It is difficult to do justice in a short review to a work of such length, erudition and thoughtful reflection as this recent volume by Jürgen Osterhammel. The author has produced previous books on both globalisation and colonialism but, as the subtitle here indicates, globalisation is his major present concern. For purposes of both coherence and the presumed concerns of Itinerario readers, I will deal only briefly with Osterhammel’s general themes and then address the role he assigns to European overseas expansion in the nineteenth-century “transformation of the world”.

The time frame of the book is a fairly conventional “long nineteenth century”, extending from roughly the French Revolution to World War I. However, Osterhammel, in a good example of his thoughtfulness, includes many references to both the early-modern era and the full twentieth century so as to qualify the claims for “revolutionary” historical change often attributed to his own period. The book cannot be described as very theoretical but the author does reflect a good deal on the aspects of modernity attributed to the nineteenth century and justifiably claims a “closeness to historical sociology” in his method (xvii). In contrast to C.A. Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World (discussed at length in Osterhammel’s introduction), this book recognizes European hegemony as a critical aspect of globalisation during the 1800s. Osterhammel does, however, make excellent use of his knowledge of China and Japan (as well as the less “modernizing” regions of Europe) to offset any charges of Eurocentrism. Some areas of the world, particularly Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, do get only limited attention in a work that acknowledges a trade-off between comprehensiveness and comparative insight (of which there is plenty).

In keeping with this sociological approach, Osterhammel gives a great deal of attention to institutions—the way society was organized and how these changing arrangements impacted the lives of different categories of people. This approach allows him to give considerable attention to politics and the state as well as developments in the economy and its infrastructure of transport and communications. What he hesitates to do is provide any sustained argument on “the great divergence” (i.e., exactly when and how Europe achieved its extended moment of global hegemony).

Colonialism does not receive a separate chapter in this book but is included in many of the issues that do get such a level of attention (e.g., “Cities”, “International Orders”, “The State”, “Civilization and Exclusion”, and “Religion”). The most extensive discussion is contained in a lengthy chapter entitled “Imperial Systems and Nation States: The Persistence of Empires”. The “empires” here include both older continental super states, particularly the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman regimes, along with the overseas empires inherited, expanded and/or created by nineteenth-century Europe, especially Britain and France. However, despite an early reference to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empire in World History (2010), Osterhammel does not make or even seriously consider an argument against the “myth” of the nation-state.Footnote ¹ Instead, he accepts the established view of “the rise of nationalism and the nation state as key features of the nineteenth century” (466) and qualifies this position mainly in chronological terms (i.e., it was only in the twentieth century that both old and new empires finally dissolved into sets of smaller nations). Moreover, Osterhammel sees the expanded overseas empires as expressions of West European nationalism as well as agencies for diffusing this state form as part of the western model of “modernity”. At the same time he notes how national boundaries also limited the extent to which some of the technologies of globalisation, such as railroads, could operate.

On the relationship of overseas colonial empires to globalisation, Osterhammel is somewhat ambiguous. The relationship is most clear and positive with regard to Britain’s informal empire of free trade, which he describes, despite the role of gunboats and opium sales, as “a kind of benign—as opposed to predatory—hegemony” that “made public goods available free of charge” creating the conditions and mechanisms for “global liberalization” (455). Britain’s former and current colonies of white settlement (i.e., North America and Australasia since there is less on South Africa) are also seen as successful examples of progressive “nation-state formation” (414), albeit at the expense of marginalized native populations who receive little attention from Osterhammel.

The real ambiguity comes with the treatment of colonies with majority indigenous populations, arguably the major nineteenth-century innovation in the history of empires. On this subject, to which he devotes relatively little space (especially since his focus is disproportionately on the British as opposed to French empires), Osterhammel vacillates between an attack upon those historians (mainly economic) who see empire as “a huge waste of money” (456) and a judgment of his own that “during the period of industrialization and the classical Pax Britannica, the empire was less economically important than it had been before the loss of the United States” (461). The ultimately dominant (and more convincing) skepticism about empire allows Osterhammel to play down the “high Imperialism” of the late nineteenth century as an apotheosis of global capitalism but it also prevents him from considering seriously what role such neo-mercantilist efforts were intended to play in the shift between free trade and more state-directed economies. Also, despite a gesture towards Bayly’s “first age of global imperialism”, he never places the British conquest of India within any larger argument about global development. Osterhammel does note the contradictions between the general liberalism of the new Indian-style colonial state and the liberalism of the other spheres of British hegemony/empire but gives only a thin account of the apparatus of colonial rule and its social consequences for subject populations. His general view is of an “Empire light” (468) which sought to minimize involvement in its economically marginal hinterlands is not entirely wrong but it also absolves him from closer examination of the active elements of such regimes.

In short, students of Indian, African and Southeast Asian colonialism will be somewhat disappointed in what this book has to say about their subject even as they may be persuaded, by the topics it treats more richly, to recognize that the most dynamic and integrated features of the nineteenth-century global system were located elsewhere.