A World Connecting: 1870-1945 (A History of the World, Band 5) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emily S. Rosenberg is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

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Introduction: Emily S. Rosenberg

Over the period from 1870 to 1945 the world became both a more familiar and a stranger place. Fast ships, railroads, telegraph lines, inexpensive publications, and film all reached into hinterlands and erased distance. The exchange of people and products accelerated, while the fascination with traveling around and describing foreign areas—long evident in human history—reached new heights. Jules Verne’s famous 1873 book Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) imagined the new age, and many others tried their hand. Chinese official Li Gui described his trip around the world in 1876; King Kalakaua of Hawai’i claimed distinction as the first ruling monarch to accomplish a global tour in the early 1880s; American journalist Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (“Nellie Bly”) scored a speed record for circling the globe in 1889; and Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore set a more deliberative pace in visitations that took him across the Pacific in 1916 and the Atlantic in the early 1920s. As the numbers of travelers grew exponentially in the first half of the twentieth century, accounts and images of distant places multiplied and became accessible to all but the most remote of the world’s inhabitants. Yet the very possibility of familiarity also bred strangeness. New connections highlighted all kinds of regional differences, and the awareness of difference could promote suspicion and repulsion perhaps even more easily than it facilitated understanding and communication.

This volume focuses on an era in world history marked by ever greater global interconnectedness—and by the excitement and anxiety, hope and violence that accompanied the complex mix often called modernity. Drawing on interpretations and approaches of the past few decades of historical scholarship, it provides both general readers and specialists with a thematic overview. Its five chapters each highlight a particular theme: modern state-building, imperial encounters, flows of migration, commodity chains, and transnational social and cultural networks. Together, these themes collectively explore the tensions between the intensifying global interconnectedness and the attempts to stabilize, control, or shape the effects of sweeping change. The new age brought flux and attempts to ward off its consequences; it brought disintegration of old orders and efforts to create and rationalize new ones.

There are, of course, many ways to present overarching patterns in world history. Some histories unfold chronologically around large events such as global wars and economic depressions. Others slice the world into geographical areas such as Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. While not neglecting chronology and geography, the chapters in this book are focused around themes that extend over both time and place and play out often unpredictably according to historically grounded circumstances. Breaking away from a common chronological spine or an area-by-area approach can help reveal the overall dynamic between outreach and containment—between flux and attempts to stabilize—that characterized and gave variability to world history in this era.

Specifically, our chapters highlight both the diverse and interactive regional and global networks of the era and the simultaneous efforts to define territorial borders. The first two chapters, on the emergence of modern statehood and on efforts to build and to resist empires, emphasize the problematic of formulating and policing geographical boundedness. How and with what consequences did modern states and empires give shape to this period? The final three chapters explore the transnational flows of people, products, capital, technologies, and affiliations that cut across bounded spaces. In a world in which these flows increasingly touched and changed people’s lives, things fell apart and also came together differently. The organization of the topics in this volume, then, emphasizes an ever-changing dyad of enclosure and permeability. Presenting the multiple processes of disintegration and reintegration that lie at the center of histories of national states, empires, demographic patterns, economic connections, and cultural affinities provides the major contribution of this volume.