C. A. Bayly’s comprehensive study, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, (2004), questions orthodox historical notions of Western exceptionalism in order to demonstrate that the European and North American dominance, consolidated during the nineteenth century, was not the result of specific economic or political agency, but rather, the logical consequence of complex and interconnected global factors. “What were the driving forces?” he asks (2). “Why did the modern state develop at all?” (6). The author argues that the riddle of the modern has less to do with technology, reason and science than with urban living, specialization, smaller family units and a tendency to global uniformity in what he calls “bodily practice” regarding health, consumption patterns and dress, (6, 242). These phenomena gave rise to the bureaucratic state, patriotic nationalism and economic empire.

Europe emerged dominant not because it was more enlightened or more evolved, but because of stabilizing legal institutions, financial structures, and advances in war-making. The West was “better at killing people,” he says, (61). Freestanding, inalienable rights, independent of divinely-ordained monarchic favors, did not the cause liberal revolutions, but they were important symbols of modernity that would reshape the patterns of public discourse. Often perceived as secularist, the modern world refashioned religion for a new messianic mission to civilize, (351). Patriotism, Bayly says, was not the cause of military conflict, but its consequence; and passports came to define national allegiance to the bureaucratic state, (247). Paradoxically, though the state seemed to be above classes and factions, it was thoroughly penetrated and appropriated by them, (265). In spite of modern notions such as self-determination and universal dignity, landowning elites of the old system dug in. They were useful to bureaucrats for imposing order on a local level. Divine right faded into the past, but the illusion of scientific positivism guaranteed the right to rule. The powerful elites were Darwin’s fittest survivors.

The most relevant work for comparison, just in terms of scope, might be J. H. Elliott’s, Empires of the Atlantic World, (2006). Elliot narrates a very extensive and detailed account of Spanish and English colonization in the New World. It is a traditional view, based on the documentation provided by state bureaucracy. Bayly, though trapped in a similar corner, indicates the epistemological difficulty that historians have trying to understand the state by studying state archives. Elliot creates a convincing overview that must be read with an awareness of its silences regarding essential voices and hidden dynamics. To whom do those silenced voices belong, and where can reliable evidence of their versions be found? Bayly’s work suffers from similar silences. Elliot observes that citizens of the old order were, perhaps, incapable of imagining a universe not centered on a divinely ordained monarch, so, after 1770, they strove to remake the new order seem like the old. In a similar vein, Bayly speaks frequently of hybridization. Though focused on different time frames, both authors accurately identify consistent global patterns that conventional wisdom tends to miss. 

Bayly’s most persuasive argument is his insistence on the idea that the conventional West-to-East “diffusion model” of global modernity doesn’t fit the facts. While it might seem to justify continued Western geopolitical hegemony, it’s mistaken. On the other hand, the author’s broad brush-strokes might seem to force the unity of a narrative that was, in reality, more fundamentally chaotic. And yet, his intuitions are insightful, and his arguments have a certain plausible affirmability. The weakness of Bayly’s worldview is that he seems to treat the New World as merely a part of Europe’s vast available backwater. Indigenous communities would beg to differ.  Though very scholarly, witty and intelligently written, Bayly’s work is not intended as a primary source investigation. It is a comprehensive synthesis of secondary sources. It would be interesting to embark on primary research based on the assumption that global modernity and rational western ways have always been complex, dialectical processes of hybridization, not monolithic, fully formed ideas manufactured and packaged for export. This would make an excellent book for an undergraduate course. Taken chapter by chapter, and supplemented with some of the readings that Bayly mentions, it could provide an unparalleled grounding experience for the academic novice.