Teachers of world history will welcome this book as an important addition not just to our store of knowledge about the remaking of the modern world, but to our repertoire of methods for understanding how the global emerged as a condition of colonial and postcolonial modernity. For in addition to being an attempt to explain how the global crises of the early twentieth century helped to “engender a revival of the parochial” (p. 326) in the present, C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 offers a set of design principles for how to imagine that historical process through a combination of diachronic and synchronic approaches.Footnote ¹

As anyone who has been engaged in the project of teaching world history knows, syllabus design is key. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that world history is as much about design and method as it is about content, insofar as having even a creditable grasp of material beyond one's areas of specialty (even when that is conceived of transnationally or comparatively) is notoriously challenging. Of course, content and method are not so easily segregated; they work in a dynamic, even paradoxical, relationship. Acknowledging that design matters, and that world histories like Bayly's participate in and help to shape what Katherine Hayles has called a “field model,” is critical for apprehending what work his book does to impact conversations about the discipline and what it takes to be its subjects.Footnote ²

The question of how we design, and narrate, the histories we want to tell arguably matters as much as what happened in the past, regardless of what we study. Yet the stakes of narrative and its methods for world history feel particularly high when we consider how ubiquitous a referent globality is now—as a descriptive term, as a perspectival mode, as a scalar standard, as a valorization technique and, of course, as a condition of the present. When the global is understood historically, it becomes clear that it is more than either a genealogy of the present or a perspective on the past. The global is an effect, an artefact even, of a set of material, discursive, and imaginative circumstances and formations that are constituted as global in part through the methodological procedures of narrative itself. Among the many contributions that Bayly has made to the field of world history, this insight about the historicity of the global, and about its emergence as an object of inquiry through narrative structure and intention, is among the most unique and most significant for our practice now. In this essay, I use Remaking the Modern World as an occasion for thinking about what kind of world history syllabus possibilities it offers, which it forecloses, and how to read with and against it in order to think more critically about what we mean when we invoke the global as a site of historical knowledge, teaching, and method.

It behooves me to acknowledge from the outset that there is much to be admired and wondered at in this book. The sheer scope of Bayly's knowledge, his deep empirical grounding, his rich and insightful interpretive moves, the intellectual energy and capacity that meets us on every page—these are just a few of the features of the work that make it an exceptional text, let alone an exceptional textbook. There is, too, something profoundly vocational about the way Bayly addresses the reader. History is clearly his calling; he thinks it should be ours; he assumes we share that commitment; and he calls us into the precincts of world history he has plotted, hailing us with both familiar events and unlooked-for organizing concepts. The book rests on mountains of material, seen and unseen. The footnotes surely only scratch the surface of what Bayly had learned and had come to know by heart across the long arc of his career as a practicing historian. They leave a breadcrumb trail of influences and touchstones, from scholarly studies to Time magazine, from the 1960s and before to the 2000s and after. In that citationary apparatus lies an enduring archive, the intellectual base for the narrative superstructure of Remaking the Modern World.

That narrative superstructure is purpose-built to explain a world inexorably shaped, and simultaneously produced, by two world wars and the end of European colonial regimes. The first half of the book (chapters 1–9) lays out that conviction with admirable precision, arguing for World War I as an “epochal” moment (p. 19), devoting an entire chapter to the Second World War and its consequences, and threading the histories of European imperialism and the ramifications of its discontents throughout these accounts. The second half of the book is rather more thematic, turning toward the production of knowledge in the emergent human sciences and taking up topics like religion; arts, literature, and entertainment; and the population question. What Bayly calls alternately “the person and society” and “the self and human society” are more than a contrapuntal line. They are a way of evoking the social textures of the cataclysmic changes laid out in the first half of the book. Inevitably, all these events and processes—from multiple iterations of world war to the emergence of the self as a key site of identity and belonging—are embedded in the geopolitical economy of capital. In Bayly's narrative, capitalism and its crises are motors for uprisings, wars large and small, and authoritarian rule wherever it takes root (whether in service of or antagonistic to it). If capitalism is the material context for geopolitics, it also explains how, why, and under what historical conditions the category of the person came to be valorized as an object of scientific knowledge—and how wholesale communities and persons became a target of state and nonstate violence as well. Bayly's approach to the domain of the economic is in step with recent developments in the history of capitalism, where capitalism is understood as much as “a system of power or way of ruling” as about proletarianization or commodification per se. If, as Jeffery Sklansky has suggested, new histories of capitalism are interested in the struggle for self-making and in how economic knowledge comes to be a means of political rule at several scales, it is interesting to think of Remaking the Modern World as a contribution to those debates.Footnote ³ Doing so also helps us to appreciate how this text—with its rather unconventional division down the middle between diachronic grand narrative and thematic deep dives—is held together by the intellectual concerns and methodological practices that underwrote Bayly's early work on the “rich pattern of commercial life” in British India, notably in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars.Footnote ⁴

Followers of Bayly's career-long work will, of course see Remaking the Modern World as a sequel to his 2003 The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914.Footnote ⁵ Though the structure of the latter is less bifurcated, here too the narrative splits between a rigorous and vigorous high political story and an equally disciplined, robust topical account—with religion, the arts, and literature featuring as prominently as in Remaking. The Birth is divided into four parts, including one called “State and Society in the Age of Imperialism,” but these do not fall easily into a diachronic/synthetic pattern. And, of course, we know that the final stages of Remaking the Modern World were interrupted by Bayly's untimely death, so it is not easy to compare the narrative structures of the two books, or to know whether one was modeled on the other.

It would be interesting to learn more about what condition the manuscript was in and how strong a hand Daniel Jacobius Morgan and Christopher Clark had in shaping various aspects of the final product, chapter titles and subsections included. As with Stuart Hall's posthumously completed memoir, Familiar Stranger, there is a lot to be gained from as full an understanding as possible about how such important texts end up being constituted through the assistance of family, friends, and colleagues.Footnote ⁶ For South Asianists, it is a reminder of the ways in which, historically, Indian history was always already the work of many hands, as Rama Mantena's study of the origins of modern historiography in the subcontinent so richly details.Footnote ⁷

The point here is not to parse tables of contents or dwell excessively on continuities and divergences between books by Bayly that were published over fifteen years apart. Nor is it to suggest that the component parts internal to each study are unreconcilable; quite the contrary. What is clear is that the links between the texture of social life and imagination on the one hand, and the view from 10,000 feet on the other, are not unique to the narrative work of Remaking the Modern World. Rather, they suggest how intuitively, perhaps, Bayly sensed the spaces in between and how invested he was in drawing a map for readers so that they—we—might be compelled to struggle with questions of narrative method when it comes to thinking comprehensively about the human experience of world history. Like the footnotes upon which Remaking rests, the chapter structure of the book is an active, living archive of its structures of feeling—realms of consciousness, to echo Raymond Williams, which are powerful but not necessarily fully worked out. They represent what happens in the gap between official discourse (elite history) and its appropriation in other forms and sites (mass media, the arts).Footnote ⁸ And they remind us that we rarely have a full grasp of the histories that shape us even as we often write as if we do.Footnote ⁹

I want to turn now to the narrative of world history that the first nine chapters of the book establishes with such rigor and conviction. With war, capital, and empire as the drivers, this is in large measure a Eurocentric story. Western actors, Western events, Western chronologies, and Western historiographies propel the narrative forward. Bayly does reconstitute familiar periodizations for the Great War, for example, from 1914–18 to 1911–26. And he brings non-European regions and geopolitical developments to bear on his explanatory frameworks—notably by calling his first chapter “The World Crisis, c. 1900–1930: Europe and ‘The Middle East’” to signal both the entanglement of that arena in wartime strategies and the ways that the very term “Middle East” is inextricably bound up with European imperial ways of seeing and knowing. Here again, the details of design are illuminating beyond the chapter titles per se. If we dig into the subsections, we can see that the Middle East gets broken down into Egypt, Iran, and Turkey; that secular Islam and Shintoism get included in typologies of authoritarianism; and that space is dedicated to topics like “Representation and Rights among ‘Subject Peoples’”—those scare quotes again an index of Bayly's awareness of the power of categorization. For our purposes in this forum, and perhaps unsurprisingly, India occupies a significant amount of real estate in Bayly's narrative. Histories of South Asia often anchor discussions of what happens in “Africa, Asia and Beyond” (which is the subtitle of chapter 2), and India's role in shaping anti-colonial struggle in the twentieth century gets more than its due.

There is no question, then, that the “world” in Bayly's Remaking the Modern World is multi-sited. To return to the note I struck at the start, what Bayly accomplishes with remarkable clarity is to argue for a narrative of world history that shows how concepts of the global itself were produced, gained traction, and have shaped what we think of as “contemporary” life from 1900 onward. War and the end of empire accomplished this, but so did mass communication, the arts and literature, social science, and scientific developments as well—all subjects Bayly engages as part of a larger ambition to help us grasp how and why this period was particularly, peculiarly generative of awareness of, or consciousness about, globality. For that reason, it is interesting that the book is called “remaking” the modern world. Of course, we are meant to think of that title in conversation with the antecedent “birth” of the modern world volume, and to see how earlier processes, both embryonic and fully formed, were dismantled and/or reconfigured under the pressures of radically different historical conditions. Because both are published by Wiley-Blackwell, we can appreciate how that connection makes sense in an academic marketplace where world history textbooks abound and the competition is fierce for adoptions at a moment when histories of globalization are at a premium.

Reading these titles serially is nonetheless a bit misleading. For the world that was born in the first book was, arguably, not actually available as “a world”—as an identifiable, usable, durable, and (hence) narratable object—until the period Bayly chronicles in Remaking.Footnote ¹⁰ To be sure, the chronologies (1780–1914 and 1900–2015) overlap slightly. And some historians have argued that nation builders and imperialists both inside and outside Europe staged the world symbolically and territorially in ways that made the late nineteenth century recognizable to some contemporaries (mainly elites) as a moment of aggressively globalizing power.Footnote ¹¹ But in Remaking, Bayly shows that it is not until the twentieth century that this worldliness, this globality, is actually “globally” apparent, let alone globally impactful in the way that total war helped to guarantee. Though he does not call it the global therein, his tantalizingly short chapter 15, “Internationalism and Transnationalism in Theory and Practice,” tracks the ways that expressions of global self-awareness took on lives of their own well beyond a League of Nations or United Nations model. Bayly ends by saying that by the twenty-first century “globalization had superseded internationalism” (p. 269). This was largely possible because of the way that the global had become, in a word, epochal.

Having said all this, and as I suggested above, the global that Bayly argues came into being, and the one he himself makes visible to us through his narrative, is effectively, even normatively, Eurocentric. That is to say, his narrative does not decenter what we have come to understand as the core of modern, Western, Euro-American, twentieth-century history: war in Europe and its aftermath; the crises and contests over Western capitalism; and the short- and long-term effects of Western colonial conquest and white settlement through mechanisms of extraction, accumulation, and hegemony (inclusive of state violence) commonly understood as the trifecta of modern imperial and to some degree of postcolonial regimes. His field model is akin to what software developers call the wheel-and-spoke prototype: that is, programs that both contribute to and receive products from the core group, tracking multiple iterations of cognate activities from a center point.Footnote ¹² What Remaking the Modern World models is neither a web nor a spiral. It is a wheel: a centrist model with hierarchies that mimic core-periphery even as they plot simultaneity in time and space. In historiographical terms, it departs from a top-down, casually imperial model of the kind we see in John Darwin's The Empire Project, which scarcely touches the ground beyond Whitehall.Footnote ¹³ Remaking is more akin to the narrative approach taken by Erez Manela in The Wilsonian Moment, which uses Versailles as the center of a spoke-like narrative of Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Korean attempts to appropriate the moment of self-determination in 1919 for their respective nationalist ends.Footnote ¹⁴

What is most interesting to me is not that Remaking is a Eurocentric story, but that it is a Eurocentric story by design. How is this possible, coming from the pen of an inveterate South Asianist, someone whose work originated in local and regional Indian histories? Limits of time and space do not permit a wholesale analysis of this question. One clue to the design principles of Remaking can be found in Bayly's 1989 book, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (rather than in the ostensible prequel to Remaking, The Birth of the Modern World).Footnote ¹⁵ Published as the Berlin Wall fell and the postwar, postcolonial global order looked poised to be remade in the wake of an end to the Cold War, Imperial Meridian was hailed as “a book of rare distinction” and “a landmark in imperial history.”Footnote ¹⁶ In it Bayly set out to reintegrate histories of British and Asian empires in the story of the so-called second British empire. He argued that it is crucially important to place Muslim imperial formations in India and North Africa in the same temporal and spatial frame as the loss of the American colonies; to see mercantilism in Asia as coeval with its Atlantic world counterparts; to acknowledge the impact of Southeast Asian frontiers for both European and Chinese territorial ambition; to appreciate India's relationship with all of these economic powerbases; to understand the United Kingdom and its “empire of Europe” in this tense and tender era of wars of succession in all dimensions; to bring white settler colonies and the Caribbean in this period into conversation with all of these convulsions and reconfigurations; and, above all, to apprehend the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the first “time” of British history as world history, thanks to its imperial fates and fortunes. Reviewing Imperial Meridian for the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient in 1993, Jurgen Osterhammel proclaimed it the beginning of nothing less than the “return of universal history.”Footnote ¹⁷

The question of whether a history of war and economic competition in the context of territorial loss and conquest in multiple imperial terrains constitutes a universal or even a global history sounds like a very good, if terrifying, doctoral preliminary exam question. For my purposes, a more useful question is one that we actually often ask our students at Illinois in their Britain/empire or global prelim exams: what is the proportional role of empires in the making of modern world histories? Empires are useful units of analysis for many reasons. But they skew to the top-down or the wheel-spoke field model all too readily. And even as in the case of Imperial Meridian, when they aim to reproportion non-Western formations and histories, they can end up serving a triumphal story of British imperial take-off or supremacy. This is true even if we acknowledge the rifts and fissures and uphill battles, as it were, that the British encountered between 1780 and 1830 as they struggled—fitfully, stutteringly—for what was considered world dominance in then-contemporary terms. Empire-centric histories produce Eurocentric world histories, even when historians can and do account for local, regional, indigenous, and otherwise off-the-grid-of-Western-narrative histories.

To my mind, then, it is easy to see how and why Remaking the Modern World produces a Eurocentric history if we read it in tandem with Imperial Meridian. The British empire is not at the center of the Remaking story. But the species of globality that Bayly narrates as having been produced by the time period of 1900–2015 is organized, is designed, by and through the centrality of European empires, their economies, their polities, and their territorial ambitions—in connection with emergent and aspirant non-Western powers (including the USSR), to be sure, but not driven in a structurally equivalent way by them.

Would Chris have disagreed with this diagnosis? I like to think he would not have. For one thing, there is a case to be made—a radical political case, in fact—that the imperial and the global are both utterly entangled and serially entailed. This is evident in the way that successes have been tied to the ascendance of managerial capital, whose benefits have been distributed beyond the top layer of elites and whose assets remain the province of the 1 percent of Euro-Americans for whom the enterprise of racialized profit principles was patently designed. Bayly's Remaking is a narrative that the new globalists would understand, especially when the end of empire is seen to yield not simply to globalization but to neoliberalism along with it.Footnote ¹⁸

This is a strong read enabled in part by Dipesh Chakrabarty's 1992 essay, “Provincializing Europe,” and his 2000 book of the same title. “Provincializing Europe” is a concept that is often misread as an invitation to the possibility that Europe can actually be provincialized rather than as principled skepticism about the ability of history qua History to get beyond the logics of capitalist Western modernity (note too Chakrabarty's insistence on the work of the social sciences in this history).Footnote ¹⁹ The version of the global that Bayly narrates is not an accidental effect of his narrative procedure; nor can it be ascribed to any limits or uncertainties of the posthumous production process that helped to bring Remaking into the world between covers. There is a thirty-year through-line from Imperial Meridian through Remaking that suggests that this is the result of both accumulated knowledge and consistent syllabus design. As such, it participates actively and generatively in a broader historiographical and political conversation about the historical time of the West and its empires in the making of the global as a problem-space and as a material force in the contemporary world—which, it turns out, according to Bayly, is 1900 until the present.

For me, skepticism about the given-ness of the global is absolutely critical to any attempt to grapple with it as a historical process, let alone as an artefact of history. This skepticism is especially warranted in light of our apparent desire for the global as well as our blindness to the ways in which, as the sociologist Gurminder Bhambra notes, “‘the global’ … was the space in which processes initiated in Europe come to play out as ‘world-historical.’”Footnote ²⁰ I will not—I cannot—say that I do not subscribe to the narrative Bayly has designed and delivered to us in Remaking. It is neither true nor untrue. It is a version of the past that has interpretive merit, not least because it is an archive of a very particular way of seeing and narrating “the world.” I am perhaps no less implicated in or circumscribed by the locative positions from which Chris thought and wrote. He was born in Britain in 1945; I was born in the United States in 1961. Tunbridge Wells, England, and Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, our respective birthplaces, may have more affinities than differences. And Cambridge and Illinois, while worlds apart, share certain structural privileges, among them that they are predominantly white institutions and are likely to remain so. But I recognize and affirm the global not just as having been produced by history, but as itself a presumptively instituted perspective through certain historical locations and structures.Footnote ²¹ For if social science and its intellectual kin group, poststructuralist theory, have taught us nothing else, it is that the “where do you see it from” question is decisive for how you design and tell the story. That locative position is shaped by your biography but also by the sources you use and the design principles you mobilize. In other words, I see Bayly's Remaking as an imperial and imperializing story about the history of the global. Or, his world history is an imperial project by any other name—as much because that is the way the narrative sets it up as because that is the realpolitik of the historical processes involved.

It is important to remember that empire-centric, even Anglophone empire histories, have their place.Footnote ²² But the field model of Remaking leaves me nonetheless with (at least) two questions, which are the start of much larger conversations about the global and world history than can be taken up here. There are so many histories left out of the base and the superstructure of Remaking that it is impossible to name them all. My claim is not that histories of this kind must be all-encompassing. But if Bayly's world history is empire-centric history by any other name, how is it that Atlantic slavery and its aftermath can leave hardly a trace on Remaking the Modern World? It is not enough to say, as some undoubtedly will, that he covered slavery in The Birth of the Modern World. Given the ravages of post-emancipation life across multiple imperial sites, the labor regimes they built on and extended, the diasporic movements and supranational violence to self and person they engendered and inflicted—not to mention the global and globalizing imaginative (and some real) solidarities they fostered across time and space—it is stunning to find these virtually unaccounted for. I must say it shakes my faith in Chris's erudition and his sense of accountability to the scholars who have made this knowledge quite ordinary and accessible in the last three decades. And it compels us to ask: how can the subject or the person be understood historically, even inside the confines of imperial history, without reference to slavery and its afterlives?

I could identify many other bodies of knowledge that I traffic in daily as a historian of empire and the global that leave nary a trace in Bayly's text. But the exclusion of histories of slavery, so utterly foundational to narratives of modernity, is both baffling and enraging. For surely a global history that is effectively an imperial one has room for slavery, if only as the bedrock of imperial economic systems, not to mention of the psychic life of power and terror from 1900 until today? The absence of attention to these histories will come as no surprise to Latin Americanists, who will approach Remaking the Modern World, if they take it up at all, expecting as little as it delivers in this regard. The comparative inattention to their histories (including histories of slavery, with their modern global consequences) moreover ratifies Micol Siegel's claim that the absence of Latin America from histories of the world is a problem of narrative as much as of content, where narrative is part of the logic of a Eurocentric modernity that is northern hemispheric in its assumptions, and hence in the ways it excises the non-Anglophonic Global South from its histories.Footnote ²³

Second, if global history is a species of imperial history, why do non-Western empires get so comparatively little play as drivers of world-making in this period? In an unusual break with the objective narrative voice he typically assumes, Bayly wonders aloud, as he turns from world crises in Europe and the Middle East toward those in “Africa, Asia and Beyond,” about the legitimacy of some subjects as global, even their relevance as history. “Here the issue of relative historical weight arises…,” he writes, “because historians have rightly asserted the primacy of European conflict in the First World War” (p. 29). He then goes on to emphasize the significance of Japan's role in the immediate conflict and across the whole of the twentieth century as well. It is Japan as empire that affords it that weight, that historical significance. Can this actually be a matter for hesitancy in a world history narrative undergirded by the forces and events of modern imperialism? Even in histories of the global where empires matter, non-Western empire must still apparently fight for recognition as globally significant enough. I suspect here that Bayly is anticipating critics. To his credit, and in keeping with commitments going back to Imperial Meridian, he roars ahead with Asian imperialism and Asian histories more broadly as a recurrent theme. But what would it look like for the Japanese empire to be the center of gravity for twentieth-century global histories, especially in light of the fact that after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the question of white imperial supremacy was on the backfoot, for all the world to see?Footnote ²⁴ It is not empire per se that is the problem for Bayly's field model. It is the structural tilt, the underlying pull, the hegemonic slope toward Western imperial formations and chronologies that defines it—acts of relegation that tell a meta-narrative story.Footnote ²⁵

Designing a syllabus for the history of a world where the global that has been produced by Eurocentric imperial histories is neither all-encompassing nor blind to its own procedural logics is a challenging task. And it is frankly tempting to be dispirited by such challenges. In fact, therein is the energy we need for more critically informed work. Because if Remaking the Modern World was accomplished by design, that makes the prospects for decolonizing either empire or global history or both a matter of design and intention as well. That is where the histories I read and teach and those I aspire to write—which foreground mobility, the body, violence, women, and subject peoples linked directly, indirectly, or not at all to global imperial regimes, their advocates, and their enemies—come in. Though not always or self-evidently “from below,” these histories do belong to what C. L. R. James called the subsoil of world history.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, when it comes to modern empires, one of the most impactful articulations of the global was arguably the specter of transnational revolutionary resistance that anonymous and fugitive rabble rousers and troublemakers beamed back to the metropole, staging a world of terror and anticolonial violence as the face of the world's future. Anti-colonial movements in India, with their capillary, transimperial reach, were of course absolutely critical to this evidently terrifying global vision.Footnote ²⁷ What Bayly calls “the shadow of empire in the modern world” (chapter 16) has been more aptly called “the shadow of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.”Footnote ²⁸ Both are instituted perspectives of and on the global.

I have chosen not to structure this response around such archives because they are not alternative histories. They are coeval and are not to serve as some kind of trapdoor that helps us avoid the hardcore realities of who gets to say what the global is and who counts as a subject of that history. This is not a naïve position, but it is an utterly sober and sobering one, in part because it is intellectually and political irresponsible not to acknowledge the force of Western imperialism in the making of history and historical experience at all scales. And I do acknowledge it, without conceding that world history or any history is coterminous with it. Meanwhile, Bayly's work, his collective oeuvre, is a treasure trove of facts, fictions, design principles, and cautionary tales. The world that Remaking narrates, not to mention the historically specific iteration of the global it produced, is, for better or worse, beginning to look like it is disappearing in the rearview mirror of history. Those who witness this must be fierce and fearless in the face of the imperative to design histories that tell stories of the pasts we want rather than those we already have. These are the teachable, usable histories for the present and for our future as well.