The Anthropocene and the Triumph of the Imagination: An Environmental Perspective on C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015

Abstract

Having had the privilege of being taught by Chris Bayly as an undergraduate, I can hear Remaking the Modern World in his voice.¹ I can hear it in the form of the dazzling lectures—never showy, but perspective-shifting week after week—that were the kernels from which this book and its predecessor on the nineteenth century both grew.² In the late 1990s, that course was still called “The West and the Third World since 1914.” Notwithstanding its then already outmoded title, it was a progressive course: a perspective on global history building out from the detailed study of South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. It was clear even then that Bayly's long immersion in the study of Indian history was not incidental but rather vital to Bayly, the global historian.

Many of Bayly's prodigious gifts as a scholar and writer are on display in his final book. Remaking the Modern World is a book of stunning range and admirable clarity. Above all, here we have a perspective on global history that gives weight and voice to the experiences of what world systems theorists once called “the periphery.” In that respect, it stands in sharp contrast with an earlier (and still compelling) attempt to write a global history of the twentieth century: Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes, published in 1994. “The twentieth century history of the non-Western … world is therefore essentially determined by its relations with the countries which had established themselves in the nineteenth century as the lords of human kind,” Hobsbawm wrote. He was convinced that “the dynamics of the greater part of the world's history in the Short Twentieth Century are derived, not original.”³ In Remaking, by contrast, what Hobsbawm called “the dynamics of global transformation” lie as much in “small wars of fragmentation” across Asia and Africa—local conflicts that erupted from the collapse of empires, spurring social change, giving rise to new ideas and ideologies, their effects reverberating back to the centers of global power.

Remaking the Modern World weaves together political, economic, and social history. But the lead voice in this chorus is that of Bayly the intellectual historian. “Above all,” he writes, “the remaking of the modern world in the last century was brought about by ideas and human imagination” (p. xx). At every turn, down to the moving epilogue, Bayly emphasizes the power of ideas. In his insistence on the importance of ideas and imagination, for good and ill, we can trace a line back to Origins of Nationality in South Asia—a sensitive meditation on regional patriotism and identity based on his Radhakrishnan lectures of 1996—through Recovering Liberties, a history of liberalism in India based on Bayly's 2007 Wiles Lectures at Queen's University Belfast.⁴ In many ways, Remaking the Modern World is a quintessentially humanist history of the twentieth century; humanist in R. G. Collingwood's sense that “all history properly so-called is the history of human affairs,” the greatest challenge of the historian being to “think himself into action, to discern the thought of its agent.”⁵

This, in turn, points to the most jarring absence in Remaking the Modern World. In 330 pages of text, Bayly mentions anthropogenic climate change just twice—and then, too, as a debate with partisans on both sides. He refers to a “wide range of polemics, some proposing immediate planetary disaster, others denying the very existence of inexorable climate change…” (p. 3). He invokes the Anthropocene a few times: mostly with respect to human population growth, or alternatively in relation to the prospect of global annihilation introduced by nuclear weapons after 1945. The Anthropocene, as Bayly invokes it, is a prospect of sudden catastrophe more than the “slow violence,” as Rob Nixon calls it, of environmental harm.⁶ Bayly refers to the Anthropocene with a certain ironic distance, scare quotes assumed; his interest in it is that of an intellectual historian. The “widely advertised ecological crisis of the early twentieth century,” he notes, “created a further strain of thought, sometimes called ‘posthumanism’ or ‘the anthropocene’” (p. 214).

To be fair to Bayly, the level of interest in climate change among humanists and social scientists has grown exponentially since he completed the manuscript; but it would already have been amply clear to many scholars in 2014 that a history of the twentieth century that does not pay significant attention to irreversible and cumulative environmental transformation is missing something crucial—perhaps even the most important story of all. My intention in pointing this out is not to fault Bayly for not writing a different book; on the contrary, it is to reflect on what we can learn from Bayly's insight and imagination as a historian in order to ask some of the questions that he does not ask.

*****

In his influential 2009 essay, “The Climate of History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed out that the study of globalization and the concern about global warming had emerged at the same time in the late twentieth century, but then proceeded along parallel paths with few points of intersection. Global warming, Chakrabarty suggested a decade ago, has “profound, even transformative, implications for how we think about human history, or about what the historian C.A. Bayly has called ‘the birth of the modern world.’”⁷ Those implications remain unexplored in Bayly's sequel, Remaking, but they have spawned an extensive debate among historians and scientists reflecting on the “new human condition” of the Anthropocene.⁸

The specific concern with dating the Anthropocene has led physical scientists toward a substantive engagement with global history, albeit in stylized form. They are concerned primarily with identifying “golden spikes,” when different forms of human activity become visible in the stratigraphic record.⁹ The narrative of global history embedded in this new work owes more to the older work of Hobsbawm than it does to Bayly. It is a narrative in which the “dynamics of global transformation,” in Hobsbawm's phrase, lie almost entirely in the North Atlantic. The story, as Ottoman historian Alan Mikhail observes, “has not challenged the Enlightenment chronology or narrative of history”; rather, it aims “to rewire the Enlightenment to include a story of progressive environmental degradation.”¹⁰

A vigorous debate continues over the Anthropocene's beginnings. A recent emphasis on early modern origins in the process of European overseas expansion contends with a traditional emphasis on the Industrial Revolution.¹¹ Both sit alongside an argument for much earlier roots for the Anthropocene in the origins of settled agriculture.¹² According to almost all accounts, however, the second half of the twentieth century appears as a time of rapid intensification, dubbed “the great acceleration.” It has been represented in a series of now-iconic charts of human population, urbanization, carbon dioxide emissions, surface temperature, methane, ocean acidification, biosphere degradation, and many other indicators: almost every single one shows a sharp increase in gradient after 1950.¹³

Most work on the “great acceleration” has been descriptive rather than diagnostic. One widely cited review of the evidence states simply that it came about as a result of “the phenomenal growth of the global socio-economic system” after 1945.¹⁴ In understanding the drivers of that transformation, Hobsbawm's account is at first glance more helpful than Bayly's. The “great acceleration” corresponds with what Hobsbawm calls the “golden age”—a period of sustained economic expansion in the industrialized core of the world economy driven by a technological revolution, by the strength of the US economy at home and abroad, and by the recovery of Europe from war. The “golden age” saw a four-fold increase in world manufacturing output and a ten-hold increase in world trade. In emphasizing the extent to which the expansion of production and consumption in those decades was anchored in the North Atlantic, Hobsbawm's account is consistent with the fact that, well into the twenty-first century, “most of the human imprint on the Earth System is coming from the OECD world.”¹⁵ Hobsbawm paid considerably less attention to the non-Western world, but acknowledged that in the postwar decades the urbanization and population growth experienced by large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America constituted “the greatest, most rapid, and most fundamental” economic transformation “in recorded history.” “For 80 per cent of humanity,” Hobsbawm wrote, “the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s.”¹⁶

These are not the transformations that Bayly emphasizes in his account of the world after 1945. Bayly includes a compressed chapter on “the pressure of people” and a discussion of what he calls “America's hegemony” from the 1950s to the early 1970s; but in his account, the true dynamics of global change lie elsewhere. In Remaking the Modern World, the ideological struggles that emerged from the Second World War and decolonization, and the “small wars” that raged beneath the semblance of superpower dominance, combined “to shape the rest of the century” (p. 138). Even though Bayly does not address it directly, his perspective has important implications for how we think of the “great acceleration.” Bayly reminds us of the fractured, uneven way in which those transformations took place. He brings our attention back to how those changes were understood culturally and the profound ways in which they transformed ideas of personhood around the world. Above all, he emphasizes how the period of the “great acceleration” was experienced outside the North Atlantic world, especially in Asia.

*****

In working through the implications of Remaking the Modern World for how we understand the drivers of climate change, I would like to put Bayly's book in conversation with one of the most important works published on the subject in recent years, Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement.¹⁷ Ghosh argues that Asia “is conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming: its causes, its physical and historical implications, and the possibility of a global response to it.” In part, this rests upon sheer numbers. But Asia is also distinctive, Ghosh argues, because indigenous resistance to industrial capitalism “was often articulated and championed by figures of extraordinary moral and political authority, such as Mahatma Gandhi.” Ghosh suggests that in India as well as China, powerful political ideas—ideas about the economy and the shape of society, about ethical conduct and justice—played a part in “retarding the wholesale adoption of a consumerist, industrial model of economy.”¹⁸ One could argue about how influential Gandhi's ideas really were in shaping India's economic trajectory after 1947.¹⁹ In neither India nor China did resistance to consumerism necessarily equate to resistance to an industrial economic model. But Ghosh's broader point is an important one: we cannot divorce our understanding of climate change from the history of moral and political ideas forged in the era of resistance to European imperialism. On this point, Bayly would have been in strong agreement.

Toward the end of The Birth of the Modern World, Bayly described the decades from 1890 to 1914 as “the great acceleration”—independent of the (somewhat later) use of that term in climate change research to describe the period since 1945. The final decade of the nineteenth century, Bayly argued, marked a culmination of the first era of globalization. It was a time when imperial states grew in power and capacity and made greater demands on their subjects, ideas traveled more rapidly and spread more widely than ever before, and industrialization connected markets around the world and spread beyond the core regions of Europe and North America.²⁰Remaking begins here, with what Bayly calls the “Idealist age” before 1914: a period of reflection, throughout which contradictory reactions to the “great acceleration” of social and technological change clamored for attention in an expanding public sphere of print and debate. It was in that era, we can see now, that many of the ideas and values that shaped different societies’ attitudes toward nature for much of the twentieth century had their roots—including those expressions of resistance to industrial capitalism that, Ghosh points out, would have enduring consequences. This period saw the rise of new modes of communitarian and collectivist thought, of which Chinese communism and Gandhian nationalism were but two manifestations.

Bayly stresses that, even at the height of his political influence, “Gandhi himself remained more of an idealist of the pre-war period than a nationalist seeking a powerful state” (p. 324). Gandhi's ambivalence toward modern industrial society was profoundly a product of the “great acceleration.” His idyll of a rural India of village republics had been shaped by his reading of Tolstoy and Ruskin in London and in the cosmopolitan city of Johannesburg; his political tactics had been honed by his experience of the racial animus of settler colonialism at its height, fueled by the competitive fever of industrial capitalism.²¹ In search of an answer to why warfare reached such heights of destructiveness in the first half of the twentieth century, Bayly reminds us that, from South Africa in the early twentieth century to Japan in the 1930s, “capitalism itself was impelled by and imbricated with the interests and populist ideologies of strengthening the state” (p. 9). Recoiling from that specter of destructiveness, Gandhi was among those who plotted a different future for India after he returned from South Africa in 1915. “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization in the manner of the West,” Gandhi wrote in 1928, for “if an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”²²

Elements of Gandhi's view were echoed in the 1920s by another figure that Bayly became interested in during the final decade of his career: the Bengali sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee, who makes a cameo appearance in Remaking the Modern World for his concern about population growth (p. 295). “Man, tree, and water cannot be regarded as separate and independent,” Mukerjee wrote; he decried “crimes” against nature, which would ultimately “[let] loose destructive forces.” Wise development, Mukerjee argued, would pay heed to the “natural balance of man with the organic and inorganic world around him.” Only in that balance could human society find “security, well-being, and progress.”²³ Though his concern with “ecological balance” was unusual at the time, Mukerjee shared elements of his world view with others of widely varying ideological commitments. He was a committed eugenicist. He absorbed the racial and environmental determinism of his time and then inverted it, calling, for instance, for lebensraum for the “teeming millions” of India and China.²⁴

If Gandhi and Mukerjee seem to many environmentalists today to have been prescient in their predictions, theirs were, at the time, lonely and idiosyncratic voices. A far more widespread response to what Bayly calls the “crisis of the world”—spanning the world wars and the Depression—was the wholehearted embrace of an industrial future. The most common critique of imperialism was not that it had brought industrial modernity to Asia, but rather that it had failed to do so—and that Asian leaders would do so more effectively.²⁵

To take one prominent example, Sun Yat-sen, architect of China's republican revolution, applied himself to the problem of China's development in the early 1920s even as rival regional polities tore China apart. He set forth an expansive vision of China as an “economic ocean” for the world. His book, The International Development of China, is replete with maps of rivers diverted, railway lines laid, ports dredged, and electricity generated. Sun told a meeting in Guangdong in 1924: “If we could utilize the water power in the Yangtze and Yellow rivers to generate one hundred million horsepower of electrical energy, we would be putting twenty-four hundred million men to work!” He predicted that, “When that time comes, we shall have enough power to supply railways, motor cars, fertilizer factories and all kinds of manufacturing establishments.”²⁶ For his part, Jawaharlal Nehru declared that “modern science claims to have curbed to a large extent the tyranny and the vagaries of nature.”²⁷ But he was also aware of the material urgency behind every vision of freedom. “Our desire for freedom is a thing more of the mind than the body,” Nehru said, but most Indians suffered “hunger and deepest poverty, and empty stomach and a bare back”; for the majority of the population, “freedom is a vital bodily necessity.”²⁸ Bayly's rich discussion of contending ideas of freedom in Remaking helps to put the hopes and fears of Nehru and Sun in an illuminating global context.

The technological breakthroughs of the Second World War underpin every account of the “great acceleration” of human impact upon planetary systems that followed. Here, again, Bayly's emphasis on ideas adds another dimension. During and after the war, he argues, “the world became an ideological as much as a geographic space,” and in the process, “a comprehensive global mentality and global awareness had been formed” (p. 119).²⁹ One of the most enduring consequences of this process was the emergence of “development” as a powerful global imaginary. Postwar “development,” of course, had deep roots in colonial ideas of “improvement”—but as development became entwined with decolonization, it became a rallying cry across political and geopolitical lines, as well as an umbrella term that masked substantial ideological differences and struggles for power.³⁰

What appears, with hindsight, as a period of sustained and unprecedented growth was not easily recognized as such by those who lived through it. On this point, Bayly and Hobsbawm agree. Even at the height of American hegemony, Bayly argues, “a country at the peak of its power in real terms was haunted by a sense of decline” (p. 140). But the “great acceleration” was experienced even more unevenly in a postcolonial world torn, as Bayly shows (pp. 143–56), between the promise of liberation, the ever-present threat of superpower interference, and the intractable scale of the social and economic challenges former colonies faced.

Political theorist Uday Mehta has argued that the “immediate ambit” of political power in postcolonial India was “dictated by the intensity of ‘mere life.’” Poverty and destitution put most Indians, Mehta argues, “under the pressing dictates of their bodies.” The imperative to address these basic needs, Mehta observes, “can have no limiting bounds. This simple logic transforms power from a traditional concern with freedom to a concern with life and its necessities.”³¹ To achieve these ends, the conquest of nature was central. In this context, a sense of urgency drove every political project. Addressing an international malaria conference in Delhi in 1959, Nehru said, “In this, as in other matters which affect us underdeveloped countries the pace, the speed of advance, become all the more important.… If you don't go fast enough, the others will.” “The others” in this case referred to all manner of natural forces, from evolving Anopheles mosquitoes to human population growth. “In many of these regions of Asia, maybe elsewhere, malaria has been a more powerful determinant in the course of human history than people imagine,” Nehru concluded: the implication was that it might still prove to be so.³² A similar sense of urgency, yoked to a very different political system, led the People's Republic of China toward its disastrous Great Leap Forward in those same years (p. 63). Seen from the vantage point of postcolonial and revolutionary Asia, the “great acceleration” appears an aspiration above all, until very late in the twentieth century. Too often, for too many, it seemed as if Asia was stuck in what Dipesh Chakrabarty has aptly called the “waiting room of history.”³³

As one of the few heads of state to attend the first United Nations conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, India's prime minister (and Nehru's daughter) Indira Gandhi conveyed her own sense of living through an unprecedented historical process. “For the last quarter of a century,” she announced, “we have been engaged in an enterprise unparalleled in human history—the provision of basic needs to one-sixth of mankind within the span of one or two generations.” There was a sense that the “great acceleration” was not fast enough; but this was coupled with a new awareness that it might be too late. That is to say, India's “unparalleled” quest was taking place when many of the planet's resources were already exhausted (by others), and imperiled. “The riches and the labour of the colonized countries played no small part in the industrialization and prosperity of the West,” she reminded her audience; but now, in the 1970s, “as we struggle to create a better life for our people, it is in vastly different circumstances, for obviously in today's eagle-eyed watchfulness we cannot indulge in such practices even for a worthwhile purpose,” she said. “We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further,” Mrs. Gandhi insisted, “and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people.”³⁴

*****

At Stockholm, Indira Gandhi told delegates that no solution to the planet's crisis would be viable without bearing in mind that “we inhabit a divided world.” This basic insight, elaborated and in many iterations, remains the most powerful critique of the Anthropocene idea. In holding an undifferentiated “humanity” responsible for the Anthropocene, we elide the massive inequalities that both drive climate change and also determine who bears its costs.³⁵ In a stimulating discussion of the Anthropocene from the perspective of African history, Gabrielle Hecht asks: “who, exactly, are ‘we’?”³⁶

Remaking the Modern World bolsters this critique, with its searching investigation into the imperial origins of global inequality. Bayly writes:

Bayly returns to these themes in one of the last chapters in the book, on what he calls “the shadow of empire in the modern world.” He revisits the enduring economic effects of European imperialism, showing how few formerly colonized countries had developed advanced economies before the year 2000 (pp. 284–85). As Amitav Ghosh observes, it is the arrested development of many parts of Asia, prior to a late twentieth-century awakening, that explains why the world did not reach a critical point in the path to global warming even earlier.³⁷

As ever, Bayly emphasizes the importance of thinking about the legacies of empire “in the broadest sense,” moving beyond its “social and economic residues” toward the realm of ideas. As illustration, he draws attention to the long life of colonial eugenic thinking, which inspired the developmental projects of both Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad (p. 285).³⁸ To extend Bayly's insight to another example, the enduring imperative to challenge the intellectual legacies of empire is evident in the history of India's environmental movement. In one of the earliest and most eloquent expressions of the argument for global environmental justice, a text that remains influential to this day, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain wrote about the problem of “global warming in an unequal world” in 1991. Their opening sentence is powerful and stark: “The idea that developing countries like India and China must share the blame for heating up the earth and destabilizing its climate … is an excellent example of environmental colonialism.” They pointed out that historical responsibility for the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere lay entirely with the advanced industrial countries of the world; they highlighted the hypocrisy of those countries now telling India and China to cut their emissions; and they emphasized that, in per capita terms, India's and China's emissions were miniscule. Their conclusion was that “the Third World today needs far-sighted political leadership” to resist the calls by Western political leaders and environmentalists to “manage the world as one entity,” which could only be a mask for exploitation as long as the world remained so unequal and so divided.³⁹

Bayly's work helps to illuminate why Indian environmentalists in the early 1990s would have chosen to think in those terms and invoke the long shadow of colonialism. His analysis provides context for the political language at the environmental activists’ disposal—forged, as it was, in interaction with activists from across the postcolonial world—in this late invocation of a “third world” that was already then in the process of unraveling through the period that Bayly calls “the tipping point.”

When the economies of India and, especially, China began to grow rapidly in the 1990s, this could not but impact the pace of global warming. Ghosh contrasts the historical experience of Western countries—which grew rich upon a sustained exploitation of Earth's resources and especially fossil fuels, beginning in the early modern era and accelerating in the nineteenth century—with Asia's role in climate change, which was based on a “sudden but very small expansion in the footprint of a much larger number of people” at the very end of the twentieth.⁴⁰ No small part of that climatic impact has been driven by the energy consumed to sustain China's role as the world's manufacturing powerhouse, supplying consumer goods to Western markets. But an increasing share of it is accounted for by the consumption of China's and India's growing middle classes.

Throughout Remaking the Modern World, Bayly emphasizes how the large political, economic, and intellectual transformations of global history also led to changes in the self and personhood. He insists on a nuanced understanding of the meanings attributed to the material changes that have swept Asia since the 1990s. New modes of consumption, he argues—drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai and other anthropologists—both engender and embody new aspirations, new dispositions, and a new sense of self and society. With the growth of Asia's middle classes have come new “expectations of modernity,” to use James Ferguson's resonant phrase.⁴¹ Bayly observes that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the “practice of the rights-bearing individual as perpetual consumer and accumulating owner of property became more and more powerful” (p. 328).

To my mind, the finest attempt to grapple with the deeper meanings of newfound wealth and new modes of consumption comes in a novel that was originally published in Kannada in 2015, the year of Bayly's death. Vivek Shanbhag's Ghachar Ghochar is one of the finest Indian novels of recent times. With stunning concision, the novel tells the story of a family that goes suddenly from the struggle for a respectable middle-class existence—they lived in a house “with four small rooms, one behind the other, like train compartments,” through times when “when the whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances”—to wealth undreamed of, when the protagonist's uncle, Chikappa, persuades the family patriarch to invest in a spice business that takes off. One of the novel's many strengths is the fine detail with which Shanbhag traces the deeper meanings of new ways of consuming. Early in the novel, the trauma of the father's loss of his salaried job as a salesman comes through in the family's humiliating reversion from a gas to a kerosene stove. As wealth comes to the family, every relationship is put under strain and “our relationship with the things we accumulated became casual.” Shanbhag's narrator says:

Bayly's lesson for environmental historians—as also Shanbhag's—is that the Anthropocene can and should be studied not only in terms of planetary boundaries crossed or macroeconomic trends, but also at a more intimate scale—as a history of aspiration, expectation, and unintended consequence. Bayly's account also reminds us that the idea of the self as “perpetual consumer” could never exhaust other visions of the good life. For instance, the period of the triumph of consumer society has also and concurrently seen the revival of a number of Asian spiritual traditions that, in Prasenjit Duara's view, provide “a more viable cosmological foundation for sustainability” than the tenets of modernity rooted in the European historical experience and its takeover of the world.⁴³

*****

With the loss of Chris Bayly, we have lost one of our most brilliant, humane, and thoughtful scholars and teachers. Although environmental history was never explicitly among Chris's key concerns, his work has made new sorts of environmental history possible; there is much to learn from revisiting his rich and textured account of the ecology and hydrology of the Ganges valley in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, and also from the centrality of the landscape of forests in his account of the Second World War in Asia, written with Tim Harper.⁴⁴

Bayly's concluding message in Remaking the Modern World is a strangely hopeful one. “Human curiosity, the envisioning of multiple alternatives—social political and religious—expanded exponentially with the human population” (p. 332), Bayly concludes, invoking in support of this the first satellite image of Earth, which allowed us to imagine our fragility and interdependence anew. Bayly's last words are this brilliant and persuasive account of a world integrated ever more closely through a series of conjunctures over the past century, “periodically ruptured by a reassertion of the power of the local” and characterized by enduring inequalities. Despite its silences, Remaking the Modern World provides much food for thought for those of us concerned with explaining our environmental crises—and the possible routes out of them.

Notes