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Imperial by Design: Field Models in C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2019

Antoinette Burton Open the ORCID record for Antoinette Burton [Opens in a new window]
Antoinette Burton*
Affiliation:
Antoinette Burton ([email protected]) is Professor of History and Swanlund Endowed Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Extract

Teachers of world history will welcome this book as an important addition not just to our store of knowledge about the remaking of the modern world, but to our repertoire of methods for understanding how the global emerged as a condition of colonial and postcolonial modernity. For in addition to being an attempt to explain how the global crises of the early twentieth century helped to “engender a revival of the parochial” (p. 326) in the present, C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 offers a set of design principles for how to imagine that historical process through a combination of diachronic and synchronic approaches.

Keywords

decolonizing historydesignempire and imperial formationfieldworkhistory from belownarrative methodnon-Western historiesprovincializing Europethe time of the globalworld history
Type
Forum—C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Interpretations from Asian Studies
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 849 - 858
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2019 

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References

1 Bayly, C. A., Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Blackwell, 2018)Google Scholar.

2 Hayles, N. Katherine, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 21Google Scholar.

3 Sklansky, Jeffrey, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1 (2012): 233–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 See “Structures of Feeling,” Oxford Reference, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100538488 (accessed February 2019).

9 See Burton, Antoinette and Kennedy, Dane, eds., How Empire Shaped Us (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)Google Scholar.

10 Rather, the emphasis is on “global uniformities.” For a strong close reading, see Ballantyne, Tony, “Putting the Nation in Its Place? World History and C. A. Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, eds. Curthoys, Ann and Lake, Marilyn (Canberra, Australia: ANU E Press, 2005), 23–44, esp. 34ffGoogle Scholar.

11 Karl, Rebecca E., Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Wheel and spoke, or hub and spoke, are also popular models for business growth and social media design.

13 Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16 Freda Harcourt, review of Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830, by Bayly, C. A., International Journal of Maritime History 2, no. 2 (1990): 281Google Scholar.

17 Jurgen Osterhammel, review of Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830, by Bayly, C. A., Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36, no. 1 (1993): 91Google Scholar.

18 Quinn Slobodian complicates these easy moves, but the fantasy of the narrative he wants to nuance still obtains. See his Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

19 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (1992): 337–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the book is Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

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21 Krishnan, Sanjay, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain's Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 The following lament about the lack of histories of empire in the British national school curriculum came to my attention with uncanny timing as I was writing this essay: Moni Mohsin, “Empire Shaped the World. There Is an Abyss at the Heart of Dishonest History Textbooks,” Guardian, October 30, 2016,  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/30/empire-shaped-world-abyss-heart-dishonest-history-textbooks (accessed June 20, 2019).

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25 “Acts of relegation” is from Sara Ahmed. See her Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

26 Quoted in Ford, Eileen M., “Insurgent Citizenships: Armed Rebellions and Everyday Acts of Resistance in the Global South,” in World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present, eds. Burton, Antoinette and Ballantyne, Tony (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 76Google Scholar.

27 For the best in a cadre of excellent recent work on anti-colonial disruption (and much more), see Mawani, Renisa, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., “The Will to Be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3 (2012): 454CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thanks to Sam Frost for this reference.