Imperial Meridian : The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (Studies in Modern History)

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Summary: One of the great historians of our age
Review: IMPERIAL MERIDIAN is the most important synthetic contribution to the historiography of the British Empire since AFRICA AND THE VICTORIANS. Much more than this, it succeeds in connecting social and political developments in the Asian interior, North America and the West Indies, the British Isles understood as a whole, and continental Europe in one riveting narrative. Buy it: this is a treasure house of historical ideas which will be valuable to students of many regions of modern history.

Rating:
Summary: Remarkably synthetic
Review: In Imperial Meridian Chris Bayly offers readers his most ambitious and synthetic work. Spurning localist and micrological historiography such as has come to dominate history departments over recent decades, Bayly ventures to do that for which most readers still turn to history, making connections and drawing parallels. In this work, the author is doing much more than distilling archival research. At the same time, he also eschews cluttering the work with too much in the way of strained interpretation. This book is by no means theory laden. It does however provoke that most profound of theoretical questions in the social sciences: how is it that, after differance, resistance, and contestation in locality after locality have been accorded due recognition, the historian of the modern nevertheless sees his subject matter as bound up within a single, if complex, historical dynamic that seems always already abstract and global? That is, by rejecting the localism of so much post-modern history writing and the nationalist preoccupations of an earlier day, Bayly re-asserts that level of analysis once denoted by the word "capital", now generally denominated "modernity". Eminently readable and stimulating, Bayly's book makes its reader smarter. At the same time, the book is true to its craft in its avoidance of claims that it finds overly abstract or reductionist. Still it avoids reading like an assemblage of so many discrete facts through its refusal to neglect connections and parallels. It is, in other words, a historian's work of history from which non-specialists and even non-historians stand to benefit greatly. Readers more familiar with his work and that of his Cambridge School colleagues will the opening two chapters on the pre-colonial transregional Muslim empires most stimulating for their condensation of earlier arguments less systematically pursued.