Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present: introduction

KENNETH POMERANZ AND J. R. MCNEILL

Forty-three essays about modern world history is both too many and too few, and to begin c. 1750 is both too late and too early. We could not do everything, and have chosen to exhibit a wide variety of approaches to world history - focusing on regions, moments, commodities, large social processes, themes, and so on - rather than providing many examples of any one of these approaches.

Our chronology is also, inevitably, somewhat arbitrary, and we have been happy to let authors violate it where they thought it made sense to do so. In fact, all the volumes of this set have a somewhat ragged and over­lapping chronology - that is a feature of the program, not a bug. Not only do different subjects invite different periodizations, but a single subject often looks quite different when considered on different timescales, with trends appearing, disappearing, or reversing, different parts of the world involved, and different results seeming more or less significant.

But that does not mean that any chronology is as good as any other, and our volume is defined by at least two decisions about periodization that are worth discussing:

(ι) why use 1750 as a rough beginning for what will, whether we like it or not, inevitably wind up being referred to as the “modern” volume of the Cambridge World History?

(2) why not subdivide this period of enormous changes, with, say, one book on 1750-1900 and another on post-1900?

Those questions must, of course, be answered in relation to particular themes. The title of this volume “Production, Destruction, and Connection,” influ­enced our choice of essay topics, though it does not fully account for what appears between these covers. It also fits some essays better than others, as volumes like ours do not aim for the degree of unity that one might find in a collection of essays from a tightly focused conference. We are, moreover, quite conscious that this choice of themes risks over-emphasizing the material aspects of life; it is not our aim to do so. But we would note that there are both historiographical and historical reasons why these themes loom so large. “Connection” is, obviously, central to a work that aims to explore “world history” in particular, rather than all history that has happened in the world; along with comparison, it forms one of the major ways that we bring remote peoples and places into the same analytical frame. Second, the material aspects of life are the ones for which comparison is easiest - life expectancy in two very different societies is more easily compared than are gender roles or art forms - and for which long-distance flows are most easily traced (shipping manifests do not list the ideas on board).

Thus, to help the reader find something in these volumes beyond the sum of their parts, it makes sense to ask to what extent the last 250 (or so) years might form a reasonably unified and distinctive epoch in terms of production, destruction, and connection.

@1750: destruction, connection, and a world of colliding empires

It is convenient, then, that the beginning of our period is sharply marked by an increase in the prevalence of world wars - events that connected larger-than-ever parts of the globe in overlapping campaigns of destruction with world-altering consequences. While earlier conflicts had involved broadly dispersed battles - particularly the long-running conflict between the Dutch and the Iberian powers - the Seven Years' War (1754-1763) was more truly global, both in its venues and in its consequences. The French loss of Quebec and Louisiana (the latter briefly and partially recovered in 1800 before being sold to the United States) and the resulting shifts in the balance of power between Native Americans, European settlers, and the British crown fundamentally changed the history of North America. The British victory at Plassey (1757) over the Nawab of Bengal (a French ally) was an equally epochal event in the history of South Asia, and of global imperialism. It marked, among other things, the first acquisition by a European power of a piece of the Asian mainland beyond a small port and its hinterland, and began the English East India Company's second (and more consequential) life as a territorial government that could tax land, adjudicate disputes, enforce monopolies, and raise and deploy significant armies. Other territory changed hands, either permanently or temporarily, on almost all inhabited continents: examples ranged from Manila to Senegal to Havana to Dresden to Pondicherry to Sacramento in Brazil (Map ι.ι).

Moreover, the Atlantic revolutions and wars were epochal in at least two other senses. From today's retrospective standpoint, they mark the first retreat of a wave of European colonialism that had begun as far back as the capture of Ceuta in 1415. As such, those revolutions also created precedents and icons which would inspire participants in the second, twentieth-century, wave of decolonization: George Washington, Simon Bolivar, Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and so on. Equally fundamentally, the Atlantic revolutions would also reorder the politics of large parts of the world and introduce political forms - the large-scale republic, and, in some sense, the national state itself - that dominate the world today.

Map 1.1 Basic political map of the world in 1800

Nor were the Seven Years' War and its sequels the only reason to think of the mid-eighteenth century as inaugurating a new, and more global, geo­political landscape. The final defeat of the Zunghar Mongols by the Qing dynasty in 1759 marked the end of a century of expansion, and gave what we today call China something very close to its modern borders. Crucially, this conquest was made possible not only by unprecedented Qing achievements in logistics but by Russian expansion, which limited the ability of the Mongols to retreat into safety. It thus marked a new era in which clear-cut geographic borders like those we take for granted today were becoming more important, and agrarian (and later industrial) polities would marginalize nomadic peo­ples as never before. Russian victory in its 1768-1774 war with the Ottomans - resulting in the exodus of about 100,000 Crimean Tatars - was part of the same advance of sedentary peoples and territorial states.

The defeat of the Zunghars in particular marked a milestone in a long- running global story: the victory of sedentary states over horse-riding nomadic confederations, after roughly three millennia of seesaw competition (and co-operation) between these different kinds of polities. That story was far from over in 1759, as we shall see shortly: its last act should probably be dated to the nineteenth century, with the defeat of the Sioux, the Comanche, and other Native American federations. But in North America, equestrian states were novelties, because horses were a recent import. On the Eurasian steppe, where horse nomads helped shape politics for far longer, the meeting of two huge agrarian empires in Central Eurasia, enabling the destruction of the last major remnant of Mongol power, marks a particularly important moment in that story.

Indeed, the Zunghar defeat can be seen as part of an even larger tale: the subjugation and sometimes destruction of “tribal” peoples generally - includ­ing forest, marsh, and other peoples who, unlike horse-riders, had rarely threatened agrarian polities, but often stood in the way of their expansion. Here, too, the eighteenth century, seen globally, marks a fateful, though not final, shift in a long-running set of struggles.

A few decades before 1750, the discovery of gold and diamonds in the interior of Brazil had helped spark a massive movement of people (including African slaves) from the coast into areas to which coastal residents had previously paid little attention. In North America, as already mentioned, the end of the Seven Years' War placed the Atlantic colonies at least nomin­ally under the same flag as the vast fertile plains west of the Appalachians, deprived indigenous people of a powerful potential ally (the French, having been more interested in fur trading than agricultural settlement, had had an easier time reaching accommodations with Native Americans) and thus opened the way for an especially dramatic (and traumatic) assault on both nomadic and settled Native societies.

The British colonial regime that was taking shape in South Asia during these same wars - a process that began in Bengal in the 1750s and reached new heights during South Asian conflicts that became intertwined with Britain's wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France - also took a much more consistently hostile stance towards non-agricultural (or semi-agricultural) populations than most of its predecessors had. This was not a settler- dominated regime, like those which emerged from Europe's American colonies. It was, however, a regime determined to increase its tax revenues, in part by encouraging intensive cultivation and agricultural commercializa­tion; it was also less dependent than its predecessors had been on locally raised cavalry and fodder.¹ Moreover, it was ideologically hostile to those who failed to “improve” property - or, because they moved frequently, seemed indifferent to it - seeing this as a barrier to “civilized” life more generally.

Next door to Britain's emerging Indian empire, a new round of wars was also reshaping mainland Southeast Asia. They began c. 1740 in Burma as Mon rebels (who had French support) were ultimately defeated by a reinvigorated central government, and increasingly marginalized thereafter. Khmers and Chams would become increasingly subordinated by a more centralized ^[1] Vietnamese state a few decades later; Siam would likewise place Malay, Lao, and Khmer tributaries under tighter control; imported guns and profits from participation in expanding maritime trade would play important parts in all of these campaigns of territorial consolidation, which were also marked by extended battles among the consolidating states themselves (especially Burma and Siam).^[2] North and east of those battles, Chinese dynamics showed that agrarian empires in crisis could sometimes be as dangerous to their neighbors as those in the flush of success. One after another “minority uprising” occurred in China's borderlands from c. 1780 onwards. Often these were in response to an influx of disaster-stricken farmers from China's interior and/or the inability of an over-extended imperial adminis­tration to keep order; in many cases, though, the ultimate result was no better for the indigenous peoples than in places where they faced a systematic campaign of expansion organized from a position of strength. Any analogy between these varied processes and, say, the Qing and Romanovs squeezing the Mongols must be a loose one - and any comparison to the expansion of creole regimes in the Americas much looser still. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that even in the absence of formal treaties and alliance systems, and in the absence of real threats from the peoples on their frontiers, expanding and centralizing empires were often engaged in increasingly similar, and mutually entangled, enterprises.

We must be careful not to assume that what we see in retrospect was visible in advance. The battle between sedentary and horse-riding nomads was, as we have already noted, a protracted one, stretching almost to 1900; the survival struggles of many forest peoples continue today. Nomads in particular had won many previous contests with agrarian regimes, and it was hardly foreseeable that a long string of particularly damaging defeats awaited them this time - especially since railways, repeating rifles, barbed wire, and other nineteenth-century innovations were as yet unknown. Indeed, the late eighteenth century was marked in many places by a seemingly opposite process, in which nomadic or semi-nomadic conquer­ors took the offensive against fragile agrarian states. This “tribal breakout” (to use Christopher Bayly's term)^[3] inflicted serious damage on Muslim empires arrayed across southern Asia, from the Ottoman realm to Java, and did much to create the context in which European (mostly British) invaders could do a great deal with relatively small forces, establishing themselves as colonial rulers, with agricultural and mercantile elites who needed security becoming junior partners. Nadir Shah and the Marathas in India, the founders of the Qajar state in Iran, the founders of the house of Sa'ud who challenged Ottoman power on the Arabian peninsula, and others, may now seem like a last gasp of nomadic power, but that is clear only in retrospect. That temporary expansions of equestrian (or camel­raising) nomadic power ultimately aided sea-borne conquerors who would press even harder than indigenous sedentary states had - not just against particular nomads, but against nomadism - complicates this long historical arc, but does not change the fact that the mid-eighteenth century marked one of its notable inflection points.

Chronologies of production and connection: unprecedented demographic and economic growth

In demography, economy, and ecology, the 1750s is likewise a watershed. Here, too, one can make a strong case for the special character of the twentieth century (as one of us has done in book-length form), but there is also much to be said for marking some eighteenth-century origins. Let us begin with population: the focus of Massimo Livi-Bacci's chapter, and also touched on in those by John McNeill and Alison Bashford (Chapters 7, 2, and 8).

The years from about 1610 to 1680 marked the last long period (so far) in which global population grew very little, and perhaps not at all. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, world population grew by almost 50 percent, which had probably never happened before in just 100 years. In the nineteenth century, human numbers grew by perhaps 80 percent, and in the twentieth century they added a stunning 4.4 billion people: an incre­ment almost three times (275 percent) the 1.6 billion people with which the century started.

Crucially, both the motors of that change and its geographic centers have changed greatly over time, as Livi-Bacci emphasizes. Until at least 1850, there was not much improvement anywhere in life expectancies, so that almost all the increase came from higher birth rates. Still, the end of the worst phases of the Little Ice Age c. 1710 improved survival rates in much of the world, and at least some societies, perhaps chastened by the horrors of the seven­teenth century, made greater efforts to provide their members with a safety

Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present net.^[4] In the nineteenth century - mostly the second half - life expectancies began to improve in a few, mostly Western, areas, and birth rates declined beginning a few decades later. In the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War, death rates have declined sharply almost everywhere; birth rates have also fallen, but not as fast or (thus far) as universally. Here, too, then, we see a case for a unified, though not homogeneous historical period running from some time in the eighteenth century to the present.

At first, the declines in mortality were probably driven mostly by improved nutrition, and by the retreat of plague: in other words by the same sorts of factors that had driven most past fluctuations in death rates. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, changes in sanitation and public health (especially improved access to clean water) became increasingly important; in the twentieth century, direct medical interventions began to matter as never before (though, as William McAllister points out in his chapter on both licit and illicit drugs [Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 19], at least one-third of the world's people lack reliable access to modern pharmaceuticals).

These may appear, then, to be transformations driven by science and technology. But it would be more accurate to say that they were enabled by those factors. As both Mark Harrison and Erez Manela make clear (Chapters 9 and 10), the timing and geography of advances in both public and individual medicine were and are very much influenced by politics. And when it comes to the decline in birth rates, politics looms even larger, as Alison Bashford shows. Politicians, intellectuals, and others have debated intensely whether anyone should be allowed or forced to limit their births, and by what means; not surprisingly, the outcomes have varied in different societies, and continue to do so even as the debates themselves have become increasingly global. Moreover, the winners of the public debates could not necessarily override the private ideas and desires of couples. Pro-natalist policies, as Bashford shows, have failed more often than succeeded; some sterilization campaigns have been strongly and effectively resisted. Even in post-1980 China, where a particularly determined and coercive birth control campaign has contributed to a dramatic decline in birth rates, the state was

forced to compromise in significant ways with the norms of rural society.^[5] In most parts of the world, the decline in birth rates has been a recent occur­rence, and has been largely the result of people making their own decisions in the light of shifting norms and incentives.

With regard to the economy more generally there would be a good case for a slightly different periodization, in which the peculiarity of the last 175-200 years was much more marked than that of the last 265. Despite various signs that important structural changes were underway in some economies during the eighteenth century, there is general agreement that even in Britain, sustained and significant per capita growth was not clearly present until some years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815; clear­cut improvements in the living standards of ordinary people would have to wait another generation beyond that. As late as 1830, even Britain still used as much power from waterwheels as from stationary steam engines; and in 1840, Britain still had considerably more installed steam capacity than the rest of the world combined.^[6] For the most part, the dramatic transforma­tions that we associate with the nineteenth century - not to mention the quantitatively even greater changes of the post-Second World War period - still lay ahead at that point, even in Europe; in most of the rest of the world they were further off still.

Probably the most striking and fundamental discontinuity is summarized by Vaclav Smil as an “energy transition from plant fuels to fossil fuels and from animate prime movers to machines powered by fossil fuel use” (Chapter 6). There is no need to review his figures in detail here, nor the somewhat higher estimates in John McNeill's chapter on environmental change. Suffice it to say that total human energy use has multiplied some­where between fifty- and one hundred-fold since 1750, with the largest increases coming in the twentieth century; even that greatly understates the increase in effective human energy use, as the efficiency with which our technologies convert combustion into the motion, heat, or light we desire has increased anywhere from 35 times (today's best diesel engine versus a 1750 steam engine) to 1,600 times (today's halide light versus a tallow candle). Moreover, since some “engines” have been much less susceptible to transformation than others - most notably, our digestive tracts have not gained in efficiency, and putting more calories into them rapidly reaches

Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present sharply diminishing or even negative returns - the transformation of parti­cularly responsive sectors, such as transportation and metallurgy, have been greater than even these very large averages suggest. Paul Josephson surveys a few of the most important new technologies involved in Chapter 5.

Energy is not, of course the whole story, but it is no accident that global GDP has also increased somewhere around 100 times since 1750.^[7] And within that huge transformation, a general spatial and temporal pattern can be discerned. It involves very high rates of growth in a few (mostly North Atlantic) places and sectors between 1750 and 1870, followed by much more rapid overall growth until the 1930s. After the interruption of the Great Depression and the Second World War, there was renewed rapid growth in those areas, combined with much more rapid diffusion to other places, most notably (though hardly exclusively) in East Asia. As Kaoru Sugihara emphasizes in Chapter 4, that diffusion - and the home-grown processes that have allowed certain areas to adapt industrial technologies to local conditions more successfully than in some parts of “the West” itself - are as central to global economic transformation as the original spurt of changes that we have typically labeled “the Industrial Revolution.”

Nonetheless, there are eighteenth-century stories that constitute a crucial first act to the modern drama of economic growth. The most famous of these is the early mechanization of cotton textile production in Britain. The major technical innovations were made in the 1750s-1770s; by 1836, the labor cost for turning one pound of cotton into the 16-count yarn used at that point for mid­priced cloth had fallen by 97 percent since 1760.^[8] Mechanizing weaving took longer, as did applications to other fibers, while the mechanization of cotton­picking would not happen until the mid-twentieth century; but this was a landmark nonetheless. We may no longer agree with Eric Hobsbawm's observation that “Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton,” because we are now prone to emphasize that other crucial sectors changed far more slowly. But that hardly changes the fact that what happened to cotton textile production in these years had few if any precedents of comparable scale and speed, while it became the precedent for a number of comparably stunning transformations in the centuries to follow. These new possibilities for

producing comfortable, cheap textiles shaped the lives of tens of millions of cotton growers, the calculations of many governments, and the habits of consumers worldwide.

Factories suggest cities. But until the twentieth century it was commerce and migration spurred by mechanized transportation, rather than mechan­ized production per se, that fueled most of the world's fastest growing cities. Shanghai, Chicago, Buenos Aires, and Calcutta all made things, to be sure, but all were more emporia than manufacturing centers, and all grew as fast as or faster than Manchester. Moreover, for urbanization, too, it is the twentieth century that has seen the great quantitative transformation, as Lynn Hollen Lees points (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 2). As late as 1900, perhaps one-sixth of humans lived in towns and cities, representing a near-doubling since 1800; by 2000 that share would be roughly half. But in a qualitative sense, it is in the nineteenth century that most of the physical and institutional features we associate with cities today made their first appearances: large-scale sewer systems, streetcars (and the residential segregation they allowed), gas and then electrical lighting, professional police forces and fire departments (as opposed to both armies and neighborhood watch groups), vagrancy laws, factories, the central business district (again, a by-product of the streetcar), and, by the end of the century, the first skyscrapers and subways, a few automobiles, and significant (though far from universal) prevalence of indoor plumbing.

Moreover many, though not all, of these new features appeared in non­Western cities at almost the same time as they appeared in Europe and North America. Antonia Finnane's chapter, for instance, makes clear how difficult it is to assign the birth of the department store to any particular city, and that Cape Town, Moscow, and Cairo (to which one could add Havana, where El Encanto opened in 1888) were among the earliest sites for such emporia (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 6). The first electric street lights in Europe were probably those installed in Paris in 1878; Shanghai had some by 1882, well before Athens (1902) or Warsaw (1908)^[9]

This should not suggest that any nineteenth-century city resembled today's London, Tokyo, Mumbai, or Mexico City. For one thing, even the most modern cities in 1900 had huge and growing populations of work animals: the world's first international urban planning conference, held in New York in 1898, devoted considerable attention to the growing problem of equine waste disposal.^{[10] [11]} But it is clear that by the beginning of the twentieth century, cities looked radically different from the way they had looked 100 years before, and that a new template had developed for what a city should be - a template that was in many ways global. City walls disappeared from much of Europe and from some Middle Eastern cities in the nineteenth century; over 2,000 Japanese castles were removed after the Meiji Restoration; Chinese city walls mostly disappeared in the twentieth century, along with many more in the Middle East. Broader streets, often on a grid pattern, and more open space followed; a distinct profession of “urban planner” emerged, and some of these (such as Patrick Geddes, often considered the first town planner) worked in many locations around the globe. Meanwhile, a quieter but equally important mile­stone had been crossed in many cities: birth rates had surpassed death rates, so that at least some cities no longer needed in-migration just to maintain a constant population.¹¹

As this summary suggests, then, by far the biggest quantitative changes have come in the last 150 years or so, and especially the last 70. With some modifications, this story holds true for many other aspects of the material world as well. Giovanni Federico begins his chapter on agriculture in 1800, rather than 1750, and charts just such an accelerating trend; moreover, while some of the developments he charts can be said to have begun earlier, some, like the heavy reliance of farmers on manufactured chemicals, have no real precedents in early modern times (Chapter 3).

The eighteenth century certainly saw considerable land clearance, espe­cially in India, China, and parts of the Americas, but nothing like the roughly 75 percent increase in cropped acreage that would occur world­wide from 1850-1920.^[12] Moreover, the amount of human labor, animal labor, and capital used continued to rise in most of the world through the eighteenth and even much of the nineteenth century, not only overall, but even per acre. In England, where the number of workers employed per acre began to fall before anywhere else in the world, the number of hours each of those workers put in kept increasing (peaking around 1800 at over 4,000 per year), so that the modern phenomenon of “labor release from agriculture” was not yet evident; indeed labor productivity in English agriculture, though it probably rose slightly over the long haul from 1500 forward, appears to have fallen c. 1750-1800.^[13] Even in labor-scarce, land­rich North America, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that machines able to save lots of field labor became available, and only one (the McCormick reaper) was widely used prior to 1920, although changes in post-harvest processing, such as cotton ginning, came earlier and faster.^[14] Only three countries, all in Europe, experienced a decline in the absolute number of farmers before 1910.^[15] Meanwhile the technologies that would dramatically change output per acre - chemical fertilizers and pesticides, large irrigation projects, scientifically engineered seeds, and so on - were almost all products of the post-1850 world, and spread worldwide mostly after 1945. Some farmers did squeeze out higher yields per acre, even in the early part of our period, but these mostly came from bringing less inten­sively cultivated plots up to the levels that some nearby farmers had already achieved centuries earlier; today's far higher yields generally had to wait until industrial inputs were available. And because modern indus­trial inputs allowed yields to rise while using less land and less labor, they have to some extent reversed the standard pattern of agricultural expansion that had generally prevailed from ancient times until at least the mid­nineteenth century.

When did a modern world economy begin?

With some variation, we see a similar story elsewhere in the world of production - and in the aspects of “connection” that relate to the economy. Industrialization in some societies often led to soaring demand for

Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present commodities they could not easily produce at home, so rubber (analyzed by Richard Tucker in Vol. vιι Part 2, Chapter 18), cotton, jute, and other primary products became enormous sources of potential profit. In pursuit of that goal, landscapes were dramatically reshaped, some people displaced and others imported (under varying degrees of coercion), and territories seized by importing countries eager to have sovereign control over the places that produced goods that their factories, transport systems, and militaries needed. Many of these trades (though not rubber) began in the pre-1800 era of colonial plantations and the transatlantic slave trade, but most of them grew far larger in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, another dynamic also came into play (particularly notable in the case of rubber): importing countries and companies nervous about their dependence on remote sources of important commodities put chemists to work seeking artificial substitutes, adding another wild card to what were often already wildly fluctuating markets. The second industrial revolution thus often accentu­ated both the peaks of commodity booms and the depth and finality of busts.

Likewise, long-distance migration, analyzed by Dirk Hoerder (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 1), certainly grew in the late eighteenth century. Intercontinental migration, in particular, first reached a truly mass scale in this period, in a particularly grim way: the transatlantic slave trade grew sharply, reaching a peak c. 1780. (This was later matched by a second peak c. 1840, though the slave trade was by then illegal in many places, and the British Navy was trying to suppress it.) Quantitative evidence about the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades are harder to come by, but there are reasons to believe that, as Frederick Cooper argues, these were also growing in the late eighteenth century (Chapter 21). Unprecedented numbers of people were also moving to frontiers within the larger Asian polities. At least in China, the boom took off in the late seventeenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth century, had probably included some­where close to 20 million people. The overwhelming majority of these people were free migrants, and thus harbingers of a new kind of long-distance mass migration.

Yet even these migrations were small and local compared to the transoceanic migrations of over 50 million Europeans that would begin around 1840, and of perhaps 40 million Indians, Chinese, and others that would take off a bit later. And though war, depression, and restrictive

legislation curbed these flows, especially after 1920,^[16] new and even larger waves of migration (featuring a wider variety of both sending and receiving countries) have become a basic fact of life in the last few decades.1^[17]

Intercontinental trade and investment - and with them integrated global markets - are also mostly qualitatively different phenomena after c. 1830. True, the volumes of goods traded across oceans soared, and shipping costs on some intercontinental routes fell dramatically even before steam. The eighteenth-century North Atlantic saw particularly large savings: as the British Navy reduced piracy, insurance rates nose-dived, and merchant ships that no longer expected to face armed raiders could use far smaller crews, saving on wages and liberating space for cargo.1^[18] But prior to about 1830, the prices of the major traded goods did not converge strongly among the major ports, indicating that intercontinental market integration was still very limited.^[19] And the identity of many of the major traded goods is also striking: gold and silver (mostly in coins), tea, sugar, spices, coffee, tobacco, and towards the end of the eighteenth century (and especially in the nine­teenth): opium. Many simply could not be produced in many of the countries where they were consumed, so competitive pressures were weak. All were expensive items, and several were at least mildly addictive - making demand relatively resistant to the high taxes, monopoly rents, and other charges that could be tacked on precisely because these were not integrated, competitive markets. (As William McAllister points out, these same factors have made the revenues from both illegal and regulated legal drugs extremely important to governments, insurgents, organized crime, and others with the capacity to organize violence and protection.) Pre-1830 growth was real, and important, but it was not sustained, rapid, and transformative growth like that which was to come after the mid-century.

The broader and more fundamental trade expansion that came after 1830 was partly due to new technologies, described by Daniel Headrick (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 17), that harnessed fossil fuels (especially revolu­tionary in overland transport) and electricity (especially for communica­tions). In the late nineteenth century, the cost of transatlantic shipping fell by half to two-thirds in forty years; shipping rice from Burma to Europe went from costing 74 percent as much as the rice to 18 percent; cotton, which cost 63 percent more in Liverpool than in Alexandria in 1840, cost only 5 percent more in 1895.^[20] The results were especially dramatic for producers of perish­able products, though mostly in the twentieth century. In 1900, tiny Delaware and only slightly larger NewJersey were two of the four biggest US states for agricultural output (along with New York and Pennsylvania), because only those states close to big East Coast cities could tap their lucrative fruit and vegetable markets.^[21] Within a few decades, however, railways helped make remote California dominant among US states. Trucks pushed this process further, as did reliable refrigeration and eventually airplanes. Today Chile, South Africa, and New Zealand sell fresh fruit to northern hemisphere consumers. Diets have been transformed, and the extreme specialization made possible by global markets made twentieth-century farming, and its environmental impact, unlike anything seen before. As distance became a much less important barrier, competition intensified, and both opportunities and pressures to adopt effective practices of foreign origin increased - all features that make the “globalization” discussed by Thomas Zeiler (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 21) something more than just an increase in long-distance contact (which has arguably been going on for millennia, albeit with periodic reversals).

But these late nineteenth- and twentieth-century changes were still unim­aginable in 1750, or even 1830. The lack of price and wage convergence prior to the mid-nineteenth century, even in the Atlantic, suggests that interconti­nental markets did not yet place powerful competitive pressures on most producers: a wheat grower or shoemaker near Bordeaux did not yet need to care what was happening near Philadelphia, much less near Tianjin. And this was true because a variety of forces - physical transport costs, tariffs, differences in taste, monopolies, and so on - meant that even if they traded some goods, these places were still only loosely linked economic worlds. The biggest commodities in world trade were still, as we have seen, mostly ones that could not be produced in many of the receiving ports, rather than goods that would have created more direct competition. Even in the Atlantic world, strong signs of economic globalization appear in the data only after 1840 - and in the rest of the world, even later.

But this does not mean that we can simply start the story of economic globalization in the mid-nineteenth century. For one thing, the integrating processes at work after 1840 did not appear out of nowhere. On the contrary, they ran in grooves laid down by earlier colonization, infrastruc­ture building, marketing efforts, and so on, many of which might never have happened without the violence, slave trading, promises of monopoly profits, and other illiberal measures that, as we have seen, also created barriers to smooth market integration. In Asia, the often violent intrusion of aspiring European monopolists was closely intertwined with the expansion of interregional connections (though they had been present before, via Gujarati, Fujianese, Armenian, and other trading diasporas) - and coercion remained important in many places throughout the colonial period. And in Africa, as noted in Frederick Cooper's chapter, neither the end of the intercontinental slave trade and the rise of “legitimate” commerce, nor colonial export trades at the end of the century disentangled themselves from various kinds of violence.

The moral and intellectual underpinnings of slavery came under sustained and serious attack beginning in the eighteenth century: a true historical landmark after millennia in which countless societies had taken slavery of one sort or another to be natural and morally unproblematic.^[22] So in this hugely important case, nineteenth-century liberalization flowed from eight­eenth century ideas rather than (as with the trade boom) the fruits of early modern violence. But even in this case, the implementation of liberal ideas has a much messier history, making it dubious to separate an era of freedom from one of coercion.

Alessandro Stanziani's chapter on abolitions is highly apposite here (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 5). Stanziani complicates what has often been treated as a simple binary distinction - labor is either free or it is bound. He points to many gradations of both de jure and de facto status within the supposedly rigid system of Russian “serfdom” (a term which he therefore views as a misnomer), and the many ways in which millions of people modified their place in the system, in the eighteenth as well as the nineteenth century. Russian abolition thus becomes a very gradual process, which began long before 1861 and seemed to be finally nearing completion around 1900 - but was then reversed by heavy use of corvee in the First World War, and even more decisively by the forced labor pro­grams instituted under the Soviet Union. He then shows how incomplete the emancipation of slaves was in the Caribbean and the United States, and how the “cotton famine” that occurred when US exports slowed to a trickle during the Civil War helped spread and intensify export agriculture based on forced labor in parts of Egypt, India, Russia, and Brazil. Forced labor did not disappear from colonized Africa, either, despite claims that this was a major goal of the colonizers (a point also made in Frederick Cooper's chapter); nor did it vanish completely in the Ottoman Empire (or, as Stanziani might have added, in the American-ruled Philippines).^[23] Finally, he notes that unfree labor returned on a large scale during the twentieth century, both in government-run forms (gulags and prison complexes) and in private ones (often involving children). By some counts there are more slaves today, in absolute numbers, than in i860,^[24] though slaves clearly make up a much smaller and less strategic share of the global labor force. Add this strongly revisionist story to a number of other forms of illiberalism (colonial extraction, epitomized by the “culture system” in the Dutch East Indies, and non-violent but still “market-distorting” mea­sures such as high tariffs in the United States) and the institutional contrast between a long eighteenth century of mercantilism and a nineteenth century of liberal globalization becomes much harder to sustain.

Global circulations of ideas before 1900

Even more importantly, we should remember that long before it produced integrated markets, long-distance commerce provided much of the infra­structure for very important transfers of ideas, faiths, tastes, technologies, plant, animal, and germ species, and so on. These influences did not directly depend on the physical volume of shipping in the same way that price integration (especially for bulky staple goods) did, and so could run far ahead of strictly quantitative indices of emerging global markets. Theyjustify seeing c. 1400-1800 as an era of “proto-globalization,”^[25] in the loose sense of a world with much more frequent and influential intercontinental connections. (One might even make a case for 1000-1400, as suggested in Volume v of this series,) We may not find “globalization” in the sense that the term is often used in debates over contemporary political economy - the “straitjacket” allegedly imposed by tightly integrated markets on governments, labor movements, environmentalists, and others whose preferred policies might raise costs for local businesses^[26] - but in other ways, the growing connected­ness in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was as consequential as what was to follow.

The Atlantic revolutions, analyzed by Jaime Rodriguez (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 12), are perhaps the outstanding example of a more intense and consequential circulation of news and ideas during the century after 1750; the rise of abolitionism, following similar circuits, and crucial to Alessandro Stanziani's chapter, would be another. Neither of these conversations extended far beyond the Atlantic world, though there were a few exceptions, such as Rammohan Roy's commentary on the 1812 constitution of Cadiz.

Enlightenment science was likewise mostly an Atlantic phenomenon, as James McClellan notes (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 8), though here there were a few more exceptions. Early environmental science received crucial stimuli from Europeans living on tropical islands such as Mauritius, who were in turn sometimes influenced by native botanists and other scientists; historical linguistics was powerfully influenced by Sanskrit scholars; and “Dutch studies” scholars in Nagasaki tried to follow (if not contribute to) Western natural science. The flows of technology spilled over beyond the Atlantic world more than those of abstract science, and were more multi­directional: military technology may have found the fastest and broadest uptake, but knowledge relevant to farming, road-building, water control, weaving and dyeing, and so on, also moved, both from West to East and

Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present from East to West. Variolation to prevent smallpox is an interesting example, as discussed in Erez Manela's chapter: Cotton Mather in Boston appears to have learned of it from African slaves in 1707, while a few years later Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman court, learned of the practice there, had her own children inoculated and advocated variolation when she returned to Britain, where the Royal Society in London accurately reported that the practice was also well known among “other Asiaticks" (including Chinese). At the end of the century the superior technique of vaccination, discovered in England, would begin a long, slow journey back out from Europe to the world.

For much of our period, the flow of scientific (and social scientific) ideas from the North Atlantic world has been more consequential than flows in the other direction, or between non-Western locales; in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these flows have largely defined the categories, assump­tions, and most influential theories of what is now global science, though that is changing in some fields. Even at the peak of Western predominance, however, information from elsewhere - and sometimes the mere fact of knowing that there were “elsewheres" where assumptions based on Euro­American experiences did not hold - were often important stimuli. While it would be tiresome to mention every occasion on which the existence of global interactions influenced some local or regional occurrence, one of the premises behind these volumes is that these less tangible circulations, often made possible by more material circuits, are an essential part of the background to the many chapters that deal with social, cultural, and intellec­tual phenomena, and with many events and trends that seemed to play out primarily on regional or subregional levels. We shall consider more of them shortly.

Destruction again

First, however, it is worth extending the story of destruction to the present. Interestingly, while the mid-eighteenth-century wars we noted at the begin­ning of this chapter were unprecedented in their geographic sprawl and financial cost, they did not make this a particularly destructive century. Taken all together and on all fronts, the Seven Years' War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars probably involved fewer deaths than the strictly European Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) had; without the Napoleonic period (which strictly speaking

belongs to the nineteenth century), the numbers are not close. Jack Levy's overall figures for intra-European conflicts suggest that the eighteenth cen­tury saw significantly less death from wars than the seventeenth, and the nineteenth century much less still.^[27] The Qing wars of expansion in the eighteenth century ended with the near extermination of the Zunghars, but even so they caused a small fraction of the death toll that the seventeenth­century wars which had put them on the throne exacted.^[28] In both cases, improved logistics were a major factor, though in different ways. European armies of the eighteenth century were much more reliably provisioned than their seventeenth-century counterparts had been (both for institutional rea­sons and because harvests were better) and so caused far less damage to civilian food supplies; the Qing were able to keep their wars with the Mongols far out in the steppe - where population densities were far lower than in the areas contested during the Ming-Qing transition - and in most cases feed these expeditionary forces far more reliably than the Ming had been able to do. The White Lotus Rebellion of 1796-1804 marked the return of prolonged fighting to China proper (though not yet to its most populous parts), and prefigured the vastly higher casualties that this part of the world would experience in the nineteenth century: no good numbers are available, but scholars agree that at least ι million people died in the suppression of this uprising.^[29] Reliable figures seem to be harder to come by for South Asia - especially for civilian casualties - but those available for even the larger battles of the wars of succession fought as the Mughal Empire broke up and those between the British and various post-Mughal successor states, suggest that while financial costs kept rising, casualties did not: A widespread strategy of seeking to incorporate enemy forces rather than destroy them probably helped in this regard (while working to the advantage of Europeans in a position to offer hard currency to induce desertions).^[30]

In Europe, the period 1815-1914 was famous for relative peace. In numerical terms the nineteenth century's major killing fields lay in the Qing empire, where four enormous civil wars between 1851 and 1878 quite likely took 50 million lives (and maybe many more).³¹ Global currents certainly mattered to those wars. For instance, the leader of the Taiping, the first, largest, and most consequential of these uprisings, professed an ersatz millenarian faith influ­enced by a Baptist missionary from Tennessee, and claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus, while the society and dynasty he attacked had been weak­ened in a number of ways by the opium trade and first Opium War (1839­1842). But in many ways, these conflicts were sui generis. The few post-1850 wars that pitted two at least partially industrialized societies against each other - above all, the American Civil War (1861-1865) but also the Franco- Prussian War (1870-1871) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) - hinted at the enormous destructive potential of such conflicts, but it is only in retro­spect that the portents seem obvious. Even the 600,000-plus death toll in the American Civil War was not much higher than in Napoleon's six-month invasion of Russia; the most striking novelty was probably in the armies' mobility, not their lethality. Napoleon's troops and supplies moved only slightly faster than Julius Caesar's; by contrast, when they were near railroad lines, which they built and rebuilt with amazing speed, General Ulysses S. Grant's Union Army could move many times faster. The physical and mental gap between this world and that of the trenches fifty years later in the First World War was enormous.³²

Outside of China, the most destructive and typical wars of the nineteenth century were primarily colonial conflicts or campaigns of expansion by white settler societies. In many of these wars, relatively small numbers of well-armed Europeans, often assisted by local auxiliaries recruited from the losers in prior battles among the indigenes, killed shockingly high percentages of both combatants and civilians while suffering relatively light casualties themselves. The Java War of 1825-1830 took perhaps 200,000 Javanese lives, in a part of the island with perhaps 2 million inhabitants, and was a portent of more to come as European colonial expansion, largely

Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 1-15; Gurcharn Singh Sandhu, A Military History of Medieval India (New Delhi: Vision Books, 2003), pp. 812-836.

31 Cao Shuji, Zhongguo renkou shi (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2000), Vol. 5, p. 553, represents the high end of reputable estimates, at over 70 million for the Taiping alone; most scholars think that this includes very large numbers of people who were still alive, but were no longer on the population registers for various reasons.

32 William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since a. d. 1000 (University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 223. ejected from the Americas, focused anew on Asia and later Africa. Dutch losses of perhaps 7,000 (plus 8,000 “native” auxiliaries) were not trivial for a small country,^[31] but they provided an early example of how lopsided the death tolls would be in many of these technologically one-sided conflicts, even when the colonized fought hard and creatively and had the disease gradient on their side (as they often did in Africa, but emphatically did not in temperate zone wars like those in North America). About 2,000 Anglo-Indians seem to have died in the rebellion of 1857-1858; figures for Indian deaths vary wildly, but the lowest are around 100,000 and one recent book (which includes various British acts of vengeance occurring as much as a decade later) suggests that the toll could have been 10 million.^[32] The Herero wars/ genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century provide another example: they cost the German colonizers of Namibia perhaps 1,400 soldiers and civilians, while perhaps 70,000 indigenous people were starved or slaugh­tered. At Omdurman in Sudan, the British and their Egyptian auxiliaries lost 40 dead, their opponents 11,000, all in a few hours.^[33] There were cases where indigenous polities ousted or resisted colonizing forces - Haiti at the begin­ning of the century and Ethiopia at the end are the most striking examples - but these were very much exceptions.

Where full-fledged conquest of existing political units would have been more difficult and/or likely to touch off serious conflicts among the Europeans themselves - for example in China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the newly independent states of Latin America, or Siam - nineteenth-century Europeans generally avoided long wars, settling for short punitive expedi­tions and informal empire. As R. Bin Wong's chapter on “Self­strengthenings” explains [Chapter 14], this allowed these counties to protect their sovereignty by making partial accommodations to European norms, while attempting - with varying degrees of success - to “integrate emulation of Western practices producing power and wealth with domestic political priorities and economic institutions.” He quite rightly emphasizes that in East Asia in particular, this worked well enough to make various indigenous ideas and practices of continuing global relevance, down to today. For our current purposes, what matters most is that this meant that even the armed clashes between Europeans and the strongest non-European states in the nineteenth century tended to produce relatively limited casualties compared to the bigger conflicts in outright colonies, much less the general wars of the eighteenth century: perhaps 15,000 deaths on both sides of the Sino-French War (1883-1885), 20,000 in the first Opium War (1839-1842), and 25,000 in the French attempt to recolonize Mexico (1862-1867). (The Russo-Turkish wars are something of an exception, with high casualties.) Because the European powers did not fight each other (or their New World descendants) much between Waterloo and Sarajevo, nineteenth-century wars never became global in the same sense as those of 1754-1814. This, of course, also meant that those fighting Europeans rarely had the kinds of allies that they had sometimes had before; US support for anti-Spanish rebels in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 was as exceptional as it was brief. At the end of the nineteenth century - about the time that Ethiopians with access to European guns were defeating Italian invaders, and the forces of Samori Toure, which had purchased (last generation) rifles, were holding out for twelve years against the French in West Africa - Europeans signed three treaties (in 1890, 1892, and 1899) to ban sales of sophisticated arms to Africans.^[34]

But wars were linked in other ways. Global markets emerged for both arms and soldiers' labor. Men who could explain how best to use the new technologies were often richly rewarded: American Civil War veterans and discarded weapons wound up in China, Mexico, Japan, and elsewhere, for instance. The unprecedented capital-intensity of weapons manufacture meant that any firm limited to one national market would be unable to compete with the prices of those who sold more promiscuously. While great powers built up unprecedentedly bulky bureaucracies and military-industrial complexes, preparing for potentially massive wars with each other, many other countries counted on being able to raise enough modern troops for their purposes quickly, through the market.

For the two largest imperial powers, Britain and France, colonial wars were frequent enough to justify a more permanent in-house establishment - but it needed to be cheaper than an army of Europeans could be. The solution was the creation of mobile colonial forces with European officers and enlisted men drawn from selected minority groups deemed to be both loyal and martial in spirit. For the British these were primarily Sikhs and people from various Indian highlands; the French used Senegalese, supple­mented by a “Foreign Legion” of displaced people from all across Europe, including defeated Polish revolutionaries, Swiss mercenaries from disbanded royal guard units, and so on. These forces fought most of these powers' colonial wars, handled a good deal of policing, and would eventually (in the twentieth century) fight in European conflicts, too. They represented, in a way, permanent equivalents of the kind of short-term emergency resort to the global soldiering market that was all that a nineteenth-century China or Paraguay could afford.

The years 1914-1945 saw the return of global wars, now waged with both the emerging technologies of the nineteenth century - high explosives, rapid­fire arms, telegraphs, and railways - and a host of distinctly twentieth-century ones including airplanes, poison gas, tanks, radios, and so on. The new weapons ultimately included atomic bombs, which, as Paul Josephson notes in his chapter, may have been used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki more because this gave a chance to demonstrate what they could do than because they were needed to end the war. Thanks to nineteenth-century empire building, national consolidation on the European mainland, and Russian and US landed expansion, the major powers fighting each other in the twentieth­century world wars were bigger than ever. They were also much better equipped to know what resources they had, to force people to deliver them, and to move them wherever commanders wanted them. All of this meant that twentieth-century militaries could strike with unprecedented force, and often felt compelled to do so. As Richard Overy makes clear, the results were astonishing death tolls, for both soldiers and civilians, and in spite of the fact that vastly improved medicine sharply reduced the toll from wounds and diseases (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 13). Casualty figures cannot be precise, especially for civilians (more of whom succumbed to war-related food-supply failures than to bullets per se), but the likely total exceeds 60 million dead for the Second World War alone.

These staggering numbers are not purely the result of the number of combatants, or their increased technological and organizational capacity. One indicator of this is that the twentieth century also stands out for the number of civilians killed - deliberately or with reckless indifference - by their own governments, by government-connected groups such as paramilitaries, and by would-be governments, such as rebels and invaders.

In some of these cases, the goals of the killers are unclear or the deaths were incidental to some other project. In others, analyzed by Mark Levene (Chapter 16), the reduction, removal, or even extermination of a particular population group was an end in itself. Robert Strayer, focusing specifically on fascism and communism (Chapter 17), speaks of a shared goal of “cleansing” the world of groups whose very existence was thought of as incompatible with desired social transformations; in the case of fascism in particular, he also notes a “celebration of violence and war” as “ennobling” (at least for men).

As Levene notes, mass killings are hardly unique to modern times; nor do all such killings fit our usual understanding of “genocide.” Many modern mass killings were relatively straightforward consequences of resource grabs: this pattern may have reached a particular intensity during the late nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa” and other attempts to extract tropical resources from areas in which few whites wished to settle and few indigenous people wished to work for very low wages. (The Belgian Congo, also mentioned briefly in Richard Tucker's chapter on rubber and Frederick Cooper's on Africa, is perhaps the most notorious example, resulting in roughly 5 million deaths.) But this was hardly the first peak period for such killings, with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conquests in the Americas being the most obvious precedent. Nor are killings aimed at firmly subordinating or eradicating an “enemy in our midst” unique to modern times, by any stretch of the imagination.

Still, it seems reasonable to link the increased number of genocides in the twentieth century to various legacies of the nineteenth, as Levene does. The increasing prevalence of the national state, rather than the multinational empire, as the supposedly ideal form for a modern polity, and of nationalist ideologies (discussed by Aviel Roshwald in Chapter 12) aligned a number of actual and would-be states with increasingly strident calls for ethnic homogeneity within the boundaries of a territorial state: calls that could not be met without massive, violent uprootings of various minorities. It is no accident, then, that the greatest concentration of twentieth-century genocides occurred in the lands that had recently been ruled by the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires, or that more recent genocides have been concentrated where post-colonial elites have tried to make “nations” within European-drawn boundaries that did not map onto communal ones. Second, the often extreme violence of “high imperialism” itself - facilitated, as we have seen, by new technologies that sometimes allowed small European forces to massacre far larger forces with impunity - may have encouraged certain attitudes that found their way back to Europe itself in the twentieth century, as Danielle Kinsey suggests in her chapter on imperialism (Chapter 13).^[35] Third, the racial and social evolutionary thinking that reached full flower amidst colonial expansion - and which was subsequently adopted and adapted by many non-Europeans as well - provided rationalizations by which the extermi­nation of certain “inferior” groups was inevitable, or even desirable. The mixture of these various factors - resources grabs, quests to eliminate “aliens," “traitors,” or “racial taints,” and rationalizations that claimed one was simply acting as the agent of historical/evolutionary necessity - were particularly likely to form a toxic brew when rulers perceived themselves to be “behind” in a merciless competition with better-established or larger empires or nations; this too, as Levene notes, was a condition recreated over and over again by the rapid change and increasingly global state system of the last century and a half.

Finally, we should note that it is not only other humans that people have destroyed on an unprecedented scale in modern times. Here a firm line between “production” and “destruction” becomes impossible to draw. The expansion of farmland or the creation of suburban housing tracts are often simultaneously cases of deforestation, for instance; the expansion of human habitats in place after place has eliminated habitats for elephants, lions, and other large mammals. And not surprisingly, it is the twentieth century that stands out here, though one can certainly trace earlier origins. As John McNeill’s chapter shows, human impacts on the environment were already increasing sharply in the nineteenth century, but have accelerated much more sharply in the twentieth. Among other things, the rate at which other species are going extinct is now higher than at any other point in the last 65 million years, and still accelerating: that the focus of deforestation has switched from the temperate zones in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the tropics in the twentieth has made matters worse, as an intact patch of Amazonian forest might have 100 or even 1,000 times as many resident species as a similarly sized patch in a Canadian forest. Meanwhile climate change, largely driven by our still-increasing consumption of fossil fuels, may well have reached a point of no return, and seems more likely to be a self-reinforcing than a self-limiting process (with, for instance, the melting of sea ice reducing the rate at which

solar radiation is reflected back into space, and the melting of permafrost potentially releasing vast amounts of methane currently trapped underneath). The final impact of our era's burst of production and destruction is thus unlikely to be felt, much less measured, until far in the future (Map 1.2).

Map i.2(a) Basic political map of the world in 2015

Connections - and connectedness - beyond production and destruction

These three themes, highlighted in our title, suggest certain fundamental issues in post-1750 history, but nobody would suggest that they represent the

totality. Indeed, for most of our authors, they may help frame the view, but are not themselves the object of interest.

As we move away from foregrounding material production and destruc­tion, it may be useful to say a bit more about some less material aspects of connection as well. Material connections can be quite real without those who are connected being aware of them: that farmers on different con­tinents both produced for the same market, or that a Bengali nawab and an Ojibwa chief simultaneously fought the British Empire, or that emissions from Chinese factories producing for US consumers may increase flooding on Pacific islands, might be far more salient in scholars' minds than in those of the people involved. In other cases, though, even people who will never meet and may have only weak material connections to each other can feel a sense of connectedness: a feeling that they are part of a community (or sometimes a rivalry) that has a powerful influence on their sense of purpose, morality, and daily lives.

The most enduring examples of such mental constructs involving people with whom one has no in-person contact - what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities" - are almost certainly religious, and despite some claims that the modern period is distinctly “secular” (powerfully criticized by Peter van der Veer in Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 7), such communities remained extremely powerful. They were not replaced by other imagined solidarities such as nations, but became intertwined with them.

The eighteenth century did indeed see decline or stagnation in some missionary efforts - Islamic expansion in Asia slowed with the crises of the major Islamic empires there, and the once omnipresent Jesuits were expelled from much of the non-European world (including Latin America) over the course of the century. But more generally, the eight­eenth century saw further growth in what we now think of as four huge religions - Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam - at the expense of many smaller ones. Islam made significant further inroads in Sub­Saharan Africa; both Catholic and Protestant Christianity became more firmly established in the interior of the Americas, and Orthodox Christianity advanced at the expense of various kinds of shamanism in Siberia and Central Asia. The post-Napoleonic period then saw a massive expansion of Protestant evangelizing in particular, paralleling European expansion of other kinds. By the end of the century there were, by one estimate, 100,000 Christian missionaries in Africa alone, a number which dwarfs those for missionaries in India or China, which were at the time

KENNETH POMERANZ ANDJ.R. MCNEILL

considerably more populous.^[38] Whether because of that concentration of effort or not, it was in Africa (much more than in any part of Asia, or sparsely populated Polynesia, which also drew many missionaries) that both Protestantism and Catholicism made their largest gains during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - indeed, their largest since the conquest of the Americas. (Given the current rapid expansion of Christian numbers in China and the large successes certain Protestant denominations have already had in Taiwan and South Korea, the longer- run story may look different within a few more decades - but this also depends on what is, at the moment, intensified conflict between Christians and Muslims in parts of Africa.) In many cases, this expansion involved syncretic fusions with more local forms of worship, so that these global religions also became more internally diverse, and often faced complex questions about how much diversity they wished to contain within their particular fold.

The late nineteenth century, meanwhile, saw the institutionalization of the very category “world religion" - both as an object of study and as a community that could be expected to behave and be treated in certain ways. It is no accident, for instance, that twentieth-century Buddhists formed Young Men's and Women's Buddhist Associations, modeled on the YMCA and YWCA, or that Muslims formed a Red Crescent Society modeled on the Red Cross. Nor is it a coincidence that the officially atheistic People's Republic of China guarantees toleration to (world) “religions” in its constitution, while outlawing (local) “superstition.” Still, we should not imagine that the new models of what a world religion should look like were simply imported and imposed. Rather, these models created occasions for contention, with various local actors seeing them as a new opportunity and/or threat within longer histories of contestation. (This was, of course, also true of imported models in many other areas of life, including some which were directly sponsored by colonial rulers - a point emphasized in Danielle Kinsey's essay on imperialism, and in R. Bin Wong's essay on the “self-strengthening”

Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present efforts of some states pressured but not actually colonized by nineteenth-century Europeans.)

A far more novel development of imagined communities in our period has been the expansion of large-scale connectedness based on non-religious ties: a process facilitated by new communications technologies, and very much tied to the projects of political and commercial expansion that we have empha­sized in this Introduction. In many ways a history of the construction of “peoples” might well have its most important inflection point before our period begins, with the encounters of the late fifteenth and sixteenth cen­turies; our goal here is narrower, and focuses on a few types of groups that have become far more salient since c. 1750.

The most consequential of these forms has been the nation (often, though not always, coterminous with a national state), as described by Aviel Roshwald in his chapter. As he (and many others) emphasize, while no single instance of nationalism is a global phenomenon (by definition), nationalism as a type has had an astonishing triumph. Today, the national state has become the taken-for-granted default mode of political organiza­tion throughout the inhabited world - a sudden transformation after millennia in which most people lived in multinational empires most of the time.^[39] Even socialism and communism - the strongest movements that prophesied a future where nations would be superseded as foci of political identity - were unable to stick to that principle while holding or seeking power in specific countries.

Meanwhile, though there has been a growing body of law and of organiza­tions that place limits on the actions of nations (discussed by Anthony Clark Arend in Chapter 11), most have emerged from agreements among national governments, and most do not aim at redirecting people's primary political identification away from the national level. Perhaps even more striking, the national idea in general thus far seems not much weakened by the numerous human catastrophes that have ensued when people attempted to create relatively homogeneous nations amidst real patterns of residence that were anything but homogeneous: in Eastern and Central Europe, in post-colonial South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and so on. Indeed, failure along these lines has often led to a redoubled commitment to achieve nationality/ modernity: here Roshwald's observations recall Levene's arguments about the fates of minorities who come to be seen as obstacles to “catching up,” and

Strayer's about the intensity with which communist and fascist states, in particular, pursued internal homogeneity.

While some of the growth of nationalism can be attributed to tools wielded by governments - mass schooling, conscription, government- sponsored monuments, and so on - entrepreneurs seeking broader markets have also played a role: book and newspaper publishers, for instance. Meanwhile, though, commercialization and mechanized production have also helped create other kinds of imagined communities, tied even more directly to products; in these cases, the particular communities have been far more ephemeral than nations (and some never took hold at all), but the broader phenomenon they represent has continued to grow in scale and importance.

With new factories producing unprecedented amounts of goods, both entrepreneurs and social thinkers worried about whether there were enough people willing and able to buy them all. Politicians and intellectuals proposed solutions ranging from tariffs to imperial expansion to economic redistribution to revolution. Probably the most powerful change, however, was the rise of large numbers of professionals who specialized in expanding demand for particular products. The creation of professional advertising agencies was the most obvious manifestation of this, but the rise of market­ing was a larger phenomenon, connected to a number of topics that appear scattered through our essays: department stores and fashion, communica­tions and media, new “culture” industries such as those marketing recorded music and sporting events.

There is no consensus among social scientists about what these market­ing efforts do. At one end of the spectrum, many economists see them as simply providing neutral “information” that helps people pursue their already given “preferences.” At the other, some people have worried about manipulation by “hidden persuaders.” What seems most likely is a more complex relationship, in which marketing efforts which suggest that particular kinds of consumption are conducive to assuming particular social roles intersect with the efforts of consumers seeking to define and signal who they are to a variety of local and translocal audiences. (Bernhard Rieger's chapter on the automobile describes how important associations with freedom, adulthood, and a variety of emotionally charged states - as opposed to mere functionality - are to the demand for specific car models, and for cars in general [Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 20].) Indeed, some scholars have pointed to signs of a seventeenth- to eighteenth--century “consumer revolution” in parts of Europe, East Asia, the American

Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present colonies, and perhaps elsewhere, focusing on new fabrics and clothing styles, exotic foods and drugs (sugar, tobacco, coffee), and various sorts of household goods.^[40] Such changes clearly pre-dated mass production and mass-marketing, reflecting increased scope for personal consumer choices made possible by thickening markets (including intercontinental ones) and greater social mobility.

But however we think about the agency of particular people, mass­marketing has clearly been part of a more general transformation: the de­localization and de-personalization of people's imagined peer groups. Increasingly, people have come to see themselves as part of large-scale groups most of whose members they will never meet. Thus, they have increasingly taken their behavioral cues from what they believe other mem­bers of that group do, orienting their dress, eating, personal hygiene, enter­tainment choices, and so on to what is perceived to be standard for a nation, ethnic group, generation, class, or other group to which they belong or wish to belong. In the process, cues from biological kin and immediate neighbors have become less central, though they certainly remain important; and since nobody will ever meet most of their fellow Brazilians, “leaders,” or members of “the Pepsi generation,” experts who claim to know what will help some­body be recognizable as a member of these groups, and/or can craft convin­cing images of how to fit into them, are conduits for very powerful forces, however one thinks those forces operate.

For current purposes, then, what matters most is that the increased importance of non-local reference groups is a crucial characteristic of the modern era. It is not unique to that era. Elites, in particular, had often adopted exotic fashions that aligned them with remote peers whose tastes they fancied more appropriate to their elevated station than those of most people around them; and on the eve of our era, Montesquieu had observed that the anonymity of the large city increased the potential returns to be reaped by copying the outward appearance of a status group above your own.^[41] But a variety of new material possibilities in the period since c. 1850

gave these dynamics unprecedented power. Cheap reproduction and dis­semination of sounds and images (and even cheaper printing, on both paper and fabrics), plus transportation cheap and fast enough to globalize the distribution of even perishable foods, fueled consumer revolutions far broader and deeper than those of the pre-1800 world. Government- organized elementary and secondary school systems brought age cohorts together and made it possible to aim standardized messages at them. Immigrants to cities and/or foreign lands entered places where their parents were quite obviously not reliable guides to expected behavior. All of these developments, and many others, encouraged people to place themselves in imagined communities of various shapes and scales, and orient their daily lives accordingly.

Increasingly powerful governments emphasized the nation, and have had plenty of tools to reinforce that reference group. Compulsory education (a nineteenth- or twentieth-century creation throughout the world) is only the most obvious, to which one might add monument-building and, in the twentieth century, broadcasting. But as legal space opened up for voluntary associations (at least politically innocuous ones) and new communications techniques made it easier for associations to transcend localities, imagined communities tied to particular activities proliferated alongside those (such as religions) tied to more general life-orientations, and often in complex rela­tionships to both nationalism and commerce.

In the process, such associations often transformed the activities on which they were built: as Susan Brownell points out, as basic an aspect of today's athletic culture as the concept of “records” presumes the existence of an imagined community to which people running 1,500-meter races in Kenya, Canada, and Korea all belong (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 10). Today, with the aid of jet transportation, some very large sections of these communities may briefly come together in person: over 50,000 people finished last year's New York City Marathon. But in most cases - and until recently - it was only the most elite members of national or international athletic communities who met each other regularly, while a much wider imagined community became perfectly real as spectators for such events, purchasers of magazines and running shoes, and so on. More occasionally, all or part of such groups might manifest themselves in local public affairs (through a fund-raising charity race or as a pressure group for maintaining trails), or even interna­tional ones (in disputes over boycotts, segregation, etc.). That such associa­tions matter to more than just the particular activity they focus on is evident from the intense efforts of many twentieth-century states to organize their

Production, destruction, and connection, 1750-present own sports associations, control the terms of participation in international competitions, and so on.

Other examples abound, though they differ crucially in their specifics. Timothy Taylor's account of the commodification and globalization of music, for instance, bears certain resemblances to Brownell's account of sports (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 9): the commodification of leisure activities, new technologies that allow for spectatorship at a distance, the spread of particular sports or musics through imperialism and migration, the emergence of globally recognizable superstar performers. But the very different mechanics of performing and consuming music as opposed to sport, the greater ease of mixing genres as opposed to games, and the much smaller role of measurement and competition in music have given the story of globalization and commodification of music a very different shape from that of sports. On one hand, music seems more multi-directional, with music rooted in economically poorer parts of the world playing a far larger role in the musical culture of today's rich countries than do sports with non­Western origins. On the other, it raises issues that seem to have few clear analogues in sports, such as increasingly private and atomized modes of consumption.^[42]

Lalitha Gopalan's discussion of global cinema (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 11) also highlights the cross-referencing of films from one country by films made in others, while noting that this exchange takes place across a global landscape that is anything but equal.

In the big picture, though, it is the shared characteristics that probably matter most: the dizzying proliferation of imagined communities of various sizes and scopes and their complex relationships to those parts of daily life that are still lived locally. If, as one of us has written in a different context, “Human history is an evolution from simple sameness to diversity to com­plex sameness,”^[43] our period is the one in which a predominant direction towards complex sameness became evident; a world history ending in 1750 might reasonably have placed greater emphasis on a still-proliferating diver­sity, despite some incipient signs of convergence. And a big part of this

change in momentum has been the way in which expanded production, cheaper and better communication, intensified supralocal competition, and stepped-up efforts to make people trust, participate in, and conform to the norms of media-based communities have reinforced each other ever more strongly.

Diversity, multiple scales, and limits of convergence

As just noted, imagined or mediated communities can have wildly varying scales, scopes, durability, and degrees of emotional power. They have also collided and recombined in many ways with what is still enormous variation in the local realities of people's lives. We now turn, then, to histories in which the role of face-to-face contacts has remained more central, and global connections have been as likely to maintain or even produce new differences to be compared as to move towards complex sameness.

It is probably no surprise that sexuality, discussed by Julie Peakman (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 4), is an area in which continued and perhaps even increasing diversity seems at least as marked as any tendencies towards global convergence. Sexuality is, after all, an intensely personal matter; it has also loomed large in the strictures of the world's diverse and influential religions, and in other moral systems on which societies have staked their claims to be considered “civilized” and worthy of raising future generations. And while many other aspects of life have been partially standardized by being yoked to increasingly globalized political and eco­nomic competition, the most truly global trend of modern times with respect to sexuality is that it has become increasingly decoupled from reproduction - thanks largely to effective contraception, and to increasing numbers of people living well beyond their reproductive years - in which governments and social planners have a particularly intense interest. (Alison Bashford's chapter describes the sometimes surprising political coalitions that made contraception widely available, based on shifting combinations of geopolitical and gender-political concerns.) So while sexu­ality is not wholly immune from the pressures towards convergence and “complex sameness” we have noted elsewhere - medical discourse has certainly become less varied than it once was, for instance, and advertisers and globalized culture industries have probably done a good deal to reduce the diversity of ideas about what kinds of bodies are sexually desirable - this is an area in which globally shared trends have probably created more room for diversity than they have eliminated.

Peter Stearns's chapter on family (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 3) finds considerably more convergence than Peakman's: not surprisingly, since families remain central to precisely those reproductive functions (in the broadest sense) from which sexuality has become partly separated. Some of the global convergence in family matters, Stearns emphasizes, is due to widely shared socio-economic processes such as urbanization and the rise of wage labor, which have changed the functional imperatives faced by both individuals and families; some is due, as he also notes, to attempts by imperial powers to promote or even impose on the rest of the world values that they considered intimately linked to their superiority, such as monogamy and opposition to child betrothals. Given these interacting forces, Stearns sees many global, or nearly global trends in family life: away from child labor and arranged marriage, for instance, and towards monogamy, fewer children, and an increasingly diffuse and unreliable sharing of responsibility for the care of the elderly. However, he also emphasizes the continued importance of many regional, ethnic, and class differences, and notes that differences in these areas are often something that social groups are extremely proud of, rather than occasions for defensive worrying about being “behind.” This latter reaction exists, too, of course, and was particularly pronounced among colonial nationalists in the early twentieth century - often placing them in the awkward position of promoting to their skeptical compatriots the same family reforms favored by the imperial powers against which they agitated in other contexts. Given the obvious influence of families and upbringing on all people, their place at the intersection of biology and culture, and the high stakes that have often attached to arguments about “race,” "civilization,” “backwardness,” and so on, it is not surprising that such debates have often been explosive.

It is also important to note that families (and other face-to-face groups) have often strengthened themselves by use of the same technologies which we mentioned above as powerful tools for those forging supralocal, imper­sonal solidarities. Photographs, cheap mail service, and mass literacy helped strengthen the bonds between many a post-1850 migrant and those with whom they hoped to reunite, as cell phones and email have done for twenty- first-century migrants. (Photography and cell phones, in particular, spread very rapidly across the globe, and also became cheap enough for ordinary people relatively quickly.) And even for those who remain in the same place, technologies that reliably preserve what a person looked or sounded like years ago have undoubtedly deepened pre-existing, face-to-face commu­nities. Such communities were, in short, sites not merely of enduring “tradition,” but also of ongoing creativity and change - change which should not be obscured merely because it has been less strikingly novel than the explosion of “imagined communities,” and less clearly in the direction of a world of “complex sameness.”

Gender -which figures in many of our essays, but is not the subject of a single dedicated essay - is another area in which one can discern very important global trends, but not necessarily global convergence. Almost all societies and governments today at least pay lip service to the idea of gender equality, which represents a very radical change from any period before 1750. And while there are widespread disagreements about what gender equality means, both within and between societies, some elements of the definition have become very widely shared: access to education, to a variety of possible jobs, the opportunity to choose one's marriage partner, and so on. In the West, the publication of Olympe de Gouge's Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) mark a convenient point of origin for these changes, and suggest yet another way in which our period is distinctive. Comparable manifestos elsewhere are hard to find until much later; Li Ruzhen's fantasy Flowers in the Mirror (1827), in which women rule the country while men stay at home and have their feet bound, can also be seen as an early feminist work, but had far less impact.

When it comes to the actual achievement of gender equality, the results are far more varied. Even here, there are some remarkable changes that are broadly dispersed, though not global. That women outnumber men in the undergraduate college enrollments of countries as otherwise different as the United States, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Iran, El Salvador, Ukraine, and China - indeed, in most countries outside Africa and South and Central Asia^[44] - represents a remarkable set of shifts. Yet in many other areas, patterns of change have varied very dramatically by region; one could make a strong case that differences between, say, Saudi Arabia and Finland today are greater than between any two large societies in 1750.

Arguments about whether one should emphasize certain kinds of con­vergence, continued diversity, or even the production of new differences sometimes come down to arbitrary decisions about whether to call a glass half empty or half full. In other cases, they come down to questions about the timescale and kind of phenomena one is interested in; and that question is often very different if one focuses on politics rather than on other kinds of issues. The issues that divided the two sides in the Cold War, for instance, mattered deeply to those involved; millions died as a result of this conflict, and it seemed perfectly possible, as Daniel Sargent notes, that those numbers could have been multiplied many times over (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 14). And the differences still matter to us a generation later. But because the worst possible outcome - a nuclear fight to the finish - did not happen, we have the luxury of decentering these differences between the blocs, and seeing that from many perspectives what the two superpowers promoted (albeit unevenly) had many similarities: economic development, technological change, urbanization, nuclear families formed by “free choice” marriages, mass education, formal decolonization, and the infor­mal incorporation of most states into large alliances as subordinate members.

Decolonization shares some of this ambiguity, as Prasenjit Duara shows (Chapter 15). On the one hand, the wresting of formal sovereignty from former colonial masters was clearly no small thing; on the other hand, the only form that success in those efforts could take was adoption of a nation­state form and participation in an international state system that was largely the creation of the Western powers. As Carole Fink notes in her chapter on “global 1956,” that year's events - above all the Suez crisis - hastened decolonization, but also “presaged the final character” of that process (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 15). Each time that the weakening of old colonial powers created an opening for new states to assert themselves, it also drew in the superpowers, one or both of which would simultaneously sponsor and constrain the emerging states. As Fink elaborates, other events of that year - most tragically, the Hungarian revolt, but others as well - showed how limited the room for maneuver could be within the logic of two extremely hierarchical alliances implacably opposed to each other. The Bandung Conference of “non-aligned” nations the year before had shown that many recently decolonized countries wished to avoid absorption into this conflict, but found that extremely difficult.

Moreover, both competitive pressures within the international system and their own convictions often prompted post-colonial elites, as we have seen, to continue or even intensify top-down projects for “remaking” or “renew­ing” their peoples that shared a great deal with those of the last, “devel- opmentalist” period of colonial rule. Duara provocatively suggests that the continuities between the late colonial and decolonized/Cold War worlds are particularly striking if we take the Japanese empire - a latecomer launched when industry and nationalism were already facts of global life - as ideal-typical for that era. We then see that the two eras shared many agenda items: a drive for at least some industrial development in both cores and peripheries, a willingness to grant nominal independence (as in Manchukuo) along with de facto integration into a hierarchical alliance system, and claims to be able to reach generally accepted milestones of modernity while protecting an authentic national culture grounded in specific traditions. To be sure, the twentieth century also spawned movements that promised far more radical repudiations of modern developmentalist agendas, but for the most part, such groups either failed to take over state power, could not hold it for long, or wound up jettisoning their original promises.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Nicole Rebec's chapter on 1989 - the most contemporary of our chapters on global “moments" - makes this question of timescale explicit (Volume vιι Part 2, Chapter 16). They note that for most of us who lived through it, it seems obvious that the political events of 1989 - the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Velvet Revolution, and the slightly earlier and later ends of repressive regimes in South Korea, South Africa, Chile, and many other places - are what make it an important year; but one cannot rule out the possibility that the beginnings of the Internet or the Exxon Valdez disaster (as a symbol of environmental problems more generally) may someday seem just as important.

Questions about global convergence and diversity come together in still another way - the last that we will consider here - in our essays on various regions in world history. John Voll's essay on the Middle East (Chapter 18) emphasizes that its history has always been intertwined with those of other regions, so that regional and outside actors have been constantly influen­cing each other (and are often hard to distinguish). And by seeing the problems that the Ottomans, in particular, faced as of a piece with those of the Habsburgs and Romanovs - and pointing out that all of them held on until roughly the same date - he reframes that decline not as a crisis of “the Middle East” impinged on by “Europe,” but as a transformative process that played out across parts of both “the West” and the “non-West,” which shared the political form of “multi-ethnic empires.” The constitutionalist movements in Iran and Turkey c. 1900 also appear to him as part of a broader global current; so does the imposition of external financial controls and foreign protectorates in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia (though here the analogues would be places like China, Siam, and some of the Latin American republics rather than parts of Europe). He also points out that throughout this period, the Middle East has been not just an importer of ideas, but a significant exporter (our clumsy metaphor, not his). From Sufi brotherhoods that had a powerful impact on Central Asian and Chinese Islam in the late eighteenth century, to Wahabbi revivalism (also a late eighteenth-century product, but far more influential after oil revenues made its Saudi patrons immensely wealthy after the Second World War), to late nineteenth-century Islamic modernism, to the Islamic revivalism (both Shi'a and Sunni) of the last few decades, ideas from the Middle East have continued to influence large portions of the rest of the world. Here, too, part of what Voll does is to show that if we do not begin by assuming that the Middle East is historically deviant, some widely accepted stories start to look different. If we assume that “the modern world” is secular, then the fact that religious ideas are “still” so central to Middle Eastern politics and culture does indeed seem to show that the region is “back­ward.” If we instead see the last few decades as an era of many religious revivals - with evangelical Protestantism in the United States (and increas­ingly also in Latin America), resurgent Hinduism in India, and a boom in Buddhist, Christian, “New Confucian,” and other religious commitments in post-Mao China, then the rise of new Islamic currents beginning in the 1970s may place the Middle East (for better or worse) in the mainstream, or even forefront, of a global re-evaluation of secularism. While some other regionally important stories, such as the rise of the oil industry, do fit more closely with an old model in which the Middle East was primarily a recipient of global currents (at least before the 1970s), VolTs narrative shows us how much it matters to narrate Middle Eastern history as world history, rather than as a regional story that “responds” to intermittent stimuli from elsewhere.

Mark Selden and Lionel Frost, looking at the overlapping regions we call “East Asia” and “the Pacific Rim,” take very different approaches (Chapters 19 and 23). Both focus heavily on economics, but diverge beyond that. Frost, while certainly not denying indigenous dynamism, concludes that “Since the mid-eighteenth century, the history of the Pacific has been shaped by exogenous shocks that provide openings for institutional change that shape subsequent economic and social conditions in path-dependent ways.” The proximate drivers of growth in his story are primarily techno­logical change, market integration, and state investment in education and infrastructure. Perhaps because the region he looks at (including California, Australia, and numerous other places along with China and Japan) is so diverse, both culturally and institutionally, he is less interested in finding any regional particularities or any influence that this region exerted on the larger world. (It is, after all, large enough on its own.) His focus, instead, is on showing how a set of global processes have operated in this region, and why - despite what he sees as the largely external origins of those forces - their positive effects have been larger here than in most other places. Selden, however, sees East Asia as the birthplace of one of two distinctive forms of capitalism, though he argues that the two have fused to a sig­nificant degree in recent decades. Much of his effort is therefore devoted to showing that regional characteristics have been far more important than Frost seems to think; together they combine to raise important questions about whether convergence or diffusion is a better way to think about the growth of a world economy. Beyond that lie implicit questions about what makes a given space a viable “region” for historical study, and whether these units are merely conveniences or represent (at least at certain moments and for certain purposes) organic wholes.

Julie A. Charlip on Latin America (Chapter 20) seems to stake out a space in between Selden's and Frost's. She is closer to Frost in emphasizing external forces as shaping the region and only briefly discussing its influ­ence on the wider world, but closer to Selden in seeing a recurrent set of challenges and traditions which tend to give a distinctive coloration to how actors within the region respond to global currents. Ian Tyrrell's chapter on the United States, treating a “region” that became a unified and exception­ally powerful national state, requires still other strategies, acknowledging the centrality of a national story but reminding us constantly how much less self-contained and unique that story is in reality than it is in many tellings (Chapter 22). What all our authors eschew is the rigidly separate and/or essentialist narratives which have sometimes characterized area surveys; by doing so, they allow us to construct a world history that is more than simply the sum of regional parts.

Conclusions of a sort

It would be extremely presumptuous to try to summarize this volume in a few final paragraphs, and we will not try. It may be less outlandish to make some observations about what these essays suggest about the study of world history.

First, they suggest how much can be gained by an intellectual exercise that does not produce new knowledge, as that is usually understood. Most of these essays use few primary sources, and a number use none at all, but by juxtaposing known information in new ways, they create new understandings.

Second, they suggest that there are many ways to write world history: through objects, concepts, events, moments, places, and many more. And they suggest that there is a cumulative “there” there: that we can see intersections, recurring patterns, and temporalities in histories as disparate as those of industrialization, sport, rubber, energy, family, and genocide. Third, they suggest that one of these recurring patterns is temporality itself: that while certainly not every topic considered here shows a pattern of certain basic trends unfolding at an ever-accelerating rate, we see this often enough to nominate it as a fundamental characteristic of at least the period since 1750. Without doubting the usefulness of many other possible period­izations, 1750 to the present seems a useful scale for considering a number of global stories: long enough to see a big picture, and to avoid taking for granted the truly extraordinary nature of the last 100 or so years, but short enough that one does not encounter too many reversals of major trends that prevent the telling of coherent stories. At the same time, we are reminded that the timescale we choose is crucial to what our stories seem to mean: whether the productive or destructive aspects of stories such as industrialization ultimately seem more important depends very much on whether we look from 1850, from 2000, or from any of a variety of possible future dates.

Finally, we see that the growth of long-distance connection in our period, though hardly uniform across either time or space, does in fact give us a theme capable of illuminating many stories at multiple scales. Whether we emphasize physical movements of goods, germs, and people; intellectual and cultural influences; the increasing tendency to compare oneself and one's community to others far away (or at least to images of those others); or the ways in which both actual and perceived competitive pressures (often from very far away) shaped what people acting locally took into account in doing so, the global, the local, and many layers in between became far less distinct than in any previous epoch. For the historian, this sometimes means that we must consider long-distance influences and impacts of which those whom we study had no knowledge; at other times it means we must deconstruct actors' (and our own) claims to be thinking globally or following universal impera­tives in order to tease out the more local dynamics behind what people said and did (and say and do). But either way, it means that at least the modern historian will almost always need to navigate some world history, even when s/he aims to tell a story on some other scale. We offer these essays as a provisional directory of the paths and guides available for travelers in this rich and surprising territory.

Further reading

AUen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Armitage, David, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840. New York: Palgrave, 2010.

Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830. London: Longman, 1989.

Belich, James. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Burke, Edmund III, and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds. The Environment and World History. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2009.

Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism 1688-2000. New York: Longman, 2002. Carmagnani, Marcello. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, trans.

Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2011.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000.

Cooper, Frederick, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1997.

Darwin, John. After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405. London: Allen Lane, 2007.

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. New York: Verso, 2001.

Duara, Prasenjit, ed. Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then. London: Routledge, 2003.

Gabaccia, Donna, and Dirk Hoerder, eds. Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrationsfrom the 1830s to the 1930s. Boston, ma: Brill, 2011.

Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Geyer, Michael, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1981.

When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848. New York: New American Library, 1962.

Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day. Baltimore: Penguin, 1975.

Jones, Eric L. Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture. Princeton University Press, 2006.

Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin, eds. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, cτ: Yale University Press, 2007.

LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2002, 9th edn. Boston, ma: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Maier, Charles S. Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-states, 1760­1914. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 2000.

McNeill, William H. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since a.d 1000. University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Metcalf, Thomas R. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena 1860-1920. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2007.

Northrup, David. How English Became the Global Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Osterhammel, Jurgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000.

Radkau, Joachim. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Reid, Anthony, ed. The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750-1900. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Rosenberg, Emily S. Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World, 1870-1945. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Rosenberg, Emily S., ed. A World Connecting, 1870-1945. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990-1992. Malden, ma, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990.

Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Wong, R. Bin. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1997.