The Transformation of the World (13 page)

Nevertheless, such formalism does not satisfy so easily: content-blind periodization achieves its clarity of focus only at the price of contributing little to historical knowledge. That is why historians shy away from it. Some regard periodization as “the core of the form that historiography gives to the past” and therefore as a central problem for historical theory.
³
Those who would not go so far readily join in discussions about “long” and “short” centuries. Many historians are partial to the idea of a long nineteenth century, stretching from the French Revolution in 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Others prefer to operate with a short century—one, for example, that embraces the period in international politics from the European new order of 1814–15 (the Congress of Vienna) to America's entrance into the global arena in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The choice of a content-based temporal framework always involves a particular interpretive emphasis. The length and shape of a century is therefore by no means a pedantic question. Since every historian
must
answer it willy-nilly, he or she might as well do so explicitly right at the start. So, how should the nineteenth century be situated within the temporal continuum? The question is all the more pressing if it cannot be assumed that Europe's political events, economic cycles, and intellectual trends are the only ones that structure the continuum.

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

Issues of dating were everywhere central for “modern” history and archaeology. In Japan, an extra-European pioneer in this respect too, it was only after the turn of the twentieth century that a satisfactory national chronology was developed for remote periods in the past;
⁴
whereas in China, whose rich historiographical tradition went as far back as Europe's, the necessary work of source criticism began in the 1920s, and it took decades before a reasonably dependable chronology of ancient times was established.
⁵
In many other countries, especially in Africa and the South Pacific, archaeological finds confirmed a wide range of
human activity but did not enable precise dating even for the modern age. In the case of Hawaii, scholars posit a “proto-historical” period that lasted until 1795, the date of the first written records.
⁶

In this book I have opted for the following solution. My nineteenth century is not conceived as a temporal continuum stretching from point A to point B. The histories that interest me do not involve a linear, “and then came such and such” narrative spread over a hundred or more years; rather, they consist of transitions and transformations. Each of these has a distinctive temporal structure and dynamic, distinctive turning points and spatial locations—what might be called regional times. One important aim of this book is to disclose these time structures. It will therefore contain many dates and repeatedly call attention to finer points of chronology. The individual transformations begin and end at particular moments, with continuities in both directions on the arrow of time. On the one hand, they continue developments from the past—let us say, from the “early modern age.” Even the great revolutions cannot be understood without the premises that led to them. On the other hand, the nineteenth century is the prehistory of the present day; characteristic transformations that began then rarely came to a complete stop in 1900 or 1914. I shall therefore, with a deliberate lack of discipline, repeatedly look far ahead into the twentieth century or even to the present day. What I wish to conjure up and comment on is not a sealedoff, self-sufficient history
of
the nineteenth century but the insertion of an age within longer timelines: the nineteenth century
in
history.

What does this mean for the temporal framework of the account? If continuities are emphasized more than sharp breaks between epochs, it will not be possible to base definitions on precise years. Instead, I shall move nimbly between two modes of macro-periodization. Sometimes I shall refer to the bare segment of time, approximately from 1801 to 1900, without specifying content: that is, the
calendar
century
. Elsewhere I shall have a
long
nineteenth century in mind, one beginning perhaps in the 1770s, that emerges only through contextual analysis. If I were to select a single “world-historical” event as emblematic of the period, it would be the revolution that led to the founding of the United States of America. At the other end, it would be convenient, dramatically effective, and conventionally acceptable to close the long nineteenth century with the sudden fall of the curtain in August 1914. This makes sense for certain transformations—in the world economy, for example—but not for others. The First World War was itself a time of colossal transition and greatly extended chains of effects. It began as a military confrontation in the space between northeastern France and the Baltic, but soon spread to West and East Africa and subsequently turned into a
world
war.
⁷
Conditions within almost all the countries involved changed dramatically only in 1916–17. Nineteen nineteen became the year of political restructuring in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and of revolutionary or anticolonial upheavals from Ireland to Egypt and India to China and Korea. Disappointment that the peace did not live up to its promise was widely shared around the world.
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Or, to put it more pointedly: only when the war was over did humankind realize that it was no longer living in the nineteenth century. In many respects, then, the long century that began in the 1770s should be thought of as having ended in the 1920s, with the transition to a world in which new technologies and ideologies established a deep gulf between the postwar present and the pre-1914 past.

Constructing Epochs

One of several ways of shaping historical time is to condense it into epochs. To the modern European mind, at least, the past appears as a succession of blocks of time. But the terms used to describe epochs are seldom crystallizations of raw memory; they are the result of historical reflection and construction. Not infrequently it is a major historical work that first calls an epoch into being: whether it be “Hellenism” (Droysen), the “Renaissance” (Michelet, Burckhardt), the “late Middle Ages” (Huizinga) or “late antiquity” (Peter Brown). In many cases, academic neologisms have scarcely trickled through to a wider public: “early modern age” is a good example. This was first proposed as the name for an epoch in the early 1950s. The term soon won recognition in the historians' lexicon, being seen almost as the fourth epoch of world history on a par with the previous three—and thus fulfilling the apocalyptic fourfold vision of world empires in the Old Testament.
⁹
Confusion reigns when it comes to “modernity,” a concept applied indiscriminately and with a host of arguments to every century in Europe since the sixteenth, and even to “medieval” China in the eleventh: social history has employed it for the period since the 1830s; cultural-aesthetic theory limits it to one not earlier than Baudelaire, Debussy, and Cézanne.
¹⁰
The ubiquitous talk of modernity, postmodernity, and “multiple modernities,” nearly always without even an approximate chronological definition, naturally indicates that the sense of epochs has been steadily weakening. It may be that “early modern age” is the last construction of its kind that commands general acceptance within university faculties.
¹¹

Whatever its precise dates, the nineteenth century appears to almost all historians as a freestanding epoch that resists naming. Whereas for earlier times, several centuries are readily grouped together into an epoch (as many as ten in the “Middle Ages,” or three in the “early modern age”), the nineteenth century remains alone. No one has ever seriously proposed using the obvious term, “late modern age.” German historians are not even sure whether the nineteenth century should be classified under “modern” (
neuere
) or “recent” (
neueste
) history: the former would define it as the culmination of developments that began before 1800; the latter as the prehistory of an age that began with the First World War.
¹²
Eric Hobsbawm, the author of one of the best general histories of Europe since the French Revolution, does not give the nineteenth century (which for him is “long”) a single overarching name but divides it into three: the Age of Revolution (1789–1848), the Age of Capital (1848–75) and the Age of Empire (1875–1914).
¹³
Nor has the history of ideas yet managed to come up with a single
appellation, along the lines of “the Age of Enlightenment” that is sometimes used for the eighteenth century. So, we are left with a nameless and fragmented century, a long transition between two ages that seem easier to identify. Perhaps a quandary.

2 Calendar and Periodization

In large parts of the world, people did not notice in 1800 or 1801 that a “new century” had begun. Official France did not want to know, because it dated the years from the beginning of the Republic (1792 = year I), and in 1793 it had arbitrarily introduced a new organization of the year that was observed with diminishing enthusiasm until the restoration of the Gregorian calendar in 1806. A new counting of the months meant that on January 1, 1801, the French people found themselves on the eleventh day of the fourth month (
Nîvose
= “snow month”) of year IX. Muslims, for their part, woke up on an ordinary day in the middle of the eighth month of the year 1215, in a calendar that went back to the flight (
hijra
) of the Prophet Muhammad to Medina on July 16, 622; the new century, the thirteenth, had already begun in 1786. In Siam and other Buddhist countries, people were living in the 2343
^rd
year of the Buddhist era, which was the year 5561 in the Jewish calendar. In China, January 1, 1801, was the day of the second of the Ten Heavenly Stems and the eighth of the Twelve Earthly Branches, in the fifth year of the rule of Emperor Jiaqing; and other calendars were also in use within the vast Chinese empire, Muslims, Tibetans, and the Yi and Dai minorities each having one of their own. In China the turn of 1801 did not mark an epochal change; the only event that counted had taken place on February 9, 1796, when the glorious Emperor Qianlong, after sixty years on the throne, had handed over to his son Yongyan, who as ruler had taken the name Jiaqing. In Vietnam, earlier than in other Asian countries, the unification of the country in 1802 brought a switch to the Western calendar for certain official purposes, although people continued to use the calendar of the Chinese Ming dynasty (which had fallen in 1644).
¹⁴
These and other possible examples add up to a colorful picture of calendar pluralism. Their message is clear: the magic of the turn of the century was limited to the areas where Christianity had spread. The West was to be found wherever people noted the passing of the old century and the coming of the new. “Our” nineteenth century began only in the West.

Pope Gregory's Calendar and the Alternatives

Anyone who finds this surprising should consider that even in Europe a uniform calendar was achieved only slowly and in stages. It took all of 170 years for England, and with it the whole British empire, to adopt the Gregorian calendar that had been introduced in 1582–84 in the Catholic countries of Europe, soon afterward in Spain's overseas territories, in 1600 in Scotland, and in 1752 in Great Britain.
¹⁵
In Romania it became official only in 1917, in Russia in 1918, and
in Turkey in 1927. The Gregorian calendar—not a radical innovation but a technical refinement of Julius Caesar's calendar—was one of modern Europe's most successful cultural exports. Initiated by a Counter-Reformation pope, Gregory XIII (r. 1575–85), it reached the farthest corners of the planet along the routes of Britain's Protestant world empire. Outside the colonies, it was imported voluntarily rather than being foisted upon “other” civilizations through the dictates of cultural imperialism. Where it remained controversial, it was often for scientific or pragmatic reasons. Auguste Comte, the positivist philosopher, made a great effort in 1849 to secure the adoption of his alternative calendar, which divided the year into thirteen months, each of 28 days, resulting in a total of 364 days plus a kind of bonus day outside the system. In this proposal, the conventional names of the months would have been replaced with dedications to the benefactors of mankind: Moses, Archimedes, Charlemagne, Dante, Shakespeare, and so on.
¹⁶
In terms of calendar technology, it was not devoid of refinement. Different variants would later often be suggested.

The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the unreformed Julian calendar from 46 BC, which Julius Caesar, in his capacity as pontifex maximus, created against a rich backdrop of thinking about time among Greek and Egyptian astronomers—an instrument tried and tested over the centuries, but one that had eventually accumulated a few extra days. The situation in the Ottoman Empire (and later Turkey) was especially complicated. Although the Prophet Muhammad had made the moon the measure of time and declared that only the lunar calendar should be considered valid, relics of the Julian solar calendar remained from the Byzantine period. The Ottoman state accepted that this was more practical for its purposes and geared its financial year to the four seasons. This was important in order to establish the point in time when the harvest would be taxed. There was no direct correspondence between the solar and the lunar calendar; overlaps, desynchronization, and time differences were inevitable. In many Muslim countries, the rural population continued for a long time to observe the lunar calendar, while the cities used the international (Gregorian) calendar.
¹⁷
Chinese all over the world, even the pioneers of globalization, continue to celebrate the New Year in accordance with the lunar calendar. And lastly, apart from “traditional” and “modern” calendars, there were and are specially created festive calendars that mark national holidays, commemorations of national heroes, and so on, or in some cases an entire separate system for the arrangement of time. The Bahai religion, for instance, has a calendar made up of nineteen months with nineteen days in each, and calculates the years from the divine inspiration received by its founder in 1844.
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