Abstract
The conditions of rapid change and modernization that swept the world from the second half of the nineteenth century enforced the new nationalisms, imperialisms, racisms, anti-Semitisms, and, more positively, sexualities that are again sweeping the world today. The longue durée of modern globalization that began with British industrialization continues with our contemporary forms of technological expansion, international competition, populist disaffection, and accompanying forms of stress, anxiety, depression, nostalgia, regression: decadence. This essay will focus on the political-economic conditions of the period and the cosmopolitanism and progressivism that resisted, and continue to resist, them. I conclude with the classic Japanese analysis of the condition, Kobayashi Hideo's “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933).
Highlights
I T was a commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century that Britain and the United States were democracies within but empires without
The late Victorian period was a time of extreme global disruption, like our own and with some of our own characteristics
In the introduction to a major reassessment collected by the historian Michael Saler, The Fin-de-Siècle World (2015), Saler writes about the three waves of study of this particular period of modernization: the first was focused on Europe and North America, the second on the critical self-consciousness of the period, and the most recent on global exchanges
Summary
I T was a commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century that Britain and the United States were democracies within but empires without.
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