sheer breadth and depth of Osterhammel's coverage geographically and topically is staggering, This book is packed with all sorts of fascinating tidbits about interactions, connections, and comparisons that I had never thought about before.
The first part of the book is clearly the strongest his chapters on frontiers, cities, empires, revolutions and statebuilding were terrific.
Of the shorter thematic essays that made up the second half of the book, the only topic that I have really specialized knowledge on was his chapter on global economic history.
I thought it was solid if pretty conventional but as he says, there's only so much you can ask of one historian in a monumental work like this one, and he's not an economic historian.
His chapter in the second part of the book on the concept of civilization, which also covered ideologies of racial hierarchy and civilizing missions, was outstanding, building on previous work he had done on civilizing mission ideology.
Another strength of this book is his engagement with social scientific work on the topics that he covers, especially with social theory and historical sociology.
Overall, it took me forever to read this book, but I am glad that I stuck with it.
As a historicallyminded comparative social scientist, I enjoyed this book from cover to cover, and I will revisit this book many times in the future.
A truly magisterial work of historical scholarship,
Some of the reviews criticize the book for its 'academic' writing style, I'm not sure what exactly these people were expecting, This isn't popular history. It's a careful treatment as much as one can expect anyway, given its ambition of complex, contradictory global processes.
It's not for the faint of heart, Where to start Amazing Great Fascinating
This is not an Eurocentric book which is awesome, Enjoyed every page of it,
Author is extremely competent on the subject he naturally moves between facts, descriptions and processes, paining colorful, vivid picture of nineteenth century.
It is a slow read, though, Book is huge, packed up with information, written in easy, but professional language, Definitely something to improve knowledge and understanding of the world,
Jürgen Osterhammel's "Die Verwandlung Der Welt" eng, "Transformation of the World" is a vastpages and profound overview of XIX century history,
It is not a usual history book, which goes over the events in chronological order, Here we have divisions to bigger panoramas e, g. Standards of Living, Cities, Frontiers, Empires and Nation States and smaller subjects e, g. Energy and Industry, Labor, Wisdom, Religion, Book does not focus on particular events like for example French Revolution or American Civil War, and does not go into details of these events.
However they are mentioned when for specific topic their impact is substantial,
The book is also not europecentric, Every chapter gives insight into related events and situation on other continents,
I find the structure of the book better then in the recently read "Global Crisis", There is no feeling of information being repeated and chapters are very consistent and could be read standalone.
The only drawbacks I see is that its good to know the major events of XIX century before reading this book and I think it would be beneficial to include at least some maps.
The lack of an overall theory or at least some kind of a thesis might confuse some readers, especially those that are used to the works of AngloAmerican historians.
And indeed, Osterhammel seems to personify a trend in recent German historiography the avoidance of theory or big claims, and a retreat into sometimes ambiguous language.
But for a book with a gigantic scope of "Die Verwandlung der Welt", this modest approach actually proves to be
a huge benefit.
Not having subscribed to any specific narrative, Osterhammel is free to treat every possible aspect of social life with equal interest, instead of cramming them all into the narrow framework of one specific theory, thus making the book valuable to scholars from different fields and schools of thought.
Phew! I did it. I know so much now, but please don't quiz me, Tolles Buch. Die Geschichte des. Jahrhundert aus globaler Perspektive. Wird allerdings nicht als Chronologie der Ereignisse erzählt, sondern in seinen strukturellen Entwicklungen beschrieben: Politik, Wirtschaft, Soziales, Kultur, Sprache, Macht, Grenzen.
Absolut anregend und zuweilen genial geschrieben, Es setzt aber zumindest grobe Kenntnisse der Geschichte und der wissenschaftlichen Diskussionen über diese Zeit der Revolutionen, der Umbrüche und auch der Gewalt voraus.
Pluspunkt ist auf jeden Fall, dass die gesamte Erdkugel einbezogen wird, chinesische und japanische Geschichten also ebenbürtig neben den europäischen und amerikanischen stehen, wenngleich es sich natürlich zugleich um das Jahrhundert des Kolonialismus und der Großen Imperien handelt oder was man gemeinhin also solche bezeichnet.
Osterhammel räumt mit vielen Begriffsverwirrungen und irrungen auf, nennt erstaunliche Fakten und scheut selbst anekdotische Details nicht, um die großen Linien plastisch zu machen.
Ich jedenfalls habe dieses Buch jetzt zu etwa zwei Dritteln durch und bin rundweg begeistert, Mein Blick auf das. Jahrhundert ist schon jetzt ein anderer geworden,
marking as read tho have only read five chapters ofpages, as I know I'm going to be referring back to this book for years
in general, a refreshingly untortured conception of the modern This is a massive book, and I've been working mypages a day on it for a couple of days.
It is a must read for anyone teaching a survey, but you have to read and digest the whole thingthe rich individual cases, like how middlebrow opera spread from Europe to every corner of colonies as a marker of status, to the sweeping themes of infrastructure, trade and military power brought change good and often very bad to the world.
Osterhammel draws from a vast pool of secondary works, sort of a reverse Barbara Tuchmanhe relies on the expertise of specialists in every country and every field rather than use primary documents and try to be everything, everywhere, with the result that this is a fantastic bibliography as well.
This book is useless if you want to dive in and extract a specific event or segment of theth century, but if you add it to your mental framework, it will immeasurably enrich the way you think about this transformative time period and give you new ideas of how to tie it all together when you teach it.
I have so many mixed feelings about this book, Some of its blindspots and inaccuracies are fairly easy to forgive, especially given the astonishing ambitiousness of the project.
What cannot be forgiven is that this "global history of the nineteenth century" shrugs complacently in its preface: "A pervasive disregard of gender issues remains a serious drawback.
" It isn't just a "disregard" of "gender issues" that is perplexing, This nearlypage global history seems to forget that women even existed in the nineteenth century, let alone before or after.
Ugh. That's not a drawback. That's a willful failure. Potężny, kompleksowy portret epoki, Nie chronologiczny jak się spodziewałem, kupując książkę lecz przede wszystkim tematyczny, co początkowo utrudniało mi nieco odbiór.
Doceniam przede wszystkim próbę opowiedzenia historii XIX wieku z innej, niż europocentryczna, perspektywy, A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition.
Jurgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition.
He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet.
Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways, He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nationstate, and much more.
This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French.
Indispensable for any historian, "The Transformation of the World" sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.
" sitelinkApparently Angela Merkel invited Osterhammel to herth birthday party to give a guest lecture based on this book, well you can say what you like about the woman but as far as I am concerned she plainly knows how to celebrate.
One newspaper review described this book as a milestone, although obscurely the publishers seem to have neglected to make the book waterproof, in every other way this seems to be true, it is about the right size and shape and weight ,
Osterhammel himself suggests that it need not be read completely from beginning to end, which for me raises the question of why he wrote the book this way rather than one that does need to read from beginning to end, it is maybe indicative of his philosophy take what you will, the feast is still there when you have a wish to return to it later, I notice that the Polish translation breaks the book down into a set of separate volumes and perhaps that was the wisest solution to publishing the work.
This has been on my currently reading list for almost two years, which in the way of statistics and figures misrepresents the situation.
I started and read slowly through about four or five hundred pages over a few months and then stopped until last December when I picked it up again and averaged about fifty pages a day until I finished.
I had made the mistake of deciding that it would be my 'upstairs book' which I would read when I was upstairs, this allowed me effectively to abandon it and to read shorter books downstairs instead.
I was intimated by the heft of the book and possibly distracted by the potential of using it for bicep curls, I found it was like going swimming, nice once I had got used to the temperature of the water, but it takes an effort to get that far, and like swimming it required special equipment, in my case reading glasses.
At times as I was reading I wondered what this book was all about and if it was going somewhere, the answer to which is no unless you countas a destination of sorts, and even that would be wrong.
. .
Osterhammel explains all in his afterword to the book, His expertise is not in the nineteenth century but in the era of the Enlightenment, The book arose out of an academic year spent at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and represents, I feel, an attempt at an analysis of the Nineteenth Century by the author to explain it to himself, there have been, he thinks, plenty of syntheses of nineteenth century history, as though distilled from the textbooks but no analysis.
Because of this I feel it is ideal as an introductory book about the nineteenth century particularly perhaps for those planning for beginning to study modern history at university, or indeed for the general reader who seriously desires to look at the nineteenth century in terms of big concepts and themes rather than flag waving and stories, although at times I felt the analysis was superficial as in his discussion of literacy.
This is a book about the long nineteenth century, so vaguely from circato sometime after, I don't think it mentions much before, or after, because of this I still feel this is the indispensable guide to living through the twentieth century, it is the opposite to thehour rolling news phenomenon, a contrast to life as an perpetual, shallow, addictive present, in which events are forever without context or relation to each other.
At one point reading I experienced a sonorous bell ringing as I read that one of the traditional functions of the King of Burma was to restrain and constrain the political activism of the country's Buddhist monks.
Elsewhere Osterhammel compares the Taiping rebellion with the Mormon movement two Christian inspired events that were brought under control by Government force, this is typical of Osterhammel's willingness to look for patterns and contrasts, some of these will be more significant than others for instance when slavery in the British empire was ended and compensation paid out to the slave owners in the case of the West Indies the former slave owners were largely absentees living in Britain so the money flowed directly back into the UK, while in South Africa the opposite was true which lead to completely divergent patterns of economic development in the two regions, but this makes reading the whole,pages a refreshing experience aided by the occasional droll observation.
It is also a book that makes a consistent effort not to be Eurocentric and points out when events around the world were interrelated and when they were on their own trajectory, it is the kind of book that just as I was thinking 'what about Greece' then up pops a paragraph about Greece under Otto of Bavaria.
The regime of Muhammad Ali in Egypt with its slave army and attempts at globalisation and industrialisation was a regularly enjoyable counterpoint to the dominant and familiar narratives of the 'successful' regimes of the nineteenth century world, the problem with a book that weighs over three pounds is that there is an awful lot to forget about, and I notice that an interesting point about China and Needham having asked the wrong question has completely slipped out of my mind.
Don't try living through the twentieth century without this book, .