Christopher Bayly was a colleague of mine at Cambridge for more than forty years. We taught some courses together and, with John Richards of Duke University, we were the editors of the New Cambridge History of India. Bayly was an enormously prolific historian, and he supervised nearly a hundred graduate students. He contributed to the history of India, to new understandings of imperialism and decolonisation, and he was influential in setting out a possible agenda for the emerging field of global history.
This collection of essays derives from a seminar held in Naples in 2016. It was one of many such conferences held in the aftermath of Bayly's sudden and untimely death the previous year. These meetings amply testify to his extraordinary reach and influence among historians of various stripes and colours, and the loss felt by friends and colleagues across the world.
The volume has a clear theme: the seven articles (two of which are of substantial length) take a chronological, not to say Whiggish, approach to Bayly's work, analysing how he moved from field to field coming eventually to confront the intellectual challenges posed by defining ‘world history’. All the pieces provide stimulating commentary. It is a pity that there is not a chapter on the two books on the second world war and the ending of British rule in South East Asia, that Bayly wrote in collaboration with Tim Harper. However, the book concludes with an invaluable and exhaustive twelve-page bibliography of Bayly's publications, compiled by Teodoro Tagliaferri.
Bayly read widely and had a subtle and playful mind. He subscribed to no particular school of thought, nor was he confined by conventional methodological considerations. From the start he was happy to write history in the broadest way, peering over the fences at insights from other disciplines. He was culturally and politically astute, always finding something of interest in others’ perspectives.
Historians take colour from the intellectual milieu in which they have their being. Bayly was nourished in a particularly rich environment. His undergraduate years at Oxford followed what, superficially, was one of the most conservative and English of history courses on offer at any British university; but he was taken through it at Balliol by Richard Cobb and Christopher Hill, an exciting mix of anarchism and Marxism; with the more formal constitutional aspects of the course tempered by insights into conflict within elites as being individuals vying for power, rather than skirmishes of ideological conviction, which Sir Lewis Naimier showed underlay the politics of the eighteenth-century Parliament.
Bayly, like other British historians, became increasingly excited by the work of continental scholars in the ‘Annales School’. These, largely French writers, built on the superb work of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and channelled history into the study of long-term continuities and dynamisms that underlie social change; they considered the totality of human experience, deployed a wide definition of culture, drew on the whole range of the social sciences, and emphasised the importance of ‘history from below’. British engagement manifested itself in 1952 with the establishment of the journal Past and Present, with which Hill was closely involved. Past and Present was a self-conscious and defiant challenge to the notion of history as being only an offspring of law, constitutionalism, monarchical and parliamentary politics, diplomacy, or conventional economic history.
For his doctoral work, Bayly transferred from Balliol College (founded circa 1263) to St Antony's, founded in 1950 as a college where graduates from all over the world, were living and working together within the Oxford community; studying and researching in modern international history, philosophy, economics and politics. His supervisor was Professor Jack Gallagher, then temporarily in exile at Balliol from his spiritual home in Cambridge. Gallagher's early interests had been in African and imperial history, but he was lured to India by his intellectually astute and most enterprising research student, Anil Seal, who went on to inspire and enable more students to follow that same passage. Seal and Gallagher were supported in India by the historical unit of the Indian Statistical Institute of which Professor P. C. Mahalanobis was Director.
Bayly moved to a post-doctoral research appointment in Cambridge in 1970. He became a Fellow of St Catharine's College, where his closest colleague was Eric Stokes, himself a distinguished historian in the demanding field of political ideas and philosophy. Stokes, with a keen desire to do something useful in the post-war and post-colonial world (he had served in the army in India), taught in universities in Malaya and East Africa and became interested in the histories of those regions before resuming his academic life in Cambridge. Gallagher returned to Cambridge in 1973.
The vigour of discussion in Cambridge, and the breadth of its geographical and disciplinary embrace, proved particularly stimulating. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of growth in African, South Asian, and Latin American studies. Cambridge had inter-disciplinary research centres in all three areas, and a lively Extra-European history seminar. It was even possible to study some non-western history as an undergraduate, and hence ideas were tested and refined in the light of ignorant but sharp questioning by the highly intelligent young.
The intellectual foundations for much of the new work derived from the teaching of Bayly's supervisor, Jack Gallagher, and his colleague Ronald Robinson.
Both had working class, and grammar school backgrounds, and both had served outside Europe during the Second World War. They brought a new appreciation of imperialism and colonialism to the then narrowly defined study of what constituted the history of the British Empire. Their article ‘The imperialism of free trade’ published in the Economic History Review in 1953 is reckoned to be one of the most widely cited and influential articles of any in the field of post-war British history. This was followed by their book, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (1961). Andrew S. Thompson describes the impact of this work in his entry for Gallagher and Robinson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: the two historians “portrayed the nineteenth century as a period of relentless expansion, taking many different forms, whereby Victorian governments worked to establish British paramountcy by whatever means seemed locally most appropriate”. Britain's global imperialism was not contained within formal empire, nor was it explicable by reference to metropolitan urges only: it involved a multitude of complex and shifting global relationships—a dynamic play between centre and periphery and of connections—often mutually advantageous, often unequal, often determining, and dependant on social structures in unexpected ways, often a manifestation of brute force, often constrained by local circumstance.
The opening essay in From the History of Empire to World History, by Maurizio Griffo, begins the Italian historians’ enquiry, by assessing the degree to which Bayly belonged to what, for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, was described as the ‘Cambridge School’ of Indian historians. The work of these historians, most simply and precisely defined as being research students of Seal and Gallagher, met with heated controversy. While they gave new life to the study of Indian political history by drawing extensively on source material in both Britain and India that went beyond the official record, and that shifted its gaze from policies made in London and the superior levels of the Government of India to see how Indians themselves behaved in political contexts, they were not liked because of the apparently Machiavellian thrust of much of the arguments they advanced. A brilliant review by Tapan Raychaudhuri for the Historical Journal (1979) was entitled ‘Indian Nationalism as Animal Politics’. In it, Raychaudhuri attacked the new studies with vigour for their denial of coherence in Indian nationalism and their refusal to take more account of either the exploitative nature of British rule in India, or of imperialism's lack of legitimacy, and of washing out of nationalism—especially as voiced by the Indian National Congress—its idealistic fervour, moral justification, and representative nature.
Bayly's first published articles (in Modern Asian Studies, 1971 and 1973), and his first book, The Local Roots of Indian Politics. Allahabad 1880–1920 (1975), were part and parcel of the growing volume of work issuing from Cambridge. Bayly's findings in Allahabad added much to the story by the detailed inclusion of local social and political organisation, moderating greatly an over-emphasis on a top-level approach. They also qualified the notion that nationalism was simply a reaction and response to imperialism and the apparatus of the state that British rule had developed from its predecessors. For Bayly, the streets of Allahabad and of the other great towns of the Gangetic plain, had a life and culture of their own, and moved to social rhythms generated by their own long-standing historical experience as much as to any external stimuli: the art was, of course, to discover and elucidate the ways in which they were intertwined and might be untangled.
It is a moot question (given the diversity of the books and articles actually published by the young Cambridge historians) whether there was a uniform or particular ideological thrust behind them. Most shared an analytical approach, later characterised by Thompson as examining “the complex web of relationships which linked locality, province, and nation, the ways in which resources were bargained for and distributed in each of these spheres, and the part played (unintentionally) by the British in inducing Indians to organise themselves in ever larger groups”. Griffo seeks to distance Bayly from the critical fall-out attached to the ‘Cambridge School’ with its seeming slur on Indian nationalism and indicating a somewhat neutral view of British rule in India.
Griffo's conclusion is diplomatically ambiguous. He makes the case that although Bayly's early work seems “to correspond to the Cantabrigian interpretative scheme” the analysis “is not entirely reductionist and derogatory, but includes a partial appreciation of Indian nationalism”. Bayly already saw how cultural, religious, and popular political motivations were creating a less deracinated and cynical account of nationalism. He may, therefore, have been with but was not really of the ‘School’. Mid-twentieth-century historians everywhere were into the business of expanding and complicating rather than simplifying the past. Bayly was ‘complicator’ beyond compare. Nowhere does this show to greater advantage than in his best and most interesting book, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian society in the age of British expansion, 1770–1870 (1983). It is to this book that Michelguglielmo Torri devotes the longest of the essays under review.
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars seduces the reader from Bayly's opening paragraph:
“Since the Middle Ages European travellers have been fascinated by the bustle and colour of the oriental bazaar. Often they contrasted the sophistication of trade and the wealth of cities with what they took to be the barbarism and decadence of the rulers of the east. This book too grew out of a fascination with the rich pattern of commercial life still be found in the tangled lanes of brass-smiths’ stalls and ancient merchant houses which lie behind the water-front of the city of Benares. The original purpose was to put side by side the ‘inner history’ of merchant people which emerged from their own legends, family papers and account books with the impersonal records of the colonial customs houses in order to create a social history of an old-style Indian business community”.
What might have been a narrow social study, however, was broadened by Bayly's appreciation that “these evocative fragments [of historical material] required a much firmer backing in standard archival and secondary sources if they were to be used to address the major questions of Indian social history”. While there was a rapid disclaimer that “Of course, the day when a ‘total history’ of India in the French style can be attempted remains distant”, there is no doubt that Bayly's ambition was clear and he determined to march purposefully in the right direction.
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars does not make easy reading. (Peter Robb, in a perceptive review for the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (1985) commented that it was “two or three books interwoven” and that “the author must at times have wished that he had tackled them separately”.) Torri deals with this problem by dividing his essay into seventeen sections, enabling him to discuss a number of themes in isolation and relate them to subsequent research and criticism—including that of revision by Bayly himself.
Among the major re-interpretations contained within Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, came strong support for the argument that eighteenth-century India was not a scene only of chaos and catastrophe: significant economic and social progress, with all its unevenness and unequal distributions, continued beneath a political surface that, in its volatility, was not unlike that of Europe, another sub-continent in turmoil in the same era. Nor was Indian society atomised and rigidly hierarchical bound by caste: the townsfolk of the great Gangetic river plains forged community and formed species of class, binding together individuals and families into broad social categories and working for common purposes. Moreover, these cohesive identities survived through being transformed over time. The Bayly book, with a late eighteenth-century starting point, sees subtle but quite dramatic changes taking place among merchant and service elites in the 1830s and again after the upheavals of the late 1850s. It followed also that communalism, which had come to mean a rather specific social vice occasioned by British imperialism's resort to divide and rule, was also not new and had an interesting past demanding investigation.
By contrast, Teodoro Tagliaferri's essay looks at how Bayly moved from an imperial and Euro-centric understanding of world history to one that finds a dynamism in more complex global interactions and connections—in a way, a revitalisation, in the light of half a century more of historical scholarship, of the Robinson-Gallagher cry to abandon monocausal and metropolitan explanations and to seek currency in the various trade-offs between many centres and many peripheries. Tagliaferri illustrates this by an appraisal of Bayly's book The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons (2004) and the mass of associated scholarship attempting to conceptualise how global history might be told.
Of the other four essays Guido Abbattista reflects on Bayly's Empire and Information. Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (1996) in which Bayly again delves into the ways in which superior layers of government—going back before the British colonial regime—have depended for their functioning on knowledge supplied to their agents by informants often able to manipulate political and administrative structures to suit their own agenda: thus is the state fractured by social realities.
Marco Meriggi's ‘The Local and the Global’ takes another look at The Birth of the Modern World and the associated literature showing, if anything, that the intellectual problem of defining ‘global history’ is far from advanced. Indeed, it is all too easy, taking the Bayly approach of giving scope to many centres and many cultures, to be reverting simply to a view that what happened in Europe (or a more generally construed ‘West’) by way of industrialisation, the growth of the market, scientific discovery, secularisation, the advance of the bureaucratic state, etc., are replicated elsewhere in the world, albeit on a different timetable and at different speeds. He argues that there is a risk that the homogeneity and homogenising of these processes, and their hegemonic role, are greatly overemphasised, even for Europe itself. A more sophisticated approach is called for in which movements for reform, revival and expansion of world religions have a place.
The remaining two essays cover Bayly's slighter late work: that by Maurizio Isabella explores the hybrid nature of Indian political ideas of liberalism advanced in the Wiles Lectures given in 2007 and published as Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2012), and Laura di Fiore discusses the collection of essays, Origins of Nationality in South Asia (1998) based in the main on the Radhakrishnan Lectures given in Oxford two years previously.
Bayly's range of academic activity made him more widely known than if, for instance, he had been typecast as an historian of India. Alongside the dozens of specialist articles and his densely written monographs, he considered it important to reach a wider public and inform them about a world beyond England and the ways in which, whether the English liked it or not, they were connected in shifting and unpredictable ways. His book Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (1989), commissioned for Longman's ‘Studies in Modern History’ (edited by John Morrill and David Cannadine), proved an invaluable entry point to world history for British sixth-formers, and was welcomed as a breath of fresh air by many history teachers and lay readers: he was surprised by the volume of personal correspondence the book generated.
The following year he played the leading part in a spectacular exhibition, The Raj: India and the British 1660–1947 held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Writing the forward to the catalogue (which would be reprinted later by Oxford University Press Delhi as ‘An Illustrated History of Modern India’) the Director of the Gallery commented that the exhibition would not have been possible without “the energy, enthusiasm and balanced scholarship of Dr Christopher Bayly”.
Altogether, the Italian scholars identify the main strands in Bayly's historical writing as being: the shift from a predominantly European perspective by locating powerful and free-flowing dynamisms in Asia and elsewhere; a broadening of the chronological scope of enquiry thus unsettling ideologically freighted divisions of time and making possible analysis of change over much longer periods; the use of non-official records and sources of information allowing a shift of emphasis from governments and high politics to influential free-standing organic, local structures; and the deployment of techniques and insights from across the whole range of the humanities and social sciences.
The essays in this slim volume are closely argued and the current state of scholarship in the field is documented in the footnotes in extraordinary detail. It remains wide open, though, how scholars in our time are to re-tell the histories of India, and imperialist and nationalist legacies, to make sense in our contemporary world. And just what does ‘globalisation’ mean? Will we understand it better refracted through the prism of race or gender, the environment or religion, or a reworking of class or some other cultural artefact? Some stories of the past, and its role in our present, will persist and retain their potency in their old form, but others call for radical reworking as time moves on and sensibilities change. Truth is many sided, and, as a nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian wit once wrote, to walk all round the polygon is a salutary exercise for the mind and an excellent antidote to bigotry.
