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The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. By Jürgen Osterhammel, translated by Patrick Camiller. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xxii + 1167. $39.95 hardcover / $29.95 paperback.
In this age of specialized and highly focused historical writing it is somewhat stunning to read Jürgen Osterhammel's new global history of the "long nineteenth century" of 1789-1914. With his astonishing collection of facts and mastery of so much literature, Osterhammel has written an unprecedented global synthesis. The result is not so much a grand narrative (as we see in the work of Eric Hobsbawm, for example), but a multifaceted presentation of how the world changed and developed during the century through a series of transitions and transformations. He provides interesting details and uses a cross-disciplinary approach. Attention is quite evenly distributed over the globe. Because industry, urbanization, and imperialism were essential hallmarks of the century, and Britain was the world's first industrial and urban nation and the greatest imperial power, Osterhammel, however, spends a proportional share of time on Britain, its extensions in North America and Australia, and their lasting impact on the world.
To present such a massive amount of material Osterhammel divides the volume into three parts, each of which is divided into a series of chapters, which are in turn divided into a series of sections and then sub-sections. Part one is titled "Approaches" and contains chapters on the role of memory and how knowledge was achieved, how changes in the perception of time...