Università di Napoli Federico II A. A. 2020-2021
Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche Scuola delle Scienze Umane e Sociali Master’s degree in International Relations
THE NEW GLOBAL PAST
An Introduction to the Global History of the Contemporary Age
(Prof. Teodoro Tagliaferri)Contents
Part One. The New Global Past: A First Attempt at Conceptualization
I. Introduction§1. World History, Global History, Contemporary History, and the Beginnings of the Global Age
§2. Twentieth-Century Inspirations and False Starts
§3. The Post-Cold War Thrust towards Professionalization $4. The Categorical Cluster in Outline: A Preliminary Glossary
II. A Synoptic Overview of the Field of Study
§1. World History Stoops to Conquer: the Global Point of View
§2. The Global Past, (A): The Transregional and Transcultural Scales and Dimensions of Human History
§3. The Global Past, (B): The «Human Community» and (or) the Long-Term History of Globalization
§4. «Large-Scale Empirical Narratives» §5. «Dynamic Interactions»
III. An Introductory Case Study: Contemporary India in the Perspective of the New Global History
§1. The Reinterpretation of the Origins of British Colonialism
§2. Hindu Civilization in the “Orientalist” Representation of James Mill
IV. Dynamic Interactions between Multiple Regional Modernities at the Roots of the Long Imperial Century
§1. Christopher Bayly’s General Approach to Global History in The Birth of the Modern World
§2. The Interactive Emergence of the British Domination in Afro-Eurasia in Bayly’s Imperial Meridian
§3. The World Historical Impact of «British Nationalism» in the Age of Revolutions
V. On the Utility of World History for Public Life
§1. «Differentiated Commonalities» and Contemporary «Pammixia»
§2. The Ethics and Politics of the New World History: Pluralist Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship
§3. A Global Past for a Common Future
Part Two. Variations, Integrations, Applications
1. Reconceptualizing the Expansion of Europe
§1. Overcoming Eurocentrism: the First Step§2. The Expansion of Europe in the Perspective of the New Global History
2. Eurasia from the Multiple Expansions of the Early Modern Period to
the 18
th- and 19
th-Centuries Crisis of the Old World Civilizational Balance
§1. Eurasia as the Center of Modern and Contemporary History§2. Eurasia’s Multiple Expansions during the «Age of Discovery»
§3. Eurasia in the Period of the «Early Modern Equilibrium» §4. The Eurasian Revolution: The Geopolitical Dimension
3. Expansion, Crisis and Renewal: the British Empire after the First World
War in the Perspective of Global History
4. World War Two in the Mediterranean in the Perspective of Global
History
Part Three. Old Global Pasts
1. Legitimizing Imperial Authority: Greater Britain and India in the Global
Historical Vision of John R. Seeley
§1. Elements of Continuity in the Liberal Imperialist Tradition §2. Historians’ Legitimating Task
§3. The Republic of Humanity §4. History as Political Prophecy §5. Europe’s Manifest Destiny
§6. From the Country-State to the World-State §7. England’s Providential Mission in Asia
§8. Unintended Consequences? Towards the United States of India
2. The Republic of Humanity: John R. Seeley and the Religious Sources
of British Imperial Universalism
Part One
The New Global Past
I. Introduction
1. World History, Global History, Contemporary History, and the Beginnings of the Global Age
The following chapters are based on my lecture notes for a course in Global History of the Contemporary Age delivered in English to the students for a Master’s degree in International Relations at the University of Naples Federico II, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, in the academic years 2018/2019, 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, with some substantial additions from materials collected for two series of seminars addressing The New Global Past. Historiographical Background, Methodological Issues, General Outlines, which I gave in the academic years 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 to first year students of the Doctorate in Global History & Governance, born in 2018 from a convention between the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the Federico II University, and then merged in the Scuola Superiore Meridionale of Naples.
Both kinds of lessons ultimately responded to the mandatory institutional purpose of introducing their culturally varied postgraduate audiences (among whom Italians, Germans, Ukrainians, Rumanians, Magyars, Polish, Turkish, Latvians, British, Americans, Pakistanis, and a sizeable handful of Erasmus students) to the disciplinary field of Global History and its complex historiographical background, which here in Naples I teach also, in Italian, to the students for two other Master’s degrees – Relazioni Internazionali e Analisi di Scenario and Scienze Storiche –, offered respectively by the departments of Scienze Politiche and Studi Umanistici1.
1 As Storia Globale dell’Età Contemporanea at Scienze Politiche and Storia Globale at Studi
Umanistici. At Studi Umanistici, to the students for the Master’s degree in Scienze Storiche, I teach a course in Storia della Storiografia Contemporanea too, after having taught for quite a long period, until ten years ago or so, Storia della Filosofia at the then Facoltà di
I deliberately chose to pursue this aim by sharply focusing, at the price of obvious omissions and simplifications, on a specific conceptualization of its subject-matter – the «new global past» alluded to in the title – which has clearly been emerging, in my view, over the past thirty or forty years in international historiography within the context of a coeval revival and renewal of World History.
In order to avoid as much as possible unprofitable terminological disquisitions, when employing the two expressions – “World History” and “Global History” – I will very roughly follow the authoritative precedent set in 1990 in the prospectus of the «Journal of World History», which was written for its inaugural number by Jerry Bentley, the founder and first editor of the review until his untimely death in 2012. Bentley described the «official journal of the World Historical Association», an affiliated to the American Historical Association founded in 1982, as aiming to provide «A New Forum for Global History»2. We may pragmatically agree, therefore,
on reserving the first expression to indicate, in the main, how an influential branch of its professional practitioners have grown accustomed to refer to the academic discipline of World History, and Global History to indicate both the discipline, as it sometimes is alternatively named in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the particular object of knowledge to which the academic world and global historians devote their work. The important thing to stress, however, is that, for the epistemological reasons given later, “World History” and “Global History” may be nowadays legitimately used as referring to the same thing when seen, respectively and reciprocally, a parte subjecti and a parte objecti. This elastic, nonbinding terminological distinction reveals itself useful also because not all those professional scholars who write on global history are necessarily World or Global Historians too. The several courses of Global History I teach at Naples, being all aimed to students for an Italian “Laurea Magistrale”, differ substantially, both in their aims
Lettere e Filosofia of the Federico II. I give these personal details, unimportant in themselves, in order to provide the reader with a clue to my own individual approach to Global History.
and their contents, from a course of Contemporary History for a Bachelor’s degree, if only because they presuppose that the students should have already acquired some basic knowledge of its fundamental outlines. In an important sense, however, their subject-matter is the same as that of the more general and elementary course I teach to the students for a “Laurea Triennale” in Scienze Politiche: the contemporary age. This means to me that, whatever epoch-making caesura one adopts as its beginning (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Congress of Vienna, the Seven Years War of the middle of the eighteenth century ecc.), the period covered by the teacher organically includes the present.
Both study and teaching of Contemporary History include the present, at least logically and virtually, in the dual sense that 1) the present forms a part of it and 2) a pragmatic, problem-oriented understanding of the circumstances in which we all are called to act as citizens should be the ultimate goal pursued by the discipline. Contemporary History, as I believe, when true to its professional calling, is never about a non-existent “past in itself”, to be studied “for its own sake”. Contemporary History is about the present as seen from the perspective of its becoming what it is for us; it deals with that past in which the world around us, our collective and political present, reveals itself grounded and recognizes its roots. If it is so, in defining the subject-matter of contemporary history, which will vary according to the value-choices of each one of us, a teacher is preliminarily bound to clarify to himself as well as his fellow-students what is the present that he selects, among the many possible, as the starting point of his Herodotean round trip into the past – that present of which he is interested to investigate the extremely complex genealogy, being careful not to incur the two historian’s capital sins of anachronism and teleologism.
Both in my global history and more basic contemporary history courses I regard as the explicandum the globalized society of our time and make the attempt to lead my students into an exploration of some significant aspects, at least, of its making and background. The global past which is being studied by the today’s World
Historians appears to me peculiarly well fit to cast light on the fundamental challenges confronting globalized humanity in the post-post-Cold War (and now post-Covid 19) era. My further intent, as far as the graduate students are specifically concerned, is to help them get intimately acquainted with a single well-defined approach to this inquiry, which focuses on the role played in the genesis of the world-wide ecumene of our days by a particular set of historical phenomena – the so-called transregional and cross-cultural interactions and connections. The approach I favour is that pioneered by the schools of historiography which can be grouped under the loose scientific paradigm on the New World History. Its fundamental tenets are concretely exemplified by the two modern classics around which the following pages will mainly center, in order to provide the reader with a kind of essay in applied methodology – Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, and John Darwin’s After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400 to 2000.
Both authors are prominent practitioners of Imperial and Colonial History more recently turned into influential new world historians. By closely analyzing the historiographical texture of some parts at least of their works, the student should become familiar not only with the important aspects and phases of the making of the contemporary world they treat, but also with the premises and the procedures which connote the achievement of original results in the specialized field of global history. Here is another momentous difference between the teaching and studying of Contemporary History at undergraduate and Master’s levels. At Master’s level the teaching of whatever discipline must pursue a specializing purpose. To qualify for a Master’s degree the student is required to give proof, by means of a final dissertation, of having become able to produce some piece of genuine research work in his field of specialization.
Global History is included in the curriculum for the Master’s degree in International Relations offered by my Department for two chief reasons. First, the specialized study of this branch of contemporary history is deemed (here in Naples at least) an essential component in the training of a master student in international affairs,
whatever the ultimate field of specialization he or she may choose to pursue. Second, a few students might legitimately choose to specialize in Global History as a first step in a historian’s career, or, more probably, devote part of their energies, at this stage of their education, to complete a Master’s thesis in Global History. An additional duty incumbent upon me when dealing with master students is therefore to teach them, in a more deliberate and systematic way than is the case at undergraduate level, how scientific knowledge is reached and advanced in my profession. What can be realistically attempted, in the time at my disposal and taking into account the different degrees of interest of the students, is to give them some preliminary notion about the logic and practice of research, the treatment of sources, the use of analytical categories, the technical language and terminology, the alternative models of interpretation of processes and events, the institutional organization of the scientific work and the modalities of exposition, circulation and evaluation of its results within and outside the scientific community, which characterize the discipline of World History.
The need for specialization is the most obvious reason why the three courses from which the following pages draw did not purport to make a general survey of their whole subject-matter – the global history of the last quarter of a millennium or so –, but approached its study through an in-depth examination of a critical turning point in the history of globalization, namely (as the title of the program of the 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 courses read) The Crisis of the Eurasian Equilibrium and the Transition to Global Modernity. WhiIe never losing sight of the overall picture, I will deal in greater detail, in other terms, with that necessarily more limited but absolutely crucial subperiod corresponding to the first act in the drama of contemporary globalization and the making of the globalized society of our times and the world we are presently, at this very moment, living and acting in.
This transitional phase I will dwell upon spanned the eight decades or so from the middle of the eighteenth century to the Thirties and Forties of the nineteenth century. It saw the concomitance of six phenomena whose links with one another, mutual dependence and partial overlapping the global historians are especially called
to disentangle: 1) a change in intensity and scale of the ecumenical connectedness which had established itself during the early modern age (as testified, to quote a sadly topical example, by the unprecedented transregional and transhemispheric reach of the first two pandemics of cholera originating in Bengal in 1817); 2) a new surge in the political, economic and cultural «expansion of Europe» started in the fifteenth century, drawing additional nourishment from the protracted conflicts of the «age of revolutions»; 3) the overthrow of the balance of power subsisting between Europe and the other cultural regions of the Eastern Hemisphere even after the Western and Russian explorers, traders, conquerors and colonizers had launched in their successful career as unifiers of the world both overseas and overland; 4) the building of the first European territorial empires in foreign civilizational areas belonging to the “Orient”; 5) a «world crisis» resulting from the intersection and commingling of the many and manifold «revolutions» which involved in these years not only Europe and the Atlantic world, but the Afro-Asian geo-historical space too; 6) the convergence of the autochthonous roads to modernity, which all the Old World regional societies had already undertaken since 1500, towards the homogenizing paradigms provided or imposed by Europe – the dawn, in other words, of what former generations of scholars called the «Westernization of the World». If we wanted to signalize the chronological bounds of this momentous subperiod by adopting as signposts some particularly emblematic dates or big events, we could employ to indicate its beginnings and its end, respectively, the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War (1839-1842), which marked in turn a further acceleration and the commencement of a new chapter in the history of globalization and the shaping of the present global world.
2. Twentieth-Century Inspirations and False Starts
But what does it precisely mean “to specialize”, or indeed “to professionalize”, in Global History?3
When I started doing some reading and research around this topic towards the middle of the 1990s, «a return of universal history» was beginning to become perceptible in international historiography. Since then I’ve written quite a lot about a favourite theme of it – the culture of British imperialism. But my scientific interest in the New World History first arose from my studies on the European historiographical tradition.
The representations of the past elaborated by the authors of universal histories, histories of humanity, histories of the world, global histories (not to speak of the theologies and philosophies of history), have always seemed to me endowed with cultural meanings that make them strongly significant from the viewpoint of political as well as intellectual history.
I must confess, moreover, that what contributed to attract me to such a figure as, for example, Arnold J. Toynbee, in spite of his largely outdated approach to the subject, and to the much more sophisticated scholars gathered around the «Journal of Modern History» under the ideal aegis of William McNeill (Toynbee’s biographer), or recruited from the ranks of British Imperial History, like Bayly and Darwin, was what I perceived as the profound relevance of their works to understanding key-issues of the post-Cold War world, which I (born in 1964) felt unprepared to cope with on the basis of the general historical education I had got at school and university in 1970s-80s Naples and Italy.
At the same time, I soon convinced myself that the incipient come-back of World History was worth attentively following up, because there were chances it would turn out to be an epoch-making development in the evolution of contemporary professional historiography.
In a sense, the recognition of Global History as a «legitimate and even important» area of «specialization», both at MA and «doctoral level», of which the very aforementioned launch in 2018 of a Doctorate in Global History and Governance by the joint initiative of such prestigious Italian academic institution as the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Naples Federico II offers a promising instance, can be regarded as the single most significant aspect of the present flourishing of the discipline.
The creation, in particular, of doctoral programs in World History centered on the study of global interactions, connections and comparisons represents in fact a novelty of the last quarter of a century also for the United States, which have been in many ways the epicenter of the so called «New World History Movement». In 2005 one among its chief protagonists, Patrick Manning, in the introduction to a collective volume expressly conceived as a kind of showcase for the debuting works by «recent recipients of doctoral degrees» in World History, evoked the atmosphere of doubt and skepticism that continued to surround «the launching of world history as a primary research field at doctoral level» «during the 1990s», when these young American «scholars» had begun «their graduate study». Not only «historians working in national and area-studies specializations gave virtually no support» – according to Manning’s testimony – «to graduate study in world history». But «even established world historians objected to the idea of doctoral specialization in world history, preferring to see it as a secondary concern adopted after primary training in a locality» (that is, in a particular subnational, national or regional history).
There are many good reasons, of course, why one may shudder at the very thought of a postgraduate student “specializing” in World History, that sounds more like a contradiction in terms. I can remember a pair of distinguished Italian historians and good friends of mine saying me a dozen years ago, arguably in order to pour water on the too easy enthusiasms of a junior colleague, that global history was simply «irricercabile» («un-researchable») – that is, unattainable and therefore virtually non-existent as an object susceptible of sound empirical investigation. I myself am very far from underrating the seriousness of the difficulties pointed to
by these and many other certainly unbiased scholars. It is only too evident that, if you aspire to contribute any serious piece of really original research to the knowledge of any relevant event or process stretching across two or more geo-historical macro-spaces or macro-regional cultures, you must equip yourself with a range of competences which are rarely found even in the ranks of senior historians. Quite apart from the arduous requirements of this more practical and technical order, however, a major obstacle which has first delayed, then hampered specialization in World History in the past, has been the lack of any sizeable consensus around a workable definition of what doing scientific research in that field of study exactly implied, notwithstanding the periodical recognition and insistence on its need on the part of vocal minorities of historians.
The present revival of World History can indeed be considered as the most recent and successful (at the moment) of a series of attempts which have periodically been made since la Belle Époque to widen the horizon of the historical study and teaching so as to bring into its purview the interconnected and interrelated pasts of all the human groups involved in the corresponding stages of contemporary globalization.
One of the most important expansive(and largely abortive) phases undergone by World History during the twentieth century – the give only a particularly significant example – occurred in the aftermath of the First World War. Its chief source of ethical and political inspiration was the confidence nurtured by many historians (among whom several protagonists of the coeval institutionalization of the discipline of International Relations, like Arnold J. Toynbee, and an influential amateur scholar like the celebrated novelist Herbert George Wells) that the pacifist project of the League of Nations would highly benefit from substituting nineteenth-century historiographical nationalism and Eurocentrism, which in their view shared the guilt of having created the cultural atmosphere that had led to the Great War and was still hindering the reconstruction of a viable international legal order, with a European and world history which would emphasize the legacy of the past
experienced in common by all the peoples of the earth notwithstanding the political, national, ideological, racial, religious and civilizational barriers which divided them. According to the female economic historian and ardent liberal internationalism Eileen Power, who in 1921 contributed a very interesting essay on The Teaching of History and World Peace to the multi-authored volume The Evolution of World-Peace, «the great aim of history teaching must be to show mankind its common heritage in the past and its common hopes for the future». The historical present, regarded as the outcome of centuries-old transnational and transregional interactions and connections among the peoples of the world, could supply them with the materials for building an ecumenical society. The success of the League of Nations depended in fact on the existence of a public opinion specifically educated to understand that, «in spite of national antagonisms and divergent interests, mankind as a whole is what the League of Nations presupposes it to be: a community with common aims and a common history». If the League of Nations had to become a working concern, an actually operating reality, it was necessary that the younger generations acquired through the school «some idea of the history of that other community to which they belong (besides and beyond the nation, N.d.R.), that is mankind». And the chief educational tool through which «this sense of mankind as a community» could be fostered in the youth was not else than «the teaching of world history». This shows, by the way, that the felicitous coupling of Global History and Global Governance in the newly born Neapolitan Doctorate has very deep and serious intellectual roots indeed.
The elective affinity between World History and some kind of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalism (which only too often goes altogether unmentioned in the cursory and amateurish historiographical retrospectives plaguing the general literature on Global History produced in connection with its most recent return in vogue) has periodically resurfaced over the subsequent hundred years, sometimes in the form of a priori and teleological meta-narratives of the progress of mankind «towards the goal of human endeavours», whose visible structural similarities with the tradition of providential and eschatological theology and philosophy of history
go a long way in explaining and justifying the suspicions and skepticism with which empirical historians have usually welcomed such an intellectual hircocervus.
What the several and largely abortive World History booms that followed each other during the twentieth century failed either singularly or cumulatively to achieve was the growth and academic institutionalization of self-organized bodies of world historians who did research and teaching in loose accordance with a distinctive paradigm that could be respected and partially shared also by members of other disciplinary communities working in more established fields of the historical profession. If, as I said, the new boom started around the 1980s marks possibly a breakthrough in the history of historical writing, it is precisely because in our own days World History seems to be finally entered into a stage of professionalization.
3. The Post-Cold War Thrust towards Professionalization
This opinion – it must be warned – is still far from being unanimously held by all the historians, critics and observers of contemporary historiography. In A History of Histories from Herodotus to the twentieth century published less than fifteen years ago, the eminent British intellectual historian John Burrow argued that World History, for all its renewed fashionability, still remained «more an inspiration than an established body of historical writing» – a judgement, by the way, that applies especially well to the current Italian situation.
An opposite evaluation was authoritatively expressed the following year by the late Georg G. Iggers in the final chapter, devoted to Historiography after the Cold War, of the Global History of Modern Historiography composed in four hands with Q. Edward Wang, then the Secretary General of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. The concluding paragraph of the book dealt with what the authors comprehensively called «World History, Global History and History of Globalization» (and this very fact is all the more noteworthy when we observe that
in Iggers’ former influential work on Historiography in the Twentieth Century, published in 1997, the New Word History movement was not mentioned at all!). As described in Iggers’ and Wang’s 2008 survey, the momentous post-Cold War trend towards World History showed all the typical hallmarks of previous processes of historical professionalization: the launch of specialized reviews like the aforementioned «Journal of World History» in 1990 or the «Journal of Global History» in 2006; the birth of scientific societies like, first and foremost, the World History Association in 1982; the growing spaces conquered by World History in the universities and in particular in the training of graduate and doctoral students; the production of textbooks like Patrick Manning’s Navigating World History published in 2003; and many other external symptoms could be added to this list (like, for example, the creation in 1987 of a Toynbee Prize Foundation, affiliated to the American Historical Association, and devoted to promote an attitude to «thinking globally about history»).
Iggers’ and Wang’s assessment has been subscribed to by Jürgen Osterhammel in an essay on the study of World History since the Second World War contributed to the last volume of the Oxford History of Historical Writing in 2011. Osterhammel preliminarily defines the subject as a kind of «transcultural history» provided with the maximum «temporal depth in the horizon of the known world». He regards its «spectacular» coming back, observable since the years around 1990, as the outcome of a tradition remounting back to the Enlightenment. During the next two centuries, roughly coinciding with the epoch that sees the professionalization of historical studies, this intellectual project precariously unfolded in an alternation of seasons of growth and seasons of stagnation or oblivion, without never managing to produce any significant cumulative effect. The distinguishing feature of the «new global history» which has been developing since the late twentieth century is that, despite its persistent state of fragmentation, it has finally shown conspicuous signs of «professionalization», giving rise to the first nuclei of a disciplinary community, with a larger and stronger presence in the United States, at least at the beginning, but with a scope, a character and an outlook more and more international and
transnational: «for the first time ever» – Osterhammel confidently concluded –, «world history crystallized as a movement aimed at procuring a place as one of the dominant historiographical paradigms».
Like the professionalization and the professional practice of history in general, so the professionalization and the professional practice of any historical subdiscipline entail many things, only a few of which I have alluded to earlier. But there can be no doubt that its most basic presupposition consists in the existence of a minimal, elastic and evolving agreement, reached and maintained by a group of scholars, about a cluster of notions embracing the epistemological premises, the thematical contents, the categorical apparatus, the methodological and organizational procedures, the cognitive purposes, the pragmatic tasks of the particular branch of historiography they profess.
Such a theoretical constellation, whose all-pervasive and inescapable operation in the actual performance of his craft every historian ignores at his peril, is exactly what I had in mind when I said, at the beginning of this introduction, that the following pages will focus on (and their title «The New Global Past» intends to refer to) a conceptualization of World History which can be recognized at the core of its ongoing «crystallization» – to borrow Osterhammel’s image – into an academic discipline.
A key factor in the process of professionalization outlined by Iggers, Wang and Osterhammel seems to have in fact been the convergence of a critical mass of scholars around an articulated vision of study of World History embodied in, and relying on the indispensable support of, a series of paradigmatic works which offered a practical demonstration of its actual feasibility in terms of adherence to the rules and requirements of contemporary historiographical realism.
This novel conceptualization, moreover, unlike in the past, is proving suitable to meet and mobilize the common consent of both the practicing or would-be World Historians and (not less importantly) other groups of specialists trained and operating within the disciplinary boundaries of the national histories, the area studies, the colonial and imperial histories, the so called “Expansion of Europe”
studies, but feeling the urgent need to overcome the conventional limitations of their respective subjects and serving at the same time as an invaluable recruitment basin for World History proper.
4. The Categorical Cluster in Outline: A Preliminary Glossary
For analytical and didactic convenience, I will decompose the notional cluster around which the professional identity of the World Historians is taking shape into a number of elements which can be grouped under nine headings. These are:
1) The Global Perspective;
2) The Transregional and Transcultural Dimension;
3) The «Human Community» and (or) the Long-Term History of Globalization; 4) «Large-Scale Empirical Narratives»;
5) Dynamic Interactions; 6) The Globalized Society;
7) «Differentiated Commonalities»; 8) Pluralist Cosmopolitanism; 9) Global Citizenship.
No. 1 – The Global Perspective – refers to the non-objectivistic, non-holistic and constructionist conception of the «global past» with which the New World Historians, distancing themselves from the onto-teleological attitudes of so many of their predecessors, nowadays tend to identify the subject-matter of their discipline (as clearly intimated by the very subtitle of Patrick Manning’s textbook: «Historians create a Global Past»).
Nos. 2-3 refer to the particular geo-historical spatiality – embracing together a plurality of cultural regions and regional cultures –, and the resulting historical processuality – the development of the «human community» as an outcome of long-term globalization –, whose study the New World Historians claim as their professional task within the academic division of labour.
No. 4 refers to the New World Historians’ diversified approaches towards the commonly felt problem of the «Grand Narrative» and macro-historical synthesis. No. 5 – «Dynamic Interaction» – refers to their innovative, nonethnocentric view of the relationships unfolding among the connected regional histories in which the global past articulates itself (like in the crucial case of the interactions between “Occident and Orient”, or “the West and the Rest”, within the context of the modern and contemporary “Expansion of Europe”).
No. 6 – The Globalized Society – refers to the central characteristic of the present age whose roots in the past, as already hinted before, the New World Historians aim to explore and elucidate.
No. 7 – «Differentiated Commonalities» – refers to the essential legacy from the global past to today’s globalized humanity that the New World Historians seem chiefly interested to emphasize.
No. 8 – Pluralist Cosmopolitanism – refers to the prevailing ethical and political option from which the New World Historians’ closely intertwined responses to the «challenge of the present» and the call of professional duty draw nourishment and inspiration.
No. 9 – Global Citizenship4 – refers to both the ultimate constituency that the
New World Historians aspire to address, i.e. the citizens of the globalized society, and the pedagogical and public functions which their discipline appears to them especially entitled and called to discharge: the education for cosmopolitan citizenship in the ecumenical city of man.
4 P. K. O’Brien, Global History for Global Citizenship, in Africa, Empire and Globalization:
Essays in Honor of A.G. Hopkins, edited by T. Falola and E. Brownell, Carolina Academic Press, Durham, N.C., 2011, pp. 447-458.
II. A Synoptic Overview of the Field of Study
1. World History Stoops to Conquer: the Global Point of View
At the epistemological ground-level, a strategic precondition for the professional take-off of World History and its fruitful dialogue with other specialisms has been its critical self-distancing from the holistic ambitions and pretensions of «Universal History» which had continued to mar or make strongly feel their influences in the works of its earlier practitioners, like, in different ways, in the cases of Arnold J. Toynbee and William McNeill, well into the twentieth century and until very recently5.
In Toynbee’s belief, for example, the supreme goal of historical knowledge (a goal that had been actually «achieved», according to him, in H.G. Wells’ Outline of History published in 1919) was «re-living the entire life of Mankind as a single imaginative experience»6.
Written in 1934, these words were intended as a polemical rejoinder to «the professional historians», who insisted on disparaging and sometimes ridiculing «“Universal Histories”» realized by solitary individuals (rather than by cooperating teams of scholars in multi-authored volumes or series of volumes). Half a century later, speaking in his capacity of President of the American Historical Association, McNeill described as «the moral duty of the historical profession in our time» the production of «an intelligible world history» which would be able to inspire in his readers a feeling of personal empathy with its object, namely, the destiny of «humanity as a whole».
5 See also, infra, ch. 7, my observations on Eric Hobsbawm as The Last of the Universal
Historian.
6 Wells’ book was subtitled «Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind», virtually embracing
But while reacting and adapting to the particular circumstances of the different periods in which they were living and working, both Toynbee and McNeill, through the mediation of their shared mentor Lord Acton, were only revamping, in an important sense, an intellectual project that dated back to Leopold von Ranke and the very origins of professional historiography in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
In 1896, echoing the definition given by Bishop Bossuet to his pupil le Dauphin de France little more than two hundred years before, Acton had exalted «Universal History» as the genre of historical writing dealing with «the common fortunes of mankind» – with that special category of events, in other terms, which involved and affected the human race in its entirety. World History, therefore, was not simply «a distinct branch», but «the sublimest branch», the consummation itself of the historian’s craft.
And exactly this had been the firm conviction of «the father Ranke» (A. Momigliano) too. For Ranke, in fact, the final purposes of the rising historical profession had to be, first, the comprehension of the past life of humanity in its fullness and totality, second, the production of synthetic works of Weltgeschichte which would transform this knowledge into the general and common possession of mankind at large, starting from the educated public of the particular nation to which each scholar or group of scholars belonged.
Compare now to these proud and high-sounding claims the unobtrusive, almost humble statement of aims prefaced to the first number of the journal of the World History Association (supra, Introduction, § 1), where Jerry Bentley expressly identifies the «systematic study and research in world history» with the production of scientific «articles that undertake historical analysis from a global point of view». What characterizes professional work in the disciplinary field of world history is, in other words, the conscious and deliberate choice of a heuristic perspective – the «global point of view» – which leads this particular community of researchers to neatly select as scientific object of their investigations a specific and circumscribed category of historical phenomena – the «global past».
So the new world historians do not claim to be new because they would have finally discovered a key to understanding the (non-existent) totality of the human past. On the contrary, they try to draw attention to the relevance of certain particular and well defined aspects of the past which have been completely neglected, or underrated, or dealt with in an unsatisfactory manner by their predecessors.
More to the point, when the New World Historians claim the «global past» as the field of competence allotted to their discipline in the academic division of the historiographical labour, they refers – as I’ve already hinted – to the study of A) the «transregional» interactions and connections and B) the resulting development of the «human community».
2. The Global Past, (A): The Transregional and Transcultural Scales and Dimensions of Human History
In the jargon of the new world historians, therefore, the much-abused term “global” acquires a very specific and specialized conceptual meaning. According to them, historical events and processes qualify as global when, and only when, they «work their influence (and make their influence actually felt, N.d.R.) in more than one civilization or cultural region» and unfold therefore on an «interregional» scale, or on a «hemispheric» scale (embracing in this case an entire group of civilizations like the Afro-Euro-Asian ones), or on a literally «ecumenical», planetary scale.
As important examples of global historical phenomena of this kind we may mention cross-cultural migrations and the creation of the relative diasporic communities; the establishment of long distance trade networks; the impact of innovations in transport and communication technologies; the encounters and the exchanges of religious, cultural, political and institutional traditions; missionary initiatives; the imposition and the exertion of economic, military, political and administrative control on colonial territories and attempts at empire-building
involving peoples rooted in far remote and far different civilizational backgrounds (like the Europeans and various branches of Asiatic peoples in the obvious case of British India); the diffusion of botanical and animal biological species and the spreading of diseases.
3. The Global Past, (B): The «Human Community» and (or) the Long Term History of Globalization
Correspondently, by «human community» – an expression employed in the mission statement of the World History Association and borrowed from the subtitle of an important book by William McNeill (The Rise of the West. A History of the Human Community) – the New World Historians mean the specific field of social activity which is generated throughout history by the interactions among human groups that take place in the «transregional» and «cross-cultural» geohistorical spaces. The «human community» is then a macro-society, a society of societies, composed of two or more great regional societies and regional cultures which interact both with it and with each other inside it. Within the human community, in other terms, there is interaction between the individual regional society and the global society at large as well as between the single regional societies among themselves.
Moreover, the human community evolves in the course of time. This means that the human community has a history of its own – a history which can be empirically reconstructed and a history which is susceptible to periodization. This history may provide the thread for a unified narrative of world history centered on the prolonged genesis of «global cosmopolitanism».
«Global cosmopolitanism» (according to McNeill’s definition) denotes the shape taken by the human community in the present epoch, in the world around us, where its development has reached a stage in which «all the cultural variety of mankind is now embraced within the bounds of an intimately interacting whole».
The global history of the modern and contemporary age (to which my course is more specially devoted) deals therefore with that period of the history of the human community through which the nowadays condition of global cosmopolitanism gradually matured and then actually took shape.
Some world historians explicitly refer to the history of the human community as the history of globalization. This choice, given the ambivalences and the ideological implications of the word, presents disadvantages as well advantages. But it is clear that, in this acception, the term “globalization” does not intend to indicate a merely contemporary phenomenon. On the contrary, what the new world historians want to emphasize by appropriating the term is that contemporary globalization is only a phase in a process – the growth of the human community – which is ideally coextensive with the history of mankind.
Not by chance, perhaps, one of the best definitions of the concept of “globalization” has been given by an Egyptologist, the German archeologist Jan Assmann. According to Assmann, globalization in world history can be described as «a process of general dissemination (of merchandise, technologies, news, political influence, religious ideas) across political and cultural boundaries and of the ensuing integration and coalescence of various previously isolated zones into one system of interconnections and interdependencies, where everything, that is, all nations, empires, tribes and states cohere in some way or other by political, economic, or cultural relations».
Another influential conceptualization of globalization in world history has been proposed by Christopher Bayly, who has defined globalization as «a progressive increase in the scale of social processes from a local or regional to a world level» which is empirically observable in human history since antiquity. More precisely, the history of globalization deals for him with the human making and remaking of «global linkages» – with the changing patterns, in other terms, of those specific «networks and dominances» which are generated «by geographical expansion of ideas and social forces from the local and regional level to the regional and inter-continental level». The «more integrated international society», «system», or
«order», whose «growth» is a major characteristic of the «long nineteenth century» (1780-1914) covered in his book on The Birth of the Modern World presupposed two previous stages in the «prehistory of “globalization”»: «archaic globalization» and «early modern» or «proto-capitalist globalization».
A concrete and very significant example of periodization of globalization based on the application of the global perspective to world history is The Rise of the West by William McNeill, one of the recognized founding fathers of the New World History in the United States.
This is precisely the book (published around the middle of the 1960s and never translated into Italian) whose subtitle reads «a history of the human community». In this pioneering and very influential work, Mc Neill identified three epochs in the history of what some global historians would call today globalization.
The first epoch is the epoch of the Middle Eastern ascendancy between the seventeenth century and the fifth century before Christ. In this first epoch the «human community» firstly emerges – already presenting the features of a «cosmopolitan civilization» that encompassed a number of local civilizations and cultures – from the expansion of a Babylonian «“great society”» formed at the beginning of the second millennium before Christ.
The following epoch is the epoch of the «Eurasian cultural balance» (or Eurasian equilibrium, as it has been more recently renamed by John Darwin). This second epoch spans the two thousand years or so from the «closure» of the entire Eastern hemisphere, occurring between the fifth century before Christ and the third century after Christ, to the threshold of the early modern age. During this period the «human community» expands into an even wider «Eurasian ecumene» – a unified space within which a variable constellation of four or five mildly connected civilizations interacts without anyone of them losing its autonomy or gaining ascendancy over the others. The third epoch, the epoch of the «Western dominance» opens in the aftermath of the discovery of the sea route to India and the discovery, conquest and colonization of the New World. It begins, in other words, with the early modern «closure» of a «global ecumene» which now becomes almost literally coextensive
with the inhabited world. This period sees the Eurasian equilibrium first «changing» to the advantage of the West (between 1500 and 1700), then «tottering» (between 1700 and the middle of the nineteenth-century), finally to give rise (since the 1850s) to that radical reconfiguration of the «human community» corresponding to the «global cosmopolitanism» of our day.
4. «Large-Scale Empirical Narratives»
Albeit in many ways outdated, McNeill’s The Rise of the West, whose republication in 1991 could be mentioned as a minor symptom of the incipient revival of World History, has been one of the inspirations for the resurgence of the belief in the possibility and necessity to produce great works of world-historical synthesis satisfying the scientific standards of academic historiography in the form of «large-scale empirical narratives», a trend which is to be regarded, as I said before, as a major component of the present surge of world history and a significant symptom of its persisting linkage with the tradition of “Universal History”.
Since the mid-1980s McNeill himself and other American scholars (among whom Jerry Bentley) have advanced and actually attempted to realize in their writings the project of an «ecumenical world history» centered on the «contributions by all peoples and societies to the making of larger global orders». One may mention, for instance, Bentley’s book Old World Encounters, published in 1993 and dealing with the «Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times», or McNeill’s The Human Web, published in 2003 and written in collaboration with his son, the well-known environmental historian John McNeill.
The underlying idea was that the development and the metamorphoses of the «human community» could provide a coherent framework for a comprehensive and non-Eurocentric narrative of world history which would explain the genealogy of the contemporary mondialized society in terms of history of globalization.
The most immediate precedent for this kind of present-centered and future-oriented approach to «ecumenical history» (dating back to the decades of the pre-First World War globalization and renewed by Arnold Toynbee in the 1920s) was precisely McNeill’s The Rise of the West.
This book can be read in fact as a teleological account of the advent of contemporary «global cosmopolitanism», which McNeill portrayed as the ultimate outcome of a process of progressive enlargement of the scale and growth of the historical significance of the spaces of cross-cultural interaction.
In the Conclusion of the book McNeill made explicit that the title «“The Rise of the West”» was intended «as a shorthand description of the upshot of the history of the human community to date». His narrative culminated with a diagnosis of the present and a «vision of the future». According to it, mankind was faced with the alternative between a nuclear catastrophe and «the eventual establishment of a world-wide cosmopolitanism», a «cosmopolitan world society» erected on the scaffolding of a «world state» enabled by its «world-wide political-military authority» to exercise «an overarching world sovereignty» (by analogy with the Roman unification of the Mediterranean or the imperial unification of Ancient China) and bearing, at least initially, «a Western imprint» (given the role played by the West in the history of the human community since 1500).
The Human Web, published by McNeill father and son fifteen years ago, largely represents an updated version of the same conceptual model. The book aimed to provide the reader with «A Bird’s Eye View of World History» by emphasizing «the centrality of the webs of interaction in human history» as both significant factors of historical change and human creations whose transformation «constitutes» – according to the authors – «the overarching structure of human history». The history of the world would lend itself, in other words, to be entirely and organically described in terms of widening, thickening, growing power of conditioning exerted on both the social life and the biosphere by the «human web».
So, in this later book, the evolving morphology of the webs of interaction takes the place of the history of human community as criterion of periodization of the
global past: from the first «world wide web», operating already before the Neolithic, to the denser «local or regional webs», forming inside it as a result of the invention and diffusion of agriculture, to the «metropolitan web» of the subsequent age of civilizations, to the Euro-Afro-Asian «Old World Web» which arose at the beginning of the vulgar era, to the «cosmopolitan web» of the Oceanic age, to end with the «single global web» of today.
A different but not incompatible and not unrelated attempt at macro-historical synthesis which has been deeply influenced by the new world history is the multivolume Blackwell History of the World planned and edited by the British medievalist Robert Moore. What makes this series of special interest to us is that Moore managed to recruit among its contributors the distinguished specialist of Indo-British and Imperial history Christopher Bayly.
Bayly wrote for the Blackwell History of the World both the now famous The Birth of the Modern World, 1770-1914. Global Connections and Comparisons, and its posthumous sequel, Remaking the Modern World, which has been published in 2018 and carries on Bayly’s story, focused on the «global connections», up to 2015 (the year of his death). It seems to me that Bayly’s volumes (and in particular the first one, devoted to the «long nineteenth century») can be numbered among the most successful attempts made in recent years to apply the global perspective and the notion of globalization in the realization of great works of synthesis dealing with the modern and contemporary periods.
As declared by the editor Robert Moore in the general preface to the Blackwell History of the World, the ambition of the Series, originally planned in more than twenty volumes, is to offer the reader «a (…) comprehensive (…) account of the entire human past» by combining simultaneously two methodological approaches: the ecumenical approach, that identifies «world history» - as we’ve seen – with «the history of the contacts between peoples previously isolated from one another», and the macro-regional approach, which consists in adopting as units of geo-historical analysis and comparison such regional (or hemispheric, in the case of Islam) civilizations or «world systems» as – I quote from various lists of the volumes
planned by Moore – Oceania and the Pacific, Latin America, Japan, China, South-East Asia, India, the Islamic World, Russia taken together with Central Asia and Mongolia, Africa, the Mediterranean (or the Western Mediterranean, in the most recent list), the Western World.
The organization of the Series reflects the belief that an «attempt to understand history as a whole» may be pursued with a reasonable hope of success only by alternating «volumes defined by regional parameters (such as the volumes devoted to the single regional or interregional or maritime geohistorical spaces I have quoted a moment ago) and volumes defined by global parameters», such as the volume written by Bayly (or the volume on the Early Modern World originally commissioned to another distinguished global historian, Sanjay Subrahmanyam). The alternation and the crossover of the two methodological perspectives should confer the Blackwell History of the World the shape of «a barrel», in which «the indispensable narratives of very long-term regional development» are «bound together by global surveys of the interactions between regions, and the great transformations which they have experienced in common, or visited upon one another (like global modernization)».
It is clear then that, in the overall economy of the Series, Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World was one of the volumes to be drawn up according to «global parameters» and called to act as circles, so to speak, of the barrel imagined by the editor.
The task entrusted to Bayly was to treat the «long nineteenth century» between the American Revolution and the First World War as one of the great epochs of enhanced convergence in which historical change assumes ecumenical dimensions and characteristics by virtue of the closer connections establishing themselves between the various regional histories and requires to be analyzed in terms of their reciprocal interaction and from a cross-regional perspective.
Bayly’s book deals therefore with the long nineteenth century as a historical period in which a dramatic acceleration of the pace of historical change coincides with an intensification of contacts already established among the regional societies
of Eurasia during the early modern age. Its theme is the classical theme of the revolutionary transition from the «ancient regime to modernity», but it regards this transition on a planetary scale, like a product of «global connections» and in its interactive aspects.
5. «Dynamic Interactions»
Also the strategy adopted by Bayly in his analysis of the transregional interactions appears in substantial agreement with the methodological positions of the New World or Global Historians, as it rests on the refusal to consider world modernization in Eurocentric terms. This brings us to a further and, in my opinion, to the most innovative and difficult point of the new conceptualization of the global past, which is its reliance on the crucial category of “dynamic interaction”.
Many historians would agree today with McNeill in placing on the more or less remote background of contemporary globalization a period marked by the long persistence of a condition of relative equilibrium in the balance of power among the Eurasian or Old World regional societies. Some of them (including myself, for what it counts) disagree from McNeill about the precise moment in which this equilibrium began to falter (Mc Neill argued, as you will remember, that this happened in the sixteenth century).
According to this alternative periodization (elegantly outlined, among others, by Bayly and John Darwin), the «Eurasian revolution» only unfolded between the middle of the eighteenth century and the Thirties or the Forties of the nineteenth century. This means that the interregional equilibrium subsisted – for a quarter of millennium – long after the Europeans had taken the lead in the process of world unification starting with the geographical discoveries. We will see later how this persistence (which is a key-problem of early modern history whose solution is of crucial relevance for the understanding of contemporary history) has to be interpreted.
In the meantime, it is all-important to observe that, whatever periodization they adopts, a central historiographical problem for the New World Historians remains to assess the unquestionably prominent role played in the making of the present global society by the so-called “expansion of Europe” and the ensuing encounters between Europe and the various regional cultures of the Eastern hemisphere, which developed along both the early modern and the contemporary periods of the history of globalization.
Most world historians would probably agree that contemporary globalization driven, at least in its earlier stages, by Europe and European global imperialism has been so intense as to entail indeed a partial convergence and reciprocal assimilation between the cultural regions of the world in conformity with patterns provided by the West. One may mention as an obvious instance of this the diffusion on a planetary scale of the national State, largely a product of Western European history, as the fundamental model of organization of the political life and international relations of peoples belonging to very diverse civilizational traditions. The least that can be said is that Europeans and Westerners, also but not only through the means of the imperial control, have been leading actors in the process of global modernization.
The foremost conceptual innovation introduced by the new world historians and their fellow-travelers working in the cognate fields of imperial history or the Expansion of Europe studies into the treatment of their subject-matter concerns precisely the way of conceiving the transregional or cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans which have shaped the trajectory of contemporary globalization. This is what I referred to earlier as the adoption of the category of dynamic interaction.
To put it in brief, in the past the non-European peoples and societies who were involved in the interactive process leading to the expansion of Europe overseas, to transregional empire-building, to global modernization, tended to be regarded as historically static, powerless and passive vis-à-vis the dynamism, the overwhelming superiority and the enterprise of the Westerners. This was an enduring legacy of
the nineteenth century – the imperial age par excellence –, when the narrative of the European colonialism, for instance, «was written around the triumph of European society over native misrule» and «Indians and Africans were rarely more than a backdrop to the doings of colonizers, missionaries and merchants».
But in the decades following decolonization – that means in the last half century or so – a revisionist trend has established itself, whose main purpose has been «to return agency» to non-Europeans, recognizing their full dignity as historical «actors».
In the jargon of the new world historians the use and sometimes the abuse of the noun “interaction” (often coupled with the adjectives «dynamic» and «bilateral» in the expressions «dynamic interaction», «bilateral interaction») reflects a fundamental theoretical and ethical concern. It is aimed to underline that the «linkages» and «connections» binding together regional societies and regional cultures in the globalized spaces are not to be imagined as the imposition of an omnipotent center on helpless peripheries, but they emerge from and are operated by a much more complex multipolar field of historical forces with the effective contribution of all the peoples involved. Although these peoples are usually invested with different and shifting degrees of historical power, it never happens, especially in the Eurasia arena, that one of them can be utterly devoid of historical power. The main distinguishing feature of the New World Historians, as compared with their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, consists therefore in the propensity to invest the modern and contemporary extra-European worlds with four attributes: first, an endogenous dynamism prior to the encounter with the West; second, the ability to condition the European expansion abroad; third, an effective impact in the construction of global orders; fourth, the capacity to re-act and feed-back on the Western societies themselves.
Seen from the theoretical perspective of the global history, the transition to global modernity appears in a very different light than in the past. As strongly underlined by Robert Moore in his editorial preface, Bayly’s book on the Birth of the Modern World doesn’t analyze global modernization «as something which some
people or some regions did to others less favoured or deserving, but as a series of transformations in which most of the people of the world participated, and to which most of them contributed, not simply as the objects or victims of the successes of others, but actively, independently and creatively».
A closer examination of the notion of dynamic interaction and the full implications of its use in the study and interpretation of the modern and contemporary age is indispensable to elucidate the remaining four components of the New World History paradigm. So, in order to reach the required level of in-depth analysis, and provide you with a more concrete set of exemplifications, I will concentrate on the answers given by a few outstanding but at the same time representative authors to the two interrelated historiographical questions of the crisis of the Eurasian equilibrium and the transition to global modernity in the period between the Seven-years’ war of the mid-eighteenth-century and the first Anglo-Chinese Opium war (1839-1842).
III. An Introductory Case Study: Contemporary India in the Perspective
of the New Global History
1. The Reinterpretation of the Origins of British Colonialism
An excellent starting point for this central part of our conceptual survey – it seems to me – is the reinterpretation undergone by the theme of the origins of British colonial domination in India in the last few decades. A close analysis of the new interpretation, put forward (among others) by Bayly himself since the nineteen-eighties and very well summarized in John Darwin’s book After Tamerlane, published in 2007, will provide you with a preliminary example of what might concretely mean to apply the global perspective in examining a major problem in modern and contemporary history.
The emergence – or, in a longer term perspective, the re-emergence – of India as a major manufacturing power is one of those epochal novelties of our times that are evoked more frequently in international historiography by those scholars who advocate the urgent need to adopt a global perspective in the study and teaching of modern and contemporary history. John Darwin, who has been professor of imperial and global history at Oxford, and who is the author of the important volume on the rise and fall of the global empires from 1400 to 2000 some parts of which I have adopted as a text for my courses, argued for example that the ultimate goal of the historian is to envisage a genealogy of the «present». If this is true, a «present» which among its most characteristic features includes the redistribution of world industrial power to the benefit of large Asian societies such as China and India cannot but induce historians to modify the very same questions that they address to the past – their notions of which parts of the past is most essential for us to know and understand here and now.
India, in particular, is playing a prominent role within some of the main thematic strands that historians are pursuing in an attempt to make the present and the contemporaneity intelligible as a result of the processes that have shaped the globalized world of our days.
The first thematic strand involving India relates more generally to the reconstruction of the centuries-old process of growth of «global connectivity» whose current stage we are accustomed to name globalization and which global historians read in terms of interactions between large regional societies.
The second thematic strand centering on India concerns the role played within this process by Europeans and Westerners, especially with the means of formal (i.e. political) or informal imperial domination.
The third, very important thematic strand involving India focuses on the «resilience» of the other societies, cultures and states of Afro-Eurasia in the face of European expansion, and the dynamics and consequences of the encounters between «the world and the West».
India has been affected by British conquest and domination for a period of little more than two centuries (from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century), to say nothing of other very important aspects of its relationship with West, like the Jesuit missionary initiative operating under the aegis of the Portuguese Crown. It is obvious, therefore, that in the case of India the three dimensions I have just mentioned tend to coincide, at least for a large part of its history – the history of globalization, the history of the Western expansion and imperial domination, the history of the reactions triggered by the impact of the West in the other societies that experienced it.
Less obvious, and still too little known to the general historical culture, especially in Italy, is the new, very original way in which historiography has come to radically rethink the relationship between these three dimensions in the interpretation of the emergence of British hegemony in the subcontinent.
In order to define correctly the terms of the question, we need to start from a fact that is as obvious as it is overlooked. Until the eighties of the nineteenth
