A. A. 2018-2019

Corso di laurea magistrale in International Relations

The Global History of the Contemporary Age An Introduction (Professor Teodoro Tagliaferri)

1. Aims and Contents of the Course 2. Key Concepts: Global Past, Human Community, Dynamic Interaction 3. Contemporary India in the Perspective of the New Global History: the Reinterpretation of the Origins of British Colonialism 4. Methodological Excursus: Indian Civilization in the “Orientalist” Representation of James Mill 5. Christopher Bayly’s General Approach to Global History in The Birth of the Modern World 6. The Interactive Emergence of the British Domination in Afro-Eurasia in Bayly’s

Imperial Meridian 7. The World Historical Impact of «British Nationalism» in the Age of Revolutions 8. A Global Past for a Common Future: The Ethics of Global History 9. Overcoming Eurocentrism: the First Step 10. The Expansion of Europe in the Perspective of the New Global History

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1. Aims and Contents of the Course

This course of Global History of the Contemporary Age is a course of Contemporary History specifically aimed to postgraduate students for a Master’s degree in International Relations in English and this implies that it differs substantially, both in its aims and its contents, from a course of Contemporary History for a Bachelor’s degree, like the Italian «Laurea Triennale», under three main respects. First of all, and more obviously, it presupposes that the student has already acquired a basic knowledge of the fundamental outlines of the history of the contemporary age. Secondly, as hinted in its title, the subject-matter of this course is the same subject- matter of the general or more elementary course of contemporary history: the contemporary age. This means that, whatever beginning we take as point of departure (the French Revolution, or the American Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution, or the Seven Years War of the middle of the eighteenth century), the period covered by this course includes the present age. But it includes the present both in the sense that the present forms a part of it and in the sense that the understanding of the present, a better understanding of our own present is the ultimate goal pursued by this discipline. Contemporary history is not about the past in itself, it is about the present as seen in its historical making, and it deals with the past only in so far our present, our political present is rooted in that past. So, in defining the contents of the teaching of contemporary history (which may legitimately vary from teacher to teacher), a teacher must, or should, clarify to himself and to his fellow-students what is the present that he selects (among the many possible presents) as his starting point, the present of which he is interested to investigate the genealogy. Within the context of this course we will deliberately take as our starting point the globalized society of our time and will conduct an inquiry about its making, an exploration of its historical background. More precisely, my firts aim will be to lead you to acquire an intimate understanding of a specific approach to the making of the global society. This approach is focused on the role 2 played in the making of the global society by a particular set of historical phenomena, the so-called cross-cultural and transregional interactions, as we will see. This is the approach which is being practised by the schools of international historiography of the contemporary age which are grouped under the scientific paradigm of the so called New World History. The methodology of the New World or New Global History is well exemplified by the two books (both in English) that we will employ as our textbook: 1) The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 - 19141. Global Connections and Comparisons, published by Christopher Bayly in 2003; 2) After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, from 1400 to 2000, published by John Darwin in 2007. Both Bayly and Darwin are prominent and influential practitioners of the New World History. By studying in depth some parts of their works you should become acquainted not only with the particular periods or aspects of the making of the global society they treat, but also with the methods and procedures which connote the achievement of original results in the specialized research field of the Global History of the Contemporary Age. This is another momentous difference between the teaching and studying of the contemporary history at the undergraduate level and the teaching and studying of contemporary history at your Master’s level. At the Master’s level the teaching of whatever discipline must pursue a specializing aim. In order to obtain the Master’s degree, you are required to give proof, by means of your final thesis, of having become able to produce original research results in the field of specialization of your choice. And this is true for the Contemporary History too (even when …). The specialized study of the Contemporary History is included in your curriculum for two reasons. In the first place, Contemporary History is deemed (here in Naples, at least) an essential component in the specializing training of a master student in International Relations, whatever the field of specialization he may choose to pursue. In the second place, one or more of you

1 The two dates refer, approximatively, to the American Revolution and the First World War. 3 might choose to specialize in Contemporary History itself or, more probably, to devote part of their energies at this stage of their education to work to a Master’s thesis in Contemporary History. This means that the additional duty incumbent upon me when I teach students for a Master’s degree is to teach them also the methods through which scientific knowledge is achieved in my profession. So, a further object of this course is to give you a preliminary notion, at least, in the very short time at disposition, of the research procedures, treatment of sources, use of analytical categories, technical language and terminology, alternative interpretations, organization of the research and modalities of exposition, circulation and evaluation of its results within the scientific community, which characterize the pursuing of original knowledge in the disciplinary field of the Global History of the Contemporary Age. To this purpose you are requested to study also an essay of mine devoted to the methodology of Christopher Bayly (Christopher Bayly e «the return of universal history», published in 2017). The need for specialization is one of the reasons why this course will not attempt a general survey of the whole subject-matter, the Global History of the entire Contemporary Age, but will approach its study through an in-depth examination of a particularly relevant moment in the making of the global society, or the history of globalization. This is why the program of the course of this year also has a more specific title of its own, that is The Crisis of the Eurasian Equilibrium and the Transition to Global Modernity. We will mainly focus, in other words, without never losing sight of the overall picture, on a necessarily more limited but absolutely crucial subperiod of the global history of the contemporary age. We will study in greater detail, and in a more in-depth way, a transitional phase which can be considered the first act in the drama of contemporary globalization, the first act in the making of the globalized society of our times, of the world we are presently, in this very moment, living in. This transitional subperiod on which we will dwell spans the century or so from the middle of the eighteenth century to the Thirties and Forties of the nineteenth century. If we wanted to trace the chronological limits of the subperiod in question adopting as signposts some particularly emblematic dates 4 or big events, we could use, to indicate its beginning, the seven-year war (1756- 1763) and, to indicate its end, the first Anglo-Chinese opium war (1839 -1842), which marks in turn the commencement of a further stage and a further acceleration in the history of globalization and in the making of the present global world.

2. Key Concepts: Global Past, Human Community, Dynamic Interaction

In order to justify this choice, it is necessary to move to examine briefly the specialized meaning that the term “global” acquires when it is used by the school of global historians (the New World Historians) whose path we will follow in this course. Let us immediately clear the field of a possible misunderstanding, by clarifying what the meaning of global is not. The new global historians do not claim to have discovered a key to understand the totality of the human past. On the contrary, they try to draw attention to the importance of a specific category of phenomena which have been completely neglected or undervalued by their professional ancestors. The terrain of specialistic competence that the world historians claim for their discipline consists in the study of the «global past» and the evolution of the «human community». In the eyes of the new world historians historical events and processes are qualifiable as global when, and only when, they «work their influence (and make their influence felt) in more than one civilization or cultural region», when they unfold themselves on an «interregional» scale, or on a «hemispheric» scale embracing an entire group of civilizations, or on a literally «ecumenical», worldwide scale. As important examples of global historical phenomena we may quote major migrations and the creation of transoceanic diasporic communities, the diffusion of botanical and animal biological species and the spreading of diseases, the establishment of long distance trade networks, the impact of innovations in transport and communication technologies, the encounters and the exchanges of religious, cultural and political traditions, missionary initiatives, the imposition and the 5 exertion of economical, military, political and administrative control on colonial territories and attempts at empire-building involving peoples rooted in far remote and far different civilizational backgrounds (like Europeans and various branches of Asiatics in the spectacular case of British India). Correspondently, for «human community» we will mean – following the new world historians – that specific field of social activity which is generated throughout history by the relationships among human groups that take place in the «transregional» and «cross-cultural» geohistorical spaces. The «human community» is a macro-society composed of two or more great regional societies and regional cultures interacting with each other inside it and with it. There is interaction between the single regional society and the global community at large as well as between the individual regional societies among themselves. The human community evolves in the course of time. This means that the human community possesses a history of its own – a history which can be empirically reconstructed and a history which is susceptible to periodization. And the history of the human community may provide the thread for a unified narrative of world history centered on the prolonged genesis of its present stage of growth – the stage that has been termed «global cosmopolitanism». In the present world, in the world around us, the development of the human community has reached a stage in which «all the cultural variety of mankind is now embraced within the bounds of an intimately interacting whole». The global history of the contemporary age deals therefore with that particular period of the history of the human community in which, starting from the transitional epoch we will treat in depth, the nowadays condition of global cosmopolitanism took shape.

Some global historians refer to the history of the human community as the history of globalization. This choice presents both advantages and disadvantages. But it is obvious that, in this acception, the term “globalization” does not intend to indicate a merely contemporary phenomenon. On the contrary, what the new world historians want to emphasize is that contemporary globalization is only a phase in a process – the growth of the human community – which is coextensive with a very 6 large portion of the history of mankind. Not by chance, perhaps, one of the best definitions of the concept of “globalization” has been given by an Egyptologist, the German archeologist Jan Assmann. According to Assmann, globalization in world history can be described as «a process of general dissemination (of merchandise, technologies, news, political influence, religious ideas) across political and cultural boundaries and of the ensuing integration and coalescence of various previously isolated zones into one system of interconnections and interdependencies, where everything, that is, all nations, empires, tribes and states cohere in some way or other by political, economic, or cultural relations». Another influential conceptualization of globalization in history has been proposed by Christopher Bayly, the author of one among the textboooks of this course, who has defined globalization as the «progressive increase in the scale of social processes from a local or regional to a world level». A concrete and at the same time very significant example of the kind of periodization based on the application of the global perspective to world history is offered to us by the masterpiece of the founding father of the new world history in the United States, The Rise of the West by William McNeill (a book published in 1965 and never translated into Italian), whose subtitle is precisely «a history of the human community». In this pionieering and very influential work Mc Neill identified three epochs in the history of what the global historians call today globalization. The first epoch is the epoch of the Middle-Eastern ascendancy, when between the seventeenth century and the fifth century before Christ the «human community» firstly emerges – already presenting the features of a «cosmopolitan civilization» that encompasses a number of local civilizations and cultures – from the expansion of a Babylonian «“great society”» formed at the beginning of the second millennium before Christ. The following epoch is the epoch of the «Eurasian cultural balance» (or Eurasian equilibrium, as it has been more recently renamed). This second epoch spans the two thousands years or so from the «closure» of the entire Eastern hemisphere occurring between the fifth century before Christ and the third century after Christ to the threshold of the early modern age. During this period the «human 7 community» expands into an even wider «Eurasian ecumene» – a unified space within which a variable constellation of four or five mildly connected civilizations interacts without none of them losing its autonomy or acquiring a significant preponderance. The third epoch, the epoch of the «Western dominance opens – in the aftermath of the discovery of the sea route to India and the discovery, conquest and colonization of the New World – with the early modern «closure» of a «global ecumene» now literally coextensive with the inhabited world. This period sees the Eurasian equilibrium first «changing» to the advantage of the West (between 1500 and 1700), then «tottering» (between 1700 and the middle of the nineteenth-century), finally to give rise to the radical reconfiguration of the «human community» corresponding to the «global cosmopolitanism» of our day. Many historians agree with McNeill in placing on the background of contemporary globalization a period marked by the long persistence of a condition of relative equilibrium in the balance of power between the Eurasian or Old World civilizations, even though some of them (including myself, for what it counts) disagree from McNeill about the precise moment in which this equilibrium would have gone into crisis. In the periodization adopted in my course, as you have seen, the crisis of the

Eurasian equilibrium began in the second half of the eighteenth century. This means that the interregional equilibrium subsisted long after the Europeans had taken the lead in the process of world unification starting with the geographical discoveries. We will see later how this persistence has to be interpreted. For the moment, it is all-important to observe that an essential aspect (someone would say the most essential aspect) of the making of the present global society consists in the so- called expansion of Europe in the extra-European world, and in the ensuing encounters between the Western civilization carried abroad by the Europeans and the various civilizations of the Eastern regions of the Old World, which characterized both the early modern and the contemporary periods of the history of globalization. Contemporary globalization driven by the West and the Western imperialism, at least in its early stages, has been so intense as to entail indeed a partial convergence and reciprocal assimilation between the cultural regions of the world 8 in conformity with patterns provided by the West. One may mention as an obvious instance of this the diffusion on a planetary scale of the national State, a product of Western European history, as the fundamental model of organization of the political life of peoples of very diverse civilizations traditions and their diplomatic relations. The least that can be said is that Europeans and Westerners, also but not only through the means of the imperialist control, have been leading actors in the process of global modernization. The foremost conceptual innovation introduced by such prominent new world historians as Bayly or John Darwin (the author of our other textbook) into the treatment of their subject-matter pertains to the way of conceiving of the transregional or cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans which have shaped the trajectory of contemporary globalizations. In the past the non-European peoples and societies who were involved in the interactive process leading to the expansion of Europe overseas, to transregional empire-building, to global modernization, tended to be regarded as historically static, powerless and passive vis-à-vis the dynamism, the overwhelming superiority and the enterprise of the Westerners. This was an enduring legacy of the nineteenth century, the imperial age par excellence, when the narrative of the European colonialism, for instance, «was written around the triumph of European society over native misrule» and «Indians and Africans were rarely more than a backdrop to the doings of colonisers, missionaries and merchants». But in the decades following decolonization – that means in the last half century or so – a revisionist trend has established itself, whose main purpose has been «to return agency» to non-Europeans, recognizing their full dignity as historical «actors». In the jargon of the new world historians the use and sometimes the abuse of the noun “interaction” (ofter coupled with adjectives like «dynamic» or «bilateral» in the expressions «dynamic interaction», «bilateral interaction») is aimed to underline that the «linkages» and «connections» binding together regional societies and regional cultures in the globalized spaces are not to be imagined as the imposition of an onnipotent center on a helpless periphery, but they emerge from and are operated by a much more complex multipolar field of 9 historical forces with the effective contribution of all the peoples involved. Although these peoples, at least in the Eurasian arena, are usually invested with different and shifting degrees of historical power, it never happens that one of them can be utterly devoid of historical power. The main distinguishing feature of the New World Historians, as compared with their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, consists therefore in the propensity to invest the modern and contemporary extra- European worlds with four attributes: first, an endogenous dynamism prior to the encounter with the West, second, the ability to condition the European expansion abroad, third, an effective impact in the construction of global orders, fourth, tha capacity to re-act and feed back on the Western societies themselves. Seen from the theoretical perspective of the global history, the transition to global modernity appears in a very different light than in the past: «not as something which some people or some regions did to others less favored or deserving, but as a series of transformations in which most of the people of the world participated, and to which most of them contributed, not simply as the objects or victims of the successes of others, but actively, independently and creatively».

3. Contemporary India in the Perspective of the New Global History: the Reinterpretation of the Origins of British Colonialism

Before continuing, it seems useful to give you a concrete example of what it means to apply the global perspective in examining a major problem in contemporary history. So I propose to show you the reinterpretation undergone by the theme of the origins of British domination in India in the last few decades. The emergence – or, in a longer term perspective, the re-emergence – of India as a major manufacturing power is one of those epochal novelties of our times that are evoked more frequently in international historiography by those scholars who advocate the urgent need to adopt a global perspective in the study and teaching of modern and contemporary history. John Darwin, who has been professor of imperial and global 10 history at Oxford, and who is the author of the important volume on the rise and fall of the global empires from 1400 to 2000 that I have adopted as a textbook for my course, argued for example the ultimate goal of the historian is to envisage a genealogy of the «present». If this is true, a «present» which among its most characteristic features includes the redistribution of world industrial power to the benefit of large Asian societies such as China and India can not but induce historians to modify the very same questions that they address to the past – their notions of which parts of the past is most essential for us to know and understand here and now. India, in particular, is playing a prominent role within some of the main thematic strands that historians are pursuing in an attempt to make the present and the contemporaneity intelligible as a result of the processes that have shaped the globalized world of our days. The first thematic strand involving India relates more generally to the reconstruction of the centuries-old growth-process of «global connectivity» whose current stage we are accustomed to name globalization and which global historians read in terms of interactions between large regional societies. The second thematic strand centering on India concerns the role played within this process by Europeans and Westerners, especially with the means of formal (i.e. political) or informal imperial domination. The third, very important thematic strand involving India focuses on the «resilience» of the other societies, cultures and states of Afro-Eurasia in the face of European expansion, and the dynamics and consequences of the encounters between «the world and the West». India has been affected by British conquest and domination for a period of little more than two centuries (from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century), to say nothing of other very important aspects of its relationship with West, like the Jesuit missionary initiative operating under the aegis of the Portuguese Crown. It is obvious, therefore, that in the case of India the three dimensions I have just mentioned tend to coincide, at least for a large part of its history – the history of globalization, the history of the Western expansion and imperial domination, the history of the reactions triggered by the impact of the 11 West in the other societies that experienced it. Less obvious, and still too little known to the general historical culture, especially in Italy, is the new, very original way in which historiography has come to radically rethink the relationship between these three dimensions in the interpretation of the emergence of British hegemony in the subcontinent. In order to define correctly the terms of the question, we need to start from a fact that is as obvious as it is overlooked. Until the eighties of the nineteenth century, the imposition of an effective European imperial control over the non- European territories, peoples and states of Afro-Eurasia remained the exception rather than being the rule. If the growing unbalance of power on the european side had to translate itself into direct domination, certain conditions of possibility had to be realized. These conditions of possibility pertained, on one hand, to the conditions of non-European territories and societies where the European control had to be imposed, on the other hand, to the readiness of the European metropolitan societies and states to bear the huge costs (both material and political) of overseas empire. And the exception, the «great exception» or the biggest exception is constituted precisely by the case of British India, where the cornerstone of the British Raj was laid in Bengala around the middle of the eighteenth century and where the British conquest of the entire subcontinent was substantially completed over the next century. So, what makes India «probably the most remarkable case of imperialism in modern times» are not only the dimensions, the duration, the general historical importance of British domination, but also the epoch, the precocity, the speed of its establishment. The European and British presence in the subcontinent originally, and for a long time, consisted of a mere network of commercial stations. The creation of a potential «bridgehead» for the British territorial expansion dates back to the early sixties of the eighteenth century, with the acquisition of Bengal by the East India Company. Bengala endowed British imperialism in India with a «security zone» from which it became difficult to dislodge it. This epochal event, therefore, lays the premises for the Company to become itself an Indian power, able to compete on 12 equal terms with the other regional powers in which the Mughal Empire was falling apart. Sixty years later, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, we find that the Company has become by far the dominant power of the subcontinent. In the following decades the Company would proceed to further conquests and annexations. In 1857, on the eve of the Great Mutiny of part of its native infantry of sepoys, the East India Company seemed well underway to take direct administrative control of the whole of India. In the light of this chronology, the historiographic question that is to be posed becomes properly the following: why was India conquered before and more completely than almost every other part of Afro-Eurasia? And why did the British prove willing and able to assume the great risks and the heavy costs that the conquest entailed? The conventional response prevailed among contemporaries, under the influence of authorative intellectual like James Mill (not to be confused with his son, John Stuart Mill), who is the author of a celebrated History of British India published in 1817, was that the triumph of the East India Company had been the triumph of the character and intellect of the most civilized and advanced Europeans on the stagnation and anarchy of the indigenous society. Christopher

Bayly, who has been a great historian of colonial India before becoming also a prominent global historian, recalled how, even at the beginning of the sixties of the twentieth century, when he attended the University of Oxford as an undergraduated, students were offered narratives of the establishment of the British Raj, dating back to the first decades of nineteenth century, when James Mill had written his History of British India, where the natives were treated like a crowd of extras, of background actors, destined to be quickly defeated and pacified.

The historiography of the last decades, even under the influence of the contemporary economic performances of India, has completely reversed this verdict, because it has explored the alternative hypothesis that the key to British success should be sought not in the alleged backwardness and stasis of India, but, on the contrary, in its «openness» and accessibility to globalizing flows, and in the sophistication of its commercial and financial life. The British, according to this new 13 interpretation, were able to exploit the advantages connected to the «modernity» of early modern India. The openess of India helped the British in many ways. During the eighteenth- century the crisis of the Moghul Empire was accelerated by a fresh wave of inland Iranian and Afghan invasions whose probable objective was to seize the control of the commercial traffic along the route between Northern India and Central Asia, which remained, even after the early modern closure of the Ecumene by the European seafarers, one of the most important arteries of global trade. Although this had been for thousands years the main route of travel followed by repeated invasions suffered by the subcontinent, nothing comparable to the Chinese Great Wall had ever blocked the way that, from the center of the Eurasian Heartland, led to the plains of the Indostan. In the coastal regions of India the activity of the English merchants was not confined to port cities (like Canton in the case of China). They were able to deal directly with indigenous merchants much more easily than was possible in China. The commercial economy of India, which in the eighteenth century was still one of the world's largest exporters of textiles, was much more outwardly oriented and internally integrated than the Chinese one and Indian prosperous merchants and bankers were far more free from the control of indigenous potentates. In maritime India, the British could therefore always count on the alliance with the local economic elites, for whom the investment opportunities offered by the East Indian Company had become increasingly important, especially when a same threat from local bosses loomed over the interests of both Indians and British (like in the case of Bengala).

Even more evident is how the advantages of modernity, and not the opportunities offered by backwardness, allowed the British to extend their power within the Indian mainland, not limiting themselves to the coastal areas. Here they could rely, in the first place, on the fact that a large part of the subcontinent was connected by an extensive and efficient credit system. In order to finance its wars, the East India

14 Company did not have to rely solely on its commercial resources, but the British could resort to the financial services of Indian bankers. Secondly, starting from Bengal, when it took direct control of that very importan province, the East Company could avail itself, for fiscal-military purposes, of the monetary revenue (not in kind or other form) coming from a consolidated system of taxation of the land erected by the Mughal Empire in previous centuries. This crucial circumstance gave the British expansion the character of a self-sustaining colonialism –a colonialism that did not fall into the vicious circle of the so-called imperial oversizing and imperial overstretching (which occurs when an imbalance between military commitments and available resources pushes an imperial power to new initiatives of conquest which are sure to aggravate the initial imbalance, rather than compensating it, because they only move the balance point even further upwards). The process of British empire-building in India, in other terms, showed itself capable of self-financing, because the increased military commitments were paid through the acquisition of indigenous tax revenues. Its costs were paid by Indian society itself, without burdening the British taxpayers at home. It is only obvious that this last was a crucial premise for the build-up and the preservation of a Metropolitan consensus around the colonial expansion. It is also well clear that the existence and profitability of the land tax presupposed a sufficiently commercialized and monetised economy in the Indian subcontinent. Thirdly, the Company was able to easily recruit an indigenous professional troop of sepoys who were loyal to their foreign employer. This was possible because in large parts of India, and especially in its great central-northern plains, the military profession had become specialized, with the formation of large mercenary armies overcoming the premodern logic of the personal devotion to a feudal warlord or the allegiance to military chieftains who were in the same time clan and tribal leaders. This standing army, based essentially on a very large number of native infantry, and much larger than the entire British army considered globally, was probably the greatest pillar of the British domination in South Asia. And it was an army whose costs, as it is worth repeating, the British were able to charge on India itself. 15 Alongside this first, very broad category of indigenous «collaborators», other crucial allies of the East India Company in the making of British India were some elite groups – which in the Marxist terminology fashionable some decades ago would have been called «colonial bourgeoisies». The very presence and importance of these groups in the life of the subcontinent testifies of the openness, the fluidity and the dynamism of Indian society. Western India had for centuries been welcoming communities of foreign merchants such as Zoroastrian Parsis of Iranian origin, who had come to dominate the great port city of Bombay and were to became strategic partners of the British. One of their Bengali equivalents in Eastern India can be considered the so-called bhadralok (the word means «respectable people»), that is a new Hindu middle class that came to replace the older Muslim élites at the top of local society. The bhadralok provided the British empire-builders with those «educated collaborators» they so desperately needed. To sum up: recent historiography has challenged the ingrained and die-hard cliché which portraied India as «immobile», «ready to let itself be subjugated by a foreign power». What is taking its place is the image of an Indian world marked by change and innovation whose promoters are trying to forge themselves their own tools to cope with the political instability of the region. Some authors, like Christopher Bayly, have pushed themselves so far as to advance an interpretation of the onset of British domination that tends to emphasize (exaggeratedly, according to their critics) the protagonism of the indigenous historical actors. The British come to power – according to them – not so much as conquerors from overseas, but rather, at least initially, as partners of the attempt imagined by sectors of Indian modernizing elites to modify the balance of power in the subcontinent to their advantage. And even after the British domination was accepted, it had to «continue (...) to rely on a combination of local forces, (...) making sure that the Indians accepted the Raj (...) in view of their own interests». If in short the European expansion was successful, it was so also because it responded to needs arising from previous transformations promoted by autochthonous subjects, with whom the Europeans were constantly forced, for the same reason, to come to terms. 16 Stressing the relative modernity of pre-colonial India, the new interpretation of the birth of the British empire in the South Asian subcontinent is predicated on the historiographical premise that, during the previous two centuries and half not only Western Europe but both India and the rest of the Eurasian world had been involved in processes of modernization which cannot be regarded as an exclusive feature of European history. Some scholars have spoken of multiple modernities in this regard. The notion of multiple modernities plays a key-role in Christopher Bayly’s interpretation of what I’ve called before the crisis of the Eurasian equilibrium and the transition to global modernity.

4. Methodological Excursus: Indian Civilization in the “Orientalist” Representation of James Mill

Before going on to examine Bayly's theses, I would like to use part of the time at our disposal to give you an example of another of the historiographical operations to which my course intends to introduce you. As I said at its beginning, the history course, at the master's degree level, has or should have among its objectives that of initiating the students to the historiographical practice and therefore to its methodology. Among the fundamental procedures of historiographical mthod there is of course the handling of documents. The document on which I want to draw your attention is represented precisely by some pages of James Mill’s History of British India As we will see, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crisis of the millennial equilibrium between the cultural regions of Eurasia – the «Eurasian revolution», as

John Darwin has called it – implied first a geopolitical, then an economic revolution. But the geopolitical and economic revolutions were accompanied by a cultural revolution too. This cultural revolution pertained, among other things, to the basic attitudes of the Europeans towards the non-Europeans. During the early modern equilibrium, the European culture retained an attitude of respect, if not of admiration, towards the non Europeans. All this changed with the Eurasian 17 revolution, when firstly the idea emerges of a hierarchy of cultures topped by the European civilization and placing all the other civilizations of the Eurasian Orient (not to mention the primitive or savage peoples of Subsaharian Africa and the New World) on the lower steps of an assumed ladder of humanity. The effects of this form of cultural imperialism were not confined to the intellectual sphere, because it influenced deeply the mentality of the colonizers, the colonial policies and codes of law and provided imperial rule with a source of pseudo-scientific justification. Published in 1817, Mill’s History of British India is a very significant document of the denigratory, disparaging attitude towards Indian culture prevailing among the British colonizers in the early nineteenth century, especially since it was largely employed in the education of the personnel of the East India Company. I will focus my reading on of the tenth chapter of the second book, entitled Of the Hindus (about the Hindus). In these pages Mill tries his hand at a task of obvious and immediate practical relevance for an England called to govern India, to determine the exact position occupied by the Hindus in the scale of human evolution. The obvious objective of these pages is to dispel the current opinion – a product of the age of Eurasian equilibrium – that the Hindus possessed a high civilization, or that they had possessed it in the past. According to Mill, they had accomplished only the very first steps along the path of progress. But Mill’s argument is of considerable interest also because it extends in reality to the entire East, since he is convinced that the main peoples of Asia have in substance achieved the same level of civilization as the Hindustani. For what concerns its pars destruens the chapter therefore develops a polemic that targets all those who have described and praised the East, the Orient, as civilized, starting from the Greeks and the Romans and continuing with the Jesuits, the originators of the positive prejudice about China that even a man with a mind of Voltaire’s acuteness had shown himself willing to subscribe. The main target of Mill in relation to India is William Jones, the great orientalist and Sanskritist, one of the discoverers of the Indo-European language family, responsible for having 18 credited through his authority the idea that the Asian countries had reached a high degree of civilization. Jones’s mistake consists first of all in using a concept of civilization so rudimentary and vague that it can be adapted to all stages of social advancement except the lowest. In regard to the Arabs, his Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations reveals for Mill a romantic and idealizing attitude not unlike the sentimental exaltation of the «good savage» made by Rousseau. It is not surprising, therefore, that, placed before the Hindus, Jones had come to believe that they had reached the peak of civilization. Moreover, Mill argues, the fact that the Europeans acquired greater familiarity with the Hindus at the same time as they discovered the «savages» of the New World contributed to their exaggerated evaluation of the Hindus, because this coincidence had brought them to emphasize the greater closeness to them of the Asians as compared to the Amerindians. Whatever the reasons, the myth was destined to be exploded by the progress of the Europeans’ ability to observe reality for what it is, which could lead, according to Mill, only to an irresistible conclusion: the state of the Hindus must be considered just slightly different from that of semi- civilized nations. A further target of his criticism therefore becomes the fallacious opinion according to which the condition of degradation, in which the Hindus undoubtedly are immobilized, would in reality be a fruit of conquest and subjugation, which would have made them fall from a peak of civilization achieved in a legendary past. Mill believes, on the contrary, that the Hindus have been stuck in their present «semi-barbaric» state since very remote ages. The periods of foreign domination, imputable to their lack of ability to combine their forces together against an enemy, were the only ones in which something had been done, by foreigners, to remedy the consequences of paralysis: «How far they are from the truth those who claim that the Hindus enjoyed a high degree of civilization before their subjugation by foreigners, is shown by the fact that where they have always remained immune from the other domination [as in Nepal, or in some areas of the south-west coast] they

19 are uniformly found at a lower grade of civilization than those who have long been subjected to a Mohammedan throne». In strident contradiction with the belief in a golden age in which India would have been united in a universal monarchy conducive to civilization and intellectual life, historical reality offers the depressing spectacle of a subcontinent divided into small states in perpetual war with each other, which does not contrast with the possibility that from this struggle temporarily emerge indigenous potentates of greater magnitude, condemned, however, to an inevitable cycle of ascent and decadence. Moreover, Mill denies sharply, citing the examples of China, of ancient Persia, of the barbarian Russia, that a large state is in itself a sign of a high rate of civilization. In any case, «rebellions, massacres, and barbaric conquests, make up the history of this beautiful country» - an affirmation to be read in the light of the claim of legitimacy advanced by the British colonizers, in whose eyes the European domination over India would have benefited in the first place the natives themselves, preserving them from a proclivity to permanent anarchy. Distinctive features of Hindu society are also, in Mill’s opinion, the most extreme indigence, the alliance of despotism and priesthood in the exercise of a common tyranny over the people, the division in caste supported by the most bleak superstitions, so that «the Hindus, both in the soul in the body, were the most enslaved portion of the human race». Extremely backward the Hindus appear in the art of war, in medicine and in the useful arts in general, to which their educated class prefers astrology and other disciplines devoid of any intellectual and practical value. The only epoch in European history to which the present state of Hindu civilization can be compared are therefore the Middle Ages. But the comparison holds only up to a certain point, because the Hindus show themselves inferior to the men of the Western Middle Ages in matters of religion (and this although the religion of the European Middle Ages was, for Mill, the discredited Papism), of philosophy, of laws and institutions of government, of poetry, as well as in the military, artistic, architectural and agricultural fields. The only area in which Mill is willing to recognize a primacy for them is some branch of craftsmanship, such as 20 textile manufactures, soon to be destroyed by the competion of British industrialism, Mill’s denigration, moreover, extends from Indian law, culture and religion to the personal character of individual Hindus, not without resorting to gender stereotypes: «In terms of manners and temperament, the virility and courage of our ancestors, compared with the servile spirit and the cowardice of the Hindus, places them (the medioeval ancestors of present-day Europeans, N.d.R.) on a much higher step. Of course, our ancestors were inferior, as far as the sophistication of the customs is concerned, to this effeminate people (...). Our ancestors, on the other hand, though crude, were sincere, while under the external surface of the Hindu lies a general disposition to deception and perfidy». For Mill, on the other hand, the Hindus express, in their own way, a stage of civilization that would unite all the peoples of Asia in all the eras of their known history: not only, then, modern Arabs, Chinese and Persians, as well as some contemporary minor peoples such as the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Siamese, the Burmese, the Malays, the Tibetans, but also the ancient Persians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians: «Since the customs, institutions and achievements of Hindus have remained stationary for many ages, when we contemplate the Hindu of our day, we are contemplating the Hindus of many ages ago; and we are brought back, as it were, into the deepest recesses of antiquity (...). Conversing with a contemporary Hindu, we are conversing, to a certain extent, with the Chaldeans and the Babylonians of the age of Cyrus, with the Persians and the Egyptians of the age of Alexander the Great». It follows, for example, that Edward Gibbon’s account of the war against the

Persians (in his celebrated History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in 1776) could serve as a description applicable to most of contemporary India, or that Zoroastrianism would possess «very strong resemblances» with Brahmanism. Therefore, the condemnation of India fully involves China, the backwardness of its agriculture and its network of communications, its shortcomings in the field of natural philosophy and medical science, with some 21 advantages to the Chinese, who, being of a more practical bent of mind, exhibit to a lesser extent those «false refinements, which the barbaric mentality exchanges for science». It is interesting to note, in conclusion, how this archaization of India is accompanied in Mill by a devaluation of the ancient Egyptian culture, much admired in the eighteenth century, at least in the artistic sphere, even by a neoclassicist like Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was willing to concede to the ancient Egyptian art an historically relative positivity as a step forward in the march of mankind towards the perfect beauty realized in the Greek art: «The admiration (...) for Egypt (...) presents not a few similarities with the admiration for the Hindus that has for so long prevailed among the Europeans. But the strength of modern intelligence has penetrated beyond the aura that surrounded it: and putting before us the state of Egyptian civilization in its authentic colours, shows us a people whose level of development, like so many famous nations of Antiquity (Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Arabs), coincides with that of the inhabitants of Indostan, as it shows all the distinctive features of a particular social stage». In this respect, the true inspirer of the extreme ethnocentrism of the utilitarian

Mill is to be probably identified in Adam Smith, the great economist, who was radically skeptical about the value of pre-classical civilizations such as the Asian and the Egyptian because they were too subject to the overwhelming domination of despotism.

5. Christopher Bayly’s General Approach to Global History in The Birth of the Modern

World

Bayly’s book on The Birth of the Modern World can be regarded as one of the most successful attempts made in recent years to apply the global perspective in the realization of a big work of historical synthesis dealing with a large period and a fundamental junction of the development of the human community. Bayly’s book 22 has been published as part of a multivolume historical series, the Blackwell’s History of the World, edited by the British mediaevalist Robert Ian Moore. As declared by Moore in the general preface, the ambition of the series, originally planned in more than twenty volumes, is to offer the reader «a (…) comprehensive (…) account of the entire human past» combining simultaneously two methodological approaches: the ecumencial approach, that identifies «world history» with «the history of the contacts between peoples previously isolated from one another», and the macro- regional approach, which consists in adopting as unit of geo-historical analysis and comparison such regional civilizations or «world systems» as, for example, Oceania and the Pacific, Latin America, Japan, India, Russia taken togheter with Central Asia and Mongolia etc. The organization of the Series reflects the belief that an «attempt to understand history as a whole» may be pursued with a reasonable hope of success only by alternating «volumes defined by regional parameters (such as the volumes devoted to the single regions or maritime geohistorical spaces I have quoted a moment ago) and volumes defined by global parameters», such as the volume written by Bayly. The alternation and the crossover of the two methodological perspectives therefore confers the Blackwell History of the World the shape of «a barrell», in which «the indispensable narratives of very long-term regional development» are «bound together by global surveys of the interactions between regions, and the great transformations which they have experienced in common, or visited upon one another». It is clear then that, in the overall economy of the Series, The Birth of the Modern World was one of the volumes to be drawn up according to «global parameters» and called to act as circles, so to speak, of the barrel imagined by the editor. The task entrusted to Bayly was to treat the «long nineteenth century» between the American Revolution and the First World War as one of the great epochs of convergence and acceleration in which historical change assumes ecumenical dimensions and characteristics by virtue of the closer connections establishing themselves between the various regional histories and requires to be analyzed in 23 terms of their reciprocal interaction and from a cross-regional perspective. Bayly’s book deals with the long nineteenth century as a historical period in which a dramatic acceleration of the pace of historical change coincides with an intensification of contacts already established among the regional societies during the early modern age. Its theme is the classical theme of the revolutionary transition from the «ancient regime to modernity», but it regards this transition on a planetary scale, like a product of «global connections» and in its interactive aspects. The strategy adopted by Bayly in his analysis of the tranregional interactions appears in substantial harmony with the approach of the New World History, as it rests on the refusal to consider global modernization in Eurocentric terms. On the other hand, the effort to highlight the multipolar nature of historical change does not leads the British scholar to deny the existence of differentials of power between the West and the rest of the world. Bayly’s long nineteenth century still remains the period in the history of the world in which the European dominance gives globalization a series of accelerations which push the different regional societies towards a unification that is carried out under the banner of the temporary hegemony of Western culture. Bayly therefore continues to identify the critical phase of the transition from the ancient regime to modernity at a planetary level with the revolutionary caesura which can be placed roughly in the decades between the American War of Independence and the Restoration after the Napoleonic wars. And this global watershed, that Bayly promotes to the rank of «an axial age in the history of the world», also coincides, for him, with «the first epoch of global (European) imperialism». In Bayly's thought, on the other hand, the expansive élans of modern Europe are intertwined in a complex way with developments which were endogenous to the non-European societies invested by the Western initiative; and this not only in the Eurasian arena, where the Europeans found other ancient civilizations on their path, but even in the case of those «native peoples» and «peoples without State» that still in the first half of the twentieth century were regarded unable to stem it and to escape, in the long run, to a destiny of extermination or complete assimilation. 24 In Bayly’s model, therefore, the convergence among the regional histories does not give rise to cultural homologation, but to processes of hybridization, by virtue of which the surviving local or regional identities are modified by incorporating global uniformities (like the nation-state), that provide them with the means to give themselves a renewed expression. The «World religions» of the nineteenth century, like Islam and Hindouism for example, cannot be regarded as the mere legacy of ancient traditions, in deference to a tenacious stereotype of which even Max Weber fell victim, since they, to the eyes of the historian attentive to «global connections and comparisons», turn out to be a much more recent product of the planetary modernization, in the «invention» of which contacts, conflicts and mutual imitation with other expansive religions like missionary Christianity played a key role. Disagreeing from too simplistic diffusionist interpretations of global Westernization, Bayly tries to highlight how the reception of the allogene Western models in the non Westerns world was grafted on non- European, autonomous «passages to modernity» which were well under way long before the «impact with the West». These other modernities help to explain, at least in part, the establishment of the European imperial supremacy as the solution that the colonized societies themselves gave to systemic crises originating from their own internal and endogenous transformations. Before becoming also a prominent global historian, Bayly has been a very influential specialist of Indo-British history. He has been among the protagonists of that revision of the conventional interpretation of the making of British India on which I dwelt previously. In his 1988 book on Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Bayly argued that the inhabitants of the subcontinent had to be regarded as «active agents and not simply passive bystanders and victims» in the process of empire-building. In subsequent works, Bayly progressively widened the range of his interactive interpretation of the emergence of the European hegemony, first, in a book entitled Imperial Meridian, to the zone of the Islamic empires extending from Morocco to Indonesia, then, in The Birth of the Modern World, to

25 the entire zone of the agrarian empires from the Atlantic to the Pacific (including therefore also China and Japan). In his 2003 book Bayly adopts as the starting point for his analysis of The Birth of the Modern World what he terms the epoch of the «global ancient regime». During this epoch, embracing the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the Eurasia space was occupied almost entirely, and with the only possible ecception of Nord- West Europe, by a chain of big peasant-based and ethnically composite agrarian empires. State power (in accordance with the theretical model of the «segmentary state») fulfills restricted functions and has a very limited capacity of penetration, which is conditioned to the collaboration of the peripheral élites. Correspondingly, the forms of political legitimacy reflect the dependence of the imperial authority on the equilibrium between centripetal forces and centrifugal forces. The ideology of the cosmic monarchy enhances the attitude of the sovereign to represent more things at the same time, that is, different things for each one of the various groups of his ethnically, territorially and religiously diverse subjects, rather than the focal center of a single shared collective identity (like nationality in the modern nation- State). The Ecumene of agrarian regimes has also known two phases of globalization

- archaic globalization and early modern globalization. Early modern globalization is the gobalization driven by the expansion of Europe (about which more later). Early modern globalization coexists with an older form of globalization, archaic globalization, dating back to Antiquity. Archaic globalization was based on three main propelling forces. The first ones were the long distance traffic networks sustained by the demand for goods generated by the «humoral conception of the bodily well-being», which put an high premium on the consumption of substances, like the spices, deemed able to confer health to their consumers. The second globalizing force was the missionaty initiative of the great world religions with their widespread networks of shrines, monasteries and pilgrimages (this was true not only of Christianity and Islam, but also, for example, in the case of Buddhism). The tird globalizing factor was the ecumenical circulation of ethical-political ideals such as

26 the universal monarchy and the civic republicanism of Aristotelian origin, which contributed to give Eurasia also a relative cultural homogeneity. By placing such a strong emphasis on the uniformity of early modern Eurasia Bayly does not intend to deny for a moment the Western exception. Rather, he aims at redeeming Western exceptionalism from the crude readings of the so called «European miracle» which avail themselves of dichotomic schemes totally depriving the East of those traits they regard as uniquely Westerner. In Bayly’s works, the specificity of the European development emerges from the particular configuration and intensity that assume, in the case of Europe, phenomena of change which can no longer be considered as a European prerogaive and completely absent elsewhere. To this end, Bayly employs a comparative strategy that starts from the identification of categories (mostly already well tested in specialist studies related to single macro-regions) suitable both to highlight the dynamism of non-European societies and to correct, at the same time, the conventional image of Western modernization in the directon of a greater gradualism and a longer temporal extension, so as to reduce the distances and draw attention to the possible analogies between the different regional experiences.

A good example of this methodology is provided by the plurification and application on a global scale of the concept of «industrious revolution». Bayly rejects the stereotype that condemns the Oriental societies to a perennial immobility owing to the predominance of stifling «tributary economies». The Islamic and Asian agrarian empires too are a theater of the two imposing economic developments which connote, after all, the global ancient regime. The first process is the last «great domestication», namely the gigantic advance of the area conquered to agriculture and non-migratory or semi-nomadic pastoralism. The second process are the «industrious revolutions» (in the plural). The expression «industrious revolution» (in the singular) was firstly coined by the eminent economic historian Jan De Vries to designate a slower and more prosaic movement of rationalization of Western economic life that far preceeded the «industrial revolution» proper, in consonance with another historiographical trend 27 that tends to postpone the global impact of the latter towards the central decades of the nineteenth century. While the economic and social changes catalyzed by industrialization were the result of factors which operated on the supply side through the abatement of production costs, the behaviour of the agents of the «industrious revolution» was ascribable to the influence exerted on the demand by changes pertaining to the sphere of material culture and consumer values. The taking roots of new models of desire in the mentality of the middle sort of people, who were compelled to turn to the market for obtaining the goods necessary to satisfy their socially conditioned needs, urged them to a more efficient use of their work energies on a household basis which fostered an ever-increasing production of commodities. In The Birth of the Modern World, Bayly tests the validity of the De Vries’ theory in a variety of non-European contexts. He hypothesizes suggestively, for example, that the role played in the Netherlands and England by the mechanical clock or the breakfast may have been surrogate in China, Japan and India by such commodities as, respectively, domestic furniture, samurai swords or pottery, in accordance with the values and social horizons prevailing in each cultural region. So, Bayly’s s attempt to define the differences through a greater emphasis on analogies differs from the more traditional forms of comparativism, because he comes to the delineation of a multiplicity of «passages to modernity», without abandoning or neglecting, on the other side, the question concerning the long-term reasons of the primacy of Europe and the consequent «great divergence» between her history and the history of the rest of the world. Bayly identifies four main «competitive advantages» of the European West: economical, juridical, sociocultural and international. The first one consists in the asymmetrical structure of early modern globalization, which sees the Europeans – the unifiers of the world – in a position to link up the various «industrious revolutions» and to exploit the economic modernizations of the other parts of the world in its own interests. The second comparative advantage enjoied by the Europeans is a political, institutional and legal framework of the European society 28 which is particularly suited to favoring the cumulative development of the local «industrious revolution». Economic progress is supported also, in the case of early modern Western Europe (and this is its third advantage) by a custom of public criticism and a «civil society» which, although not a European prerogative, we find in early modern Europe (and in eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe) much more developed than anywhere in Eurasia. The fourth factor advantaging Europe has to be seen in the pluralistic, multicentric nature of the European international states-system. This created a condition of chronic competition and interstate conflict, which acted as a permanent incentive for institutional and technological innovation and trans-oceanic expansion and both stimulated and exploited the early formation of patriotic identities on a national scale (which can be regarded perhaps as a fifth relative advantage of Europe as compared to the rest of Eurasia). An essential condition for the subsequent establishment of the European hegemony, however, was, according to Bayly, the general upheaval that during the eighteenth century overwhelmed the global ancient regime and a determining aspect of which was quasi-simultaneity, convergence and interconnection of the many «revolutions» to which it gave rise well beyond the borders of France,

Continental Europe or the Atlantic world. The first to be involved in this world-wide series of global events was the Eurasian East. The crises that invest the different regional societies present numerous and important traits in common. They manifest themselves as fiscal-military crises (as lack of resources for financig big imperial armies), but their origins, according to Bayly, have to be traced back in the ideological and economic and social sphere. The ascent of the various types of middle classes benefiting from «industrious revolutions» erodes, on the long run, the foundations of monarchical legitimacy. In a sense, the agrarian regimes paid the consequences of their own success. The autocthonous transformations which they had promoted or favoured generated a growing imbalance between the imperial centers and their peripheries. In the provinces the early modern modernization (if you allow me this word play) enhanced the power and the prestige of dynamic peripheral élites, who were able to coagulate 29 a growing sense of belonging and local patriotism around themselves and around the new forms of moral or religious discourse of which they were often spokesmen or standard-bearers (analogous to contemporary Western public criticism) in challenging the more traditional imperial authority. The imperial centers, on their part, were suffering because of the worsening of their relative oversizing and were increasingly paralyzed by the impossibility of adequately financing their military apparatus. An additional factor of aggravation of the difficulties of Asian imperial systems was finally introduced by the world-wide impact of the crisis in which even the European ancient regimes proper precipitated in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War of mid-eighteenth-century. The European crisis propelled a breakthrough, a leap forward, in the Western initiative on the transoceanic geopolitical theaters at the same moment when the Asian empires (with the temporary exception of China and Japan) were experiencing their own internal troubles. The Western response to the crisis of the European ancient regime took the shape, in fact, of a combination of internal revolution (in America and then in France) and accentuated competition on a global scale between aggressive imperial powers.

The international struggles between England and France, in particular, which developed on a literally world-wide scale, drew their impulse from the clash of opposites patriotic ideologies and nationalisms which revealed themselves capable of mobilizing the internal resources and the consent in both metropolitan society (in England as well in France). In the crucible of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, political legitimacy itself had to be rebuilt on a new ideological basis, and this not only in France, but also (as it is less known) in England. And in both cases, the rebuilding of political legitimacy – in a liberal and democratic key in the case of France, in a neo-conservative key in the case of England – relied on on myths of progress that erected the State, the public authority as the main protagonist of an action of reform and improvement of social conditions. These new progressive ideologies found their raison d'être in the role that the European States actually played in giving fresh impetus to the local «industrious revolutions». 30 The global crisis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries centuries thus created the conditions for the spectacular economic, political and cultural expansion of Europe in the long nineteenth century not only because it provided incentives and prepared the ground for the imperialist penetration, but for another reason too. The global crisis marked the beginning of a new stage in the history of the human community or globalization because it multiplied, strengthened, thickened and tightened the linkages between the cultural regions of the old world. At the same time, the global crisis allowed the Western model of presenting itself to non- European societies as the best solution for the continuation of the processes of development of the industrious classes and the related modernization of their forms of statehood, collective identity, public discourse and religious experience, which had begun to invest them in the age of equilibrium, well before, then, the great «Eurasian revolution» and the advent of the European dominance.

6. The Interactive Emergence of the British Domination in Afro-Eurasia in Bayly’s Imperial Meridian

It is important to observe that the conceptual model implemented in The Birth of the Modern World is the result of a development in Bayly’s historical thought. In the Nineteen-Seventies, at the beginning of his historiographical career (he was born in 1945), Bayly had established himself as a brilliant young historian of colonial India belonging to the so-called Cambridge School of Imperial History. In the next decade his scientific interest turned to the transition from precolonial to colonial India; and it was at this stage, when he advancred his theory of the interactive emergence of British domination in South Asia that Bayly outlined the first sketch of what had to become his general approach to global history. But the most complete prefiguration of the categorical framework used in The Birth of the Modern World in 2003 has to be found in a more precise moment of Bayly's historiographical path, coinciding with the production of another important book, entitled Imperial Meridian. The British 31 Empire and the World, 1780-1830. Imperial Meridian, which was published in 1989, spans the half century of expansion and refoundation of the British Empire from the pan-imperial crisis that accompanied American Independence to the aftermath of the defeat of Napoleon. This is the same period in which Bayly, in The Birth of the Modern World, will locate the climax of the global crisis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries leading to the transition to global modernity. Imperial Meridian, in other words, no longer deals solely with India, but doesn’t specifically focus on global history yet. It deals with a critical moment of the history of the British Empire as a whole analyzing it – in all its components scattered all around the world –, within the framework of global history. Imperial Meridian marks therefore a new phase in Bayly’s professional career, in which the specialist of colonial and precolonial India expands the horizons of his historiographical reflection, both extending it from the Raj to the totality of the British «imperial system», including the British Isles, and trying its hand at the difficult task of organizing in a unified analytical and narrative field the corresponding multiplicity and variety of large geo-historical spaces. In carrying out such a veritable tour de force Bayly outlined a complete reconceptualization of the imperial studies that already involvee the identification of their territory of investigation with the «global past» investigated by the world historians and with those elements of the global past, in particular, in which we can trace «the origin of contemporary international order». Another prominent global historians of our days, Jürgen Osterhammel, who reviewed Imperial Meridian in 1993, noted that, although formally an essay in imperial history, «the scope and ambition» of Bayly’s work were «nothing less than universal» and suggested that it shoud be read «in the light of a current “return of universal history”». Another reviewer stressed (exaggeratig a little, perhaps, but anticipating the further development of Bayly’s career) that the «real stuff» of Imperial Meridian wasn’t so much the British Empire as «the world» mentioned in the subtitle. Bayly himself not only declared that the purpose of the book was «placing British expansion in the wider context of world history», but made altogether explicit his intent to contribute to a «project» – to be prioritized by the «future historians» – aimed «to fit (…) 32 together once again» the three huge «fragments» into which professional historiography had unfortunately broken the unity of the «history of the world» since the nineteenth-century: the history of Europe, Colonial History (the history of the settlement colonies), and Orientalism (the history of the Eastern or non- Western part of Afro-Eurasia). In Imperial Meridian – in the chapters consecrated to the rise of the British Empire in the East – Bayly had alredy adopted as a unit of analysis, if not Eurasia as a whole, the entire range of great Islamic kingdoms extending from the Maghreb and from the Balkans to Burma and to the Indonesian archipelago. Bayly’s analysis starts – already in this 1989 book – from the anti-Eurocentric assumption that the «empire in a world-historical sense (i.e. as a factor in global and world history, N.d.R.) can only be understood by examining social change in the areas colonised as an essential component of an imperial system». Although its central theme is, after all, the rebuilding of the British Empire after the lost of the American colonies in the half century between 1780 and 1830, Imperial Meridian devotes dozens of pages to the «longer-term patterns of class formation and state-building» which can be found in Asia and North Africa since the sixteenth-century and which were destined to be

«central to the emergence and form» of the British supremacy. Bayly justifies the adoption of this enlarged geohistorical and chronological scale by arguing that «the (historiographical, N.d.R.) genre of “imperial history” or of “European expansion” has no future unless it can draw on the growning body of studies of the extra- European world to illuminate the development (in the precolonial era, N.d.R.) of social institutions and ideologies which were as formative of the nineteenth-century colonial world as were the policies of European governments or the profit-hunger of their merchants». At the beginning of the modern age the territories composing the Afro-Eurasian scenario surveyed by Bayly were dominated by four big Islamic empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire in Persia (or Iran), the Moghūl Empire in India, the Muslim Empire of Mataram in Java. Bayly sees the histories of these great cultural spaces as both distinct from each other and interconnected in even wider 33 «interregional units». What they share in common according to Bayly (beside to the many links binding them in an interactive whole, like religion) is a three-phased evolutionary pattern which, far from confirming the nineteenth-century stereotype of the Asian «decline» divulged by Mill, reflect a complex dialectic of «crisis and reorganization» of the Imperial spaces. In the initial stage, these vast patrimonial and agrarian State, which are legitimized by the ideology of the cosmic monarchy, ensure stability and order to their territories. In turn, the Pax Islamica encouraged an interweaving of processes that denies «the (received, N.d.R.) notion according to which the modern capitalist system would have spread from West to East». During the first two centuries of the modern age not only the West, but the rest of Eurasia too underwent such developments as the demographic growth, the geographical division of labour, the rise of a class of landowners rooted in the localities, the setting in motion of a plurality of «Asian routes to commercial agriculture», the flowering of the mercantile economy and a lively culture of consumption, the emergence of multiple forms of «“proto-capitalism”» and of «Asian (or North African) “capitalism”». But the very success of the Islamic empires created the conditions for the «general crisis» which had to fall on them in the eighteenth century. This happened because the main beneficiaries of the Pax Islamica were, on the long run, the newborn, modernizing agrarian and bourgeois provincial elites. As a further historical paradox, their centrifugal tendencies were also fuelled by the very prestige of the monarchical institution. The islamic ideal of cosmic royalty spread in peripheries that had preserved or had begun to develop «a strong sense of their own identity, expressed in religious difference or regional solidarity», and where therefore imperial universalism underwent a radical metamorphosis, which anticipated the process of rebuilding of political legitimacy in a State-national key which had to characterise the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, all the Islamic imperial polities had therefore to face an escalation of conflicts and internal contradictions, ultimately attributable to the «consolidation of Asian capitalism». And this happend before a 34 new series of eigtheenth-century «tribal break-outs» which saw as protagonists the egalitarian warlike societies that survived at their margins and who decreee the end of the «Pax Islamica». What replaced it, however, was not the condition of decadence, stagnation, anarchy evoked by James Mill and the historians engaged in the apology of the European conquest. Rather, the crisis of the Islamic peace gave start to a fundamental restructuring of the political spaces occupied by the dissolving agrarian regimes, in which Bayly invites us to recognize the feature of a new season of Afro-Asian state-building developing – this time – not on a macro- regional scale, but on a sub-imperial, provincial scale. The «regional magnates» who posed as the would-be heirs of the universal sovereigns of the great empires adopted mercantilistic practices and endeavored to redress the balance of power between the State and rural landowners for the benefit of their own treasures. Moreover, the new provincial rulers had to legitimize realms which were much more compact, intrusive and exclusive than the old agrarian empires. But, in pursuing this legitimating aim, the new rulers were also able to exploit and mobilize the growing sentiments of territorial patriotism and religious affiliations which were more «tightly defined» that in the past. This gave them the opportunity to become a focal point of new unprecedent kinds of collective identity foreshadowing modern nationality. In this sense, according to Bayly, the late eighteenth century marked therefore «an important stage in the creation of the preconditions for the emergence of modern ethnicities and nation states» in Asia as well as in Europe. Nor does Bayly fails to underline with energy how this implies, in his view, that «the regional ethnicities which were later seen as “nationalism” in Europe, Asia and North Africa had already begun to form before the full impact of the West was felt. They were not the simple product of “westernisation”» – of a Westernization, that is, interpreted according to a crude, simplistic diffusionistic model. More generally, the reasons that push Bayly to regard the endogenous changes in early modern Eastern societies as «a critical force in the creation of European world-wide dominance», rather than the «immobile background» of the expansion of Europe, are three. First and more obviously, endogenous changes generated both 35 he «pressures and opportunities» that induced Westerners to take or to try to take the power (already before 1800) in «key regions» such as Bengal, Java or Egypt, Secondly, endogenous changes made available to the conquerors the administrative, financial and military tools elaborated by the «new “Asian states”». Three, and perhaps less obviously, endogenous transformations also cast some of the foundations of the «colonial world» and of the «para-colonial» States of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: they prepared, for example, the rise of indigenous proprietary classes destined to become «the keystone of the European colonial economy» and «the nineteenth-century export boom in primary agricultural produces». Morevor, endogenous changes acted as «critical precondition» of phenomena destined to shape «the modern world order», with effects recognizable to the present day, not less decisively than the globalization of the catchwords of the French revolution – «Liberty, Equality and Fraternity». The phenomena to which I intend to refer are, as alraedy remembered, the emergence of new paradigms of political legitimacy more attuned to the modern State than monarchical universalism, the beginnings of what had to become the «national consciousness», the religious fundamentalism or the so-called «communalism» (that means the tendency of people to be loyal to their ethnic or religious groups of belonging more than to the wider society and political State which they live in and are citizens of).

7. The World Historical Impact of «British Nationalism» in the Age of Revolutions The need to highlight the much-underestimated analogies between European and extra-European histories and the multipolar nature of global change makes Bayly well aware of the faultiness of theories of historical globalization which emphasizes, in any sense, the overbearing role played by the West in it. The most obvious example are those normative stage theories of development which simply equate global modernization and Westernization. But Bayly detects the same error in the opposite theory of the capitalist world system advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein, according to which the expansion of the European world-economy since the 36 sixteenth century, far from promoting the progress of the other areas of the world, condemned them to a condition of uniform underdevelopment and subaltern integration as peripheries or semiperipheries in the Western-dominated world order. These theories, both denying, in different ways, the interactive nature of the process of globalization, appear inadequate to provide historiography with the synthetic, unifying categories which historians need in order of escaping the risk to remain locked in their respective specialist fields without sacrificing, on the other hand, the agency and the individuality of the single world «cultures or communities». Bayly, however, as I’ve said, is equally far from denying the relative exceptionality of the Western path to modernity and the existence of differences in power between «the West and the Rest». In the Birth of the Modern World, as we have seen, the specificity of the European way to modernity lies in the peculiar configuration and intensity with which changes take place, such as the «industrious revolutions», which can no longer be considered, in the light of the empirical findings of the area studies, completely absent elsewhere in Eurasia. In Imperial Meridian, at first signt, Bayly's criticism seems to focus mainly on the «Eurocentric» theories of imperialism. But in reality his methodological polemic is directed with equal vigor and urgency against the so-called «“excentric”» interpretations of imperialism developed in reaction to the conventional ethnocentric interpretations dating back to James Mill. For Bayly the «excentric school» is guilty of having exaggerated in turn the role played in the colonial expansion of Europe by such extra-European factors as «local crises» in the peripheries, availability of indigenous «collaborators», independent initiatives of European “men on the spot” operating in territories remote from the metropolitan centre. In the nineteen-eighties (when Imperial

Meridian was composed) this had led, for example, to a complete «Africanisation» of the factors taken into account in the historiographical debate on the partition of Africa. Bayly felt therefore obliged to remind his readers of the apparently obvious truth that the «Metropolitan impulses were, by definition, central to the process of expansion and to the creation of the social order of European empires». The opposing limitations of the two explanatory strategies, the Eurocentric one and the 37 excentric one, are surmountable, in the eyes of Bayly, only if it is held firmly in mind that the imperial experience «by definition was a dialogue between the metropolitan impulses and the history of the colonized societies». Perhaps the single most noteworthy aspect of the complex historiographical operation attempted by Bayly with his 1989 book is the virtual reinclusion in the field of investigation of the imperial studies of the l’histoire à part entière (the whole history) of the colonizing power. Bayly shows now a vivid awareness of the impossibility of neglecting what happened in the depths of the «British society» if we really want to understand «those societies which were touched by imperial power». This methodological awareness represents an important novelty with respect to Bayly’s previous work on India, as well as an essential prerequisite of its subsequent work on global and world history. In Imperial Meridian Bayly made an original attempt to reincorporate the internal history of Europe and the West as a whole in a field of inquiry of which the historiographical school that had influenced his beginnings as a historian of colonial India – the so-called Cambridge School – had rather privileged in an almost exclusive manner the overseas side. In the preface to Imperial Meridian Bayly confesses that the composition of his 1989 book coincided for him with the resumption of an interest in national history – of British history -- which had remained dormant since he was an undergraduate. Bayly adds that this new interest was reawakened in particular by two historiographical trends. The first trend is the trend focusing on the very long-term role played in the history of British society by the so-called «British landed establishment» (which is exemplified by the work of the eminent historian David Cannadine on the prolonged Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy between the seventeen-eighties and the nineteen-eighties).

The second research trend, whose chief exponent is Cannadine’s wife, Linda Colley, focused complementary on the formation of British national identity in the context of the European international State-system, with particular reference to the so- called Second Hundred Years War that opposed England and France from the end of the seventeenth century to the fall of Napoleon in 1815. In Bayly’s case, therefore, reinterpreting British and Western expansion by framing it in a global scenario 38 doesn’t just mean to cross the boundaries of his original area of specialization (colonial India) and to widen the range of his studies so as to embrace to all the regions of the Ecumene in any way interacting or comparable, at least, with England and its colonial system. Adopting a global perspective in the study of the British Empire also implies, in Bayly’s case, to rediscover and to revisit the past of the European Metropolis itself, whose very Anglo-Celtic core presents, after all, the character of a «British Empire in Europe». And in making this effort to «returning the British to» imperial history Bayly could avail himself of the guidance of colleague specialists in other areas of historical research who were intent, in their turn, to reintegrate into the purview of British national experience the international dimension, the imperial dimension, the «fiscal-military» dimension and the correlative culture of patriotism. All these dimensions of the British past – it has to be noted – had been neglected or put in the background by major currents of the historiography of the second half of the twentieth century as Anglo-Marxism (especially in the “populist” version given of it by E. P. Thompson), which had tendend to emphasize internal social conficts and the moments in which ordinary people contested the hegemony of the ruling classes as the main theme of national history. The central thesis argued by Bayly in Imperial Meridian is that the «metropolitan impulses» played a preponderant role in giving impetus and form to empire-building during the expansive phase that it experienced between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Its engine, in this particular historical conjuncture, was not industrial capitalism, which would begin to make its consequences felt on the Empire only later, in the Thirties and the Forties of the Nineteenth Century.

The greatest thrust behind imperial expansion did not even come by the «Gentlemanly Capitalism» (a capitalism dominated – according to the proponents of this thesis, Anthony Hopkins and Peter Cain – by a landed or gentrified elite prone to invest his wealth rather in commerce and finance than in industry). What propelled the extra-European expansion was, according to Bayly, the energetic response given by the broadly majoritarian sectors of the British metropolitan 39 society which were under the hegemony of the oligarchic and aristocratic agrarian establishment to a succession of terrible internal and external challenges. The first challenge was represented by the «imperial crisis» concomitant with the secession of the thirteen American colonies in 1776. The American independence only marked the triumph of a more general tendency toward the «creolisation» which set itself in the colonies of settlement, including Ireland, after the Seven Years' War (by creolization we understand the transfer of imperial power from the metropolitan center to the colonial, peripherical white elites; settlement colonies, or settlement empire, are named those parts of the European global empire which underwent a significant measure of white colonization, that is immigration; Ireland is often regarded as a settlement colony because it underwent the settlement and the ascendancy of a Anglo-Saxon or Scottish and Protestant population in the midst of a predominantly celtic and catholic country; in the imperial crises of the eighteenth century it was the Anglo-Irish or Protestant establishment, and not Catholic Ireland, as in the following two centuries, to mobilize against the English domination). The British reaction to the American revolution, while failing to impede the Amrican independence, arrested and inverted the more general trend towards creolisation.

In the case of Ireland, for example, the Act of Union of 1801 deprived Ireland of legislative autonomy, abolishing the Irish Parliament; Irish Protestants mantained the right to parliamentary representation but, after that, their representatives had to seat in the London “imperial” House of Commons; Irish Catholics remained excluded from any parliamentary representation whatever till the Eamncipation Act of 1829. The Irish Act of Union was passed in the context of the British response to the second challenge which spurred Britain to imperial expansion between the late eighteen and early nineteen centuries. This second challenge came from the competition with revolutionary and Napoleonic France and from the veritable «world crisis» that the further globalization of the inter-European international conflict contributed to triggering from the Atlantic world to South-East Asia. Bayly holds that this second and much wider crisis was «the first true (that is the first literally woldwide, N.d.R.) world crisis since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century». 40 The British response to this succession of crises developed therefore on the ideological, political, institutional, military plans more and before than at economic level. Integrating significantly the mainly «excentric» approach followed in his previous works on the genesis of the colonian empire in India, Bayly examines now the «new imperialism» emanating from the British Isles as an organic part of the nascent «British nationalism», which was fomented by the aristocratic and noble ruling class in order to mobilize the consensus and resources, above all of the Metropolis, for the purposes of the anti-French struggle. The clash between England and France was, after all, a clash of ideologies. Which ideology did the British oppose to the French Gospel of the Revolution? The British ideology took the shape of a patriotic ideal which credited the British State with a providential mission and relegitimized the Empire as an essential instrument for performing that mission. The anti-French and anti-revolutionary patriotism inspired a process of reinvention of the British monarchy which made the king (George III for most of the period) the symbolic personification of the British identity. This reinvention of the monarchy had been studied by Linda Colley in a series of essays published during the nineteen-eighties. In Imperial Meridian Bayly complements significantly Colley's investigations by tracing the manifestations of the new cult of the monarch also in the public rituals which were celebrated in the imperial peripheries, in the theaters of colonial power. On the other hand, Bayly differentiates himself from Colley’s paradigm, which devoted much attention to popular patriotism, because, in Imperial Meridian at least, he focused almost exclusively on elite nationalism. It is important to observe that this new British nationalism, for Bayly, did not draw its chief inspiration from the kind of anti-revolutionary conservativism and constitutionalism represented by Edmund Burke. Burke’s celebrated and enormously influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (published in 1790) criticized the French revolutionary model and its British admirers and followers by arguing that that dangerous foreign experiment was completely alien and antithetical to the spirit of the English institutions and political tradition. Burke condemned the arrogant 41 French ambition of remaking State and society in conformity with abstract reason and extolled the contrary ideal of change-in-continuity supposedly realized in the history of England, whose Constitution had not been consciusly and artificially “made” by men according ot a preconceived overall plan, but had organically and naturally “grown” in time from precedent to precedent without never losing contact with its roots in the past. For Bayly, the political culture and mentality of the new anti-French and anti- revolutionary British nationalism and patriotism presents the very different aspect of a «constructive», dynamic, sometimes reformist and modernizing conservatism. Its projection in the colonial world gave life therefore to a series of autocratic, militaristic, paternalistic regimes far remote from the Burkean ideal. These proconsular regimes, and the policies they pursued, were very similar to each other, so that they «began to impose uniform pattern of rule and uniform notions of “law” and “progress”» also to the heterogeneous mosaic of distant extra-European societies which were invested by its impact all around the world. What the increased British domination and influence spread globally, all around the world, starting from the colonial fringes of the British Isles themseves (Ireland and Scotland) were, first of all, the after-effects of the enormous strengthening of the «sinews» of the State that was produced by the imitative antagonism with France. The period, like any other period of world war, saw a huge growth of the fleet, of the army, of the armaments industry, of the police forces, of the bureaucratic institutions and personnel, as well a corresponding «revolution in government» (i.e. administrative) which was concealed behind the appearances of constitutional continuity. And the repercussions of all these developments were felt well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom proper. But at the same time the «new British Empire» forged in the struggles of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period conveyed outside its original English and Scottish laboratory a system of beliefs and attitudes that supported a pedagogical-religious «project» of regeneration of humanity which Bayly deems comparable, for its universalistic claims, to the much more well-known French revolutionary ideology. This project 42 can be regarded, in some respects, as a prefiguration of the so-called civilizing mission that the nineteenth-century propagandists of colonial rule (like James Mill) will assign to the British Empire, which was called to convert backward peoples to Commerce, Civilization and Christianity (a celebrated Victorian triad). Bayly, on the other part, does not identify the intellectual basis of this first modern culture of imperialism with the doctrines of utilitarianism and free trade prevailing in subsequent periods of the European expansion. For Bayly, the chief inspirer of the new British nationalism and imperialism was a peculiar kind of civic republicanism2 which was fully compatible with the cult of the king and much similar in fact to the French, Napoleonic conception of the administrative monarchy3. This specific form

2 Civic republicanism is a kind of political discourse (dating back to classical antiquity and Aristotelian politics) which extols as one of the highest form of self-realization of the human being the performing of the duty and the fruition of the right to take an interest in the res publica, to participate in his corporate life, to contribute to its common good even at the cost of personal sacrifice. 3 A Note on the Administrative Monarchy – If we try to go below the surface of legal-formal definitions, we see that the administrative State (whatever the institutional framework within which it is implemented) represents a post-revolutionary attempt to rebuild the relationship between State and society on the basis of new parameters of legitimization, which had been partly anticipated by the absolutist State itself, especially in its reforming eighteenth-century Enlightenment version, and whose legacy was to be transmitted to the liberal State during the «long nineteenth century». The administrative State and its ideology can be reconciled, in other words, with other forms of goverment than the administrative monarchy proper, such as the British constitutional monarchy. This means that the administrative State embodies characteristics and attempts solutions of problems which pertain to political modernity at large, among which, for example, the adaptation of the political discourse to a cultural atmosphere marked by a growing secularization. The most evident traits of the administrative State are institutional centralization, bureaucratic rationality and efficiency, zealous care of the general interest. But all these practises are to be seen as means to a further end. They all aim at basing the obedience and the consent to public authority (to an authority which in certain cases, like in the Napoleonic regime, can be placed outiside the control of representative assemblies) on the integration and the active identification with the State of the most advanced and responsible strata of public opinion and civil society. The ideology of the administrative State or monarchy identified these privileged strata with various kinds of notables and elites, both bourgeois and aristocratic, who are enabled to the recognition of some public role (a subordinate public role in the case of the more autocratic regimes) by the exercise of the virtues inherent to the proprietary individualism, whose growth is precisely what the reforms undertaken by the administratvie State have the task of favoring or generating, in a demiurgic enterprise of social technology and civil pedagogy. A typical example of the «activism» of the 43 of civic republicanism, that Bayly calls agrarian patriotism, was strongly indebted towards the ideas of the eighteen-century Enlightenment, and in particular towards the Scottish Enlightenment and the physiocracy. The physiocracy was a current of economic thought that regarded agriculture as the real source of the wealth of the nations and advocated therefore the right to the full enjoyment of the land property rights and the free exchange of the products of agricultural work. Agrarian patriotism idealized therefore the figure of the «independent» big landowner or the «independent» yeoman (the rich peasant). «Independency» implied the practice of a whole cluster of economic, ethical and social virtues and values: enterprise, strength of character, public spirit etc. And we can find this worship of «independency» reflected in many ways both in the rhetorics and in the colonial institutions of the refashioned British Empire – the so called Second British Empire – resurrecting phoenix-like from the ashes of the First British Empire. The presumed degree of «moral independency» is placed at the foundation of a hierarchy of racial, social and cultural types more or less provided with this complex of human virtues. This scale or ladder of humanity (a notion we’ve already found in James Mill) culminated of course in the Anglican or Protestant gentleman. In the period covered in Bayly’s book the scale of humanity was still conceived in an historical-evolutionary rather than in a biological way. This means that the “humanities” situated on its lower steps were considered susceptible of improvement; their improvement began to be considered indeed the very purpose of imperial government. In the colonies, however, the world-wide exportation of the cultural hierarchy inherent to agrarian patriotism propelled by global imperialism resulted already, well before the rise of biological racism, in a hardening of the boundaries between colonizers and natives

(which previously had been much more fluid and porous), practices of exclusion,

administrative State, which can be found both in Europe and in the colonies, is the construction or the modernization of the transport and communication networks.

44 multiple forms of juridification of otherness. Faith in the virtues of agrarian individualism also inspired the legislative interventions of the imperial authorities regarding land regimes, which met, in this case, the demands of the rising (since the pre-colonial period) Asian «gentry». The decades of the rebirth and the rebuilding of the British Empire on a wider scale were also a period of significant missionary expansion of the Established Church and British Christianity at large. It is true that, in these years, missionary initiative had for recipients the British colonizers themselves or categories of non Europeans who were already christianized (such as, for example, the so-called Indian Eurasians, who were born from the marriage or the coupling between European males and Asian women). The missionaries, in other terms, did not aim at the direct conversion of the followers of other cults, at least in principle. But the mere intensification of the Anglican and Christian presence in the colonial world, together with the explicitly Protestant character of the Second Empire's legitimizing myth, was enough to provoke not only hostile reactions, but also attempts at emulation by Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. These religious implications of the new imperialism sound an eloquent confirmation of the capacity of British metropolitan nationalism to exert its influence, through colonial expansion, even on «the deeper historical experience of non-European peoples». The analysis of the elements of homogeneity which can be found in the «proconsular despotisms» predominating in the British Empire during the first four decades of the nineteenth century fulfills a strategic function in the project of reincorporating the history of the Empire in world history pursued by Bayly. The homogeneizing effects produced by the imperial expansion helps to explain «the emergence in varied colonies remote from each other of similar policies and similar types of colonial discourse», thus highlighting the globalizing effectiveness of forces of change that had their sources, in this case, in the heart of European civilization: «Out of the collision and accomodation between widely differing societies and these impulses to uniformity was generated much of the structure of the modern world». The fact that the new and powerful expansive efforts accomplished by Europe were 45 intertwined with previuos dynamics which were endogenous to the areas which they impacted, and never ceased to depend on the other paths to modernity in some way, explains why the convergence between the regional histories that was being realized under the aegis of a contingent and temporary Western hegemony could not give rise, neither now nor later, to mere cultural homologation or to provoke resistances which were capable of preserving a mythical integrity of the threatened cultures. Imperial globalization rather produced a range of those which an American scholar, Emily Rosenberg, has called «differentiated commonalities», that is a type of hybridization by virtue of which the surviving local identities were transformed by incorporating the global uniformities that provided them with the stimuli and the means to express themselves in completely renewed ways.

8. A Global Past for a Common Future: The Ethics of Global History

This conclusion offers also a precious key to the implicit ethichal and political assumptions which are at the basis of the Bayly’s approach to global history. Let’s begin to observe which is the human condition of the globalized society that seems to be the point of arrival of the story of transregional encounters and clashes described by Bayly in Imperial Meridian and in The Birth of the Modern World. We have to take into account that a sequel to this last book, the posthumous Remaking the Modern World, 1900-2015: Global Connections and Comparisons, which has been published as a new volume of the Blackwell History of the World Series only few weeks ago, carries the story of the human community literally to the present.

We must therefore ask ourselves: what is the historical present, which are the selected aspects of the historical present whose roots in the past Bayly aimed to explore? And wasn’t there any practical, moral and political purpose which he aimed to pursue through his scientific work in the field of global history? It strikes me how similar is the vision of the present globalized society which emerges from Bayly’s work to a brilliant characterization of contemporary Indian 46 culture that was given by the historian Edward P. Thompson in the late nineteen- seventies and that has been more recently re-proposed and disseminated by Amartya Sen (the celebrated winner of the Nobel Prize for Economy): «All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind». What Thompson and Sen observed about Indian multiculturalism some decades ago could be truly repeated, with the necessary adaptations, for each and every part of the globalized world of today. It is not only that, in the very shrunken world we inhabit, the different cultural regions interact much more closely than in the past and bearers and representatives of different regional cultures may be found living, working, studying at each other’s elbow in the same streets, factories, schools, or inveigh against each other in the same TV talk shows. Contemporary globalization means also something more. It implies that the world cultures have been increasingly penetrating, permeating and modifying the core identity of each other up to the level of the individual «minds» and souls of the people belonging to them

(this already happened in the past – think only of the conversion of ancient Rome to Christianity –, so there is no reason to believe that it couldn’t happen again), if only because their unprecedented mixing forces us to react in some way or another to their ubiquitous presence and influence. And it is only too obviuos that our political future will greatly depend on the way in which we will react to this situation of melting pot or panmixia. The term panmixia (an ancient Greek word which means the mixing of everything with everything) was employed by the pioneer world historian Arnold Toynbee in the Nineteen-Forties to describe the cultural condition created by globalization, which Toynbee still equated with the Westernization of the world. Referring in particular to the possible role of Islam in the future world politics, Toynbee evoked the «discordant panmixia set up by the Western conquest of the world» in order to warn that «a panmixia may end in a synthesis, but it may equally well end in an 47 explosion». Toynbee believed that the first duty of the world historian was to help mankind precisely to avert this «disaster»4. This suggests a conclusive consideration about another significant similarity which has to be noted between Bayly's positions and the recent orientations of the global historians, which pertains to the sphere of the ethical-political options related to the adoption of the «global perspective» and to the practical results that the global historians expect from it in the educational and public spheres too. Among the global historians, and particularly so among those of them who belong to the North American branch of this international movement, there is a widespread belief that the production of «an intelligible world history» would be «the moral duty of the historical profession in our time». This is because such a world history would possess the virtue «to diminish the lethality of group encounters» and to favour «cross-cultural understanding and global peace». A world history written according to the methodological precepts followed by the global historians would be, in their opinion, the natural ally of movements committed «to advance the causes of global citizenship, cosmopolitan democracy, cross-cultural dialogue» and analogous «globalist projects», such as, first of all, the international struggle for a «more just and equitable organization» of the world economy. These sanguine expectations are also reflected in the plan of the Blackwell History of the World to which Bayly contributed both The Birth of the Modern World and its sequel Remaking the Modern World, so that we have to suppose that Bayly himself shared them to the full. The ideal readers, to whom the series addresses itself, are in fact – as we can read in the Series Editor’s Preface – the citizens of «a world which faces a common future of headlong and potentially catastrophic transformation». A mature awareness of «its common history» – of the common history of peoples who are living together and appear destined to live together in a unified world – would help its inhabitants make it into «a rational and humane cosmopolis» based on mutual respect and understanding among all the identity

4 Bayly was posthumously awarded the Toynbee prize in 2016. 48 group involved. It is the consciousness of a common present and a common future, in other words, to give value to the knowledge of a common past. It his worth noting in this connection that one of the major expansive phases underwent by World History in the twentieth century occurred in the aftermath of the Great War. And its main source of ethical and political inspiration was precisely the confidence nurtured by many historians (among whom several prominent protagonists of the foundation of the discipline of the history of international relations) that the pacifist project of the Legue of Nations could benefit from the substitution of the nineteenth-century historiographical nationalism and Eurocentrism, which they deemed responsible for creating the cultural atmosphere that had led to the First World War, with a European and world history which emphasized the past shared in common by all the peoples of the earth notwithstanding the political, national, racial, religious and civilizational barriers which divided them. According to an essay on The Teaching of History and Peace published in 1921 by the female economic historian (as well as ardent liberal internationalist) Eileen Power, «the great aim of history teaching must be to show mankind its common heritage in the past and its common hopes for the future».

The success of the League of Nations depended on the existence of a public opinion specifically educated to understand that, «in spite of national antagonisms and divergent interests, mankind as a whole is what the League of Nations presupposes it to be: a community with common aims and a common history». If the League of Nations had to become a working concern, an operating reality, it was necessary that the younger generations acquired through the school «some idea of the history of that other community to which they belong (beyond the nation, N.d.R.), that is mankind». And the chief educational tool through which «this sense of mankind as a community» could be fostered in the youth was not else than «the teaching of world history». There may be no doubt that Bayly endorsed the belief in the ethical responsibility of the global history professed by the editor of the Blackwell History of the World, although he rarely hinted to his ethical and political convinctions in his published 49 writings. This is witnessed, for example, by an obituary that, at his death in 2015, his colleague historian and personal friend Richard Drayton dedicated to him in «The Guardian» (the English newspaper). Drayton describes Bayly’s entire scientific work as tacitly and implicitly «animated by a moral, even utopian, purpose». «Hidden» behind Bayly’s impeccable professionalism there was an «emotional» source of inspiration, which Drayton describes as the «hope for a cosmopolitan liberal future, in which human beings, beyond race and nation, would live compassionately in a family of democracies». In fact, Bayly’s ideal propensity towards some form of pluralist cosmopolitanism seems confirmed by a certain sensitivity to what Bayly himself has critically described as «the fascination which the vast, multi-ethnic empires of the agrarian world exercise on (contemporary, N.d.R.) scholars and laymen». There is an obvious political dimension to this appeal, that is the historical cultural myth which depicts such «universal empires» – when compared to the homicidal and genocidal intolerance of diversity displayed in the twentieth century by the nation State – «as benign political organisms providing their subject populations with the benefits of peace, law and order». It is worth noting that until the mid-twentieth century the

British monarchy, the British Empire and the British Commonwealth of Nations claimed precisely to be the last and the newest incarnation of the ideal of the universal monarchy. Official propaganda described the British world state as a great family of nations scattered in every corner of the earth, all contributing to the richness of the whole in terms of their prized talents and peculiarities and realizing therefore the political utopia of the unity in diversity. And there is every reason to believe, also on the strength of Bayly’s autobiographical testimony, that he actually entered into contact with this kind of liberal imperialism through the mediation of both his parents when he was a youth (Bayly, as you remember, was born in 1945). We must therefore ask ourselves how Bayly imagined that his scholarly activity in the scientific field of world history could help ensure «a 21st-century global future for his kind of liberalism». To answer this question is not an easy task, because Bayly never addressed explicitly enough the problem in his published writings. There is no 50 doubt, on the other hand, that Bayly personally believed in the practical value of the historical knowledge. This is confirmed by Bayly’s participation to the works of the World Bank Development Research Group, to which he contributed a long paper on the Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development comparing the cases of Colonial India and Colonial Africa, and thus setting a remarkable example of how comparative imperial history, in particular, could be concretely used for the planning of policies suitable to face global poverty. We can exclude from the start, however, that Bayly attributed to the empirical knowledge of the «common history» of the globalized world the magical virtue of automatically converting into a choice of value in favor of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. This ways of thinking was widespread among the world historians of the previous generations. Many of them, often influenced by Christian providentialism, believed that history possessed an objective teleological meaning. Immanent in history there was a purpose, a logic and a direction. Therefore, history could be regarded as anything else than the process of realization, more or less inevitable and dependent on human free will, of a predetermined end. And this end (or télos in Ancient Greek) consisted, for eminent world historian like, for example,

Arnold Toynbee, in the progressive reunification of all the branches of mankind into a single family or community (Christian theologians – it is worth remembering – had identified the Church as the final unifier and ultimate tributary of the antecedent stages of the providential process of unification of the world which had seen as protagonists secular actors like the Roman Empire). A man equipped with a truthful knowledge of world history could not help take sides for some pluralist cosmopolitan (ecumenical was the adjective preferred by Toynbee) way out from the present predicament of globalized humanity, which is being torn apart by the simultaneous intensification of the «unifiyng and divisive movements» coexisting in history. Some conspicuous traces of this way of viewing and trying to exploit the potentialities of world history can be found in the work of William McNeill – the theorist, as you will remember, of the growth of the «human community» as the essential subject-matter of universal history. In 1985 McNeill was elected president 51 of the American Historical Association (an event that can be regarded in itself as a significant indication of the incoming recognition of world history as a legitimate field of historical professionalization). In this occasion McNeill delivered a very important address entitled Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians. Its main thesis was that, in order to perform the most urgent ethical duty conferred on them by the society in which they lived and worked, professional historians had to take on the task of producing a world history which partook of both myth and historical truth. As history, this «mythistory» (so McNeill baptized it) had to be written impeccably, of course, from a scientific and professional point of view. But the world history envisaged by McNeill had to possess at the same time the narrative structure and meaningfulness proper of a «myth». To this end, the would-be mythistorians were exhorted by McNeill to reconstruct a synthetic overview of the entire human past around an organizational principle which sounds reminiscent, both in its hypothetical gnoselogical status and in its more specific content, of Immanuel Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. Adopting the mythistorical approach implied, for McNeill, to regard world history – the history of the human community – as if it were the long and difficult march of mankind towards the possible «eventual establishment of a world-wide cosmopolitanism». In this way, the resulting world historical narrative would have been able to generate in its readers – in the words of McNeill – «a sense of individual identification with the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole». Bayly distanced himself much more markedly than McNeill from the traditional teleological approach to world history, albeit the two scholars shared in a way a remotely similar religious background (McNeill was the son of a Presbyterian minister, while Bayly’s father, Roy, had converted from his family’s Presbyterianism to free thinking). Bayly’s epistemological pronouncements reveal a strict adherence to the precepts of the English empiricist tradition. He was radically skeptical about the possibility for the professional historian to base any judgment about how things ought to be on the scientific knowledge of what really happened in the past. More precisely, Bayly’s work is infused with a sophisticated understanding that historical 52 reality cannot have any ethical meaning in itself, because the objects of the historiographical research are shaped by the subjective cognitive interest of the researcher and in their shaping an indispensable role his played therefore by his ethical beliefs. In other words, we can’t draw our ethical preferences from history. What happens is rather the opposite: our ethical free choices give form and meaning to that portion of the past which we select as the object of our inquiry. Let’s add to this that Bayly, as a historian of imperialism, has equally opposed an apologetic whitewashing of its evil consequences and crimes as well as the Manichaean attitude of prejudicial and indistinct condemnation of this complex phenomenon which has so long prevailed. Therefore, Bayly has shown himself only too aware that the vivid consciousness of a common history is not in itself conducive to an attitude of mutual comprehension between the different peoples who share that same past. What «unite» today, for example, the descendants of the colonizers and the descendants of the colonized is also, first and foremost, a heavy and often unmanageable heredity of «inexcusable» injustice (like slavery) and clashes. For all this reasons, Bayly seems to have set himself a practical goal which is much more circumscribed, as well as much more well defined and actually achievable, than the very ambitious edificatory goal pursued by McNeill’s «mythistory». Far from attempting to convert their reader to Bayly’s own brand of pluralist cosmopolitanism, Bayly’s explorations of the global past aims at counteracting the obnoxius ideological tendency of our times to reify the fluid and intricate group identities coexisting in the contemporary globalized society as if they were instead fixed and separate essences, so as to equip the aspiring builders of the future Cosmopolis with a realistic knowledge about the cultural materials which must be handled and the obstacles which must be overcame in order to advance towards its realization. The critical study of the actual ways in which contemporary globalization has come to shape the identity profiles of the individuals and the groups involved in social interaction in the globalized world belies the pseudo-historical and essentialist 53 stereotyping that tends to credit the prejudice according to which between “Us” and “Them” (between “Us” Europeans or Italians, for example, and non-European Union migrants of various origins and provenance) there exist irreducible differences, which can be classified in crude dichotomous schemes. The global history of the last two centuries and half has generated, rather, a very high number of Emily Rosemberg’s «differentiated commonalities». «Differentiated commonalities» are resemblances between regional societies and identity groups which result, on the one hand, from their sharing of common or analogous experiences (that is a common past as defined by global historians), but are locally inflected, at the same time, according to the most varied cultural codes. This means that the global interactions of the past, as they have made possible the present high degree of intercultural convergence among the peoples of the world, have left us not only a tragic legacy of conflict and violence, but also vast and multiple opportunities for mutual accommodation between group identities that are anything but rigid, monochord, mutually exclusive and uncommunicating monads.

9. Overcoming Eurocentrism: the First Step

One of the chief sources that inspired the international revival of the World History, which has been going on for about thirty years now, must certainly be seen in the reconceptualization in a polycentric key that has invested, in the same period, the field of studies dealing with «The Expansion of Europe». This expression refers to the object of investigation privileged by a well-defined scientific and academic tradition, predominantly British or pan-Britannic, but with significant ramifications also elsewhere, like in the United States and the Netherlands, whose path has been followed, in earlier stages of their career, by paradigmatic exponents of the new global history like both Christopher Bayly and 54 John Darwin. It is worth trying to outline a summary profile of this tradition because the works of his best heirs suggest historiographical ideas which seem to me very useful in order to subtract the ongoing controversy about the role of Europe in the history of the modern and contemporary world to a false alternative in which this debate, especially here in Italy, risks too often to become entangled. I intend to refer to the false alternative between the polemical demand of «provincializing Europe», which has been advanced in particular by the Indian post-colonial and subalternist historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, and the uncritical re-proposal, in reaction to the radical assault against Eurocentrism, of a European centrality which is undoubtly in need of a profound rethinking. «The Expansion of Europe» is actually the name of a prestigious and long-lived examination paper set up by the Cambridge History Department in 1945. It echoed pretty obviously the phrase «The Expansion of England», that is the title of a famous course of lectures held in Cambridge at the beginning of the eighteen-eighties by the founding father of the British imperial historiography, John Seeley. At the end of the nineteen-seventies the examination was split into a first part, which kept the old denomination of «The Expansion Europe», and a second part dedicated to the period after 1918, entitled «The West and the Third World» but popularly known as «the West and the rest». And the first part is the direct ancestor of the current Paper Twenty One of the Historical Tripos, Empires in World History, which corresponds to the course of World History dealing with the period from the Iberian colonization of the New World to the Great War (the Historical Tripos is the name given to the series of written examination which have to be passed in order to obtain the bachelor’s degree in History at Cambridge). According to the original program approved by the Council of the Faculty of History in April 1945 (a few weeks before the end of the Second Word War), the courses related to European expansion would have dealt «in outline with the political, economic and cultural contacts of the principal countries of Europe – including Russia – with the remainder of the world in the period since 1400» to the present. The subject-matter of the teaching is described in a list of contents that can be read in The Student’s Handbook to the 55 University and Colleges of Cambridge for 1947. These are the great voyages of «exploration; the relevant missionary, humanitarian and political movements; the development of overseas trade and investment; the reaction of extra-European countries to European influence, including the effects on peasant economy of the opening of international markets and the industrialisation of colonial territories; the foundation of colonial empires, with the general features of the imperial policy of the principal European countries; the problems of native self-government; international relations in the colonial sphere, with the relevant military and naval history»5. In the next decade also the organization of the research at Cambridge was formally adapted to the introduction of this remarkable didactic innovation, with the launch of a specific research seminar on the history of European expansion. But in order to fully grasp the meaning and the historiographical implications of these initiatives, it is essential to dwell for a few moments on the motivations put forward by their academic supporters and on the intellectual attitudes of some of the initial architects of their successful and rapid taking roots. Among the latter, a prominent place certainly has to be given to the young John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, two eminent revisionist historians of British imperialism. Starting in 1953 (the same year in which they jointly published a very influential article in four hands on The Imperialism of the Free Trade in the «Economic History Review»), and for about thirty years, Gallagher and Robinson held for the most part, simultaneously or in turn, the two introductory courses on the fundamental outlines of the European expansion before and after 1850, namely the series of lectures dedicated to the synthetic presentation and macro-historical contextualization of the phenomen of the European expansion. According to its proponents, the need to introduce the systematic study of the European expansion stemmed from the blatant inability of the colonial and imperial

5 The Student’s Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge, supplement for 1946-47, Cambridge, University Press, 1947, p. 99; Statutes of the University of Cambridge and Passages from Acts of Parliament relating to the University; Ordinances of the University of Cambridge, to 1 Ocober 1952, Cambridge, University Press, p. 206. 56 history that was taught at Cambridge to provide satisfactory answers to the questions raised by the momentous changes which were underway in the «European position in Asia and Africa» on the eve of decolonization. Many pupils and young teachers and researchers, including Gallagher and Robinson themselves, had recently had the opportunity of personally experiencing these epochal changes by serving in the armed forces on the different non-European fronts of the world war. In their diagnosis, the fault of colonial history was its excessive concentration on the «imperial factor» and neglect of the role played by the colonized people, whom the events of the war and its aftermath were bringing to the fore. The adoption of the broader category of «European expansion», in the place of that of «Expansion of England», responded first of all to a need of relativization and demythization of the British imperial experience. But it was intended also to remedy a too narrow conception of colonial history still mostly focused in an almost exclusive manner on the victorious protagonism of European actors, so that – to quote again the testimony of Christopher Bayly referring to the state of things which subsisted at Oxford till the nineteen-sixties – «Indians and Africans were rarely more than a backdrop to the doings of colonizers, missionaries and merchants».

One of the main purposes of the introduction of the new paper was therefore to widen the analytical context in which the empire-building processes and the different types of European presence and influence in the world had to be studied, so as to include in it the contribution of non-European forces which were recognized now able to interact dynamically with the Europeans and to condition the deployment and the outcomes of their colonial initiatives. A well-known historiographical exemplification of this approach, and of its vast methodological repercussions, is offered to us by the much debated theory of imperialism advanced by Gallagher and Robinson themselves. An essential element of this theory is its vigorous emphasis on the «Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism». According to them, even at the height of the so-called «triumph (...) of European domination» in the final decades of the long nineteenth century, British and European expansion and colonial power constantly depended on 57 a multitude of forms of «collaboration», and therefore of compromise and negotiation, actively involving non-Europeans, albeit in a subordinate position. Later research influenced by the so called School of Cambridge has showed how the imperative necessity of making sectors of the elites and other key strata of the native societies willing participants in the formal or informal control of the non- European peoples gave imperial government and domination the character of a «cross-cultural enterprise». This crucial circumstance offers a plausible explanation of why the representations of the Non-European “Other” that can be found in the rhetoric of official legitimation of the imperial authority elaborated in the European Metropolis usually abstain from resorting (at least in the British case) to the most derogatory stereotypes of cultural differentialism and biological racism (I’ve stressed how, after all, James Mill’s derogatory representation of the Hindoos didn’t deny the possibility that the Hindoos could be ultimately civilized) or to the language of the Kiplingian «white man's burden» This partially contradicts, or renders indispensable to rectify, Edward Said’s well-known thesis about the relationship between colonial culture and colonial power. The exercise of colonial power did not necessarily imply the utter stigmatizatin of the colonized. We can see therefore how, in this case, the awareness of the interactive nature of the relationship of colonial power reveals itself an essential prerequisite for a truly historical, non-ideological approach to the theme of the culture of imperialism, which has risen to the top of the agenda of the European studies in the last generation. At the very beginnings of the Cambridge School we may recognize therefore that propensity to organically connect within the same interpretative framework the dynamics unfolding in the European and non-European scenarios of expansion, which we have already found, in a more developed form, in the work of Christopher Bayly and which we will find again in John Darwin’s book on the global empires. This methodoogical attitude suggests a second qualifying aspect of the Expansion Studies paradigm on which I would like to draw attention, and that I would define, in a first approximation, the synoptic ambition cultivated by the major exponents of the Cambridge tradition. It is highly probable, of course, that the appeal exercised 58 by the newborn discipline of «The Expansion of Europe» after the Second World War reflected to a large extent a growing interest for the knowledge of the extra- European worlds. The Expansion of Europe course provided the students with one of the rare opportunities to pursue this interest in the English universities at the time. We see here the prodromes of a trend that from the mid-nineteen-sixties would have continued in the most congenial form of the disciplinary autonomization of the regional studies (the so called area studies). The fact remains that the Expansion of Europe course had been conceived and would have been kept alive until its explicit transmutation in the World History course which is presently taught at Cambridge for a more specific institutional purpose. This didactic purpose was to delineate the wider world historical and comparative horizon within which the more specialized teaching and study dealing with individual non-European regions or the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth would have to find their place. At the heart of the idea of «universal history» that informed the thought of the Cambridge historians after the Second World War, it is easy to see a persistent tendency to imagine the European expansion as a «many-sided» but intrinsically unitary phenomenon and to identify it, at the same time, with the vector of a process of «unification of the world» which, in the contemporary era, had reached the critical phase of its fulfillment. This tendency dated back to the nineteenth- century historiography (Seeley himself, the founding father of Imperial History as an academic discipline, had been one among its foremost exponents during the Victorian age) and had recently resurfaced, in an updated form, in the writings of Arnold Toynbee. Even for Gallagher and Robinson, in fact, the «expanding» entity, driven by the «expansive energies of Europe» and in particular of the British industrial society, was properly the «western civilization»; and the various dimensions of its expansion had to be regarded as «radiations» in different shapes of the same «social energies», and constituted therefore «interconnected» «parts» of a «whole. Within this «totality», the European imperialism assumed a more informal or formal character according to the variable conditions of the extra- European areas which the civilizational movement impacted in its world-wide 59 advance. Considered as an aspect of the expansion of Europe so conceived, British and European or Western imperialism fufilled «the political function» of «integrating new regions» if and when its help was needed to this purpose – as it was not at all inevitable that always happened. In its holistic impetus, the Cambridge school also conceives the temporal manifestations of the expansion of Europe as moments in one single centuries-old sequence of events that embraces together both the modern and the contemporary age and requires an appropriate internal periodization of its own. The historians belonging to this tradition see the ubiquitous spatial manifestations, both material and ideal, of the European expansion, as ramifications of «one great» geohistorical «movement». The national subcurrents of this movement, that is the expansions promoted by other European people and States, of which the English expansion would be «only the largest and the latest of a whole species», are regarded by these scholars as contributions to a common «European» or «Western» historical work. Last but not least, the Cambridge School regards the European and neo-European irradiation poles and the non-European destination areas of the expansive movement as internal articulations of a single large, virtually ecumenical theater of transregional and transcultural interactions. Such methodological propensities seem to have been particularly pronounced in John Gallagher, who was an academic mentor both to Bayly and Darwin. In Gallagher’s intellectual personality, however, the holistic, «all-embracing» ambition coexisted, in a rare and fruitful combination, with a historiographical realism that appears indebted to the elitist empiricism and «anti-impressionist positivism» which came to dominate the British historiographical scene after World War Two under the influence of Lewis Namier (1888-1960). It was in Gallagher’s teaching to undergraduates, however, that his leaning towards macro-history found its most congenial vent. Some former pupils, including Darwin himself, who in After Tamerlane declared to have learned from Gallagher to consider world history «as a connected whole», have witnessed (or suggested at least) that Gallagher, as university teacher, availed himself of a «global» approach so as to make the 60 expansion of Europe the reconstructive principle of a synthetic presentation of world history. Gallagher used to inaugurate his annual preliminary course on the fundamental outlines of the European expansion by warning his listeners that the subject-matter of the lessons would actually lead him to deal with the entire «Tokyo to Tipperary (which is in Ireland) group of civilizations». This testimony provides us with a precious clarification about the true theme of the history of the European expansion, because it shows as the founders of the Cambridge School conferred a privileged status to a hemispherical space (to which they were uncertain whether ascribing or not Sub-Saharan Africa) that they regarded as profoundly different from the transoceanic new worlds. Here, in the transoceanic new worlds to which has to be added Southern Africa, the Western civilizations expanded in the form of more or less homogenizing «gains» (acquisitions) which were promoted by the neo-European societies, that is, by the white colonial societies created by immigrant form Europe and their descendants. In the Americas and Oceania the Western society expanded by pushing forward its frontiers. In the Eastern hemisphere, on the contrary, the Europe expanded by establishing «contacts» with people which possessed a kind and a degree of civilization comparable with their own. The Western expansion in the extra-European world acquired in this case the character of «contacts between civilizations in space». But this circumstance has to be taken into the highest consideration not only because it peculiarly shapes the dynamics of expansion in the Old World in various ways. The fact is that the group of the Eurasian «civilizations» are ultimately the co-protagonists of a common history. This common history is given its structural unity, from a certain point onwards, by the «Western» expansion. But at the same time the common Eurasian history possesses a further meaning, which consists in the final convergence and reciprocal integration of the various regional societies into the contemporary global society. To make altogether explicit the historical-universal assumptions which are at the basis of the originary paradigm of the historiography of the European expansion have been a couple of those non-British scholars, who, as I already mentioned, were 61 involved in its launch alongside their British colleagues. The most complete definition of the post-war concept of history of the European expansion (among those which are known to me) was given by the Dutch historian Henk Wesseling when he described the institutional mission of the homonymous Center («Geschiedenis van de Europese Expansie» in Dutch) which was created at the University of Leiden in 1974. Studying the European expansion, according to Wesseling, amounted to concentrating research on the intertwining of a triple order of phenomena. The first theme was the «history of the encounters between different systems of civilization» generated by the European expansion. The second theme was the relationship of mutual «influence» that had established itself between these civilizations. The third theme was the their «gradual growth towards a global, a universal system of civilization» (the modern and contemporary development of McNeill’s «human community», in other terms). A further tacit key element of the Expansion of Europe paradigm is vividly illuminated by an observation that I draw from an essay published in 1959 by the American scholar Philip Curtin, the great historian of the Atlantic slavery turned world historian in the subsequent phases of his professional career. Since the mid-nineteen-fifties Curtin himself had held in various universities of the

United States a course on «The Expansion of Europe» later renamed «The World and the West». According to Curtin, the basic assumption of the new discipline was that during the modern and contemporary age «the impact of the West» had been «the most important single factor in the history of any single country» of the extra- European world which experienced it and therefore, at the same time, «the unifying factor» in the history of the extra-European world taken as a whole. Focusing on the «impact of Europe» the historiography of the expansion could therefore legitimately aspire to sketch an organic, general and «comparative» outline of world history as a whole. The conceptualization of the expansion of Europe that was elaborated at the dawn of decolonization recognized therefore a real capacity to interact with the West to the non-Europeans (or at least to the «civilized» non-Europeans of the Eastern hemisphere). But it continued to rest on a theoretical framework that 62 circumscribed their «agency» within very narrow limits. Non European agency was mainly described in terms of reactivity or response of worlds which were in themselves stagnant to an exogenous jolt or challenge. This first, genuine attempt of overcoming Eurocentrism left largely intact old stereotypes and still relegated the past of the Oriental societies prior to the «encounter» with the West to a historicity which was qualitatively different, if not antithetic, to European historicity. The persistence and pervasiveness of such stereotypes should not be forgotten by those who today, faced with the opposite excesses of which the radical critics of historiographical eurocentrism are too often guilty, regret indiscriminately the time (which is after all, and fortunately, as far as I’m concerned, far from being yet over) when «in general historical representations Europe occupied a central place» - as the late Professor Giuseppe Galasso declared in one of his latest interviews. I limit myself to an example taken from one of the university manuals of contemporary history on which I myself studied at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties. I refer to the volume of Alberto Caracciolo on «the age of the bourgeoisie and revolutions» published by Il Mulino in 1979, which is an example - I immediately add - made in my eyes all the more significant by the authoritativeness and by the particular intellectual distinction of its author. Like Bayly’s books on the Birth and the Remaking of the modern world, Caracciolo’s book was part of a series published by Il Mulino whose other three volumes – on the Middle Ages, on the «formation of the modern world», on the «triumph and collapse of European dominance» between 1870 and the present – were also authored by big names of Italian and European historiography of the time such as Giovanni Tabacco, Alberto Tenenti and Pasquale Villani. The editorial project of the series presupposed (a little too optimistically, perhaps, even by the standards of the time) the existence of a potential market that was composed not only of «university students», but of a wider and growing audience of «cultured» readers, to whom the General Presentation of the series ascribed a keen interest in the «basic processes of the modern world». To the questions posed to history by these readers the series promised to offer «overall but rigorous answers» in the form of «a 63 carefully updated interpretive synthesis» and focused – let’s note well – on the history of «European civilization» considered «as a whole» spanning the «ten centuries» from the Middle Ages to the «late twentieth century». The four volumes of the series would have followed the «long process» of development of the West «in its successive expressions until today's crisis». To mark the overall macro-historical framework of this series of university textbooks was therefore the conviction that students and readers could gain an adequate and intellectually satisfying understanding of the entire genesis of the modern and contemporary world – of their own world – by retracing, under the guidance of their distinguished authors, the stages which had prepared and rythmed, in the course of a thousand years, the rise of Europe to the «gradual rule over all the known world», culminating in its nineteenth-century «triumph» and twentieth-century «collapse». The Eurocentric perspective adopted by the editors of the series was clearly stated indeed in its very title: The European Civilization in World History. The volume of the series authored by Alberto Caracciolo has a paragraph entitled «The European civilization takes off», in which a student could read that, starting from the industrial revolution, which Caracciolo located yet in the second half of the eighteenth century, there had emerged in the world a division of mankind into two parts. There was «a part of humanity» which remained «underdeveloped», by which Caracciolo meant that it was «nailed to a substantial stasis and repetition of its own condition». And there was «another» part which was «involved», on the contrary, «in an ascending dynamic, in short in a practically uninterrupted “development”». The developed and developing part of mankind, moreover, was rising to «a dominant position over all others» parts which were still underdeveloped, including those peoples - «Muslims or Indians, Chinese and Japanese», who «retained (...) the elevated levels of their traditional civilizations», despite the immobility and the cyclicity of their histories». The category of «traditional», understood as the opposite, as the antithesis of «modern» and «progressive», is central to the general vision of the European 64 expansion advanced by Gallagher and Robinson. Their macrohistorical ideas are brilliantly summarized, in their characteristic non-academic if not anti-academic writing style, in the epilogue of another four-handed essay on The Partition of Africa which was published in 1962 in the New Cambridge Modern History. According to the co-authors, the European expansionism and imperialism of the nineteenth century had been «the engine of social change» in the «totally not- European» regions of the world, namely Asia and Africa. And the past transformations promoted by the European expansion were at the roots of the «world revolution» which was unfolding on the contemporary scene, that is decolonization and the rise of the post-colonial State. Gallagher and Robinson described indeed «colonial nationalism» itself as both a product and an «auxiliary» of the social changes triggered by the Western global empires, so much so that «colonial nationalism» had to be regarded as «the continuation of imperialism by other means». The European expansion had unleashed gigantic «disruptive forces upon the indigenous structures». In this way it had fulfilled the function «of the first importance» from a world-historical point of view «to wear down or to crak open the casings of societies» which had been «governed hitherto by traditional modes».

The «many-sided» European expansion had subjected these traditional non- European cultures and societies to the rough treatment, based on «cuffs» and «hustles», which necessary in order to remove them from the «postures of tradition» and to introduce them into «a new era of change» and «transformation». The impact force of the expansion of Europe had therefore triggered and favoured «rapid» processes of «social mobility», formation and «rise of new elites», «change of values», conflicts between traditional potentates and «emerging groups». In these ways the Western expansion had put Asians and Africans in front of what Gallagher and Robinson called, with an expression borrowed from Arnold Toynbee, «the western question». In a book published in 1922, entitled The Western Question in Greece and Turkey. A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Toynbee had drawn attention to the fact that the Expansion of Europe had forced upon the civilized non Europeans (or 65 non Westerners, the case of the Russians) a choice concerning what attitude to assume towards Europeanizing modernization and towards all those groups - Europeans or non-Europeans - who were promoting and carrying on it. And this dilemma, this «Western question», and the different responses evoked by it, was the most single important process unfolding on the contemporary political scene. 1952. And it is precisely in the various possible «responses» to the inescapable «challenge» represented by the «Western questions» that Gallagher and Robinson in 1962 (as already Toynbee since 1922) identify the limited terrain of exercise of the restored historical «agency» of the non-Europeans. This means that Gallagher and Robinson circumscribed the field of the global – that is the field of interaction and integration between the «civilizations» entered into «contact» with each other following the European expansion – exclusively to the phenomena pertaining to the chain of actions and reactions started by the European initiative (compare this to Christopher Bayly’s emphasis on the role played by non European modernities in preparing the ground for the transition to global modernity during the long nineteenth century). It goes without saying that the option towards which the two

English scholars manifest their greatest sympathy is not the «romantic, reactionary» «response» of the «Zealot», fundamentalist movements that reacted to the «shock» of Western-induced change by integrally opposing it, such as, for example, the theocratic Sudanese Mahdism. Gallagher and Robinson showed a strong appreciation toward a range of «more positive responses» to westernization that saw as protagonists the much more «defters nationalisms of Egypt and the Levant» (that is of the Ottoman Empire), the Confucian Occidentalism of the so-called «Scholars of New Learning» committed to modernize the late nineteenth-century imperial China, the different sections of the Indian National Congress of the origins (who pursued a progam of modernizing nation-building without severing the connection with the British Empire) as well as «the separatist churches of Africa» (that is the autochtonous, non missionary Churches created by the initiative of the indigenous Christian Africans themselves). This type of response amounted to an attempt 66 made by non-Europeans to make use of the resources of various kinds put at their disposal by the encounter with Western civilization for «re-form their personality and regain their powers by operating in the idiom of the westerners». They opted, in other terms, for a strategy of «sophisticated collaboration», by virtue of which the non-Europeans themselves became the agents of European expansion and strove at the same time to decline it according to their own cultural codes and to bend it to their own interests. According to the «excentric» interpretation of imperialism advanced by Gallagher and Robinson, the novelty of the local crises produced by the «proto-nationalist awakenings» ultimately imputable to the consequences of the previous phases of the expansion of Europe (such as, for example, the nationalist revolt headed by Colonel Urabi which provoked the British military intervention in Egypt in 1882) played a crucial role in determining the late nineteenth-century turn towards «formal» imperialism. Starting from the eighteen-eighties, it became more likely than in the past that the Europeans chose to impose their «formal» control on extra- European territories rather than keeping to the methods of «informal imperialism». It was so because the expansionists did not prove to be sufficiently «creative» and audacious to adapt themselves to the changed conditions of «collaboration» with the non Europeans that the expansion itself had generated. They failed to adopt also towards the new, modernizing «emerging groups» – in a form corresponding to the novel, unprecedented social and cultural characteristics of these group – their old policy which had consisted in negotiating an alliance with the «more dynamic» elements in the extra-European society in order to ensure optimal conditions for the expansion at the minimum cost. And a relevant aspect of this diminished creativity was the deafness of the West to the authentic historical significance of the turbulences that manifested themselves in the wider world – the Europeans’ unwillingness to read in the extra-European tensions and crises anything else that «the signs of decrepitude and crack-up». For Robinson and Gallagher, on the other hand, the whole range of the late nineteenth-century «awakenings» (including, that is, the more archaistis responses to the Western question) reveals the existence in 67 the Afro-Asiatic societies of «growth points», of the fruitful seeds which were destined to mature in the «modern struggles against foreign rule» and in the colonial nationalism which was called to carry forward the Promethean work initiated by industrial imperialism. It is only too evident, if we follow attentively Gallagher’s and Robinson’s argument, and take note also of the eloquent metaphors which corroborate its logic, that the only possible «growth points» to be found in the non- European soil still completely coincided, for the founders of the Cambridge School, with the seeds implanted ex novo by the Western historical enterprise.

10. The Expansion of Europe in the Perspective of the New Global History

Until now I’ve insisted on the unsurpassed limits of the genuine efforts which were made by the founding fathers of the Cambridge School in order to overcome the Eurocentric approach to the theme of the expansion of Europe. To underline these conceptual limitations is essential for exactly measuring and qualifying the further progress made by their pupils and successors, among whom Christopher Bayly and John Darwin, in the direction of a complete de-ideologization and historicization of the phenomenon of European expansion. The profound «rethinking» of which «The Expansion of Europe» has been made the object since the mid-nineteen-eighties is well illustrated by the title and by the program of the today’s course of World History in which, as I’ve already mentioned, the examination paper instituted in 1945 has progressively evolved at Cambridge since then: Empires in World History from the Fifteenth century to the First World War. As can be seen from various syllabuses published in the last years, the architects of the course (among which Bayly, who was Professor of Imperial History at Cambridge from the early nineteen-nineties to the beginnings of the present decade) continue to believe that the empirical study of causes, phases and modalities of the ascent of the «European and Atlantic world» to a «dominant» 68 position «in the world economy and world politics», with particular reference to «what (..) that dominance meant for the rest of the world», is able to provide a unifying theme for the history of humanity during the period in which «the modern world came to be». The crucial didactic innovation has to be seen in the fact that the course now proposes to deal with these issues by considering «the “expansion of Europe”» (the expression appears in inverted commas in the particular syllabus I’m quoting from) in close connection with the «major changes and developments» which also took place «in other world societies» of Eurasia, starting from the phase of consolidation of the great Asian empires during the early modern age and until the initial emergence the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries colonial «nationalisms». In the revised and updated version that has taken shape in recent years, the expansionist paradigm reveals itself, in other words, in substantial agreement with the primary methodological requirement of the coeval revival of World History, which consists in an invitation to reimagine the intensified cross-cultural interactions catalyzed by the western initiative, from which the globalized society of our time emerges, like the convergence, the confluence and the coalescence of the histories

- of all the histories and of the whole histories - of a plurality of dynamic macroregional spaces. This means that, on one hand, the Empires in World History course, as well as the works of synthesis that share its changed conceptual structure (like Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World and Remaking the Modern World and Darwin’s After Tamerlane), continues to employ as an indispensable narrative axis the histories of the European colonial empires, including (like the original Expansion of Europe course) the «multiple geographical directions of the Russian expansion». And yet the Empires in World History course professes and prides itself not to be «a European-centered course», not only because it emphasizes the transregional «movement of ideas, peoples and trades» which «bypass Europe», involving, that is, two or more other historical regions, but also and in the first place because – as declared in one of syllabuses – «it stretches the compass of empire» so as to include 69 among the factors to be taken into account in order to understand the making of the modern world the «strategies of expansion» related to the early modern processes of empire-building and culture-building promoted also «by the Ottomans, the Mughals and the Qing and other polities beyond the West». The Empire in World History course does not cease, therefore, to reserve «central stage» to the phenomena of «resistance and adaptation of non-European peoples to western economic penetration, political dominance and evangelization», and to the «non-western modernities» or «religious resurgences» (in the case of Islam, for example) which emerge from them. It is worth repeating that the attention paid to the non European or non Western responses is not in itself a novelty in the tradition of the Cambridge School. The real and very important novelty has to be seen in the fact that the «reactions» to the European expansion are no longer interpreted solely as a function of the «social change» induced by the «impact of Europe». The non European reactions are regarded now, at the macro historical level, as moments and phases of pre-existing, prolonged and uninterrupted currents of historical life and activity which saw the «non-European peoples» as their agents and protagonists. I have to repeat also, to avoid misunderstandings, that in the new historiography of the expansion of Europe the revaluation of the performances of non-European «cultures, economies and states» does not aim at calling in doubt the relative exceptionality of the European case and the temporary, contingent centrality and preponderance of the Europeans in the hierarchies of world power. On the methodological plan, this step forward in the overcoming of Eurocentrism reflects the scientific need to reconsider the periodization, the geography, the morphology, as well as the legacies left to the present, of the global interactions which mark the rise and decline of European dominance in the light of the empirical results of area studies. The growing research conducted in this field has documented the presence in the rest of Eurasia, during the centuries of the early modern age and prior to the actual «impact of the West» on its regions, of endogenous dynamics of change which were for long time considered an exclusive prerogative of Europe. We may disagree with Bayly’s opinion that these other early modern Eurasian 70 transformations can be regarded as «passages to modernity» which went parallel or were analogous to the European development. What remains true is that, within the theoretical horizon of the Cambridge School, such early modern Afro-Eurasian changes strongly suggest two new questions: what is the actual historical relationship, if any, between the acquisition by Europeans of the control of a particular area of the Eurasian world and the previous and long-lasting transformations in which this particular area now appears to have been involved? And in which ways, if any, did the antecedent endogenous changes contribute to defining the real terms in which the «Western question» arose for the Eurasian societies and influenced the «reactions» of their elites to the «challenge» of Europeanization? The argumentative strategies employed in order to answer these questions are well illustrated by John Darwin’s book After tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000. Darwin’s work is based on a long experience of teaching imperial and global history not at Cambridge but at Oxford (where Gallagher, his mentor, had moved for a period from 1963 to 1970). It represents the largest and, in my opinion, the most successful attempt realized up to now of reorganizing the overall field of the Expansion studies. In addition to covering a vast subject-matter, Darwin's work presents a historiographic structure that is both highly synthetic and, at the same time, very articulate and complex. Moreover, we fail to do justice to the book if we neglect to take fully into account how Darwin deals with the properly European, metropolitan and international sides of the expansion. Postponing for the moment a more balanced and detailed reconstruction of the whole conceptual framework of Darwin’s intellectual tour the force, I will briefly examine two aspects of his book which show with particular clearness the enlargement of the category of «dynamic interaction» and the redefinition of the expansionist paradigm pursued by the most recent representatives of the Cambridge School. These two topics are 1) Darwin’s interpretation of the genesis of British domination in India between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and 2) Darwin’s interpretation and evaluation of the attempts at «self-strenghtening» through the adoption of 71 «European methods» which were made by the Empires and States of the «Afro- Asian world» during the nineteenth century. Darwin is not a specialist of pre-colonial and colonial India, but his analysis of the connections between the history of Indian society and the European imperial expansion in the Asian subcontinent shows a clear affinity and complementarity with the somewhat controversial theses which have been advanced by the current of Indianist studies which counted among its major representatives Chris Bayly. Darwin inserts the formation of the British Empire in South Asia in the broader context of a turning point in the balance of power between European and non- European societies, which can be located in the eight decades or so between the Seven Years War and the First Opium War. The «Eurasian revolution» – as Darwin calls it – coincides essentially with the initial phase of the prolonged transition process between two types of «global connectivity». The first type – the starting point of the transition process – consists in the global network woven by the Europeans in the quarter of a millennium following the beginning of the oceanic explorations, during which among the societies of Eurasia there persisted, however, a situation of «equilibrium». The second type of «global connectivity» – the

(temporary) point of arrival of the transition started from the «Eurasian revolution» – is, for Darwin, the «limited» «Europa-centric» «global imperial order» that emerged in the decades preceding 1914, which was sapped at the foundations by the First World War, but was destined to survive, albeit on a reduced scale, in very precarious conditions and at the price of considerable modifications, until the Second World War and the decolonization. The «Eurasian revolution» is indeed the period in which the economic and technological effects of the industrial revolution began to modify, to the advantage of the Europeans, the relations between the West and the rest of Eurasia. But another component of primary importance of the Eurasian revolution (and an essential prerequisite for the take off and the maximizing of the global impact of industrialism) lies for Darwin in a two-phased «geopolitical revolution». Its first phase is marked by the progressive intensification, radicalization and globalization of the inter-European struggles culminating in the defeat of Napoleon. 72 The second, post-Congress of Vienna phase sees the tendential limitation of the international and ideological conflict between the European states that left the two lateral Powers of the system, i. e. England and Russia, relatively free to pursue their expansionist «ambitions» towards the East. On the broader extra-European stage (which includes, let’s never forget, the New World) the «geopolitical revolution» had the result of shattering the barriers that, still in the mid-eighteenth century, decisively hamper European expansion. The disconfiture of France, for example, weakend the resistance that the indigenous societies of North America had been able to continue to oppose to the advance of the white settlement colonialism by exploiting the inter-European rivalries and brought to an end the mercantilist compartmentalization of world trade preparing the terrain for the advent of free trade. In another sector of the non-Eurasian «“Outer World”», the sector of the globe comprising «the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, island South East Asia and Oceania» – the inter-European competion of this period also provided an incentive for the annexation of Oceania to the area at disposal to the European settler societies for the construction of the colonial «neo- Europes». But as far as the equilibrium between the regional societies of the Old

World is concerned, the further revolutionary geopolitical novelty of the period was that European Powers proceed, for the first time, to the building of «territorial empires in Asia and Africa», among which the one built by the East India Company. In the case of India, it appears even more clear that the geopolitical revolution, given its chronology, precedes and is relatively independent from the advent of industrialism. Territorial empire-building in the subcontinent turns out to be the result of the synergic interweaving that now for the first time establishes itself between European history and Asian history, between the increased expansive movement of Europeans and certain peculiar regional conditions and dynamics that can ultimately be traced back to the Pax Mughalica of the early modern age and to the crisis in which it had entered in the late seventeenth century. For Darwin, recent historiography has falsified and debunked the «simplistic black legend» which for so long credited the idea that in the half century before the battle of Plassey (1757) 73 and the acquisition of the «Diwan» of Bengal by the East India Company (1765) India had sunk into a chaos of «political disintegration», «economic decline» and anarchy from which only the British conquest could raise it. And a correct diagnosis of the crisis of the Mughal Empire, which has been made both indispensable and possible by historical research, is precisely the key to a more realistic understanding of the specific historical meaning that the «Eurasian revolution» assumes in the subcontinent. To summarize it in brief, Darwin subscribes to the thesis that, starting from the Fifties and Sixties of the eighteenth century the East India Company, driven among other things by the rivalry between England and France, was compelled or catched the opportunity to become part of a number of contending States into which the Mughal imperial space had been disarticulating itself for some time. But the «centrifugal» forces which, in the case of the Mughals as well as in the partially analogous case of the Ottomans, favoured the disintegration of the Islamic empire were the product of processes of modernization of the Indian society which had been encouraged by the grandiose constructive work of unification, pacification and internal organization of India initiated by the Timurids in the sixteenth century (such as demographic growth, extension, specialization and commercalization of the agriculture, integration of India in the networks of the long-distance world trade – both terrestrial and oceanic –, development of the manufacturing activity, urbanization, rise of a class of landowners linked to localities and forms of mercantile capitalism). At the roots of the political changes which formed the presuppositions and the background for the advent of European colonialism there was therefore a shift in the balance of power in the subcontinent to the advantage of new peripheral

élites, that were directly or indirectly the protagonists of a «new phase of Asian state building» whose most distinctive feature was an attempt to adapt the ideology and the institutions of the imperial epoch to the «regional» (i. e. provincial) scale. The origins of European domination are to be searched, in short, in the transformation of the Company into an «Indian power» – into one of those Asian

74 states of a new type which were at the same time the gravediggers, the continuators of the work and the would-be heirs of the Mughal Empire. Understanding to which extent European expansionism in India was in the condition and revealed itself capable of intercepting and exploiting for the purposes of empire-building pre-existing currents of indigenous political, social and economic change also constitutes, for Darwin, the indispensable premise for trying to answer the historiographical problem posed by the «exceptionality» of the Indian case. In India, in fact, the process of colonial conquest, precouciously started around the middle of the eighteenth century, prolonged itself without interruption and «more completely than in almost every other part of Afro-Asia» until the eve of the rebellion of the sepoys in 1857-1858. Conquest was carried on, in other terms, well into the new period of the history of expansion which can be located between «the first epoch of global imperialism» from 1760 to 1830 and the «new imperialism» of the late nineteenth century. During these intermediate half century or so, the British and the Europeans showed themselves reluctant to proceed to new territorial acquisitions in «Afro-Asia» (this happened, after all, in India too, where, after the Great Mutiny, the British made the choice to let the remaining “princely states” survive as polities governed by native rulers on which they exercised their ultimate control through methods of «indirect rule»). In order that the growing disparity of the respective levels of power could translate itself into the imposition of an effective European control over Afro-Asian peoples and territories - Darwin argues - it was necessary that certain minimal conditions of possibility realized themselves. The most basic of them pertained, on one side, to the circumstances of those peoples and territories, on the other side, to the willingness of metropolitan countries to shoulder the burdens of colonial conquest and goverment. And the reasons of the presence of these conditions in Indian society are not to be found, according to Darwin, in its backwardness, but, on the contrary, in those conspicuous traits of «modernity» that were the legacy of the pre-colonial period.

75 India’s «openness» to world trade and the sophistication of its commercial and financial life meant that English merchants, whose activity was not confined to port cities like in the Canton system in China, could conduct their business directly with prosperous indigenous merchants and bankers who were much freer from the control of indigenous potentates than their Chinese counterparts. In maritime India, therefore, the Company could always count on the alliance with (and on the collaboration of) local economic élites for whom the investment opportunities offered by the British had become increasingly important. But even more obvious (so obvious as to be most often overlooked) is the extent to which the special advantages that the Company could exploit to expand its power into the huge continental mass of inland India stemmed from «developments» that India had known in the course of early modern age. As we have already seen, India possessed an extensive and efficient credit system, thanks to which the East India Company was able to pay its wars without having to draw only on its commercial resources, but also rely on the services of Indian bankers. Furthermore, starting from the acquisition of the right to collect taxes in Bengal, the Company could employ the monetary revenue deriving from the consolidated system of taxation of land of Moghul origin (which presupposed in turn a sufficiently commercialized and monetized economy) in order to meet the costs of its fiscal-miliary apparatus without falling into the vicious circle of imperial oversizing. In this way, the Company could pursue a strategy of territorial expansion which sustained itself at the expense of the Indian society itself rather than the English taxpayer. Even the well-known dependence of the Company's army on the recruitment of a vast indigenous infantry, which had to be loyal, ocìf course, to its foreign employer, presupposed the modernizing process by which, especially in the great central-northern plains of India, soldiering had become a profession, overcoming the feudal or tribal logic which prescribed that a soldier should be primarily a loyal follower, owing personal allegiance to a military leader who was at the same time his lord or clanic chieftain. But alongside this more numerous category of indigenous «collaborators», the most significant manifestation of the openness, fluidity and social dynamism from 76 which European expansion benefited in India remain for Darwin the extraordinarily rich and various range of regional élites among which the British colonizers could select their strategic partners - from the ancient diasporic communities of Farsi merchants in Bombay to the new educated Hindu middle class who was supplanting the older Muslim elites at the top of Bengali society. Some historians, including Bayly, starting from historiographical premises which are very similar to the theses subscribed to by Darwin, have gone a long way in attempting to overturn the stereotype of an «immobile» India, «ready to allow itself to be subdued» by a foreign conquest of which it would be a purely passive «spectator and victim». They seems inclined to believe that the active «collaboration» of components of Indian society in the construction and functioning of the European colonial regime should be read as the continuation, in other forms, of an attempt which was already being made by the modernizing élites of a world vibrant with change and innovation to remedy its political instability and to modify the balance of power in the subcontinent to their own advantage. Darwin does not exaggerate to this point the co-protagonism of the indigenous historical actors in the making of the colonial society. On the other hand, there is no doubt that even for Darwin the reason why the European succeeded was that it responded to needs arising from historical transformations promoted by the «local forces» to which it was obliged to «rely». As described in After Tamerlane, European imprerialism announced itself - to paraphrase an aphorism by Gallagher and Robinson that I mentioned earlier - as «the continuation of the Indian way to modernity by other means». The theme of the continuity and «resilience» of the long-term stories of the Ottoman, Persian, Chinese and Japanese Empires in the period after the «Eurasian revolution» plays a central role also in the pages that Darwin's book dedicates to the «answers» which the respective dominating élites gave to the «challenge» of Europeanization (which is the second topic on which, as mentioned, I would call attention at this stage). For Darwin, the «success story» of Japan (which starting from the 1868 Meiji Revolution reacted to the «westrn question» by undertaking an original experiment in modernization from above) is not to be considered as an 77 unicum with respect to a series of failed attempts to stop the decline and disintegration of the other Eurasian empires. Darwin rather represents the Japanese case as the extreme of a continuum of reforming initiatives whose balance sheets show, in varying degrees, some not negligible lights in the middle of the prevailing shadows. Again, the essential point in Darwin’s argument is that the uninterrupted legacy of the experiences of «consolidation», «reconstruction», «expansion», «exceptional transformation» experienced by all the non-European imperial spaces (or non-Western imperial spaces if we include also Russia in their number) in the age of the Eurasian equilibrium made available to them decisive resources for resisting in some measure «the impact of the West» during the nineteenth century. The resources they had accumulated during the early modern age allowed the Ottoman, the Persian, the Chinese and the Japanese Empires to escape, after all, the fate of foreign conquest that had befellen the Mughals, leaving in turn important legacies to the nation States which succedeed them and which survive until now as key protagonists of contemporary and future world poltics. But also in the very different cases of India or Egypt the legacies of the imperial past allowed the respective conquered or semi-conquered societies «to retain or construct a distinctive identity that transcended the limits of a colonized culture». In all the other cases, «the states that the Europeans faced» during their nineteenth-century expansion «were anciens régimes in need of renewal, not broken-backed states that had fallen to pieces». The Qing and Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals who were called upon to deal with the «Western question» could count, not unlike their Japanese (or Russian) counterparts, on «tenacious traditions of political and cultural autonomy». This important circumstance allowed them to escape the rigid alternative between having to succumb to the expansion of the Europeans for refusing to adopt «European-type armies, bureaucracies, schools and technologies» and jeopardizing internal «solidarity» and «social cohesion», which were equally indispensable to the survival of their kingdoms, through the imposition to their subjects of «an alien blueprint» that was incapable of arousing their «loyalty». Eurasian modernisers were able to «graft new European political methods 78 on to the original stock» of a historical past which was still alive. And this helped ensure that their efforts were not completely lost or only a factor of weakening and decline of the Eurasian Empires. The reforming seasons that followed each other after the Opium Wars (1839- 1842, 1856-1860) in the history of the Chinese Empire, dominated by the foreign Manchu dynasty since the middle of the seventeenth century, preserved and renewed the «huge residual strenght» that China derived from the possession of a «unified culture» and a «working political system». The so-called yangwu movement of the 1860s-1880s, for example, pursued a devolutive policy which favoured the hegemony of the provincial gentry in the countryside and its integration into an imperial élite made more homogeneous by an increasing rate of sinicization (that means the growing presence in it of the ethnic Chinese, or Han, element). The westernizing initiatives are therefore to be counted among the key factors of the «resistance» that imperial China was ultimable able to oppose to its degradation to a «mere semi-colonial periphery» of the «Eurocentric world system». The Qing Empire was able to retain to the end almost unchanged the borders it had reached at the top of its «expansion» in the eighteenth century (which are still largely those of contemporary China) and to transmit to the subsequent Republican period (from 1911 onward) its own «idea of China», which is still recognizable under the new appearance of Han nationalism. Similarly, even in the case of the eternally moribund Ottoman Empire – the nineteenth-century «sick man of Europe» – Western domination remained after all an «unfinished business». Its «Anatolian core» could survive the «partition» that had been planned by the winners of the First World War to transform itself, largely cleansed of its Christian minorities, in the new Turkish national state erected «on the foundations of the Ottoman reforms». What made all this possible –at least in those parts of the Ottoman State where the necessary preconditions of «cultural cohesion» existed – was precisely the cumulative effect of a policy aimed to the «deliberate grafting of Western technique on to the social and political structure» of the Empire that had been adopted by Ottoman reformers, modernizers and Westernizers since the early decades of the nineteenth century. 79 In John Darwin’s general view of modern and contemporary history, the «resilience» revealed by non-European societies and cultures to the «impact of the West» confirms the original polycentric character of the Eurasian space. But this conclusion provides us at the same time, according to Darwin, with a historical precedent which authorizes us to suppose (or strengthens our actual perception) that this geo-historical space, even in our era of hyperglobalization, will continue to oppose «resistance» to cultural homogenization and to the hegemony of «a single great ruler». On the other hand, as I have tried to point out, in Darwin’s updated version of the old expansionist paradigm, the «resilience» and the polycentrism of contemporary Eurasia are fed in various ways by the same European expansion, configuring themselves as a result of the mutual interaction and permeation between European and non-European histories. The most recent outcome of the Cambridge tradition therefore points a way out from the illposed problem concerning the place to be assigned to Europe and European studies in global historiography to which I alluded before. I will try to formulate it by using, entirely instrumentally and without any pretension of hermeneutical correctness, a quotation taken from an essay by the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Writing around the mid-nineteen-thirties, Huizinga maintained that European civilization is the first to consider «its past the past of the world», that «our history is the first to be world-history». The phrase in itself can be understood in many ways (in the sense, for example, that in an era of planetary interdependence,ì there is no history, no people in the world whose past does not become relevant, at least virtually, for us). But Huizinga’s words can also mean that European civilization, during its modern and contemporary «axial age» of expansion, has inscribed its past in the past of the whole world. This implies that any scholar or student or citizen sincerely interested to understand the characters and the problems of the contemporary world (whether he be a European or not) cannot neglect to study, among many other things, the indelible traces impressed by the European expansion in the past of each of the human groups coexisting in

80 the globalized society with the realistic spirit and the ethical tension inherent to the historical discipline.

81