contrast between the Yangzi Delta’s relationship with its peripheral region in central China and England’s relationship with its non-European peripheral region, arranged around the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, that makes imperialism so central to Pomeranz’s argument. England’s colonial periphery was coercively maintained, whereas the relationships that other core territories maintained with their own peripheries were characterised more by mutual growth and were a closer approximation to free market economics. Pomeranz’s “reciprocal” and “encompassing” forms of comparative analysis have drawn historians’ attention to the globally distinctive forms of European imperialism and its crucial role in Global history. They have also set the tone for much of the comparative Global history that has followed. For instance, Victor Lieberman has argued that fruitful comparisons can be drawn between the northern and western regions of Europe on the one hand, and mainland southeast Asia on the other. Pomeranz has found “surprising resemblances” in the early modern period: Lieberman’s research has revealed, in an equally evocative turn of phrase, “strange parallels” operating in the period between c.800 and 1830 CE. Yet not all agree with Pomeranz’s approach to “re-spacing” the globe. In one of the most significant engagements by an Imperial historian with the field of Global history, C.A. Bayly has rejected entirely the method of “reciprocal comparison”. For Bayly, the role of Global history is to “blow down the compartments which historians have made between this region and that region, or between this subdiscipline of history and that one.” For Bayly, it is unnecessary to ponder how best to divide the world up into meaningfully comparable units: all regions can meaningfully be compared, because all parts of the world were undergoing similar changes during the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. All regions were “modernizing”, becoming more like one another, partly as a result of widely-felt economic transformations, but especially due to the spread of common forms of state organization and intervention. Bayly thus argues for what we might label a “great convergence” rather than a “great divergence”, driven by the global diffusion of the model of the “patriotic and information-rich state.” Northwest European countries pioneered this model, and as a result enjoyed an early imperial sway over global flows of information, wealth and power. Yet by the end of the nineteenth the gap was
already narrowing, with formidable “modern” states emerging in other parts of the world. The overseas spread of Western influence was always accompanied by “leakages and the transfer of power and intellectual skills” to non-Europeans, ultimately ensuring both that Western dominance was temporary and that “modernity” was everywhere inevitable. The origins of change might have been “multi-centric”—they did not all derive from Europe or the West—but ultimately they all pointed in the same direction. Bayly argues that in the long nineteenth century the entire world thus took a common “step-change” forward, towards “contested uniformity.” Does Bayly offer Imperial historians a more useful model of comparative and connected history than Pomeranz’s tools of “reciprocal” and “encompassing” comparison? We would argue not. Bayly’s brand of Global history exhibits some of the key characteristics of World history, in terms of its attempt to offer a single, essentially narrative-driven, account: a unified, world-encompassing story. Although the book’s subtitle evokes themes of comparison and connection, it is not a work of “connected history” as Subrahmanyan or as most Transnational historians would understand that approach. Bayly is interested more in the analytical connections and comparisons that can be created in the mind of the historian, than in the connections and comparisons that contemporaries themselves created or perceived. His themes of convergence and homogeneity, and his desire to take the entire world as his frame of analysis, ultimately work to obscure the complex ways that individuals and groups created global connections, within and across the boundaries of empires, to serve a wide range of often conflicting agendas. Comparative Methods in Imperial History As already noted, the debate over the “great divergence” has tended to focus the attention of Global historians on the period before 1830, at least in terms of their discussions of empire: Bayly is a notable exception here. Meanwhile, Imperial historians with comparative interests have primarily concentrated either on the “New Imperialism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or on European “decolonization”. This chronological disjuncture has compounded some of the wider differences between Imperial and Global approaches to the history of empire.
must be a priority if we are to write truly connected histories of empire. Conclusions Comparative methods and a focus on connections have been marked features of Imperial history and Global history alike. In writing connected histories of empire, we can borrow some of the new, invigorating geographical frameworks that have been suggested by Global historians. We can also follow the lead provided by Imperial historians and explore how comparisons were made by contemporary historical actors. The use of “encompassing comparison”, and the development of a sensitivity to the “politics of comparison” should, as both Stoler and Pomeranz have suggested, be seen as integral to the writing of connected history. Connected histories of empire might also be informed by the rich Imperial historiography that has revealed the webs, networks, systems and flows that linked up different sites of colonization. However, as the articles in this special issue suggest, these networks should not be examined within an analytical frame that is restricted to a single empire. Different empires were connected to one another, materially as well as through the “politics of comparison”. These connections were thus more than imperial. But they were also less than global, in two senses. Firstly, these interconnections seldom spanned the entire globe. As research on borderlands has illustrated, the processes of imperial expansion and the production of denser webs of interconnection in fact operated to marginalise and exclude some parts of the world. Indeed, to describe these connections as global is to miss the simultaneous and linked process by which places previously networked could become disconnected. Secondly, long-distant interconnections were seldom subjectively experienced as global. Individuals linked by these networks did not self-consciously conceive of themselves as operating globally. Usually, historical actors regarded themselves as working within the frameworks of empires and nations, even as they combined and switched between local, national and imperial (and ethnic, linguistic and religious) identities as needs might dictate at any given moment. Connected histories of empires should push us beyond traditional imperial boundaries, but not necessarily to a geographical scale encompassing the entire planet. The essays in this collection demonstrate the value and potential of studies that deploy these comparative methods and move us towards a truly connected history of empire. Alex Middleton, Andrew Priest and Satoshi Mizutani’s contributions all engage