Commenting on Christopher Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 is a bittersweet exercise.Footnote ¹ My assignment for this forum is to consider Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 from the vantage point of China studies. I will do so by framing my remarks with respect to some of the ways this major South Asia historian took his expertise into larger projects, the last of which is the volume under discussion.

Bayly and I first met at a conference at the Library of Congress in 2003 where we discussed over a beer the need to encourage more discussion between China and South Asia historians, as these two well-developed, non-Western historiographies rarely engaged each other directly. His affirmation of the promise of such meetings helped bring a number of China and South Asia scholars together, including Ken Pomeranz, the late John Richards, and David Washbrook. From one of those discussions emerged a 2009 article on law in this journal by the late Jonathan Ocko and David Gilmartin.Footnote ² Thanks to Bayly's suggestions, he and I were involved in several projects together, including A Concise Companion to History, edited by Ulinka Rublack, and History, Historians, and Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue, a volume he edited with fellow Cambridge historian Simon Szreter, as well as economist Vijayendra Rao and sociologist Michael Woolcock, both of the World Bank.Footnote ³ I will return to this second volume and what I see as its relationship to Remaking the Modern World later in this essay. In A Concise Companion to History, Bayly's essay on global history recounts the challenges posed by persistent preferences for narratives of nation-states, noting the contributions of politicians and the media to fostering the long-lasting attachments to such narratives that make global histories so difficult to craft. For that volume, he suggested that I write on “causation,” an issue that has long vexed historians but had become methodologically buried by the discipline's cultural and linguistic turns well before the Concise Companion appeared in 2011.

In The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914, Bayly states in the introduction, “Most professional historians still have at the back of their minds the question of ‘why things changed.’”Footnote ⁴ He suggested that world history needs to attend to the relations between politics and economic activity, noting, “In the broadest terms, then, historical development seems to have been determined by a complex parallelogram of forces constituted by economic changes, ideological constructions, and mechanisms of the state.”Footnote ⁵ He certainly retained a commitment to considering causation in Remaking the Modern World, as displayed in this book's introduction in a section on “The Motors of Change.” Here we find economics continues to matter as “capital” joined by religion and communication as key elements in his account of twentieth-century historical change. They shape the character of warfare and violence more generally, as they also create possibilities for personal cultural beliefs and social practices. Together with population growth, religion and the rapid expansion of communications affect the ways in which nationalism, democracy, and capital continue to act as “the clearest motors of change” (pp. 10–11).

Though Remaking the Modern World covers a huge subject, it is also a markedly personal book. Whereas the great French historian Fernand Braudel's last book project was a deep engagement with his national homeland, Bayly's final work is personal despite its global scale because his own voice as a reflective individual who lived through a good portion of the twentieth century fills the pages with a counterpoint to his main narrative anchored in large processes of historical change. Herein lies a tension between a history shaped by profound forces and a human meditation on the twentieth century as lived experience. As a historian of the British Empire and of South Asia who broadened his vision to take on the challenges of writing global history, he was understandably best able to manage the interplay of large-scale processes of historical change and human experiences for the people, places, and pasts that he knew best. As someone who came to writing in far more modest ways in the field of global history, I can imagine the difficulties he likely faced in making choices about what to include and how to write about the subjects he chose. When tackling a subject as large as a global history of a long twentieth century, inevitably much ends up being left out due to an unavoidable mix of materials that do not quite fit and knowledge any particular historian lacks when tackling a subject as large as a global history of a long twentieth century. I therefore offer the following remarks as possible supplements that might be integrated intellectually even if they are possibly unwieldly within the specific kind of thematic narrative that Bayly chose to write.

Remaking the Modern World brings into view certain kinds of connections and comparisons at a global level. This scale of history writing makes possible some suggestions regarding what a focus on world regional and national levels adds to further enrich global history, as Bayly himself no doubt would have acknowledged. In other books he wrote on local dimensions of regional politics in colonial India, the social and economic history of North India in the era of British expansion, information and communication in India as the British formed their colonial empire, and works on the British Empire more generally before turning to writing two volumes on world history. As he was well aware of issues of historical causation in each of these spatial scales of history, I believe he would have enjoyed a conversation about the types of causation present across different spatial scales within and beyond different world regional contexts, one of the subjects I addressed in the essay on historical causation that he suggested I write for A Concise Companion to History.

The first half of Remaking the Modern World, comprising chapters 1–9, is centered on politics, first across world regions between 1900 and 1930 and then among authoritarian and democratic regimes. Returning to a narrative format from the Great Depression through World War II to the first postwar decade, the final two chapters of the first half of the book complete Bayly's chronological coverage by addressing an era of American hegemony from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, followed by what he calls a “tipping point” in world politics during the 1980s. The second half of the book includes thematic chapters on communication, the individual, the arts, and religion, before returning to the subjects of war and violence, the character of international politics, and the legacies of empire. The book closes with chapters on demographic pressures on the environment and on a juxtaposition of economic integration and political fragmentation.

How does the twentieth-century history of China fit into the framework of Remaking the Modern World? China certainly slots well into the first half of the book as one of those countries in world regions beyond Europe affected by empire, capital, and nationalism. In considering the first three decades of the twentieth century for China in a chapter 2 section titled “Decentering the War in East Asia: China and Japan, Nationalism and the New Imperialism,” Bayly notes that the direct effects of World War I in China mattered far less than the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 or the May Fourth Movement of 1919. These observations situate China in the global politics of the era. As Bayly's focus is on China's political and economic connections to other countries, specifically domestic issues matter mainly when they are affected by foreign connections. In chapter 3, he puts the Nationalist state under Chiang Kai-shek into comparative perspective among authoritarian regimes with modernizing military leaders. Parallel to Iran, Turkey, and Iraq in the Middle East, China in East Asia is subject to early twentieth-century authoritarianism. Bayly notes that the growth of authoritarian states represented different sets of interests in different societies; their ideologies were informed by religious arguments and beliefs in ways that created distinctions among them. These insights suggest that much can be learned by comparing the regional contexts and domestic agendas of these different authoritarian regimes.

I offer one important regional contrast to suggest some elements of an approach to key features of China's transition from empire to nation state. The early twentieth-century states of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey were fashioned from pieces of the former Safavid and Ottoman empires by a combination of domestic and foreign political actors. The political leaders of the early twentieth-century Chinese Republic, in contrast, made claims to much of the territory of the former Qing empire on behalf of the Chinese people; however limited those claims may have been in practice, the principle of sovereignty over large portions of the fallen Qing empire was subsequently embraced and effectively acted upon by the People's Republic after 1949. From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, China can be considered the only nation-state creating sovereignty over most of the realm of a former territorial empire, relying in no small part upon political practices related to those employed in an earlier era. The countries, whose similarities of authoritarianism Bayly highlights, entered the twentieth century coming out of different histories and faced distinctive possible futures as their world regions were hardly the same as China's; what became the domestic challenges and opportunities of each concerned only portions of former empires.

I believe that three features of Chinese governance established in imperial times mattered for the twentieth-century national state's approaches to and aspirations for governing this particular former empire. First, Chinese political leaders developed bureaucratic capacities to implement a governance agenda by deploying a mix of material, moral, and coercive techniques beginning a millennium before the twentieth century. Secondly, state ideology of the past millennium envisioned official-elite relations highlighting shared values and interests regarding social order and the ways in which such order could be achieved, maintained, and when lost, recovered. A third practice worth noting is the recurring use of political campaigns to mobilize people and resources through and beyond the bureaucracy, especially beginning in the eighteenth century; these included river-dredging projects, rebuilding granary reserves, and assembling the scholarship of the empire on important subjects as well as proscribing publications deemed disrespectful to the Manchu rulers. Twentieth-century Chinese political leaders fashioned bureaucracies by drawing upon earlier principles and practices, making changes with important foreign influences, to be sure, as they did so. No doubt one of the most important changes was the model of a one-party state begun under the Nationalists after 1927. Official relations with new kinds of twentieth-century elites certainly differed from those typical of earlier centuries, but officials retained related expectations for elites to support state goals defining political power. Finally, political campaigns were not a twentieth-century invention, but an extension and transformation that mobilized elites and common people for larger and deeper projects of economic and social transformation, especially after 1949. In a manner that strikes me as at least somewhat similar to what we can see as principles and practices of democratic representation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western societies reworking ideas and institutions guiding the negotiations of early modern era European rulers with their aristocratic, clerical, and urban elites, the political campaigns of twentieth-century China also have historical antecedents.

From a global vantage point, Bayly very reasonably highlights political connections and comparisons, showing China's early twentieth-century political issues in terms of connections to global political events and the country's political regime as one of the several authoritarian regimes found across the world. Complementing this level of observation are those insights gained at more limited spatial scales. Rather than seeing this shift of focus solely as one from global to national, putting China's imperial past into comparative perspective alerts us to the fact that China alone among territorial empires in various parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia present before the twentieth century became a nation-state. In the early modern and modern eras, when Europe was politically fragmented and moving towards a system of competitive nation-states within a world region, China was in spatial and demographic scale already a world region that had repeatedly formed as an empire. The moves towards economic and political integration in the Europe of the late twentieth century has created a European Union that now comes closer than any other European polity to achieving the spatial and demographic scales of China since the era of the Han and Roman empires. With a population and territory obviously far larger than that of any single European nation-state, the EU faces governance challenges associated with scale akin to those long confronted by the Chinese but with different sets of political principles, practices, and preferences. Some of these salient differences may prove durable despite the similarity of some of their governance challenges within their world regions and the increasing number of challenges they share as part of larger global challenges, perhaps most especially those regarding the relationships between the economy and the environment. If so, we may wish to look for clues to identifying possible futures through a deeper understanding of earlier histories. Such comparative exercises could help us put twentieth-century China into a global history, building upon the one Bayly offers us.

In the next two chapters of Remaking the Modern World, Bayly makes three major points concerning the first half of the twentieth century—democracy made strides across the world; Western leaders made misjudgments regarding their economic policies; and a third age of imperialism occurred during and after World War I involving the Japanese in Asia, the Italians in East Africa, and the Germans in Eastern Europe. China fits within this set of themes as the object of Japanese imperialism; the point about Western leaders formulating problematic economic policies does not concern China, while whatever forward march democracy was making in some other world regions, it did not step very confidently into Chinese politics. If we seek to place China of this period into Bayly's twin trios of “empire, nation, and capital” and “democracy, nationalism, and capital,” we could consider how China was an empire that became a nation or at least was a country in which many people developed a strong sense of nationalism. Democratic institutions and ideology lost out to concerns for order led by authoritarian government, including the twentieth-century development of a one-party state well before the Communists established rule over the country in 1949. Capital, especially British and Japanese, certainly entered China on a significant scale; joined by domestic capital, new light industrial enterprises emerged in several Chinese cities. In the case of the area around Shanghai, these changes built on a long-existing set of market institutions and commercial activities to contribute to what proved a precarious prosperity because of the growing threat of Japanese military invasion. Yet, the many other parts of China, where thin resource bases had been depleted and populations lacked the capital and technologies increasingly available in a few Chinese urban sites, faced far more dire straits as Japanese armies invaded the Chinese mainland in 1937.

Bayly covers World War II and political conditions for the decade thereafter in chapters 6 and 7. He importantly stresses the world regional character of the war, noting China's World War II was largely a conflict with Japan and thus distinct from the European and Atlantic war that pitted Germany and its allies against other European countries and the United States. In chapter 6, Bayly offers a chronological sketch of World War II and then traces the political, economic, social, and moral consequences he sees affecting countries across different world regions. In chapter 7, he considers what he calls the “small wars” that continued after World War II, including those in Africa, between Israel and Arab countries, and in Asia. The three-paragraph assessment of the Chinese Civil War acknowledges, “In many ways the most momentous of this melee of post-war conflicts scattered around the fringes of the great battlegrounds of Europe and the Soviet Union was the Chinese Civil War of 1946–1949.” His markers of significance have less to do with China domestically than a larger geopolitical picture on regional and global scales—the civil war brought the Cold War into Asia and “indirectly precipitated the Korean War” (p. 125).

From the vantage point of China as a country—and the significance of this country in demographic and spatial terms on the scale of Europe as a world region—the Civil War was momentous for the possibilities for historical change that opened up after 1949. The first thirty years of the People's Republic do not fit into chapter 8's account of global history from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, which highlights American hegemony and colonialism's final years. These major features of the period's global history do not directly include China, but rather serve to remind us that Chinese problems and possibilities during this period were largely conceived and confronted by Chinese leaders pursuing their dreams in a world largely beyond American hegemony and outside colonial rule. China does appear in the conclusion of chapter 7, where Bayly contrasts Western scientific advances in open societies with conditions in the Communist world and its purges and suppression of opposition. Mao is further noted for his efforts at leveling society (p. 161). China specialists who study the first thirty years of the People's Republic are of course also very concerned with the conditions of China as a Communist country under the leadership of a revolutionary leader aspiring at multiple moments to fostering dramatic social change through political campaigns that in crucial ways were intended to substitute for both the routine and the extraordinary efforts that could be mounted by a party-state bureaucracy of the kind that existed in China during the 1950s and 1960s. Some specialists, however, have also evaluated how China developed economically in the three decades following the mid-twentieth century, when the country was certainly largely insulated from either beneficial or harmful effects of “capital.”

Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen, with Jean Drèze, has observed ways in which socialist China was ahead of democratic India according to key indicators of social well-being, including rates of literacy and life expectancy.Footnote ⁶ Some specialists on Chinese economic development have noted that the dramatic growth occurring in the economic reform era beginning in the 1980s was made possible in part by advances in water control, infrastructure, and agricultural technologies made in the three previous decades of Communist rule.Footnote ⁷ Such observations by no means negate the utterly grim consequences of the human and natural disasters of the famine years following the Great Leap Forward or the twisted and tortuous extent of suffering enabled by Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but they do encourage us to remember the multiple features of historical change in China during the post–World War II years when China does not figure in Remaking the Modern World beyond the Communist excesses that took place. To consider what the Communist Party and state aimed to achieve and the consequences, both positive and negative, of those efforts reminds us that the political metric of judging regimes according to how democratic or authoritarian they are does not adequately prepare us for what they substantively do or choose not to do.

To understand China's political economy in the period when the country became quite isolated from the global forces of capital and American hegemony considered by Bayly, I would suggest the goal of achieving power and wealth, first formulated in the late nineteenth century, was also pursued in the 1950s. Striving for industrialization, principally to make the state militarily strong and its country safe, required extracting resources out of agriculture to pay for industrialization, even as assuring the material security of the agricultural producers remained a chronic concern echoing a priority long predating Communist rule. My stress on seeking at least some of the reasons for Chinese economic policy choices in past principles and practices stems from a sense that we can at best only poorly explain why the Chinese, or for that matter policy makers in other non-Western countries, made the choices they did, without such an understanding, a theme I discussed regarding the subject of social spending in the essay I contributed to History, Historians, and Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue. Bayly's own chapter in that volume was a clearheaded commentary on a very influential article by economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, which suggests the crucial importance of institutions of Western origin to subsequent possibilities for improving material welfare.Footnote ⁸ Bayly undertakes “a historical investigation of how, when and why indigenous people appropriated, adapted, absorbed, and often totally reconstituted European-style institutions in the light of their own mental and material capacities.”Footnote ⁹ After presenting Indian actors and their approaches and contrasting them with what others have said about indigenous actors in colonial Africa, Bayly explains why a dialogue between historians and both model-building social scientists and model-using policy makers is important for what historians bring to the table. “Historians build up larger structures of argument from carefully contextualized special cases, or local and regional studies.”Footnote ¹⁰ They serve as “useful checks” on broader arguments advanced by other kinds of analysis. Bayly makes clear in this article how much he cared about causal forces contributing to globally significant changes that have their origins in regionally specific context with regionally specific actors.

In his presentation of a global “tipping point” in chapter 9 of Remaking the Modern World, Bayly offers an assessment of Chinese political changes after 1979. The “tipping point” occurred for Bayly in the “long 1980s” from the first active revolt against what Bayly calls “semi-Westernised autocrats” (p. 163) in the Iranian revolution of 1979 through the collapse of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe. He marks the “the last phase of decolonization” with the South African government giving up apartheid in 1990. The 1980s were also the era when Ronald Reagan led the United States in ideological lockstep with Margaret Thatcher in Britain on a march toward a neoliberal global economy, as several countries on the continent of Europe prepared to move from a common market to a more complex form of political union. Within this set of changes occurring globally, Bayly characterizes changes in 1980s China in a section entitled “China and East Asia: A Revolution Contained.” For Bayly, the popular movement demanding more democracy culminating in what he refers to as the “Tiananmen Square incident of 1989” ended up leading in the early 1990s to a kind of state capitalism replete with a new middle class benefiting from the development of the export economy sector. He suggests that the persistence of fears of civil war and foreign intervention led to a politics quite separate from the new democracies that emerged in the same years in both South Korea and Taiwan. While this evaluation helps us situate China within a spectrum of authoritarian and democratic regimes at the same time as it notes China's changed relationship to capital, it is necessarily more limited in locating these Chinese developments within more local contexts in which the agency of actors can be recovered as they made choices that were causally consequential, even if not always intentionally so.

Remaking the Modern World notes the presence of varied local contexts in chapter 9's assessment of a global “tipping point”:

For scholars who read journals like the Journal of Asian Studies, one of our principal challenges for topics in the modern and contemporary eras is to address the ways in which global ideologies engage more local ones. I am suggesting in these remarks that these labors should include those that take seriously the possibility that local settings are anchored in histories that enable expressions of certain priorities and possibilities distinctive to some people in that country or world region.

The subjects that deserve attention in this context very much include political economy, a subject that spans what twentieth-century scholarship has more often than not split into subjects central to the disciplines of economics and political science. This epistemological move frames Bayly's understanding of capitalism and liberalism as distinct topics. At the same time, I wonder if it does not also follow what many of the histories after the cultural and linguistic turn have done in leaving political economy to the large, impersonal forces of a Marxist-inflected understanding of the modern era. If we take seriously the priorities and passions that historical agents brought to their decision making about matters of political economy and explore how their views are shaped by perspectives partially constructed from their personal and national histories, we can possibly identify reasons or causes for why they made the choices they did and why these decisions had the consequences that end up making history more generally.

The second half of Remaking the Modern World has far less to say directly about China than the first half. It moves from a chronological narrative highlighting geopolitical themes embedded in a concern about the character of political regimes and the effects of powerful economic actors to chapters on communication, the individual, the arts, and religion, followed by a return to issues of war and violence in the context of international politics and the legacies of empire. While a China studies specialist could ponder the possible significance of China's fleeting presence in much of the book's second half, I will complete this commentary with some reflections on China's early twenty-first-century global position in terms of the themes of the book's final two chapters concerning the environmental challenges of population growth and a juxtaposition of economic integration and political fragmentation characterizing the world he saw at the end of his life.

I begin by considering the closing sentences of chapter 16, “The Shadow of Empire in the Modern World.” After noting the persistence of the colonial legacy in South Africa, Bayly goes on to write:

For Bayly, China's economic advance disrupts the persistent power of colonization in Africa. Other observers have highlighted both positive and negative impacts, potential and actual, of the rapid and large-scale expansion of Chinese capital, technology, and influence in Africa and other world regions.Footnote ¹¹ While Bayly suggests ways in which China's forging new economic relations with Africa blunted the enduring legacy of European colonialism, others have posed the possibility that China's intent toward and likely impacts on African economies may be little different than those already visited upon the continent by capitalism and colonialism.

China-Africa economic relations have become one of the many components to the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) announced by Chairman Xi Jinping in the autumn of 2013 as the “One Belt One Road Initiative.” Placed in a global economic history perspective, the Belt Road Initiative has the potential to reconfigure the contours of the twenty-first-century global economy. In the briefest of terms, the BRI potentially promises some greater degree of Afro-Eurasian economic integration of a kind that was first achieved in the late nineteenth century for an Atlantic-centered global economy and was expanded by the creation of a Pacific-center within the global economy that linked American and Asian economies so closely in the late twentieth century. The relevance of these developments in Remaking the Modern World is minimal since capital as a motor of change is considered at a general and often abstract level, unattached to the more particular ideologies and institutions of global political economy for which China's BRI may (or may not) prove a prod for consequential changes in the future.

The BRI can be related to the concerns of the final two chapters of Remaking the Modern World, namely those of environmental stresses stemming from population growth increasingly viewed as dangerous in the late twentieth century and the simultaneous economic integration and political fragmentation of the early twenty-first century. China's trade and investment in Africa and Latin America have made possible the import of mineral resources and agricultural products much needed to sustain the country's industrial and postindustrial economic growth. Mineral resources are quite directly natural resources that are essentially finite in nature; this unavoidable fact has created the demand globally for postcarbon technologies that will enable people to survive the end of the industrial era founded upon the exploitation of fossil fuels. The agricultural products China imports have other natural resource implications, in particular those of the embodied water content of crops grown elsewhere for animal or human consumption in China. Issues of water quality and quantities more generally have become important global issues, and China's own water issues are especially acute, as they have been exacerbated by rapid, and in retrospect sometimes reckless, late twentieth-century industrialization. The environmental concerns Bayly discusses and relates most directly to population growth include as key elements questions of how human beings can create sustainable development, which is an issue concerning multiple relationships between economy and environment. Once again, this concern can lead us to the subject of history and development policy that Bayly helped promote, as it promises the relevance of past practices as potential sources for marking present problems and fostering future possibilities.

Turning to the last chapter of Remaking the Modern World, Bayly's observations on economic integration and political fragmentation may already have become dated in terms of a present that is significantly different from the global political economy of April 2015, when he passed away. As a product of deliberate economic policy, the American president elected in 2016 has strived to dismantle both the architecture of global economic integration and the collaborative efforts to manage economic impacts on climate change. In addition to the reversals of political fragmentation that Bayly noted, we increasingly see challenges to political integration in Europe that could further change the possibilities for economic integration. We have become more aware of the uncertain directions in which political and economic changes can lead.

The making of the modern world has long been understood to have been the product of the twin processes of global capitalist development and nation-state formation. Concerns about economy and environment put issues of political order and economic activities in a new global context unappreciated by most observers for much of the modern era. The kinds of coordination conceived amidst recognition of different particular interests and beliefs that can motivate competition and conflict, at least as easily as cooperation and collaboration, will likely have to transcend the ideas and institutions that previous generations have developed and relied upon to organize their lives, including the diverse political and economic foundations of modern life that came into existence in the nineteenth century.

After writing a book in which he presented his important interpretation of a global nineteenth century, Christopher Bayly skillfully presents in Remaking the Modern World how that nineteenth-century world was extended and transformed in the twentieth century. He has given us much to ponder and to build upon as we consider what our twenty-first-century planet might become.