Ambitious new book captures the 19th century's lasting impact on our world
An ambitious new book has deftly captured the 19th century's lasting impact on our planet, from the social to the economic and political, writes Ben Richardson
The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century
by Jürgen Osterhammel (translated by Patrick Camiller)
Princeton University Press
4.5 stars
This is not a book for wimps. It's not just the historical significance of Jürgen Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Your reviewer nearly broke his nose after losing control of the brick-sized, 1,192-page tome.
It's weighty in every sense of the word. Indeed, every word carries the weight that comes with a wildly ambitious - Osterhammel calls it "impossible" - attempt to draw together the threads of that extraordinary "long century". The result - being published next month - is an epic, masterly and sprawling mosaic of the age that built on, if only as reaction, foundations laid down by the Enlightenment.
For China, the 19th century was a disaster - its ancient institutions buckled under pressure from Europe's hegemonistic ascendancy
Having torn the god of superstition from his pulpit, humanity exploded into action - not just shattering centuries-old political and social structures (starting from the American and French revolutions to the colonialism that engulfed Asia's dynasties and overran Africa, to the industrialisation and globalisation of war and revolt at the epoch's bloody finale), but technological and economic ones too.
We learnt to leverage the earth's store of carbon - using coal to turn steam engines that were harnessed to looms, to ships' pistons, to railway engines. The carbon age gave us unprecedented mobility and the industrial economy; but we needed an equal revolution in ideas - new ways to work, to finance, to trade, to govern - to reap the benefits of new technological efficiency.