The Blackwell History of the World

General Editor: R. I. Moore

There is nothing new in the attempt to grasp history as a whole. To understand how humanity began and how it has come to its present condition is one of the oldest and most universal of human needs, expressed in the religious and philosophical systems of every civilization. But only in the last few decades has it begun to appear both necessary and possible to meet that need by means of a rational and systematic appraisal of current historical knowledge. Until the middle of the nineteenth century history itself was generally treated as a subordinate branch of other fields of thought and learning – of literature, rhetoric, law, philosophy or religion. When historians began at that time to establish its independence as a field of scholarship in its own right, with its own subject matter and its own rules and methods, they made it in practice not the attempt to achieve a comprehensive account of the human past but the history of Western Europe and of the societies created by European expansion and colonisation. In laying the scholarly foundations of their discipline they also reinforced the Enlightenment's belief in the advance of “civilization” and, more recently, of “Western civilization”. In this form, with relatively minor regional variations, it became the basis of the teaching of history almost everywhere for most of the twentieth century. Research and teaching of the histories of other parts of the world developed mainly in the context of area studies like those of ancient Greece and Rome, rooted in philology, and conducted through the exposition of the canonical texts of their respective languages.

While those approaches prevailed, world history as such remained largely the province of thinkers and writers principally interested in constructing theoretical or metaphysical systems. Only towards the end of the twentieth century did the community of academic historians begin to recognise it as a proper and even urgent field for the application of their knowledge and skills. The inadequacy of the traditional parameters of the discipline is now acknowledged, and the sense is growing that a world facing a common future of headlong and potentially catastrophic transformation needs its common history. The realisation of such a history has been delayed, however, by simple ignorance on the one hand – for the history of enormous stretches of space and time has until very recently been known not at all, or so patchily and superficially as not to be worth revisiting – and on the other by the lack of a widely acceptable basis upon which to organise and discuss what is nevertheless the enormous and enormously diverse knowledge that we have.

The first of those obstacles is now being rapidly overcome. There is almost no part of the world or period of its history that is not the object of energetic and sophisticated investigation by archaeologists and historians. The expansion of the horizons of academic history since the 1980s has been dramatic. The quality and quantity of historical research and writing have risen exponentially in each decade, and the advances have been most spectacular in some of the areas previously most neglected. The academics have not failed to share the results of their labours. Reliable and accessible, often brilliant, accounts are now readily available of regions, periods and topics that even 20 years ago were obscure to everyone but a handful of specialists. In particular, collaborative publication, in the form of volumes or sets of volumes in which teams of authors set forth, in more or less detail, their expert and up-to-date conclusions in the field of their research, has been a natural and necessary response to the growth of knowledge. Only in that way can non-specialists, at any level, be kept even approximately in touch with the constantly accelerating accumulation of information about the past.

Yet the amelioration of one problem exacerbates the other. It is truer than it has ever been that knowledge is growing and perspectives multiplying more quickly than they can be assimilated and recorded in synthetic form. We can now describe a great many more trees in a great deal more detail than we could before. It does not always follow that we have a better view of the wood. Collaboration has many strengths, but clarity, still less originality, of vision is rarely prominent among them. History acquires shape, structure, relevance – becomes, in the fashionable catchphrase, something for thinking with – by advancing and debating new suggestions about what past societies were like, how they worked and why they changed over long periods of time, how they resembled and why they differed from contemporaneous societies in other parts of the world, and how they interacted with one another. Such insights, like the sympathetic understanding without which the past is dead, are almost always born of individual creativity and imagination. That is why each volume in this series embodies the work and vision of a single author. Synthesis on such a scale demands learning, resolution and, not least, intellectual and professional courage of no ordinary degree. We have been singularly fortunate in finding scholars of great distinction who are willing to undertake it.

There is a wealth of ways in which world history can be written. The oldest and simplest view, that it is best understood as the history of contacts between peoples previously isolated from one another, from which (as some think) all change arises, is now seen to be capable of application since the earliest times. An influential alternative focuses upon the tendency of economic exchange to create self-sufficient but ever-expanding “worlds” which sustain successive systems of power and culture. Another seeks to understand the differences between societies and cultures, and therefore the particular character of each, by comparing the ways in which their values, social relationships and structures of power have developed. The rapidly emerging field of ecological history returns to a very ancient tradition of seeing interaction with the physical environment, and with other animals, at the centre of the human predicament, while insisting that its understanding demands an approach which is culturally, chronologically and geographically comprehensive. More recently still “Big History”, led by a contributor to this series, has begun to show how human history can be integrated with that not only of the natural but also of the cosmic environment, and better understood in consequence.

The Blackwell History of the World seeks not to embody any single approach, but to support them all, as it will use them all, by providing a modern, comprehensive and accessible account of the entire human past. Each volume offers a substantial overview of a portion of world history large enough to permit, and indeed demand, the reappraisal of customary boundaries of regions, periods and topics, and in doing so reflects the idiosyncrasies of its sources and its subjects, as well as the vision and judgement of its author. The series as a whole combines the indispensable narratives of very long-term regional development with global surveys of developments across the world, and of interaction between regions and what they have experienced in common, or visited upon one another, at particular times. Together, these volumes will provide a framework in which the history of every part of the world can be viewed, and a basis upon which most aspects of human activity can be compared across both time and space. A frame offers perspective. Comparison implies respect for difference. That is the beginning of what the past has to offer the future.

Professor Sir Christopher Bayly, LittD, FBA, the author of this volume, died in Chicago of a heart attack on 19 April 2015 at the age of 69. Bayly was the pre-eminent historian of India and the British Empire and a pioneer in the field of global history. He was also the first academic ever to be knighted “for services to history outside of Europe”. Chris's distinction was international, as the long list of his appointments and honours testifies, but his career was centred on St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was elected in 1970 to a Fellowship and College Lectureship in History and became Director of Studies in History. In 1981, Chris Bayly was appointed to Cambridge University's Smuts Readership in Commonwealth Studies, and thereafter he was appointed to a succession of posts in the Faculty of History, culminating in the Vere Harmsworth Professorship of Imperial and Naval History in 1992. At the time of his death, he also held concurrently professorships at Chicago, Copenhagen and Queen Mary University of London.

Chris was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to a family entangled with the recent history of Empire. He remembered childhood conversations with his London cockney grandfather, who had fought during the First World War in Egypt, Palestine and Turkey. His father had seen service all over the world as a merchant mariner, including on ships running copra from India. “So I had an early introduction to colonial and world history,” he would later say. The history Chris learnt at the Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells and as an undergraduate at Balliol, Oxford, in 1963, was broad in its intellectual horizons but strongly European in focus. The turn towards a career in Indian history came in 1965, when Chris embarked on a long vacation journey across land to India, passing through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Forced to avoid the Indian–Pakistani warzone, he travelled south to Karachi and caught a Shia pilgrimage boat to Basra. “I got a sense of India from the other side,” he recalled in a July 2014 interview. “Not dropping out of an aircraft. India in West Asia, and particularly the Muslim dimension. So that was a very formative experience.”

At St Antony's, his graduate college, Sarvepalli Gopal and Albert Hourani guided his reading in the histories of India and the Middle East; the supervisor of his doctoral thesis was Jack Gallagher (also of Balliol), who was then overseeing a transformation in British imperial history. Chris came to Cambridge in 1970 at the invitation of Eric Stokes, Smuts Professor of British Commonwealth History, who had been at St Catharine's College since 1963. The transfer to Cambridge was arranged, as Chris later recalled, in the strikingly relaxed way typical of those times: “Jack phoned Eric: ‘Eric, have you got a job there for this funny person called Bayly that I've got?’ He said: ‘Maybe we do’, and that was it.”

Eric Stokes was to be Chris's most important mentor. In the 1970s, Stokes was moving away from the issues of principle and ideology that had commanded the attention of his earlier work towards an approach to Indian history that stressed the importance of landholding structures and the pressures exerted on them by British systems of revenue management. An interest in the dynamic interaction between local elites and imperial governments would also be an abiding feature of Chris's work on India. Stokes's unpretentious and likeable scholarly persona was another inspiration. In a touching piece for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Chris found words for Stokes, who had died in 1981, that one might use of Chris himself: “His influence as a historian was accomplished not with domineering patronage, but through humour, self-deprecation, and intellectual inquisitiveness.”

Chris Bayly's books don't document results; they track intellectual journeys. “This book,” Chris writes at the opening of Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (1983), a study that transformed historical understanding of the impact of British rule in India, “grew out of a fascination with the rich pattern of commercial life still to be found in the tangled lanes of brass-smiths' stalls and ancient merchant houses which lay behind the waterfront of the city of Benares.” The stately waterfront mansions of the ghats of Benares were just a point of disembarkation. What interested him were the tangled lanes behind.

These steps away from the waterfront, into the recesses behind elite networks and smooth historiographical surfaces, can be traced in every book Chris wrote. Chris was acutely aware of the intricately layered quality of human societies. Again and again, he offers us vertiginous views through superimposed social textures. Nothing in what unfolds before our eyes is obvious, because everything is in motion. Clans and occupational fraternities coalesce into class-like structures; power changes hands: cosmopolitan oligarchs cede power to merchants; Nanakpanthi Khattris take over from their Islamicised caste fellows; Kannada merchants and Chettis slip into positions once occupied by Armenians and Jews. Chris saw a piece of agency, a spark of resilience and hope, in everyone who entered his field of vision.

This seething, ever-present mobility made it utterly impossible to think of India as something stagnant or passive, something to which history or empire simply happened. Chris's eye was fixed on those forces of self-organisation and self-reinvention that predated the arrival of the British and would survive their departure to shape the India of today.

Already in the earliest books on India, Chris had discerned parallels with peasant Egypt, small-town Meiji-era Japan and the striving professional classes of nineteenth-century China. These expansive reflections later fed into the two breakthrough books that shaped and deepened the new field of world history – Imperial Meridian and The Birth of the Modern World – establishing Chris as one of the foremost historians of his generation worldwide. Imperial Meridian (1989) marked a transition from highly textured work on the Indian subcontinent to a new kind of history focused on how the interactions between great imperial power complexes shaped and were shaped by processes of change within them. The most historiographically significant work in this mode was The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780–1914 (2004), to which Remaking the Modern World is the sequel.

The Birth of the Modern World not only did much to establish world history as a scholarly discipline but also altered the conceptual framework of the subject by de-centring the West. It forged a new kind of world history which reflected both an appreciative engagement with the work of other historians across the widest possible span of fast-changing disciplinary specialisms and an eagerness to build bridges with neighbouring fields. Anthropology was a subject that loomed especially large on Chris's intellectual horizons. There was of course a personal dimension to this encounter. Thirty-four years of marriage to Susan, an anthropologist of India and Vietnam, took shape as a life of perpetual travel and reunion, sustained and nourished by joyfully impassioned argument, and keen enthusiasm for one another's work.

In many ways Chris took an anthropologist's as well as an historian's eye to his work in India. At a time when many other historians regarded official state archives as the only important source, Chris was searching out the privately archived north Indian collections of commercial family record books from which he derived the most important insights in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. Once deciphered, these complex texts allowed him to reconstruct the social and religious life of the merchant networks and thus to peer into worlds whose inner life had left little trace on the grand narratives of official reportage. What Chris found most attractive in the anthropology he read was its practitioners' insistence that the intimate and the everyday are matters of profound importance for a sympathetic understanding of the world's people and places. He responded with particular keenness to the insights of those anthropologists who brought to the exploration of social and cultural life in both familiar and far-flung settings a recognition that human existence is experienced dynamically, in a world of continual flux and change. Indeed, he was an important contributor to anthropology's own debates about how to do justice to the complexities of change and transformation in a discipline once thought to be equipped only to chart the specifics of the here and now, as observed by the intensive methods of ethnographic participant-observation.

One of Chris's critical early forays into new history writing reflected precisely this excitement about the dialogue with anthropology. This was the essay on Indian cloth entitled “The origins of swadeshi (home industry)”, which he published in 1986 in the ground-breaking joint volume The Social Life of Things edited by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. Still widely read within and beyond both history and anthropology, Chris's account of the remarkable array of meanings ascribed to the production and consumption of items, ranging from the sumptuous shawls ceremonially exchanged by rulers and courtiers in India's precolonial princedoms to Gandhi's famous khadi homespun cotton, charts the subtleties of Indian taste, choice and culture as matters of economic, political and moral initiative and in no sense a reflection of uncontested or inert cultural givens. His writings on Indian temple and trading cities, on the surprising involvement in early colonial economic life of north India's networks of Hindu spiritual ascetics and his explorations of Hindu and Muslim statecraft in the transition from precolonial to colonial rule have also been appreciatively read by anthropologists.

At the heart of The Birth of the Modern World was a narrative of convergence. The book opened with a powerful evocation of the diversity of bodily practices across the world's societies at the beginning of the modern era; the nineteenth century, Bayly argued, saw the rise of global uniformities in the structures and articulations of states, religions and economic life, visible not only in great institutions but also in modes of dress and the consumption of food. The book shrank the distance between “the West” and “the rest”; industrialisation, urbanisation, nationalism and the development of the state were for him ultimately global processes, notwithstanding local specificities. The book registered moments of heightened difference and antagonism, but for Chris, these were always subordinate phenomena. Antagonisms flourished precisely because societies were becoming more connected and more alike.

Chris's account allowed for what he described as “the brute fact of western domination”, but his book also stressed the limited and temporary character of that domination and insisted on the “interdependence” of diverse processes of change. No one who reads this book can fail to be impressed by the subtlety and lucidity of the reasoning, the breadth of compass, the attention to reciprocity in political, economic and social relationships and the well-oiled analytical gears that enabled Chris to travel elegantly between the local and the global.

And even as he enlarged the scope of his attention, Chris continued to generate fresh insights into Indian history. Empire and Information (1996) offered a compelling account of British intelligence gathering in India between 1780 and 1870, showing how “native informants” recruited by the British actively shaped the process. In analogous fashion, Origins of Nationality in South Asia (1998) and Recovering Liberties (2011) elucidated how Indians responded as autonomous agents to Western nationalism and liberal political and economic thought.

Chris's books bore the imprint of wide and humane interests; they were also methodologically eclectic. As Richard Drayton, former Research Fellow at St Catharine's College and Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London, put it in an obituary for the Guardian: Chris Bayly had “an astonishing capacity to respond quickly to new perspectives and had the knack, in particular, of grafting historical ideas from one specialism to another. He read widely across the social sciences and had a magpie's eye for something brilliant in another discipline.” Conversation was a crucial part of the gathering and comparing that drove Chris's historical thinking: when discussions with students or colleagues got interesting, Chris would often pull out a small crumpled notebook and start scribbling down ideas.

As these observations may suggest, Chris lived in his work. Not for it, but in it. The “Bayly mahal”, as he sometimes affectionately called the home he and his wife Susan founded when they married in 1981, was a place of conversation over work and wine, a conversation anchored in shared passions, complementary interests and pride in each other's achievements. And C3 on Main Court, the room Chris occupied for decades at St Catharine's College, was much more than an office. Eloquent objects were gathered there. The model ship his father had built. The tall eighteenth-century Venetian rosewood slippers decorated in mother of pearl – witnesses to the cultural links between northern Italy, the Ottoman Empire and China. The beautiful Gandhara head of the Buddha, 1500 years old and carved by Greek and South Asian artisans in a style native to eastern Afghanistan – of all the things Chris and Susan had found together, this was his favourite.

It was in C3 that so many conversations happened, conversations that never failed to take Chris's guests to new places. And this was not just a matter of the sparks that were always falling from Chris's forge, but also his other gifts – gifts of unassuming and attentive friendship. Just a few days after his death, one of Chris's former St Catharine's graduate students, Jayeeta Sharma, wrote: “I will never forget how awkward I felt, as a provincial student from a little place in north-eastern India, how he helped me to find my moorings, with C3 as a welcoming, warm and beautiful space for talk, laughter, and hospitality.” Words like this remind us of why Chris was admired and loved in equal measure.

After he had declined the offer by his former students to produce a Festschrift, a conference was organized in Varanasi (Benares) in January 2015 to honour his achievements. Here one could see Chris at ease and happy in the setting of the civilization that had absorbed and rewarded his attention for so many years. It is hard to imagine a more fitting acknowledgement: it was on the stone bathing wharves (ghats) of this beautiful, thronging city that the young Chris Bayly had begun his research into the mercantile elites of northern India. He was probably the first scholar to make use of the account books (bahi khatas) that all significant mercantile families had kept for centuries. In these, Chris found not just a meticulous record of revenues and expenditures but also entries documenting the constellation of relationships and affiliations that sustained the economic and moral life of merchant networks across much of the subcontinent. Alongside the double entry bookkeeping were salutations to various deities, lists of temple accoutrements and accounts of expenditures on worship, bathing in the Ganges and gifts to Brahmins. And what struck him most as he worked with those difficult, handwritten texts was what he saw and heard when he lifted his gaze from the faded pages and observed what the banker merchant families were doing all around him, especially the visits they hosted from the naked sadhu holy men still consigning their brotherhoods' assets to the trusted men of business whose forbears their own precursors had dealt with in centuries past. As Chris himself put it, “Notions of credit, piety and commercial security were closely tied together.” A nexus connecting commerce and religion announced itself here that would be a central theme in his subsequent work.

Connections of this kind were the stuff that Chris's historical thinking was made of. He was personally a sceptic in religious matters. Yet, his books are striking for their integration of religious identities and forms of social mobilisation into larger narratives of transformation. He respected the Marxist tradition in historical writing for its deep interest in processes of social change, but he never allowed social, economic or political categories to occlude the agency of individuals seeking to make their way in a difficult and changing world.

Christopher Clark
Susan Bayly
March 2018