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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).

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