Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (Studies In Modern History) [Paperback]

C.A. Bayly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1989 | ISBN-10: 0582494389 | ISBN-13: 978-0582494381 | Edition: 1

In this impressive and ambitious survey Dr Bayly studies the rise, apogee and decline of what has come to be called `the Second British Empire' -- the great expansion of British dominion overseas (particularly in Asia and the Middle East) during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era that, coming between the loss of America and the subsequent partition of Africa, constitutes the central phase of British imperial history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'This is a rich and ambitious book. Its purpose is to put into focus developments throughout the world in the age of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. It offers a radically different interpretation from generally accepted theories about the history of the world for this period.'

The Times Literary Supplement

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Longman; 1 edition (1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0582494389
• ISBN-13: 978-0582494381
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #427,036 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable Depth and Breadth, July 20, 2010

By 

D. B. Levenstam (Centreville, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (Studies In Modern History) (Paperback)

I used Imperial Meridian the first time I taught Europe's Expansion Overseas, an undergraduate history course, at The University of Iowa back in 1996. Bayly writes like an erudite British historian--in other words, over the heads of the average Big 10 undergraduate history student--so I never used it again, despite the great depth and breadth of the material it covers.

Bayly focuses on the interaction between the British Empire and the three great Moslem (or Muslim as we say today) Asian empires ruled by the Ottomans (Turkey), the Safavids (Persia) and the Mughals (India). In his thesis he argues that the degree of centralized rule by the dynasty in question determined how it faired when interacting with the British.

On one end, both geographically and politically, the Ottoman sultans ruled through centralized government machinery (inherited in part from the Greeks who ruled the Byzantine Empire that the Ottomans had conquered), and buttressed their political rule by serving as the heads of Islam in their country. On the other end the Mughals ruled disparate, essentially alien, non-Muslim populations across the Indian subcontinent largely through local, non-Muslim magnates. So while the Ottomans lost outlying pieces but never lost control of their core to the British, Mughal rule dissolved, displaced by British rule.

The Safavid shahs, in the middle both geographically and politically, had more centralization than the Mughals, and served as the heads of Shi'a Islam, but did not have the extreme centralization of the Ottoman sultans. A revolt by Afghani tribesman combined with attacks from the Russians and the Ottomans helped depose the Safavids, but the Afsharid dynasty soon replaced it, tossing out the Russians and Ottomans, and reestablishing relations with the British. The British were thus able to influence Persia more than than they did the Ottoman Empire, but never came to rule it as they did India. Bayly argues, thus, that it was the degree of central rule possessed by each Muslim dynasty rather than British policy that served as a primary determinant of how much control the Britain came to exert in each empire.

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the British Empire and, if not the whole world, certainly the Ottoman, Persian and Indian empires.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the great historians of our age, February 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (Studies In Modern History) (Paperback)

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.

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Remarkably synthetic, October 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (Studies In Modern History) (Paperback)

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.