The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 - 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Blackwell History of the World)

A little grimy on the outside so I had to give it a wipe but other than that the condition is great and it was fast delivery.

Good quality and sturdy cover / pages

By any standards, a major contribution to historical texts. It should be considered as a history textbook, since it bears no relationship to a novel.In keeping with other 21st century historians, Bayly attempts to draw together contemporaneous events from all over the world to explain change.His ability to move from continent to continent is quite remarkable, though I did conclude that his desire to understate the role of the West in developing the modern world, was perhaps overemphasised. One of his main themes - the importance of industrious revolutions as opposed to industrial revolution - was at times rather contrived.His use of the English language is staggering, and certainly beyond my vocabulary limits on many occasions.A work of genuine academic merit and perspective.

Although used, it arrived pristine and untouched, as if it was completely new. It took a while to arrive but overall I'm very happy with it.

The book undeniably offers several interesting and new perspectives on the long 19th century and, as such, it is a pleasant and most useful read. That said, it is too vague and poor in data/facts (even anecdotes are rare) to be truly outstanding

bought for a degree level history student. She found it very interesting and useful.

Global history has become hugely fashionable in the last decade or so, and alongside Pomeranz's Great Divergence, Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World is one of its leading titles. Essentially, the book argues that the modern world was not, contrary to established wisdom, of purely Western creation. Or, more precisely, Bayly argues that the rise of modernity was a multi-centred affair until the very last decade of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, when Western domination became more marked. My problem, though, is not so much with the argument as with the way it is made. The book is turgid, laboured, and I have had to force myself to read until the end. It also packs surprisingly little depth in its near five hundred pages. Indeed, many of the examples chosen to illustrate Bayly's point, taken from a global range, are often deployed very superficially and with little regard for their historical complexity, so that the book tends to read like an extended treatise.The second, more fundamental issue is that Bayly studiously refrains, at the beginning, to explain what he means by modernity. I suppose the intention was to let a pattern emerge and the question answer itself, but in practice this fails to happen, and the book tends to read like a very broad survey or compendium of surveys. Modernity emerges as a laundry list of features: organised commerce, industrialisation, urbanisation, powerful states featuring strong administrations, 'world' religions with missionary movements, and even certain ideas and artistic trends. But this is to describe, not to explain, and in the process the contributions of non-Western societies gets lost, a matter of me-too-ism rather than original role.And this is also the third problem with The Birth of the Modern World, namely that in its eagerness to raise awareness of non-Western trends, it tends to mix anything and everything. The radical Enlightenment as contributing factor to the French revolution and what followed, for example, are compared to mandarin contestation in eighteenth-century Qing China. The question, though, is to what extent this literati contestation was anything very new, and conversely what influence it actually had over the Qing collapse of the mid-nineteenth century. Just as and perhaps more interesting points might have been made about Chinese freedom of expression and political contestation as antecedents to their European, Enlightenment versions, but this is lost in the effort to make the Qing events count more. A related problem, finally, is that inevitably on such a broad topic, the narrative is drawn from secondary sources. This makes for a very derivative, and often insufficiently discerning analysis, for example on economic matters. The best parts of The Birth of the Modern World remain those that deal with Asia and Africa or the Middle East, and for this material I am giving the book two stars. The book is dry, theoretical, and derivative, though, and it is an absolute struggle to read.

Great book

What makes a history book great is the relations and links between events and describing different aspects of those events and their links! This book surprisingly proves by those events and their relations how accurate is its content! I would recommend to everyone specially for those who questions school and universities limited teaching of History!

lot of words

Livre reçu abimé, couverture déchirée au coin, bord plié... Cela est vraiment embêtant pour un livre acheté neuf à 30€...

had to order the book for my history class. very satisfied

Goed boek dat voor velen na lezing een eyeopener zal zijn