Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: Cultural Struggle, Society and the State

This is a work in progress not intended for publication beyond this website! It may not be reproduced, disseminated or altered without the explicit consent of the author.

Despite much notable recent historical research and theorizing the long nineteenth century (1750-1914) continues to be framed in terms of the binaries presented in Edward Saidís Orientalism: East/West, modern/traditional, active/passive, male/female. For different reasons, theorists of modernity, world systems, the culture of colonialism and the modern state all accept this framework. What is at stake? How might a study of cultural struggles around the nineteenth century Liberal Project help shed light on the ways in which the modern world came into being? One place to start the rethinking is to conceive of modernity as both social structural and discursive elements, in which the latter is the arena of contestation and struggle over the institution of new practices.

The conference seeks to develop elements for an alternative way of viewing the long nineteenth century from a comparative world historical perspective.  The focus on the cultural struggles occasioned by the emergence of the world market and the modern state provides a productive point from which to embark on such a task.

Please submit proposals of organized panels and papers on these and other themes to the organizers, Terry Burke (email: eburke@cats.ucsc.edu), Randy Head (email: randolph.head@ucr.edu), Ken Pomeranz (email: klpomera@uci.edu), and Jack Goldstone (email: jagoldstone@ucdavis.edu).
 

Possible thematic approaches or issues include:

• Where is colonialism?

Underlying the persistence of the West and the Rest narrative is the continued influence of the nationalist counter-narrative . Until we find a way to escape the shadow of nationalism, we are condemned to repeat the same cliches.

• Is modernity western?

Recent work on the culture and colonialism has argued that colonialism was first and foremost a racialized discourse that structured the ways colonized peoples experienced modernity. By implicitly accepting the frame of the West and the Rest, however, this approach fails to fully account for modernity as a world historical phenomenon.

• Histories of consumption and production

The 19th century forged webs of connection between producers and consumers, linking female tea workers in Darjeeling plantations and British ladies, slaves on sugar plantations in Cuba and U.S. sugar consumers, silk weavers in factories in Suzhou, and European consumers. How did these commodity chains develop? How did their cultural meaning structure the modern world economy?

• Local elites and colonialism

Local elites were divided in their support for and opposition to colonialism throughout the world. A comparison of India, Egypt or parts of Africa would quickly bear this out. Which brings us to the next move: to compare colonized and non-colonized societies. Do the struggles within the colonial state resemble those in societies where colonialism was never formally established, like Japan, Turkey or Mexico? How much did it matter that India was colonized and Turkey was not?

© Edmund Burke III, 2/2000. This is a work in progress not intended for publication beyond this website! It may not be reproduced, disseminated or altered without the explicit consent of the author.