Includes bibliographical references (pages 514-532) and index.

List of illustrations -- List of maps and tables -- Series editor's preface -- Acknowledgments -- Notes and conventions -- Introduction -- Organization of the book -- Problem 1: Prime movers and the economic factor -- Problem 2: Global history and postmodernism -- Problem 3: Continuing "riddle of the modern" -- Conforming to standards: bodily practice -- Building outward from the body: communications and complexity -- Part 1: End Of The Old Regime -- 1: Old regimes and "Archaic globalization" -- Peasants and lords -- Politics of difference -- Powers on the fringes of states -- Harbingers of new political formations -- Prehistory of globalization -- Archaic and early modern globalization -- Prospect -- 2: Passages from the old regimes to modernity -- Last Greta Domestication and Industrious -- Revolutions-- New patterns of Afro-Asian material culture, production, and trade -- Internal and external limits of Afro-Asian "Industrious Revolutions" -- Trade, finance, and innovation: European competitive advantages -- Activist, patriotic state evolves -- Critical publics -- Development of Asian and African publics -- Conclusion: Backwardness, lags, and conjunctures -- Prospect -- 3: Converging revolution, 1780-1820 -- Contemporaries ponder the world crisis -- Summary anatomy of the world crisis, 1720-1820 -- Sapping the legitimacy of the state: from France to China -- Ideological origins of the modern left and the modern state -- Nationalities versus states and empires -- Third revolution: Polite and commercial peoples worldwide -- Prospect -- Part 2: Modern World In Genesis -- 4: Between world revolutions, c 1815-1865 -- Assessing the wreck of nations -- British maritime supremacy, world trade, and the revival of agriculture -- Emigration: a safety valve? -- Losers in the new world order, 1815-1865 -- Problems of hybrid legitimacy: whose state was it? -- State gains strength, but not enough -- Wars of legitimacy in Asia: a summary account -- Economic and ideological roots of the Asian Revolutions -- Years of hunger and rebellion in Europe, 1848-1851 -- American Civil War as a global event -- Convergence or difference? -- Reviewing the argument -- 5: Industrialization and the new city -- Historians, industrialization, and cities -- Progress of industrialization -- Poverty and the absence of industry -- Cities as centers of production, consumption, and politics -- Urban impact of the global crisis, 1780-1820 -- Race and class in the new cities -- Working-class politics -- Worldwide urban cultures and their critics -- Conclusion -- 6: Nation, empire, and ethnicity, c 1860-1900 -- Theories of nationalism -- When was nationalism? -- Whose nation? -- Perpetuating nationalisms: memories, national associations, and print -- From community to nation: the Eurasian empires -- Where we stand with nationalism -- Peoples without states: persecution or assimilation? -- Imperialism and its history: the late nineteenth century -- Dimensions of the new imperialism -- World of nation-states? -- Persistence of archaic globalization -- From globalization to internationalism -- Internationalism in practice -- Conclusion -- Part 3: State And Society In The Age Of Imperialism -- 7: Myths and technologies of the modern state -- Dimensions of the modern state -- State and the historians -- Problems of defining the state -- Modern state takes root: geographical dimensions -- Claims to justice and symbols of power -- State's resources -- State's obligations to society -- Tools of the state -- State, economy, and nation -- Balance sheet: what had the state achieved? -- 8: Theory and practice of liberalism, rationalism, socialism, and science -- Contextualizing intellectual history -- Corruption of the righteous republic: a classic theme -- Righteous republics worldwide -- Advent of liberalism and the market: western exceptionalism? -- Liberalism and land reform: radical theory and conservative practice -- Free trade or national political economy? -- Representing the peoples -- Secularism and positivism: transnational affinities -- Reception of socialism and its local resonances -- Science in global context -- Professionalization at world level -- Conclusion -- 9: Empires of religion -- Religion in the eyes of contemporaries -- View of recent historians -- Rise of new-style religion -- Modes of religious dominion, their agents and their limitations -- Formalizing religious authority, creating imperial religions -- Formalizing doctrines and rites -- Expansion of imperial religions on their inner and outer frontiers -- Pilgrimage and globalization -- Printing and the propagation of religion -- Religious building -- Religion and the nation -- Conclusion: the spirits of the age -- 10: World of the arts and the imagination -- Arts and politics -- Hybridity and uniformity in art across the globe -- Leveling forces: the market, the everyday, and the museum -- Arts of the emerging nation, 1760-1850 -- Arts and the people, 1850-1914 -- Outside the west: adaptation and dependency -- Architecture: a mirror of the city -- Towards world literature? -- Conclusion: Arts and societies -- Prospect -- Part 4: Change, Decay, And Crisis -- 11: Reconstitution of social hierarchies -- Change and the historians -- Gender and subordination in the liberal age -- Slavery's Indian summer -- Peasant and rural laborer as bond serf -- Peasants that got away -- Why rural subordination survived -- Transformation of gentries -- Challenges to the gentry -- Routes to survival: state service and commerce -- Men of fewer broad acres in Europe -- Surviving supremacies -- Continuity or change? -- 12: Destruction of native peoples and ecological depredation -- What is meant by Native peoples? -- Europeans and Native peoples before c 1820 -- Native peoples in the age of hiatus -- White deluge, 1840-1890 -- Deluge in practice: New Zealand, South Africa, and the USA -- Ruling savage natures: recovery and marginalization -- 13: Conclusion: Great acceleration, c 1890-1914 -- Predicting things to come -- Agricultural depression, internationalism, and the new imperialism -- New nationalism -- Strange death of international liberalism -- Summing up: globalization and crisis, 1780-1914 -- Global comparisons and connections, 1780-1914: conclusion -- What were the motors of change? -- Power in global and international networks -- Contested uniformity and universal complexity revisited -- August 1914 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Old regimes and "archaic globalization" -- Passages from the old regimes to modernity -- Converging revolutions, 1780-1820 -- Between world revolutions, c.1815-1865 -- Industrialization and the New City -- Nation, empire, and ethnicity, c.1860-1900 -- pt. 3. State and society in the age of imperialism -- Myths and technologies of the modern state -- The theory and practice of liberalism, rationalism, socialism, and science -- Empires of religion -- The world of the arts and the imagination -- The reconstitution of social hierarchies -- The destruction of native peoples and ecological depredation -- Conclusion : the great acceleration, c.1890-1914.