ABSTRACT
The three decades either side of 1800 have been identified as a pivotal moment that crystallised an emergent global political-economic system of unprecedented density and complexity and that cemented Britain’s centrality to that system. For Britain, Bayly notes that from the nadir defined by the loss of the North American colonies in the American War of Independence (1776–83), the British empire revived and came to control a quarter of the world’s population and a third of world trade by 1820. As such, the so-called ‘second’ British empire in the east came to dwarf the first British empire in the west within a generation of the latter’s loss. 1 And the British empire, viewed in a larger perspective, was part of a far broader process which consolidated and connected trade and political power at the global scale. Identifying this as an age of crisis, Bayly has argued that it is in these decades that we can locate the birth of our modern, global world system: ‘contemporary changes were so rapid, and interconnected with each other so profoundly, that this period could reasonably be described as “the birth of the modern world” … Modernity, then, was not only a process, but also a period which began at the end of the eighteenth century and has continued up to the present day in various forms’. The shock waves of an age of crisis reverberated around the world through networks forged by what Bayly terms ‘archaic globalisation’, but their outcome was to build a new, more highly interconnected and interdependent global system, the system of modern globalisation. 2
