond

British borders. Angus Maddison, a leading statistician of world history, gives a forthright answer: he sees the 1820s as the decade when worldwide stagnation gave way to more dynamic and ‘intensive’ (in the economic sense of the word) development.60 The little reliable evidence we have about income trends supports the thesis that, even in England, early industrialization led to a noteworthy economic upturn only after 1820. So, the years between 1770 and 1820 do indeed count as a period of transition from the slow income growth of the first half of the eighteenth century to the faster rates of the 1820s and beyond.61 Almost nowhere other than in northwestern Europe did the industrial mode of production take root before 1830.

Historians of technology and the environment point to a similar break when they suggest that the ‘fossil fuel age’ began around 1820; it was then that the replacement of wood, peat, and human or animal muscle power with stored fossil energy (coal) became a visible option in production processes throughout the economy.62 Coal gets steam-engines moving, and steam-engines drive spindles and pumps, ships and railroads. The fossil fuel age that dawned in the first third of the nineteenth century not only made possible the production of goods on an unprecedented scale, but also greatly boosted the formation of networks, speed, national integration, and imperial

29 control. Until the 1820s, however, an ancient regime still prevailed in the energy

sector.

Seventh. The smallest degree of worldwide synchronization was to be found in

the realm of culture. Contacts and exchange between civilizations, though not

negligible, were not yet sufficiently strong to impart a general rhythm to the

development of ‘global culture.’ As regards the exchange of experience among

articulate minorities – which underlies Koselleck’s concept of a Sattelzeit – we know

little from non-Western settings for the period around 1800. It has so far been difficult

to demonstrate such phenomena as a greater time-awareness in world-views and cultural semantics , or a general experience of the speeding-up of human existence, except in relation to Europe and its settler offshoots. The evidence for this starts to come in thick and fast only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Similarly, the discovery of previously hidden depths and causalities – which Michel Foucault highlighted in the natural sciences. linguistics, and economic theory around 1800 – was probably peculiar to Europe.63 In any event, 1830 marks one of the clearest watersheds in the entire history of European philosophy and arts: the end of the heyday of philosophical idealism (Hegel succumbed in 1831 to the global spread of cholera) and strict utilitarianism (Bentham died in 1832) but also of the ‘Age of

Goethe’ in the arts; the weakening of Romantic currents in German, English, and

French literature, the end of the classical style in music (when Beethoven and

Schubert fell silent in 1827-28) and the shaping of the ‘Romantic generation’

(Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt),64 and the transition to realism and historicism in

West European painting.

All in all, there are good reasons to consider the ‘true’ or ‘Victorian’

nineteenth century as a shortened trunk: that is – as it has been said about German

30 history – ‘a relatively brief, dynamic, period of transition between the 1830s and the

1890s.’65

The 1880s Threshold

The 1880s were a time of especially radical change, a hinge period linking

Victorianism and the Fin de Siècle. Of course, in terms of political and military history, the turn of the century too brought profound upheavals for many parts of the world: it may not have marked a striking break in most European national histories, but the final years before 1900 were certainly momentous for China, where unexpected defeat at the hands of Japan in 1895 resulted in a massive loss of sovereignty, and where Great Power rivalry flung the country’s doors wide open and triggered an unprecedented crisis that issued in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In Spain, military failure in the war with the United States caused similar reactions in 1898, and still today it is regarded as a low point in the country’s history. In both cases the victorious power – Japan, the USA – felt its path of imperial expansion to have been vindicated. The whole of Africa had been in turmoil ever since Britain’s occupation of

Egypt in 1882. Its conquest of Sudan in 1898 and the South African War of 1899-

1902 basically concluded the ‘division of Africa’ and were followed by a less stormy and traumatic period of systematic exploitation. In the early years of the new century a wave of revolutions swept across the world: Russia in 1905, Iran in 1905-6, the

Ottoman Empire in 1908, Portugal in 1910, Mexico in 1910 (the bloodiest of all, which lasted until 1920), and China in 1911. By the eve of the assassination in

Sarajevo all these upheavals had given a new impetus to political democratization; the world war would add little new of substance to it. When monarchies started to

31 collapse east of the Rhine towards the end of the First World War, they had already

disappeared or lost much of their power in parts of the world that Europe considered

‘backward.’

These processes added up to a cluster of crises in the age that we have called the Fin de Siècle. The transition to this age in the course of the 1880s may be characterized by a set of further traits.

First. As in the 1820s, a new threshold was crossed in the history of the environment. Around 1890, minerals (coal and petroleum) moved ahead of biomass in estimates of global energy use – even if most of the world’s population still did not directly consume such fuels. The fossil fuel age began after 1820 only in the sense that these became the cutting edge in energy production. Around 1890, however, this tendency gained the upper hand quantitatively on a world scale.66

Second. Global industrialization entered a new phase. Japan and Russia

experienced what economic historians used to call a ‘take-off’, that is, a transition to

self-sustaining growth. Things were not yet so advanced in India or in South Africa

(where large gold deposits were discovered in 1886), but a core of industrial and

mining capitalism began to take shape there, for the first time outside the West and

Japan.67 At the same time, the organization of the economy changed in the early

industrializing countries of Europe and North America, as a ‘second industrial

revolution’ took them beyond steam-engine technology. One can dispute which were

the most important inventions, and therefore the ones most fraught with

consequences, but any list would have to include the incandescent lamp (1876), the

Maxim gun (1884), the automobile (1885-86), cinematography (1895), wireless

transmission (1895), and radiological diagnosis (1895). The most significant for

economic history was the technological-industrial application of discoveries in the

32 fields of electricity (dynamo, electric motor, power plant technology) and chemistry, in both of which the 1880s were the decisive years. The serial production of electric motors alone revolutionized whole branches of industry and commerce that had been little served by the steam engine.68 Science and industry drew closer together; the age of large-scale industrial research was beginning. This was associated in the United

States and several European countries with a transition to large capital concentrations

(‘monopoly capitalism,’ critical contemporaries called it) and the spread of limited companies that placed managerial employees alongside family entrepreneurs

(‘corporate capitalism’). New bureaucracies appeared in the private sector, and ever more finely graded hierarchies developed within the growing ranks of the salaried classes.69

Third. This reorganization within advanced capitalism produced worldwide effects as large European and American companies increasingly opened up overseas markets. The age of multinational corporations was nigh. Steamship ocean travel and the telegraphic cabling of all continents greatly increased the density of world economic links. European global banks, joined around the turn of the century by US institutions, began to export capital on a massive scale across the Atlantic, as well as from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, to colonies such as South Africa or India, and to nominally independent countries like China and the Ottoman Empire.70 Also in the 1880s, the flow of European migrants to the United States suddenly shot up,71 and new intercontinental systems of contract labor came into being to transfer Asian manpower to North and South America. The Fin de Siècle would be the most intense period of migration in world history. All in all, the 1880s brought a surge in globalization that for the first time linked all continents into economic and

33 communications networks.72 The great expansion of international trade lasted until

1914 – or for some regions (Latin America, for example) until 1930.

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 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: provisional conclusion of nation-building (Germany, Japan), a retreat from earlier reforms (the USA after the end of Reconstruction in 1877; the return to strict autocracy in 1881 under Tsar Alexander III in Russia and in 1876 under Sultan Abdülhamid II in the Ottoman Empire), 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 refoundation 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

34 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 West 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 growing weight of the press, palpable in

Europe, North America, Australia, Japan, China, India, Egypt, and elsewhere, was 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 anti- colonialism or a renewed attempt to draw on indigenous resources in the encounter with the West. Breaking from the sometimes uncritical fascination with which local

35 elites greeted European expansion in the Victorian age, this reflective attitude differed

from spontaneous xenophobic resistance while 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 meant to revitalize the Chinese Empire. Ten years later it would acquire political significance within the ambitious, though ultimately futile, Imperial initiative, the ‘Hundred Days of Reform.’76

Such anti-colonial 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 strike waves 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 whole of the

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.

36 Subtle Processes

Nevertheless, one must not be too naïve or one-sided in looking for watersheds or

historic shifts. World history is even less amenable than the history of a nation or

continent to precisely defined time frames. 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, in 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 tempi – 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 judgement:

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, 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.

37 Historical processes do not only unfold within different time frames: short- term, medium-term, 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 cases of the latter are those that unfold causatively between different fields 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 non-simultaneous 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 not be 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

38 basis for a secure chronology can the perception of time contribute to internal differentiation within history and histories. Temporal regularity is the necessary background for something like the experience of 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 even 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 not linear-progressive but ‘round-shaped’ 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, whose discovery 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, however often 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

39 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 onwards, 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 afterwards, 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

40 high cultures and the Slavs. This refusal to accept that different cultures can participate simultaneously in a common space-time 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: the efficient North Atlantic out ahead, other regions as stragglers or late developers. To keep open at least the possibility of non-linear historical movement frees us from the false alternative of binary simplification or

Eurocentric homogenization.

Reforming Time

One gets closer to a history of nineteenth-century mentalities if one considers which experiences of time may have been characteristic of the age. This is a case of cultural construction and is one of the favorite criteria used by anthropologists and cultural theorists to distinguish civilizations from one another.90 Indeed, there is scarcely a more demanding or productive starting point for a comparative approach to cultures.91

Conceptions of time vary greatly both on the level of philosophical or religious discourse and in everyday behavior. Can anything sufficiently general be said about images and experiences of time in the nineteenth century?

No previous age had developed such uniformity in its measurement of time.

At the beginning of the century there were myriad times and temporal cultures specific to particular locations or milieux. By its end the order of world time had

41 settled over this reduced, but not entirely vanished, multiplicity. Around 1800 no

country in the world had a synchronized time signal beyond the limits of a particular

city; every place, or at least every region, adjusted its clocks by its estimation of the

solar noon. By 1890 the measurement of time had been coordinated within national

frontiers, and not only in the advanced industrial countries. This would not have been

possible without technological innovations. The standardization of clock time was a

challenge that occupied many engineers and technicians – even the young Albert

Einstein. Only the invention and introduction of telegraphic electrical impulses made a solution practicable.92

In 1884 an international conference met in Washington, with delegates from

25 countries, and approved a single ‘world time’ (the one we still use today), dividing

the globe into 24 time zones each of 15 degrees of longitude. The driving force behind

this historic agreement was a private individual, Sandford Fleming, a railway engineer

who emigrated from Scotland to Canada, and who may safely be described as one of

the most successful ‘globalizers’ of the nineteenth century.93 Advocates of time

reform had been proposing similar plans since the beginning of the century, but until

the 1880s governments had shown little interest. The logic of train timetables had

cried out for coordination, but the actual work of reform had dragged on and on. As

late as 1874 railroad time in Germany was calculated on the basis of local times in big

cities, each of which had to be precisely measured and officially monitored.94

Passengers had to calculate for themselves the hour at which they would reach their

destination. In 1870 the United States had more than four hundred railroad companies

and 75 different ‘railroad times;’ each passenger had to report to the counter in

accordance with the time in use for his or her journey. A first step toward

standardization was the electrical synchronization of clocks for the reckoning of time

42 within one railroad company.95 But where was the measure to be taken from? Since the eighteenth century sailors had been largely agreed upon a standard time that took the longitude of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as the zero meridian, and since

1855 some 98 per cent of all public clocks in the United Kingdom had used

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), even though this became compulsory only 1880.96 In

1868 New Zealand became the first country in the world to make GMT official. In the

United States, where the coordination problems were of a different magnitude, a

GMT-based national standard time was introduced in 1883 with four geographical

time zones. This was the idea that caught on at an international level the following

year, with adjustments in the many cases where the national territory was spread out

over a wide area.97

There was standardization at two levels: within and between nations. Not

infrequently the international coordination came first. In the German Reich, which

was small enough to dispense with separate eastern and western time zones, an

official standard time came into effect only in 1893, after the aged Field-Marshal

Helmuth von Moltke, the nation’s foremost military authority, had made a moving

plea in the Reichstag five weeks before his death. France adopted GMT as late as

1911. What were the reasons for its revealing hesitation?98

It is a remarkable paradox that the major moves toward international

standardization – the same is true of weights and measures, postal and telegraphic

communications, railroad gauges, etc. – went hand in hand with the strengthening of

nationalism and nation-states. For this reason Sandford Fleming’s plans met with

fierce resistance in France. When the Washington conference of 1884 was considering

the proposal to accept Britain’s imperial observatory on the Thames as the zero

meridian, Paris would have much preferred to see its own ‘older’ meridian-

43 observatory play that role (there were also any number of other suggestions, from

Jerusalem to Tahiti). However, not only had the Greenwich meridian long been in use

in ocean navigation; the American railroads had already set their clocks to GMT, no

doubt in an expression of British hegemony that was freely recognized, not imposed.

The French objections therefore had no practical chance of acceptance.

In 1884 relations between France and Britain were not particularly bad, but

each of them had staked a claim to represent the peak of Western civilization. It was

therefore no trivial matter whether Britain or France was the reference country

dominating global standard time. France even offered a deal: it would accept that the

zero meridian should run through a district of London if the British agreed to adopt

the metric system of weights and measures. As everyone knows, that did not happen;

an attempt to decimalize time, back in Year II of the Revolution, had likewise been an

utter failure.99 Of course, no one could force the French to join an international time system. In the mid-1880s every city in France still had its local time adjusted to the

height of the sun; the country’s railroads ran to Paris time, which was 9 minutes and

20 seconds ahead of GMT. In 1891 a defiant law made this Paris time the heure

légale throughout the country. In 1911 France finally adhered to the universal time

standard, essentially dispelling the anarchy in European time. The French example

shows that national uniformity did not necessarily precede international

standardization, and that global regulations did not automatically cancel national

specificities. Tendencies to the nationalization of time were also present during the

period of its universalization. But at least in this case the tendency to standardization

was victorious in the end.

Chronometrization

44

All this took place in societies that were already wedded to precise time-keeping. The ubiquity of clocks and the obedience of their owners and users to the dictates of mechanical time struck many Asian or African visitors to countries like Britain and the United States. A standardized time was possible only in societies that had agreed to measure time and grown used to doing so – that is, in clock societies. It is hard to say when not only academics, priests, and princes but whole societies became subject to chronometrization. Probably the threshold was reached only with the industrial mass production of cheap timepieces for the private living room, bedside table, and waistcoat pocket, in the second half of the nineteenth century. This ‘democratization of the pocket watch’ (David Landes) made punctuality within the reach of all. Annual world output of pocket watches climbed from 350-400,000 units at the end of the eighteenth century to more than 2.5 million in 1875, at which point the manufacturing of cheap timepieces had been extant for only a few years.100 The main producer countries were then Switzerland, France, Britain, and the United States. It is not known how many watches found their way into non-Western pockets. In any event, like the commanding heights of world time, the devices for its measurement were mainly in the hands of white males; the world divided into the watch-owning and the watchless. Missionaries and colonial rulers made new time resources available, but in doing so established their monopoly control of time. Lewis Mumford’s observation that the clock, not the steam-engine, was the most important mechanism of the industrial age is applicable at least for the non-Western world.101 The clock was incomparably more widespread than the steam-engine. It ordered and disciplined societies in a way in which production technology alone could not have done. There were clocks in parts of the world where people had never seen a coal-fired machine or

45 locomotive. Yet the problem of making the prestigious device meaningful to them remained on ongoing challenge.

The watch became an emblem of Western civilization. In Japan, for want of pockets, it was initially worn around the neck or the waist. The Meiji Emperor awarded pocket watches – made in the USA at first – to the best students of the year.102 By 1880, along with the top hat, laced corset, and false teeth, it was considered in Latin America to be a status symbol of the Western-oriented upper classes. In the Ottoman Empire, nothing more clearly exhibited the resolve of the state and social elites to introduce Western-style modernization than the public clock- towers that Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered to be built in large cities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.103 The British did much the same in their world empire – for example, on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Such towers, a secular and culturally neutral offshoot of the clock-bearing church tower, made time publicly visible and in most cases audible. China, for its part, remained largely content with drum towers and their purely acoustic time signal until well into the twentieth century.

The spread of mechanical chronometry contributed to the quantification and continuation of labor processes. In the preindustrial world, E. P. Thompson argued in a famous essay, labor followed an irregular and uneven course. In the nineteenth century, however, as the division of labor intensified and production was organized within ever larger and more capital-intensive firms, entrepreneurs and market forces enforced a stricter time regime and a longer workday. Workers who moved from agriculture or handicrafts into the early factories found themselves subject to a strange new concept of abstract time represented by clocks, bells, and penalties.104 This sounds a plausible account, all the more attractive in that it places English factory

46 workers in a similar situation of social discipline and cultural alienation to that of

workers in later industrializing countries or subjugated colonies. Thompson’s thesis,

with its critique of modernity, thus appears to be universalizable. The clock

everywhere became a weapon of modernization. Only this seems to have happened

later than Thompson claimed. For, even in Britain, clocks that told the precise time in accordance with standard norms came into widespread daily use only towards the end of the nineteenth century.105

It is a good idea to keep the quantitative and qualitative sides of this argument

separate. Karl Marx already believed that the workday had been appreciably

lengthened, and many other contemporary witnesses confirm that the beginning of

industrial factory production was often, or almost always, associated with an increase

in the number of hours worked by individuals; workdays as long as sixteen hours

appear to have been normal in the early period of cotton-spinning machines. It is true

that the full picture is not easy to discover, even with the precise and detailed

techniques and quantitative procedures available to the historical sciences, but

meticulous studies have established a clear rise in the length of the workday, at least

for England’s early industrialization up to 1830.106 This upward trend, over a period

of roughly eight decades, was accompanied with increased ownership of clocks and

watches, which made factory workers more aware of the quantitative demands made

upon them.107 The struggle for a shorter working week presupposed that workers had

an idea of their actual performance. With watch in hand, they could check the extent

of the capitalist’s impositions.

Qualitatively, therefore, it is questionable whether the clock was really nothing

but an instrument of compulsion in the service of the factory owner. And if

technological developments are not to be seen as an independent variable, we must

47 ask whether the invention of the mechanical timepiece created a need for precise

measurement in the first place, or whether the need had already been present and

kindled a demand for technical means to satisfy it.108 Wherever precise time-keeping was introduced, it was an instrument of mechanization, and even of the more intensive form that involved the strict metronomization of production and numerous other processes in everyday life. This was emblematic of a time regime more uniform than that experienced in a close-to-nature peasant lifestyle.109 In the nineteenth

century, peasants and nomads were confronted on all sides with this regulation of time

that radiated out from the cities.

Those who have learned from experience that the same strict standards of

punctuality still do not apply everywhere in Europe, not to speak of the rest of the

world, will not underestimate the capacity of human beings to resist time and to live

simultaneously in more than one temporal order: that is, to cope with discontinuous mundane experiences of time as well as with the abstract time of the clock and

calendar.110 Anthropologists have found many instances of societies without astronomy or clocks that are able to distinguish between ‘points in time’ and ongoing processes and to coordinate their activities precisely in time.111 E. P. Thompson’s

appealing hypothesis that the perception of time was a battlefield in the cultural

conflicts of early industrial England seems to be of only limited applicability to other

regions and other epochs. Its validity has been openly contested in the case of Japan.

Japanese peasants of the late Togukawa period (up to 1867), who competed with one

another in small economic units overwhelmingly geared to intensive agriculture and

craft production for the market, did not by any means live in idyllic harmony with the

rhythms of nature, but related to time as a precious resource to be used in accordance

with a well thought-out plan. A bad economy of time would spell ruin for the family.

48 When industrialization began around 1880, manpower was already occupied

continuously in a flow of work through all seasons of the year. The new discipline of

the factory – which in Japan was actually quite lax for a long time – did not feel too

oppressive. The workers, unlike their working-class comrades in Europe or the USA,

complained little about the intensity of exploitation and did not make a shorter

workday one of their central demands. More important to them was the moral issue

that management should recognize them as partners within the enterprise hierarchy.112

Things were different on the cotton plantations of the American South before

the Civil War, where overseers had long imposed an intense rhythm on ‘gangs’ of

slaves and backed it up with extreme violence. Slave-owners soon got their hands on

the new-fangled mechanical timepieces, which they made available as part of the arsenal of labor discipline. Unlike factory workers – whether in England, Japan or the slave-free Northern states of the USA – slaves were in no position to argue with their bosses over working hours. Here the clock was much more plainly a one-sided instrument of compulsion, although in the end it changed the life of the slave-owner too; master and slave shared the new world of pitilessly ticking hands. The clock also served another, quite different purpose, in so far as the plantation oligarchy tried to use it to link up with cultural practices in the more developed North. As in countless other situations around the world, a private owned timepiece became one of the most potent symbols of modernity.113

On closer examination, it is necessary to make a number of further

distinctions: between village and city time, men’s and women’s time, old people’s and

young people’s time, the time of soldiers and the time of civilians, the time of

musicians and the time of master builders. Between the objective time of the

chronometer and subjectively experienced time stands the social time of ‘typical’ life

49 cycles in the family and work. This in turn exhibits various mixes of cultural norms,

economic tasks, and emotional needs. One question especially worthy of

consideration is whether and under which circumstances social time was also

experienced collectively, for example, as the cycle of a generation.

Acceleration

Was acceleration the characteristic experience that especially large numbers of people

shared as they moved into the nineteenth century?114 In the wake of the steam-engine and its mechanical combination with wheels and ship’s propellers, the nineteenth century became the age of the speed revolution. Although the dramatic speed increases due to air travel and greatly improved road transport would come only in the next century, the railroad and the telegraph marked a decisive break with all previous history. They were faster than the fastest horse and carriage or the fastest dispatch rider. The conveyance of people, goods, and news was released from the shackles of the bio-motor system. This development had none other than technological causes.

However different the cultural reactions and modes of employment, the effects of rail travel were in principle the same all over the world.115 The experience of physical

acceleration was a direct consequence of new technological opportunities.

The fact that the railroad had been invented in Europe was less significant than

its spread across whole continents. The railroad was culturally neutral in its use

potential. But the same was not true of its actual use; there were many different ways

of handling it. It has even been claimed that the Russian public showed little

enthusiasm for the fast speed of rail travel (which was anyway more measured than in

the West), because of a cultural preference for slowness that faded only when the

50 observation of other countries showed how backward Russia was becoming.116 Trains

were not only faster but also more comfortable than older forms of land transport. In

1847, en route from Tauroggen (today’s Tauragé in Latvia) to St. Petersburg, the

French composer Hector Berlioz spent four days and four nights in an ice-cold sledge,

which he describes as a ‘hermetically sealed metal box,’ enduring ‘torments I had

never suspected in my most lurid dreams.’117 On the other hand, there was the new

calamity of the train crash: in England, where Charles Dickens barely survived one in

1865 on a journey from the south coast to London; in Russia, where Tsar Alexander

III suffered the same experience in 1888; in India or Canada. At the latest by 1910,

mechanical acceleration and denaturation of the experience of time was in principle

(not necessarily in fact) a reality for most of the world’s population.118

This can be stated less confidently about the new temporal categories used in

interpreting the world, which Koselleck has analyzed in relation to the Sattelzeit

around 1800 in Western Europe. The accelerated experience of history was only

loosely connected with the greater physical speed of travel and communication. Nor

did it attain the same universality. We have already seen how small was the radius of

the direct influence of the French Revolution. But it also questionable whether the

philosophical-historical model that Koselleck detects in the epochal changes in

Europe around 1800 – that is, the forcible ‘breaking open’ of a time continuum through revolutionary action in the present – can be found anywhere else in the world.119 Was there anything comparable – and, if so, when? – in those parts of the

world that were not shaken by 1789? Did they doze on in the slumber of

premodernity? Or were their ‘breaking open’ experiences different? England, which

had beheaded a king way back in 1649, was agitated but not convulsed by the events

51 in Paris. By 1789 the United States had already codified its revolution into a written constitution and was directing it into safe institutional channels.

Where else in the nineteenth century do we find the perception that something totally new has irrupted into familiar life-cycles and conventional expectations of the future? Millenarian movements and apocalyptic preachers lived on this effect. They did exist in various regions, from China via North America (among Indians as well as whites such as the Mormons) to Africa. As many testimonies show, Afro-Americans experienced the end of slavery as the sudden dawning of a new age, even if the actual

‘death of slavery’ was often arduous, protracted and disappointing.120 From the

French Revolution to the Chinese Taiping movement of the 1850s, the vision of the new was often bound up with a resolve to link it with a reorganization of time. A calendar that breaks with tradition is itself part of what a revolution is about.

However, it should by no means be seen as always involving messianic spiritualization or resistance to the logocentrism of a previously hegemonic culture.

More characteristic for the age since the late eighteenth century is an urge to rationalize the recording of time, to make it more in keeping with the modern world.

This was the case in France in 1792, in Japan after the Meiji renewal of 1868, or in

Russia in February 1918 when the Bolshevik regime moved without delay to introduce the Gregorian calendar. The same impetus is evident in the counter-state that the Chinese Taiping rebels sought to construct, whose calendar had eschatological as well as thoroughly practical references. The ‘new heaven and new earth,’ we read in the Taiping documents, shall overcome the false teachings and superstitions of the past and enable the peasantry to distribute their labor time in a rational manner.121 Time was supposed to be simple, transparent and devoid of magic.

52

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

1 J.M. Roberts, Twentieth Century (1999), p. 3. 2 Wills, 1688: A Global History (2001); Bernier, The World in 1800 (2000). 3 Pot, Sinndeutung (1999), p. 52, referring to such authorities as Jan Romein, Lucien Febvre and R.G. Collingwood. 4 Tanaka, New Times (2004), p. 112. 5 On the theories of time underpinning this, see Kwong, Linear Perspective (2001). 6 Kirch, On the Road (2000), pp. 293 f. 7 Today’s standard work sets this out in detail: Strachan, First World War (2001). 8 See Manela, Wilsonian Moment (2007). 9 Eichhorn, Geschichtswissenschaft (2006), pp. 145-52. 10 Evidence for the varied use of ‘modernity’ is collected in Corfield, Time (2007), pp. 134- 38. 11 Wolfgang Reinhard suspects that this is the case: see his ‘The Idea of Early Modern History,’ in: Bentley, Companion (1997), pp. 281-92, at 290. 12 Cf. P. Nolte, Einheit (1997). 13 Hobsbawm, Revolution (1962), Capital (1975) and Empire (1987). 14 E. Wilkinson, Chinese History (1998), pp. 196f. 15 On the pragmatic reasons why the Gregorian calendar was preferred, see Watkins Time Counts (1954), p. 47. Along with Watkins’s classic, the best modern history of the calendar is E.G. Richards, Mapping Time (1998). 16 Ibid., p. 114. 17 See Gardet et al., Cultures and Time (1976), pp. 201, 208. 18 E.G. Richards, Mapping Time (1998), p. 236. 19 Wilcox, Measure of Times Past (1987), p. 8. 20 Tanaka, New Times (2004), p. 11. 21 Brownlee, Japanese Historians (1997), p. 209. 22 Coulmas, Japanische Zeiten (2000), p 127; Zöllner, Japanische Zeitrechnung (2003), p. 9; Tanaka, New Times (2004), pp. 5f., 9. 23 Zerubavel, Time Maps (2003), pp. 89 ff., speaks of ‘firstism.’ 24 Keirstead, Inventing Medieval Japan (1998). 25 Pot, Sinndeutung (1999), p. 63.

53

26 Troeltsch, Historismus (1922), pp. 756, 765. 27 However, some historians have made bold suggestions for carving up world history into fairly thin temporal slices of three to four decades. See Wills, The World from 1450 to 1700 (2009). 28 Cited in Raulff, Der unsichtbare Augenblick (1999), p. 19. 29 Barry, Influenza (2004). 30 See Wigen, Japanese Periphery (1995), p. 19. The author had in mind 1868, the central date in nineteenth-century Japanese history. 31 Hans-Heinrich Nolte has even postulated a major epoch in world history stretching from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century: Weltgeschichte (2005). 32 Cf. Green, Periodization (1992), pp. 36, 46, 50, 52f. 33 Schilling, Die neue Zeit (1999), pp. 10-15. 34 Gerhard, Old Europe (1981). A similar approach had been taken previously by the famous historians Otto Brunner, and Otto Hintze. 35 Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (1981-4). 36 Macfarlane, Savage Wars of Peace (1997); A. Reid, An Age of Commerce (1990), pp. 5f.; idem, Charting the Shape (1999), pp. 1-14, esp. 7. 37 The concept of a ‘long’ eighteenth century (approx. 1680–1830) has been argued for in Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens (2010), pp. 31-37. On the enlarged meaning of the eighteenth century, cf. Blussé / Gaastra, Eighteenth Century (1998); Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth Century (2003). 38 Quataert, Ottoman Empire (2000), p. 54; Kreiser, Der osmanische Staat (2001), pp. 36ff. 39 See the authoritative account in Totman, Early Modern Japan (1993); cf. J.W. Hall, Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4 (1991). 40 R. Oliver / Atmore, Medieval Africa (2001). 41 Quoted in Jordheim, Against Periodization (2012), p. 156. 42 For a first impression of the period turn to Blom, Vertigo Years (2008). 43 Nitschke et al., Jahrhundertwende (1990). 44 E.g. Dejung / Petersson, Foundations of Worldwide Economic Integration (2013). 45 This is a periodization suggested in the six-volume History of the World edited by Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel (Cambridge, MA 2012ff.). See E.S. Rosenberg, A World Connecting (2012). 46 The term should not be used naively, without an awareness of the rich history behind it. On post-Victorian (British) perceptions of the Victorians, see Gardiner, The Victorians (2002). 47 G.M. Young, Portrait (1977, orig. 1936), p. 151. 48 For example, Searle, A New England? (2004). 49 Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil des Begriffs “Frühe Neuzeit.” Fragen und Thesen,’ in: idem et al., Frühe Neuzeit (1992), p. 21. 50 One might also put the question ‘the other way round’ and focus on the new beginning in the 1840s, as the great social historian Jerome Blum does convincingly in his last work, In the Beginning (1994).

54

51 Bayly, Birth of the Modern World (2004), pp. 110ff. The argument is more striking in Bayly’s earlier writings, when it was not yet mixed in with a particular interpretation of globalization: see esp. First Age (1998). 52 This emerges clearly in F. Anderson, Crucible (2000); McLynn, 1759 (2004); and above all in a masterly work, Marshall, Making (2005), pp. 86-157. 53 Palmer, Democratic Revolution (1959-64); Godechot, France (1965). For the background, cf. Bailyn, Atlantic History (2005), pp. 15-15, 24-30. 54 See Bayly, Imperial Meridian (1989), p. 164; Förster, Weltkrieg (1995), especially on the global military context; and Michael Duffy, ‘World-Wide War and British Expansion, 1793- 1815’, in: Louis, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2 (1998), pp. 184-207. 55 Here the foundation of the USA, the Haitian revolution and the independence of South and Central America should be seen as a single interlinked process, as they are, for example, in Langley, The Americas (1996). 56 See Meinig, Shaping of America, vol. 2 (1993), pp. 81-96. 57 C.A. Bayly, ‘The British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760-1860: Power, Perception and Identity,’ in: Daunton / Halpern, Empire and Others (1999), pp. 29-31. See also Chapter VII below. 58 Again, it is Bayly, Imperial Meridian (1989), where this point is underscored forcefully. 59 A model for such research may be found in Dipper, Übergangsgesellschaft (1996). 60 Maddison, World Economy (2001), p. 27; and Contours (2007), pp. 73f. 61 Wrigley, People (1987), p. 3. 62 Ibid., pp. 10f.; J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun (2000), p. xxiii, 298; Smil, Energy (1994), pp. 156ff. 63 Foucault, Order of Things (1989), pp. 248ff. 64 C. Rosen, Classical Style (1971); idem, Romantic Generation (1995). 65 P. Nolte, 1900 (1996), p. 300. 66 J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun (2000), p. 14; and see Fig. 6.5 in Smil, Energy (1994), p. 233. 67 Stearns, Industrial Revolution (1993), pp. 87ff. 68 Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century (2005), pp. 33–97 (‘The Age of Electricity’). 69 A. D. Chandler, Visible Hand (1977), Ch. 5 & passim; Zunz, Making America Corporate (1990), pp. 40f. 70 Woodruff, Impact (1966), p. 150 (Tab. IV/1). 71 Nugent, Crossings (1992), p. 12. 72 Or, to put it differently, the 1880s ushered in the ‘fourth wave of globalization:’ Therborn, Globalizations (2000), p. 161. 73 In his great history of Western music, Richard Taruskin diverges from this view by arguing in detail that nineteenth-century music ended only with the First World War. The ‘long’ Fin de Siècle, he maintains, was as an age of ‘maximalist’ intensification of the Romantic striving for expression (Mahler, Debussy, Scriabin, Richard Strauss’s early operas, the Schönberg of the Gurrelieder and the Stravinsky of the Ballets Russes). The musical twentieth century began only with the advent of a greater artistic stringency, with the emphasis on irony,

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pastiche, and constructivism under the aegis of neo-classicism, New Objectivity and twelve- tone technique. See Taruskin, Western Music, vol. 4 (2005), pp. 448, 471. 74 The comparison between India and Italy is drawn in: Antony Copley, ‘Congress and Risorgimento: A Comparative Study of Nationalism,’ in: Low, Indian National Congress (1988), pp. 1-21; see also Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism (1971), p. 47. 75 A. Black, Islamic Political Thought (2001), pp. 295–99, 301-4. 76 On the complicated dating of Kang Youwei’s intellectual evolution, see Hsiao Kung-chuan, A Modern China (1975), p. 56. 77 See R.W. Bowen’s major study, Rebellion (1980). 78 Though never fully elaborated, these ideas appear most clearly in Braudel, History and the Social Sciences (1960). 79 J. Goldstone, Problem (1998), p. 269. 80 Koselleck speaks of ‘structures of repetition,’ in Zeitschichten (2000), p. 21. Charles Tilly has developed similar ideas in a number of writings. 81 An original way of differentiating these modes of historical change may be found in Laslett, Social Structural Time (1988). 82 See Koselleck, Futures Past (2004), p. 96. 83 Schumpeter, Economic Analysis (1954), pp. 738-50. 84 These approaches are synthesized in Rasler / Thompson, Great Powers (1994). Three major representatives are George Modelski, Joshua S. Goldstein, and Ulrich Menzel. 85 For a concise discussion, see Schmied, Soziale Zeit (1985), pp. 144-63. 86 Gardet et al., Cultures and Time (1976), p. 212. 87 Aung-Thwin, Spirals (1991), pp. 584, 590, 592, 595. 88 See Osterhammel, Entzauberung Asiens (2010), pp. 390-93. Around 1900 Japanese intellectuals saw the rest of Asia, especially Korea, in a similar light. 89 At its most effective in Fabian, Time and the Other (1983). He speaks there of a ‘denial of coevalness.’ 90 A brief introduction to the question is given in Östör, Vessels of Time (1993), pp. 12-25. 91 Surveys are: Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur (1980); J.T. Fraser, Voices of Time (1981); and, a classical text, Needham, Grand Titration (1969), pp. 218-98. 92 This is one of the main themes in Galison, Einstein’s Clocks (2003). 93 See Blaise, Time Lord (2000). 94 Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour (1996), p. 348. 95 Bartky, Selling the True Time (2000), pp. 93, 114. 96 Whitrow, Time (1988), p. 164. 97 Bartky, Selling the True Time (2000), pp. 139f., 146. 98 The following section is based on unpublished work bei Vanessa Ogle. 99 Galinson, Einstein’s Clocks (2002), pp. 153, 162 ff. 100 Landes, Revolution in Time (1983), pp. 97, 287. 101 Mumford, Technics (1934), p. 14.

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102 Coulmas, Japanische Zeiten (2000), pp. 142, 233. 103 Kreiser, Istanbul (2001), p. 181. 104 E.P. Thompson, Time (1967). 105 Gay, Clock Synchrony (2003), pp. 112, 136. 106 Voth, Time and Work (2001), p. 257 and passim. This also contains a summary and evaluation of older studies. 107 Ibid., pp. 47-58. 108 David Landes gave an unambiguous answer in his great work on the history of clocks: ‘The clock did not create an interest in time measurement, the interest in time measurement led to the invention of the clock.’ Revolution in Time (1983), p. 58. 109 On the (not very precisely developed) concept of metronomization, see Young, Metronomic Society (1988). And on the mechanization of classical labour, see the work by the Swiss architectural historian and theorist Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization (1948). 110 For the example of a semi-nomadic tribe in Morocco, see Eickelman, Time (1974), esp. pp. 45f., and for present-day Bali, Henk Schulte Nordholt, ‘Plotting Time in Bali: Articulating Plurality,’ in: Schendel / Schulte Nordholt, Time Matters (2001), pp. 57-76. 111 The founder of ethnological functionalism, Bronisław Malinowski, already noted this in the early twentieth century. See Munn, Cultural Anthropology (1992), pp. 96, 102-5. 112 T.C. Smith, Peasant Time (1986), pp. 180f., 184-89, 194f. 113 M.M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock (1997), pp. 5-7. 114 A lot of relevant material, especially from Western Europe, has been collected and discussed in: Borscheid, Tempo-Virus (2004), esp. chs. 5-7, and Kaschuba, Überwindung (2004); also still valuable is Kern, Culture (1983), pp. 109-30. 115 See the historical phenomenology of rail travel in: Schivelbusch, Railway Journey (1986); Freeman, Railways (1999). 116 Cvetkovski, Modernisierung (2006), pp. 192, 222, 236f., 242f. 117 Berlioz, Memoirs (2002), pp. 456f. 118 Koselleck, Zeitschichten (2000), p. 153. 119 See, in addition to Koselleck: E.W. Becker, Zeit der Revolution (1999), pp. 14-16; and numerous works by Lucian Hölscher. 120 Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long (1979), p. 172 and passim. 121 Shih, Taiping Ideology (1967), p. 75.

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