By Adeel Hussain

IT is impossible to confront the 19th century directly. We can attempt to make sense and ascribe meaning to it only through carefully selected detours. These detours can take us, for instance, to the realm of Urdu writings that, arguably through royal patronage, blossomed like never before in the 19th century, with the likes of Mir, Ghalib, Momin and Zauq attempting to reconcile the tension of their inner lives with the changing temporal patterns of their age. It is through their words that we can get a sense of what it must have been like to live in that time, yet it remains distant and remote.

Ghalib’s experience of encountering a letterbox in his local dak for the first time is one such window that allows us to view his comprehension of time. “The post office department has gone to pieces”, Ghalib wrote to one of his most intimate friends, Munshi Har Gopal Tufta. “They’ve put a big box in the post office”. It didn’t take long for Ghalib to realise that this anonymous way of dispatching letters had its benefits, as he noted in a subsequent letter to Tufta: “I am sending this letter unstamped so that it reaches you safely. The dak people treat unstamped letters as urgent and dispatch them quickly. Post-paid is delayed.”

The acceleration of postal efficiency cannot solely be credited to the sense of urgency that the colonial mail employees devoted to unstamped letters, as Ghalib had swiftly concluded. It is part of a much wider, indeed a global transformation, and it is these transformations that Jürgen Osterhammel sets out to capture in his monumental work Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts that has recently been published in a fine translation from the German by Patrick Camiller as The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. In a meticulously researched and ambitious project, Osterhammel has built on his earlier work on 18th-century China to explore different paths through which one could approach and analyse the transformation that the world underwent in the 19th century.

Osterhammel’s magnus opus is a timely publication in the field of ‘global history’ that essentially seeks to liberate traditional historical narratives from the confining frameworks of nation states and complicate these stories by comparing them to structurally-related transnational developments.

There is nothing new about the attempt to understand history as a whole. After all, it seems an inherently 19th-century activity, when it was much more common for intellectuals to make sense of the world and humanity in its universality. One only needs to think of the lectures given by G.W.F. Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität zu Berlin (University of Berlin) in 1820 that divided the world in different civilisations with the German Kultur, unsurprisingly, leading mankind in the historical struggle for the realisation towards freedom. History for Hegel was moving towards a certain telos and therefore the careful observer could predict future outcomes by assessing and analysing the history of thought that mankind, or rather Europe, had produced. If we were to chronologically map the transformations in the history of philosophy, Hegel famously claimed, the philosophy of history would come to reveal itself. Osterhammel is much less optimistic.

Anyone who is looking for simple answers and big theories in this voluminous book will be thoroughly disappointed. Whilst reviewing the book for Prospect magazine, the Harvard historian Samuel Moyn was left wondering what the thesis and plot of the book had been. Is it enough, Moyn asked pointedly, to write a book that merely described things and overwhelmed the reader with detail upon detail?

And yet there is something profoundly Hegelian about Osterhammel who has been all too conscious of this critique. “For a historian it is easy to captivate and excite the public”, he reminded his audience whilst delivering the prestigious Patočka Memorial Lecture at the Viennese Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences) last year, “one only has to make a big revisionist claim and it eventually attracts media attention. It is also safe to read a current phenomenon back into the past and surround oneself with the aura of omniscience. I will not take either of these easy options but instead attempt to present a nuanced view.”

Osterhammel’s truly Hegelian mission then is to save world history from itself and the danger of slowly drifting into vulgarisation. His book is breathtaking in its scale covering a staggering amount of secondary sources and packaging them cautiously and neatly into what he calls ‘Approaches’, ‘Panoramas’ and ‘Themes’. The chapters in themselves form a whole and can, and probably should, be read individually. It is a love letter to contemporary historical scholarship. The incorporation of insights gained from historical works covering disparate geographical areas and synthesising them into a single volume, can only be described as astonishing.

The approach that he has taken has much in common with the late Cambridge historian C. A. Bayly’s book The Birth of the Modern World. It is telling that Osterhammel calls his project an “alternative in kindred spirit” and was led to question the continuation of his own when The Birth of the Modern World was published in 2004. During a conference at Cambridge in 2010, Bayly jokingly remarked, awestruck by the sheer size of the book, that it was unfair to compare these two works as they occupied different weight categories. Osterhammel’s, a true heavyweight, runs into 1,500 pages, whereas Bayly’s only fills some 500. The lenses that Osterhammel employs to analyse the dynamics that shaped the century range from slavery, migration, economics, the environment, and international politics to cities and religion. Bayly’s main thesis — that the 19th century saw a growing uniformity within which an increasing plurality emerged — is probably the only argument that secretly runs through Osterhammel’s book.

It is impossible to provide a broad overview of the many fascinating and insightful essays that Osterhammel has presented. The book starts with three exhaustive chapters, ‘Approaches’ as he calls them, that focus on ways in which the century reflected itself through museums, opera houses, travel writings, photography and the increased standardisation of time and space. The journey continues with eight ‘Panoramas’, where Osterhammel masterfully explicates the role that different conditions (demographic transition, living standards, cities, frontiers, nation states, wars and revolutions) played in the lives of people in the 19th century. The last part of the book is devoted to thematic essays centred on questions around labour, increased connectivity and networks, social hierarchies, civilisations, knowledge and technological trans­formation.

For the purpose of this review it is only possible, and perhaps much more useful, to focus on one small theme in order to get a glimpse of how Osterhammel unravels the epoch. Let’s take his chapter on revolutions, where Osterhammel at the outset rightly points out that “more than in any other era, politics in the 19th century” should be described as “revolutionary politics”. Osterhammel proposes a broad reading of the 19th century which allows him to include both the French revolution of 1789 and the aftermath of the First World War as part of this “long 19th century”. In accordance with the historian Reinhart Koselleck, perhaps the most celebrated student of the controversial political philosopher Carl Schmitt, Osterhammel identifies revolutions as “accelerated processes” that he understands are unevenly distributed along the temporal continuum. They appear clustered, Osterhammel tells us, “at critical conjunctures of historical change”. He neatly distinguishes between three such clusters: the first comprising the rapid colonial expansion, the second encompassing the Taiping Rebellion in China (1850-64), the American Civil War (1861-65) and the Indian Rebellion (1857-1858), and the third containing the revolutions in Russia, Iran, Turkey and China in the early decades of the 20th century.

What is it then that a revolutionary event entails? Earlier answers, Osterhammel accurately contends, have focused too much on a “revolution as a local event with a claim to universal validity”, a claim that in itself already favours and centralises the American and French Revolution. The eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt, for in­­stance, famously described in her study On Revolution that a revolutionary event had to entail the “pathos of novelty” that was intimately linked to the “idea of freedom”. Osterhammel justly condemns this rather Eurocentric definition and proposes to regard revolutions simply as events that transform and fundamentally change the social structure; events where “everything familiar is turned upside down or torn up at the roots”. This inclusive definition allows him to identify colonial conquest as revolutionary in a sense.

Osterhammel is surprisingly reluctant, however, to regard the Indian Rebellion of 1857 as a revolutionary event as he goes on to explain that it was lacking a clear outline and a vision. There was no leadership worth the name, Osterhammel writes, which could have led the “country into the modern age”. As the “rebels” in India “had no other programme than a return to pre-British conditions”, he concludes, they could not adequately confront the “challenges of the day”, which would crucially involve the building of “a counter-state capable of lasting beyond a short-lived military occupation”. Thus for Osterhammel, anti-colonial resistance is revolutionary “only when its aim is to establish a new and independent political order — such as the nation state.” This position is hardly too far removed from the Arendtian view that he had earlier neglected in passing. While he departs from Eurocentric approaches in his methodological excursus, Osterhammel, at times, struggles to provincialise Europe himself.

Despite its unrealistic if not utopian aspirations, there is much of value in the book. Osterhammel is strongest in his detailed accounts on the rise of cities, the slave trade and migration. Indeed his progressive views on migration might have encouraged his most prominent supporter, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in taking up her stance to open the borders to the Syrian refugees. While delivering a speech on Merkel’s 60th birthday, he confessed that his academic discipline had taught him humility: “We should be ever more careful to read too much into the future. It might, in fact, only be possible to draw out margins of probabilities and potentialities.”

The Transformation of the World - A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

(HISTORY)

By Jürgen Osterhammel

Translated by Patrick Camiller

Princeton University Press, US

ISBN 978-0691169804

1167pp.