The Day Before Yesterday : THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN: World Society, 1815-1830, <i> By Paul Johnson (HarperCollins: $35; 1,120 pp.)</i>

What on earth does Paul Johnson mean by the Modern and World Society ? The terms seem almost too broad to have meaning.

Over the last two centuries, Western society has changed radically in every respect: in technology and commerce, art and intellect, popular government and private morals; through nationalism, colonialism, genocide. Science has journeyed to outer space and inside the atom. To isolate a brief, early period of transition would seem futile and misguided. But while “The Birth of the Modern” is many things--possibly too many--misguided isn’t one of them.

Johnson, the author of such works as “Modern Times,” “A History of the Jews” and “A History of the English People,” doesn’t shy from big subjects. Nor does he distill, condense or simplify. History isn’t a tidy affair, and neither is this sprawling, cornucopian book. Its main thesis has two parts: that the ultimate mark of modernity is global integration, spurred on by technological revolutions; and that the world emerged from the period 1815-1830 significantly more integrated than before.

The first proposition is valid, but overly general; the second seems arguable, even after a thousand pages of evidence. But no matter; not far into the book, I absolved the author of responsibility for where we came out. For all its flaws, and despite my best initial intentions to dislike it, “The Birth of the Modern” is a profoundly, persistently, maddeningly interesting work.

We begin at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, where Gen. Andrew Jackson is clobbering the British forces, ending a conflict that already had been concluded at the peace table (news of the Treaty of Ghent hadn’t reached the Mississippi Delta). The outcome of the War of 1812 was the enduring “special relationship” between England and the United States. Among other things, it ended French and Russian designs on this continent.

Now we swing over to Europe: Napoleon escapes from Elba, and three months later he’s defeated at Waterloo by Britain and the Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria. The Napoleonic Wars are over, and the Congress of Vienna opens the way for the Bourbon Restoration in France, a century of peace in Europe, and major advances in art, science and politics during the 1820s.

Much (but by no means all) of “The Birth of the Modern” could be described as a cultural history of England during that decade. Those sections alone would have made a more coherent book. But I’m frankly glad that Johnson chooses instead to jolt us back and forth between continents, making several forays each to France and the United States, and side trips to China, Japan, Russia, Australia and Latin America. One chapter recounts the brutal Russian conquest of Central Asia; another, the ambiguous legacy of Simon Bolivar; a third, Chinese politics and the opium trade.

We meet, on this long and somewhat chaotic world tour, an enormous gallery of brilliant, eccentric and (especially the poets) licentious characters: the monomaniacal Bonaparte; Jackson, whose penchant for dueling took a grievous toll on his body and perhaps his mind; Wellington, who concealed his Irish heritage, noting that “Because a man is born in a manger, that does not make him a horse”; Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, Schubert and Berlioz, Faraday and Fulton. There are compelling portraits of Beethoven, Turner, Victor Hugo and Martin Van Buren; a memorable dinner party attended by Wordsworth, Keats and Charles Lamb; a chapter on Jackson’s populist Administration, and the bizarre scandal, involving the wife of a crony, that marred his presidency.

If space is no stricture on Johnson’s imagination, neither is time. While we lurch around the globe, chronological sequence is dispensed as a nuisance, making the narrative somewhat disjointed. (The procession of British statesmen, for example--Pitt, Peel, Canning, Castlereagh, Wellington, Palmerston--is never clearly established.) At times, Johnson wisely discards the 1815-1830 framework; elsewhere, by rigidly adhering to it, his chronicle becomes disengaged from the longer train of events. What animates the writing, however, is not argumentative thrust, stylistic grace or narrative flow, but a passion for the vivid minutiae of recorded history--anecdotes, facts, quotations.

Occasionally these are trivial. We’re informed, for example, that when Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, traveled to the Congress of Vienna, “Under his traveling cloak he wore a blue winter coat, red breeches and jockey boots, with a gold-banded fur cap on his head”; and that “Beethoven, at 5 feet 6 inches, was the same height as Bonaparte.” Johnson is likewise obsessive about numbers and statistics. We’re given, as if to allay any doubt, precise figures on land prices in Argentina, and reminded that “by 1874, only two out of 658 British members of Parliament were beardless.” There is scarcely a paragraph that doesn’t contain a superfluous date, amount, weight, cost or dimension.

Despite such arcana, one has to appreciate Johnson’s determination to enliven, concretize and humanize the past. At times--as when recounting obscure details of Andrew Jackson’s ruthless campaign against the Creek Indians--he seems to lose sight of modernity altogether. But just as often the details help to make a telling point: for instance, the impact of advances in road-building on daily life and public safety, or the emergence of the piano as a common household item, “proof that the middle class was taking over the cultural leadership from the old nobility.”

There are many arresting examples of the social consequences of technology: the effects of gaslight on the London theater; how the cotton gin boosted slavery in America when it was losing ground elsewhere; the incalculable impact of the steam engine, which opened great rivers (such as the Yangtze, Irrawaddy, Amazon and Nile) to the Royal Navy’s gunboats. Steam power also led (in 1835) to the railroad, with commercial and social implications perhaps more profound than the advent of flight.

A paragon of the “great man” school, Johnson provides ample evidence that the early 1800s were “an age of great men.” He takes particular delight in emphasizing that it was an age when men and women of humble origins--including Thomas Telford, the great designer of bridges and canals, and many other Scots--rose to become great artists, inventors and engineers.

But in merely exalting genius, Johnson betrays the prejudices of the modern conservative intellectual. He brings us into the drawing rooms, studios and laboratories, but not into the factories, prisons, asylums, poorhouses or urban slums, where millions of less fortunate wretches were left behind by the Industrial Revolution.

Likewise, Johnson portrays Britain’s role overseas as almost wholly benign. As he would have it, the main tasks of the Royal Navy were “promoting trade and suppressing slavery.” Knowledgeable readers may receive this news with some skepticism. He does, however, suggest the cruelty of the European conquest of primitive cultures, and the “tragic irony” that famine and overpopulation in the Old World, and the enclosure of land, helped to produce the “surge of European settlement which was subjecting the Indians of North America to a similar process of eviction and exile.”

Johnson is hostile toward the nascent trade-union movement (without considering the conditions that occasioned it); toward almost all radicals, and toward intellectuals as a class--the subject of a previous book that I’m now less inclined to read. He makes foolish remarks about the seeds of totalitarianism in the thought of social visionaries such as Bentham, Fourier and St. Simon, and betrays his ignorance of philosophy in dismissing Hegel, the century’s most profound thinker, as a “protototalitarian ideologue.”

So what is the modern? On one level it is the cultural and economic integration that Johnson posits. Trade, transatlantic migration and technology (primarily electricity and steam) certainly accelerated the process between 1815 and 1830. Other signs of modernity included the Romantic celebration of the self, and of nature, borne of a sense that the wilderness was about to disappear; a new sense of the past, along with the rise of archeology; the emergence of distinct international scientific and artistic communities; the waves of populism and political reform in France, England and America, circa 1830, concurrent with the rise of mass journalism. “Public opinion,” Johnson writes breezily, “was the great new fact of the dawning modern world.” Well, one of them.

The central modern development, correlative to all these others, is the emergence of a large, stable middle class. Johnson documents and celebrates the rise of that class, and there is much about it to celebrate. Yet what makes this elephantine work an unexpected pleasure is not its themes but the author’s sheer enthusiasm for making the tiniest fragments of recorded history burst with light and color.

If he neglects the darker side of the picture--the failure of that middle class, down to the present, to absorb the rest of society--well, nobody’s perfect.