The Transformation of the World Quotes

“Cultural arena” thus became the key postliberal concept, supplanting the “individual” in the idealist geography and history of Carl Ritter’s generation.35 Those ideas, later to resurface in the work of Samuel P. Huntington, were a typical fin de siècle phenomenon, expressing an oversimplistic view of the world such as was also to be found in the terminology used by followers of geopolitics.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“In 1790 an official investigation established that a majority of people in France spoke and read a language other than French: Celtic, German, Occitan, Catalan, Italian, or Flemish. Even in 1893 every eighth schoolchild between ages seven and fourteen knew no French.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“The rise of outdoor eating did not stop with expensive high-class restaurants but stretched all the way down to diners in working-class districts. Peculiarities of national culture also played a role. Across the Channel there were 26,000 fish-and-chip shops, which used a thousand tons of frying oil a week. The occasion when cod was first combined with potato strips in this way is lost in the mists of time, but it must have been at some point in the 1860s. The meal then developed into the favorite of the British working class, helping to shape its identity and symbolizing the national virtues on a plate.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“Thus, when the banker John Pierpont Morgan left a fortune of $68 million in 1914, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie is supposed to have remarked pityingly that he had by no means been “a rich man.”203 Carnegie’s own fortune and those of industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Andrew W. Mellon were over half a billion dollars. The rapidity of the concentration of wealth may be gauged from the fact that the largest American private fortunes grew from about $25 million in 1860 to $100 million twenty years later and $1 billion two decades after that. By 1900 the richest man in the United States had assets worth twelve times more than those of the richest European (who was a member of the English aristocracy); not even the Rothschilds (finance), the Krupps (steel, machinery, weapons), or the Beits (British/South African gold and diamond capital) were in the same league.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“Poverty and starvation are closely related to each other, without quite being mutually reinforcing. Although the poor may lack everything else, the last thing left to them is enough food to keep body and soul together. Not all poor people go hungry, and not all starving people are poor. Poverty as a concept embraces more. Societies have their own definitions of “the poor”; people who are not poor engage in discourse about those who are and make them recipients of their charity. In comparison with developed industrial societies, all premodern societies, whatever their cultural characteristics, were poor. But modern economies have not ended poverty—which is one reason why the achievements of “modernity” should not be celebrated too smugly.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“Over the next thirteen years the viceregal capital, Rio de Janeiro, became the center of the Lusitanian world. It was a dual premiere: it was not only the first exodus overseas by a whole system of rule but the first time in the history of European maritime expansion that a ruling monarch had paid a visit to one of his colonies.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“Statistics became what it still is today: a form of political rhetoric. The categories that statisticians had to develop were reified in the hands of government bureaucracies. Categories that statistics made technically necessary—classes, strata, castes, ethnic groups—acquired the power to mold reality for administrative departments and, indeed, in society’s perception of itself. Statistics had two faces: a tool for sociological description and explanation, and a powerful mechanism for stereotyping and labeling people”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“The history of the nineteenth century was made in and by Europe, to an extent that cannot be said of either the eighteenth or twentieth century, not to speak of earlier periods. Never has Europe released a comparable burst of innovativeness and initiative—or of conquering might and arrogance.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“A watershed in the century is the moment when the first recognizably genuine pictorial documents were produced. No one knows what Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) really looked like, but we do know how Frédéric Chopin (1810–49) appeared. Only paintings of Franz Schubert exist, but Gioachino Rossini, five years his elder, lived long enough to be photographed in the studio of the great portraitist, Félix Nadar. A few other heroes from the age of Romanticism and Idealism lived to see the age of photography, which dawned in 1838–39 with the invention of the daguerreotype, followed by the opening of the first studios two years later.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“The electrical overland telegraph came into use in 1844. The first durable underwater cable was laid across the English Channel in 1851, and a permanent transatlantic link was established in 1866.124 By 1862 the worldwide terrestrial telegraph network was 150,000 miles in length; by 1876 India and all the settler colonies of the British Empire were linked to the home country and one another; and by 1885 Europe could be reached from nearly all large cities by underwater cable.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“The first German state to introduce full freedom of the press was the Kingdom of Württemberg, in 1864, but it was another ten years before an imperial press law ended preventive censorship for good throughout the Reich.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“The pioneer in Europe was Sweden, where the first national census dates from 1755. In 1787 the great Enlightenment monarch Carlos III ordered one to be held in Spain, and its methods were so advanced that it has sometimes been described as Europe’s first “modern” census.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

“By “West Sudan,” for instance, an almost vanished term, people understood the whole gigantic stretch of savannah immediately south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to Darfur in the country now known as Sudan.”
― Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century