The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers 9780520964297

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THE NEW WORLD HISTORY

THE CALIFORNIA WORLD HISTORY LIBRARY Edited by Edmund Burke III and Laura J. Mitchell 1. The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F. Richards 2. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian 3. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho 4. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860– 1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf 5. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker 6. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, by Jeremy Prestholdt 7. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall 8. Island World: A History of Hawai‘i and the United States, by Gary Y. Okihiro 9. The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz 10. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones, by Gary Y. Okihiro 11. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, by Robert Finlay 12. The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, by Sebastian Conrad; translated by Alan Nothnagle 13. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860– 1914, by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi 14. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, by Marcello Carmagnani 15. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800– 1900, by Julia A. Clancy-Smith 16. History and the Testimony of Language, by Christopher Ehret

17. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, by Sebouh David Aslanian 18. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route, by Steven E. Sidebotham 19. The Haj to Utopia: The Ghadar Movement and Its Transnational Connections, 1905– 1930, by Maia Ramnath 20. Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History, by Arash Khazeni 21. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World, by Kevin P. McDonald 22. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, by Marc Matera 23. The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward

THE NEW WORLD HISTORY A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers EDITED BY

Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dunn, Ross E., editor. | Mitchell, Laura Jane, 1963– editor. | Ward, Kerry, editor. Title: The new world history : a field guide for teachers and researchers / edited by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Series: The California World History Library ; 23 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2016021166 (print) | LCCN 2016020076 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520964297 (e-edition) | ISBN 9780520293274 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520289895 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects:  LCSH: World history—Historiography. Classification: LCC D13 (print) | LCC D13 .N454 2016 (ebook) | DDC 907.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021166 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

Preface

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xiii

INTRODUCTION

Further Reading CHAPTER 1

1

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15

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WORLD HISTORY OVER TIME: THE EVOLUTION OF AN INTELLECTUAL AND PEDAGOGICAL MOVEMENT

Introduction

17

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The Rise of World History Scholarship

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22

Craig A. Lockard

World History

39

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Marnie Hughes-Warrington

Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course 48 •

Gilbert Allardyce

Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History 78 •

Edmund Burke III

Further Reading

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89

CHAPTER 2

DEFINING WORLD HISTORY: SOME KEY STATEMENTS

Introduction

91

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Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History 97 •

Marshall G. S. Hodgson

The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years

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107

William H. McNeill

Depth, Span, and Relevance

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121

Philip D. Curtin

A Plea for World System History

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130

Andre Gunder Frank

Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History 145 •

Jerry H. Bentley

World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality 152 •

Merry Wiesner-Hanks

Further Reading CHAPTER 3

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163

REGIONS IN WORLD-HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Introduction

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167

The Middle East and North Africa in World History

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173

Julia A. Clancy-Smith

No Longer Odd Region Out: Repositioning Latin America in World History 183 •

Lauren Benton

Southeast Asia in World History

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189

Craig A. Lockard

American History as if the World Mattered (and Vice Versa) 199 •

Carl Guarneri

Further Reading

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212

CHAPTER 4

RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL SPACE

Introduction

215

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The Architecture of Continents: The Development of the Continental Scheme 222 •

Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen

Southernization

242

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Lynda Shaffer

Oceans of World History: Delineating Aquacentric Notions in the Global Past 259 •

Rainer F. Buschmann

Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities 267 •

Alison Games

Further Reading CHAPTER 5

285

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RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL TIME

Introduction

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289

Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History 296 •

Jerry H. Bentley

When Does World History Begin? (And Why Should We Care?) 304 •

David Northrup

History and Science after the Chronometric Revolution David Christian

Worlding History

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317

Daniel A. Segal

Further Reading

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329

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311

CHAPTER 6

WORLD HISTORY AS COMPARISON

Introduction

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331

Global and Comparative History

335

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Michael Adas

Frameworks for Global Historical Analysis

337

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Patrick Manning

How to Write the History of the World

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342

Lauren Benton

What Is World History Good For?

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347

Kenneth Pomeranz

Further Reading CHAPTER 7

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354

DEBATING THE QUESTION OF WESTERN POWER

Introduction

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357

Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture 366 •

Kenneth Pomeranz

The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity 383 •

Joseph M. Bryant

Capitalist Origins, the Advent of Modernity, and Coherent Explanation: A Response to Joseph M. Bryant 399 •

Jack A. Goldstone

Comparison in Global History

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412

Prasannan Parthasarathi

Further Reading CHAPTER 8

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418

WORLD HISTORY, BIG HISTORY, AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

Introduction

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421

The Columbian Exchange Alfred W. Crosby

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427

Matter Matters: Towards a More “Substantial” Global History 434 •

Frank Uekötter

The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? 440 •

Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill

Big History: The Emergence of a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach 459 •

Fred Spier

Further Reading CHAPTER 9

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472

GLOBAL HISTORY AND GLOBALIZATION

Introduction

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475

Global History: Approaches and New Directions

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484

Maxine Berg

Comparing Global History to World History

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495

Bruce Mazlish

Cycles of Silver: Globalization as Historical Process

503

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Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez

What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective 514 •

Frederick Cooper

Further Reading

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529

CHAPTER 10 CRITIQUES AND QUESTIONS

Introduction

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533

Global History and Critiques of Western Perspectives

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Dominic Sachsenmaier

Much Ado about Something: The New Malaise of World History 555 •

Vinay Lal

540

Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History 561 •

Jerry H. Bentley

Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multicentric World History Needs Africa 568 •

Joseph C. Miller

Women’s and Men’s World History? Not Yet Judith P. Zinsser

Histories for a Less National Age

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587

Kenneth Pomeranz

Further Reading

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611

Teaching World History, Further Reading Credits 615 Index 619 •

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613

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578

PREFACE

In 1997 Ross Dunn contracted with Bedford/St. Martin’s to edit a collection of essays on the development of world history as an educational and research field and on the problems of conceptualizing, constructing, and teaching the subject in colleges and universities. A twenty-five-year veteran of the world history program at San Diego State University, he agreed with his Bedford/St. Martin’s editors that the field had matured to a point where publication of a selection of outstanding scholarly essays and book excerpts was worthwhile. In the preface to The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, which appeared in 2000, Dunn wrote that the book aimed “to signify how rich and inventive the world history field has become and to explore several different dimensions of its development,” mainly in the United States, in the twentieth century and especially since the 1960s. The New World History had been out for only a few years when colleagues starting asking Dunn to produce an updated edition, owing to the accelerating growth of world history education and scholarship. He was not in a position to take on the job for a number of years, and he decided that when he did, he wanted a partner or two. Thus, in due course he invited Laura Mitchell, who teaches African and world history at the University of California, Irvine, to collaborate with him as coeditor. More recently, Laura and he recruited Kerry Ward, an Africanist, Southeast Asianist, and world history teacher at Rice University, to join the team. As work on the project progressed, the three of us found ourselves amazed by the expansion of the field since 2000, not only in the volume of writing but also in the

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appearance of new subdisciplines, new theoretical statements, new periodicals, and many new programs and institutions, not only in the United States but also in several other countries. We also noted that some of the issues that had provoked much debate in the 1990s or earlier—introductory world history versus Western Civ, the problems of starting a new course on a campus, alternative syllabus designs, the pros and cons of world systems theory—no longer commanded as much attention in the new century. Consequently, we concluded that new essays should replace many, though not all, of the ones in the 2000 volume. This meant that we also had to rethink the chapter categories into which readings were to be grouped and to write a new general introduction, as well as new introductions to all the chapters. In short, we transformed the 2000 book into a new and very different publication. This transformation has been shaped by our conversations— both sustained and fleeting, in formal panels and in social contexts— at meetings of the World History Association (WHA). We are grateful for the institutional structure of a scholarly society that facilitates wide-ranging inquiry and detailed attention to pedagogy. Without the WHA, the intellectual engagements necessary for this kind of book would not have been possible. Laura Mitchell brought the project to the attention of Niels Hooper, executive editor at the University of California Press. The press has an outstanding and growing world history list, including books of interest to student readers. Hooper responded enthusiastically. In collaboration with Bradley Depew, David Peattie, and other UC Press editors, and with the advice of anonymous reviewers, he guided this project to completion. As the submission date grew near, the three of us faced the painful task of deleting some of the excellent essays from our working list. This is to be a one-volume publication, our editors reminded us, not two! We are nonetheless able to provide a robust selection of existing scholarship thanks to a generous subvention from Alida Metcalf, history department chair at Rice University, to support payment for reprint permissions. We are grateful for the university’s material assistance and vote of confidence in this project. We believe that the forty-four selections offered here represent a cogent sampling of literature that addresses the history, methodology, criticism, and pedagogy of a vibrant research and teaching field.

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INTRODUCTION

Colleges and universities in the United States have taught world history, defined one way or another, since the nineteenth century. Out of the curriculum of the early Republic, which was centered on holy scripture and the classics, emerged “general history,” a course of study designed for the multitude of both native-born and immigrant Americans entering post-primary education after the Civil War. The one-year general history course, taught in either high school or college, was the story of humankind defined unabashedly as the progressive evolution of peoples of Caucasian race and Christian faith to world dominion. As an approach to teaching, it encouraged students to exercise interpretive judgment, but it also demanded a good deal of fact drilling. In the 1890s two scholarly commissions disparaged the course for stifling the historical imaginations of young Americans.1 Endorsing the recommendations of the commissions, the secondary schools largely abandoned general history after 1900, replacing it with a solid four-year block of courses in classical, medieval/modern, English, and American history. History’s reign over the humanities curriculum was glorious but brief. After World War I, the world history survey course reappeared in secondary schools in response to new educational ideologies promoting acculturation, vocational training, and civic responsibility. At the same time, the burgeoning social science disciplines demanded places in the curriculum. In public schools, “social studies,” a phrase added to the American lexicon in the 1920s, largely replaced the four-year history block. The new pedagogy assigned world history to the tenth grade, where it served as a vehicle for delivering geography, government, sociology, citizenship, and a kind of resurrected general history in one efficient package.

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Paralleling this development, colleges began in the 1920s to offer undergraduate surveys of Western civilization from ancient to modern times. James Harvey Robinson, who taught at Columbia College from 1895 to 1919, trained a number of graduate students who introduced the first Western Civ courses and wrote textbooks for them. Robinson offered a graduate course that explored his ideas about the progress of rational thought in human society, a process that he located exclusively in Europe and North America. According to anthropologist and historian Daniel Segal, the authors of the first generation of Western Civ textbooks contended that college students must acquire a knowledge of Western political, cultural, and intellectual achievements, not so much to fortify their American patriotism as to prepare them to help defend human civilization against the irrationality and barbarism that had afflicted society in World War I and that in the 1930s threatened to do so again.2 Both tenth-grade world history and college Western Civ paid attention to the big international issues of the day. This practice reflected the public interest in Europe and world affairs that had been growing since before World War I. Nevertheless, the prewar intellectual principle, endorsed by Robinson and other scholars of Western civilization, that one part of humankind had a history to be studied and preserved but that other parts did not, endured throughout the interwar period. This was the era when European colonial empires sprawled across Africa and Asia and when Western science, medicine, and engineering appeared to be transforming the material world. Most educators took it for granted therefore that non-American history studies reasonably excluded all but the very contemporary or very ancient experience of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. As the “American Century” reached its zenith in the two decades after World War II, the Western Civ course remained preeminent as a framework for explaining what should matter most to young Americans. Many citizens recognized, however, that the second global war and its aftermath made the world simultaneously smaller as an interacting social sphere and much larger as a cultural construct in the collective consciousness, not only of Americans and Europeans but of peoples almost everywhere. A bigger world required a bigger world history. The critical challenge to the Western perspective of discerning causation and meaning in the human past through what James Blaut called the “European tunnel of time” came slowly and from several directions.3 One was the insistent nationalism that emerged in most European colonial dependencies after World War II, including the rise of armed liberation movements in some places. Another was the Cold War as an apocalyptic global rivalry for influence over the futures of nonaligned states. Those twin developments prompted the movement to train more American college students in the history, culture, and politics of “foreign areas,” as well as more insistent calls for the internationalizing of both secondary and college curricula. In the universities, the rapid expansion of historical and social scientific knowledge, the social broadening of faculties, and, in the late 1970s, the rise of multiculturalist ideology all contributed to

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serious questioning of the assumption that world history was largely equivalent to the experience of people inhabiting Europe. By the 1970s a movement was under way among a significant minority of college and secondary teachers to enlarge the cultural scope of syllabi and textbooks to include the historical and cultural traditions of Africans, Asians, and indigenous Americans. Few educators, however, seemed to know how to make non-American history more culturally inclusive without creating courses that were more incoherent and unwieldy than Western Civ. Fortunately, a few thinkers, notably William H. McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson at the University of Chicago and Leften Stavrianos at Northwestern University, had been working since the 1950s to formulate large historical questions that could seriously be addressed only by breaching, at least in some measure, the borders of civilizations and nation-states. These scholars drew ideas from the increasingly nuanced disciplines of historical sociology and cultural anthropology. They also read the works of twentieth-century metahistorians like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, whose “universal histories” contemplated the underlying moral and spiritual structures that might govern change in the human condition, past and future. They did not, however, engage in the philosophical conjectures that characterized this earlier tradition of world history writing. Rather, they applied the methodological rules of the modern historical discipline, founding their interpretations of the past on the collection and analysis of material evidence. By the later 1970s, introductory world history, drawing broadly on the conceptions of these and a few other thinkers, was beginning to gain acceptance in collegiate education as a distinct curricular alternative to Western Civ. Some traditionalists argued that world history educators wanted to “drop the West.” Clearly, few instructors had that in mind, and in fact most of the detractors who complained about Western exclusion probably feared that a course might devote less than 80 or 90 percent of its syllabus to European history. Indeed, the new field owed a significant debt to Western Civ. That course was the first of any non-American history survey to make a place for itself in colleges. Because it was not just a compilation of histories of European states or nations, it advanced the concept of border-crossing history. And, though not in its earliest manifestations, it eventually put forward the idea that the human venture began in the Paleolithic era, not in fifth-century BCE Athens.4 World history practitioners, however, sought more-sweeping innovations than these. In the 1980s and 1990s, more young scholars, possessed of internationalist sensibilities and area studies training, and influenced by the social science disciplines, turned enthusiastically to economic, social, popular cultural, and other spheres of inquiry that invited cross-cultural or interregional frameworks of analysis. In our view world history became “new” as both a teaching and research endeavor when nations, civilizations, and conventionally defined areas (Africa, the Middle East) no longer rigidly predetermined the borders of investigation. Moreover, just in the past two decades, the astonishing acceleration in the production and flow of information, the proliferation of exchange

INTRODUCTION

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networks, the advent of social media, and the continuous restructuring of the world economy have obliged teachers and scholars, whether they like it or not, to reflect on the past, from Paleolithic times onward, in more holistic and spatially flexible terms. The traditional argument that the global past is much too tangled and perplexing to explore profitably— or that Andre Gunder Frank’s proposal for “humanocentric history” is too much trouble to construct when nations and cultures are “natural” units of study—has lost much of its persuasive power.5 Several writers have observed that the world history teaching project nourished research more richly than the other way round. By reverse analogy, we know for example that the social history of the United States grew steadily as a scholarly enterprise from the early part of the century, when scholars like James Harvey Robinson advocated a broadening of inquiry beyond political, diplomatic, and military subjects, until the 1960s and 1970s, when social history exploded in all directions. With only a few exceptions, however, college and high school textbooks lagged well behind advances in social history scholarship, and in the 1980s they were still catching up. By contrast, the pressure on curriculum makers and textbook publishers to broaden the scope of world history beyond the Western metanarrative has until recently exceeded scholarly energy devoted to new studies in comparative, interregional, and global subjects. Much of the exciting new work in world history has come from the pens of scholars who either were teaching the subject already or were intellectually affiliated with a network of teachers who did. Philip Curtin, for example, made several key contributions to the literature of comparative world history, but these began to appear only after he started teaching “The Expansion of Europe,” later called “The World and the West,” at the University of Wisconsin.6

DIMENSIONS OF WORLD HIS TORY TE ACHING AND LE ARNING

The world history research and educational project today encompasses a potentially immense range of topics to investigate. The richness and diversity of the field is evident in the essays that follow in this book. It is also manifested in journals (the Journal of World History, the Journal of Global History, and World History Connected) and in scholarly meetings of the World History Association, its American affiliates, and the organizations that have emerged in other parts of the world. In short, the aim of the world history project is not only, or even mainly, to construct histories of the world. Nevertheless, educators have faced continuing challenges in devising conceptual frameworks for introductory world history that match the narrative coherence of Western Civ. Since the 1980s undergraduate courses have proliferated in both two- and fouryear colleges across the United States, as if college faculties actually agree on a clear definition of their subject and on the epistemological objectives of their course, when so far they do not. Indeed, designing a globally inclusive course invites controversy. This is not because world historians argue over finding the best way to cover “everything,”

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an ambition that some critics apparently imagine the field is trying to achieve. (Not even a two-semester history of a small town in Missouri could hope to attain such a goal.) Rather, educators have agonized over how to build and then properly position conceptual platforms from which to explicate the human past in all its variety and confusion. World history, as opposed to European, Moroccan, or Iroquoian history, lacks an assumed, coherent cultural frame, however mythical such cultural uniformity may be. In the early days of the world history teaching project, most instructors took the view that the study must first of all be multiculturally inclusive, not Eurocentric— as the Western Civ course was by definition. If a course could not be built on any imagined “global culture” existing since ancient times, it should certainly not leave out any major geographical region. Both Stavrianos and McNeill worked from the premise that Western civilization, meaning essentially Europe, was a natural unit of investigation but that it must not stand for the whole of humankind as the only tradition of historical significance. The narrative must also include chapters about other civilizations. This idea that regions, defined by either their perceived cultural commonalities or their geographical coherence, may serve reasonably as the fundamental categories of inquiry has remained a credible conceptual framework for many teachers and textbook writers. Regional approaches accept a single chronology of human development at a broad level, dividing the past into ancient, medieval (middle period), and modern segments. However, within those large chunks of time, and perhaps within a few additional subdivisions, students explore continuities and changes in particular parts of the world one after another. They cover the same chronological ground several times from different regional standpoints. Instructors may note similarities and differences between developments in two or more regions, though a broad, globally inclusive narrative does not allow for deep, systematic comparative analysis of particular topics. The main advantage of a regional approach is its attention to relatively long-term continuities within particular civilizations or regions, a structure that permits students to place often complex historical subject matter within intellectually manageable geographical or cultural compartments. World historians, however, have increasingly questioned the validity of world history surveys that aim simply to “cover” several civilizations or regions, none of them analytically connected to the others, a strategy that may largely ignore the large-scale patterning that puts the world in world history. Indeed, educators have recently adopted more flexible and expansive views of region-centered world history by, for example, reconceiving the meaning of regions to include arenas of human commercial and cultural interaction such the Indian Ocean basin or Inner Eurasia. Today, most regionally organized textbooks, especially for college readers, give some attention to geographical spaces defined by human interconnectivity and to “big pictures” of change at hemispheric and global scales. Some teachers and writers have departed from region-based world history by adopting thematic narrative structures. This means organizing study of the human past

INTRODUCTION

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in terms of different categories of change—political, economic, intellectual, environmental, and so on—within defined time periods. Typically, the themes chosen address particular phenomena of large historical significance, such as empire formation, belief systems, trade, wars, women and gender, or the social consequences of epidemic disease.7 Thematic organization allows students to explore particular types of historical change in detail. It also encourages comparison of cases in different parts of the world within the frame of the selected theme. A too-rigid thematic approach, however, may mean separating a particular phenomenon from the more general social context of the period under study and thus discounting the complexities of historical causation. Structuring a world history survey thematically may also mean repeating chronological sequences multiple times, not to move from one region to another but to address different subject matter. In the past decade or two, more educators have questioned both region-centered and thematic world history, persuaded that the field must continue to push toward more integrative accounts in which the human story from Paleolithic times to the present unfolds as a single, unilinear chronological narrative. The whole earth and its physical and natural environment become the predominant and ever-present spatial context of this narrative. Humans are identified, first, as members of a particular (and special) animal species and, only second, as affiliates of particular societies, empires, migrating populations, or other groups. This approach pushes to the foreground the study of largescale patterns of change and requires that some of the knowledge about civilizations, events, and peoples traditionally regarded as essential recede from view. In the past fifteen years, the best-known interpretive works that unify the human story have been William H. and J. R. McNeill’s The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History and David Christian’s Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History.8 Christian’s book, however, is something more than world history. It has provided the principal textual foundation for an ambitious intellectual endeavor that undertakes to narrate the whole of the past from its cosmic beginnings. This movement for what Christian named “big history” has generated a corpus of literature and introduced courses in both high schools and universities in several countries.9 Big history connects the human past to the much older story of the universe, starting with the Big Bang. It aims to link the humanities and social sciences with the “historical sciences,” including cosmology, geology, climatology, and evolutionary biology. Advocates of big history, as well as proponents of unified but chronologically less aspiring narratives, argue that the study of change on extremely large scales does not blur our vision of the past. Rather, it directs our view to phenomena that we would not otherwise notice at all. According to David Christian, “World history is as doable as any other type of history; we just have to develop the methods and conventions needed to do history at large scales. And despite the many difficulties, it is worth doing because what can be seen at large scales are objects and problems . . . that cannot be seen at smaller scales.”10 No matter the scale of history being addressed or the narrative approach taken, edu-

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cators face the task of encouraging habits of mind that lead learners to formulate good historical questions. This is basic to advancing world history beyond the coverage of different cultures and places. Since the 1990s, pedagogical research increasingly shows the importance of developing the critical thinking skills of students, whether at K–12 or college levels.11 History classrooms, reformers have argued, should be places where students pose questions rather than simply memorize information that has no connection to concrete historical problems, especially problems that have relevance to contemporary society. In world history education, the examination of interregional or global patterns, as opposed to the factual coverage of a selection of regions, requires critical thought to identify what those patterns might be and how their significance might be evaluated. In other words the starting point of any world historical investigation, whether undertaken by research scholars or middle school students, should be to ask good questions and then test these hypotheses by gathering and analyzing evidence. When students think about the past in terms of questions that probe for explanations of historical cause, effect, and change, they may find that the appropriate scope of their inquiry fits neatly within the limits of a particular nation, civilization, or region. They may also find, however, that their investigation must encompass what Philip Curtin called a “relevant aggregate” of data and of human interrelationships that cuts across political or cultural frontiers. In other words, the inquiry should embrace whatever geographical, social, or cultural field is appropriate for seeking answers to the questions posed. Border posts between countries or geographical markers between continents should not predetermine the scope of the investigation. Over the millennia humans have formed all sorts of aggregates—migrating bands, marching armies, commercial caravans, religious missionaries, big corporations— that act in time and space without regard to the geographical conventions—nations, culture areas, continents— that scholars decided, in some cases a century or two ago, should be the proper and even exclusive vessels for historical inquiry. The movement for a new world history has given researchers leave to break out of national and regional shells, and as they have done this, they have discovered a wealth of new historical questions to explore. As Patrick Manning notes, “The problem is not with studies of nations but that the national framework constrained twentieth-century historians to limit their research and writing.”12

I N S T I T U T I O N S T O A D VA N C E T H E F I E L D

Most of the development of world history as a professional field has taken place since 1970. Hundreds of courses have sprung up in two- and four-year institutions, usually as part of undergraduate core (general education) programs. These courses have typically either replaced or supplemented Western Civ or other broad area studies. Robust data on the number and distribution of world history offerings in the United States are lacking. But in the 1980s and 1990s, courses probably expanded fastest in public universities and community colleges, where demand for large-enrollment core courses was greater

INTRODUCTION

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than in either liberal arts colleges or major research universities. In institutions that do not grant doctorates in history, instructors have faced somewhat less pressure than they have in PhD-granting universities to focus their careers almost exclusively on specialized research. Moreover, state universities have historically trained large numbers of K–12 teachers who, especially from the late 1980s, might find themselves assigned to middle school or high school world history classrooms whatever their initial career preferences might have been. To cite one example of growth, a group of five instructors introduced world history at San Diego State University in 1974 as a two-semester sequence of courses. Team-taught the first three or four years, the course drew heavily on the conceptual thinking of McNeill, Hodgson, and Curtin. Today, lower-division world history is a pillar of the general education program, enrolling several hundred students every semester. One useful gauge of the expansion of world history in recent years in both K–12 and postsecondary education is the striking success of the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program. Every year more than two million high school students enroll in AP courses and examinations. Many of these students strive for scores that will earn them credit in courses offered at the college or university they plan to attend. A trend of growth in the number of students taking the exam in a particular subject indicates concomitant growth in the availability of that subject in collegiate institutions. The AP world history program, designed by a committee of scholars and teachers vested in world historical modes of inquiry rather than simply area specialties, offered its first exam in 2002. Since then, the number of test takers has grown at a remarkable rate. The table below indicates the world history exam’s growth between 2002 and 2015 compared with the long-established programs in European and US history. As world history core courses have proliferated, the logic of creating both upperdivision and graduate options for studying comparative, interregional, or global historiographical topics has become apparent. Some instructors who developed first-year courses also wanted to try out new world history concepts and approaches at moreadvanced teaching levels, offering classes on such topics as the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean world, comparative nationalist movements, or the modern world economy. In some institutions that trained K–12 teachers, both historians and education faculties recognized that even though states and school districts increasingly mandated world history, prospective teachers had little opportunity to address the subject except by taking an introductory course plus a selection of area studies classes. Ironically, teachers who had little exposure to world history as a set of innovative ways of thinking about the past were nonetheless expected to offer middle school or high school courses that embraced the whole inhabited earth over many centuries or even millennia. It is clear that students seeking careers in social studies teaching need much richer training in world history as a distinct discipline. In 2012 a group of K–12 and university educators initiated a project to address this issue, forming the Alliance for Learning in World History. This association aims to advance, potentially on an international scale, both

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TaBLe 1 Test takers 2002

2015

Growth percentage

European History

68,876

107,267

55.7

US History

227,757

469,689

106.2

World History

20,955

265,308

1,166.1

AP program

SourCeS: CollegeBoard, AP Data, Archived Data 2002, AP Exam Volume Change 2002, http://research.college board.org/programs/ap/data/archived/2002; AP Program Participation and Performance Data 2015, AP Exam Volume Changes (2005–2015), https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2015/2015-Exam-Volume -Change.pdf.

the professional development of K–12 world history teachers and scholarly research on student learning as it applies specifically to world history classrooms.13 The number of graduate programs in world history began to grow in the mid-1980s, but we have to go back to 1959 to identify the first formal one. That year Philip Curtin led the founding of the Comparative Tropical History (later Comparative World History) PhD program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The curriculum emphasized area studies, but students received training in two world regions, selected from among sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. Some courses in the program required comparative case studies of phenomena such as slavery, religious movements, or nationalism. Most students chose dissertation topics involving only one region, and they looked for academic jobs in that area. Nevertheless, a number of Wisconsin graduates, inspired by Curtin’s comparative globalism, went on to inaugurate world history courses that in some institutions eventually included graduate studies. Several new programs burgeoned after 1985, the year that Jerry Bentley and colleagues introduced world history as a secondary PhD research field at the University of Hawaii. In 1994 Northeastern University inaugurated a PhD program in which world history was the primary field of study. In other institutions, faculty have created programs that include world, interregional, or comparative history as secondary fields. In 2014 the World History Association listed 116 institutions in the United States having world history components in MA or PhD programs.14 Most of these initiatives have had the combined aims of preparing young scholars to contribute to world history as a research field, to teach the subject in K–12 or collegiate classrooms, and to advance the integration of historical research methods with those of other disciplines, not only with the standard social sciences and humanities but also with such fields as archaeology, linguistics, genetics, and climatology. As soon as world history took root as an educational and scholarly project in the United States, its advocates also set to work to organize and professionalize the move-

INTRODUCTION

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ment outside the classroom. This endeavor got seriously under way in 1982, when a small band of educators launched the World History Association (WHA). From the start, the WHA strove to build sturdy bridges between K–12 and collegiate educators. This was an unusual strategy for an organization whose founding members were mostly, though not exclusively, professors. The WHA has held fast to this founding philosophy, bringing together “university professors, college and community college instructors, school teachers, graduate students, and independent scholars in a collegial camaraderie rarely found in more narrowly focused academic and professional societies.”15 The founding of the WHA was just the first of many initiatives to build new institutions, expand knowledge, and advance teaching. Here are some of the key events: • 1984. History educators organized the Rocky Mountain Regional World History Association, the first of several regional affiliates of the WHA to be founded in the United States. • 1987. The California State Board of Education endorsed a new public school curriculum that called for three full years of world history in middle and high schools. This strong commitment to the subject helped activate reform of world history curricula in several other states. • 1990. The University of Hawaii Press published the inaugural issue of the Journal of World History under the editorship of Jerry H. Bentley. • 1992–94. A large partnership of educational and civic organizations, funded by federal grants, developed voluntary national competency standards for both United States and world history in K–12 schools. Even before they appeared publicly, these standards attracted harsh criticism from conservative politicians and opinion makers for undervaluing patriotic ideals and Western achievements in favor of multicultural inclusiveness, critical inquiry, and “politically correct” attention to African, Asian, and Native American history. Ironically, the controversy drew more public attention to the project’s pedagogical sophistication and intellectual substance than would otherwise have been likely, and it stimulated constructive national discussion among history educators. The standards had an important influence on the subsequent design of history guidelines in several states.16 • 1994. H-World, a free electronic list for discussion of world history scholarship and education went online. H-World became one of dozens of lists affiliated with the H-Net family of interactive newsletters hosted by Michigan State University to facilitate communication among professionals in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. • 1994. The Center for History and New Media was founded at George Mason University to make available “digital media and technology to preserve and present history online, transform scholarship across the humanities, and advance historical education and understanding.”17 Now named in honor of its late

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founder, Roy Rosenzweig, the center administers a number of sites offering primary document resources and up-to-date news on world history. • 2001. Under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a group of educators launched World History for Us All (WHFUA), an online model curriculum for world history in middle and high schools. Initiated at San Diego State University, WHFUA has continued under development as a project of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. • 2001–2. The College Board introduced the Advanced Placement course in world history. • 2003. The free electronic journal World History Connected came online. Based at the University of Illinois and edited at Hawaii Pacific University, the journal aims “to bridge the long-standing divide between teachers in secondary and postsecondary education, . . . introduce teaching methods that have proven particularly effective in world history classrooms,” and provide “readers with the latest news in world history research and debates.”18 • 2006. The London School of Economics and Political Science initiated publication of the Journal of Global History. The journal’s tables of contents show that its mission is not distinctively different from that of the Journal of World History. The two periodicals together offer a wider conduit for publication in the field. • 2008. The Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO) was founded in Dresden, Germany, to promote and facilitate communication among world and global historians. • 2010. The International Big History Association was founded at a conference in Coldigioco, Italy, to foster integrated and interdisciplinary investigation of the history of the universe, the earth, organic life, and humankind. • 2011. The World History Association was admitted to membership in the American Council of Learned Societies. • 2012–13. World history scholars and educators inaugurated the Alliance for Learning in World History. As discussion and debate over world history education continues, the scholarly research and analytical reflection that must inform it continue to accumulate. Indeed, world history has firmly established itself within the discipline mainly because research and writing on explicitly comparative, interregional, or world-scale historical problems have given it credibility as both a research and classroom subject. This book aims to encourage history professionals to consider the directions the discipline has taken and to contemplate where it might go from here. We would like the book to encourage prospective, novice, and veteran educators and researchers to think afresh about world history’s intellectual premises, conceptual structures, and historiographical genealogy and to

INTRODUCTION

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become more self-conscious about the ideas and precommitments that have influenced their teaching and research choices. Since the turn of the new century, the work of world historians to reimagine and enrich the field has been striking. Before 2000 teachers and scholars who exchanged ideas had much less to say than they do now about such subjects as environmental history, applications of genetic research, the roots of globalization, change in the Paleolithic era, the cosmic context of the human past, the “great divergence” between Europe and Asia, postcolonial critiques of world-scale narratives, the prioritization of research agendas, and the world history project in countries besides the United States. As editors of this volume, we recognize that our angle of vision on world history is conspicuously American, that is, reflective of our experience as educators and scholars in the United States. We have all taught, and two of us continue to teach, world history in American universities, and we intend this book to be of use primarily, though not exclusively, to American educators and students. In the past few decades, research and teaching in world history, or as some prefer, “global history,” has gained traction in many countries besides the United States. World historians have engaged in lively discussions about how perspectives on both teaching and research may differ from one country or region to another. For the most part, these historians dismiss the notion of homogenous national perspectives on world history, whether a reified Chinese, German, Mexican, or Australian perspective, in contradistinction to an American one. Rather, world history research and education projects have invariably been shaped by a combination of local, national, and transnational influences. Modern states have their own distinctive traditions of knowing world history, from creation stories of the distant past to contemporary writing that investigates historical encounters between the scholar’s country or region and the rest of the world. Nevertheless, within many countries, differing institutional environments, intellectual preferences, funding sources, social attitudes, and public policies have produced a diversity of local viewpoints on world history. This is eminently the case in the United States. Moreover, in the past decade or two the intellectual and institutional connections among world history scholars in different countries have expanded greatly. The founding of the Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO) in 2008 attests to this phenomenon. International exchanges have influenced world history outlooks in all countries where a significant commitment to the field exists. And if Western, and especially American, scholarship and teaching models have to date stimulated the field in Asia, Africa, and Latin America more than the other way around, that state of affairs will certainly change in the coming decades. In his comparative study of world history scholarship and institutional development in the United States, Germany, and China, Dominic Sachsenmaier writes: “If one takes the claim for local contingency seriously, it is impossible to solely focus on alleged worldwide commonalities that may characterize a growing trend in historiography. At the same time, it would be impracticable to discuss only local theaters of global historical research since this would inevitably overlook

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the multifarious forms of transnational interconnections and exchanges in the field.”19 A collection of essays on world history method or teaching published in Germany or China would no doubt look very different from this one. We hope, nevertheless, that the ideas in this book will feed into the transnational network and stimulate discussion in many countries. This volume addresses collegiate educators and scholars primarily, but K–12 world history teachers also struggle with conceptual and organizational problems. Like university instructors, many K–12 educators claim creative responsibility for the conceptual shape of their world history courses even when they might conveniently fall back on textbooks and state or district guidelines that, with a few exceptions, have been slow to entertain ideas and strategies of the new world history. This book also intends to serve the ever-growing ranks of Advanced Placement world history teachers, who must assign their students college-level work but who also have wide latitude to structure their courses in innovative ways. Finally, we encourage social studies specialists in school districts and university education departments to consult this volume to familiarize themselves with the transformations that have taken place in world history scholarship and pedagogy since the days not so long ago when historians regarded the European and global past as largely synonymous or defined the subject as simply the study of the achievements and peculiarities of foreign cultures. The essays in this book are organized in ten chapters, beginning with writings that describe and interpret the emergence of academic world history and concluding with a selection of critiques, hard questions, and dissenting viewpoints. Some of the choices we made in assigning selections to one chapter of the book or another might be contestable because some essays reasonably fit in two or more of our chosen categories. Because the focus here is on issues that confront the modern history professional, the volume touches only lightly on the long philosophical and moral traditions of universal history writing exemplified in the modern centuries by such exponents as Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, and Toynbee. Nor does the book include course outlines or day-to-day classroom strategies, resources that a number of publications and websites amply supply.20 We have made selections with an eye to their length, sometimes choosing one essay over another because it is more concise. All but two of the articles are reprints from earlier publications, in some cases excerpts from longer essays. Many of the selections have been edited for length, if only slightly. The annotated Further Reading list at the end of each chapter offers a selection of additional works. As the title of this book suggests, we offer our perspectives on world history as an academic subject in the expectation that it will encourage other teachers and scholars to stretch and deepen their understanding of the field.

NOTES

1. National Education Association, Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies, Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies ([US Government] Printing Office,

INTRODUCTION

   •   13

1893); and American Historical Association, Committee of Seven, The Study of History in Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1903). 2. Daniel A. Segal, “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105, 3 (June 2000): 770– 805. 3. J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guildford Press, 1995), 5. 4. See Kenneth Pomeranz and Daniel A. Segal, “World History: Departures and Variations,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 16–17. 5. Andre Gunder Frank, “A Plea for World System History,” Journal of World History 2, 1 (Spring 1991): 3. See Chapter 2. 6. Philip D. Curtin, “Graduate Teaching in World History,” Journal of World History 2 (Spring 1991): 772. Curtin acknowledged that “I have already raided my lectures for [The World and the West] to publish two books, one on cross-cultural trade and one on plantations.” 7. For a description of a thematically organized course, see Steve Gosch, “Cross-Cultural Trade as a Framework for Teaching World History: Concepts and Applications,” The History Teacher 27 (August 1994): 425–31. 8. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); and David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 9. See the Big History Project, https://www.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive. See also David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014). The authors have written this textbook both for college and university students and for advanced high school pupils. 10. David Christian, “Scales,” in Palgrave Advances in World Histories, ed. Marnie Hughes-Warrington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 78. 11. Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). 12. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 273. 13. Alliance for Learning in World History website, http://www.alliance.pitt.edu. 14. “Graduate Programs,” World History Association, www.thewha.org. 15. “History, Mission and Vision of the WHA,” World History Association, http://www .thewha.org. The constitution of the WHA, written in 1983– 84, stipulated that at least two members of the nine-member Executive Council must be precollegiate history educators. Key documents on the early days of the World History Association may be found in volumes of the World History Bulletin, first published in fall 1983. Issues of the Bulletin are archived on the WHA website (www.thewha.org). 16. National Standards for History, Basic Edition (Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996). See also Gary B. Nash,

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Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 17. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, chnm.gmu.edu. 18. Heather Streets, Tom Laichas, and Tim Weston, “World History Is Here,” World History Connected 1, 1 (November 2003), http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/1.1/ index.html. 19. Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7. 20. See World History Connected, the e-journal for learning and teaching world history, http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/index.html; “AP Central, AP World History Course Home Page,” College Board, http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/ teachers_corner/4484.html; and Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, chnm .gmu.edu.

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780– 1914. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Bentley, Jerry H., ed. The Oxford Handbook of World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. The Cambridge World History. 10 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper, 2015. Headrick, Daniel R. Technology: A World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, ed. Palgrave Advances in World Histories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Iriye, Akira, ed. Global Interdependence: The World after 1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power. 4 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ———, ed. Global Practice in World History: Advances Worldwide. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2008. McNeill, J. R., and William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Morris, Ian. Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Northrop, Douglas, ed. A Companion to World History. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

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Pomper, Philip, Richard H. Elphick, and Richard T. Vann, eds. World Histories: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. Ponting, Clive. A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Reinhard, Wolfgang and Akira Iriye, eds. Empires and Encounters, 1350– 1750. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015.

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1 WORLD HISTORY OVER TIME The Evolution of an Intellectual and Pedagogical Movement

IN T R O D U C T I O N

The earliest world histories were stories ancient people told of how the earth was formed and human beings came to inhabit it. Many of these creation stories have endured. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions share the main lines of the world history told in the book of Genesis. In that account, God first made the earth and furnished it with the seas, land, and all manner of plants and animals. Then he fashioned man and woman and gave them dominion over the earth and all its creatures. But because Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, God condemned them to mortality and drove them from the garden to bear children in sorrow. Thus, the populating of the world got under way. According to the Yoruba creation story told in West Africa, the supreme deity, Olodumare, dispatched his vice regent to form the earth with help from a pigeon and a five-toed hen. Then God sent Oduduwa, another of his agents, to shape human beings from clay. The first human community arose in Yorubaland, and from there people went out to settle other parts of the world.1 These creation stories have a universal character. They recount the origins of the world, not just a particular place in the world, and the human species, not just a particular ethnic group. The first humans do not remain confined to the place of their creation but go forth to populate the globe. Traditional creation stories express the urge that Homo sapiens has to explain itself to itself—where did we come from, how long have we been here, how did the world get to be the way it is, what is our destiny?

17

In the agrarian age, when societies grew larger and interactions among them more complex, chroniclers who had the benefit of writing systems recorded much more detailed universal histories. Their accounts typically started with the creation of the world at the hands of a divine power but then described the course of what they regarded as important events up to their own era. A number of historians of premodern centuries chronicled not only their own societies but also neighboring ones, universalizing their accounts in both time and space to the extent that available knowledge of foreign lands allowed them to do it. In those centuries, networks of interregional communication carried increasing quantities of cultural and historical information from one society to another. But the knowledge flow still remained erratic and piecemeal. No scholar in any region of the world could richly incorporate knowledge of the culture and history of all other regions. Historians defined the world as the places they could in some measure comprehend, passing over the rest as unknowable. In the case of Eurasian, American, and Australasian societies, they had no awareness of one another at all before 1500 or later. Universal history could only be the history of the writer’s “known world.” Inevitably, historians also filtered their knowledge through cultural lenses, which further constrained their global vision. Just as the Yoruba origin story placed God’s creation of human beings and the starting point of human history in Yorubaland, so Christian and Muslim writers conceived of events in their own parts of the world as rich with purpose and meaning, as manifestations of God’s plan for the world. From these ethnocentric perspectives, exotic peoples inhabiting remote climes could justifiably be ignored because their ways were presumed to be both unfathomable and heathenish. From the earliest encounters between Europeans and American peoples, Spanish theologians wrote admiringly about Indian societies. But they filtered their admiration through a lens that discerned traces of divine intervention and potential conversion to Christianity. In the eighteenth century, European thinkers began to disengage their historical studies from Christian doctrine. Some scholars, writing from a secular perspective, expressed their approval of what travelers reported about distant regions, notably China. Nevertheless, universal historians of the Enlightenment era located the development of human rationality and creative spirit, for them the historical narrative that most mattered, squarely in Europe, starting with the blossoming of reason, individualism, and liberty in ancient Rome and Greece. From the nineteenth century, European scholars who tried their hand at world history faced a growing chorus of intellectual disapproval. Historical writing, like so many other occupations in the era of the Industrial Revolution, became professionalized and specialized. Scholars, notably in Germany, proclaimed the advent of a “new history.” They admonished all historians to eschew philosophizing or speculating and instead to study the past scientifically by gathering evidence, mainly from written documents, and to analyze it rigorously to determine objectively “what actually happened.” Most inquiries founded on this method had inevitably to limit their subject matter in time and space. Indeed, scholars took eagerly to the study of particular nations and to local

18    •   W O R L D

HISTORY OVER TIME

developments within nations, including mastery of the languages in which those peoples recorded historical information. Leaders of sovereign states— and in the twentieth century nationalist organizations in colonial dependencies—recruited intellectuals to recover the historical origins and development of the presumed national community, even though such projects often served the mission of creating a national identity where none had existed previously. Moreover, because the richest places in which to unearth documentary evidence of the national past were among the papers stacked in government or church archives, nationalism and historical professionalism neatly reinforced each other. As that synergy developed, most academic specialists came to regard writers of universal history as intellectual speculators oblivious to rules of evidence. As Gilbert Allardyce writes in this chapter, historians “reared on specialized research, learned to hold world history in suspicion as something outmoded, overblown, and metahistorical. Whoever said world history, said amateurism.” If professional scholars thought that universal history was unsound, the great majority of them also insisted that peoples other than Europeans, and their cultural offspring in the Americas and a few other regions, either had no history at all or had reached a state of historical stasis some time in the ancient past. Even though Europeans and Americans accumulated vastly more knowledge of Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the nineteenth century than ever before, the power that European states increasingly wielded in the world tended to intensify rather than soften attitudes of cultural superiority and exclusiveness. To be sure, Europeans had no corner on cultural arrogance: most peoples who shared language, culture, and historical experience regarded themselves as smarter and morally loftier than foreigners in general. In Europe, however, the methods and vocabulary of science were invoked to legitimize claims that Europeans were biologically superior to all peoples outside of the West. Nineteenth-century race ideology postulated that Africans, Asians, and American Indians had always been to one degree or another intellectually and culturally incapacitated. In consequence, they could never have been agents of progressive change. Rather, they either existed permanently in a prehistoric state, or their early efforts at building civilizations floundered for lack of sufficient mental and moral aptitude. In the later nineteenth century, racial teachings that excluded a large part of humankind from history pervaded all levels of education in both Europe and the United States. Outlines of the World’s History, a textbook published by William Swinton in 1874 for use in both high schools and colleges, opened with a staunchly racialist take on the global past. Viewing history as confined to the series of leading civilized nations, we observe that it has to do with but one grand division of the human family, namely, with the Caucasian, or white race. . . . Thus we see that history proper concerns itself with but one highly developed type of mankind; for though the great bulk of the population of the globe has, during the whole recorded period, belonged, and does still belong, to other types of mankind, yet the Caucasians form the only truly historical race. . . . Of the peoples outside of

INTRODUCTION

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the Caucasian race that have made some figure of civilization, the Chinese, Mexicans, and Peruvians stand alone. But though these races rose considerably above the savage state, their civilization was stationary, and they had no marked influence on the general current of the world’s progress.2

Most academic historians subscribed to these twin precepts— one, that national history could be grounded in “scientific” archival research but that world history could not, and, two, that African, Asian, and Native American history was either unknowable or long frozen in immobility—well into the twentieth century. After World War I, however, the overt racial triumphalism that pervaded nineteenth-century scholarship gradually lost its persuasive power as new social scientific theory began to influence Western views of human evolution and social development. Nevertheless, inquiry into the histories of peoples outside the “Western tradition” continued to receive little professional attention, or it was left to the new academic disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. In the interwar period, a number of writers tried their hand at universal history. A few of them, notably Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and H. G. Wells, achieved popular success. But university elites questioned their professional credentials or their indulgence in moral or religious conjectures. The four essays in Chapter 1 demonstrate how world history, in a state of scholarly eclipse in the Western world since the mid-nineteenth century, gained academic respect and a secure place in college and school curricula in the decades after World War II. Craig Lockard opens his essay with a brief discussion of premodern and early modern world historiography, a survey that throws into relief the extraordinary density and diversity of the scholarship that has appeared since the 1950s. He contends that the research and teaching field “became feasible with the great increase of knowledge and the evolution of a more international orientation during the second half of the twentieth century” and that the extraordinary acceleration of global change persuaded many history professionals that viewing the past from “the widest possible angle of vision” was a legitimate if not imperative endeavor. He cites dozens of scholars who have produced comparative, interregional, and global-scale histories, exploring world systems, gender relations, empire building, commodity flows, migrations, climate change, and numerous other topics. He shows that the field has come to encompass much more intellectual variety than just histories of the world, even though the mission to make the whole human experience intelligible by one narrative formulation or another remains an important part of the research agenda. In the second selection, Marnie Hughes-Warrington demonstrates this variety by succinctly surveying women’s world history writing from ancient times to the near present. She argues for a broad-enough definition of the field to encompass many centuries of learned production. World historical scholarship, she contends, may embrace any work “that attempts to comprehend a meaningful ‘world,’ understood as an entire meaningful system of existence.” Thus, Hughes-Warrington includes within her purview biographi-

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cal compilations, florilegia (collections of literary extracts), mystical works, and moral debates over the natural differences between men and women, as well as universal histories, studies of gender relations over time, postcolonial histories, and, finally, analytical works informed by the world history movement of the past few decades. Starting from this wide-ranging definition, Hughes-Warrington challenges two assumptions that have obscured many of the world historical works produced by women. The first is that the sex of the writer is basically irrelevant because, notwithstanding inclusion of rhetorical categories that describe women’s particular roles and achievements in the global past, the main story world historians have to tell is “above gender.” As Judith Zinsser puts it in her essay in Chapter 10, “In this configuration, women carry all the sex and all the gender, leaving a neutered, apparently ungendered history of mankind.” This way of conceiving the past has offered little incentive to document female scholars who do not fit obviously into a conventional category of women’s history but who have nonetheless insightfully interpreted the past on relatively large scales. The second assumption is that world history writing is a phenomenon mainly of the past century. Consequently, historiographers have often invoked Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, Bishop Bossuet, and a few other celebrated universal historians of earlier times— all of them men—but have failed to search systematically in the premodern past to discover other scholars, including notable women, who have written with world historical scope and sensibility. The third and fourth essays in this chapter consider the achievements of William McNeill, Leften Stavrianos, and Marshall Hodgson, three of the founding intellectuals of the contemporary world history movement. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of World History in 1990, Gilbert Allardyce’s essay “Toward World History” reviews the growth of the teaching field from early in the century to the 1980s. He traces the movement by examining the intersecting careers of McNeill, Stavrianos, and Louis Gottschalk. Allardyce demonstrates the great formative influence that both McNeill, who published The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), and Stavrianos, author of both high school and college world history textbooks, had on the subject as an “art of classroom teaching.” He shows how these two men labored persistently to persuade the historical profession, dedicated as it was to high specialization, to take world history seriously as an academic subject. The excerpt of Allardyce’s essay printed here omits the account of Gottschalk’s leadership in writing one of the six volumes of the UNESCO History of Mankind: Scientific and Cultural Development. Allardyce links this colossal project, which ran from 1951 to 1976, to postwar yearnings for international understanding and peace education. The History of Mankind stands as a learned and monumental reference work. Allardyce demonstrates, however, that precisely because of its commitment to “equal time” for numerous peoples, it failed to cohere as a unitary history of humankind. In the process of writing the fourth volume in the series, Gottschalk, a specialist on early modern Europe, became an eager convert to more integrated formulations of world history.

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In the final essay in this chapter, Edmund Burke describes the career of Marshall Hodgson (1922–1968), a colleague of McNeill’s at the University of Chicago and author of several visionary articles on interregional and comparative history. Burke explains that Hodgson thought McNeill’s work, despite its global scope, privileged Europe and relied too much on cultural diffusionist theory. Burke also makes clear that Hodgson jumped ahead of both McNeill and Stavrianos in working out the idea of Eurasia, indeed of Afroeurasia, as a single field of human interactivity, rather than simply as a setting within which bounded civilizations knocked against one another. Hodgson conceived of Afroeurasia, which he spells “Afro-Eurasia,” as a place where “unconsciously interregional developments” might converge “in their effects to alter the general disposition of the Hemisphere” (See Hodgson in Chapter 4). His three-volume project, The Venture of Islam, which appeared in 1974 (seven years after his death at the age of forty-six), restated his world history ideas. Indeed, this monumental work represents a seminal contribution to global as well as Islamic history.3 At his passing Hodgson was immersed in a major project titled “The Unity of World History.” Admittedly, he had much less impact than McNeill or Stavrianos in launching world history as an academic field, but both men acknowledged a serious intellectual debt to him.

NOTES

1. Richard M. Dorson, ed., African Folklore (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 322–25. 2. William O. Swinton, Outlines of the World’s History (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, 1874), 2. 3. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

T H E R I S E O F WO R L D H I S T O R Y S C H O L A R S H I P Craig A. Lockard

Although the writing of history goes back deep into antiquity, world history is of relatively recent origin as a coherent field of study.1 Yet, a rich scholarship has emerged that is of much value to students, teachers, and specialists on world history. Over two millennia ago historians like Herodotus in Greece and Sima Qian in Han dynasty China were proto-world historians, examining the peoples on the fringes of their own societies. The widely traveled Herodotus, born and raised in Anatolia and later a resident of Athens, discussed with some admiration the societies of Western Asia and Egypt and their Craig A. Lockard’s “World History” was originally published in the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 130–35. This revised and updated version is printed with permission from Taylor & Francis Group LLC Books.

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relationships with the Greeks. Several centuries later Sima Qian, a court historian, pondered the connections between the Chinese and the nearby Central Asian pastoralists. In the second century BCE Polybius, a Greco-Roman historian, wrote that, rather than unrelated episodes, “the affairs of Europe and Africa are [now] connected with those of Asia and all events bear a relationship.”2 Gradually the scope of history writing broadened. Rashid al-Din, a thirteenth- century Persian physician and government official, made an early attempt at world history, writing a remarkable compendium of Muslim, Mongol, Chinese, Indian, and European history that led to his ruminations on the fate of humankind. In the fourteenth century the well-traveled and cosmopolitan Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, sometimes called the first sociologist, used an analytical approach to explain the behavior of varied societies. For example, his monumental work connected the rise of states within tribal communities that developed a growing feeling of solidarity between leaders and their followers, often enhanced by a coherent religion. He advocated a critical examination of other cultures to identify their similarities and differences. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some European Enlightenment thinkers developed an interest in Asian societies, especially China, for purposes of comparison, often favorably, with Europe. Some historians have called the philosopher Confucius the French Enlightenment’s patron saint. In 1687 the French translator of a book on Confucius wrote that the sage’s “moral system is infinitely sublime, simple, sensible. Never has Reason appeared so well developed and with so much power.”3 In this tradition the French thinker Voltaire, who hung a portrait of Confucius in his library, compiled a universal history that broadened the rigid European historiographical tradition. By the nineteenth century various European thinkers theorized a universal history shaped by essential principles such as progress. In the mid-1800s Karl Marx articulated a world historical approach embedded in dialectical materialism, although he also denigrated the non-Western world as largely “feudal,” in contrast to capitalist Europe. In late nineteenth- century China the reformist scholar Liang Qichao, influenced by Social Darwinism, called for the study of world history to address his country’s national humiliation at the hands of the West: “All countries have the same sun and moon, all have mountains and rivers, and all consist of people with feet and skulls; but some countries rise while others fall, and some become strong while others are weak. Why?”4 Scholars have pondered this incisive question ever since. Nonetheless, the sort of comprehensive and analytical global history accepted today was impossible for centuries; historians lacked sufficient information about other societies while world views were still largely parochial. Thanks to Western imperialism and Social Darwinism, many Europeans and North Americans, despite more knowledge of other societies, developed a contempt for non-white, non-Christian peoples. The renowned British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper reflected this ethnocentrism in the 1960s when he dismissed African history as “the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”5 Meanwhile many Asians

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and Africans, especially Muslims, generally thought of Westerners as greedy, violent, and barbaric. The Western pioneers of world history writing during the first half of the twentieth century were philosophers of history, including Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, H. G. Wells, Christopher Dawson, Karl Jaspers, Pitirim Sorokin, and Karl Lamprecht. They generally sought to comprehend the principles of history and looked for larger patterns of human behavior rather than narrate events or analyze processes. Spengler, an eclectic German, and Toynbee, a British classicist, were particularly interested in understanding “civilizations” and “cultures,” large complexes defined by shared features and orientations, rather than in studying national states. Spengler addressed what he considered the rise and decline of the West.6 To Toynbee, the foreordained cyclic flow and ebb of civilizations—Western Christendom, Hindu India, and several others—were the appropriate focus for studying the larger forces of history.7 But although their work was valuable in posing stimulating questions, most historians later found it wanting on various counts. The philosophers of history like Toynbee often conformed their material to their explanatory framework. Furthermore, their ideas were based largely on European (especially ancient) and, to a lesser extent, Asian experience, betraying little understanding of other regions. The writings of the French Orientalist René Grousset, although Eurocentric in tone, along with the informed musings of Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted to refute British claims of superiority, restored Asia to a position of historical primacy.8 In recent years many historians have discarded the concept of civilizations, questioning whether the notion of large coherent entities, marked by criteria such as writing and monumental architecture that exclude some complex societies is of much use in examining world history. A truly analytical history with a universal perspective only became feasible with the great increase of knowledge and the evolution of a more international orientation during the second half of the twentieth century. Social scientists and humanists learned much more about the peoples and traditions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while Western models of a more critical historiography spread. Historians became more aware of biases in the available sources (both written and oral) and more cognizant of the need to avoid imposing their own prejudices in studying other cultures. The patterns of modern history, including devastating world wars, colonization and decolonization, political and social revolutions, nuclear threats, environmental crises, globalization, technological advance, the amplification of commercial and financial exchange, and rapid changes in all aspects of life also fostered a realization that the widest possible angle of vision was most appropriate for understanding Spaceship Earth and the Global Village. This required teaching and writing a world history that, as British historian Geoffrey Barraclough wrote, “is more than the sum of its [regional and national] parts; it cannot be divided and subdivided without being denaturalized, much as water, separated into its chemical components, ceases to be water and becomes hydrogen and oxygen.”9 The study of Western civilization became entrenched in American universities in

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the years following World War 1. Introductory courses in Western civilization remained an undergraduate requirement in many institutions of higher education well into the 1970s and are still widely taught today. In the decades following World War II, however, the emphasis on Western Civilization faced a challenge from a new interest in world history. The writing of world history changed dramatically, with less emphasis on the ontological meaning of history and more on processes, connections, and comparisons. This reflected the increasing interaction and sometimes confrontation of nations, as well as the gradual globalization of education in the United States, now the world’s major superpower with political, economic, and military interests around the globe. Whereas most earlier world history studies derived from Europe-based scholars, United States–based historians now came to the forefront. Furthermore, there was a gradual movement toward a more comprehensive approach to history that incorporated all world regions. Beginning in the 1950s Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Pacific Island, and Latin American studies programs, courses, and research centers developed in many U.S. universities as well as in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, and the Netherlands. Moreover, the writings of non-Western scholars like the Indian K. M. Panikkar (on European expansion in Asia), the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre (on his country’s diverse roots), the Kenyan Ali Mazrui (on African connections to the Western and Islamic worlds), and the Guyanese Walter Rodney (on European imperialism in Africa) were becoming better known in Europe and North America.10 Reflecting a new global interest, UNESCO commissioned the preparation of a noncentric history of humankind. The project eventually involved hundreds of scholars from around the world, including Louis Gottschalk of the University of Chicago. He struggled to overcome his own entrenched Eurocentrism in discussing the period from 1300–1700 while also recruiting a number of young scholars into the effort. The UNESCO project was completed in 1963 but, despite this multinational effort, still largely reflected the interests of specialists on European history.11 By the 1970s many historians no longer considered the study of Western civilization, however valuable, as sufficient to prepare North American and European students for life in a pluralistic world as well as in increasingly multicultural nations. As historians examined China’s long-lasting Golden Age, scientific thinking in early India, vibrant millennia-old Asian trade routes, the flowering of Islamic cultures, mercantile societies in black Africa, long-forgotten pre-Columbian peoples, and the substantial European import of technologies and ideas from Asia and North Africa, among other topics, viewing the mainstream of history as invariably European and, later, as North American was no longer intellectually defensible. Clearly world history was far more complex, with major contributions from and achievements attributed to many different peoples. This realization led to serious attempts, only partly successful, to escape any sort of centrism—Eurocentrism, Americocentrism, Sinocentrism, Islamocentrism— and try to write world history as if the author had no national or cultural attachments. A pronounced internationalism and a dissatisfaction with the long-entrenched Euro-

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centrism and Americocentrism of the history profession became the hallmark of world historians. World history required new ways of thinking historically, always keeping in mind the broader picture of connections between societies and the patterns and transitions that transcended regions. There was also the realization, articulated earlier by Geoffrey Barraclough, that global history necessarily constituted much more than a collection or compilation of national and regional narratives. Out of this intellectual ferment came several highly influential historians whose first books appeared in the 1960s and helped spark a new world history. Three of the major figures can be loosely grouped together as the “Chicago School,” since they taught at universities in the Chicago area. Canadian-born William H. McNeill, trained in European history and an expert on modern Greece, borrowed ideas from cultural anthropology, emphasizing diffusion, especially of technology, and the impact this had on various societies. McNeill’s scholarship was inspired by the universal historians, especially Toynbee, whose biography he wrote and with whom he collaborated for a time. McNeill’s The Rise of the West, the first major North American synthesis of the broad sweep of world history in the form of a grand narrative, was probably the most influential book in invigorating world history studies, despite its basic Eurocentric framework.12 The book incorporated Toynbee’s emphasis on large-scale patterns of change and coherent civilizations but also provided a more comprehensive framework emphasizing processes transcending regions that often resulted in cultural fusions. Indeed, as McNeill later concluded, Toynbee’s notion of autonomous “civilizations” seemed increasingly timebound and outdated as concepts in a world marked by global influences and forces. To McNeill, change was produced by contacts and collisions between societies. He pursued this theme in an undergraduate textbook and a series of brilliant scholarly books analyzing various aspects of diffusion and interaction, including epidemic diseases, parasitism, military and industrial technologies, and human migrants.13 In the process McNeill became the role model for a younger generation of world historians and a chief influence on the founding of the World History Association in 1982. The other key figures of the “Chicago School” were Marshall Hodgson and Leften S. Stavrianos. Hodgson, McNeill’s University of Chicago colleague, was an Islamicist, and his ideas on world history were shaped by his focus on the Middle East, the pivotal intersection between East and West. His hemispheric interregional approach offered the concept of the Afro-Eurasian Historical Complex, a single field of interaction linking much of Asia, Europe, and large chunks of Africa into a comprehensible whole. Hodgson also pioneered the idea, adopted by McNeill, of “ecumenes,” large trans-civilizational regions within which trade and cultural contact became commonplace.14 Stavrianos, a Canadian-born Balkanist, became a strong proponent of globalizing the high school and college curriculum, devoting his early energies to promoting the study of “global history” (as opposed to a Europe-based history) through his World History Project at Northwestern University and then writing innovative textbooks for use in secondary and higher education. By the late 1960s his world history survey texts were

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used widely by teachers and faculty seeking a comprehensive global approach. Stavrianos was particularly interested in the evolution and spread of technology, as well as the consequences when various peoples engage each other. Later in his career he employed world-system ideas to write a stimulating modern history of the “Third World” and also offered an interpretative framework for understanding world history.15 A second American strand of world history study was associated with the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Philip Curtin became the most influential exponent of the comparative framework that provided the heart of the “Wisconsin School.” Curtin began his career as a Caribbeanist, writing a dissertation on colonial society in Jamaica, and then became renowned as an economic historian of West Africa. He pioneered the concept of an Atlantic system linking the Americas, Europe, and Africa after 1500, focusing his writing on trans-Atlantic interaction (such as the Slave Trade), plantation systems, and kindred themes, as well as on global trade patterns.16 Curtin also trained a number of younger world historians in the Comparative World History Program at Madison, which he founded and directed until moving to Johns Hopkins University to develop an Atlantic Studies program. Along with McNeill, he was a founding patron of the World History Association.17 An interest in world history also emerged across the Atlantic. The British scholar John Roberts, a Europeanist, contributed synthetic overviews emphasizing the rise of the West, not just as a technological and economic triumph but as a confirmation of the power of Western ideas.18 Among other British scholars, Geoffrey Barraclough stressed themes, especially for the modern period; Eric Hobsbawm wrote influential books on European as well as comparative history and the twentieth century world; and Clive Ponting became a pioneer of world environmental history.19 French historian Fernand Braudel and the Annales School had a profound influence on world historians, especially Braudel’s analysis of the rise of a global economy and his sweeping examination of the Mediterranean basin as an interlinked zone of activity. Meanwhile, Italian scholars Carlo Cipolla and Massimo Livi Bacci helped pioneer world demographic history.20 Historically-oriented social scientists contributed greatly to the world history field. Concepts (such as societal typology) from anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber and Robert Redfield influenced the Chicago school. In the 1950s and 1960s the writings of modernization theorists, chiefly sociologists, economists, and political scientists, became greatly influential among academics and policy-makers in the United States. Their notions of systemic change and of the United States as the development model became the mainstream in American scholarship and were reflected in the comparative history of Cyril Black.21 But modernization theory was later perceived by many historians as too deeply rooted in American political ideology and lost much of its credence. In the 1970s and 1980s some historians turned to the world-system ideas of American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and his followers, who postulated the rise after 1400 of a global economy shaped by European capitalism and imperialism and embracing and affecting all societies as the essential framework for understanding the experi-

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ences of individual nations.22 Although they have been widely criticized as too rigid and even Eurocentric, Wallerstein’s ideas have more influence today than modernization theory.23 Janet Abu-Lughod identified a pre-1500 world-system centered on the Middle East.24 Andre Gunder Frank, a controversial sociologist who earlier helped formulate dependency theory in Latin American studies, extended the world-system notion deep into antiquity, while Italian Giovanni Arrighi and others refined the model for the past several centuries.25 The efforts of anthropologist Eric Wolf to shift the focus of world history away from Western elites and Europe to the non-Western masses, once derided by Western scholars as “people without history,” should also be noted.26 Many historians and political leaders have remained unconvinced of the value of doing world history. Moreover, the field is still relatively marginal in many countries. Some observers criticized the study and teaching of world history as requiring a grand synthesis involving vast amounts of knowledge and sweeping generalizations that neglect regional variations. Some complained that it neglected Europe and North America in an effort to include all societies. Others complained that, since world history mostly gained support in North America, the field was still rooted in Western, especially Anglo-American, intellectual traditions. Nor was there agreement on at what point in time we can even speak of a truly world history as opposed to diverse and loosely-connected regional histories. Did world history commence with human evolution and “Stone Age” societies, the rise of agriculture, the first cities and states 5,000 years ago, the emergence of universal religions and great empires beginning around 2,600 years ago, the thirteenth-century Mongol expansion that conquered or reshaped a large portion of Eurasia, the Western voyages of exploration and colonization in the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries that connected the hemispheres, or the globe-spanning empires and technologies of the nineteenth century? Heated debates have persisted between those identifying a directionality of human history (e.g., toward socialism, liberal capitalism, modernity, freedom, or religion) and those mistrusting broad theoretical or ideological thrusts. Whatever the differences of opinion about world history, a younger generation of scholars, based chiefly in the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands, has over the past four decades built on the foundation established by the earlier historians and social scientists to produce a flourishing, heterogeneous scholarship on various topics. This work ranges from general macro-level surveys of the broad scope of world history, to studies of particular themes and patterns with global reach, to examinations of how particular regions or cultures fit into world history. As courses on world history proliferated in North American universities, the writing of surveys and overviews became more sophisticated and inclusive. Today, there are many textbooks with a global focus surveying the broad sweep of history, but only a few are notable for their efforts at inclusiveness and non-Eurocentrism. Though mostly aimed at undergraduate students but also excellent references for teachers and the general public, these surveys generally begin their examination with the rise of agriculture

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and the first cities and states and then continue the story down to the present. Some place the emphasis on the global overview rather than detailed analysis of cultures. Others attempt to mix this overview with rich coverage of the world’s diverse societies, as exemplified by titles such as Societies, Networks, and Transitions; Traditions and Encounters; Worlds Together Worlds Apart; and Panorama, a World History. There are also several excellent collections of essays on various aspects of world history.27 While many historians ignore the millennia before the rise of the first urban societies and the invention of writing, considering those distant times the responsibility of anthropologists, archaeologists, and natural scientists, a few historians have taken the longest possible perspective, expanding the whole concept of universal history. The proponents of Big History, especially the Australian David Christian, the Dutch scholar Fred Spier, and the Americans Cynthia Stokes Brown and Anthony Penna, situate human history within the general evolution of life on earth and, beyond that, to the formation and growth of the cosmos beginning with the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago.28 Big History integrates the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities into a comprehensible whole, seeking out common patterns. But it requires scholars and teachers to acquire a daunting depth and breadth of knowledge. Several other scholars with natural or social science backgrounds have explored various aspects of human history over large spans of time. Jared Diamond has examined, among varied topics, the factors that influenced the triumph of the West over the rest of the world (summarized as “guns, germs, and steel”) and the causes of societal collapse.29 The Canadian Vaclav Smil, whose scholarship, like Diamond’s, encompasses a wide range of natural and social sciences, has published a pathbreaking study of energy production and use in world history.30 In recent years scholars from various backgrounds have studied the globalization of economies, cultures, and politics that has become the hallmark of the contemporary world. Some have traced the roots deep into the past.31 Various scholars have examined particular eras of history from a global perspective. There is a growing literature on Paleolithic, Neolithic, and ancient societies, mostly by archaeologists like Peter Bellwood and paleontologists like Ian Tattersall.32 Jerry Bentley has examined Eurasian interaction, including long distance trade and the spread of religions, during the Classical Era and Middle Ages; Ross Dunn has used the travels of the Moroccan Ibn Battuta to portray the Islamic realm of the fourteenth century.33 For the second millennium of the Common Era, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s readable overview, Alfred Crosby’s pioneering examination of the Columbian Exchange, Robert Marks’ and C. A. Bayly’s multi-dimensional analyses of the rise of the modern world, John Wills’ study of the Early Modern World, Emily Rosenberg’s edited volume on the connecting world of 1870–1945, and Victor Lieberman’s collection on Eurasian political history from 1000–1830 are excellent resources.34 In contrast to, but also supplementing, the macro-level histories are the studies of particular themes and patterns of world history, often traced through many centuries or several millennia. Connections between societies were made possible by water and land communication, leading to sev-

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eral fine studies of explorations and travel.35 From ancient times various peoples have mastered the oceans, and mariners have played a key role in world history. Historians have examined the diverse roles of the oceans in human history, especially in facilitating long distance trade and the spread of cultural forms and technologies.36 While maritime activity was significant, overland trade and travel routes were even more important for most of history. Of these, the Silk Road that linked China with India, the Middle East, and Europe via Central Asia has received the most attention.37 Some studies fall under the general rubric of environmental and agrarian history. In recent years scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds such as Alfred Crosby, Brian Fagan, John McNeill, and John Richards have examined the role of environments and climate on human history and the environmental changes that agriculture and industry have fostered.38 The agricultural revolution that occurred around the world set the stage for the rise of cities and states, and various scholars, among them Henry Hobhouse, Kenneth Kiple, and Pita Kelekna have studied the history of agriculture, food, famine, and domesticated animals.39 Studies of disease, which was often related to environmental change and to increasing connections between societies, are still somewhat sparse.40 World historians have been particularly good at exploring economic history and the rise of technology and science. There is a growing literature on merchants, money, trade routes, interregional trade, and the rise of the world economy.41 Many historians, among them Mark Kurlansky, Sidney Mintz, and John Keay, have examined the histories of commodities produced and traded around the world such as spices, salt, sugar, chocolate, and coal.42 From earliest times societies invented new technologies, and a few set the framework for the rise of modern science. Many studies explore the history of technology and science, including fine surveys by Daniel Headrick and Arnold Pacey.43 Historians such as Peter Stearns have examined the technological and scientific innovations developed in Afro-Eurasia that by the late eighteenth century led to the Industrial Revolution and eventually to the spread of industrialization from Europe to the rest of the world.44 Some studies of world history address cultures and societies. Religion has been at the core of most societies and hence deserves, and receives, considerable attention.45 The literature on global social history is surprisingly sparse.46 Women account for half of humanity but have long been neglected by historians generally. Only in recent decades have scholars, among them Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Pamela McVay, addressed gender issues, the roles of women, and the structure of families and childhood in a world history context.47 Beginning in the mists of Paleolithic history and continuing up to the present, people have moved from place to place, often over long distances, making studies of migration, diasporas, and frontiers a crucial component of world history scholarship. In addition to fine general overviews by scholars such as Patrick Manning and Robin Cohen, scholars have been particularly interested in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the transport of millions of Africans to the Americas.

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More recently others have explored the Asian migrations and diasporas that helped shape the modern world.48 Since history writing for millennia has emphasized politics and leaders, and governments play a key role in human societies, the scholarship on states, politics, and political change is growing. The first empires appeared over 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, setting a foundation for much larger empires that rose and fell over the millennia. Imperial expansion imposed colonialism on millions of subject peoples and often fostered racism. These topics have been examined by historians such as David Abernethy, John Darwin, and Jane Samson.49 In addition to empires, studies of nations and political ideologies sparked several provocative analyses by scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Robert Strayer.50 But societal stresses also led to social and political revolutions and insurgencies that challenged, and sometimes replaced, unpopular or ineffective governments.51 Furthermore, countries periodically engaged in warfare against rival countries, generating a growing scholarship among world historians such as Jeremy Black and Michael Nieberg.52 Political violence, social conflict, and extremist ideologies sometimes led to horrific genocides against population groups, often vulnerable ethnic or religious minorities.53 Another category of new scholarship addresses particularly controversial issues in world history. Just as an earlier generation of scholars argued over the utility of modernization and world-system approaches, a lively debate has occurred in recent years around questions raised over a century ago by Liang Qi Qao and later by William McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein: the rise and decline of the East (Asia and the Middle East) and the rise of the West. Some Europeanists, such as David Landes, E. L. Jones, and Rodney Stark, claim that European cultures, technologies, and the Christian religion were more amenable to long-term success than their Eastern counterparts and that this superiority was clear by the later Middle Ages. Hence, they argue, the period after 1500 saw Western Europe rapidly outdistance “stagnating” Eastern societies.54 Opposing this view, scholars such as Jack Goldstone, Andre Gunder Frank, Jack Goody, John Hobson, and Robert Marks argue that, during the Middle Ages, China, India, and the Islamic societies were more advanced in most areas of life than a medieval Europe that imported ideas and technologies from the “East.” Furthermore, most of them contend that the “rise of the West” to a superior position and world domination was gradual after 1500 and did not necessarily imply Eastern decline.55 A related debate concerns when and why Europe (primarily Britain) gradually eclipsed leading Asian societies, especially China, long a major power and the economic engine of Eurasia, in wealth and power, an issue known as the great divergence. Scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, R. Bin Wong, and Andre Gunder Frank argue that China remained dynamic and at least the equal of Europe well into the 1700s and perhaps into the 1800s.56 Since world historians often explore the relationship of various regions to world history, the literature on this theme has been growing. Studies have explored how regions— such as East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Islamic world, Western

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Europe, and Africa and countries such as the United States—have fit into the broader trends of world history.57 Some scholars have criticized much Western writing on world history, especially the books published before the 1970s, as rooted in a Eurocentric or Americocentric hegemonic dimension, despite the aspirations of world historians to seek non-centric approaches. For example, India’s Claude Alvares attacked the prevailing interpretation of technology and culture as imperialistic while another Indian scholar, Ranajit Guha, argued that the Western philosophy of history buttressed imperialism and led to the colonization of indigenous histories. Egyptian-born Samir Amin critiqued the Eurocentric bias and neglect of the Arab-Islamic world in the discussion of the rise of the West.58 Some Muslim scholars have offered a view of world history from an Islamic perspective, while writers in the peoples Republic of China have vigorously debated the conflicts between Chinese nationalist and Western perspectives on world history.59 In this tradition, two Canadian historians of Asia wrote: “Too often the generalizations of social science— and this is as true in Asia as in the West—rest on the belief that the West occupies the normative starting position for constructing general knowledge. Almost all our categories—politics and economy, state and society, feudalism and capitalism— have been conceptualized primarily on the Western historical experience.”60 And yet, despite these criticisms, attempts to comprehend world history and relate it to national experiences have lately developed in countries like China, Turkey, and South Africa. To be sure, there remain major lacunae in our knowledge that will need to be filled in by a new generation of world historians, more of whom will hopefully come from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And controversies among global historians still percolate over many issues, including the periodization of world history, the balance between Western and non-Western societies at various periods of history, the relationship between global and regional or national histories, the possibility of noncentric viewpoints, and the most appropriate methodological and pedagogical approaches. For example, should world historians aim at comprehensive “big picture” studies or more restricted focus on themes and patterns or on comparative studies? World history remains a lively and increasingly international field expanding in both breadth and depth.

NOTES

1. This essay is a revised and updated version of Craig A. Lockard, “World History,” in Kelly Boyd, ed., Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), pp. 130–135. 2. Quoted in Michael Wood, Legacy: The Search for Ancient Cultures (New York: Sterling, 1994), 192. 3. Quoted in John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 194. 4. Liang Qiqao, “A People Made New,” in William Theodore de Bary et al., eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 93.

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5. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965), p. 9. 6. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1934). 7. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University, 1934–1961); The World and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). For Toynbee’s career, see William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 8. See René Grousset, The Sum of History (Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1951); Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). 9. Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell and Mott, Ltd., 1955), p. 18. 10. See K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco de Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945 (Northampton, MA: George Allen, 1953); Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956; revised ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Ali Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982). 11. See International Commission for a Study of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, History of Mankind, 6 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin and New York: Harper, 1963). 12. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; reprinted 1992). 13. See Plagues and Peoples, revised ed. (Garden City: Anchor, 1998); The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University, 1983); The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society Since A.D. 2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982); Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). See also McNeill’s autobiography, The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005). 14. See Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History, Edited by Edmund Burke III (New York: Cambridge University, 1993); and The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 15. See A Global History: From Prehistory to the 21st Century, 7 th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1999); Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: William Morrow, 1981); Lifelines From Our Past: A New World History (New York: Pantheon, 1989). 16. See The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1990); The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also his autobiography, On the Fringe of History: A Memoir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). 17. On the Comparative World History Program at Wisconsin see Craig A. Lockard, “The Contributions of Philip Curtin and the ‘Wisconsin School’ to the Study and Promotion of World History” in Journal of Third World Studies, 11/2 (Spring, 1994), 180–223. 18. See The New History of the World, 8th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University, 2003). 19. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New

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York: Pantheon, 1994); Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978); Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 2007). 20. See Carlo Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1974); Massimo Livi Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). 21. The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study of Comparative History (New York: Harper, 1966). 22. See The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989) 23. For a critique and comparison of modernization and world-system approaches see Craig A. Lockard, “Global History, Modernization, and the World-System Approach,” The History Teacher, 14/4 (August, 1981), 489–515. 24. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 25. Andre Gunder Frank, The World System: Five Hundred or Five Thousand Years? (New York, Routledge, 1994); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994). 26. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 27. See, for example, three volumes of essays edited for the American Historical Association by Michael Adas and published in Philadelphia by Temple University Press: Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (1993), Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History (2001), and Essays on Twentieth-Century History (2010). See also Jerry H. Bentley et al., eds., Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005); Jerry H. Bentley, ed., The Oxford Handbook of World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Douglas Northrup, ed., A Companion to World History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); and Kenneth R. Curtis and Jerry H. Bentley, eds., Architects of World History: Researching the Global Past (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). 28. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Fred Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History from the Big Bang to the Present (New York: New Press, 2007); Anthony N. Penna, The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 29. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005). 30. Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview, 1994). 31. See Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing Global Consciousness (New York: Zed Press, 2003); A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002); and Peter N. Stearns, Globalization in World History (New York; Routledge, 2010). 32. See Ian Tattersall, The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Lauren Ristvet, In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006); Johan Goudsblom, Fire and

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Civilization (London: Penguin, 1992); and Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 33. Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Premodern Times (New York: Oxford University, 1993); and Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century, updated with a new preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 34. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner, 1995); Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Greenwood, 1972); Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); John E. Wills, The World from 1450 to 1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Victor Lieberman, ed., Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 35. See Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); Stewart Gordon, When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the “Riches of the East” (New York: Da Capo, 2008); Stephen S. Gosch and Peter N. Stearns, Premodern Travel in World History (New York: Routledge, 2008). 36. See Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); Rainer F. Buschmann, Oceans in World History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); Philip de Souza, Seafaring and Civilization: Maritime Perspectives on World History (London: Profile Books, 2001); Edward Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York; Oxford University Press, 2014); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003); Douglas R. Egerton et al., The Atlantic World (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007); Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007); and David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Peregrine Horden, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 37. See Xinru Liu and Lynda Shaffer, Connections Across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange Along the Silk Roads (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); Frances Wood, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Richard C. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Sally Wiggins, The Silk Road Journey of Xuanzang (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 38. See Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel; Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Brian Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate

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Changes Civilizations (New York: Basic Books, 2004); J. Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009); John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World ( New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); John Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Stephen Mosley, The Environment in World History (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 39. See, Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Kenneth F. Kiple, A Moveable Feast: Ten Millennia of Globalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Food in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001). 40. See John Aberth, Plagues in World History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Sheldon Watts, Disease and Medicine in World History (New York: Routledge, 2003); John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Crosby, Columbian Exchange; McNeill, Plagues and People. 41. See Erik Gilbert and Jonathan Reynolds, Trading Tastes: Commodity and Cultural Exchange to 1750 (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 3rd ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2013); Ronald Findley and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); Steven Topik et al., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); James D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jonathan Williams, Money: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade; Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 42. See Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Penguin, 2003); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985); John Keay, The Spice Route: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Giergio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 43. Daniel R. Headrick, Technology: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Stephen L. Sass, The Substance of Civilization: Material and Human History from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon (New York: Arcade, 1998);

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Alfred W. Crosby, Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 44. Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2007); Tom Kemp, Historical Patterns of Industrialization (London: Longman, 1978). 45. See Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Donald Johnson and Jean Elliot Johnson, Universal Religions in World History: The Spread of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam to 1500 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia— And How It Died (New York: HarperOne, 2008); John C. Super and Briane K. Turley, Religion in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006); Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern World: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009). 46. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change,” Journal of World History 18, 1 (March 2007): 69–98; Peter N. Stearns, “Social History and World History: Prospects for Collaboration,” Journal of World History 18, 1 (March 2007): 43–52. 47. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in World History: Global Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Pamela McVay, Envisioning Women in World History 1500– Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009); Catherine Clay et al., Envisioning Women in World History: Prehistory–1500 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009); Peter N. Stearns, Gender in World History (New York: Routledge, 2000); Bonnie C. Smith, ed., Women’s History in Global Perspective, 3 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 48. See Patrick Manning, Migration in World History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012); Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Wang Gungwu, ed., Global History and Migrations (New York: Westview, 1997); Lisa Lindsey, Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 49. See David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); Jane Samson, Race and Empire (New York: Longman, 2005); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Scott Cook, Colonial Encounters in the Age of High Colonialism (New York: Longman, 2006); and Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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50. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 1991); Robert Strayer, The Communist Experiment: Revolution, Socialism, and Global Conflict in the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); and Steven Grosby, Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 51. See Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Michael D. Richards, Revolutions in World History (New York: Routledge, 2004); James DeFronzo, Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 2007); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Palgrave, 2010); William R. Polk, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerrilla War from the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: Harper, 2007). 52. See Jeremy Black, War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450– 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Michael S. Nieberg, Warfare in World History (New York: Routledge, 2001); Stephen Morillo et al., War in World History: Society, Technology, and War from Ancient Times to the Present, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009). 53. See Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University, 2007). 54. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Power of Nations: Why Some Are so Rich and Some Are so Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2006). 55. Jack Goldstone, Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Jack Goody, The Eurasian Miracle (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010); J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993); Hobson, Eastern Origins; and Marks, Origins of the Modern World. 56. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Frank, ReOrient. Also, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 57. See Warren I. Cohen, East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); S.A.M. Adshead, China in World History, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Peter B. Golden, Central Asia in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); James L. Huffman, Japan in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Craig A. Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003 and 2009); Erik Gilbert and Jonathan T. Reynolds, Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2012); Ralph A. Austen, Trans-Saharan

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Africa in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006). 58. See Claude Alvares, Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1492 to the Present Day (Goa: Other India Press, 1991); Ranajit Guha, History at the Limits of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review, 1989). 59. See Tamim Ansart, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (New York: Public Affairs, 2009); essays on “World History vs. Global History? The Changing Worldview in Contemporary China,” Chinese Studies in History, 42/3 (Spring, 2009). For world history as practiced and debated in various nations see Patrick Manning, ed., Global Practice in World History: Advances Worldwide (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2008); and Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 60. Gregory Blue and Timothy Brook, quoted in Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. vii.

WO R L D H I S T O R Y Marnie Hughes-Warrington

Historians commonly assume that world history and women’s history have only intersected with one another quite recently, despite abundant evidence to the contrary (Bentley 1996: 25; Zinsser 1996: 11; Manning 2003: 209; Dunn 2000: 441–80). At least two assumptions have shaped this perception. First, and most importantly, world historians generally presuppose that they write above gender, documenting the unsexed activities of humanity over time (Zinsser 2005: 209–10). This gender blindness, combined with gendered periodisations, categories of analysis and theoretical strategies has at its worst fostered the unquestioned use of women as an historiographical device to signal the preservation or destabilisation of world order. Furthermore, it has served to minimise and even disguise the activities of women in the past, including women world historians. Second, “world history” is a broad field and many of its sub-fields—like universal history, ecumenical history, comparative history, eschatological history, world-system history, macrohistory, big history and the new world and global histories— are not considered in relation to one another. Consequently, surveys of the historiography of world history tend to be limited to the period following global exploration or even to the twentieth century (Bentley 1996; Pomper, Elphick and Vann 1998; Manning 2003; Stuchtey and Fuchs 2003). The cumulative result of these assumptions is that pre-twentiethcentury women world historians are routinely overlooked. This essay seeks to rectify such oversights by treating the genre broadly, focusing on Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s “World History” was originally published in Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, edited by Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys, and Barbara Caine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 611–17. Reprinted with permission from Palgrave.

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women’s historical writing that attempts to comprehend a meaningful “world,” understood as an entire meaningful system of existence. World histories written by women vary widely in narrative structure and emphases and range in time and space. They are united, however, by the purpose of offering a construction of and a guide towards a meaningful “world” or “realm or domain taken for an entire meaningful system of existence or activity by historians or historical agents” (Hughes-Warrington 2005: 4, 8). Recognising the kinship of “world history” with “universal history,” for instance, extends the historiography of the field back to Herodotus’ Histories (c. 430–424 BCE). Considerations of women and gender were there at the beginning. The Histories comment freely on gender relations; women and men function as symbols of the health of the polis and as agents of social order. While few of the male historians that followed Herodotus held to his flexible assignment of typologies, they shared his understanding of history as a source of orientation towards the world and as a guide to action. They persistently used women as an historiographical device to signal the maintenance of— or more commonly threats to—world order.

A N C I E N T A N D M E D I E VA L “ U N I V E R S A L H I S T O R I E S ”

Most ancient world historical writing on women belongs to the biographical catalog genre, which lists and describes particular groups of people, a genre that has lasted ever since. There were, for instance, ancient catalogs of priestesses, queens, women responsible for causing wars and ruining or joining family houses, and prostitutes. Ancient catalogs of women are characterised by the apparently random order of their entries (i.e., non-chronological or nonalphabetical), the use of male relatives to place or identify female figures, and the judgement of women according to their physical appearance and sexual passion. Some of these works range far over known space and time, and deserve recognition as universal histories because their authors were evidently interested in drawing together historical events to lay bare universal moral truths. These biographical catalogs expressed a continuum of opinion on women, ranging from sympathetic treatments to misogynistic accounts brimming with vitriol. A notable example of the former is the anonymous Women Intelligent and Courageous in Warfare (c. 200 BCE), which celebrates the achievements of Greek and barbarian queens without passing comment on their physical appearance or sexuality. The non-standard treatment of women in this work has led commentators to wonder whether the author might have been a woman (Gera 1997). Many catalogs, by contrast, warned of the potential sexual impropriety, idleness and disobedience of women; Juvenal, for instance, connected the idleness and moral or sexual depravity of women with the decline of the Roman state. In the medieval period, a common fear of the social and intellectual impact of female actions upon world order, along with the New Testament prohibition against women teaching (for example, I Timothy 2:9), made it difficult for women to position themselves as pedagogical writers or authorities. They therefore sought covert opportunities for expression, particularly via the frameworks of hagiography, mystical writing and

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florilegium: compilations or collections of literary and biographical texts. For instance, although Herrad of Hohenbourg positions herself in the florilegium Garden of Delights (c. 1176–1191) (Green et al. 1979) as a little bee of God who simply makes honey out of the different flowers of scriptural, philosophical, scientific and cosmological writings, the resulting fusion is a cleverly crafted contribution to medieval universal historical writing. Hildegard of Bingen, too, though not opting for the Augustinian method of using texts, also documents the epochs and future of mankind in the mystical work Book of Divine Works (1163–1173) (Fox 1987). Over a century later, Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) appeared, the earliest extant work in which we see the content and structure of history explicitly modified to empower female readers. In the narrative frame of a dream vision, de Pizan inserts herself as a protagonist. In doing so, she presents herself not as the dispenser but as the receiver of information and as a result generates the impression that she is a model for her readers who can encourage them to “write” themselves into the city of womanly virtue (Brown-Gram 1999: 74–128). Further, to de Pizan, the examples of female warriors, good wives and saintly women demonstrate their common humanity with men and— as their natural and worthy companions—their contribution to the progressive development of civilisation. Through the use of the word “city” in her title— an echo of Augustine’s City of God— de Pizan signals that her account of civilisation is a “universal history.” When discussing the role of men in the history of civilisation, she looks to contemporary events and echoes the late medieval view of society’s decline and decadence. When discussing the contributions of women, however, she looks to events over the long term and observes progress. Women are credited with the invention of the letters of the alphabet, arms and agriculture and the development of cities and education. They are also expected to make valuable contributions to society in future—mostly through their companionship with men. Men, on the other hand, are portrayed as increasingly willing to slander women and as connected with the decadent institutions of the Church and State. De Pizan’s work is thus characterized by two gendered narratives of differing timescales and modes of employment: male as tragedy and female as romance (Hughes-Warrington 2005: 124).

THE DEFENCE OF WOMEN

De Pizan clearly anticipated some of the key developments in Renaissance and Reformation historiography. Topical issues also continued to be important, particularly those in politics and religion. Both came together in the querelle des femmes or literary debate about women from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Generally, querelle des femmes works are characterised by theological, philosophical and legal arguments, but many also included biographical catalogs. Women participated in this debate, with defences of women being provided by Moderata Fonte’s (Modesta Pozzo) The Worth of Women, Lucrezia Marinelli’s The Excellence of Women Together with the Defects and Defi-

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ciencies of Men (1600), the pseudonymous Ester Sowernam’s Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (1617), Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomas (1617), Mary Fage’s Fames Roule (1637) and Bathsua Makin’s An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673). Of particular interest to these writers was whether women were morally, socially and intellectually complementary to men, rather than subordinate to them, and capable of being citizens and even sovereigns. For instance, while John Knox presented many historical examples in The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regimen of Women (1558) to show that the rule of any woman is “repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and . . . the subversion of good order, or all equity and justice,” Diana Primrose in her Chains of Pearle (1630) fragmented Elizabeth I into a pseudo-biographical catalog of allegorical virtues. Defences outnumbered attacks by a ratio of four to one and the number of works by women or purportedly by women increased steadily up to the nineteenth century.

W O M E N , C I V I L I S AT I O N , A N D U N I V E R S A L H I S T O R I E S

By the seventeenth century, history writing moved away from theology and towards science and philosophy. Through that century and the next, male historians continued in universal fashion, however, to search for the fundamental principles that shaped the behaviour of individuals and societies. They often sought confirmation of the leading role of Western Europe in progress towards intellectual, moral, aesthetic, technological and social perfection. Very often, the treatment of women was a barometer for degrees of civilisation. With some exceptions, these universal historians thought “civilisation” saw the transformation of Western women from “slaves” and “sexual idols” into “friends and companions” in the private sphere of the home. Women’s historical writing proliferated in the nineteenth century, and this included world histories. Indeed, right at the beginning of the century, Hester Piozzi (also known as Mrs Henry Thrale) published her ambitious world history, entitled Retrospection; or, A Review of the Most Striking and Important Events, Characters, Situations and Their Consequences, which the Last Eighteen Hundred Years Have Presented to the View of Mankind (1801). Her book was in 24 chapters, starting with “Containing the First Century; from Tiberius to Trajan” and ending with “Last four years of the century from 1796 to 1800.” Piozzi is notable for presenting annotated copies to her friends, the annotations often emphasising her views as to the fitness of rulers. Especially popular was the biographical catalog featuring women through the ages. Mary Hay’s Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (1803), Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women, Exemplifying Their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations with Miscellaneous Poems (1810), Anna Jameson’s Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1832), Characteristics of Women (1833) and The Romance of Biography (1837), Laure Junot’s Memoirs of Celebrated Women (1834) and Mary Elizabeth Hewitt’s Heroines of History (1852) are just some of the many nineteenth-century world histories of women that took the form of biographical surveys.

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Burstein has argued that in the period from 1830 to 1870 reader, reviewer and publisher demand for morally edifying works quashed methodological innovation, leading authors to produce didactic and encyclopedic texts “characterized by instances of déjà vu, plagiarism and mutual raiding of sources” (Burstein 1999: 48). The biographical catalog genre could, indeed, be imbued with deep moral purpose. Women’s lives were thought to be particularly edifying, for as Sarah Josepha Hale argued in her biographical catalog Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from “The Beginning” until AD 1850, “woman is God’s appointed agent of morality” and the mainspring of human progress towards “millennial Peace” because she was created last in an ascending scale from matter to man (1853: vii, xxxv, xxxvi). As Sarah Stickney Ellis, the author of The Mothers of Great Men realised, the moral needs of readers dictated that historical order be subordinated to moral order (1859: 70). “World-noted women,” as Mary Cowden Clarke called them in her book, World-Noted Women; or, Types of Womanly Attributes of All Lands and Ages, were accordingly not so much individuals as historical exemplars or “types of particular womanly attributes” (1858: 3). Yet a closer inspection of at least some of the women’s world histories from this time reveals the use of narrative arrangement, contradictory statements and asides to deliver oblique and sometimes even quite pointed moral, social and political comments. Sarah Josepha Hale’s principles of selection clearly indicate her use of history to support a progressive, womanist political programme; Mary Cowden Clarke notes how quickly men are apt to read feminine intelligence as a vice (World-Noted Women; or, Types of Womanly Attributes of all Lands and Ages 1858); and a little later Clara Lucas Balfour in Women Worth Emulating (1877) complains of the deleterious effects of depriving girls of education. Not all women’s world histories took the form of a biographical catalog. Lydia Maria Child, a radical abolitionist with a fascination with world religions, wrote five volumes of the Ladies Family Library, the first three of which contained biographies of exemplary women. The last two volumes, however, published as The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (1835), were organised spatially. In the same year, Emma Willard, an American innovator and pioneer in girls’ education, wrote a school text book A System of Universal History, In Perspective: Accompanied by an Atlas, Exhibiting Chronology in a Picture of Nations, and Progression Geography in a Series of Maps (1835). Reflecting contemporary stereotypes, however, Child’s and Willard’s works relate European history diachronically and activities in non-European locations synchronically. Yet Child and Willard were deeply affected by the ideals of the new professional history. Unlike many of her peers, Child consistently refused to deduce overt philosophical or universal explanations from the many and varied facts she assembled. The 1835 edition lacks even an introduction or preface, and the preface Child added to the 1845 edition confirmed that she did not want her work to be read as a philosophical or universal text: “This volume is not an essay upon women’s rights, or a philosophical investigation of what is or what ought to be the relation of the sexes . . . I have simply endeavored to give an accurate history of the condition of women . . .”

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It is ironic that female authors of nineteenth-century world histories argued for the domesticity of women at the same time that they enlarged their own sphere of influence by becoming publicly known figures with opinions on the experiences of women in far flung parts of the globe. Perhaps, like Lucretia, as Mary Cowden Clarke argued in World-Noted Women, they would have kept “peaceful silence” had “destiny so permitted” and would return to privacy once their moral duty had been performed (Clarke 1858: 37). Furthermore, women’s world histories, as Hobbs has argued, were double-edged because while on the one hand they provided reading material designed to reinforce prevailing norms regarding girl and womanhood, they also contributed to and thus promoted the literacy and education of women (Hobbs 1995: 10). Many nineteenthcentury women’s world histories were conduits for womanist thought, demonstrating that women were not lesser instantiations of humanity than men, but their complementary companions, using the gifts of their separate spheres to enhance the abilities of their partners and to turn them away from iniquity. Few nineteenth-century world histories are mentioned in historiographical surveys today, but the neglect of women contributors to the field is particularly apparent. As some commentators have noted, this is likely due to their exclusion from academic discussions and privileges and even library facilities: few women could hope to produce the archival research that was increasingly valued (Karcher 1998). It is also worth noting, however, that their biographical, ethnographic and narrative methods meant their easy assimilation into the genres of “travel writing” and “biography” and movement out of an increasingly professionalised “history.” Stigmatised as well intentioned but amateurish, compilations of women worthies remain today on the margins of professional worldhistorical writing, with production limited almost exclusively to the growing market of eight-to-twelve-year-old girls or “tweens.” Girls may have “rocked the world” as one series of texts declares, but their collective biographers have not shaken the foundations of world-historical writing.

GENDER AND WORLD HIS TORY

Mid-way through the twentieth century, Arnold J. Toynbee in “A Woman’s Life in Other Ages” asked “When was the best time in history for women to live?” His conclusion, that “it was a black day for woman when man . . . [wrenched] the hoe out of women’s hands and [transformed] it into a plough,” was an early contribution to the debate about whether there was a particular point in world history that ushered in gender inequalities (Corfield and Ferrari 2001: 1–16). Yet the debate over the origins of sexual inequality took on a new life with the advent of second-wave feminism. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) and later Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) argued that gender inequality began much earlier than Toynbee’s suggestion of the onset of agriculture, and was extremely common spatially and temporally. A number of works

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by women historians have continued this debate, notably Marija Gimbutas’ Civilization of the Goddess (1991), Margaret Ehrenberg’s Women in Prehistory (1989) and Rosalind Miles’ The Women’s History of the World ( 1989). In the mid-twentieth century, modernisation analysis dominated world history research and writing. Of interest to modernisation theorists were the paths of development in the West that might be used to study and foster development in the “developing” world. Works such as Ester Boserup’s Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970) considered development to lead to female empowerment. A disparate group of Marxist theorists such as A G Frank (1978) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) disagreed, noting the inadequacy of modernisation theory for an explanation of Latin American development alongside the marginalisation and exploitation of women, and suggesting an alternative in the form of world-system and dependency theory, which focused on inequalities in the distribution of power worldwide. World histories based on world-systems and dependency theory, however, have rarely been gendered; though writers like Baron have noted it theoretically could be (Baron 1998). This lack is probably due in part to these approaches, affinity with Marxism, and the generally perceived disjunction between feminism and Marxism. It is also due, though, to the growing preference amongst many women historians for identification under the rubric of “postcolonial studies.” Postcolonial histories emphasise the specificities of race, class, gender, nationality and religion and as such can work against the search for universal patterns of change. First brought to the attention of world historians with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), postcolonial theorists enhance political and economic criticisms of colonialism with cultural analyses. For example, representation and language are crucial for the construction of an “Other,” as works by Joanna de Groot have demonstrated (1989: 89–128; 1999: 107–35). Post-colonial scholars have been tugged by opposing aims: to establish the alignment of the experiences of women and colonised subjects and to recognise the specificities of race, class, nationality, religion, sexuality, epistemic, social, political and economic hierarchies and gender relations. Some have managed to strike a balance, as with Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel’s study of the varying impacts of European women’s activities on men and women in colonial societies and Louise Tilly’s recognition that industrialization did not lead to the marginalisation of all women (Chaudhuri and Strobel 1992; Strobel 1993; Tilly 1993). However, as Judith Tucker has argued, the desire to recognise and respect cultural particularity can result in a loss of confidence in one’s ability to write about those whose lives are shaped by presuppositions very different from our own. Writing world history can thus appear difficult or even unethical (Tucker 1993; Prazniak 2000). Many historians would agree, and, like Von Laue, argue that history is best written on small scales, or from what he calls “the ground floor of life” (Von Laue 1998: 233). Dependency, world-system and postcolonial world histories were part of a wider shift in the twentieth century towards the study of relations between peoples across

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the globe. With the exception of sociological macrohistories, new global histories and neo-universal “big” histories, “new” world histories are smaller in scale and more crosscultural and comparative in approach than earlier works. This shift is mirrored in new world historical writing on women: for example, recent women’s world histories such as Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser’s Women in Early Modern and Modern Europe (2000), Bonnie G. Smith’s Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (1989) and Pauline Pantel’s A History of Women in the West (1992) are restricted to Europe or the West. Other indications of this trend to smaller-scale approaches include Sarah and Brady Hughes’ Women in World History (1995) and the American Historical Association’s “Women’s and Gender History in Global Perspective” series, both of which derive their large-scale perspectives from the combination of specialist sources and pamphlets. Mary Ritter Beard in Women as a Force in History worked to shift the emphasis of world history discourse away from finding the origins of “subjection” and towards an appreciation that “women have been a force in making all the history that has been made” (1946: vi). This idea has inspired much recent scholarship by women about women, but little of it has been in the field of world history. Unfortunately, Beard’s comments have had little impact on the field of world history, as women are still routinely confined to sidebars or paragraphs on inequality and agriculture, and on family and marriage. It is as if, as Zinsser notes, women singlehandedly created families and had no part to play in technological change. There have, however, been some attempts recently to argue for the value of a gendered approach to world history. Ida Blom (2000) in “World History as Gender History: The Case of the National-State” has analysed the ways in which different gender systems shape different understandings of the nationstate. Sarah Hughes in “Gender at the Base of World History” has argued for gender to be brought to the forefront of world history scholarship and education. Marilyn Morris ( 1998) in “Sexing the Survey: The Issue of Sexuality in World History Since 1500” has surveyed world history textbooks, finding unconscious biases against homosexuality and its conflation with the East. How much the construction of world histories might change when gender is brought to the forefront is clear when one compares the periodisation categories and narrative structure of Merry Wiesner-Hanks’ innovative global survey Gender in History (2001) with the more traditional approach of Peter Stearns in Gender in World History (2000) which are contemporaneous. While Stearns fits women to a chronological survey punctuated by phenomena routinely included in world history surveys—the invention of agriculture and the industrial revolution, to name just two— Wiesner-Hanks questions the dominant techno-centred narratives of world historians, and offers instead a thematic treatment of the various points of intersection between gender and policies in family life, warfare, government and popular social movements. It is time for studies of gender in world history to be joined by those of the gender of world history. Until world historians understand that they do not write above gender, they will continue to offer limited and limiting visions of our world.

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BIBLIOGR APHY

Baron, E, “Romancing the Field: The Marriage of Feminism and Historical Sociology,” Social Politics, 5 (1998) 17–37. Bentley, J, Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1996). Blom, I, “World History as Gender History: The Case of the Nation-State,” Between National Histories and Global History, (eds.) S Tønnesson, J Koponen, N Steensgard, and T Svensson (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1997) pp. 71–91. Brown-Grant, Rosalind, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth, “‘From Good Looks to Good Thoughts’: Popular Women’s History and the Invention of Modernity, c. 1830–c. 1870,” Modern Philology, 97 (1999) 46–75. Chauduri, N and Strobel, M (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). Clarke, M E, World-Noted Women; or, Types of Womanly Attributes of All Lands and Ages (New York: D Appleton and Company, 1858). Corfield, Penelope J and Paolo Ferrari, “‘A Woman’s Life in Other Ages’, by Arnold J. Toynbee, with an Editorial Introduction,” Historical Research, 74, 183 (2001) 1–16. de Groot, J, “‘Sex’ and ‘Race’: The Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century,” Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 89–128. Dunn, R, “Gender in World History,” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s 2000) pp. 441–442. Ellis, Sarah Stickney, The Mothers of Great Men (London: Chatto & Windus, 1874). Fox, M (ed.), Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs (Santa Fe: Bear, 1987). Frank, A G, World Accumulation 1492–1789 (London: Macmillan, 1978). Gera, D, Warrior Women: The Anonymous Tractatus de Mulierbus (Leiden: E J Brill, 1997). Hale, Sarah Josepha, Women’s Record: Or Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from the Beginning until AD 1850 (London: Sampson Low & Son, 1853). Hobbs, C (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1995). Hughes-Warrington, M (ed.), “Shapes,” Palgrave Advances in World Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) pp. 112–134. Karcher, Carolyn L, The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Manning, P, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Morris, M, “Sexing the Survey: The Issue of Sexuality in World History since 1500,” World History Bulletin, 14 (1998) 11–20. Pomper, P, R H Elphick and R T Vann (eds.), World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Prazniak, R, “Is World History Possible?,” in A Dirlik, V Bahl and P Gran (eds.), History after

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the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiography (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Strobel, Margaret, Gender, Sex, and Empire (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1993). Stuchtey, B and E Fuchs (eds.), Writing World History, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Tilly, L A, “Industrialization and Gender Inequality,” in M Adas (ed.) Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) pp. 243–310. Tucker, J. “Gender and Islamic History,” in M Adas (ed.) Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) pp. 37–74. Von Laue, T H, “World History, Cultural Relativism, and the Global Future,” in Pomper, P, R H Elphick and R T Vann (eds.), World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) pp. 217–234. Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). Zinsser, J P, “And Now for Something Completely Different: Gendering the World History Survey,” Perspectives (American Historical Association) 34 (1996) 11. ———, “Gender,” in M Hughes-Warrington (ed.) Palgrave Advances in World Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) pp. 189–214.

T OWA R D WO R L D H I S T O R Y: A ME R I C A N H I S T O R I A N S A N D T H E C O M IN G O F T H E WO R L D H I S T O R Y CO U R S E Gilbert Allardyce

Historians have been death on world history. Most believe that the subject is simply too vast and visionary for academic study and too alien to the modern temper of their profession. In fact, however, Andrew D. White, first president of the American Historical Association (AHA), called upon his members at their first public meeting in 1884 to make the new organization a place for both specialized work and the higher endeavor that he described as “the summing up of history,” the study of the past on a world scale. “We may indeed consider it as the trunk on which special histories and biographies are the living branches,” he said of world history, “giving to them and receiving from them growth and symmetry, drawing life from them, sending life into them.” The branches spread, but historians in the AHA sawed off the trunk. Not synthesis but empiricism became the house style—history in fine grain, layered, textured, nuanced, footnoted. To criticize this style, one historian commented recently, is to criticize the practice of

This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Gilbert Allardyce’s “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course” was originally published in Journal of World History 1, 1 (Spring 1990): 23–26, 40– 76. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press.

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academic history in the United States. “This is the work we are good at,” he concluded; “it is the essence of professional history.”1 If so, world history plainly does not come naturally to historians. Some say the fault is in ourselves and the narrowness of our discipline. Others say it is in the sheer impossibility of the subject itself. Is world history possible? Those who say it is begin from a simple premise: all the history in the world is not world history. Bishop Bossuet in the seventeenth century commented that just as world maps could be projected to appropriate detail, so world history could be scaled to proper size. This same idea, that world history was not more boundless than other histories but merely different in focus, became common to the literature that most influenced American historians on the subject. Thus Lord Acton in 1898 defined world history as “distinct from the combined history of all nations” and concentrated only upon “the common fortunes of mankind.” To H. G. Wells in 1920, it was “something more and something less than the aggregate of the national histories,” just as European history was something more and something less than the aggregate of all national histories on the continent. Others have explained that, to have a place in world history, events must be large, comprehensive, and compelling enough to affect whole segments of humanity. In sum, because humankind is so vast its common history probably is fairly limited.2 Indeed, someone said that world history can be written on a single page. But what is world history? Here, on this question of the content of world history, some historians believe that this old subject simply has too much bad history to live down. They look on it the way astronomers look on astrology, that is, as an early and immature form of their discipline, a form all bound up in religion, metaphysics, and prophecy. Through twelve centuries, major church historians from Augustine to Bossuet infused world history concepts of the sacred and profane. They identified it as the unfolding of the divine idea, as a revelation of the truth of Christianity, as the story of God’s people in Europe and the Middle East. Thereafter, in the secular, universal histories of the Enlightenment these religious ideas merely gave way to moral philosophy and metaphysical abstractions. However, with the rise of “scientific’’ history, the whole enterprise came under a cloud. As the practice of history became professional, the practice of world history became identified with amateurism. The new history defined itself against the old, and apprentices in the vocation, reared on specialized research, learned to hold world history in suspicion as something outmoded, overblown, and metahistorical. Whoever said world history, said amateurism. In our century, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee formed new versions of world history out of the cultural pessimism of western society. They opened the subject to a new civilizational approach and, at the same time, turned it back upon itself, returning to ultimate questions about God and humanity that had aroused historians against the old universal history in the first place. Their work seemed to set university historians on edge, to challenge something fundamental in the contemporary practice of history. This response revealed, on the one hand, the considerable solidarity of the history pro-

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fession in opposition to world history; on the other, it revealed the isolation of the profession from the reading public. Spengler and Toynbee made world history popular in the twentieth century, and their success with the book-buying populace, particularly in the United States, indicated the public appeal of histories with a claim to global scale and cosmic significance. In most academic literature, however, the writings of Spengler and Toynbee generally were dismissed as works of imagination, as philosophy, prophecy, pap. British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, in reaction to the commercial success of Toynbee’s work in America, quipped: “As a dollar earner . . . it ranks second only to whiskey.”3 Indeed, the influence of these modern masters of world history, rather than inspiring historians to return to the subject, caused them instead to harden against it. The result was to make universities hostile ground for world history in the United States. This article concerns three historians who fought against this opposition in the profession and the universities. Louis Gottschalk and William H. McNeill of the University of Chicago and Leften Stavrianos of Northwestern University in the Evanston suburbs made Chicago the capital of world history in the United States. This is not a study of the works and ideas of these three men. Rather the purpose here is to draw from the lessons of their experiences in preparing the coming of world history in American education. The work of McNeill and Stavrianos in particular inspired the rise of the World History Association (WHA), formed by young historians in 1982 to take over the cause of world history from these men of the older generation. This organization wants historians to turn the leading scholarship of the men studied here into effective world history courses through the art of classroom teaching. Their message, in short, is this: the way to make world history possible is to teach it. The late Warren I. Susman, vice president of the AHA Teaching Division in 1982, remarked that good scholarship becomes good history when it is forced to teach, when it is made to communicate knowledge in clear and systematic form. “The fact remains,” he concluded, “that an effective course demands to be informed by effective scholarship and effective scholarship to have its impact fully felt needs to be taught.” This, in effect, is what McNeill told world historians as well. “So my injunction to you is this,” he declared: “Try to teach world history and you will find that it can be done.” 4

T OWA R D A G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : L E F T E N S TAV R I A N O S A N D THE HIGH SCHOOL COURSE IN WORLD HIS TORY

This section of the present article concerns the work of Leften Stavrianos (b. Vancouver, 1913) in bringing this idea to teachers of world history in American high schools. Stavrianos called for “a view from the moon,” a higher, unifying vision of the whole human past. To him, world history in American education had never been about world history; it had been about Europe. The subject was always the west and the westernization of other continents, with Europeans at the center. Americans on the side, and everyone else on the planet in limbo.5

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It seems, however, that western historians have always resisted larger histories. Eurocentrism is us. Even though the history of ancient China, for example, was known to Europeans from the writings of Jesuit missionaries nearly a generation before Bossuet wrote his universal history in 1681, it took another century to break through the old western limits of sacred history. And even after the discovery of other peoples on the planet, the world beyond Europe often still remained as nonhistorical as before. In the nineteenth century as the study of European states became the subject matter of history, the study of peoples without states became the subject matter of anthropology. Nonwestern peoples became “societies” and “cultures.” Some, like the Egyptians and Chinese, were perceived as exhausted civilizations left behind by history. Others, supposedly more isolated, were conceived as primitives and “exotics” who had never been part of history in the first place. Europeans had a history; others had customs, which were timeless and unchanging. “The history of European peoples could be found in the archives,” a historian comments, “the customs of . . . peoples overseas were to be found in the field.”6 Scholars have described how western thinkers consistently invented categories to define this duality of the west and “the people without history”: civilization and primitivism, modernism and traditional society, development and underdevelopment, core and periphery. “Many of us,” explained Eric R. Wolf. “even grew up believing that this west has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution.” 7 This was not only the history that most westerners knew, it was their perception of the nature of history itself as well—its oneness, linear direction, and progressive movement. Incapable of transcending European experience, they were also incapable of so-called global perspective. For this reason, Toynbee compared the west to Sleeping Beauty: fair, alluring, but dead to the world. However, there is a kind of allure and romance in the idea of global perspective as well. British historian Geoffrey Barraclough, for example, claimed that such a universal vision could bring a revolution in consciousness, a breakout from the parochialism of histories limited to particular regions and peoples. “The change,” he asserted, “can be compared with that from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican picture of the universe; and its results, in opening new dimensions and changing our perspective, may well be no less revolutionary.” Such leaps of imagination perhaps suggest why the writing of world histories has been as persistent in western culture as the writing of utopian literature.8 In taking a different angle of vision, utopian literature attempts to transcend old limits to perception. There is something of this as well in Stavrianos’s attempt to transcend the limits of Eurocentrism in the teaching of world history. What gives Stavrianos’s thought significance here as a study in the reaction against Eurocentrism is his radical separation of western and world history. To him, neither western civilization courses, European imperialism courses, nor courses of “the west in world history” type were offerings in world history. Instead, they were western histories,

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versions in which dynamic Europeans did their stuff to the passive populations that made up the rest of humankind. “It needs to be recognized,” Stavrianos explained, “that world history and Western Civilization are inherently and fundamentally different, that they cannot be combined in any fashion, and each teacher must make the basic policy decision as to whether he will offer either the one or the other.”9 To him, this decision had important consequences in the education of American youth. For world history, Stavrianos argued, had one message for them and western history had another. His is a brave new world, with nuclear annihilation lying in one direction and a more vibrant interaction of cultures in the other. “We have the privilege,” he wants students to know, “of living in what is without a doubt the most exciting and significant era in history.” But this, he laments, is not what students learn from western history. Instead, as Europe and the United States lose mastery in the world, western history becomes like a dirge for the human race. Innocently, students project this dark present into a vision of a dark future. To Stavrianos, the answer to this western gloom is global perspective. It offers students not only a different past but also a different future to go with it.10 Someone said the future is not what it used to be. That, to Stavrianos, was the good news of world history in global perspective. Originally a Europeanist specializing in Greek history, Stavrianos was long conscious of the influence of boundaries between peoples. (Significantly, the two foremost world history academics in the United States, Stavrianos and McNeill, were born in Canada and published their early work in Greek history.) As early as the 1940s, he turned to world history in reaction to what he perceived to be the limitations of the traditional western civilization survey as education for Americans involved after the Second World War in larger international commitments. “I felt the need at the time for another course with a global perspective,” he recalled of his first thoughts about world history, “and this feeling was strengthened during the Korean War when so many of our students left our campuses for the Far East with negligible knowledge or understanding of” what they were about to face.11 After Sputnik in 1957, this perception of a national need for education in nonwestern cultures became more widely shared in the United States, and with the National Defense Education Act in the next year, government, universities, and private foundations in the field of education came together in the idea that instruction in foreign languages, area studies, and international education was in the national defense interests of the United States. In this way, Stavrianos’s ideas were part of a larger cultural expression, with origins in a period when Americans were more at home in the world, when students looked on nonwestern peoples with a kind of peace corps idealism, and when international education was identified with American political interests. In particular, Stavrianos’s ideas connected him with those advocating the “global approach” to international education, and the work of his Global History Project at Northwestern University largely coincided with the rise and decline of the globalism idea in American learning between 1957 and 1975. Partly, the term global history was simply a modish, space age name for world history. Partly, it was a term intended to

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contrast a world overview, transcending cultures and states, with the older, limited focus of area studies on particular nonwestern regions and languages. Area studies stressed the need to understand nonwestern cultures in their own context. This, to Stavrianos, was as parochial as Eurocentrism. Even before Sputnik, however, area studies methods, first developed for national strategic reasons after the Second World War, were already losing influence. After Sputnik, the work to supersede them with a new global approach took off with the first voyages into space. Before Sputnik, Stavrianos in 1952 had modest plans for a single course in world history at Northwestern. After Sputnik, he designed a whole new world history program from freshman survey to graduate studies. By 1961, he thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that he had convinced the entire faculty to convert most introductory courses in the liberal arts to the global approach. Writing to departments in that year, he stressed that changing the perspective of courses depended first on changing the perspective of teachers: The potentiality can be realized only if each course is genuinely global and meaningfully integrated. In the case of the World History course, for example. it would not suffice to have the specialist on Asia, followed by the specialists on Europe, Africa, Latin America, etc., and thus cover the globe and assume that the course is global. This would be a superficial and worthless hodgepodge of fragments of existing courses. Rather it is essential that one person invest the time and thought required to really integrate the course and to master the interrelationships and inner dynamism that inevitably would be overlooked in a vaudeville-style course.12

Gathering faculty resistance indicated, however, that the hold of traditional approaches was too strong. So was the hold of traditional histories. “Stavrianos knows full well that all of his own colleagues do not share his convictions,” the history department chairman reported; “Perhaps he is engaged in a controversy which will make the quarrels of the ancients and the moderns . . . seem like mere skirmishes.”13 “You can not globalize courses,” Stavrianos concluded, “without globalizing the instructors.” This was the lesson that he carried into the work of his World History Project on the world history course in high schools. Supported by the Carnegie Foundation, this project was part of the response to the crisis of confidence in American education that followed the Sputnik surprise, when an infusion of federal and foundation grants opened opportunities for reform in the teaching of high school subjects. None needed it more than the world history course. This was a lady with a past. World history was at once the oldest history course in public high schools and the most despised by teachers and students alike. To Stavrianos, this failing was the result of what he described as “the sheepskin curtain”—the communications barrier between universities and secondary schools that kept the influence of professional historians out of the social studies. Therefore, to understand Stavrianos’s place in the story of the world history course in high

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schools, it is necessary to review the history of this relationship between historians and secondary teachers in the making of the world history class and fixing it on the European past. The original high school world history course, called “General History,” can be traced back to the beginning of the high school itself in Boston in 1821. It evolved from a second-year course, “Ancient and Modern History and Chronology,” given at Boston English High School in that year, a course itself developed from older Latin school instruction designed to provide historical background to the study of classical languages. As it spread to other locations, the course continued to focus on the ancient past, and only gradually did it expand to include later centuries. Covering a history beginning with Adam and Eve, the course mixed biblical history and classical mythology; but the line of development toward European history was clear. For, despite a reputation for dreariness and dry facts, the course had a clear organizing idea: history was the story of the “true religion” of Christianity. “Civilization,” affirmed Samuel G. Goodrich in his course textbook in 1828, “has followed in the train of Christianity.” When, with the decline of religious thinking in the nineteenth century, this principle of organization lost influence in textbook writing, other authors turned to secular themes of race and “progress,” thus continuing in the same way to make Europe the equivalent of civilization. If, today, world history is represented as a way to overcome ethnocentrism, General History at this time was more a way to teach it. “The history of the civilized world is the history of the Aryan, Semitic, and Hametic races,” explained William Swinton in his Outlines of the World’s History, one of the most popular texts of the 1870s. “We are fully authorized to say that the Aryans are peculiarly the race of progress; and a very large part of the history of the world must be taken up with an account of the contributions which the Aryan nations have made to the common stock of civilization.”14 At the end of the nineteenth century, as amateur historians gave way to professionals, Philip V. N. Myers virtually cornered the textbook market in General History. Where earlier texts fixed on politics and wars, Myers’ A General History for Colleges and High School gave coverage to economic and social developments and added brief sections on nonwestern areas. Whereas Swinton in 1874, for example, failed even to list either India or China in his index, Myers in 1889 gave five pages of coverage to each of these areas (compared with 373 on ancient civilization and 328 on Europe) and ten to the expansion of Islam. Other authors followed the leader, but plainly no one knew what to do with the rest of the world. Bare descriptions of nonwestern peoples were added as supplements, chapters standing in isolation— usually at the end of the book—from the European story. Thus General History grew, but it did not change. Myers in 1889 continued the racial theme that gave justification to the old preoccupation with European history. “Of all the races,” he explained, “the White, or Caucasian, exhibits by far the most perfect type, physically, intellectually, and morally.”15 However, by the time his text appeared in the 1906 edition, Myers had removed these racial references, and Eurocentrism was simply left on its own, without a legitimizing myth or clear principle of organization.

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In a survey of teachers and students of General History in 1887, Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard reported that the class—like most high school history at the time—was taken up with recitation drills and the textbook method. “It was mostly conglomerate, scrap-book history,” an educator recalled some time later, “and merely tied together dynastic and ecclesiastical occurrences. . . . It was predominantly political, with a few comments on cultural developments and religious clashes. It stressed wars and schisms; pictured kings and queens, feudal lords and bishops, popes and emperors; emphasized dates and names . . . and made the study of history largely an exercise of the memory. Geographically it was confined to the Mediterranean basin, and to Western Europe, with brief allusions to the New World, Asia, and Africa.”16 To enliven student interest, Wellesley College historian Mary D. Sheldon tried unsuccessfully in 1885 to introduce the source method to General History, but the course resisted everything new— except more names and dates. In these years, therefore, just as historians began to organize their profession in the United States, General History was a sitting duck for critics of history in the schools. Observers described it as a course in disorder: overstuffed, meaningless, and plain boring. Meeting in 1892, members of the Conference on History, Civil Government, and Political Economy, a subcommittee of the famous Committee of Ten on Secondary School Subjects, recorded their fears that  the class was turning students away from the study of history altogether. “The opinion of the Conference is decidedly against single courses in general history,” they reported, “because it is almost impossible to carry them on without the study degenerating into a mere assemblage of dates and names.”17 On came the American Historical Association. From the beginning of their organized existence as a profession, historians in the AHA wanted to get rid of General History. In 1899, the report of the organization’s Committee of Seven, the first group of college historians to review systematically the condition of history in high schools, made the course anathema. The committee found General History offered in about half of the over two hundred schools it surveyed in 1897; by 1915, reports to the United States Commissioner of Education from over seven thousand schools indicated that only 5% were still teaching the course. Instead, the new order in schools across the country was the four-block curriculum recommended by the Committee of Seven: (I) ancient history, (2) European history, (3) English history, and (4) American history. These were the good old days. “Those in charge of these schools had so much confidence and faith in the leadership of the American Historical Association,” recalled Rolla M. Tryon in 1935, “that they almost ceased merely offering history, but required it instead.” Scholars have described a period of cooperation between colleges and schools in curriculum making that began in 1884. For historians, this defeat of General History was evidence of their own breakthrough of influence in high schools. The course, it seemed, was gone with the wind. “It was eliminated root and branch,” a midwestern professor commented in 1919, “and the space which it once occupied has since been so covered that few, if any, of the later generation of school pupils know of its former existence.”18

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However, this was not the final solution to the General History problem. After America’s crusade for democracy in the First World War, some educators called for a return to world history— the term “world” history was now used in part to distinguish the subject from the old, discredited General History—in order to prepare citizens for the nation’s new international involvements. In 1919, the National Education Association (NEA) asked the AHA for recommendations to adjust school work to this wider conception of citizenship education. What followed was an important episode in AHA history in which historians renounced all association with the world history idea and school teachers took it up in their place. What was involved was the report of the AHA Committee on History and Education for Citizenship in Schools. During 1919–20, committee members debated two ideas of world history, both a response—in different ways—to the war experience. One, which set the new direction for the subject in schools, was the idea of world history as the story of democracy, a progressive version of the Whig interpretation of history in which the human past became, as someone has described it, “American history pushed back through time.” This approach, in effect, gave Eurocentrism a new lease on life in world history, with the theme of democratic development in the west taking the place of the old themes of religion and race. Conversely, the other idea, a reflection of the crisis of confidence caused by the Great War, was an expression of the loss of faith in western values. Here began the reaction against Eurocentrism in world history. Influential, in this connection, was the work of H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, calling in 1920 for world history in schools as a basis for a world community of understanding and belief. The AHA committee, however, wanted no part of this world “religion,” recommending instead a tenth-grade world survey based on a “growth of democracy” theme. But the AHA wanted no part of this either. Members opposed anything resembling the old General History, and, with widespread resistance to the committee recommendation, the organization decided to stick to the friendly old Committee of Seven curriculum.19 However, these good old days of AHA influence in the schools were numbered. The early grip of history on the curriculum can be explained in part by the fact that the history profession got into the schools first, establishing a virtual monopoly in humane studies long before the social science disciplines organized their own efforts to crack the curriculum. What broke this monopoly was not only the crush of these new competitors, but the influence as well of the so-called New History, developed by historians of the progressive movement to make the study of the past useful to public life in the present. Historian of education Hazel W. Hertzberg has explained how educators during the period of the First World War brought this New History together with ideas of citizenship education to form the social studies movement. In the work of the Committee on Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (in which secondary teachers outnumbered college professors), established by the National Education Association in 1913, the father of the New History, James Harvey Robinson, stole the show with his ideas on recent history as instruction for democratic citizenship.

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Members complained of the Committee of Seven curriculum as being too academic for this kind of practical teaching, too remote from problems of contemporary life, and too much an instrument of “college domination” over the schools. “The customary four units,” asserted the committee report in 1916, “which have been largely fixed in character by the traditions of the historian and the requirements of the college, are more or less discredited as ill adapted to the requirements of secondary education.”20 Over the following years, this committee’s proposals for a new social studies curriculum did battle with the old Committee of Seven subjects. The result was a “terrific overhauling” of the secondary curriculum, which broke the influence of the history profession in schools and brought on the reign of the social studies. The social studies, a term used originally to describe offerings in history, civics, and political economy, became more broadly defined after the turn of the century as “the social sciences simplified for pedagogical purposes.” From this conception came the professional mythology of the “education men” of the schools and teachers colleges as specialists in course-making and curricula in the field. If history and the social sciences were the subject matter of university scholars, they asserted, social studies was the subject matter of teachers and educators. In this way, the struggle of education reformers for the social studies was a struggle against the influence of historians in the schools. In 1921, reform leaders established the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) as the professional organization of social studies teachers. From now on, remarked a reformer, the curriculum was the business of educators.21 One result, as described below, was the return of the once and future course in world history. Swept from the schools during the rise of history professionals, the course returned with the rise of professional educators. If, therefore, the passing of General History marked the rise of AHA influence in secondary education, this second coming of world history was a sign of its decline. Visiting high schools during 1923–24, Columbia University Teachers College historian J. Montgomery Gambrill found principals caught up everywhere in curriculum making. The squeeze was on. With subjects old and new clamoring for space, these educators worked to compress subject matter into new social studies offerings. In this, the discipline of history, still dominant, served them as the integrating subject for social studies material—but Gambrill did not like the form of history that some were using. His complaint: General History was coming back. This new tenth-grade course, he lamented, was too much like the old one, “overwhelmingly European in content and point of view,” with none of the sweep and spirit that H. G. Wells tried to bring to the subject: Any one who has the opportunity of visiting schools and making inquiries will soon learn that very often the new course is introduced simply to cover as much ground as possible in the one year of history other than American which is offered, and that the . . . conflicting demands of other social studies are the real explanation, rather than any recognition

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of a World Community or of the need for a new world history. Such a practice is simply a reversion to the old “general history” so vigorously attacked a generation ago and for many years so completely discredited.

Historians objected that the course had no recommendation from any of their organizations. To some educators, however, it was “the answer to the curriculum-maker’s prayers.” The subject and the social studies just seemed to go together. “The world story naturally brings in world geography,” a school principal told Gambrill; “the worldwide race contacts permit a natural introduction of all required sociology; the historical development of governmental and economic problems furnishes more concrete material for elementary study of political science and economics than the textbook presentation based almost entirely on recent or present-day government and economic questions.”22 Further, this world story made room not only for other subjects but also for other histories. “Here was a one-year course into which could be compressed all that was worthwhile which had formerly been taught in ancient, medieval and modern, and English history,” remarked another educator. “A three-year course in one to be taught on the sophomore level in high school seemed almost too good to be true.” Thus in 1924 the History Curricula Inquiry, organized by the AHA to examine the crumbling of the Committee of Seven curriculum, reported that world history was feeding on other history offerings, and that, as a result, separate courses in ancient, medieval, and English history were dwindling in number. The Inquiry found American history— as much a fixture in the classroom as Old Glory—taught in all of the 504 high schools that it surveyed; in contrast world history, as yet, was taught in only eighty. But even this slow advance of the subject contrasted significantly with what appeared to be a larger retreat of history subjects in general. “It does seem to be true,” concluded Inquiry chairman Edgar Dawson, “that as leadership in the making of curricula passes from the Committee of Seven to the NEA Committee on Social Studies, the amount of history other than that of the United States tends to decrease.”23 Professors complained of a power grab by educators and lamented the passing of a history of cooperation between academic scholars and secondary teachers in forming history programs. Hazel Hertzberg, however, in her study of the social studies movement, identified these complaints as part of a mythology among historians of a golden age of history in public schools, which, as they perceive it, was suddenly ended by the barbarian invasions of educationists and administrators. In fact, this parting between historians and social studies teachers, Hertzberg explains, was more civilized, with cooperation between the AHA and NCSS continuing across the growing distance between universities and high schools. Over time, however, unfamiliarity bred contempt. Hertzberg notes that historians lost interest in pedagogy and made “education” and “social studies” terms of opprobrium. Educators, in turn, belittled historians in ivory towers. “These specialists,” one remarked in 1934, “have been viewed, perhaps justly, in education circles as remote from classroom activities and experimental and

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progressive activity, as conservative or even reactionary, and as uncooperative or even hostile to schoolmen.”24 So descended the sheepskin curtain. As this curtain came down, however, world history course enrollment went up, and up. Observers traced the steady rise of enrollments in the class. In 1934 student numbers reached a half million (12% of all pupils in the grades nine to twelve), marking the breakthrough of world history as the leading course in “foreign” (read non-American) history. The drawing power of this one-year survey, authorities concluded, was not in the appeal of its subject matter but in the opportunity that it offered students to avoid two years of work in other foreign history areas. Thus the success of world history was both preserving instruction in non-American history and reducing the amount of time that pupils were devoting to the study of history in general. The United States Office of Education reported in 1934 that enrollment gains in world history, in fact, were making up for losses in all other foreign histories: Within the history groups of subjects the evidence indicates . . . that American history has been largely holding its own, English history has almost been eliminated, and twoyear sequences in foreign history are gradually giving way to one-year courses in world history. . . . While the percentages of pupils studying foreign history might at first sight suggest a falling off in number of pupils reached, more careful examination of the data does not justify such a conclusion. Pupils are now much more often than some years ago giving only one year to study of the history of foreign nations, but, owing to the rapid rise of world history, the proportion of the pupils who are exposed to foreign history at some place in their high school courses appears not to have diminished.25

By 1949 the numbers in world history, over 870,000 students (16%), were much greater than those in all other foreign history courses combined (4%)—and rising. From nearly 59% of all tenth graders in 1949, world history enrollments reached over 69%, a million and a half students, by 1961. “The one-year course in world history,” reported an educator, “has emerged as the model offering next in popularity to American history.”26 Thus, at the beginning of the 1960s, history in high schools was standing on two legs. One was the eleventh-grade course in American history, a national institution, made compulsory by law in many states, and safeguarded everywhere by civic and patriotic organizations. The other was world history. This course, in terms of enrollment, was one of the great success stories in the history of American education; in terms of everything else, it was a running failure. Students declared it to be too aimless; teachers, too boundless; educators, too stale. In 1949, NCSS president Dorothy McClure identified the course as the sick man of the social studies curriculum. “Random surveys of opinion among teachers and students alike,” she remarked, “indicate that perhaps no other part of the social studies program is more criticized than the one-year, elective world history course.” Making his rounds of high schools, James Bryant Conant in 1958 reported “widespread disappointment” with the class. Education critic Martin Mayer,

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after his own survey in 1961, described it as the course “everyone hates.”27 So fared world history when, in the same year, Stavrianos called teachers to a new global approach to the subject. These criticisms of the world history class were part of a larger and more powerful attack at this period on the condition of secondary education in America. Critics spoke of a “failure by comparison,” an incapacity of schools to match the rigor of Soviet education in teaching fundamental skills. After Sputnik in 1957, this criticism widened into a wholesale condemnation of the “progressive” curriculum in the United States. This was the background to a “decade of experiment” during which, as indicated earlier, various funded “projects,” based mainly in universities, worked on methods to bring new toughness and stimulation to school subjects. One result was the development of the “new social studies,” designed to involve students in critical thinking and the celebrated “discovery method.” Another was the effort to give relevance to the curriculum by opening it to the “issues” of the 1960s. Involved in this was the effort of Stavrianos’s World History Project at Northwestern to bring “globalism” to the world history course. This course, since its rebirth in the movement for citizenship education after the First World War, had little internal development. Instruction concentrated on the evolution of western democracy, with more and more “ground covering” of other world areas added on over the years. Against this, the small band of critics calling for a more international approach made little progress.28 Now, however, in a period of popular fascination with the new space age, the course appeared more vulnerable to change. Future historians are likely to make much of this impact of space on American education. As if conjured up by the magic of the first photographs from space of the blue planet, movements appeared to advocate the education of youth in global consciousness. Most wanted to bring a global perspective to the whole curriculum, and, in this connection, Stavrianos’s work with the world history course was but a small part of a larger design. All global studies movements were together, however, in using the woeful reputation of this course to beat their opponents over the head and to explain why Americans were ignorant of world affairs. The quaint little Eurocentric world that boys and girls learned about in schools, argued one of these global educators, was no longer the world they lived in: For over one hundred years there has been some form of teaching about people outside America’s geographical borders in both elementary and secondary schools. All of us have traced the storied Nile to its source while learning that Egypt is her gracious gift. We have memorized the Plantagenet kings and sung about the Alps. Events of the 1960s, however, changed all that. The Soviet launching of Sputnik had set the USA on her ear. . . . When most of us try to recall what we were taught about human cultures from kindergarten through grade 12, we remember only United States history, the history of our own home state, and what was lumped into a bag known as “world” history, namely European, emphatically Western culture, commencing in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. Suddenly out of the 1960s, sprang Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Canada.29

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Through the work of global studies movements, this idea of a wider world made inroads into the social studies. For a time, globalism was the word. In some schools, old world history offerings, once bound to western perspectives, were converted to surveys of “World Cultures.” More importantly, attacks on the old Eurocentric approach now became the most familiar criticism of world history teaching. Thus the larger influence of global studies movements carried along the effort of Stavrianos to bring the ideal of “global perspective” in world history to intellectual fashion. The ideal endured, but the movements did not. Oil crisis, pollution crisis, population crisis—these were some of the concepts that spread the idea after 1973 that an era of affluence and growth was over. “Spaceship Earth” became part of the new imagery of the global studies movements to educate pupils in the notion of global interdependence on a small and endangered planet. “We humans are all in this together,” affirmed one movement leader. “The fate of some of us is quickly becoming the fate of all of us.” After the Vietnam War, however, Americans were coming in from the cold of international involvements and looking to themselves. Popular writers spoke of the “big chill”; educators called it “back to basics.” A poll by the National School Board Association found that public school officials ranked high the need for more instruction in basic skills, consumerism, and parenting; they ranked low the needs of global studies and world history. To them, the most important issues for the nation were domestic problems of crime, violence, and family breakdown; the least important were global problems of conflict and poverty. Spaceship Earth would not fly. By 1979, global studies movements lamented the decline of funding and the hard reality that their cause was dead at the roots.30 With the sharp decline of history enrollments in colleges and schools after 1970, some educators feared that the same fate was overtaking the subject of history itself. At fault, some believed, were antihistorical currents within global studies and the “new social studies.” True, certain elements in global studies movements always doubted the value of history to international education. Understanding the historical causes of global problems, they believed, was less useful—and potentially more divisive—than understanding the need for world cooperation in the present. The global village was no place to dig up the past. In addition, some in the new social studies questioned the value of history in developing individual powers of analysis and conceptualization useful to problem solving in the present. To them, history instead was associated with older methods of recitation and drill, intended to compel students to memorize a body of accumulated knowledge about the past. In 1975, the Committee on the Status of History, appointed by the Organization of American Historians (OAH), reported that it found a troubling opinion in the land. “This is the widely held assumption,” explained chairman Richard S. Kirkendall, “that history is not a useful subject, not useful for an individual eager to find a job and not useful for a society eager to solve its problems.”31 This report on history’s time of troubles in the 1970s revived old fears among historians that the social studies were undoing history in the schools. In reality, history teachers were undoing the new social studies.

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Surveys in the 1970s confirmed that the vogue of the new social studies was passing with little influence on instruction. “The decade of change and innovation in the schools,” concluded a Kettering Foundation report in 1973, “had little or no lasting effect on the content of school programs or the quality of teaching and learning.” The great chain of teaching was strong. As part of this triumph of teacher conservatism over the innovations of the new social studies, history continued to dominate the social studies. But lack of student interest in the subject, critics noted, appeared to have become a generational phenomenon. Americans, one remarked, were never much interested in history in the first place; now, among the young, the subject seemed to be ready for the waxworks.32 “Something must be done,” warned an educator, “and done shortly, or world history, as well as history in general, will no longer be a part of the school curriculum.” A perception that the universities were failing the schools, and that the subject of history was paying the price, was gaining strength. Responding, the AHA, OAH, and NCSS became active in programs to encourage contacts between history educators at both levels. Writing in 1978, AHA Teaching Division vice-president Warren Susman lamented the difference between the good old days, now “almost legendary,” when historians involved themselves in high school matters, and the current separation between professors and teachers. “It is still them and us,” he complained, “still two separate worlds, with a few tentative bridges thrown across the gap.”33 In one way, the bridge thrown across by Stavrianos helped to open the road toward a global perspective in world history. In another, it was a bridge to nowhere. As indicated, Stavrianos believed that breaking the hold of Eurocentrism over world history depended on breaking the barrier between universities and schools. In truth, however, world history in universities was as dead a language as Latin. Historians, in fact, were probably more distant from the subject than school teachers. “I liked teaching high school world history, and I wanted to be the best high school world history teacher I could be,” remarked one educator, for example, in recalling his return to university to better prepare himself in the subject. “I asked for all their courses in world history. They did not have any. I suggested pasting some courses together from the catalog. They said I first had to choose a speciality.” What such students did not learn in universities they could not pass on as teachers in the schools. “Thus,” Stavrianos observed, “there has been a vicious circle of inadequate training at both levels, interacting back and forth between high school and college, and preventing substantial progress all along the line.” Teachers taught the world history they knew. In sum, they taught European history.34 By 1965, Stavrianos, in response, was planning a graduate program at Northwestern to produce future teachers in world history. However, events within the university (not discussed here) caused him to put these plans on hold and, eventually, to take up opportunities at another institution. When, in 1973, he ended his teaching at Northwestern, America’s fascination with globalism was ending as well. Stavrianos believes today, however, that the intellectual transition from European

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to global perspective in world history largely has been achieved—“at least in theory.” A survey in 1985 by Douglas D. Alder of current high school textbooks on the subject confirmed that, while most works continued to give priority to western history, a gradual trend was underway toward broader world coverage. However, the result, Alder observed, was much diversity in new approaches and little agreement on new content. “There seems to be no clear ideas about what to include,” he remarked, “and what to leave out.”35 Thus the effect of the global approach was to discredit the old Eurocentrism, which once provided easy and familiar themes for the world history course, without replacing it with an integrating concept that historians could agree on. Having gained the whole world, the course lost its bearings. In this sense, the idea of global perspective was a form of negativism, powerful in overturning the old approach but powerless to produce a new one. Figuratively, Stavrianos spoke of global perspective as “a view from the moon”; in fact, however, a view from the moon reveals only the globe itself, with nothing human or historical in sight. Rather than solving the problem of the world history course, global perspective made it more difficult. There was nothing wrong with the Eurocentric approach to world history— except that it was not world history. Now, however, with the intellectual conversion to the global approach, teachers faced a question made more terrible by this loss of western orientation: what is world history? Finding an answer, Stavrianos agrees, is the next task for world historians. When he wrote his high school textbook, A Global History of Man, in 1962, Stavrianos was involved in an “equal time” philosophy designed to counter the prevailing western approach. “At all times,” he told teachers of the period, “one basic rule must be kept in mind: that no European movement or institution be treated unless non-European movements or institutions of similar magnitude and world significance also be taught.” Beginning with a unified survey of the human past, his text mostly was taken up with separate chapters on different cultural regions, each approached through a “flashback technique” in which—in pursuit of “relevance”—present conditions were traced back to origins in the past. Critics objected to Stavrianos’s present-mindedness, his treatment of the west as one civilization among equals, and his separate, area-studies approach to world cultures. Now, however, observers note that of all the world history textbooks produced in the era of the new social studies, only this one continues to be used widely in schools.36 Today, Stavrianos affirms, he would write a different book. Global perspective was a first step toward global history; but most writers, he explains, simply piled global history upon western history, the new social history upon the old political history, history from below upon history from above. Thus the new approach added to the old problem: too much material and too few principles of selection. The need, Stavrianos concludes, is for historians to take the second step toward global history: the design of an integrating framework, an overarching idea of organization, which can raise up the value of the course and cut down the size. “Dare to be relevant,” he urges. “Dare to omit.”37 In 1973, at the end of the “decade of experiment” in schools, members of the Ketter-

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ing Foundation commission mentioned above concluded that dissatisfaction with the world history course probably was greater than before. After this, the rising influence of the global approach made the subject still more difficult to handle for teachers and students alike. Researchers Douglas D. Alder and Matthew T. Downey, in a 1985 study on the condition of history in schools, reported: “From many quarters comes the message that the course is not well taught, is not received well by students, and is confined to the unimaginative presentation of far too much detail.” Courses on ancient, European, and English history once made up a large part of the history curriculum in high schools; now this beleaguered one-year course on world history was about all that remained on the human past outside the United States. Saving this course, Alder and Downey concluded, was the major task for teachers of history. “What the world history course needs,” they affirmed, “is an adequate conceptual base.”38 After turning away from a long and hard course toward the west, the ship of world history was lost at sea. To the rescue came the World History Association. For this organization, saving world history was part of an even greater task in American education: saving the study of history itself.

I N S E A R C H O F W O R L D H I S T O R Y: W I L L I A M H . M C N E I L L A N D T H E W O R L D H I S T O R Y A S S O C I AT I O N

For the good of history, the AHA in the last century wanted to banish world history from American education. For the same reason, the World History Association (WHA) now wants to bring it back. Thus the subject once accused of deadening student interest in history is presently acclaimed as the one needed to restore it to life. In so identifying world history with the larger needs of history in the curriculum, WHA members, now numbering around 700, were taking up the cause of one of their idols in the older generation of historians. “No one would have any difficulty in explaining the rise of world history as a movement and as a field of study,” remarked WHA President Kevin Reilly in 1986. “It is due to William McNeill.”39 McNeill’s book, The Rise of the West, winner of the National Book Award in History and Biography in 1960, gave him a place among modern masters of world history.40 In the history profession, however, he was long a voice in the wilderness. But just as this lonely warrior came to retire from his teaching career at the University of Chicago in 1983, he was joined by the small army of the WHA. Established in the previous year, this organization represented the coming of a new generation to what had been a long and losing battle waged by McNeill (b. Vancouver, 1917), Stavrianos, and a few other isolated figures in the history profession. Importantly, the WHA was a response as well to the crisis in history enrollments, which, as indicated, had come to consciousness in the 1970s. In McNeill these young historians found someone whose prescription for world history was, at the same time, a prescription for this crisis in their discipline. For years, McNeill had been crying world history or ruin. “Without such a course to

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teach the students of any and every specialism,” he contended during the enrollments crunch in 1976, “the place of history in our colleges and universities is going to continue to shrink, almost for sure.” Students, he asserted, simply were not listening to historians any more. Without something important and useful to teach, history professors, McNeill warned, were fated to follow classics professors down the road to irrelevance and antiquarianism. “Who besides ourselves really cares for the details that fill our learned journals and monographs?” he asked. “Why should we expect to be paid for doing things no one cares much about? Why should students listen to us ? Why should anyone?”41 So in the thought of McNeill, the continuing influence of history— and the career interests of historians—were identified with the cause of world history. Therefore, to the global ideas that the WHA inherited from Stavrianos and the international education movements of the previous period, members added a critique of things in the profession that McNeill held responsible for the crisis of history teaching in the first place: the reign of specialization, the primacy of empirical research over historical synthesis, the breakdown of the introductory course, the failure to educate youth for public duties of citizenship, and the irrelevance of much of the old Eurocentric subject matter. The WHA, in terms of organization, came out of the effort of the AHA to turn historians and high school teachers to thoughts of cooperation. Appropriately, it was founded at the AHA annual meeting at Washington in December 1982, a meeting marking the high point of anguish over the state of university–high school relations. In spirit, however, the organization was born earlier at a Teaching Division regional conference on world history instruction at the Air Force Academy (May 12–14, 1982). There, reported an organizer, participants experienced “a definite sense of movement on behalf of the world history course which includes secondary, college, and university teachers.” World historians were off to the crusades. During his own difficult struggle against an unyielding profession, McNeill had come to represent this fight for world history as a moral imperative for historians, a professional duty, “a great and holy calling.” There was, he believed, a real hunger for world history out there. “Human minds,” he affirmed, “yearn to understand things in the largest possible way.” The present generation of historians was the first, McNeill believed, able to respond to this yearning in a serious way. Events had shaken them loose from western ethnocentrism. At the same time, these young historians were the first to be active at a period when study and description of nonwestern societies had achieved global coverage.42 For WHA members, therefore, real world history now was possible in the classroom. In America, however, it was not the crusading season. Gottschalk and Stavrianos began their work when universities were at ease with the federal government and Americans were at ease with their place in the world. Now, after Vietnam, universities were more wary and citizens more insular. In Washington, a new administration reflected a new mood in the nation. “The college curriculum must take the non-Western world into account,” acknowledged the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1984. “But the core of the American college curriculum—its heart and soul— should

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be the civilization of the West, source of the most powerful and pervasive influences on America and all of its people.”43 Internationalism runs warm and cold in the life of the country, and interest in international education runs with it. In the 1980s, advocates of world history found a cold climate in America. Within the history profession, as always, they faced a virtual nuclear winter. As described, world history in high schools was a course that never worked. In colleges, it was a course never really tried. When, for example, an international mood in the nation after the First World War caused some voices to call on universities for world history instruction, historians instead developed the western civilization course, giving the European past a world dimension of its own. After the Second World War, educators called again for world history and international subjects to educate Americans for world leadership. “Modern man,” a commission on education advised President Harry S. Truman in 1947, “needs to sense the sweep of world history in order to see his own civilization in the context of other cultures.” Instead, historians and social scientists turned this time to the study of other cultures in their own context. Not the sweep of world history but the closed theaters of area studies increased in universities, adding to the proliferation of electives that expanded the curriculum in the 1960s. To McNeill, this era of area studies, like the era of Eurocentric history before it, postponed and complicated the development of a unified world approach. Indeed the increased funding for international education in this period following Sputnik, he concluded, provided historians with the means to do what they wanted to do. They wanted to specialize. In his presidential address to the AHA in 1983, Philip D. Curtin summed up the result: “Where the field of history grew broader and richer, the training of historians grew narrower.”44 McNeill believes that this aversion of the historical profession to world history has something to do with the immensity of the subject itself. Trained to value accuracy of fact above conceptual synthesis, historians, he contends, shrink before the scale of world history. It appears, however, that some historians find the subject not so much awesome as simply too amateur. Revealing, in this connection, is a practice on some campuses where history departments provide a solitary world history course open to nonhistory majors only and offer the subject in the way that colonists once offered beads to natives. Not taking the course seriously themselves, these departments make it light and breezy for students as well. Evident here is a state of mind, a presumption that world history is good enough for science majors and the football team, but not for historians in training. Thus, to establish the subject in the curriculum, WHA members, McNeill observes, must first make world history intellectually compelling. Second, they must convince deans and administrators that—with university budgets strained—it can be taught inexpensively to large survey classes. This, he told his following in 1982, was the way in which the western civilization course swept the country during the interwar period. At this particular time, however, these young world historians were more concerned with still another possibility: namely, that western civilization was about to sweep the country

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again. The return of Harvard University to a core curriculum in 1978 marked the coming of a chill to college campuses—the end of a period of lively curricular change and a return to the general education philosophy of a common learning and core courses. Among historians, discussions focused particularly on the old western civilization survey, a course battered and sometimes blown away by the storms of the sixties. Critics dismissed the course as something for an earlier day, a form of citizenship education intended to teach sons and daughters of old world immigrants to identify with a common culture: one heritage, one history, one course. American values and the practice of history itself, they argued, were now too different and diverse to be contained in such a course. So was the planet we live on. “Emerging,” the present writer remarked in a study of the western civilization course in 1982, “were other peoples, other histories, a globe of historic diversity beyond the imagination of earlier Westerners, a cosmos where pluralism replaced the oneness of history and where human experience could not be ordered into a unilineal pattern of development.”45 No matter. As educators revived the idea of core courses, some history departments revived the teaching of western civilization. Who says you can’t go home again? However, the western civilization course has a special place in the imagination of WHA members. Although they want to see world history implanted at every level of education from high school to graduate training, their time and energy is devoted in particular to the project of replacing western civilization as the freshman survey. In part, they are inspired by the old western civilization success story; in part, they are troubled by the continuing hold of the course upon the history profession. McNeill recalled that his own student encounter with western civilization was one of the most “dazzling experiences of my life”; now, however, he believes that the whole idea of “civilization” is timebound. From the eighteenth century, he explains, came the idea of the west as civilization itself, the one and only, a high, singular, and unique unit in history. In the early twentieth century, masters of world history described in turn a multiplicity of civilizations, each different in style but alike in historical development. Now, McNeill speculates, as modern communications transcend all boundaries, the prospect arises that the era of civilizations is a passing phase in world history. Thus, he concludes, the concept of civilizational units needs to be rethought; and so does the concept of civilizational history based upon it.46 The civilizational approach, McNeill observes, by concentrating study on a defined geographic area rather than the larger space over which cross-cultural and global developments occur, divides historical experience. In contrast, world history unites it. Therefore, world history is the proper subject for the introductory survey; equally, the survey is the proper course for world history. Specialized work in the field at advanced and graduate levels generally must focus on specific topics and time periods. The survey, however, provides the sweep for world history to do what only world history can do: unite the whole human past and be total, global, and universal in time and space. In consequence, however, the survey, more than any other course in world history, poses the old, awful

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question: What is world history? So far, a compelling response has eluded the WHA. What the organization needs, a member remarked, is “a simple, all- encompassing, elegant idea” with the power to order all human experience. In fact, just such an elegant idea explained the appeal of the original western civilization course. The course was based on what McNeill described as “a great idea about the whole human past,” the idea of history as the evolution of freedom. The most compelling interpretations of the past, he observed, are those that people want to believe in. This one, in which a flattering view of English history was elevated into a Eurocentric perception of the whole human adventure, “set the mold within which the Englishspeaking world has tended to view modern times ever since.”47 To become effective classroom history, however, a great idea requires a good teacher to make it clear and simple. At Columbia University early in this century, James Harvey Robinson, father of western civilization, formed this idea, generally known as the Whig interpretation of history, into a course that became the model for the most successful class in the history of higher education in America. However, McNeill has explained how, with time, this original vision faded, how new subject matter clouded over the old liberal theme of the progress of freedom, and how historians in the 1960s, having lost faith in western civilization ideas, gave up this grand old survey and the mass enrollments that went with it. Says McNeill, “We cut our own throats.” With the waning of Whig history, he comments, historians returned to confusion about the larger shape of the past. Such was the background to the search of the WHA for another idea and another teacher. It seems what members want is an idea of history at once global and American, something that reacts against the Eurocentrism of western civilization and yet remains “our history,” a history with the kind of spirit and values that American youth want to believe in. For this reason, the two most common approaches to global analysis, modernization theory and world system methods, appear unbefitting, the first being too western, the second too much the other way around. When Cyril E. Black in 1982 advocated modernization theory as a conceptual theme for the world history survey, he was careful to explain that, contrary to received opinion, this theory was neither conditioned by western bias nor constructed on European experience. Critics, however, objected that this approach made world history appear too much the son of western civilization, a global version of western “progress,” drawing again on ancient perceptions of a core civilization bringing light to a periphery in darkness. In contrast, world system theory provided quite a different analysis of core and periphery in which the west’s werewolf accumulation of wealth was used to explain the poverty of almost everyone else on the planet.48 Here critics objected that this approach would make the world history survey not an extension of the western civilization idea but a revolt against it: an antiwestern civilization course and a judgment on the west, its imperialism, its economic hegemony, and its hold over the lives of other peoples. Educators were aware that the focus of global studies on world hunger, pollution, resource exploitation, and other issues that could implicate the economic behavior of rich and developed nations made this subject matter

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delicate for Americans; the focus of world system theory on a historical explanation of how the world got this way would likely make the world history course more disturbing still. Stavrianos believed that a view of world history from the moon would challenge American consciousness; no doubt, a view from the Third World would challenge it even more. Western civilization, originating in friendly Whiggish ideals, and subject to little public controversy as a result, was good, consensus history for educating American youth. Compared to this, world history in world-system style is likely to appear, to some taxpayers at least, as downright subversive. Gottschalk and UNESCO historians believed that such core-periphery theories of world history were too often theories of cultural superiority or economic exploitation. Their desire, instead, was not to take sides but to perceive, beyond human conflicts and systems of exploitation, a unified and constructive direction to the human enterprise. Where humankind is one, there is no side to take. In assuming this same attitude, WHA historians reveal themselves as heirs not only of this international education tradition, but also of the western civilization outlook; that is, of a liberal, optimistic, and progressive interpretation of the past that affirms the good American belief in human potential, cultural contacts, and open societies. To them, no one has done more than McNeill to bring world history out of European metaphysics and into the positive and practical spirit of this form of American historiography. “William H. McNeill,” asserted WHA president Kevin Reilly, “has turned the study of the human past from a philosophical meditation into an empirical, historical account.”49 McNeill himself describes all histories as “mythistories,” rival versions of the past, which, for those who accept them, provide collective identities and respond to human needs for belief and belonging. In this sense, his own version of world history probably can be described as the mythistory of most WHA members. McNeill himself came to world history after “delving into the earth” of material history (his Ph.D. dissertation was on the potato). Importantly, this old history lived on in the new. His journey began in a revolt in 1939 against his graduate supervisor at Cornell, Carl Becker, and against the kind of Eurocentric history that Becker represented. On his own, he discovered first the contrasting history of eastern Europe, which aroused his interest in the diversity of cultures, and thereafter Toynbee’s larger history of the world, which instilled the idea of a unity behind the whole human experience. McNeill recalled that he was “transported” by the global sweep of Toynbee’s vision—but only so far. “The aspect of human life on which my attention fastened—the technological, material and ecological—was the polar opposite,” he explains, “from what had come to interest Toynbee.”50 Toynbee looked to God and McNeill to the good earth. His own world history, therefore, combined an enchantment with the sweep of the human adventure with a secular and materialist approach to subject matter. On the one hand, McNeill loved the task of high synthesis (he confides that, during ten years of research for The Rise of the West, he never took a note!). On the other, his works were solid and down to earth, with ideas and concepts borrowed from the same familiar

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sources used by most other working historians in the United States—from the social sciences, the Annales school, and the tradition of history as social process. The result was at once academic and American. Thus McNeill comments that he learned from Annales historians to recognize the power of geography and climate over life and mind, yet tempered this determinism by holding to his American faith in the influence of the human will in history as well. His native attitudes can be recognized too in his account of world history as the human ascent through know-how, skills, and inventions, to a position of power over the natural world. Here, in McNeill’s celebration of global intercourse and enterprise, in liberal notions of a human impulse to truck and barter, in assumption of an invisible hand turning cultural contacts to larger human ends, was a world history in American dress. McNeill reports, in this connection, that he had never been at home with Toynbee’s perception of civilizations as separate organisms, each alone, self-absorbed, and little affected by other peoples. Influenced by the work of American anthropologists on cultural borrowings among Native Americans, he fixed instead on the opposing thesis that cultural interaction was “the main drivewheel” of world history. Encounters with outsiders possessing superior skills, McNeill concluded, set cultures into motion to imitate or resist the stranger. So evolved the organizing idea of The Rise of the West in 1963: “I simply set out to identify in any given age where the center of highest skills was located,” he explained. “By describing them and then asking how neighboring peoples reacted to such achievements, a comprehensive structure for successive periods of world history emerges.” The result, therefore, was an approach that featured the diversity of cultures and, at the same time, ordered world history into one story. It was also an approach with a moral dimension, a people-to-people history, concerned with cultural exchanges and the ties that bind. To Stavrianos, the world before 1500 was a lonely place of separate civilizations. To McNeill, cultural encounters broke through this separation much earlier. In The Rise of the West, he described how “the stimulus of contacts” was inseparable from the development of civilized life in the ancient Middle East. Rejecting the UNESCO “equal time” approach to the history of world cultures, McNeill, in this work in 1963, portrayed the ascendancy of the west as the predominant development in modern history. More recently, however, he has drawn earlier civilizations more closely together. He describes now an “ecumenical cosmopolitanism” emerging in ancient times along the cord of agrarian lands running from China into Africa and Mediterranean Europe—the so-called Eurasian ecumene. By A.D. 1000, trade routes here developed into a “sophisticated world market” where east and west came together.51 In this perspective, the European voyages of discovery in 1500, for example, mark not the origins of world history but a further extension to the Americas of this vast Eurasian network of communications and commerce. Thus, to WHA members in search of an authentic and integral world history with particular relevance to American students, McNeill offers a version that, in settling accounts with the old Eurocentrism, provides these students at the same time with a sense of the place

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of their own western civilization within the longer and larger history of an ecumenical global community. What attracts WHA members to McNeill as well is his easy gift for making the transition to this history in American education appear to be a matter of simple logic and public interest. “Surely it takes only a little common sense,” he explains, “to see that some sort of world history is the only way a college can do justice to students who live in a world where events in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are as likely to involve the United States in critical actions as anything happening in Europe and North America.” Indeed McNeill makes historians and their craft seem important to life. Versions of history, he observes, provide peoples with ideals and inspirations, with motivation to bond together and act in common. When believed in and acted upon, histories thus can condition and direct collective behavior. In this sense, histories are to humans what instincts are to animals. World history alone, McNeill acknowledges, is too pale and pluralistic to satisfy the depth of human needs for identity and belonging. Separate peoples need separate histories, strident histories, histories of “us” against “them,” myths that unite fellow citizens against enemies. But in a nuclear age, he insists, something is needed to make up for these separate mythistories; something is needed to balance them and to nurture the sense that all peoples are world citizens as well. If historians do not take up their duty to develop this ecumenical history, he warns, the profession will have nothing important to teach, and other mythmakers will lead opinion in more dangerous directions.52 This summary reveals McNeill’s faith in world history as something involving larger human interests and appealing to the better part of ourselves. His version of it, as described here, is compelling, ethical, American— and problematic. Scholars have noted that the process of cultural diffusion, the process on which McNeill has constructed his whole interpretation of the past, is the most difficult and debated issue in the field of world history. Indeed the great philosophers of the subject have disagreed most on the very questions of whether cultural borrowing or cultural isolation was the way of the past, and whether, as a result, unity or pluralism was the nature of human history. But one of McNeill’s achievements, we have observed, was to lead the subject of world history out of such abstract quarrels in the philosophy of history. As a result, the impulse of his WHA admirers is not so much to theorize about world history as to think about how to teach it. However, if they have taken McNeill’s diffusion theory as their own, some have found less satisfaction in the general theme of his work; that is, the human struggle for control over the environment, the natural world— and other humans. Certainly the pursuit of power is less “elegant” as a structuring concept than the old western civilization idea of the pursuit of liberty. Thus Ross E. Dunn, first president of the WHA, concluded in 1985 that most members still sought a more appealing vision of the world past.53 Neither Stavrianos nor McNeill left disciples at Northwestern and the University of Chicago to continue the development of the world history courses that they taught there. And although these two pioneers of world history in American education remain active in retirement, the further elaboration of their design

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for the subject probably depends now on their WHA offspring who continue to work the classroom. Thus the question, “What is world history?” passes to the next generation. Important here is the fact that this new interest in world history came on the heels of a vast expansion of history fields in the 1960s and 1970s. The WHA, as a result, is an ingathering of historians of all kinds, with many engaged, in their own way, in shaping the world history course in the image of their own fields. Therefore, the struggle to define world history is also a struggle for turf. One WHA member, for example, dismissed another’s textbook on international history as “too political” for use in world history instruction. The proper subject of world history, this social historian explained, was social contacts, not political affairs; it was the everyday life of common people, not the military power of nations. The international historian disagreed— by half. Wrote he: “Let our students be exposed to both perspectives—world history from the bottom up, international history from the top down, if you will—through a multiplicity of texts and assigned readings.”54 The more the better. Thus, in the new organization, world historians find themselves in the same old double bind: they have too much history to put into one course and not enough agreement on what history to take out of it. During a tour of campuses in 1985, however, AHA president Carl H. Degler noted the spreading influence of the new organization. “I was surprised,” he reported, “by the rising interest in courses in world history.” Degler found most departments were recovering on their own from the decline in student numbers; most were still leaning heavily on the western civilization course; and most still had the same old doubts about world history. But most also believed that the subject was coming nevertheless. “Even the most conservative departments,” he concluded, “including those with a limited number of faculty, display a growing sense of the need to look beyond Europe and its offspring in North America.” In the same year, after debate at a national conference on the question of the introductory course in history—western civilization or world history?—Professor Richard E. Sullivan reported the same verdict. “I predict that one of the prime messages conveyed to our colleges across the country,” he remarked, “is the necessity—perhaps even the urgent necessity—to consider developing a world history course as a substitute for a western civilization course.”55 “World history,” McNeill observed, “was once taken for granted as the only sensible basis for understanding the past.” It seems some historians now think so again. Dr. Johnson said that second marriages represent the triumph of hope over experience. Hope for this second time around between historians and world history depends in large part on a realistic assessment of the problems and limitations of world history as a course of study. As indicated in comments here on Gottschalk and the UNESCO project, the subject has always promised more than it can deliver. Others have warned historians of a high price to pay. Richard Sullivan, for example, commented that a conversion to freshman world history would require teachers to acquire a whole new knowledge base and “survey wisdom.” It would mean more abstraction, more synthesis, more “teaching by generalization,” more techniques borrowed from the social sciences. It would

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mean, in Sullivan’s terms, a focus on history of a different kind: “long term processes in place of accretive events, commonalities in place of lineality, collectivities in place of individuals, structure in place of conscious choices, problems in place of shared values.” All this, Sullivan concludes, will mean “revolutionary changes” for a history profession raised on inductive methods.56 As the previous section on Stavrianos indicates, however, revolutionary changes are not academic style. Probably, given the conservatism of educators, the WHA must somehow make world history come easy to American teachers and students, or it will not come at all. Thus, in effect, the question, “What is world history?” can be reduced to another: What is world history in the United States? Gottschalk learned two things from his UNESCO experience: first, that future world history must focus more on the nonwestern world; and, second, that each nation, at the same time, must work out a version of this history appropriate to its own people.57 These are the directions in which Stavrianos and McNeill have led the world history survey. In conception, the general advance is toward a course that is neither global history in pure form nor western civilization in world dimension. It is something in between. Beyond this, it seems that the search for an elegant and meaningful idea behind the human experience on earth, a search probably as old as human thought, is likely to continue as long as the subject of world history itself. Finally, then, what is world history in the United States? It is not everything that some historians claim it to be, but it is something that more historians should try to teach.

NOTES

1. Eric H. Monkkenen, “The Dangers of Synthesis,” American Historical Review (hereafter cited as AHR) 91 (1986): 1149. Andrew D. White, “On Studies in General History and the History of Civilizations,” Papers of the American Historical Association 1 (1885): 8. 2. Marshall Hodgson, “Interregional History as an Approach to World History,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale (Journal of World History, published by UNESCO; hereafter cited as CHM) 1 (1954): 716. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, 2 vols. (London, 1920), 2: v. Lord Acton, “Letter to Contributors to the Cambridge Modern History,” in Lord Acton: Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers, ed. William H. McNeill (Chicago, 1967), p. 398. Jacques Benigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, ed. Orest Ranum (Chicago, 1976), p. 4. 3. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Arnold Toynbee’s Millennium,” Encounter 8 (1957): 14. 4. William H. McNeill, “The World History Survey Course,” in 1982 World History Teaching Conference, ed. Joe C. Dixon and Neil D. Martin (Colorado Springs, 1983), p. 5. Warren I. Susman, “Annapolis Conference on the Introductory Course,” AHA Perspectives 20 (1982): 23. 5. L. S. Stavrianos, “A Global Perspective in the Organization of World History,” in New Perspectives in World History: 34th Yearbook of the National Council for the Social Studies, ed. Shirley H. Engle (Washington, D.C., 1964), p. 616.

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6. Bernard S. Cohn, “Anthropology and History in the 1980s,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981): 231. Edwin J. Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” AHR 76 (1971): 385. 7. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982), p. 5. 8. On the idea of world history as utopian literature, see W. Warren Wagar, The City of Man: Prophecies of a World Civilization in Twentieth Century Thought (Boston, 1963). Geoffrey Barraclough, “Universal History,” Approaches to History, ed. H. R. Finberg (London, 1962), pp. 88, 101. 9. L. S. Stavrianos, “The Teaching of World History,” HT 3 (1969): 24. 10. L. S. Stavrianos, “From ‘Why World History’ to ‘What World History’?” Social Education (hereafter cited as SE) 39 (1975): 362. Stavrianos’s world optimism is best expressed in his The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco, 1976); it is more tempered in Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York, 1981). 11. L. S. Stavrianos, “Project for Research and Teaching in World History” (grant application, 1957), in the papers of Dean of Faculties Payton S. Wild, Northwestern University Archives. 12. L. S. Stavrianos to Northwestern University Faculty, memorandum, April 14, 1961, Wild Papers, Northwestern University Archives. Stavrianos’s plans for global studies at Northwestern are outlined in his “Memorandum to the History Department: World History Project” (1958), and “Project for the Introduction of Globally-Oriented introductory Courses” ( 1961), in the papers of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Simeon E. Leland, Northwestern University Archives. 13. Gray C. Boyce, “Department of History: Annual Report, 1958–59,” Leland Papers, Northwestern University Archives. 14. William Swinton, Outlines of the World’s History: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (New York, 1874), pp. 3, 4. Samuel G. Goodrich, Outlines of Chronology: Ancient and Modern (Boston, 1828), p. 201. On the origins and spread of General History, see John E. Stout, The Development of High School Curricula in the North Central States from 1860 to 1918 (Chicago, 1921), pp. 174–79; William F. Russell, “The Entrance of History into the Curriculum of the Secondary School,” History Teachers’ Magazine 5 (1914): 311–18; and Calvin O. Davis, “Public Secondary Education in Michigan: Its History and Contemporary Tendencies” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1914), pp. 59–66, 262. 15. Philip V. N. Myers, A General History for Colleges and High Schools (Boston, 1889), p. 2. 16. Alexander C. Flick, “Content of World History Courses in Schools and Colleges,” Proceedings of the Association of History Teachers of the Middle States and Maryland, no. 25 (1927), pp. 60–61. Albert Bushnell Hart, History in High and Preparatory Schools (Syracuse, 1887), pp. 5–6. 17. National Education Association, Report of the Committee on Secondary School Subjects (Washington, 1893), p. 174. Albert Bushnell Hart, “Conference on History, Civil Government and Political Economy: Preliminary Report, January 13, 1893” (typescript), Charles W. Eliot papers, Harvard University Archives. Mary D. Sheldon, Studies in General History (Boston, 1895). For a description of daily instruction in a General History class at this period, see Stuart MacKibbin, “Outline Course of Study in History,” Education 10 (1889): 164–66. 18. Calvin O. Davis, “A Course in World History,” The Historical Outlook (hereafter cited

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as HO) 10 (1919): 453. Rolla M. Tryon, The Social Sciences as School Subjects: Report of the Commission on the Social Studies (New York, 1935), p. 177. American Historical Association, The Study of History in Schools: Report to the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven (New York, 1899). For a rearguard defense of General History as a course preserving the unity of history, see Lucy M. Salmon, “Unity in College Entrance History,” Educational Review 12 (1896): 165–68; and Edward Van Dyke Robinson, “An Ideal Course in History for Secondary Schools,” The School Review 6 (1898): 672–78. On college-school cooperation in this period, see Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (Madison, 1969). 19. Daniel C. Knowlton, “Report of the Committee on History and Education for Citizenship: Syllabus for Modern History in the Tenth Grade,” HO 12 (1921): 165–84. 20. National Education Association, The Social Studies in Secondary Education: Report of the Committee on Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (Washington, 1916), p. 40. Hazel W. Hertzberg, Social Studies Reform, 1880–1980 (Boulder, n.d.), p. 27. 21. Harold O. Rugg, letter published in HO 12 (1921): 184–89. 22. Montgomery Gambrill, “Some Tendencies and Issues in the Making of Social Studies Curricula,” HO 15 (1924): 54; and “The New World History,” HO 18 (1927): 267. Observers first noted the return of the General History survey in 1919. Arley B. Show, “One or Two Years of European History in High Schools?” HO 10 (1919): 283. 23. Edgar Dawson, “The History Inquiry,” HO 15 (1924): 269. A. K. King, “Is World History as Successful as We Thought It Would Be?” High School Journal 20 (1937): 185. 24. E. M. Hunt, “The Conclusions and Recommendations of the Commission on the Social Studies of the American Historical Association,” The Social Studies (hereafter cited as SS) 25 (1934): 282. Hertzberg, pp. 65–92 (n. 20 above). Arthur E. Bestor, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (Urbana, 1953), pp. 44, 103. 25. U.S. Office of Education, Offerings and Registrations in High School Subjects: 1933– 1934, Bulletin no. 6 (Washington, 1938), p. 6. Arthur Dillman Gray, “The One Year Course in World History,” HO 23 (1932): 407–9. 26. Edgar B. Wesley, “The Potentialities of World History in a World Society,” in Improving the Teaching of World History, ed. Edith West (Washington, 1949), p. 1. William E. Pulliam, The Status of World History Instruction in American Secondary Schools (Washington, 1972), pp. 8, 15–16, 20. In 1961, according to Pulliam, world history was taught in 87% of all four-year high schools, American history in 93%, modern Europe in 4%, and ancient and medieval Europe in 3%. 27. Martin Mayer, Where, When, and Why? Social Studies in American Schools (New York, 1962), p. 22. James Bryant Conant, The American High School Today (New York, 1959), p. 42. Dorothy McClure, “Needed Revisions in World History Programs,” in West, ed., p. 25 (n. 26 above). 28. For a remarkable example of this criticism, anticipating present arguments for the “global” approach, see Marshall Hodgson, “World History and a World Outlook,” SS 35 (1944): 297–301. Elmer Ellis, “The Permanence of Learning in World History,” SS 25 (1934): 133–36. 29. Betty Bullard, “Personal Statement to the President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies,” President’s Commission on Foreign Language and Inter-

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national Studies: Background Papers and Studies (Washington, D.C., 1979), p. 2. On global education movements, see James M. Becker, ed. Schooling for a Global Age (New York, 1979), pp. 245–336. 30. Strength through Wisdom, a Critique of United States Capability: A Report to the President from the President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies (Washington, 1979), pp. 1, 9, 16–17. James H. Mecklenburger, What Priority for Global Education: A National School Board Association Survey of School Board Members and School Superintendents (Washington, 1979), pp. 1–12. James M. Becker and Gerald Marker, A Final Report on the Mid-America Program for Global Perspectives in Education (Bloomington, 1979), p. 1. 31. Richard S. Kirkendall, “The Status of History in the Schools,” Journal of American History 62 (1975): 563; and “More History, Better History,” SE 40 (1976): 449. On the new social studies, see John D. Haas, The Era of the New Social Studies (ERIC, 1977). 32. Fred M. Hechinger, “Waxworks History,” Saturday Review (May 29, 1976). The Reform of Secondary Education: A Report to the Public and the Profession: The National Commission on the Reform of Secondary Education, Established by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation (New York, 1973), p. 7. For surveys on the decline of the new social studies, see James P. Shaver, G. L. Davis, and Suzanne W. Helburn, “The Status of Social Studies Education,” SE 43 (1979): 150–53, and Richard E. Gross, “The Status of the Social Studies in the Public Schools of the United States,” SE 41 (1977): 194–200. 33. Warren Susman, “Report of the Vice-President, Teaching Division,” AHA Annual Report: 1978 (Washington, 1979), p. 58. Pulliam (n. 26 above), p. 79. 34. L. S. Stavrianos, “New Viewpoints in Teaching World History” (paper presented to the NCSS, November 25, 1961), pp. 6–7; “World History Program: Northwestern University” (grant report, 1959), Wild Papers, Northwestern University Archives. Howard Mehlinger, “World History in Secondary Education,” 1982 World History Teaching Conference (Colorado Springs, 1983), pp. 8–9. 35. Douglas D. Alder, “World History Textbooks for the Secondary Schools” (typescript, 1986), p. 11. 36. Howard Mehlinger, (n. 34 above) p. 10. L. S. Stavrianos, Loretta Kreider Andrews, John R. McLane, Frank R. Safford, and James E. Sheridan, A Global History of Man (Boston, 1962). Stavrianos’s original ideas on the structure of world history were outlined in the introduction to this text. They are elaborated in his “Technology as a Central Theme for World History,” in Proceedings: The Conference on Technology in World History, Aspen, June 14–15, 1985, ed. John P. Mueller (Greeley, Colo., 1986), pp. 1–6. 37. L. S. Stavrianos to the author, March 5, 1987. 38. Douglas D. Alder and Matthew T. Downey, “Problem Areas in the History Curriculum,” in History in the Schools, ed. Matthew T. Downey (Washington, D.C., 1985), pp. 14, 16. On recent trends in world history enrollments, see Douglas D. Alder, “Is World History Disappearing?” (typescript). 39. Kevin Reilly, World History Bulletin 4 (1987): 1 (this newsletter of the WHA is cited hereafter as WHB). 40. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963).

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41. William H. McNeill, “A Defense of World History,” and “Beyond Western Civilization: Rebuilding the Survey,” in Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986), pp. 94, 105. 42. William H. McNeill, “A Defense of World History,” p. 93, and “The Rise of the West as a Long-Term Process,” p. 43, in Mythistory. The Teaching Division conference proceedings were published by the Air Force Academy, 1982 World History Teaching Conference. Kevin Reilly describes the founding meeting in Washington in “World History Association Established,” AHA Perspectives 21 (1983): 7. Four sessions at the 1982 AHA meeting were devoted to teaching issues. The gloom at these proceedings over university–high school relations is reported by David Felix in Network News Exchange 8 (1983): 2. 43. William J. Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (Washington, D.C., 1984), p. 39. 44. Philip D. Curtin, “Depth, Span, and Relevance,” AHR 80 (1984): 1. McNeill, “The World History Survey Course,” 1982 World History Teaching Conference, p. 3. Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education (New York, 1947), p. 17. 45. Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” AHR 87 (1982): 717. McNeill, “The World History Survey Course” (n. 4 above), p. 4. 46. William H. McNeill, “The Era of Civilizations in World History,” WHB 4 (1986–87): 1–4. On world history as graduate study, see the paper of Jerry H. Bentley on the new Ph.D. field in world history (inspired by the comparative approach of Philip Curtin) at the University of Hawaii, “Graduate Education and Research in World History,” WHB 5 (1988): 3–7. 47. William H. McNeill, “Introduction” to Lord Acton (n. 2 above), p. xviii. McNeill, “Beyond Western Civilization: Rebuilding the Survey,” pp. 101–2. 48. Craig A. Lockard, “Global History, Modernization, and World System Approach: A Critique,” and Cyril E. Black, “Modernization as an Organizing Principle for World History,” in 1982 World History Teaching Conference, pp. 55–67, 69–83. On modernization theory, see Black’s The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York, 1966). On world system analysis, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974). 49. Kevin Reilly (n. 39 above), p. 1. 50. William H. McNeill, “Arnold J. Toynbee,” in Mythistory, p. 197. McNeill recounts his intellectual development in the essays republished in Mythistory. 51. William H. McNeill, “The Rise of the West as a Long-Term Process,” in Mythistory, p. 64. The concept of an Eurasian ecumene was first proposed by anthropologist A. L. Kroeber and developed by Marshall Hodgson. See Hodgson, “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History,” CHM 1 (1954): 715–23. 52. William H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” in Mythistory, pp. 13–17. 53. Ross E. Dunn, “The Challenge of Hemispheric History,” HT 18 (1985): 329–38. For a good discussion on the problems of diffusion theories in world history, see Matthew Melko, “The Interaction of Civilizations: An Essay,” CHM 11 (1969): 559–77. Critics have cited McNeill’s spare coverage of isolated pre-Columbian America as evidence of the limits of his diffusion theory. He defends this approach to the world history course in “World History

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in the Schools,” New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History, ed. Martin Ballard (London, 1970), pp. 16–25. 54. See the reply of William R. Keylor, “World History and International History,” WHB 3 (1985): 3, to the review by Joe Gowaskie of Keylor’s The Twentieth-Century World: An International History (New York, 1984), in WHB 2 (1984): 8. 55. Richard E. Sullivan, “Summary Statement,” in What Americans Should Know: Western Civilization or World History?: Proceedings of a Conference at Michigan State University, April 21–23, 1985, ed. Josef W. Konvitz (East Lansing, 1985), p. 260. Carl H. Degler, “How Fares History: A Personal and Impressionistic Report, Part II,” AHA Perspectives 25 (1987): 4–6. 56. Richard E. Sullivan (n. 55 above), pp. 262–63. 57. Louis Gottschalk, “Projects and Concepts of World History in the Twentieth Century,” XII Congrès international des sciences historique: Rapports, 1965 (Vienna, n.d.), pp. 14–15.

MARSHALL G. S. HODGSON AND THE HEMISPHERIC IN T E R R E G I O N A L A P P R OAC H T O WO R L D H I S T O R Y Edmund Burke III

Writing in the first issue of this journal, Gilbert Allardyce surveyed what he called the “Chicago school of world history”: William H. McNeill, Louis Gottschalk, and Leften S. Stavrianos.1 Missing from his list was a fourth Chicago-based world historian, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, whose biography is intertwined with theirs, even as his ambitious efforts to devise a methodologically self-conscious and epistemologically grounded world history distinguishes his approach from theirs. Marshall Hodgson’s influential articles on world history are widely scattered, and the world history manuscript he left upon his death in 1969 is unpublished, so it is perhaps understandable that he should have been neglected. Otherwise, Hodgson is primarily known as the author of a three-volume history of Islamic civilization, The Venture of Islam.2 Because of the significance of Hodgson’s efforts to devise a hemispheric interregional world history and his personal relations with McNeill and Gottschalk, both of whom were University of Chicago colleagues, one might have expected Allardyce to discuss his work as well. (Hodgson’s relations with Stavrianos, who taught at Northwestern University, remain unknown). With the posthumous publication of his Rethinking World History, one can see his importance more clearly.3 As the editor of this work, in the present article I seek to place Hodgson in the Chicago context and to introduce his ideas on world history to a larger audience. Hodgson’s originality and methodological self-consciousness, unusual in the 1950s and 1960s when he was writing, as well as the ways in which his thought anticipates Edmund Burke III’s “Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History” was originally published in Journal of World History 6, 2 (Fall 1995): 237– 50. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press.

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recent efforts to reconceptualize the place of Europe in world history, are compelling reasons to heed his voice. His perspective, though flawed in certain respects, nonetheless provides a basis for evaluating the recent debates over “Europocentrism” (as he called it) and multiculturalism. His hemispheric interregional approach to world history breaks decisively with previous Europe-centered approaches to world history. His view of modernity as a world historic process is equally innovative. While the breakout to modernity might have occurred in many other regions, he argues, it was centered, for particular reasons, in northwestern Europe. Finally, Hodgson’s humanistic conscience and commitment to the moral discipline of world history (unfashionable in his age as in our own) provides a powerful argument for the field against epistemological nihilists and moral agnostics.

M A R S H A L L H O D G S O N : A N I N T E L L E C T UA L A N D H I S T I M E S

Allardyce’s important essay argues that the American roots of world history are to be sought in the affinity between world history and certain internationalist and pacifist strands of early twentieth-century American culture. Gottschalk, McNeill, and Stavrianos came to world history from a sense of the folly of war and the need for international understanding as a remedy to chauvinistic national histories. World history was seen by those who shared this viewpoint as a school for global citizenship. Allardyce’s intuition appears validated in Hodgson’s case, as well. Like his three Chicago colleagues, Hodgson was a committed internationalist who saw in world history a means of combating ignorance, prejudice, and ethnocentrism. In Hodgson’s case, his convictions derived from his membership in the Society of Friends. Indeed, Hodgson’s first publication bears the dateline Camp Elkton, Oregon, where he was interned along with other conscientious objectors (most of them Quaker) during World War II.4 As a young man, Hodgson was influenced by Wendell Willkie’s “world federalism” and was an ardent early supporter of the United Nations. Several of his earliest articles were published in journals sponsored by UNESCO, when presumably they could have found other, more scholarly outlets. The epigraph to Hodgson’s Venture of Islam is drawn from the eighteenth-century American Quaker, John Woolman, a pacifist and antislavery activist: “To consider mankind otherwise than brethren, to think favours are peculiar to one nation and exclude others, plainly supposes a darkness in the understanding.”5 For Hodgson, it was axiomatic that “the individual sensibility, focused in a point of conscience, is one of the ultimate roots of history.” I have argued at length elsewhere that Hodgson’s Quakerism is a leitmotif that can be traced throughout The Venture— and indeed through most of the rest of his published work.6 Following the war, Hodgson was appointed to the University of Chicago, where as a young instructor he served for a time as an assistant to Gottschalk in the early phases of the UNESCO world history project. (He later became disenchanted with the project and quit, alleging that it lacked a coherent historical vision and a willingness to uphold intel-

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ligible standards of inquiry). Later, disabused by the ways in which the United Nations was enlisted in the Cold War, his youthful expectations for that organization dropped by the wayside. An interesting footnote to his early career is that Hodgson briefly shared an apartment with Andre Gunder Frank in 1953 and 1954 while he was working on his germinal article, “The Interrelations of Societies in History.” Frank is best known for his work on economic dependency and world-systems analysis.7 Hodgson’s approach to world history is as much the product of a particular time and place as of a particular man. Hodgson had deep intellectual roots at the University of Chicago, where he had been an undergraduate and graduate student in the 1940s during the latter phase of Robert Maynard Hutchins’s remarkable experiment, and where in the 1950s and 1960s he served as a faculty member.8 In this period, the undergraduate program at Chicago was organized around the study of world civilizations through their “great books.” Originally, the program had been limited to the study of Western civilization, but it was broadened in the postwar era to include surveys of the civilizations of India, China, and Islam under the intellectual leadership of the younger Robert Redfield and Milton Singer. The course on Islamic civilization was developed by Hodgson, then a young assistant professor. It was to remedy the absence of a suitable textbook for this course that he wrote The Venture of Islam. Successive generations of Chicago undergraduates read mimeographed manuscripts of The Venture, along with a class reader of Islamic writings in English translation. It was Hodgson’s work as a world historian, however, and not his orientalist writings, that earned him a faculty appointment at Chicago. Even though Hodgson is today primarily known as an Islamicist, he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought (where he had done his Ph.D. work) rather than the Oriental Institute (then as now primarily concerned with classical archaeology and prehistory). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Committee on Social Thought was a unique interdisciplinary graduate program of broad and eclectic scope, and not yet the fossilized repository of Eurocentrism it became in the 1980s. At the time of his death, Hodgson was chairman of the committee. In the company of John U. Nef, Mircea Eliade, and Edward Shils, Hodgson sought to rethink the philosophical and historical traditions of Western civilization. With his vast erudition and enormous self-confidence, Hodgson was a formidable figure. Other Chicago colleagues included Gustave von Grunebaum, Muhsin Mahdi, Robert McC. Adams, Wilfred Madelung, Clifford Geertz, Lloyd Fallers, and Reuben Smith (who saw the manuscript of The Venture of Islam through to publication after Hodgson’s untimely death). Simply to list the names reminds one of how remarkable an intellectual environment Chicago was in those days. Although Hodgson’s world federalism faded with the years, his moral commitments did not. His pacifism and prickly vegetarianism were renowned among his peers. (One catches echoes of them in Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back).9 Hodgson was involved in the effort of liberal faculty to bridge the chasms of misunderstanding between the university and the black community of Hyde Park in the late 1950s and 1960s, espe-

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cially with the Nation of Islam. Finally, Hodgson was one of the first faculty members at Chicago to publicly oppose the Vietnam War in a period before opposition became widespread. Other important aspects of his personality remarked by those who knew him were his Quaker insistence on the recognition of the common humanity of all people, and his natural curiosity about how others lived. From the foregoing sketch, several things stand out. One is that Hodgson was a pure product of the University of Chicago. From his undergraduate years before World War II until his death in 1968 at the age of forty-six, he lived within its institutional confines, shaped by its intellectual traditions and human concerns, yet always also in rebellion against them. His critique of the Eurocentric assumptions of Hutchins’s “great books” approach to civilizational studies was grounded in a thorough understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. Similarly, his critique of 1950s modernization theory was based in his daily interactions with the members of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations, a Chicago interdisciplinary faculty seminar that included scholars such as David Apter, Leonard Binder, Bernard S. Cohn, Morris Janowitz, McKim Marriot, Suzanne and Lloyd Rudolph, Milton Singer, and Aristide Zolberg, as well as Edward Shils, Clifford Geertz, and Lloyd Fallers, among others.

RETHINKING WORLD HIS TORY

Hodgson’s conceptual approach to world history derives from an essay written when he was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at Chicago. For the next twenty-five years he continually reworked this early piece, which went through several different forms, always changing, always deepening.10 Over those years his thoughts on reconceptualizing world history and the place of Europe in it were published in several seminal articles, as well as in The Venture of Islam. Versions of these essays as well as chapters 11–13 of Hodgson’s unpublished manuscript entitled “Unity of World History” are now available in Rethinking World History. For purposes of this essay, one can usefully group Hodgson’s contributions to world history under three main headings: his methodologically self-conscious attempt to examine the epistemological presuppositions of the writing of world history; his effort to resituate European history in the hemispheric interregional context of what he called Afro-Eurasia; and his vision of world history as the center of a reinvigorated historical discipline. For Hodgson, the difficulty with most world histories was that they either consciously conceived of their mission as inscribing a Hegelian teleological narrative—the story of history as a tale of progress, with the West in the starring role— or they presented an insufficiently examined Eurocentric history as if it were world history. Anticipating in many ways the current concern with the politics of location, he believed that it was epistemologically necessary to recognize that all works are the products of their authors’ (often unacknowledged) “scholarly precommitments,” or fundamental orientations. For

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Hodgson, precommitments included not only religious affiliations but also Marxism and (more surprisingly) what he called Westernism. Westernists were “those whose highest allegiance is to what they call Western culture, as the unique or at least the most adequate embodiment of transcendent ideals of liberty and truth” (RWH, p. 78).11 While Hodgson does not mention gender, ethnic identity, or class position in his list of precommitments, he would surely recognize their shaping influence on scholarly production as well. The idea of precommitments was Hodgson’s way of recognizing that the writing of history always necessarily brings the concerns of the present to the task of finding meaningful patterns in the past. At the same time, he believed that a historian by systematic and self-conscious effort could to a degree transcend the limitations of any personal and time-laden perspective. More clearly than many more recent authors, Hodgson did not presume to be speaking from some epistemologically sanitized space, in which one is liberated from having one or more precommitments. Rather, he assumed that we all have precommitments that both enable and constrain our understanding in various ways. Although there is no likelihood that we will ever escape the constraints of this situation, this does not mean that no human knowledge is possible. A second fundamentally shaping scholarly orientation of which Hodgson was aware was the textualist approach to world civilizations. Here perhaps we may see a critique of the University of Chicago undergraduate core program of civilizational studies of which he was a product and in which he taught. The idea that civilizations have essences that can best be observed in their “great books” was anathema to Hodgson. For him, civilization as an organizing principle was constantly undercut by the fact that societies were never closed wholes and that they always contained fields of activity that were only superficially molded by the central tradition in question. “Different sorts of lettered tradition mingled in different degrees in different societies,” he argued (RWH, p. 14), and multilingualism and multiculturalism were always present to some degree. In The Venture of Islam he turned this into a notable critique of what he argued was the Arabistic bias of Islamic history. Arabistic bias viewed anything written in Arabic as a product of “Arab culture,” even though the lands of Islam were culturally cosmopolitan, most members of the elite were familiar with more than one language, and many ethnically non-Arab authors wrote in Arabic (RWH, pp. 81–85).

THE HEMISPHERIC INTERREGIONAL APPROACH TO WORLD HIS TORY

Hodgson’s hemispheric interregional approach to world history (as he called it) is most clearly spelled out in his 1963 article “The Interrelations of Societies in History.”12 In it, he made several important conceptual points aimed at establishing world history on a more reliable footing, against the shallowness and Eurocentrism of earlier, less methodologically self-conscious approaches.

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What fascinated Hodgson was the possibility of telling the tale of humanity from the perspective of global history and not in a skewed, Western, self-justificatory version. A more adequate world history, he argued, would have to begin with the proposition that rather than privileging a particular regional civilization, the history of human literate society should take interregional developments on a hemisphere-wide basis as its focus. Hodgson’s comparative interregional approach contrasts sharply with the model proposed in McNeill’s Rise of the West, currently dominant in the field.13 McNeill had seen as his task the development of an approach at once simpler and less idiosyncratic than that of Arnold Toynbee, the reigning figure in the field in the 1930s and 1940s. To this end, McNeill reduced the number of civilizations from Toynbee’s nineteen to four: Europe and the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, and China. He also retained Toynbee’s idea that the civilizations of Afro-Eurasia were part of a broad intercommunicating zone, which he referred to as the ecumene (in place of the Greek oikoumene favored by Toynbee). From American cultural anthropologists Redfield and Alfred Kroeber, McNeill borrowed the concept of cultural diffusion. Where in Toynbee’s approach the evolution of each civilization was largely autonomous, the working out of an encoded essence, McNeill insisted that the motor of world history was the cultural interaction of civilizations with one another. In this way, McNeill appeared to have solved the problem of connecting the separate histories of individual civilizations into a single narrative. He also appeared to have eluded the problem of essentialism that had long plagued world history and civilizational studies generally.14 For Hodgson, McNeill’s world history was flawed in its basic conception.15 Far from being a breakthrough, Hodgson asserted, McNeill’s reliance upon cultural diffusionism was philosophically naïve, because it made unacknowledged moral judgments about the relative importance of civilizations based upon their supposed contributions to the emergence of modern Europe. Moreover, since diffusionist approaches were readily assimilable by Westernist ones, Hodgson argued, in spite of McNeill’s stated efforts to the contrary, his world history was permeated by a persistent Western exceptionalism. Long before J. M. Blaut, Hodgson had a developed critique of the diffusionism that underlay most attempts at developing a world history. He was also deeply aware of the ways in which the Mercator projection map presented a geographical encoding of a colonizer’s map of the world.16 By contrast, Hodgson’s interregional approach sought to situate developments in particular civilizations against the background of the disposition of the entire ecumene, the better to grasp their true significance. Hodgson’s emphasis upon the interconnections between civilizations and upon the cumulative development of the common stock of human techniques and cultural resources across the whole of Afro-Eurasia is one of his most important ideas. He argued that the history of the interconnecting band of agrarian, citied societies from China to Western Europe is necessarily an Asia-centered history and that world history must focus upon interdependent, interregional developments on a hemisphere-wide basis:

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Historical life, from early times at least till two or three centuries ago, was continuous across the Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization; that zone was ultimately indivisible. The various regions had their own traditions; important social bodies arose, sometimes within a regional framework, sometimes cutting across regional life, which molded much of the cultural life of their constituents. But all these lesser historical wholes were imperfect wholes. They were secondary groupings. Local civilized life could go on without full participation in any of them; some of the most creative of historical activities, such as that of natural science, cut across their boundaries. The whole of the Afro-Eurasian zone is the only context large enough to provide a framework for answering the more general and more basic historical questions that can arise. (RWH, p. 17)

The constant cumulative transformation of interregional conditions led to the broadening of the range of human activity from the beginning of human history. Thus, for example, the emergence of new agricultural techniques transformed the internal balance of population and economic power within given regions and cumulatively within the interregional configuration itself. But “the Afro-Eurasian historical complex was not merely a framework for mutual borrowings and influences among organizationally independent civilizations; it was a positive factor with its own proper development” (RWH, p. 26). With the expansion of the size of the interconnected zone and the multiplication of the historical components in Afro-Eurasia, particular developments in any given civilization (such as Arabic numerals, paper, the compass, gunpowder weapons) were soon paralleled in other societies throughout the ecumene, cumulatively affecting future possibilities everywhere. Hodgson believed that one could not understand developments in any given civilization without considering their relationship to the interregional context as a whole. A few examples may make the stakes clear. The emergence of Greek science has one meaning seen in the context of the origins of a putative “Western” tradition, but quite another when situated against the achievements of the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean with which it was intertwined in a complex way, as Walter Burkert has recently argued.17 Similarly, the sixteenth-century Portuguese voyages of discovery in the Indian Ocean as seen by historians of Westernist inclination appear (tendentiously) as the beginning of a period of modern European advance, when they are more properly viewed as “one more venture within an essentially agrarianate historical complex, which was rather readily contained in the course of the 16th century by the other peoples in the Indian Ocean” (RWH, p. 93). Hodgson was quick to point up the fundamental fault of such attitudes: while apparently cosmopolitan, they assume that “the modern West is the only significant end point of progress; that developments leading to present conditions in other lands have no meaning” (RWH, p. 290). Instead, he argued, “we must force ourselves to realize what it means to say that the West is not the modern world, gradually assimilating backward areas to itself; but is rather the catalyst, creating new conditions for other forces to work

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under (though in this case, to be sure, the West itself is also thoroughly transformed)” (RWH, p. 290). A major purpose of Hodgson’s interregional approach was to resituate modernity and to unhook it from Western exceptionalism. Seen in this light the European Renaissance, far from signaling the onset of modernity, marks instead the attainment by Western Europe of the cultural level of the other major civilizations of Afro-Eurasia in the period. Hodgson’s rejection of Max Weber’s tradition/modernity dichotomy and his insistence that all periods be accorded equal weight by historians made it possible to rehistoricize the premodern period as something more than an antechamber to the rise of the West and to restore its integrity as a period interesting in its own right. (At one point he aptly queried historians’ use of the term tradition, defined as cultural stasis, and pointed out that “traditional” societies are always changing and that the maintenance of institutional forms and values requires quite as much purposive energy as changing them). Progress-oriented histories (involving the rise of the West or similar teleologies) ultimately draw connections where none exist. The line that allegedly connects the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance to modern times, he pointed out, is a moral judgment, not a historical one. By resituating European history and modernity in a hemispheric interregional context, Hodgson permitted us to see that what is striking about European history are its profound discontinuities, not its continuity.

THE DISCIPLINE OF WORLD HIS TORY

Hodgson’s hemispheric interregional approach to world history is part of his overall vision of the potential role of world history. For him, world history was the necessary disciplining frame for all history, with its own appropriate concepts and methodology. In the final section of his unpublished “Unity of World History,” reproduced in Rethinking World History, Hodgson sought to delineate the types of historical thinking specific to world history, and he insisted that “world history, interpreted as interregional history, must form the core of the intellectual organization of the historical profession” (RWH, p. 247). Hodgson’s sense of history as a discipline was grounded, in part, in a 1950s sense of the division between the social sciences and history. Thus he saw the role of history as exceptionalizing and that of the social sciences as typicalizing. Other nontypicalizing disciplines included philosophy and art. (In the wake of the new social history and the linguistic turn, such a division of the human sciences seems no longer tenable). What is the domain of history? he asked. In what ways are historical questions about the exceptional interdependent? How do they form a field? History is a field, he argued, not because history possesses a distinctive method but because the questions historians ask are substantively interrelated (RWH, pp. 252–53). Not only is history a field, Hodgson maintained, it is a public discipline whose basis is the asking of large-scale questions that make comparisons based upon the many-

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faceted character of historical contexts. Since the question asked often determines the answer, he continued, we need to know that the questions asked are legitimate. Similarly, the categories one uses determine the questions asked. Thus, he reasoned, world history requires agreement on the concepts and terminology used before its claim to be a discipline can be recognized. The point of Hodgson’s argument is that the concepts and questions that historians use must be subjected to careful scrutiny; otherwise, they can unwittingly smuggle in important biases. In particular, questions about origins or the filiation of ideas or techniques are vulnerable to inadvertent biases. This is why Hodgson included a lengthy section on methodology in Islamic studies as part of the introduction to The Venture of Islam (included as chapter 6 in Rethinking World History). It is crucial, he argued, that we develop a methodology for determining what are significant questions—what is and what is not a problem. “The choice of terms determines what categories one uses; the categories determine the form and limits of the questions posed; and the questions posed determine the answers that can be expected. But since the comparison must be over the whole field, categorization must form a complete system: perceiving the relations and discontinuities over all mankind in time and space” (RWH, pp. 268–69). In an effort to devise appropriate concepts for interregional study, Hodgson in typical fashion devised an elaborate matrix of units of analysis, including “interregional motifs,” “historical complexes,” new periodization schemes, and the like. His interregional motifs included large-scale events, such as the Indo-European migrations or the Black Death, and “paralleled developments” (he proposed the development of supragovernmental law as an example). As part of this same effort he also criticized the use of terms such as “the West” and “the East,” which he saw as freighted with heavy and generally unacknowledged ideological baggage. His critique of the biases of the Mercator projection map, in chapter 1 of Rethinking World History, provides an example of how such unacknowledged racism can infiltrate even so neutral-seeming a thing as a map. On what basis can one proceed to do world history? Hodgson made three suggestions: First, we must recognize the field, distinguishing it on the one hand from an extended Western history, which at present is commonly meant by the term “world history”; and on the other hand from a series of regional histories, however much value they may have in themselves. . . . Second, we must, negatively, free ourselves from various older ways of thinking of broader problems of history, which interfere with an interregional approach. We must recognize the limited role in history of our West, as one region among others, during much of its development distinctly peripheral; and even in modern times, as not the substance of the age, into which other lands are merging insofar as they are significant at all, but instead as the center of important events affecting both the West and other lands, and significant from an interregional point of view in their interregional rather than their local aspect. As a corollary of this placing of the West, we must leave behind the Westward pattern of history and the “East and West” dichotomy in studying the development of

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the Oikoumenic Configuration; and we must free our theorizing of the turns of thought which arise from assuming the Westward pattern. Third, positively, we must go on to developing means of organizing the various types of interregional history, particularly within literate times, finding the scope and value as organizing elements of various interregional motifs, and studying from a consciously interregional point of view various circumstances of significance. At the same time, we must look toward synthesizing hypotheses, making use of all the contributions already under way in the field, each for its particular aspect of the problem involved. (RWH, p. 292)

Although I am not convinced by some of the more abstract formulations proposed by Hodgson in his quest to develop a methodology for disciplining interregional comparisons—his motifs, for example, smack too much of Toynbee’s categories—the attempt to devise a methodology is obviously of central importance to the development of world history as a field. The point of his motifs is that they overlap regional cultures and provide a necessary corrective to generalizations that arise from the consideration of a particular civilization’s experiences (RWH, pp. 270–77). Hodgson’s self-conscious attempt to develop a methodology appropriate to world history is the only one known to me. At another level, interregional history as proposed by Hodgson is inadequate to the extent that it neglects the history of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. This is indeed a major defect. Before sounding the trumpets of political correctness, however, it would be well to realize that Hodgson’s world was one in which African independence was newly minted and African history as an academic discipline in its infancy. None of the other members of the Chicago school who were his contemporaries was notably more astute on this point. An Asiacentric interregional history is still a vast improvement methodologically over the “four civilizations” model, as indeed it is over all other approaches that do not put human interactions at their center. Certainly Hodgson was on the right track, for the interregional approach can be modified and extended to encompass Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.18 If world history is to flourish as a field, then similar carefully reasoned parallel efforts to think through the difficult conceptual and methodological issues must be encouraged. Elsewhere I have commented on the extent to which even Hodgson’s approach is not exempt from a residual Westernist bias. This is apparent in his formulation of the “Great Western Transmutation” and the central role he gives to a putative Western technicalism. (These terms are, of course, fully defined: one expects nothing less from Hodgson).19 Given that most of Hodgson’s writings on world history date from before 1965, it is remarkable that despite the heightening of historians’ self-consciousness and the expansion of the field—the new social history, women’s history, minority history, and environmental history all date from after his death—the basic insights of his interregional world history remain relevant. The challenge of devising a methodology for disciplining large-scale generalizations has yet to be addressed. Nourished by the

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Hodgsonian example, we need a methodologically self-conscious and conceptually rigorous discussion and debate about the basic concepts and frameworks appropriate to world history.

NOTES

1. Gilbert Allardyce, “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course,” Journal of World History 1 (1990): 23–76. 2. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 3. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History, edited, with introduction and conclusion, by Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4. “World History and a World Outlook,” The Social Studies 35 (1944): 297–301. 5. John Woolman, The Journal, and Other Writings (New York and London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1952). 6. Edmund Burke III, “Islamic History as World History: Marshall Hodgson and The Venture of Islam,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 2 (1979): 241–64, reprinted in Rethinking World History, pp. 301–28. 7. Personal communication, Andre Gunder Frank, 8 December 1989. 8. For a portrait of the University of Chicago in this period, see William H. McNeill, Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929–50 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 9. Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (New York: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 105–109. 10. The Hodgson papers at the Department of Special Collections of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago allow us to follow this evolution in detail. The essay “World History and a World Outlook,” which dates from 1944, was the first published expression of Hodgson’s distinctive approach to world history. In 1945, inspired by the title of an article by Margaret Cameron, he planned to call his world history “There Is No Orient.” Its purpose was “to combat western provincialism.” By October 1960 he was calling the book “The Structure of World History: An Essay on Medieval and Modern Eurasia.” In 1962, the chapter outline resembled the table of contents of his eventual “Unity of World History” unpublished manuscript (the last three chapters of which are reprinted in Rethinking World History). By examining the gradual transformations of the project, we see the maturing of a young scholar into an established professional. 11. When cited parenthetically in the text, RWH refers to Hodgson’s Rethinking World History. 12. Reprinted as chap. 1 of Rethinking World History. An earlier version appeared in the UNESCO journal of world history: “The Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 1 (1954): 715–23. 13. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 14. McNeill discusses Toynbee’s work and its relationship to his own in his Mythistory

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and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chaps. 7 and 9. See also his intellectual biography of Toynbee: William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 15. Hodgson was critical of many aspects of McNeill’s approach, though for the most part he kept his thoughts to himself. His deep reservations come out in a letter he wrote to John Voll in 1961, reprinted in Rethinking World History, chap. 6. 16. J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford, 1993). 17. Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near East Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 18. Ross E. Dunn, “Central Themes for World History,” in Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, ed. Paul Gagnon (New York: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 216–33. 19. See especially Rethinking World History, chap. 4. For my critique, see “Islam and World History: The Contribution of Marshall Hodgson,” World History Bulletin 6:1 (Fall 1988–89): 6–10.

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 1 Benjamin, Craig. “Beginnings and Endings.” In Palgrave Advances in World History, edited by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, 90–111. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Benjamin builds his essay on the question of how writers from ancient times to the near present have conceived of the chronological parameters of the human past. He shows how the sources for determining the beginning of history shifted over time from ancient mythology and divine revelation to paleoanthropology and cosmological theory. Bentley, Jerry H. “The New World History.” In A Companion to Western Historical Thought, edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, 393–416. Medford, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. This chapter outlines the emergence of world history and the theorization of the global past with particular emphasis on how world historians can and should subject large-scale processes to historical analysis while also challenging Eurocentrism. ———. Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1996. This is a concise historiography of the scholarly field by the founding editor of the Journal of World History. These essays consider in turn “the philosophers of history,” “the social scientists,” and “the professional historians.” Bentley, Michael. “Theories of World History since the Enlightenment.” In The Oxford Handbook of World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, 19–35. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. The author interprets the development of world history writing since the eighteenth century in terms of six overlapping and sometimes competing intellectual “turns”: universal history, Weltgeschichte (world history in its nineteenth-century and mainly German expression), modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and global history. Bentley argues that world history should be subjected to more profound theoretical critique, notably the problem of determining in what measure change in a particular society can be attributed to interactions with other societies. Costello, Paul. World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993. This critical investigation of metahis-

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torical paradigms of the twentieth century focuses on the work of H. G. Wells, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson, Lewis Mumford, and William McNeill. Curtis, Kenneth R., and Jerry H. Bentley. Architects of World History: Researching the Global Past. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014. This is an innovative collection of intellectual autobiographies of leading world historians. Each chapter focuses on particular themes in world history research, teaching, and methodology. The authors also point out potential agendas for future research in the field. Ledbetter, Rosanna. “Some Thoughts on the Historiography of World History.” World History Bulletin 9 (Fall/Winter 1992– 93): 12–17. Ledbetter surveys world history writing since the seventeenth century, arguing that only in recent decades has enough knowledge accumulated to write genuine global history. McNeill, William H. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. McNeill demonstrates that Toynbee’s reputation as a metahistorical systems builder and, in the end, religious mystic has overshadowed his brilliance at formulating important world historical questions. Moore, R. L. “World History.” In Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley, 941– 59. New York: Routledge, 1997. A British historian offers his astute observations on the development and future prospects of world history as “a distinctive mode of inquiry.” Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Daniel A. Segal. “World History: Departures and Variations.” In A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop, 15–31. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012. This essay appraises the development of world history as an academic field since World War II. The authors critically assess several of the conceptual frameworks currently in play among scholars and teachers—big history, global history, world systems history, and world history as the study of connections—weighing up the virtues and the limitations of these approaches.

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2 DEFINING WORLD HISTORY Some Key Statements

IN T R O D U C T I O N

The new world history owes much of its success to historians who have addressed the field’s broad conceptual and methodological issues, argued for its inclusion in the historical discipline, and proposed concrete approaches to writing and teaching it. The six authors selected for this chapter have all made crucial contributions to the defining and refining of the world history project. Their interventions have encouraged young scholars to undertake world history research, sometimes in the face of professional skepticism, and helped teachers to think through hard questions of how to frame and organize history courses of global scope. In some measure these statements are manifestos, declarations of support for world history and challenges to some of the profession’s dominant assumptions. These statements dovetail with the critiques of world history collected in Chapter 10. These authors also view world history from different intellectual angles, advocating distinctive approaches that are not necessarily compatible with one another. Kenneth Pomeranz and Daniel Segal write that “what is striking about world history today— looking at both teaching and research—is the great variety of frameworks that are in use, and the continued difficulties of dealing with issues of geographic and temporal coverage, particularly in comprehensive projects.”1 Indeed, the field has not achieved anything approaching a consensus regarding its aims and models, but this intellectual and pedagogical diversity has been generally productive, obliging historians to further

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illuminate the field’s significance and methodology. In writing about these epistemological questions, Patrick Manning observes that “world historians will benefit from a continuing discourse about their methods and a continuing revaluation of both the general principles of gaining historical knowledge and the specific needs of study of world-historical issues.”2 The essays in this chapter document the successive reimagining of world history since the 1950s. All of the authors have been cited frequently in the historiography of the field, and the selections amply demonstrate the intellectual cross-fertilization that has occurred among them. The essays therefore lend themselves well to analytical comparison. Other writings that historians might regard as equally influential in shaping the field are included in this book; they appear in other chapters, following our judgment regarding their most appropriate placement. According to Edmund Burke, Marshall Hodgson’s precocious vision of world history is attributable to the powerful combination of his Quaker universalism, his residence in the intellectual hothouse of the University of Chicago, and his singular perception of Islam as a transhemispheric cultural system.3 Hodgson worked out his views on world history in the academic arena that pitted fashionable modernization theory and Chicago’s Europe-centered great books tradition against his universalist and cosmopolitan sensibilities. “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History” represents one of the early published statements of his new conceptualization. He explains his idea of the Afroeurasian ecumene as a unitary spatial framework for understanding both interactions among civilizations and developments that altered human relationships across the entire transhemispheric region. Civilizations and the interactions between them governed the structure of William McNeill’s monumental The Rise of the West, published in 1963. He described these interactions in terms of the meeting of strangers possessing different, and perhaps unequal, bodies of knowledge and skill, a process that was in his view the prime mover of social change. In the years following the publication of The Rise of the West, however, McNeill’s ideas evolved. He moved closer to Hodgson in recognizing that, notwithstanding the reality of civilizations as cultural complexes, acceptance of these units as the prime spatial categories for constructing world histories risked minimizing or ignoring important developments whose significance transcended civilizational boundaries. Study of such relatively large-scale developments required, as Hodgson writes, “a common historical context,” which might be Afroeurasia as a whole or, after 1500, the globe.4 In Plagues and Peoples, which he published in 1976, McNeill abandoned the civilizationism that had guided The Rise of the West by exploring the impact of infectious diseases on humankind in both hemispheric and global frames.5 Books of similar spatial scope followed that one. In 1990 the editor of the Journal of World History invited McNeill to contribute an article to the inaugural issue. “The Rise of the West after TwentyFive Years,” the second selection in this chapter, is a remarkably candid self-criticism of that work. McNeill raises two major issues that he believes world historians must

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address and that he did not address, at least not adequately, in The Rise of the West. The first, which he treats at length, is the emergence of “the ecumenical world system,” a term he uses with a nod to Immanuel Wallerstein. The second, which McNeill describes briefly at the end of his essay, is environmental history, or more specifically “our encounters and collisions with all the other organisms that make up the earth’s ecosystem.” This theme, introduced in Plagues and Peoples, became important in his late work. McNeill is particularly dissatisfied with two chapters in The Rise of the West. He admits that owing to his fixation on separate civilizations, he failed in Chapter 4 to see the “ecumenical process” that emerged in the ancient Middle East and that eventually embraced the adjacent Mediterranean and South Asian worlds. In Chapter 10, which addresses the 1000–1500 CE period, he privileges Latin Christendom over other regions and especially over China. Later in his career, and notably in his 1982 book The Pursuit of Power, he recognized that China was in fact “the ultimate disturber of world balances in the era itself” and that “the world system . . . thus acquired a new and far more powerful productive center” whose capacity to both export and import goods by land and sea significantly altered the hemispheric commercial economy as a whole.6 In later years, McNeill exchanged the term “world system” for “communications networks” and finally for “webs of interaction,” which is the central concept in The Human Web, the book he published with his son John R. McNeill in 2003.7 This book brings to culmination the themes of “ecumenical process” and ecological change that he outlined in his seminal 1990 essay. Philip Curtin, founder of the first world history graduate program in the United States, was a pioneer of the field whose philosophy is largely implicit in his numerous writings on comparative and interregional subjects. In contrast to Hodgson and McNeill, Curtin did not devise a conceptual architecture that encompassed the full sweep of the human past. He also had serious doubts about the value of survey courses that stress global coverage. Rather, he adopted a world-scale frame for investigating the history of trade, migration, and disease, drawing mainly on a methodology of inductive comparison. In “Depth, Span, and Relevance,” his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1983, he offers some general reflections on his approach. Like McNeill, he worried that excessively narrow graduate training and professional expertise were contributing to the flight of college students from history. Scholars have an obligation, he argues, not only to specialize but also to synthesize from “a wider span of historical knowledge.” The profession must do a better job of formulating historical problems that Americans will care about and find engaging. This involves identifying the “universe of data” pertinent to the problem under investigation rather than allowing the nation-state or some other geographical convention to limit the range of inquiry. Curtin presents several examples of how a proper fit between a problem and the “relevant aggregate” of human beings and data can illuminate world historical processes and prevent interpretive distortions. Andre Gunder Frank became well known in the late 1960s for challenging the then

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predominant economic theory of modernization. Modernization theory, which postulated that as the developed world—mainly Europe, North America, and Japan—modeled free-market capitalism, rational science, liberal democracy, consumerism, and faith in progress for poorer countries (the Third World), those states would, if they hoped to prosper, adopt Western institutions and the values of free enterprise. Under Western leadership, “traditional societies” would thereby transform themselves into “modern” ones to the benefit of the human race. Frank, however, saw a different world trend entirely. Drawing his data mainly from Latin America, he contended that the major industrial powers, which controlled a preponderant percentage of the world’s finance capital, technological resources, and military power, in fact systematically exploited poorer states for their labor and raw materials, thus preventing them from advancing economically and socially. The world economic system was thus rigged for what Frank called the “development of underdevelopment.” Meanwhile, Frank shifted his research focus from Latin America to world-scale subjects and along with McNeill and Curtin became a patron of the World History Association and its mission. Frank also had a large influence on Immanuel Wallerstein, who in the mid-1970s became the leading exponent of world-systems theory. Three important threads run through Frank’s work from about 1990, the year he published “A Plea for World System History” in the Journal of World History. One strand is his adoption of a broader, more flexible definition of “world system“ than Wallerstein had posited, embracing not only market-based economic networks but all phenomena that involved human groups linking themselves to one another, consciously or not, in relationships of cause and effect across state or civilization frontiers. A second theme in Frank’s work is his proposal to extend the “world-system” that Wallerstein saw emerging in the sixteenth century back 5,000 years, when agrarian societies of Afroeurasia began to create networks of commercial, diplomatic, and cultural exchange with one another, thereby stimulating change within all the societies involved. Finally, Frank expands on Marshall Hodgson’s idea, which McNeill also came to advocate, that until the nineteenth century the center of gravity for production, trade, and innovation in Afroeurasia was not Western Europe but a point much farther east. Frank developed this hypothesis in detail in ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. 8 Jerry H. Bentley served as editor of the Journal of World History, the scholarly organ of the World History Association, from its founding in 1990 until his untimely death in July 2012. One of world history’s trailblazers, he and colleagues initiated a world history graduate program at the University of Hawaii in 1985, the first since Philip Curtin’s initiative at Wisconsin twenty-six years earlier. A Renaissance historian by training, Bentley published a steady stream of books and articles. He was a tireless public speaker and participant in world history conferences, symposia, and institutes, gaining a reputation for adapting to transpacific airplanes as his mobile office. Bentley’s philosophy of world history writing and teaching is implicit in most of his works. But in his essay “Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World

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History,” published in 2005, he lays his ideological cards on the table. He admits that any scheme to envision the history of human society as a whole is fraught with conceptual and methodological risk. Nevertheless, he is willing to bet on what he calls an “ecumenical world history,” a phrase he adopts from William McNeill. The gamble is worth making, Bentley argues, if an ecumenical history, that is, a history of and for the whole world that neither privileges nor dismisses any particular social or cultural group, might “conceivably contribute to such worthy goals as cross-cultural understanding and global peace.” In contrast to Andre Gunder Frank, Bentley was not attracted to the framing of world history in terms of the formation of increasingly elaborate systems, especially economic ones. Rather, the corpus of Bentley’s writing reveals his wariness of macrosociological inquiries that are mostly about aggregates and structures, because this approach may lose sight of human beings and their constituent groups as creative agents interacting with one another for benefit or ill. He prefers an ecumenical history founded on the idea of a world manifesting increasing complexity over time in consequence of cross-cultural interactions among groups, whether technological, religious, artistic, military, or biological. For him, this way of looking at the past represents a moral position. He aligns himself with McNeill’s hope that “an intelligible world history might be expected to diminish the lethality of group encounters by cultivating a sense of individual identification with the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole.” Bentley believes that an ecumenical world history is urgent owing to the presence of “several other players in the game.” He specifically critiques writers who occupy two ends of the ideological spectrum. One group are conservative promoters of a “patriotic world history” who extol a particular civilizational or religious tradition. The other are left-leaning scholars who either advocate world history dedicated to the ultimate dismantling of the capitalist world system as it currently exists, or reject the discipline altogether as an epistemological construct tightly chained to Eurocentric assumptions. In excerpting Bentley’s essay for this chapter we have excluded these critiques. In Chapter 10, however, we have included the section in which he responds to Marxist and postcolonial scholars, one of whom is represented in that chapter. Merry Wiesner-Hanks is one of a select number of scholars who have distinguished themselves in both world history and the study of women and gender. (See also Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Judith Zinsser in this volume.) By 2007, when Wiesner-Hanks published her essay “World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality” in the Journal of World History, an assessment of the intersection of these subdisciplines was certainly due. Because the atomization of research into specialties has been a prominent characteristic of the historical profession since its inception, we should not be surprised that Wiesner-Hanks found little mutual engagement or influence among the practitioners of the two fields. Many world historians have taken a long time getting past a perception of women’s history as enclosed in the local, domestic sphere. Indeed, unexamined assumptions of maleness have suffused world history writing. For many scholars of women’s history, on the other hand, world history concerns itself too much

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with the study of aggregate, people-deficient economic or social structures. In the past two decades, Wiesner-Hanks contends, world historians have occupied themselves primarily with connections between human groups without paying much specific attention to gender or sexuality. Research on women and gender, on the contrary, has focused on divergence, demonstrating that the identity and disposition of groups are permeable and complicated. Wiesner-Hanks reviews briefly the trajectory of women’s and gender history— and the intellectual struggles in the field— since the 1960s in the contexts of developments in social history, labor history, the “linguistic turn,” and cultural studies. None of these movements puts women’s and world historians in closer touch with one another. Nevertheless, Wiesner-Hanks sees significant potential, even in cases where scholars do not overtly identify themselves with world history at all. One promising avenue lies in the thriving research on colonial and postcolonial South Asia, including the scholarship of several distinguished women. Some of this work has ranged beyond India to encompass other regions, especially comparative studies and research on environmental change. Other avenues include studies of gender and nationalism, the making of ethnoracial distinctions in different regions, and gendered analysis of trade and consumption. Wiesner-Hanks concludes that “we may now be at a point where the opposite paths of world history and women’s and gender history . . . could be coming together.” Works that have appeared since 2007, for example, Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, The Modern Girl around the World, and Wiesner-Hanks’s own Gender in History: Global Perspectives, suggest she is right.9

NOTES

1. Kenneth Pomeranz and Daniel A. Segal, “World History: Departures and Variations,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 22. 2. Patrick Manning, “Epistemology,” in The Oxford Handbook of World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 119. 3. See Burke, “Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History” in Chapter 1. 4. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History,” Journal of World History/Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale (UNESCO) 1, 3 (1954): 715–23. 5. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976). 6. ———, The Pursuit of Power (IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 7. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 8. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Other works that compare Asian and European economic trajectories since 1500 are discussed in Chapter 7. 9. Anne Walthall, ed., Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (Berke-

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ley: University of California Press, 2008); Alys Eve Weinbaum et al., eds., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in World History: Global Perspectives (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Also to be noted is Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman, “It’s a Man’s World? World History Meets the History of Masculinity, in Latin America, for Instance,” Journal of World History 21, 1 (March 2010): 75– 96.

H E M I S P H E R I C IN T E R R E G I O N A L H I S T O R Y A S A N A P P R OAC H T O WO R L D H I S T O R Y Marshall G. S. Hodgson

The term “world history” is often used in schools (at least in the United States) to designate a course designed to tell something of as many different foreign nations as possible. As a serious field of study, however, we expect “world history” to reflect not just a wide range of facts, but in some sense an overall development in the human past. The philosophical possibility of such an overall history has been questioned. I do not intend to discuss the problem on that level. Rather, I want to remind us of a particular field to history too generally neglected, which may not itself be strictly world history, but the examination of which at least forms the principal part of any possible world history. If a world history is philosophically possible, it will in any case be subject to two important limitations. It is unlikely to deal with all or even most of the events that have troubled mankind from the beginning, and it is unlikely to bear the type of human meaning which a sensitive history of a particular community can have. For it will deal with only such themes as are too broad in their ramifications to be conveniently handled within the limits of nations and cultural regions. Such themes are unavoidably somewhat impersonal. But admitting these restrictions, I believe that research on the worldhistorical level is not only possible, but exceedingly important. Indeed, its cultivation is already under way, many detailed problems of interregional history having been fruitfully approached in monographic terms, and many treatments of its overall problems having been suggested. But for its further progress now such world-historical research needs far wider recognition of its importance and its problems as an independent field.

W H AT W O R L D H I S T O R Y I S A N D I S N O T

During the last decade or so (at least in the United States) we have become increasingly aware of our need for history of a world scope. But what goes by the name of world history and tries to satisfy this need is still essentially Western history amplified by a few unrelated chapters on other parts of the world, notably India, China, and Japan. Even Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History” was originally published in Journal of World History/Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale (UNESCO) 1, 3 (1954): 715–23.

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such non-Westerners as write “world history” seem to have been stirred to little better than this, except for an amplification of the chapters dealing with their particular region. This sort of thing is not world history; no more than a history of France, or of Germany, supplemented by occasional chapters on other countries, would be European history. Nor is world history merely the sum of separate histories of the nations or regions of the world; no more than European history is the sum of the separate histories of the European nations. European history, rather, traces those developments which have involved large parts of Europe in common, and have determined the overall posture of affairs. It deals with the Renaissance, the rise of nation-states, the Industrial Revolution. Similarly world history must be expected to trace those developments which proceeded on a stage too wide for any more local history to cover other than fragmentarily, and which determined the cultural possibilities of mankind as a whole, or the greater part of it. During the last three thousand years there has been one zone, possessing to some degree a common history, which has been so inclusive that its study must take a preponderant place in any possible world-historical investigations. From at least the first millennium B.C., the various lands of urbanized, literate civilization in the Eastern Hemisphere, in a continuous zone from the Atlantic to the Pacific, have been in commercial and commonly in intellectual contact with each other, mediately or immediately. Not only has the bulk of mankind lived in this zone, but its influence has long emanated into much of the rest of the world. (Thus, we are learning that the history of Bantu Africa cannot be adequately traced in isolation from the wider agricultural and commercial history to its North.) As these civilizations expanded during the millennia, their heirs, in one way or another, have come to dominate the globe; so that at least ninety percent of the world’s population now traces its history to some segment of this zone of nations; and the remainder must recognize the dominance of its cultural heritage. A history of interregional developments among the literate urban civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere, developments transcending cultural regions like Europe, the Middle East, India, or the Confucian lands, will go far toward meeting our needs for world history.

T H E P R O B L E M O F O R G A N I Z I N G T H E H I S T O R I C A L M AT E R I A L

The attempt to study such a history is plagued with many problems, but we can set aside at least some that have been supposed to plague a universal history. We need not be deterred, of course, by the sheer quantity of past events in so wide an area. We are not concerned, after all, with each of the events that have happened in each nation, but only with those which have involved major segments of mankind, and so set a framework to all our historical experience. Those, while very important, can be presumed to be relatively few. For purposes of perspective (these need not be the only purposes of a world history, but surely they are important), a slim volume may be of more value than a fat one.

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Further, we can at least postpone the insuperable problem of finding a universal scheme into which all history will fit—whether in terms of progress or of cycles, of a master race or of a revelation. History is so rich, that almost at the first touch it yields an overabundance of suggestions of pattern. We will find this true even for so broad a zone as we are concerned with. The historian needs not fix upon a pattern for his whole field of inquiry before beginning his detailed work of criticism and exploration. The great problems we do have to face are those of appropriately reorienting our historical and geographical attitudes, and then organizing the relevant historical material for purposes of study. We must first (as we shall see) learn to orient ourselves adequately to the Hemisphere as a whole rather than to one— or, in the case of non-Westerners, two—particular parts of it. Once the vision is caught, this is perhaps the easier of the two problems. For when we come to organizing the historical material, we must find ourselves without the frames of reference we are accustomed to in work of lesser scope. We cannot organize an interregional investigation in terms of political continuity, as is usual in the case of nations; nor even in terms of a multiple institutional continuity, as in the history of Western Europe as a whole. For the various cultural regions of the Hemisphere shared directly very few institutions—no common church, no common legal commitments, no common schools of art or literature. Yet history, to be meaningful in interpreting our past to us, must be more than a disconnected listing of events and movements, selected arbitrarily because they happened to occur on a large scale.

INTERREGIONAL HIS TORIC AL DEVELOPMENTS

The following approach I conceive as adapted to organizing the material with a minimum of presuppositions as to the patterns of history. Events may be dealt with in their relation to the total constellation of historical forces of which they are a part— a method not limited to world history, but perhaps likely to be especially appropriate in this case. This means that we are to consider how events reflect interdependent interregional developments. Then we are to trace these developments as they affect one another and their common geographical, cultural, and economic setting in the world as a whole. An interregional development of this sort, relatively simple in form, is the rise, spread, and disruption of the Mongol power in the thirteenth century—in connection with which the political and even the economic life of remote parts of the Hemisphere were made to interact quite directly. But probably more important are those developments which involved no consciousness of their remoter ramifications on the part of the actors in them. Thus in the Middle Ages Chinese mathematicians learned from Muslims in Turkestan, and European mathematicians learned from Muslims in Spain. The Muslims were aware of other’s existence as scholars, but the Chinese and Europeans scarcely so. Yet we in our day need not therefore be unaware of their participation in a common tradition. This tradition had received impetus from the Aegean and the Indus and beyond, before the Medieval Muslims gathered it together again for a new

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dispersion; we can look at what these scholars, scattered in time and space, were doing as a whole— and so avoid more than one error of perspective and of fact. We can do the same regarding the distant spread of Hellenistic artistic inspiration; or of Indian monasticism. But we must study those interregional developments in a common historical context, if only to avoid overlooking the clues this can afford as to the bearing of evidence in regard to any one development. (For data regarding Hellenistic art or commerce may take on quite new meaning as we become aware of the state of civilization in all the regions affected— and unaffected.) Among these unconsciously interregional developments, then, should be noted especially those which, even if appearing independently region by region, converged in their effects to alter the general disposition of the Hemisphere. Thus the gradual expansions into the northern parts of Eurasia by Chinese, Europeans, and others, combined to reduce steadily the range of the Eurasian nomads, and to alter their relation to all the surrounding societies. One may compare the invasions of the pre-Christian Indo-Europeans in the Middle East, when the civilizations appeared almost surrounded by uncultivated peoples ready to submerge them; then the invasions of the time of Attila, when the outsiders themselves were in a large measure submerged; then finally compare the time of Genghis Khan, when the nomads in their turn might rightly feel surrounded; their freedom of motion being cut off by great empires penetrating their very deserts; but the skills of civilization lying also at hand, to help destroy the great empires themselves with a vast success undreamed of by former nomads. One might analyze analogously, if there were more data, the results in interregional commerce of the southward expansion of the civilizations, especially around the Indian Ocean. This gradual expansion of civilized territory over the Hemisphere, which so altered the role of the nomads, was only one part of the constant cumulative acquisition, in all parts of the world, of new techniques and discoveries. All these acquisitions resulted, in sum, in radical changes in the possibilities of further development anywhere. Of a slightly different sort are those developments taking place in particular regions, but which became of interregional consequence when they came to alter the relationships, economic or otherwise, among the regions of the world. The economic weakness of the pivotal Middle East by the end of the Middle Ages, for instance, seems to have been a decisive factor in the economic and political disposition of the world into which Europe was about to expand.

T H E I N T E R R E G I O N A L H I S T O R I C A L C O N S T E L L AT I O N

In tracing the Hemispheric context of these interregional developments, we find some elements relatively constant from age to age. For instance, up to 1500 A.D. the Middle East is the only great region in direct commercial relations with all parts of the Hemisphere. Likewise the other regions persist in playing distinctive roles: the restless

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Mediterranean Basin, and later the eccentric Western Europe; Central Eurasia struggling with nomadism; India, harbor of wealth and exiles; Indo-China and Malaysia, crossroads of trade; the relatively isolated Far East of China and Japan. But from time to time the general posture changes greatly in point of cultural resources and dominant activities. After the rise of the early valley civilizations occurred a spread and cosmopolitan mingling of urban cultures—which produced a new total picture by the time of the great IndoEuropean invasions, and of the use of iron. Then among Greeks, Hebrews, Assyrians, Persians, lndo-Aryans, and Chou Chinese arose still another historical climate, different from either the age of the early river civilizations or the cosmopolitan age of Tell el-Amarna; a new age reflected surely in such matters as the new coinage, but most obviously in the great classical sages from Thales and Isaiah to Mencius. This was a cultural climate far readier for the subsequent great expansion of Hellenism than the world had been a thousand years before. In yet another thousand years, yet another world had been ushered in, not only by Hellenism but by the various activities of missionary Buddhism which sometimes mingled with it; and by the impact of several major regional empires such as Rome and the Han in China, empires which reflected to some degree the work of the classical sages. But not the least significant change which that world of Mohammed’s time had undergone was the rise to political power everywhere of a new type of scriptural religion of personal salvation: either in the form of ad hoc faiths like Christianity or Mahayana Buddhism, or of old faiths made over like Rabbinical Judaism, and the Hindu Shaivism and Vaishnavism. Though their answers differed widely, the questions they posed were largely the same as those which Islam for a time seemed to answer more effectively than any of its older rivals. Within five or six centuries Islam was reaching into most parts of the Hemisphere. But before Islam could absorb the world, the scene changed yet again. By the time of the Mongol outburst there had intervened at least the usual cumulative improvement militarily, scientifically, in financial technique and commercial expansion; and, as if to settle old problems and clear the way for new, there had intervened scholastic syntheses of philosophy and religion from Shankara to Chu Hsi. For new problems were indeed threatening: the far Western nations of Europe were becoming unwontedly active. The stage was being set, not only in the technical means, but in the human disposition of the Eastern Hemisphere, for the modern world. Then between the Mongol victories and the Western conquest of the Oceans intervened not only certain key inventions, but a number of political and economic changes which left the crucial Indian Ocean open to Western power. Then between the days of Vasco da Gama and the French and Industrial Revolutions, the evolution of Western power in relation to each of the major world cultural regions had already set the form of the subsequent world order; which in turn began to collapse not only in Europe but throughout the world in the second decade of this century. The purpose of this sketch of the historical constellation of the Hemisphere is to suggest some of the major watersheds, after which history throughout the Hemisphere must take account of new factors in the total situation. I have had to allow the reader to

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fill in the details on the canvas, and have attempted therefore rather to evoke memories than to demonstrate data. What is important is the recognition not only that there is a whole range of problems which require treatment in terms which cross all regional boundaries; but then that there has been some sort of developing pattern in which all these interregional developments can be studied, as they are affected by and in turn affect its elements as constituted at any one time. I am sure that alternative methods of organizing these interregional materials are to be had. Jacques Pirenne, while concentrating his attention on the West, has attempted in some measure a general world history centered on the fortunes of the cosmopolitan cultures he calls “maritime” over against the more ingrown “continental” ones. Toynbee’s method of tracing connections among great “civilizations,” while not intended to yield world history, in effect does so. Other significant studies could be named. But there are some approaches that can be labeled blind alleys. Some have tried to list the most prominent national events side by side chronologically, and then deduce interregional patterns; this naturally does not succeed. One anthropologist, Kroeber, seems to have assumed in an early work that any world history must exhibit an independent parallelism of development in various regions, and used statistics to show that such does not appear. (But his statistics, in fact, suggest a striking amount of parallelism if it need not be supposed to be independent.) Whatever one’s general orientation to world history, however, the monographic problems will be similar. These world-historical problems require treatment independently, over and beyond the treatment they may incidentally receive by specialists in this or that region. Interregional history deserves attention upon its own merits. There must be more studies of “influences,” of course, and generally of relationships among cultures. But these will not fully serve the purpose so long as they are limited in outlook to only one region— e.g., how has India influenced Europe? Yet regarded from a world viewpoint, even these limited studies will have a place among the innumerable studies of every sort that must arise in tracing interregional affairs. For many of all these will be pursued within a very local field; only the purpose which informs the inquiry will be world-historical. What matters is that this purpose emerges with clarity. To this end, scholarship in interregional history must become more aware of its special problems and outlook.

T H E P R O B L E M O F W O R L D O R I E N TAT I O N

Having indicated thus briefly the position of Hemispheric interregional history, I must turn even more briefly to certain obstacles in our way. Before any adequate sort of organization of the historical material can be found, we must accustom ourselves to seeing the world as a whole from a more interregional view point. This is in some ways a psychological rather than a historical problem. Our attempts at a world-wide perspective are too often subtly vitiated by habitual distortions in our ideas of mankind dating from

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the days of Western world dominance. In Western thinking— and this thinking still dominates too greatly other parts of the world as well—the West was the center of the world; and the world at large was to be regarded, historically most especially, in the light of its effect upon and contributions to the modern West. Is not the world now Westernized?—we have justified ourselves; not noticing that (even if this were true) there is a great difference of historical structure and perspective between even such a world and the West itself. All too often men of other regions also have tacitly accepted the Western criterion, trying to show the supremacy of their own region by showing how much it helped to form, or is worthy to alter, the West. Such an explicit orientation is now being sloughed off; but it has left innumerable traces in our thinking which do not disappear so easily. A peculiarly important example of the results of this attitude is the concept of “the Orient.” The word has meant many things; as used by historians it has come to mean, if taken generally, all those urbanized and literate countries of the Eastern Hemisphere, whether south or east of Europe, which were eventually subjected in various degrees to the West-European expansion after 1500. There is no internal point of unity among these peoples, apart from their relation to Europe, which they do not share as much with Europe itself as among one another; the term is therefore a negative one, like “foreign”; it has meaning only in a common contrast to the triumphant West. Yet repeatedly it is taken to have a substantive content. One hears not only general remarks about the “Oriental” character, bred of the same ignorance in the West as similar general remarks about “foreigners.” One hears mention of “Oriental” philosophy, or art, or even race. Such mentions, in practice, usually refer to some particular region, rather than the formless conglomerate that would result from an attempt to lump the greater part of civilized man together in a single cultural pattern. But the more inclusive expectations they foster are nevertheless often taken seriously— often even by “Orientals” themselves; it is not rare for a native of Egypt or some equally Mediterranean country to take the credit for the best lives of India on the one hand and China or Japan on the other over three thousand years, as proof of “Oriental” superiority over the materialistic modern West. The root fallacy is to take “Orient” and “Occident” for two equal halves of the world. A Mercator projection map of the world, which frankly exaggerates the Western countries in comparison to more southerly lands like India, may encourage this. (One wonders how much less tenacious the conception would be if mapmakers could be persuaded to drop that mischievous projection altogether!) But the new global maps, as well as the briefest study of linguistic and historical variation, will remind us that the West is historically simply one among several regions in the Eastern Hemisphere, each of the same order as itself in size, populousness, and cultural wealth. The elimination of catch-all categories like “Orient”— and the very similar “Asia”— will automatically rid us of many absurdities in daily conversation (at least in the United States). For instance, that one or another gathering is truly world-wide because it has members from “all the continents”— so many from North America, so many from

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South America, so many from Europe, a couple from Africa, and even one or two from “Asia.” Or the fatuous remark of a popular “world” historian, that Europe progressed and “Asia” did not, because Europe’s rivers flowed from the heart of the continent out to the sea, whereas “Asia” had no such rivers. The Narbadda is roughly as long as the Rhine, and the Ganges as the Danube, and waters lands as diverse. But even in serious history such absurdities take their toll. It is very hard to persuade a historian of “world literature” that it is misleading to give a chapter to each of the little literatures of Europe, and then one chapter to that of “India”— as if he shared the supposition so often found among the uninformed that one should learn “Indian” before going to live there. If it is worthwhile treating world literature at all, then Tamil and Bengali and Maratha should have chapters as distinct from Sanskrit as are the Italian and German from the Latin; if this should show up a cultural poverty in Bengali or Maratha, that would already be a point gained. But in any case, for the purposes of comparison and of perspective, it would reflect the position of India as an understandably complex sub-continent—not as one incomprehensibly vast “country” in “Asia” roughly answering to Italy in the more comprehensible Europe. Throughout the serious work of scholars we find “international” affairs in Europe treated as matters of world import, while relations between parts of Africa or even between India and China come under the head of regional studies; a war among Western powers is a “world” war, while one between China and Japan is “localized”; a new language based on all European tongues claims to be a “world” language, while a threatened alliance of Russia, China, and India could be referred to as merely an “Asian bloc.” However in the current situation each such instance might be justified in itself, together they reflect a pattern of thinking which makes constructive interregional history very difficult for us; and particularly just that interregional history which I am suggesting is crucial to world history— that of the literate zone of the Eastern Hemisphere. For we are psychologically still not very distant from the times in which the Greco-Persian wars and the Crusades could be regarded as episodes in an unending struggle between East and West as two halves of mankind. These unfortunate habits of thinking, not challenged as they would have been by a balanced world history, have so multifariously woven themselves into scholarly thinking that their uprooting is an important prerequisite to the writing of world history itself. Otherwise, the very categories necessary to interregional inquiry will escape us, and the “vast mass” of Africa and Asia must remain “inscrutable.”

T H E W E S T WA R D D I S T O R T I O N O F H I S T O R Y

Finally, I shall turn to an illustration of how important a more explicit cultivation of interregional history can be to our historical understanding generally. For a particular historical form of this Westward distortion of our view of mankind has tended to

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vitiate most of our popular conceptions of general history. The most significant error Westerners have made lies not in ascribing to themselves too much glory or virtue in any particular comparisons with other peoples. More dangerous has been the West’s practice of reading the very structure of history in a distorted fashion, for this has been carried over unconsciously even by non-Westerners. I will review briefly some of the more unfortunate systematic errors which our lack of an adequate framework of interregional history has led us into. True to the principle of judging all the world by its effect on the West, Western history used to set about tracing civilization from its earliest times in Egypt and Babylon only up to a point— only so long as these lands remained the nearest direct antecedents of the modern West. We ceased tracing civilization in those countries almost as soon as Greece and Rome came to have a literate history, concentrating on each of them, in turn; ignoring each time any further history in the lands farther east (except when forced to pay attention, by their role in a more westerly story). So soon as northwestern Europe came to have an independent story, all lands east of the Adriatic dropped from sight, and the very words we used suggested that henceforth the West was the world. Something like this might have been legitimate if done consciously; but generally no recognition was made that the focus of our vision had been shifted in the process. The whole story commonly ran as if (as Westerners have indeed actually believed) civilization itself had been moving steadily west. From this false impression of the story’s continuity arose a number of illusions, which continue to have their effects after the grosser aspects of the above process have been abandoned. First, it came to be supposed that after the early years the more eastern nations had in fact little significant history. This impression was early extended from Egypt and Iraq to other lands; reinforced by a number of accidents, including the habits of Indians and Chinese of glorifying, and exaggerating, the antiquity of their institutions. A variant of the same notion, encouraged by the rapid rate of change in the modern West, and by illusions of distance, was that of the static, changeless East. Second, a different and more persistent illusion produced by the pattern was that of a certain historical discontinuity—recurrent degeneration, followed by a new start. Not that such degeneration has never in fact happened; but in the westward historical pattern the contrast between one age and another was confused and compounded with that between places, as our attention moved west. This occurred especially when the focus was shifted from the Mediterranean Roman Empire, in which Rome was a western outpost from the cultural and even economic point of view, to the Latin Christendom of the Western Middle Ages, in which Rome was a southeastern outpost on the very edge of Greek and Muslim territory. A relative decline intervened in the Imperial lands between the age of the Antonines and that of Justinian and the Hagia Sophia; the shift of attention meanwhile from the seaways of the Mediterranean to the forests of Germany and Gaul magnified this decline into the fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Age of civilization!

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P E R VA S I V E R E S U LT S O F T H E D I S T O R T I O N

The grosser misconceptions which have accompanied the Westward pattern of history are now being done away with; we are now less inclined to judge the fate of Greek culture by its eclipse in Merovingian Gaul. But the illusions which it fostered were a strong influence making possible the nineteenth-century theories of history which still tend to hold sway. The idea of inevitable and triumphant progress probably owes something to the practice of watching only those nations, as civilization spread, which were just taking on its graces: a partly borrowed progress always seems fast. Those conceptions of history which reduce it to stages or cycles owe far more to these illusions. The famous fall of the Roman Empire seems to be the kernel from which such conceptions have grown. Spengler decried a West-centered history, yet accepted the limitations imposed by the Westward pattern, allowing no history to India or China in the last two millennia. Toynbee is anxious to recognize the continuing evolution of the non-Western nations; yet he seems to have used the “Fall of Rome” as his starting point, and hence involved himself in a system of distinct societies, definitively rising and falling, which naturally bristles with fundamental anomalies. Thus the distortion has infected his work, even though he guarded explicitly against the illusion of the “static East,” as well as escaping the imposing list of those whose data suffers a displacement in space which they treat as if it were a change merely in time. Perhaps a more significant evidence of the pervasive effect of the Westward distortion in what we have called world history, is its effect upon so great a historical analysis as the Marxist. Like others, the Marxists have envisaged stages of evolution, appearing in a predictable order. Thus the slavery “stage” of the Roman Empire must be followed by the manorial serfdom “stage” of Carolingian Gaul. But the picture becomes awkwardly complicated if the Syrian or Anatolian provinces are focused on, rather than Gaul: for the Abbasid and Byzantine societies represent alternative sequels to the Roman. Accordingly, as the historical vision of Victorian Europe has widened, Marxism has been faced with the need to patch up its theory, and possibly to revise it thoroughly, allowing for more varied elements in and outcomes of the dialectical process; it is my impression Marxists have not yet adequately met the problem. It will be noticed that even our conception of the West in particular has suffered—it has been a rather dubious practice to eke out early Western history with excised portions from the development of certain more easterly lands such as Greece. More important from the present point of view, a Western history which has tried to make itself selfsufficient in this way gives a false estimate of the role of the West in the world— both passive and active. But one of the greatest tasks of world history is surely precisely to clarify the role of the West in the world. This is doubly true with regard to the literate zone of the Eastern Hemisphere. Some will have the impression that in advocating an interregional history of this zone, I am advocating not world-oriented history, but just Oriental history. Not quite: a history of “Asia” without Europe could conceivably resemble

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a history of Western art or letters without France. (Yet I will confess that just as a history of Europe without France would better deserve the name of European history than one of France without Europe, so a history of “Asia” without the West could be more readily called a world history, than the reverse.) The point is that from a world-historical point of view, what is important is not European history in itself, however important that be for us all, but its role in interregional history. This role has latterly been momentous; but our very concentration on internal Western history has commonly obscured our view of the West as one dynamic region among others in the wider world. The problem of reorienting ourselves to a more interregional viewpoint, then, is psychologically far-reaching, and must be solved along with that of organizing the historical material. The problem of reorientation is precisely the greatest in the case of the hemispheric history that I recommend as a major avenue to world history. But this fact only emphasizes the central importance of such history in the building of a world-historical approach free from Westward distortions. The interregional history of the Eastern Hemisphere is one of the most important to which young historians with a reasonable linguistic equipment can contribute their monographs and their vision.

TH E R I S E O F TH E W E S T A F T E R T W E N T Y- F I V E Y E A R S William H. McNeill

Historians approach their subject from the moving platform of their own times, with the result that the past changes shape continually. Anyone who lives to reread his own work long afterwards must therefore expect to recognize signs and hallmarks of the inevitable displacement that time brings to historical understanding. This truism was brought home to me by a seminar devoted to my magnum opus, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, at Williams College, where I was visiting professor in 1988. It was the first time I had read the book in twenty-five years, and the experience of revisiting an old friend— and incubus1— both humbling and elevating. The book was a sudden, surprising success when it came out in 1963. Lavish praise from Hugh Trevor-Roper in the New York Times Book Review and the onset of the Christmas season briefly lifted it to the bestseller list; the book has remained in print ever since. A cheap paperback ($1.25 for 828 pages!) sold out of an initial printing within a year, and cumulative sales of the full-sized book amount by now to more than 75,000. In retrospect it seems obvious that The Rise of the West should be seen as an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States. Its scope and conception is a form of intellectual imperialism, for it takes on the world as a whole, and it tries to This selection is an edited version of the original publication. William H. McNeill’s “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years” was originally published in Journal of World History 1, 1 (1998): 1–21. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press.

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understand global history on the basis of cultural diffusion developed among American anthropologists in the 1930s. In particular, The Rise of the West is built on the notion that the principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills. A corollary of this proposition is that centers of high skill (i.e., civilizations) tend to upset their neighbors by exposing them to attractive novelties. Less-skilled peoples round about are then impelled to try to make those novelties their own so as to attain for themselves the wealth, power, truth, and beauty that civilized skills confer on their possessors. Yet such efforts provoke a painful ambivalence between the drive to imitate and an equally fervent desire to preserve the customs and institutions that distinguish the would-be borrowers from the corruptions and injustices that also inhere in civilized life. A second corollary of the proposition that contact with strangers is the major motor of social change is that contacts among contemporaneous civilizations ought to be of key concern to a world historian, for such contacts can be expected to alter the assortment and expression of high skills each civilization possesses, and they thereby affect the local skill-diffusion pattern described above. Moreover, whenever one civilization, through some apparent superiority of its skills, becomes able to influence everyone with whom it comes in contact, then the grain of world history begins to run in a single direction, so to speak; and so by observing the reception of new skills and ideas in distant parts a historian can give shape and meaning to the confusion of detail that otherwise makes world history— quite literally—inconceivable. In part and parcel the years 1954 to 1963, when the book was being written, the United States was, of course, passing through the apex of its post-war capacity to influence others thanks to its superior skills and wealth. It follows that my vision of the world’s past can be dismissed as being no more than a rationalization of American hegemony, retrojecting the situation of post–World War II decades upon the whole of the world’s past by claiming that analogous patterns of cultural dominance and diffusion had existed always. (Of course the obvious rebuttal is to point out that the post–World War II era was of world history, and conformed to precedent in a way Americans were not aware of at the time.) No historian can deny that his views of the past reflect experiences of his own time, interacting with a tradition of learning that, in turn, bears all the marks of the times and places in which it grew. But I can at least say this: when I was writing the book I was entirely unaware of the way in which my method of making sense of world history conformed to the temporary world experience of the United States. In retrospect, it seems the warmth with which the book was received in the early 1960s did arise from this congruence in large part. But if so neither I nor the reviewers noticed it at the time. The hand-in-glove fit between my review of the whole of human history and the temporary world role played by the United States therefore operated, if it operated at all, entirely at a subconscious level for all concerned. In view of the way historiography has moved in the intervening twenty-five years,

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a second reproach against my way of viewing the past seems even more obvious. The Rise of the West tends to march with big battalions, looking at history from the point of view of the winners—that is, of the skilled and privileged managers of society— and shows scant concern for the sufferings of the victims of historical change. This no doubt reflects personal idiosyncrasies—family, ethnic, class, and other identities and experiences—that led me to value the fruits of humankind’s accumulated capacity to control the natural and social environment and shape it to our wishes. Profiting from such skills, as everyone constantly does, including the poorest populations alive today, we must, I think, admire those who pioneered the enterprise and treat the human adventure on earth as an amazing success story, despite all the suffering entailed. The obvious ideal is a judicious balance in assessing the gains and losses inherent in each new human attainment. I did of course try to strike such a balance, but what seemed like a just balance to me is liable to strike others as a shabby sort of apologetics for those at the top (adult males) who ran things in each of the world’s great civilizations. These general considerations scarcely came up in the Williams seminar. Instead, by struggling through a chapter a week, variations in the quality of different chapters became rather painfully obvious. The low point came with chapter 4, entitled “The Rise of Cosmopolitan Civilization in the Middle East, 1700– 500 B.C.” After a brief introduction, this chapter undertakes to describe the military-political changes, administrative systems, social structure, and cultural conservation and advance across the twelve centuries and amongst the dozens of peoples and scores of states concerned. The result is labored and fragmented, more confusing than illuminating, even for a persevering, patient reader. Chapter 4 made the fundamental mistake of abandoning a chronological for a topical ordering of the material at the wrong place. It lumped together two eras that ought to have been considered seriatim: the bronze age of chariot warriors and aristocratic rule on the one hand, and the iron age of democratized warriors and culture on the other. There is no excuse for this clumsiness. New data has not much altered what is knowable since I wrote. Nor has any sort of contemporary experience since 1963 altered sensibilities toward the emergent cosmopolitanism of the ancient Middle East. It is a plain case of defective organization, cutting against the grain of things and thereby disguising a simpler, truer, and more adequate way of understanding the history in question. Moreover, the notion of successive bronze and iron ages was completely familiar in the existing literature; and in retrospect, I can not imagine why I did not use that ordering to put the chapter together. Another deficiency helped to spoil the architectonic of this chapter— a deficiency, which I shall argue, was also apparent in the later parts of the book. For The Rise of the West assumes that separate civilizations form real and important human groupings and that their interactions constitute the main theme of world history. But in this chapter I had to deal with the merging together of what had once been separate civilizations into a new cosmopolitanism that extended throughout the Middle East without erasing

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local differences. Those differences were very considerable, for after 2500 B.C., a cluster of interstitial and satellite societies, each possessing all the hallmarks of civilization, had arisen on the rain-watered lands around and between the floodplains of Egypt and Mesopotamia. As a result, as long as I thought mainly in terms of separate civilizations, the historical stage became excessively crowded. Not surprisingly, the fragmented, choppy character of this chapter arose from an effort to say something about how each culturally distinct people expressed or exemplified each of the themes I had chosen to emphasize. Firmer focus on the cosmopolitan process itself was called for. I needed to think more carefully about the new sorts of activities that were binding the peoples of the Middle East together, and I should have highlighted these more clearly. But that required new assumptions and concepts that I lacked at the time and have only haltingly explored subsequently. A second, less embarrassing but more important failure occurred in chapter 10, which treats world affairs between A.D. 1000 and 1500. In this case, new scholarship since 1963 has pointed the way to a firmer and better understanding of what was going on in the Eurasian world, and it is therefore obvious why I missed the centrality of China and Chinese civilization in these centuries. Instead I concentrated on “The Steppe Conquerors and the European Far West,” to quote the title of the chapter. My mistake is therefore entirely forgivable. All the same, it is clear in retrospect how emphasis on steppe conquerors and the rise of medieval Europe reflected the bias of my education. For the chapter looks at Eurasia from a naïvely western viewpoint. Turks and Mongols come galloping over the horizon from the east— suddenly, and, so to speak, mysteriously, though I did note the system of bureaucratic management that made Genghis Khan’s armies so formidable. Nonetheless, I failed to connect the remarkable upsurge of nomad power with the fact that the new bureaucratic methods of military administration that the Mongols employed were a straightforward borrowing from Chinese practice. As a result, I overlooked the ultimate disturber of world balances in the era itself: that is, an efflorescence of Chinese civilization that raised China’s culture, wealth, and power to a new level, far outstripping all the rest of the world for a period of four to five centuries. Moreover, I gave undue attention to Latin Christendom, being eager to search out seeds and portents of Europe’s rise to world leadership after 1500. That is legitimate enough, but it would be better located as a preface to the next chapter. The scholarship in the 1950s ought to have allowed me to see that, despite its vigorous new growth, western European civilization remained marginal to the ecumene and should have been given the same emphasis that I gave to the maturation of Japanese civilization in those same centuries. Instead, I treated Turkish and Mongol conquests and the rise of medieval Europe as of coordinate importance for world affairs. I even relegated China to second place among the civilized victims of nomad assault, treating the transformation of the Muslim world first and at greater length, largely because I knew more about it.

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In retrospect it is fascinating to see how some of the material for a proper appreciation of Chinese primacy between A.D. 1000 and 1500 was available to me before 1963. In particular, I used Stefan Balazs’s articles on the economic transformation of China in Tang times,2 and I had seen the first volumes of Joseph Needham’s monumental study of Science and Civilization in China as well. But until Robert Hartwell showed the scale of ferrous metallurgy and the sophistication of economic management under the Song,3 until Yoshinobu Shiba provided a portrait of the Song commercial economy as a whole,4 and until Mark Elvin set forth a bold and speculative interpretation of the entire Chinese past,5 the meaning of China’s transformation about the year A.D. 1000 quite escaped me. My excuse is that the historiography available a generation ago still reflected the traditional valuations of China’s past, so that a regime unable to control the northernmost provinces of historic China was, by definition, inferior to those ages when China was intact and united under a properly virtuous emperor. Since the Song dynasty (A.D. 960–1279) never controlled the northern barbarians and lost China’s northernmost provinces to them almost from the start, it followed that their era was not one of China’s great periods, even though it had long been recognized that art and literature bloomed under the Song as never before. But that did not compensate for political failure; and no one before Jacques Gernet6 seems to have noticed how the ill-success that attended the Song armies on the steppe frontier arose from the fact that Chinese skills were spreading beyond the country’s traditional borders, upsetting previous balances between China and its nomad neighbors and, as Ghengis Khan’s career soon showed, throughout most of Eurasia as well. In view of the way The Rise of the West is put together, my failure to understand China’s primacy between A.D. 1000 and 1500 is particularly regrettable inasmuch as the book would have attained an elegant simplicity of structure if I had done so. As matters stand, the middle part of the book, entitled “Eurasian Cultural Balance, 500 B.C. to 1500 A.D.,” is built around the idea that Mediterranean Hellenism (500 B.C.–A.D. 200), India (A.D. 200–600), and a reintegrated Middle East under the Muslims (A.D. 600–1000) entered upon successive periods of cultural flowering that assured each of them a period of primacy among the peoples of the old world. To follow that simple structuring of the past with a Chinese far eastern (1000–1500) and a European far western (1500–2000?) efflorescence and era of ecumenical primacy has a tidiness and precision that the facts seem to sustain,7 but my ignorance (and residual Eurocentrism) hid this from me in 1963. This, indeed, is the central failure of the book. Of course there are many other passages where scholarship since 1963 makes the text obsolete, but these are almost always matters of detail. An exception is Africa, where the scholarship of the past twenty-five years has revealed a far more complex interplay of peoples and cultures than was accessible when I wrote The Rise of the West. Yet sub-Saharan Africa never became the seat of a major civilization, and the continent therefore remained peripheral to the rest of the

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world, down to and including our own age. Hence while the brief passages touching on African history are now antiquated and inadequate, the defect does not distort the overall picture of the past as much as the failure in chapter 10 to recognize China’s era of world leadership. In general, the assumption that reaction to contacts with strangers was the major motor of historical change still seems good to me, and the choices of what to emphasize, which derived from that assumption, still strike me as sound, with the exception of the failure to give China its due between 1000 and 1500. In that sense, therefore, revisiting The Rise of the West was an elevating, even exhilarating, experience. For all its defects, it is still a good book, and deserves to count as an important way station in the development of a more genuinely global historiography. Yet on another level, it seems to me now that the book is flawed simply because it assumes that discernibly separate civilizations were the autonomous social entities whose interactions defined history on a global scale. Just what the term “civilization” really means is left fuzzy, though I followed V. Gordon Childe8 and others in equating civilization with a society in which occupational specialization allowed the emergence of high skills— administrative, military, artisanal, literary, and artistic. That may be adequate to distinguish early civilizations from neolithic village societies, but it does not say much about geographical and social boundaries in subsequent eras when a multiplicity of civilizations arose, and when at least part-time occupational specialization extended very widely among peoples supplying raw materials to distant civilized consumers, yet who can scarcely be described as civilized in their own right. This raises the question of who really belongs to a civilization. Newborn infants clearly do not earn membership until they learn their cultural roles. But what about the poor and unskilled, whose roles are limited at best? And what about those living at a distance, subjected, perhaps, to a superior force— at least occasionally—but otherwise alien? And how do all the different skills and habits and outlooks of sharers in a civilization fit together into a more or less coherent whole? I fell back on the expression “style of life” in affirming the reality of that cohesion. But this metaphor, borrowed from art history, is only a metaphor and is all but useless in actual practice, since stylistic affinities are not nearly as easy to observe when one is comparing human habits and states of mind as when one is looking at works of art or other material objects. Perhaps a historian is not required to face these questions explicitly. If one insists on precise definitions of terms, discourse at once degenerates into epistemological debate, and is never likely to emerge from that labyrinth. Suffice it to say, therefore, that civilizations do seem real to me, and have in fact united many millions of human beings across millions of square miles and many centuries in significant ways. But they are not the only actors on a world historical scale; this I failed to emphasize sufficiently in The Rise of the West. Let me try to explain more fully my current view. A shared literary canon, and expectations about human behavior framed by that canon, are probably central to what we mean by a civilization. But it is unheard of for all

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to have access to such a canon. An upper class, educated to revere a body of literature that sets forth rules about how human beings should behave, is what in practice therefore delimits a civilization. The less privileged share such ideas in varying degrees, and no one fully embodies them—not even the holiest moral athlete. Conventional expectations allow for both individual and group shortcomings, while the lower classes and peripheral members of the society adjust and adapt their own, more local, moral codes and customary practices to make room for the ways of the upper class— deferring and obeying where they must, reserving zones of privacy and difference where they can. But to keep a civilization together, there must also be a continual circulation of news and nuances of meaning, moving from city to city, region to region, and among diverse social classes and ethnic groups that make up the body social. Continual circulation of such messages is required to maintain sufficient cohesion across space and time to count as a single whole— a single civilization. Clearly there are degrees of cohesion, and shared characteristics shade off as one moves toward the frontier. Drawing precise boundaries on a map is nearly always arbitrary, but cultural slopes do exist, and when they become precipitous, the geographical limit to a given style of life may, indeed, become apparent enough for all practical purposes. Obviously, modes of transport and communication are crucial for the circulation of messages within an established civilization; as they change, the boundaries and reach of the civilization will alter. This assumes a new dimension when, with the improvement of communication, diverse civilizations begin to impinge on one another more and more often and in increasingly urgent ways, since under these circumstances the autonomy and independence of the separate civilizations begin to shrink, and a new cosmopolitan entity—what Wallerstein calls a world system9 —may start to take over as the key factor in further historical development. This process is what I handled so clumsily in chapter 4 and omitted almost entirely when treating the millennia of the Christian era until after 1850. Thus, in addition to the problems in chapter 4, the central methodological weakness of my book is that while it emphasizes interaction across civilizational boundaries, it pays inadequate attention to the emergence of the ecumenical world system within which we live today. Instead of organizing the book solely around the notion of a series of efflorescences, first in one, then in another separate civilization, I should have made room for the ecumenical process. How this might be done remains to be seen. Somehow an appreciation of the autonomy of separate civilizations (and of all the other less massive and less skilled cultures of the earth) across the past two thousand years needs to be combined with the portrait of an emerging world system, connecting greater and greater numbers of persons across civilized boundaries. To make this a feasible enterprise, one needs a clear and distinct idea of the emergent world system as manifested first in the ancient Middle East and a second time in the modern world, and then one must reflect on how these two systems intersected with the more local civilizational and cultural landscapes they impinged upon. It does not

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follow that the two world systems were the same. Clearly, insofar as each depended on an expanding network of transport and communications, the technical base differed very markedly. And since each world system somehow arose out of political, military, and economic behavior, it is worth remembering that the institutional heritage of the second and first millennia B.C. were very different from those of the first and second millennia A.D. If one thinks of the world since about 1870, when instantaneous communications and mechanically powered transport started to manifest their influence on a global basis, it is obvious that the modern world system rests on economic complementarities and exchanges in the first place, and secondarily on institutional arrangements— military-political primarily— and on flows of ideas, skills, and tastes that follow in the wake of changed economic and political behavior. One may, perhaps, assume that a similar primacy for economic exchanges existed also in earlier times all the way back to the earliest beginnings of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, even though, for a long time, such exchanges were marginal in the sense of being confined to strategic and luxury items. It could scarcely be otherwise, since as long as transport was sporadic and subject to frequent interruptions, people could not safely depend on goods from afar to supply daily needs. As long as each civilization was thus surrounded by a network of suppliers who depended on sailing ships and animal caravans to carry rarities from where they were produced to where they were consumed, the notion of separate, autonomous civilizations provides an adequate model for historical understanding. Techniques and ideas were exchanged along with goods, of course, and from time to time barbarians from the periphery conquered civilized centers, since mistrust between rulers and ruled tended to counteract the superiority of numbers on which civilized peoples could always count. In the ancient Middle East, the resulting interactions among peoples living in different landscapes, with diverse languages and other outward signs of civilized diversity, led to the emergence of a cosmopolitan world system between 1700 and 500 B.C. Unlike the world system of recent centuries, in the ancient Middle East the primacy of command was preserved within ever-widening boundaries of a succession of great empires—Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian. But the tax and tribute collecting bureaucracies that sustained these empires worked in symbiosis with caravan and shipping networks that antedated the political empires and whose zones of activity always extended beyond even the most far-flung political frontiers. Thus merchants flourished and sometimes even grew great in the cracks and crannies left by the rent and tax systems, supplying wants, old and new, and making a profit on market sales. The result could be counted as a territorially enlarged version of the sort of separate civilization from which the evolution started. This is what I did in The Rise of the West. Yet that way of thinking overlooks the continued diversity of religions, languages, and moral systems that long survived the rise of new empires, and it minimizes the economic role of markets and of long-distance trade in holding the ancient Middle East

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together while connecting it with an ever-widening and politically independent periphery. Market relations, insofar as they arose from uncoerced human choices, differed in a simple but important fashion from the older way of concentrating resources by rent and tax collection. People are more likely to work efficiently when they do so willingly. As a result, when they can buy and sell things at their own discretion, and satisfy at least some of their wants by doing so, the result is likely to be a general increase in wealth. This, it seems to me, was beginning to be discovered in the second millennium B.C. and became normal and expected in course of the next millennium, at least in the principal theater for this dawning of a commercially based world system, that is, in the increasingly cosmopolitan Middle East. This is all adumbrated in The Rise of the West but not pursued. For example, I used the phrase “the great society” to refer to the way trade and markets entered into symbiosis with taxes and rents in Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia; but this idea was not used to organize the history of subsequent centuries, and simply disappeared from the rest of the book. Being too much preoccupied by the notion of civilization, I bungled by not giving the initial emergence of a trans-civilizational process the sustained emphasis it deserved. There is a sense, indeed, in which the rise of civilizations in the Aegean (later Mediterranean) coastlands and in India after 1500 B.C. were and remained part of the emerging world system centered in the Middle East. Historians have always known that archaic Greeks borrowed wholesale from the more skilled peoples of Asia and Egypt. Something similar occurred also in northern India. All three regions and their peoples remained in close and uninterrupted contact throughout the classical era; and in due course Alexander’s armies overthrew the Persians and made Macedonians and Greeks into the rulers of the Middle East. Why, therefore, should the Greeks not be counted as one of the family of nations taking part in a common and increasingly cosmopolitan enterprise? No doubt the traditional answer to this question rests very largely on what happened later, and reflects the historic antagonism between Christendom and Islam, and between Hindu India and Muslim rulers of that land—though in these subsequent ages, commercial and other relations across disputed cultural and religious frontiers always remained lively and tended to increase as time went on. At any rate, without any real reflection about the choice, I conformed to precedent by organizing the history of western Eurasia in the first millennium B.C. around three separate and distinct civilizations: Middle Eastern, Indian, and Greek. Yet what happened might just as well have been described as the expansion of the Middle Eastern “great society ” to embrace new regions and fresh peoples, with variable cultural characteristics of their own. From this ecumenical point of view, even distant China began to tie into the system after 100 B.C., when caravans connecting Syria with China began to travel regularly along the so-called Silk Road. Moreover, sea voyaging supplemented caravans, linking the Mediterranean world with India, and India with China at about the same time.

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This ancient world system met serious setback after only two to three centuries of expansion, owing mainly to the way lethal diseases spread along the new trade routes and provoked catastrophic losses of life, especially in the Roman and Chinese empires. Demographic decay invited or allowed barbarian invasion and the resulting onset of the dark ages of European history. Similar though perhaps less destructive disruption also took place in China after the overthrow of the Han dynasty in A.D. 220. Longdistance trade across Eurasia thereupon dwindled toward insignificance due to the impoverishment and political insecurity that came to prevail at the two extremities of the ecumene. On the other hand, seafaring in the Indian Ocean and adjacent waters probably underwent no comparable decline, although information is so painfully scant that one cannot be sure. Despite the dark ages, and the disruption of the earliest world system that ensued, revival soon became apparent, and in much the same way that long-range contacts revived in the Middle East after iron age barbarian invasions had disrupted the incipient cosmopolitanism of the bronze age. Moreover, when revival got underway, the Middle East, was, as before, the center; and it was helped by the fact that the domestication of camels had begun to put improved transport at the disposal of warriors and merchants alike. According to Richard Bulliet,10 domestication of camels was a long, drawn-out process, beginning in southern Arabia, perhaps as early as 3000 B.C., but it attained decisive importance for the civilized world only between A.D. 300 and 500. During those centuries, camels displaced wheeled vehicles for transport purposes in the Middle East, and soon became the principal goods carriers in central Asia, north Africa, and adjacent regions as well. Camels could cross deserts that were otherwise impenetrable. The geographical and cultural effect was analogous, on land, to the far better known opening of the oceans by European seamen after 1500. Places previously isolated now became accessible to camel caravans, and the reach of civilized trade nets extended accordingly. Arabia together with the oases and deserts of central Asia, the steppe-lands to their north, and subSaharan Africa were the regions most powerfully affected by this upgrading of caravan transport. They were all brought into far more intimate contact with the established centers of civilized life—primarily with the Middle East and with China— than had been possible before. As a result, between about A.D. 500 and 1000 an intensified ecumenical world system began to nibble away at cultural autonomy— a process registered more sensibly than in any other fashion by the spread of Islam into the newly opened marginal regions of the old world. Indeed the rise of Islam and the revival of a world system reaching across civilizational and other cultural boundaries went hand in hand, and perhaps should be thought of as two aspects of the same process. Assuredly, in the first Muslim centuries, the community of the faithful subscribing to Muhammad’s revelation was only one among a number of other religious communities that coexisted in the Middle East and adjacent regions. Religious and cultural pluralism was in fact institutionalized by the prescrip-

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tions of the Koran requiring Muslims to tolerate Christians and Jews. The civilization of the Islamic heartland therefore became a mosaic in which separate religious communities managed their own affairs within remarkably broad limits. Conquest and conversions after A.D. 1000, that carried Islam into India, southeast Asia, and across most of the Eurasian steppes, as well as into southeast Europe and a large part of sub-Saharan Africa, added far greater variety to this mosaic. Only at the extremes of the civilized world, in China, Japan, and northern and western Europe, did more old-fashioned social and cultural homogeneity prevail. Persistent cultural pluralism within the realm of Islam was matched by the special restraints on political authority that Islamic law imposed. This meant greater autonomy for trade and market behavior than had been common in pre-Islamic times. Merchant communities were seldom completely self-governing in the Muslim scheme of things; but they were respected and could usually count on protection from Muslim political authorities. After all, Muhammad had been a merchant before he became a prophet; and no higher endorsement of the mercantile mode of life could be imagined. The next landmark in the history of this rising commercial world system arose out of Chinese borrowings from the Middle East, operating in a different natural environment and making use of a new and more efficient transport system. What the Chinese borrowed from the Middle Easterners was the array of customs, practices, and moral attitudes that sustained local and long distance trade nets. Buddhism, reaching China along the trade routes of central Asia, served as the main transfer agent, implanting habits of mind and moral rules that accorded well with life as a trader. (Confucianism, by comparison, remained disdainful of commerce, viewing merchants as social parasites, who made a living by buying cheap and selling dear, without adding anything to the goods they handled.) But what gave special importance to the spread of commercial habits and outlook to China was the fact that a canal network already existed, connecting the valley of the Yellow River with the even more extensive valley of the Yangtze. Barges and canal boats could easily move to and fro on those canals, and with almost complete safety, while carrying comparatively enormous loads. China’s canals had been constructed for agricultural and tax collecting purposes across many centuries. Then in A.D. 605, when the Grand Canal linking the two great river basins was completed, China’s network of internal waterways became capable of connecting regions with contrasting and complementary resources. As a result, the scale and importance of trade and commerce could escalate within China far beyond anything possible in the Middle East or elsewhere. Old ceilings on interdependence and regional exchange were broken through. A new range for the market integration of human effort came on stream, whereby ordinary people, even poor villagers, could safely depend on buying and selling to pay their taxes and even to provide themselves with food and other items of everyday consumption. Medievalists have long recognized the importance for Europe of the rise of towns after about A.D. 1000 and the role of the spice trade that tied European consumers with

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producers in islands of the distant Indies. But historians have not yet gotten used to the idea that this was only part of a larger phenomenon—the expansion and intensification of an emergent world system that now embraced almost all of Eurasia and much of Africa as well. Nor have European and Islamic historians yet realized that the rise of medieval European civilization after A.D. 1000 coincided with an eastward shift of the world system’s center from the Middle East to China. That is not surprising. Given the past preoccupation of our medievalists with the national histories of England and France—implicitly retrojecting upon the entire human past the circumstances of the late nineteenth century, when the French and British empires did cover most of the globe—it requires a real leap of the imagination to recognize China’s primacy, Marco Polo to the contrary notwithstanding. The next great chapter in the rise of the modern world system is, of course, far more familiar, and indeed, the scholar who made the phrase famous, Immanuel Wallerstein, once believed that it only began in about 1500 with the European oceanic discoveries and the rise of capitalism. The discoveries certainly did change the pattern of world trade and world cultural relations, bringing the Americas and innumerable oceanic islands into the vortex of the expanding world system. Within surprisingly few decades, the most active center of innovative activity shifted from China to the Atlantic face of Europe. Before 1500, capitalists achieved remarkable autonomy within the walls of a few Italian and north European city-states; and even after that political framework decayed, some few of the new monarchies and emergent national states that supplanted urban sovereignties in Europe continued to give merchants and bankers almost unhampered scope for expansion of market activity, whereas in China, and also in most of the Muslim world, regimes unsympathetic to private capitalist accumulation prevailed. In the name of good government, Asian rulers effectively checked the rise of large-scale entrepreneurship by confiscatory taxation on the one hand, and by regulation of prices in the interest of consumers on the other. This left large-scale commercial enterprise, and presently also mining and plantation agriculture, more and more to the Europeans. Consequently, the rise of the west to its world hegemony of recent centuries got underway. Scholarly investigation of what happened in China and why the Ming dynasty chose to abandon overseas ventures after the 1430s remain very slender by comparison with the abundant literature on European exploitation of the new worlds their navigation opened to them. Comparative study of the dynamics of Chinese and European expansion before and after the tip point that came about 1450 to 1500 offers an especially intriguing topic for historical inquiry today, poised as we are on the horizon of the twenty-first century, when, for all we know, the displacement of the far east by the far west, that took place in the sixteenth century, may be reversed. It is, nonetheless, worth noting that just as China’s rise after A.D. 1000 had depended on prior borrowings from the Middle East, so Europe’s world success after 1500 also depended on prior borrowings from China. And if Japan’s post–World War II economic record turns out to be the presage of further triumphs for the Pacific rim, it

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is no less clear that this success, too, will depend on prior borrowings of European (and American) skills. This looks like one of the clearest patterns in world history. It is also something to be expected inasmuch as no population can overtake and then surpass the rest of the world without using the most efficacious and powerful instruments known anywhere on earth; and by definition such instruments are located at the world centers of wealth and power—wherever they may be. Thus any geographical displacement of world leadership must be prefaced by successful borrowing from previously established centers of the highest prevailing skills. The fluctuating growth of this sort of world system, with shifting centers and a great multiplicity of peoples and cultures caught within it, seems to me now to be a part of world history that largely escaped my attention when writing The Rise of the West. Even for the centuries after 1500 I was intent on using the civilizational envelope to organize my remarks; only after 1850 did I suggest that the autonomy of the separate civilizations of Asia had broken down, yielding to a new global cosmopolitanism. But autonomy had been eroding long before 1850, long before 1500, and even long before 1000. The process, I now think, dated back to the very beginning of civilized history, and ought to have been presented as such, alongside the history of separate civilizations and their interactions. Exactly how a narrative could combine both aspects of the human past is not easy to specify. Only by making the attempt can the possibility be tested, and this ought now to become the agenda for serious world historians. Cultural pluralism and differentiation is a dominating feature of human history; yet beneath and behind that pluralism there is also an important commonality. That commonality found expression in the rise of a world system that transcended political and cultural boundaries because human beings desired to have the results of the operation of that system, In other words, they wanted access to rare and valuable goods that could not be found close at hand, and presently they also desired the enrichment that market exchanges helped to provoke and sustain by rewarding efficient producers. In proportion as more and more individuals spent more and more of their time on activities connected with market exchanges, the world system grew from its initial marginality toward the remarkable centrality it enjoys in our own time. Yet this sort of interchange and interdependence remains entirely compatible with cultural diversity, and, at least so far, also with political pluralism and rivalry. All three belong in a proper history of the world— somehow. Finally, there is another level of human experience that deserves historians’ attention: to wit, our encounters and collisions with all the other organisms that make up the earth’s ecosystem. Agriculture is one chapter in that story. So is the shifting incidence of disease. And the recent rise of scientific understanding and the extended control that such understanding sometimes allows is yet a third dimension of this story. As hinted above, disease affected the history of the world system of exchange in the first Christian centuries, and again, more briefly, in the fourteenth, when the black death ravaged China, the Middle East, and Europe. More importantly, civilized diseases regularly acted

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to break down the cultural morale and independence of peoples newly exposed to their ravages. The disaster that struck Native Americans after 1492, when they were suddenly exposed to European and then African diseases, is the most dramatic but by no means the only example of this phenomenon.11 The spread of crops, of domesticated animals, and of unwanted pests and infestations is another side of ecological history about which historians are as yet quite ill informed.12 Yet these, too, clearly impinged on economic and political history in much the same way that epidemic diseases did, by allowing some populations to flourish while penalizing or even destroying others. These dimensions of human history therefore also deserve a place in any really satisfactory account of the past; they, too, ought to be woven into the narrative of the rise and elaboration of separate civilizations and cultures and viewed as ecumenical processes comparable in importance with the rise of a world system of economic complementarity and cultural symbiosis. Such an agenda for world historians is perhaps daunting. Yet anything less is plainly inadequate to the complexities of the human condition as we now understand it. Nor does it strike me as impossible—however ambitious. Data exist; what is needed is to gather and bring them to order and then construct a clear and elegant discourse with which to present the different facets and interacting flows of human history as we now understand them. Historians always face exactly this task, even when writing about comparatively small numbers of people and limited periods of time. Information is almost always overabundant; intelligibility comes only with selection and ordering, somehow embodied in a flow of words to provoke a portrait of the past in readers’ minds. It is an art that historians have always cultivated, and we are now in a position to apply that art to the whole of the human past with a precision, richness, and accuracy beyond anything previously possible, simply because historical scholarship has explored the whole of the globe as never before, while the evolution of historical concepts has arrived at a level of sophistication that makes older efforts at world history, even one as recent as mine, seem fundamentally outmoded and obviously in need of replacement.

NOTES

1. While writing The Rise of the West I walked home past an elm tree that had lost a large limb in a storm and was slowly covering its wound with an enormous weal of new growth. I used to wonder whether my book would be done before or after the elm tree healed itself. In fact, I got my manuscript to the printer a year before the tree died of Dutch elm disease, with its self-seal still incomplete, so I was never able to carry the completed book past the healed-over tree. 2. Stefan Balazs, “Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der T’ang Zeit,” Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin 34 (1931): 21–25; 35 (1932): 27–73. 3. Robert Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and Structures of Enterprise in the Development of Eleventh Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of Economic History 26 (1966): 29–58.

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4. Yoshinobu Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung China (Ann Arbor, 1970). 5. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973). 6. Jacques Gernet, Le Monde Chinois (Paris, 1972). 7. Gunpowder, printing, and the compass, three critical factors in Europe’s ascension to world leadership after 1500, were Chinese inventions, and reached the far west during the time when the political unification of northern Eurasia by the Mongols made movement back and forth across the whole continent unusually safe, frequent, and easy. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China: The Gunpowder Epic (Cambridge, 1967), disposes of lingering notions of Europe’s equality with China in developing early gunpowder technologies and traces their westward diffusion with new precision. 8. V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth, 1943). 9. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York, 1974–1988). 10. Richard Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). 11. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), is still the best general survey of the subject. A shorter essay, William H. McNeill, The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View (Princeton, 1980) offers a preliminary overview of the intersection of ecology with history as more usually understood. 12. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge, 1988) is a truly remarkable effort to overcome that ignorance, but constitutes only a beginning.

D E P T H , S PA N , A N D R E L E VA N C E Philip D. Curtin

The discipline of history has broadened enormously in the postwar decades, but historians have not. We teach the history of Africa and Asia, but specialists in American history know no more about the history of Africa than their predecessors did in 1940. We have specialists in black history, women’s history, and historical demography, but people outside these specialties pay little attention to their work. Where the field of history grew broader and richer, the training of historians grew narrower. The proportion of new Ph.D.’s who can easily teach the standard “Western Civ” course is smaller in the 1980s than it was in the 1950s. The new Asianists and Africanists know next to nothing about European or American history. Americanists know less European history than they did thirty years ago. At the level of course offerings, the old surveys in European and American history lost popularity. Departments offered a greater number of specialized courses, while history enrollments declined over all. In recent years, the idea of a broad survey has begun to recover—with some uncertainty about what it ought to be about. A rejuvenated Western Civ is one possibility. A

Philip D. Curtin’s “Depth, Span, and Relevance” was originally published in American Historical Review 89 (February 1984): 1– 9. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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new world history with real concern for the history of non-Western world is another. Ironically, one reason the world history movement has not gained momentum is that few historians have the background necessary to take it on. Many world history courses are “team taught,” a reasonable solution to begin with. But the very fact that they are is a sad admission. Even those who have recognized the need have also realized how few of their colleagues have the breadth of knowledge required—even for an introductory undergraduate course. Nor is our failure to help graduate students gain a world-historical perspective just of concern to the history departments that train them. What we teach passes to a broader public, and members of that public make political decisions that are crucial for us all. From the heights of power in the White House, we find portrayed a simplistic, tripartite division of the world into ourselves, our enemies, and the rest—who do not count, even though they form the vast majority of the world’s population. Historians did not do this all by themselves, of course; the rest of the educational system carries as much responsibility. Nor is everyone in the federal government as badly informed as Mr. Reagan’s circle of advisers. But, if one of our responsibilities as historians is to explain how the world came to be as it is, either our answers are not very good, or they are not communicated to the national leadership. In fact, both are the case. The government has enormous resources in short-term intelligence data, but the national leadership lacks long-term understanding of historical change. Without that, its evaluation of the short-term evidence has the fallacious quality we see week in and week out. Perhaps this problem is no worse than it was when an earlier generation of leaders led us into the Vietnam War, but official American reactions to affairs in Central America and talk about preparing to “prevail” in a nuclear war suggest deterioration at the top levels. In one sense, all this criticism amounts to is the statement that a liberal education is better than ignorance. Historians have been on the right side of that one all along. Their professional failing has been something else—to forget that one of the prime values of a liberal education is breadth, not narrow specialization. Even before the explosion of new kinds of historical knowledge, historical competence required a balance between deep mastery of a particular field and a span of knowledge over other fields of history. Depth was necessary to discover and validate the evidence. Span was necessary to know what kind of evidence to look for— and to make some sense of it, once discovered. We find the tendency toward specialization not only in graduate requirements and course offerings but also in our professional associations. We have an American Historical Association, and the Association also has seventy-five affiliated societies, each with a special concern with some particular field of history. Many other professional associations, like the Medieval Academy of America and the Organization of American Historians, are not even affiliated, although we work together in many different ways. The clear fact seems to be that many, perhaps most, historians value their personal contacts with fellow specialists more than they value their contacts with historians in general.

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This is somewhat understandable. Historians can talk with many different specialists in their own schools, colleges, and universities. But to find someone in precisely the same subfield or specialty, they have to look elsewhere. A common complaint about the annual meeting of the AHA is that too few sessions are concerned with these particular research interests. The dissatisfied drift away from the AHA toward more specialized associations. This tendency is strongest outside old-line, Western history. Most Latin Americanists, Africanists, and Asianists have stronger ties to their own subfields than they have to history as a whole. This in turn makes it hard for a program committee to organize panels in these fields, thus increasing the sense of alienation.1 Many Asianists already regard the AHA as just another specialized organization for European and American history. In time, these trends could be serious for the Association, but they are far more serious for the profession. They are the expression, not the cause, of intellectual splintering that has been going on for decades. The old-time, main-line fields like European and American history have been, to put it mildly, unenthusiastic about the growth of nonWestern history. The Americanists were— and are—the most parochial, almost by definition, because they study the past of their own society. But Asianists and Africanists have often reacted by cultivating their own kind of parochialism— sometimes seeking refuge in area studies programs. These, in turn, have been far more successful in opening interdisciplinary communication within the area than they have been in keeping open interarea communication within history. But the fundamental problem is still overspecialization. It is just as ubiquitous and just as deplorable in almost any other field of knowledge. But what to do about it? One way to begin looking for answers is to step back and consider what the study of history might be expected to accomplish. Every historian will have his own answer, but many of these answers can be grouped roughly under three headings—in rising order of general importance. Each heading can be set off as a question: (1) How did we come to be as we are? (2) How did the world come to be as it is? And (3) how and why do human societies change over time? The “we” in the first of these questions can be somewhat variable, from family history on to local history and on up to national history or even the history of Western civilization, which remains ethnocentric despite its broad scale. History, considered as one’s own past, is both the most common and the most problematic approach. Selfknowledge is no doubt a good thing, but self-knowledge by itself is also a form of selfishness that can be dangerous to social health. In the nineteenth century and too far into the twentieth, history was consciously one-sided; it was not supposed to be even-handed but designed instead to promote patriotism and glorify the nation. These tendencies reached a kind of apogee with the overblown patriotic fervor of the First World War. They have declined somewhat since, but only slowly and not in all parts of the world. I have already suggested the second category under the question, How did the world come to be as it is? This, too, is a form of self-knowledge, useful information to guide

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all kinds of decisions that have to be made by people both inside and outside the circles of power. This kind of history is just now beginning to challenge the more self-centered variety for a place in high school and college curricula. But the contest is no longer a simple choice between the traditional Western Civ and another, broader survey of world history. It involves complex problems at several levels in the educational process. One problem is what to teach students who will take only one or two history courses, at most. A second is what to offer to undergraduate history majors who will not become professional historians. A third is what span of knowledge to demand of graduate students in addition to the depth of specialized knowledge they will need for their research. The choice of formats for historical study is pretty much what it has been for some time: survey courses like Western Civ or U.S. history, backed by a second level of more specialized courses set in the familiar time-span segments— Germany from Barbarossa to Bismarck, the American South from 1860 to 1876, the history of China to 1910. Off in the wings, a potential world history survey is ready to compete for the present position of Western Civ, but that competition is still uncertain. Meanwhile, we continue with time-span segments. We have to trust that students will be able to put them together into some kind of synthesis. That may sometimes happen, but it leaves the burden with the student. It may be a useful challenge, but only for students capable of creative learning— and most are not. Perhaps we, the professional historians, should attempt to meet the challenge by trying to create our own syntheses of historical knowledge. For myself, I doubt that a worldhistory survey course will be even as satisfactory as Western Civ was in its day. What we need is a new kind of course that will have the perspective of world history—will ask and try to answer the question, How did the world come to be as it is?—by treating topics selectively, with examples detailed enough to be comprehensible, rather than by surveying the entire panorama too superficially to be worth remembering. Different teachers will no doubt see the world from different points of view, but the important thing is to seek a genuine world perspective. Historians have not yet tried this approach very much, but Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (1982) can stand as a useful example, by an anthropologist, of the kind of broad synthesis we should be doing ourselves. If we move in some such direction, history may well appear relevant again to far more students than we now reach. But this will not be easy, and our graduate education is largely to blame. We train people to do research on narrow subjects. We make them acquire the kind of background knowledge that appears necessary for such research. They emerge with a Ph.D. and teaching competence adequate to a narrow time-space framework. With a good deal of self-education, most will work their way outward enough to teach Western Civ or the American survey. Graduate schools, with very few exceptions, do nothing at all to prepare history teachers to handle the kind of courses students need in order to understand the world they live in.

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Which brings me to the third kind of history— the kind that asks how and why human societies change over time. The main difference between this question and the second, on world-centered history, is that the answers here require an understanding of human beings in general. But human beings in general are too amorphous to be investigated directly. Obviously, we have to begin with some part of the whole—but what part? This question is nearly identical to the one Arnold Toynbee posed a half-century ago in the first volume of his A Study of History: What is the correct, objective “intelligible field of historical study?” His answer, of course, was that it could not be the European nation-state, the framework historians used far too commonly in his time, as in ours. He opted instead for units he called societies, of which the familiar Western civilization is the clearest example.2 He was right in wanting some field of study other than the nation-state, but his identification of “civilizations” as the prime actors on the historical stage led to new problems. Civilizations are hard to identify. Their borders in time and space are shifting and uncertain, and we lack clear criteria to demarcate one from another. Toynbee’s own choice of religion as the marker of civilization was, moreover, not universally accepted— or acceptable. Rather than seeking a single “intelligible field of historical study,” we need, more prudently, to go partway along the road Toynbee mapped out, without stopping precisely where he did. Toynbee believed that each configuration of historical events can be separated fairly clearly in time and space from other, different configurations. And he dealt at length with the limits of his civilizations in space and in time. We can each go through the same exercise and reach different conclusions by centering on a problem to be solved. Just as a “civilization” has its limits in time and space, so too each historical problem has a universe of data necessary to its solution. Social scientists sometimes talk about a relevant aggregate. An individual, for example, can simultaneously form part of many different groupings—by family, social class, income, ethnic background, race, and so on. The task is to find which of these groupings is the significant aggregate for the problem at hand. One of the worst mistakes social scientists ever made was to assume that race is the most important determinant of human action in society or in history. That mistake led to the nineteenth-century rise of pseudo-scientific racism. Yet, to solve historical problems, we do first have to identify the relevant aggregates and discover their limits in time and space. Sometimes the correct answers are so obvious as to present no difficulty. At other times, discovering the correct aggregate requires rare breadth of knowledge, depth of insight, and plain luck. The point, however, is that the relevant body of data to be examined is not a free choice. It is dictated, ultimately, by the problem to be solved. Failure to identify it correctly can lead to errors that range from minor misunderstandings to completely wrong conclusions. Let me take a few examples from the history of the Atlantic basin—a region badly treated by historians until recent decades, mainly because it has been partitioned among specialists in European, North American, Latin American, and African history. None

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of these groups paid much attention to the work of the others. The result was a range of misunderstanding from trivial to deadly. On the trivial side, I discovered, when working on the history of the Atlantic slave trade, that most Americans thought then (and probably still think) that a large majority of the slaves transported from Africa to the New World arrived in the present territory of the United States. In fact, those that came to the United States were only about 6 percent of the whole. I have no idea what teachers of U.S. history actually tell their students, but I do not think that they set out consciously to misinform. More likely, most simply stay within the limits of the assigned aggregate, the history of the United States— and thereby leave out any mention of the other 94 percent of the Atlantic slave trade. And students, unfortunately, take silence to mean absence. The result is a major misunderstanding of the role of the United States in the larger history of the Atlantic basin— and of the migrations that have formed so much of its history over the past four centuries. A far more serious— indeed, deadly— misunderstanding underlay the early nineteenth- century idea of some philanthropic (and not-so-philanthropic) Americans that it would be both humane and convenient if freedmen of African descent could return to Africa. Recent history, as it was then understood, showed that people of European descent died of disease on the African coast at astronomical rates—in an environment in which adult Africans appeared to be reasonably healthy. This “lesson of history” suggested that, since black Americans looked like Africans and had African ancestors, Afro-Americans would be safe from African diseases. But it was wrong. The relevant factor was not race but childhood disease environment. The retransported settlers from America died at rates nearly as high as those of North Europeans. In many cases, the move to Liberia was an unintended death sentence.3 A third example comes from the demographic history of the American side of the ocean and concerns the comparative demographic patterns of slave populations in the U.S. South, the Caribbean islands, and Brazil. The error began with the failure of U.S. historians to look beyond the political boundaries of the United States. Historians of the South paid no special attention to the mortality and fertility rates of the antebellum slave population. In general, the numbers looked a lot like those for the white population in the same regions—with a slightly lower rate of population growth, as one might expect of a people with a lower standard of living than free people had. In this narrow framework of North American history, there seemed little to explain. Meanwhile, the Latin Americanists and Caribbeanists knew that slave populations in the tropics had such high death rates and low birth rates that population increase was rarely possible. Rates of net natural decrease could run to 2 or 3 percent, occasionally even more. But that, too, seemed explicable for the region. The white populations also suffered a net natural decrease, at least among those who were newly arrived from Europe. Only in the past two decades or so have historians of the United States looked further afield and found that the demography of the slave population here was highly unusual. What first

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appeared to be no problem at all now called for explanation— once it was set in the larger aggregate of New World slave demography. These three examples, all taken from Atlantic demographic history, show an aggregate misidentified on grounds of race or from overly narrow regional specialization. Other conventions of historical discourse, even more commonplace, can lead to similar misunderstandings. One of the most deceptive is our conventional approach to divisions of time and space. Reigns and dynasties, centuries and decades are convenient short cuts for dealing with chronology, but these man-made markers can also take on the appearance of reality. Just think of the thousands of students who still associate Queen Elizabeth I with Shakespeare’s plays, simply because we tolerate the label “Elizabethan drama.” Some escape is possible by petty distortion, like beginning the nineteenth century in 1815 and ending it with the outbreak of the First World War. But the conventions sometimes get out of control, like the former habit of dating the Industrial Revolution in England from 1760 to 1820—partly because those dates mark off neat decades and partly because they are the regnal dates of George III, who, of course, had nothing to do with it. Mapping conventions are far more serious in their unintended— sometimes their intended—influence on historical thought. The Mercator projection is a prime example. Even though we know distortion is necessary in order to show the surface of a sphere on a flat piece of paper, we become conditioned to accept the convention as reality. As a result, most well-informed people “know” that the European subcontinent of the Eurasian landmass is considerably larger than the Indian subcontinent, when in reality they are nearly the same size. This misperception arises not only because the Mercator projection enlarges all northern territories but also because we use the Urals as the conventional eastern boundary of Europe, when a line drawn from the White Sea to the Black Sea makes much more sense geographically.4 For similar reasons, most Americans imagine the Indonesian archipelago as about the same size as the Antilles. In fact, Indonesia from east to west stretches a good deal farther than the distance from Maine to California. The conventional hemispheres cause still more serious distortions. Anyone who bothers to think about such things knows that the potential number of hemispheres is infinite, simply because the earth can be viewed from an infinite number of points in space. Knowing our ethnocentric traditions, we might expect conventional hemispheres in school atlases to center on the United States, and the newer books often show some such thing. But the older convention respects the earth’s rotation and shows the north pole at the top and the south pole at the bottom. Hemispheres are thus viewed from above the equator. If the United States is then placed in the middle between east and west, the result is a conventional hemisphere that actually centers approximately on the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. This is, of course, the hemisphere that served as a basis for “hemispheric solidarity.” It conveniently puts the Asians and the Europeans halfway around the world— and on another page. Another hemisphere,

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centering on Omaha, would show that parts of Siberia and northwest Europe are comparatively close neighbors. Even parts of Africa would be included, while Argentina would not appear at all. The hemispheric misconception is obviously associated with the political hemispherism of the Monroe Doctrine, the Good Neighbor Policy, and American isolationism before the Second World War. But even historians are still led astray. A recent book on the North American fur trade argues that a particular combination of Native American religious ideas joined the commercial impact of European fur traders to produce the depletion of fur-bearing animals in North America between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth century.5 Both the author and his opponents have argued their case without seriously considering that the depletion of fur-bearing animals belongs not to the Galapagos-centered hemisphere but to a polar-centered hemisphere. Over these same centuries, the phenomenon stretched from Finland east to the Saint Lawrence. The few miles of the Bering Straits made no real difference to the Russian fur traders, who followed their prey into Alaskan waters and on south to California. The obvious aggregate is the depletion of furbearing animals in northern latitudes in these centuries. The rule of parsimony suggests that similar events, wherever they occur, have similar causes. It can hardly be legitimate to leave out the culture and psychology of the Native Siberians, which might have been quite different from those of Native Americans— even though the Siberians killed their animals with about the same speed and timing as the Native Americans did. In this case, then, the relative aggregate was split in two by geographical convention. Much the same is sometimes done for political reasons. The treatment of Canadian history in U.S. schools and universities provides a striking example. In the broadest sweep of world history over the past four hundred years, the most important thing that happened in the history of northern North America was its repopulation by settlers from Europe. These settlers founded new societies of overseas Europeans, beginning about the same time in Canada and the United States. This pattern of blanket settlement by Europeans, also prevalent in southern South America, was clearly different from two other kinds of settlement over these same centuries: the settlement of some Spanish and Portuguese among the surviving Indians of the tropics, especially in the highlands, and the settlement of the predominantly African slave populations in the tropical lowlands. It can be argued that the fullest understanding of New World history requires a comparative study of what went on in all three of these zones. What is hard to justify is dividing the zone of blanket settlement in two by a political boundary. For school and university teaching, it seems self-evident that Americans need to know how Canada came to be there and how the Canadian historical experience differs from our own. In fact, Canadian history adds a whole new dimension and range of understanding to U.S. history seen in this comparative context. Comparison is valuable for illuminating differences as well as similarities, as the example of slave demography demonstrates.

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Regionalism in politics has been important in the political life of both Canada and the United States, but it has taken different forms. Both countries have a federal constitution— but one is parliamentary and the other presidential. Both countries have experienced severe regional conflicts—but one led to a major civil war and the other did not. One country has faced a severe problem of linguistic nationalism, whereas the other has not. Yet our old emphasis on political history, with a healthy carry-over from the patriotic goals of an earlier historical tradition, makes it possible for historians on both sides of the border to deny the immense explanatory value that a broader history of North America would have had. Examples can be multiplied. Nor is the problem limited to history as an intellectual discipline. The underlying problem is the proliferation of all knowledge in this century. The historians’ solution, in common with that of other disciplines, has been to multiply the fields of specialization. To some degree, that is unavoidable. But its very unavoidability imposes an obligation. We must try even harder to balance the depth of our own specializations against a wider span of historical knowledge— to make sure we are asking the most important questions and seeking answers in the framework of the relevant aggregates. I can close by recalling two time-honored aphorisms that are still worth remembering: Some of those gaps in our knowledge belong there. An elegant answer to an irrelevant question is still irrelevant.

NOTES

1. The journal of the American Historical Association experiences the same difficulties as the Program Committee. The Review cannot publish what it does not receive, and on several occasions in the last few years the editors have had to plan special issues and call for papers in those fields in order to receive articles in Asian, Latin American, and African history. 2. Toynbee, A Study of History, 2d ed. (London, 1935), 1:17–181. 3. Tom W. Shick, “A Quantitative Analysis of Liberian Colonization from 1820 to 1834, with Special Reference to Mortality,” Journal of African History, 12 (1972): 45–59. 4. The area of Europe, exclusive of Iceland and any part of the Soviet Union, is approximately 1,820,000 square miles; the area of the Indian subcontinent, exclusive of Ceylon and Burma, is roughly 1,680,000 square miles. Including that part of the Soviet Union west of 40 degrees east longitude (a line drawn essentially from Archangel to Rostov) would add roughly 675,000 square miles to the area of Europe: including Burma (often considered geographically a part of the Indian subcontinent) would add approximately 260,000 square miles. 5. Calvin Martin, The Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978). Also see Shepard Krech III, ed., Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game (Athens, Ga., 1981).

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A P L E A FO R WO R L D S YS T E M H I S T O R Y Andre Gunder Frank INTRODUC TION AND PROCEDURE

I plead for writing a world history that is as comprehensive and systematic as possible. It should offer a more humanocentric alternative to western Eurocentrism. This history should seek maximum “unity in the diversity” of human experience and development. Therefore, we should not only make comparisons over time and space, we should also seek more connections among distant and seemingly disparate events at each historical point in time. Moreover, we should systematically seek to systematize both the comparisons and the connections. Thus, our historical inquiry may well find more than comparative commonalities among parts of the whole. We may also discover common features and relations among historical events, which are derived from their common participation in a whole. For the long period before 1492, this “whole” world history should concentrate on the unity and historical interrelations within the Asio-Afro-European “old” “eastern” hemispheric ecumene, stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic—before Columbus (again) crossed the latter. The principal idea I advance is the principle, indeed the imperative, of doing a “macro” world system history. The main reason to do so is that, as the old adage goes, this historical whole is more than the sum of its parts. This holistic principle does not deny the necessary “micro” history of its parts. However, it is necessary to remember that all the parts are also shaped by— and can only be adequately understood in relation to—their participation in the whole and their relations with other parts. Such “comprehensive” macro attention to the whole and its essential structure and dynamic must, of course, give short shrift to many “micro” details. However, these can be supplied by specialists, whose also necessary study will in turn help amend and reshape our vision of the whole. For reasons of expository convenience (for me) and clarity of communication (with the reader), I proceed to pose selected (and numbered) either/or issues. Then, I give my own positions on these issues in the form of theses. Of course, I do not think that all historical reality is so simply reducible to such alternative choices. Nor do I claim to cover all possible or even all important such alternatives and issues. My selection of issues, and their phrasing below, is governed by my own positions, whose arguments I wish to pose for the reader. Therefore for reasons of exposition and communication, I will frequently resort to brief citations or quotations of arguments of mine, which are elaborated more fully elsewhere. I will also “appeal to authority” (and anti-authority by my lights) by citing This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Andre Gunder Frank’s “A Plea for World System History” was originally printed in Journal of World History 2, 1 (Spring 1991): 1–28. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press.

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and quoting authors who have long-standing claim to authority (even if, to their credit, they would disclaim the same). Of course, I do not expect the reader to accept my arguments on the basis of appeals to any authority, least of all my own. On the contrary, my purpose in making these appeals is only to incite readers ever more to “seek truth from (the authority of) facts” and to appeal to “the authority” of their own (re)interpretations of them.

T WENT Y ISSUES AND THESES O N E U R O C E N T R I S M A N D I T S A LT E R N AT I V E S

1. Should world history continue its recent western Eurocentric bend, or should it seek to liberate the world from it(self)— even in the west? World history should be a reflection and representation of the full diversity of human experience and development, which far exceeds the limited and limiting recent bounds of the “west.” Indeed, the “west” does not exist, except by reference to the “east.” Yet the historical existence of “east” and “west” is only a figment of “western” imagination. A few generations ago, a different perspective was still counseled even by some western historians. For instance, in 1918 Frederick Teggart criticized “Eurocentric” history and pleaded for a single “Eurasian” history in which “the two parts of Eurasia are inextricably bound together. Mackinder has shown how much light may be thrown on European history by regarding it as subordinate to Asiatic. . . . The oldest of historians (Herodotus) held the idea that epochs of European history were marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line that separates East from West” (Teggart 1977, 248). Yet since Teggart’s 1918 plea, western domination in power and technology has further extended the domain of its culture and Eurocentric western perspective through proselytizing religion, mass media, language, education, “world” history writing and teaching, and using the (in)famous Mercator projection maps. Nonetheless, homogenization has proceeded less far and fast than some hoped and others feared, and many people around the world are seeking renewed and diverse self-affirmation and self-determination. 2. Should and need western Eurocentric world history and its distortions be replaced by “equal time” for the history of all cultures? Or need we admit (a variety of competing) other centric histories, be they Islamo-, Nippo-, Sino- or whatever other centric? No, we can and should all aspire to a non-exclusivist humanocentric history. This world history can be more than a historical “entitlement program,” which gives all (contemporary) cultures or nationalities their due separate but equal shares of the past. Instead, a humanocentric history can and must also recognize our historical and contemporary unity in and through diversity beyond our ideological affirmations of cultural self. 3. If we should not aspire to “equal time” in history of every body in the world, should such a world history be limited to, or concentrate on, the addition of representative

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“non-western civilizations” and cultures to western ones? Should we limit our study to the comparative examination of their distinctive and common features? This is the procedure of most (literally) so-called courses and textbooks. I argue that our world history can and should also make efforts to connect and relate the diversity of histories and times to each other. It may be empirically possible, and in that case it is historically important, to uncover all sorts of historical connections among peoples and places, not only over time but especially at the same time. These connections would lend additional meaning to our comparisons.

O N W O R L D H I S T O R I C A L CO M PA R I S O N S , CO N N EC T I O N S , N E X U S E S , A N D S Y S T EM(S)

4. Need or should world historians then limit themselves to only connecting and comparing different peoples, places, and times as they appear to them at first sight? Or can and should a one world history also seek systematically to systematize these connections and relations, as well as comparisons, into an analysis of a world system history? This is now the opinion of our contemporary dean of world history writing, William McNeill (1990). In “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years,” he reflects and concludes that the central methodological weakness of my book is that while it emphasizes interactions across civilizational boundaries, it pays inadequate attention to the emergence of the ecumenical world system within which we live today . . . Being too much preoccupied by the notion of “civilization,” I bungled by not giving the initial emergence of a transcivilizational process the sustained emphasis it deserved. . . . Somehow an appreciation of the autonomy of separate civilizations (and of all the other less massive and less skilled cultures of the earth) across the past two thousand years needs to be combined with a portrait of an emerging world system, connecting greater and greater numbers of persons across civilizational boundaries (McNeill 1990, 9–10). Thirty-five years earlier, Marshall Hodgson had already pleaded: The point is that from a world-historical point of view, what is important is not European history in itself, however important that be for us all; but its role in interregional history. . . . The problem of reorienting ourselves to a more interregional view point, then, is psychologically far-reaching, and must be solved along with that of organizing the historical material (Hodgson 1954, 716).

A few years later, Hodgson would add that “few scholarly tasks are more urgent than that of learning to see the various historical backgrounds of our common world in relation to each other” (1960, 879). Allardyce (1990, 62, 67, 69) quotes others to the effect that what world history “needs is a simple, all-encompassing, elegant idea, which offers an adequate conceptual base for a world history.” I suggest that the basic elements of this idea may be found in

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the foregoing quotations from Hodgson and McNeill. The central concept of this allencompassing idea is the world system and the historical process of its development. What we need is a world system history, please. The attempt to help advance this “urgent task” is also the main intent of Frank (1990a, b, c, d) and Gills and Frank (1990), although they were largely written before reading these quotations from McNeill and Hodgson. However, the major works by both authors were important inputs. Frank (1990a) concentrates on a critique of many quoted and otherwise cited civilizationists, world and other historians, historical macro-sociologists, economic historians, political economists, and others. These scholars mostly do not even consider such a world system history before 1500. Or they consider it, and then deny its practicability or even its utility. Even those few who would welcome a world system history in principle, in their own practice still neglect to pursue it themselves. The conclusions of Frank (199oa) and Gills and Frank (1990) argue why and how such a world system history can and should be undertaken— even if “world history in world-system style is likely to appear . . . as downright subversive” (Allardyce 1990, 69). But then so have been all new systemic departures. The idea of a world system since 1500 has indeed gained ground in recent years. However, its principal protagonists and others resist the extension of this idea backwards before 1500 (for Immanuel Wallerstein 1974, 1989) or 1250 (for Janet Abu-Lughod 1989). However, the historical empirical evidence and especially its internally contradictory treatment by these authors vitiate their arguments of a systemic historical break around 1450 to 1500, as per Wallerstein, or around 1250 to 1350, as per Abu-Lughod. 5. Is world history limited to that of sedentary “civilizations” and their relations? Or must it also include “barbarian” nomads and others, and especially the multifarious relations among the former and the latter? Frank (199oa) follows Lattimore (1962) and others to make a strong plea for more study of central and inner Asian “nomadic” and other peoples, their continuous trade and political relations with their “civilized” neighbors, and the recurrent waves of migratory and invasory incursions from central and inner Asia into east, south, and west Asia, and Europe. Therefore, I argue for greater attention to the possible centrality of central and inner Asia and the dynamics and relations of its peoples with others in world history. Similarly, the nomadic tribes of the Arabian peninsula before the time of Muhammad merit more attention. Africa has also received less attention than it merits in world (system) history. Curtin has done pioneering work on trade and migration in Africa, but in his Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984), he has not sought to pursue the African connection in Afro-Asia as far back in history as it may deserve. The southeast Asian peoples and their history were intimately related to and also influential on those of China and India, yet southeast Asia is often largely omitted from even those world histories that give their due to China and India. Relations between the “eastern” and “western” hemispheres, across both the Atlantic and the Pacific, even if they may not have been “systematic,” long predate those (re)initiated by Columbus.

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ON WORLD HIS TORIC AL TIMES AND TIMING

6. Should we treat historical diversity and comparisons as we often do, and as Anderson explicitly defends, by arguing that “there is no such thing as a uniform temporal medium: for the times of the major Absolutism . . . were precisely, enormously diverse . . . no single temporality covers it”? (Anderson 1974, 10). Or can and should the systematization of inter-regional world history also realize, as Hodgson argued, that “what is important is the recognition . . . that there has been some sort of developing pattern in which all these interregional developments can be studied, as they are affected by and in turn affect its elements as constituted at any one time” (Hodgson 1954, 719). In Frank (1978b) I argued that Anderson’s apparent attempt to make historiographic virtue out of empirical necessity when he argues that the historical times of events are different though their dates may be the same must be received with the greatest of care— and alarm. For however useful it may be [comparatively] to relate the same thing through different times, the essential (because it is the most necessary and the least accomplished) contribution of the historian to historical understanding is successively to relate different things and places at the same time in the historical process. The very attempt to examine and relate the simultaneity of different events in the whole historical process or in the transformation of the whole system— even if for want of empirical information or theoretical adequacy it may be full of holes in its factual coverage of space and time—is a significant step in the right direction (particularly at a time in which this generation must “rewrite history” to meet its need for historical perspective and understanding of the single world historical process in the world today) (Frank 1978a, 21–22).

7. Did world history discontinuously jump from one place and time to another? The usual western Eurocentric rendition jumps from ancient Mesopotamia to Egypt, to “classical” Greece and then Rome, to medieval western Europe, and then on to the Atlantic west, with scattered backflashes to China, India, et cetera. Meanwhile, all other history drops out of the story. Or peoples and places never even appear in history, unless they are useful as supposedly direct descendants of development in the west. Instead, any world history should try to trace and establish the historical continuity of developments between then and now in the world systemic whole and all its parts. Gills and Frank (1990) argue that these relations extend even farther out and further back. During another millennium from 2500 B.C. or earlier already, peoples established relations with each other around and from the Mediterranean to the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Persian highlands, and the Indus Valley, as well as with many central Asian “nomads” and others. Gordon Childe (1942) already argued for the recognition and analysis of these and even earlier and more widespread relations. Some two millennia later, China, Manchuria, Korea, and Japan in the northeast, and southeast Asian peoples developed (systematic?) relations with each other and with

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other peoples across and around Asia. Systemic relations around the beginning of the Christian era among Han China, Kushan Pakistan/India, Parthian Iran, the Roman empire, and parts of Africa are well documented and analyzed by among others Hudson (1931), Teggart (1939), and with regard to technological diffusion more recently again by Needham (1961). Several recent authors quote Pliny’s lament about the fiscal crisis in his native Rome, which was due to its balance of trade deficit with Parthia and through it with China. Teggart went further. He quoted Cicero to the effect that “the credit of the Roman money-market is intimately bound up with the prosperity of Asia; a disaster cannot occur there without shaking our credit to its foundations” (Teggart 1939, 74). 8. However, since when can we accurately refer to “China,” “India,” “Persia,” “central Asia,” or elsewhere as particular peoples or civilizations? Alternatively, how long were (or still are?) these only geographical loci in and through which different peoples came and went, mixed, and developed cultural, social, political, and economic institutions and relations, which also came and went? Most civilizations, empires, ethnicities, “races,” and of course nations only temporarily developed here and there out of a mixture of peoples. Some peoples among them took or gained enough of a temporary upper hand to put their temporary imprint and name on the civilization, dynasty, or empire, et cetera. Perhaps the longest still living civilization is that of the Chinese. Yet for half of “China’s” history, it has been ruled by non-“Chinese.” Historians conventionally study the “dynastic” history of China. Civilizationists generally focus on this and other (supposedly self contained) “civilizations.” Thereby, both have detracted attention from the more important, but often changing, ecological or economic units, empires, states, and (inter)state systems, and their relations with each other over much of the world. Moreover, the fact that peoples and their institutions have come and gone over the world stage of history does not mean that there was no systemic rhyme or reason to their coming and going. On the contrary, the very coming and going of different peoples, their institutions, and their relations with each other may systematically, and not only exceptionally, have obeyed some systemic “laws” of world system development and history. We should inquire into these. 9. Should we then start our world historical (system) inquiry at some arbitrarily or conveniently selected date? Or should we instead permit the historical evidence to take us back as far as we can go? Should we move forwards or backwards in our historical inquiry? Both! John King Fairbank, the contemporary dean of American historians of China, wrote from his experience that “the rule seems to be, if you want to study the mid-period of a century, begin at the end of it and let the problems lead you back. Never try to begin at the beginning. Historical research progresses backward, not forward” (Fairbank 1969, ix). This has been my experience as well, and I recommend Fairbank’s rule to others with two reservations. One is that real historical development, of course, moved forward in time, and our scientific rendition of it must respect this fact. The other is that however heuristically useful it may be for us to inquire backward, we can still turn around to relate and present our findings and history itself forward in time.

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O N C U M U L AT I O N O F A CC U M U L AT I O N A N D ECO LO G Y I N W O R L D S Y S T EM H I S T O R Y

10. Is world (system) history only continuous (since when?), or is it also cumulative? Has there been, is there still, a cumulative historical development? Civilizationists and cultural historians have long since presented much of human knowledge and culture as cumulative. Childe (1942) and others have also presented technology as substantially cumulative (little re-invention of the wheel). If that is so, can we not theoretically argue and empirically demonstrate that world (system) history includes a long process of economic accumulation, including skills and technology, but also infrastructural, productive, and financial accumulation? 11. Is this process of accumulation, and the associated production, trade, finance, and their political organization independent of ecological possibilities and limitations? Just posing this question seems to answer it, especially in this age of heightened ecological degradation and awareness. Human social, economic, and political history have always been adaptations to ecological circumstances and changes. Ecological possibilities and limitations helped determine the development of alluvial valley agricultural civilizations like ancient Sumer and Egypt. Their ecology also affected their needs for commerce and political influence over highland sources of metals and other mineral raw materials and wood. Similarly, ecological realities and their changes also impacted on grassland nomadic and other peoples and their trading, migratory, and invasory relations with sedentary civilizations. Of course, hunting, migration, agriculture, industry, political and military institutions and activities, and many cultural ones have also in turn impinged on and altered the physical environment. Today, but also at some times and places in the past, this human ecological impact has been damaging to the physical environment and to human welfare. A world history must devote more attention to human and social ecology, especially now. 12. Are these ecological and social adaptations and transformations often renewed independent inventions (as of the wheel) at different times and places in the world? Or are many of them also the result of migratory, invasory, trade, political, and cultural relations and diffusion around the world? Or both? The easy answer would seem to be both by simple addition of renewed invention here and there and diffusion from here to there. However “necessity is the mother of invention.” Therefore, much of the renewed “(in)dependent” invention and innovation there was also “diffused” from here. That is, invention was stimulated there by the necessity of competition with here, where its use offered a competitive advantage. Moreover, this process of diffusion and emulation of invention and innovation was not limited to things (bronze) or technology (smelting) but extended to social institutions and cultural forms. 13. A particularly important open question is whether the all too widespread sociocultural institution of patriarchy was indigenously invented by many societies or diffused from a few to many. Feminist archaeologists and historians (thank Goddess for

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them!) have begun to dig up or reinterpret a paleolithic and neolithic past supposedly governed by non-patriarchal “partnership” relations. However, these relations were found to be “indigenous” particularly in Catal Huyuk and Hacilar in Anatolia, the site of Jericho in the Levant, later in Minoan Crete, and in the Balkans (Eisler 1987). Figurines that suggest non-patriarchal goddess worship have also been found farther eastward into India. The feminist scholars argue that these societies, and by extension western Judeo-Christian society, only switched to patriarchy later after armed invaders from inner and central Asia brought warfare, military technology, oppression, and therewith the “diffusion” of patriarchy. Thus, these feminist scholars suggest that western patriarchy is the result of its (unwelcome) diffusion from farther east in inner Asia. (Re)writing history from a more gender-balanced or feminist perspective is very welcome. We particularly need more “feminist historical materialist” analysis of different and changing gender and family relations, accumulation, politics, and culture/ideology. Much of history has been dominated by men in their own interest and written by them from their own perspective. However, the above-cited feminist version of history seems less than satisfactory. It focuses rather selectively on some circum-Mediterranean societies with supposedly indigenous partnership societies and sees patriarchy as having been only belatedly diffused there from inner Asia. These primarily EuroMediterranean centered feminist historians would do well to expand their scope to that of the world, if not also to the world system, as a whole.

O N W O R L D S Y S T EM C H A R A C T ER I S T I C S A N D T R A N S I T I O N S B EF O R E A N D A F T ER I5 O O A . D.

14. Are systematic and systemic relations of trade, not to mention migration and invasion or military conflict over the same, only recent developments in world (system) history, which bear study merely since the twentieth century, or the nineteenth, or the sixteenth? Or must we more systematically trace all of these political economic relations, no less and maybe even more than cultural ones, back further and further in a wider world (system)? I propose the latter and offer some indications on how to proceed in Frank (1990a, b, c, d) and Gills and Frank (1990). For millennia already, these systemic relations of peoples and localities combined a mixture of systematic trade relations and recurrent migrations far beyond the confines of any state or empire. Diplomatic expeditions, military excursions, and shifting alliances among states and empires were expressions of systematic and systemic relations. So were the diffusion and invention or adaptation of technological advances, social institutions, and cultural forms in response to changing ecological, economic, political, and often competitive necessities and opportunities in the wider world system. 15. Can the principal systemic features of the “modern world system” also be identified earlier than 1500 or not? Wallerstein (1988) and Modelski (1987) argue that the differentiae specificae of our world system are new since 1500 and essentially different from

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previous times and places. Christopher Chase-Dunn (1986) and others find parallels in “other” and prior world systems. Wilkinson (1987) discovers at least some of these features in his “Central Civilization” and elsewhere. However, he sees historical continuity, but no world system. Abu-Lughod (1989) sees a “thirteenth-century world system,” but she regards it as different from the world system since 1500 or before 1250. Moreover, she is not so interested in comparing systemic features or characteristics. Gills (1989) and Gills and Frank (1990) combine all of the above into an analysis, or at least an identification, of the principal features of this world system over several thousand years of its history and development, which are detailed below. 16. According to Wallerstein (1988, 1989, and elsewhere) and many students of world capitalism, the differentia specifica of the modern world system is the accumulation of capital: “It is this ceaseless accumulation of capital that may be said to be its most central activity and to constitute its differentia specifica. No previous historical system seems to have had any comparable mot d’ordre” (Wallerstein 1989, 9). But was capital accumulation absent or minor or irrelevant elsewhere and earlier? Or, on the contrary, did capital accumulation exist and even define this (or another?) world system before, indeed long before, 1500? Gills and Frank (1990) emphatically argue for this latter position and point to considerable empirical evidence to back up the argument. For millennia and throughout the world (system), there has been capital accumulation through infrastructural investment in agriculture (e.g., clearing and irrigating land) and livestock (cattle, sheep, horses, camels, and pasturage for them); industry (plant and equipment as well as new technology for the same); transport (more and better ports, ships, roads, way stations, camels, and carts); commerce (money capital, resident and itinerant foreign traders, and institutions for their promotion and protection); military (fortifications, weapons, warships, horses, and standing armies to man them); legitimacy (temples and luxuries); and of course the education, training, and cultural development of “human capital.” The drive to produce, accumulate, distribute, and consume capital provided much of the economic, social, political, and cultural motor force in history. This was the case, for instance, of the development of Song and earlier Tang China, Byzantium, the expansion of Islam, Gupta India, and other regions in “medieval” times. However, the same may be said equally of the earlier “classical” Rome, Parthian Persia, Kushan India, and Han China; of the still earlier Hellenistic world and Persia; and so on back through world history. 17. Are other characteristics, in particular a core-periphery structure, of the modern world system also unique to it since 1500? Or are they also identifiable elsewhere and earlier? In a short list of three main characteristics of his modern world system, Wallerstein (1988) argues that “this descriptive trinity (core periphery, A/B [cycle phases], hegemony-rivalry) as a pattern maintained over centuries is unique to the modern worldsystem. Its origin was precisely in the late fifteenth century” (Wallerstein 1988, 108). Wallerstein (1989) also makes a list of twelve characteristics of his modern world

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capitalist system since 1500. Frank (1990c) argues why all of them also apply earlier. Frank (1990a) and Gills and Frank (1990) argued the same even before seeing Wallerstein’s lists of characteristics. To avoid tiring the reader here, however, we limit the present review to Wallerstein’s holy trinity alone. The first characteristic is the core-periphery structure. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall (1990 forthcoming) are editing a book on Precapitalist Core/Periphery Relations. Chase-Dunn (1986) himself has found many examples and so has Gills (1989). Wilkinson (1987) surveys core-periphery relations over five thousand years of world system history, which Ekholm and Friedman (1982) argued earlier. Therefore, Gills and Frank (1990) contend that core-periphery structures and relations have been prevalent throughout geographical space and historical time. 18. Another of the three world system characteristics mentioned by Wallerstein is hegemony-rivalry. But is this feature limited to the world since 1500? Or did it also exist elsewhere and earlier? Or, indeed, does it also characterize the same world system earlier? Wallerstein himself discusses the rise and fall of mostly economically based hegemony only since 1500. Modelski (1987) and Thompson (1989) analyze largely politically based and exercised hegemony since 1494. Paul Kennedy (1987) wrote a best seller about the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers but without connecting them in any systematic way. The decline in the hegemony of a great power gives way to an interregnum of competitive economic, political, and military rivalry among others to take its place. Gills and Frank (1990) argue that hegemony-rivalry has also characterized the world system for thousands of years. As suggested above, hegemony is not only political. It is also based on center-periphery relations, which permit the hegemonic center to further its accumulation of capital at the expense of its periphery, hinterland, and its rivals. After a time, not the least through the economic-military overextension signalled by Kennedy, the hegemonic empire loses this power again. After an interregnum of rivalry with other claimants, the previous hegemonical power is replaced by another one. Shifting systems of economic, political, and military alliances, reminiscent of those featured by George Orwell in his 1984, are instrumental in first creating, then maintaining, and finally losing hegemonical imperial power. Gills and Frank (1990) not only argue that there have been numerous and repeated instances of hegemony and rivalry at imperial regional levels. They also suggest that we may be able to recognize some instances of overarching “super-hegemony” and centralizing “super-accumulation” at the world system level before 1500. The Mongol empire certainly, and Song China perhaps, had a claim to super-hegemony. Thus, very significantly, the later rise to super-hegemony in and of western Europe, Great Britain, and the United States after 1500 were not unique first instances in the creation of a hegemonic world system. Instead, as Abu-Lughod persuasively argues, “‘the fall of the East’ preceded the ‘Rise of the West’” (Abu-Lughod 1989, 338) and resulted in an hegemonical shift from east to west. This shift came at a time— and perhaps as a result— of overextension and political economic decline in various parts of the east, which suffered a

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period of cyclical economic decline so common to them all as to have been world system wide. Thus the “Rise of the West,” including European hegemony and its expansion and later transfer to the “new world” across the Atlantic, did not just constitute a new Modern World Capitalist System. This development also— and even more so—represented a new but continued development and hegemonic shift within an old world system. 19. The third characteristic of Wallerstein’s world system after 1500 is long economic cycles of capital accumulation. Their upward “A” and downward “B” phases generate changes of hegemony and of position in the center-periphery-hinterland structure. These cycles, and especially the Kondratieffs, play important roles in the real development of the world system[. . . .] However, are these cycles limited to modern times, or do they extend further back? Frank (1990c) tries to demonstrate that this same cyclical pattern definitely extends back through the eleventh century and that it could be traced further back as well. Gills and Frank (1990) go on to argue that these long cycles extend much further back in world system history. 20. So do these characteristic similarities with the “modern world-capitalist-system” extend only to “other” earlier empires, state systems, regional economies, or different “world systems”? Or do similar characteristics extend backwards through time in the same world system, which itself also extends much further back in time? I believe the historical evidence supports, and our analytical categories should promote, this second interpretation. The argument in Frank (1990a) and Gills and Frank (1990) is, in its essence, that this same world system was born at least five thousand years ago out of the confluent relations of several “civilizations” and other peoples. As mentioned above, these included at least peoples in Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, and central Asia. They and other peoples have ever since been continuously and cumulatively related through center periphery-hinterland structures, relations of hegemony and rivalry, and cycles. These have been regional and probably world system–wide. The argument is that these system-defining relations have persisted continuously and grown cumulatively albeit cyclically on a system wide basis throughout much of the world for thousands of years. For instance, such systemic relations not only characterized, but probably motivated, many Akkadian and Sumerian Mesopotamian economic ties, political institutions, and military excursions into Anatolia and Persia from the time of Sargon in the 2300s B.C. Lattimore (1962), Eberhard (1977), Gernet (1982), and many others have documented and analyzed the later recurrently continuous, systematic, and systemic exchanges of surplus and other relations among sedentary “civilized” people in China and nomadic “barbarian” peoples from central Asia (and with those who were intermittently one or the other in between). Similar, if perhaps more tenuous or at least less researched, overland and maritime relations developed among Chinese and southeast Asian peoples. Farther west, the near simultaneous birth and spread of major religions after 6oo B.C. and later Persian-Hellenic rivalry probably responded

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not only to contemporary similar, but to perhaps also related conditions in different “parts” of the world. As noted above, the birth of Christ, expanding systemic relations, and interpenetrating exchange of surplus characterized and helped shape all of Han China and its military conquests and economic dependencies through central Asia, Kushan and then Gupta south Asia, Parthian Persia, imperial Rome, and its African and European outposts. Indeed, the subsequent near simultaneous and coordinated imperial declines from Han China to western Rome and the renewed “barbarian” incursions ultimately emanating out of central Asia should be analyzed as the interconnected expressions of a single dynamic in a single world system.

CONCLUSIONS: T O R E J E C T FA S H I O N A B L E T R A N S I T I O N S A N D M O D E S

Given this argument and the historical evidence to sustain it, is it still possible or sensible to argue that there was a qualitatively different “transition” to and creation of a “modern-world-capitalist-system” around 1500? Or that this “transition” arose essentially out of the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” in Europe? No! and No again! It is time to relegate the latter debate to the parochial European history to which it rightly belongs. We may still wish to debate whether there was a significant “transition” in the world as a whole around 1500, and whether this transition was more “significant” than earlier or subsequent ones. However, in this debate it would be useful and clarifying for all participants to understand that the real world (system) essence of a transition is a transition from a transition to a transition! Then we can see which transitions, if any, are more equal than others, for instance in the light of the dramatic supposedly “world shaking” transitions taking place, as I write, in eastern Europe. Then, is it still sensible to hold on for dear life to the supposedly scientific historical categories of, and ideological preferences for, feudalism, capitalism, socialism—or indeed any such “scientifically” defined “modes of production” or ideologically defined “systems” and “isms”? I believe NOT! (and so argue in Frank 1990a, c). However, the beliefs in either the virtues or the vices, or both, of “capitalism” and also of “socialism” are still very irrationally cherished, strongly held, and widely shared (literally) right and left all around the world. Therefore, scarcely anyone is yet ready to abandon them, no matter how strong the historical evidence nor how logical the argument. Even readers who have followed and may accept my argument through the first twenty points may resist these conclusions. Nonetheless, the historical and contemporary evidence strongly suggests— and may increasingly persuade more people— that these virtues and vices are systematically ingrained in the world system itself, and not in any of its transitionally varying or variably transitional mixed up “modes.” Those who still cannot liberate themselves from their “modal” and “modish” thinking should at least examine the historical evidence that all “modes” share virtues and

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sins, even if the shares of some may be more equal than others. Moreover, the absolute and relative virtues and sins vary over historical time and perhaps over the “life cycles” of “modes” and their implementation or application in (different parts of) the world system. Indeed, it might be said that it is through the virtues and sins of its various and varying “modes” that the system expresses its own structural and dynamic characteristics, operation (“function”), and development (evolution). In that case however, the insistent reification of “modes” is a case of “misplaced concreteness.” If we want to reify anything, we would do better (less badly) to reify the world system itself (like me?). Yet even then, we should regard the system like a three-legged stool, supported equally by its ecological/economic, political/military, and cultural/religious/ideological legs. World system history is long (and cyclical!), and I can wait for this idea’s time to come (again!). In the meantime, as throughout world system history in the past, people— today (again) actively including many more women—will unite in a myriad of ever changing social movements to continue their ever-lasting struggle for their just demands and rights. More power to them! A Luta Continua!

WORKS CITED

Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Adams, Brooks. [1903] 1939. The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press. Allardyce, Gilbert. 1990. “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course.” Journal of World History 1: 23–76. Amin, Samir. 1988. L’eurocentrisme. Critique d’une idéologie. Paris: Anthropos. ———. 1989. “Le système mondial contemporain et les systèmes anterieurs.” Unpublished manuscript. Anderson, Perry. 1974. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: New Left Books. Braudel, Fernand. 1981–84. Civilization and Capitalism. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Row. Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1986. “Rise and Demise: World-Systems and Modes of Production.” Unpublished manuscript. ———. 1989. “Core/periphery Hierarchies in the Development of Intersocietal Networks.” Unpublished manuscript. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and T. Hall, eds. 1990. Precapitalist Core/periphery Systems. Boulder: Westview Press. Childe, V. Gordon. 1942. What Happened in History. London: Pelican Books. Curtin, Philip D. 1984. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. New York: Cambridge University Press. DeMeo, James. 1987. “Desertification and the Origins of Armoring: The Saharasian Connection.” Journal of Orgonomy, vols. 21–23. ———. 1990. “Origins and Diffusion of Patrism in Saharasia: Evidence for a Worldwide, Climate-Linked Geographical Pattern in Human Behavior.” Kyoto Review, no. 23.

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Eberhard, Wolfram. 1977. A History of China. Rev. ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Eisler, Riane. 1987. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Ekholm, Kajsa, and John Friedman. 1982. “‘Capital’ Imperialism and Exploitation in Ancient World-Systems.” Review, vol. 4. Fairbank, John King. 1969. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Farmer, Edward L. 1985. “Civilization as a Unit of World History: Eurasia and Europe’s Place in It.” The History Teacher 18: 347–63. Farmer, Edward L., et al. 1977. Comparative History of Civilizations in Asia. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1978a. World Accumulation 1492–1789. New York: Monthly Review Press; London: Macmillan Press. ———. 1978b. Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment. New York: Monthly Review Press; London: Macmillan Press. ———. 1990a. “A Theoretical Introduction to Five Thousand Years of World System History.” Review, vol. 13. ———. 1990b. “De quelles transitions et de quels modes de production s’agit-il dans le système-monde réel? Commentaire sur l’article de Wallerstein.” Sociologie et Sociétés, vol. 22. English version: 1991. “What Transitions and Modes in the Real World System? A Comment on Wallerstein.” Review. ———. 1990c. “The Thirteenth-Century World System: A Review Essay.” Journal of World History 1: 249–56. ———. 1990d. “Eurasian World System History: The Centrality of Central/Inner Asia.” Paper presented at the UNESCO Seminar on Land Routes of the Silk Roads, Urumqi, Sinkiang, 19–21 August. Gernet, Jacques. 1982. A History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gills, Barry K. 1989. “Hegemonic Transition in East Asia: A Historical Materialist Perspective.” Unpublished manuscript. Gills, Barry K., and Andre Gunder Frank. 1990. “The Cumulation of Accumulation. Theses and Research Agenda for 5,000 Years of World System History.” Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 15; and in Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall, eds. Precapitalist Core/Periphery Systems. Boulder: Westview Press. Goldstein, Joshua S. 1988. Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. 1954. “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History.” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 1: 715–723. ———. 1960. “The Unity of Later Islamic History.” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 5: 879–914. ———. 1974. The Venture of Islam. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hudson, G. F. 1931. Europe and China. Boston: Beacon Press. Kennedy, Paul. 1987. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House. Lattimore, Owen. 1962. Inner Asian Frontiers of China. Boston: Beacon Press. Lombard, Maurice. 1975. The Golden Age of Islam. Amsterdam: North Holland.

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Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNeill, William. 1963. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1976. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. ———. 1982. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1990. “The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years.” Journal of World History 1: 1–22. Modelski, George. 1987. Long Cycles in World Politics. London: Macmillan Press. Needham, Joseph. 1961–. Science and Civilisation in China. 7 vols. to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Odani, Nakae. 1990. “Some Remarks on the Kushan Coins Found in the Western Chinese Regions.” Paper presented at the Unesco Seminar on Land Routes of the Silk Roads, Urumqi, Sinkiang, 19–21 August. Quigley, Carroll. 1961. The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis. New York: Macmillan. Schneider, Jane. 1977. “Was There a Pre-Capitalist World System?” Peasant Studies 6: 20–29. Stavrianos, L. S. 1970. The World to 1500: A Global History. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Taylor, Alistair M. 1987–88. “Comment on the Shape of the World System in the Thirteenth Century by Janet Abu-Lughod.” Studies in Comparative International Development 22: 39–53. Teggart, Frederick. 1939. Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. [1918] 1977. Theory and Process of History. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, William. 1989. On Global War: Historical-Structural Approaches to World Politics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Tilly, Charles. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Toynbee, Arnold. 1946. A Study of History. 2 vols. Abridged by D. C. Somervell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System I. New York: Academic Books. ———. 1984. The Politics of the World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. The Modern World-System III. New York: Academic Books. ———. 1989. “The West, Capitalism, and the Modern World-System.” In Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 7, The Social Background, part 2, sect. 48, edited by Joseph Needham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkinson, David. 1987. “Central Civilization.” Comparative Civilizations Review 17: 31–59. ———. 1988. “World-Economic Theories and Problems: Quigley vs. Wallerstein vs. Central Civilization.” Paper delivered at Annual Meetings of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, May 26–29, at the University of California, Berkeley.

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M Y T H S , WAG E R S , A N D S O ME M O R A L IMP L I C AT I O N S O F WO R L D   H I S T O R Y Jerry H. Bentley

In his presidential address before the American Historical Association in December 1985, William H. McNeill argued that the relationship between myth and history was much closer than most professional historians would be comfortable acknowledging. In an essay that almost has a postmodern ring, he observed that historians have faithfully reflected larger collective urges for attachment and identity. They have done so partly by producing what McNeill called “mythistory,” a form of knowledge about the past that relies on the techniques of professional historical scholarship but also draws inspiration from perspectives that offer idealized visions of a community and endow its historical accounts with meaning. He conceded that professional methods had enabled scholars to overcome certain prejudices, such as those arising from overtly confessional historiography, that often infected scholarship of earlier generations. And he adopted an upbeat tone, suggesting that myths were not necessarily reducible to unprincipled propaganda, but rather that they had the potential to guide societies toward the realization of noble ideals. Yet he did not compromise on his main point, the claim that all historical scholarship, no matter how professional or technically proficient, is mythistory in that it draws on some vision of the human community that is not susceptible to documentation in the archives.1 This view of things raises problems that go well beyond scholarship. While holding out the possibility that mythistory might inspire the pursuit of high ideals, McNeill also acknowledged the point—which developments both before and since 1985 have definitively confirmed—that myth-informed history has equally strong potential to fuel maniacal and murderous violence. The power of myths to promote tendentious or distorted understandings of the past and even to inspire the production of historical fabrications is all too evident in both popular and professional historical accounts of all lands and peoples without exception. Yet the production of parallel mythistories that stroke the collective psyches of national, ethnic, racial, religious, and other groups, while also nourishing their memories of supposed past injustices and encouraging hatred of their perceived oppressors, is a formula for disaster in a world oversupplied with appallingly effective technologies of destruction. How might it be possible to move beyond historical scholarship that takes glorification of the national community or some other exclusive constituency as its principal purpose? In his discussion of mythistory, McNeill proposed a remedy for the various narcissistic, clashing mythistories that fuel conflicts by emphasizing the glory and righThis selection is an edited version of the original publication. Jerry H. Bentley’s “Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History” was originally printed in Journal of World History 16, 1 (March 2005): 51– 82. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press.

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teousness of some chosen people against its enemies. Without denying either the power or the considerable value of local identities and solidarities, he called for an approach to the past that focuses on the entire human community rather than its national, ethnic, racial, or religious components. “Instead of enhancing conflicts, as parochial historiography inevitably does, an intelligible world history might be expected to diminish the lethality of group encounters by cultivating a sense of individual identification with the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole. This, indeed, strikes me as the moral duty of the historical profession in our time. We need to develop an ecumenical history, with plenty of room for human diversity in all its complexity.”2 Thus McNeill held out an attractive vision of an ecumenical world history with the potential to foster such lofty ideals as cross-cultural understanding and global peace. But how might it be possible to go about constructing an appropriate and persuasive ecumenical history? Alas, the discipline of history in general and the subfield of world history in particular have not found reliable routes to this destination. Historians thus far have discovered no Archimedean point from which a neutral or totally objective vision of the global past is attainable. It is possible in many cases to demonstrate more or less definitively the historical truth or falsity of certain factual information, but there is no generally recognized method or convention leading to any generally accepted distillation of meaning from analyses of the past. Indeed, recent critical scholarship has argued powerfully that history is a form of situated knowledge, that some set of political or ideological principles informs all historical studies. Professional historical scholarship as we know it was born under the signs of the nation and the empire, and its birthmarks help to account for both its subject matter and its methods. Even the most careful, conscientious, restrained, self-critical, or reflexive scholarship makes assumptions about the world and the way it works that influence historians’ choices of topics, themes, and methods of analysis, not to mention their constructions of significance and meaning of the past. The result is an intellectual impasse: historical scholarship inevitably reflects some set of political or ideological influences, which by definition will not enjoy general approval; yet in order to validate its truth claims and enhance the credibility of its bid to serve larger social purposes, history depends upon a reliable intellectual foundation that enjoys widespread if not universal respect. Otherwise it runs the risk of degenerating into propaganda, or at least of arousing suspicion that it has degenerated into propaganda. Neither logic nor linguistic precision nor ever more careful scholarship alone will open a way beyond this impasse. Rather, resolution of the problem will require the placing of an intellectual and moral wager, akin to Pascal’s famous wager on the existence of God, that scholarship and education in a certain kind of world history will lead to a sophisticated understanding of the world and its development through time, and possibly also to the formation of wisdom and the cultivation of values conducive to responsible global citizenship.3 In one way or another, no doubt, all historical study involves an intellectual wager.

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The implicit gamble is that analysis of a certain issue employing certain methods at a certain level of generalization on the basis of certain evidence and reasoning will yield a coherent, persuasive, and meaningful account of past human experience. The risk is that some set of problems with the conception, methodology, scale, evidence, or reasoning of the study will compromise its value or even render it worthless. World history is perhaps an even riskier proposition than most other kinds of historical study. The issues of conception, methodology, scale, evidence, and reasoning are less widely tested and quite possibly less reliable for purposes of global historical analysis than they are for more conventional approaches to national, political, social, economic, or cultural history. At the same time, the stakes in world history are higher than they are in many other fields of study. To the extent that visions of world history shape the values of voters and policy makers, the stakes include intellectual influence with potentially enormous implications for global governance, peace, and security— or lack thereof. With stakes so high, it is imperative to wager on an ecumenical world history rather than some more parochial alternative. The wager is necessary because there are already several other players in the game, and some of their positions carry implications that run from the actively unhelpful to the downright dangerous. Because of its claims to general knowledge, and perhaps more importantly because of its increasing prominence in educational curricula, world history has recently become a principal target for interests pressing various political and ideological views. In their efforts to elaborate some larger political, social, ideological, or moral implications of world history, commentators from both the right and the left have staked out positions that lead right back to the problems McNeill sought to transcend in his essay on mythistory— sometimes by reverting to a parochial historiography and sometimes by encouraging the construction and production of a world divided into hostile, noncommunicating blocs. If the construction of meaning in world history involves intellectual and moral wagering, the conservative commentators have placed their bets on the prospect that democracy and capitalism will reign supreme over the long term, while Marxist and postcolonial critics have gambled that some variety of crisis will soon bring an end to global capitalism or Eurocentric modernity or both. In order to be both intellectually credible and socially useful, however, world history must be more honest and inclusive than the patriotic history promoted by conservative commentators from the right as well as more constructive and pragmatic than the critical versions served up from the Marxist and postcolonial left. As an alternative to impulsive betting (or is it compulsive gambling?) driven by specific ideological visions from the right and the left, an ecumenical world history might constitute the basis for a sounder, bolder, and more compelling wager. My own version is an ecumenical world history based on what feminist critics Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson have called large-scale empirical narratives— as opposed to totalizing, ahistorical metanarratives deriving from specific ideological positions—that builds a frame-

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work useful both for understanding the development of larger global orders and for contextualizing the experiences of particular lands, peoples, and societies.4 In another essay I have outlined the principles of a large-scale empirical narrative meeting this description, so I forego a detailed presentation here. The main features of this narrative are rising human population, expanding technological capacity, and increasing prominence of cross-cultural interaction over time—three empirical realities that have profoundly influenced the world and its development through time. The argument holds that human population has generally risen at least for the past two hundred thousand years; that human groups have progressively extended their technological capabilities with respect to production, organization, transportation, and communication, not to mention destruction; and that the intensity and range of cross-cultural interactions have generally increased over time. The argument holds further that these three empirical realities of global human experience have not only worked their effects individually, but have also intertwined like the strands of a triple helix to reinforce one another with powerful effects throughout human history.5 This vision is only one of many that are conceivable, and it no doubt reflects the perspective of one standing within the horizon of modernity rather than some alternative cultural world. Yet I believe that it enjoys several advantages over ideologically inspired visions of the global past. My ecumenical world history grounded in large-scale empirical narrative does not pretend to know the end of history. Rather it leaves the end of history open, warning that human agency and ingenuity likely hold surprises in store for those who leap from world history into world forecasting.6 Nor does it promote any specific ideological agenda. Perhaps its closest approaches to an ideological position rest in its materialism (although I would characterize it as a flexible materialism rather than a rigid doctrine) and its claim that cross-cultural interaction has been a much more influential feature of human history from earliest times than most historical scholarship admits. Yet it does not naturalize or endorse capitalist globalization in its contemporary form as an inevitable or wholly beneficial mode of cross-cultural interaction. Rather it recognizes that cross-cultural interaction has brought suffering and fragmentation as well as prosperity and integration, that participation in processes of cross-cultural interaction is not inevitable in any simple sense of the term but rather is subject to multiform political and cultural influences, and further that contemporary global capitalism may well be unsustainable over the long term because of the social and environmental pressures that it generates. It is conceivable that this sort of ecumenical world history might take on a more explicit ideological dimension by allying with movements seeking to advance the causes of global citizenship, cosmopolitan democracy, cross-cultural dialogue, and related projects. In recent years, political scientists, moral philosophers, and others have devoted considerable energy to the articulation and development of these ideals.7 Historians also have occasionally offered reflections that contribute specifically to contemporary crosscultural understanding and the quest for more just and equitable organization of a ram-

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pantly globalizing world.8 Yet these projects all face daunting arrays of cultural, institutional, and practical political obstacles. At the moment, my sense is that it is premature to contemplate the alliance of world history with any particular globalist project—not least because the moral implications of world history are not precise enough to lend support to any specific policy. It may be appropriate for a historian to sound a further cautionary note: in their discussions of these undoubtedly admirable globalist projects, the political scientists and moral philosophers have largely neglected to consider the fact that, historically speaking, large-scale power shifts of the kind contemplated in their visions have taken place generally after rounds of massive destruction. Consider for example the circumstances that prompted establishment of the Westphalian system, the League of Nations, and the United Nations. Past experience is not destiny, of course, so there may well be less destructive and more agreeable ways to bring new forms of global cooperation into being. If so, global citizenship, cosmopolitan democracy, cross-cultural dialogue, and similar projects might well become ideologies attracting broad interest. In the meantime, even without subscribing to any particular globalist project, ecumenical world history has strong potential to serve larger social purposes much more constructively than the xenophobic and hyper-patriotic versions of the global past that are all too prominent in schools throughout the world, including the United States. In the first place, ecumenical world history offers a far more accurate and persuasive account of the world and its development through time. No matter what form it takes— survey courses in educational curricula, synthetic works addressing the general reading public, analytical studies for scholars, or others— an ecumenical rather than parochial world history makes it possible to account for contributions by all peoples and societies to the making of larger global orders while also discerning patterns in the global past that place the experiences of individual societies in meaningful historical context. A large and expanding body of scholarship has demonstrated powerfully that global historical analysis brings fresh insight to the understanding of processes such as large-scale migration, imperial expansion, cross-cultural trade, biological exchanges, environmental change, economic development, and cultural exchanges that are prominent features of contemporary as well as earlier times.9 This scholarship makes it clear that the world’s peoples have engaged in interaction across geographical, political, and cultural boundary lines since the early days of Homo sapiens more than a hundred thousand years ago, and perhaps even since the time of Homo erectus more than a million years ago. This scholarship also demonstrates that even though most individuals have not moved to distant lands, or traveled abroad as merchants, or converted to foreign religions, or died from diseases introduced from afar, nevertheless, by defining, shaping, or transforming the conditions of existence, processes of cross-cultural interaction have thoroughly influenced the development of almost all human societies and thus at least indirectly touched the lives of most human beings who have walked the earth. For purposes of leading informed lives and developing responsible policies in a globalizing world, it is essential for students and citizens to take these points on board and reflect

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on the effects of cross-cultural interactions on the development of individual societies as well as the world as a whole. Ecumenical world history has unique potential to help students and citizens explore the moral implications of cross-cultural interactions through considerations of the ways, the means, and the reasons why some peoples have dominated others or drawn more benefit from the world and its resources than their counterparts. Perhaps even more immediately important, ecumenical world history also has exceptional potential to help students and citizens learn to deal constructively with the world beyond their own societies by engaging it in active study and understanding it as the product of development through time under specific historical conditions, rather than simply assuming that different peoples, different values, and different forms of social organization are suspect because they are unfamiliar. Because the United States is so wealthy, powerful, and influential, American students and citizens have a moral responsibility to make special efforts to understand the larger world and the effects of American policies in the larger world. Ecumenical world history will not provide easy or automatic answers to specific policy questions, but it stands to reason that honest, rigorous, reflexive study of the global past can help foster the development of good judgment among students and citizens about the world and its ways.

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.

In his Pensées, composed in the mid-seventeenth century and published posthumously in 1670, Blaise Pascal expounded his famous wager on the existence of God. If you gamble on the existence of God and win, Pascal reasoned, you stand to reap infinite rewards at little cost, while if you lose the bet, you might experience minor temporal inconvenience, though no major loss. On the other hand, if you place your bets against the existence of God and win, you gain nothing beyond perhaps some fleeting pleasure in this mortal life, while if you lose the bet, you will suffer in misery for all eternity. For anyone viewing matters in this way, identifying the smart bet is a no-brainer. Wagering on history and the making of historical meaning does not involve the high-stakes personal consequences that Pascal’s wager entailed, nor are the various alternatives so clear. Yet the stakes involved in wagers on world history are nevertheless considerable. In a world bristling with technologies of destruction, it does not seem especially wise to convert world history into a propaganda tool that mobilizes the global past in support of a particular set of political and ideological values. Nor is it sensible to dismiss most of the world’s societies as the trivial works of irrelevant peoples without history. Nor is it useful to hinge historical meaning on future contingencies in the form of currently unknowable and unforeseeable developments that might or might not bring dramatic changes to the global order. Nor is it helpful to renounce historical scholarship altogether on the grounds that some indelible original sin inevitably and fatally taints its products. Rather than placing bets on a so-called world history that in fact reverts to invidious

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parochial historiography or that imagines a world of isolated and hostile blocs in hopes of generating such an order, would it not be wiser to wager on an ecumenical world history that actually takes the world seriously, treats its various peoples with respect, sheds light on the dynamics that explain the world’s development through time, and might even conceivably contribute to such worthy goals as cross-cultural understanding and global peace? If myth inevitably informs history so as to produce mythistory, ecumenical world history possesses strong potential both to yield better history and to harness it to myths that are better for the welfare of a globalizing yet dangerously divided world than do alternative approaches to the global past. In this wager on world history, Pascal I believe would have no difficulty deciding where to place his bets.

NOTES

1. William H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1–10; also published in William H. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986), pp. 3–22. 2. McNeill, “Mythistory,” p. 7. For an elaboration that perhaps represents what McNeill had in mind for his ecumenical world history, see J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York, 2003). 3. For the idea of applying the wager to historical study, I acknowledge the inspiration of Sumit Sarkar,” “Post-modernism and the Writing of History,” Studies in History 15 (1999): 293–322, esp. pp. 308, 322. See also Tzvetan Todorov’s “humanist wager” in his Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Casman (Princeton, 2002), especially pp. 226–238. 4. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism,” Theory, Culture, and Society 5 (1988): 373–394. 5. Jerry H. Bentley, “World History and Grand Narrative,” in Writing World History, 1800– 2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford, 2003), pp. 47–65. For two other formulations that are congenial to this view of things, see Johan Goudsblom, E. L. Jones, and Stephen Mennell, Human History and Social Process (Exeter, 1989); and Andrew Sherratt’s brilliant essay, “Reviving the Grand Narrative: Archaeology and Long Term Change,” Journal of European Archaeology 3 (1995): 1–32. For two fleshed-out analyses that also are quite congenial to my view, see McNeill and McNeill, The Human Web, and David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, Calif., 2004). 6. Consider for example the ways events have subverted recent efforts to extrapolate the future from the past and present: see E. L. Jones, “World History and World Forecasting,” Journal of World History 5 (1994): 125–138. 7. For only a few particularly thoughtful or notable works among many that have recently addressed these themes, see Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Oxford, 1995); Martha Nussbaum with respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston, 1996); April Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London, 2001); Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds., Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2002); and three books by

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Fred Dallmayr: Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham, Md., 1998); Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham, Md., 2001); and Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York, 2002). 8. See for example two essays by John Obert Voll: “The End of Civilization Is Not So Bad,” MESA Bulletin 28 (July 1994): 1–8, and “The Mistaken Identification of ‘The West’ with ‘Modernity,’” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 13 (1996): 1–12; and Prasenjit Duara’s unpublished keynote address for the Third International Conference of Asian Scholars (Singapore, 19–22 August 2003) titled “Crossing Boundaries: A Personal Journey in Asian Research.” 9. To mention only a few titles from the many that could serve to substantiate this point, see McNeill and McNeill, The Human Web; Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, 1986); John E. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 2003); J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000); and Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993).

WO R L D H I S T O R Y A N D T H E H I S T O R Y O F WO ME N , G E N D E R , A N D   S E X UA L I T Y Merry Wiesner-Hanks

In his recent— and excellent— study of the development of world history, Navigating World History, Patrick Manning remarks on the lack of intersection between social history and world history as the two fields have developed over the last several decades.1 World history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality have also seen relatively few interchanges, which several women’s historians, including Bonnie Smith, Judith Zinsser, Margaret Strobel, and I, have noted in various venues.2 Manning does as well in Navigating World History, writing “World history, especially as a history of great states and long-distance trade, included little recognition of gender and little space for women . . . it remains striking that studies of women and gender roles in world history have developed so slowly and that their development has been restricted to a small number of themes.”3 Why might this be? In his comments about this issue, Manning suggests that the reason for this is the “well established presumption that women’s lives are acted out in the private sphere of the family rather than the public sphere of the economy and poli-

Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s “World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality” was originally published in Journal of World History 18, 1 (March 2007): 53– 67. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press.

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tics” and notes that one reason scholarship on colonized societies seems to be leading the way in a gendered approach to world history is that “in colonial situations, the state interferes in the working of families and social values generally.”4 This may indeed be a well-established presumption among world historians, whom Manning knows very well. Most historians of women, gender, and sexuality today begin with the exact opposite presumptions, however: that women’s history is not the same as the history of the family, that the state has always interfered in the working of families and social values (and continues to do so), that the boundaries between public and private are contested, variable, and shifting, and perhaps don’t really exist at all. Manning’s statements and his thorough discussion of the field of world history inadvertently highlight what I would see as the reason for this situation: women’s/gender history and world history have both developed at the same time as, in part, revisionist interpretations arguing that the standard story needs to be made broader and much more complex; both have been viewed by those hostile or uninterested as “having an agenda.” Both have, as Judith Zinsser has commented, “had to write with the stories of men’s lives in the United States and Europe paramount in their readers’ memories.”5 Both have concentrated on their own lines of revision and, because there is only so much time in a day and only so many battles one can fight, have not paid enough attention to what is going on in the other. Thus neither has a very good idea of what the other has been doing over the last several decades, and each conceptualizes the other in terms that the other would find old-fashioned: world historians see women’s history as a matter of families and private life; women’s/gender historians see world history as area studies and world-systems theory. The primary revisionary paths in world history and women’s and gender history have also been in opposite directions. In Patrick Manning’s words, “world history is the story of connections within the global human community. The world historian’s work is to portray the crossing of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past.”6 As David Northrup commented recently, world history has been the story of the “great convergence.” 7 In contrast, after an initial flurry of “sisterhood is global,” women’s and gender history over the last decades have spent much more time on divergence, making categories of difference ever more complex. There was, of course, the Holy Trinity of race, class, and gender, but there was also sexual orientation, age, marital status, geographic location, and able-bodiedness. Women’s historians emphasized that every key aspect of gender relations—the relationship between the family and the state, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and so on—is historically, culturally, and class specific. Everything that looks like a dichotomy—public/private, male/female, gay/ straight, black/white—really isn’t, but should be “queered,” that is, complicated so as to problematize the artificial and constructed nature of the oppositional pair. These differing revisionary paths have meant that most historians who identify themselves as scholars of women, gender, and sexuality thus do not think of themselves as world historians, and both leading and younger scholars who do identify as

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world historians do not regularly focus on women or sexuality, or include gender as a primary category of analysis. This lack of intersection is reflected in the fact that at the 2003 World History Association conference, there was only one full panel and two individual papers (out of forty panels) that focused on women, gender, or family; at the 2004 conference there were two panels and two individual papers; and at the 2005 conference two papers and no panels. At none of these conferences was there anything on sexuality. Of the eighty articles in the last five years of the Journal of World History, only three specifically examine women or gender, and none focuses on sexuality. Of the more than thirty books in the Ashgate series “An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History 1450–1800,” not one focuses on women or gender, though there is one on families. This could be because gender is so well integrated as a category of analysis that separate articles or books aren’t necessary (in other words, that the “add women and stir” stage has been vaulted over), but this is not the case. From the other side, well over half of the paper proposals to the Berkshire Women’s History Conference in the last several years it was held (1996, 1999, 2002, 2005) focused on U.S. history, despite the fact that the 1996 Berks theme was “Complicating Categories,” the 1999 theme was “Breaking Boundaries,” and the 2002 theme was “Local Knowledge and Global Knowledge.” The 2005 Berks theme was even more pointedly global: “Sin Fronteras: Women’s Histories, Global Conversations,” but about half the proposals were still in U.S. history. Yes, the “globalization” of U.S. history has affected women’s history, and many of the papers that focused on U.S. topics considered issues such as migration, American neo-imperialism, various diasporas, ethnic identity, and transnationalism. They were still about the United States, however. Of the eighty-eight articles published in the last five years of the Journal of Women’s History, only eight are what I would term “world history” topics, though two-thirds do deal with topics outside the United States. Of the books submitted to the American Historical Association by publishers for consideration for the Joan Kelly Prize in women’s history for the last two years (about ninety books a year), about 40 percent focus on U.S. history, another 40 percent focus on Europe, and about 20 percent are about the rest of the world. Only a handful take on topics that have been at the center of world history, such as trade, cultural diffusion, or encounters between population groups. Though some people may interpret all these numbers as intentional exclusion on the part of journal editors and conference organizers, I edit a journal and have run enough conferences to know that it more likely reflects a lack of manuscripts or papers submitted. Because conference paper submissions often come from younger scholars, including those still in graduate school, however, the prospects for the immediate future aren’t great— too much world history does not involve gender, and too much women’s and gender history focuses on the United States. The lack of interchange between world history and social history, and between world history and women’s history, might seem to be directly related, as most stories of women’s history as a field link it with the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s

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and also with the rise of the New Social History in the 1960s. That latter connection is one that has not always been comfortable, however. In a recent article in the Journal of Women’s History, Joan Scott comments that “there was nothing inevitable about women’s history arising from social history. Rather, feminists argued, within the terms and against the grain of behaviorism and new left Marxism, that women were a necessary consideration for social historians. If they were omitted, key insights were lost about the ways class was constructed. While male historians celebrated the democratic impulses of the nascent working class, historians of women pointed to its gender hierarchies [and] also offered a critique of the ways in which labor historians reproduced the machismo of trade unionists. This did not always sit well, indeed feminists found themselves (and still find themselves) ghettoized at meetings of labor historians.”8 I remember this from a conference years ago sponsored by History Workshop Journal, which had only just changed its subtitle to “a journal of socialist and feminist historians,” but in which the two sides of that linking were still quite separate and definitely not equal.9 That has changed; the editorial board at History Workshop Journal is now exactly gender balanced, and that of Radical History Review has slightly more women than men. (What’s going on in labor history, at least in terms of journals, has been complicated by the dispute between the editors of Labor History and its publisher, Taylor & Francis, which led to a founding of a new journal in 2004, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, edited by Leon Fink. The editorial board of the new journal is distinctly more gender-balanced than that of Labor History, however, and the phrase “men and women” does appear in its mission statement.) Despite Scott’s sliding from one to the other, labor history and leftie history are not the same as social history, of course, though both are often seen, like women’s history, as growing out of the New Social History of the 1960s. In the last several decades, however, women’s historians have stressed that what they do is not always social history, to avoid the very presumption about the limitation of women’s lives to the private sphere of the family that Manning talks about. They assert that there is really no historical change that cannot be analyzed from a feminist perspective, and no historical change— or continuity—that did not affect the lives of women in some way. (They also assert that these two things are not the same, that is, that feminist analysis does not have to be about women.) They argue most forcefully in historical fields in which the fit seems less obvious and in which the resistance to women’s history has been greatest—intellectual history, political history, military history. This is in part because who doesn’t love a good fight? But also, I would argue, because it has been more satisfying and comfortable to take on people in such fields than those who are closer politically and intellectually. Generally when women’s historians set what they do up against “traditional” history, that “traditional” history, despite Scott’s comment, is more often the story of states and generals than that of labor unions and socialist parties. The split between “women’s history” and “gender history” also became mixed up in this distinguishing of women’s history from social history. Afsaneh Najmabadi has

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recently commented that “social history was most welcoming of the former [that is, women’s history], but anxious about the latter, especially as gender became a troubled category in itself.”10 The development of gender history occurred at the same time as the “linguistic turn” and “the new cultural history,” and in some people’s minds—both in and out of the fields—the two are related. Many women’s historians responded harshly to the linguistic turn. Wasn’t it ironic, they noted, that just as women were learning they had a history, and asserting they were part of history, “history” became just a text and “women” just a historical construct? In her wonderfully titled 1998 article in Church History, “The Lady Vanishes,” Liz Clark wrote, “Why were we told to abandon subjectivity just at the historical moment that women had begun to claim it?”11 In an article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Women’s History that surveys books and dissertations in U.S. women’s history 1998–2000, Gerda Lerner documents and criticizes the trend toward studying representation, culture, and discourse. She comments that “the subject of class is being massively ignored, and interest in the economic realities of women’s lives in the past seems generally to be fading.”12 She also finds, and criticizes, a “low order of interest aroused by topics such as suffrage, women’s organizations, women’s struggles for equality under the law, and political subjects in general,” and calls for more research that “focuses on the activities, thoughts, and experiences of women,” and that also constructs theory that develops a “new paradigm for an egalitarian history of men and women as agents of history.”13 In recent speeches, Lerner’s critique of the focus on representation has been even sharper. The linguistic turn provoked strong reactions and led to splits within many other historical fields as well. Most recently, however, cultural history, or rather the more broadly defined “cultural studies,” has portrayed itself not as a divisive force but as a healer of all wounds, a sort of humanistic unified field theory. “Cultural studies” understands itself— at least in self-descriptions on Web sites and in essay collections— as including everything I’ve been talking about: social history, women’s history, world history, gender history. The word “social” appears in most descriptions of cultural studies programs— social theory, social construction of values, social relations— as do words that suggest (though they rarely use the word) history— contemporary and past cultures, change and continuity, present and past. Cultural studies does not understand itself as growing out of or even linked to social history, however, and even less to anthropology. Both Colin Sparks (in the reader What Is Cultural Studies?) and Simon During (in The Cultural Studies Reader) locate the origins of cultural studies in two books of literary theory, The Uses of Literacy by Richard Haggart and Culture and Society by Raymond Williams.14 Sparks does note that these two represented a “shift from the aesthetic to the anthropological definition of culture,” but it was only when literary criticism shifted that a new field was born. The fact that anthropologists had had an “anthropological definition of culture” for quite some time did not seem to matter. Nor did it seem to occur to the folks at Towson State’s cultural studies program that someone, somewhere might have already been studying “aspects

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of everyday life in both the present and the past,” a phrase they include in their description of the program’s objects of study.15 They do world history and women’s history, too, of course, studying “gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity, globalization, and national identity.” So apparently we can just stop worrying about finding connections and promoting interchange, because cultural studies has done it for us. There are some problems with this, however, as you can imagine. Despite the sweeping (and often breathless) self-definitions, programs and readers in cultural studies tend toward the literary and the contemporary, as might be expected from programs that often grew out of the theory wing of English departments. Simon During’s introduction to The Cultural Studies Reader notes first that the field’s focus is culture, but then adds, “more particularly, the study of contemporary culture.”16 A few historians are included in the general readers, and some course descriptions also include the same language about “contemporary and historical” that the program definitions do. But it is, not surprisingly, primarily in cultural studies materials produced by historians that there is much concern with the deep past, that is, the past before the invention of television. These materials are often specifically framed as “cultural history,” however, a reification that has both benefits and detriments; it highlights the historical nature of some studies of culture, but also implies that there is some history that is not cultural, while the definitions of cultural studies imply no such limits. I don’t think, therefore—to use a highly gendered metaphor—that cultural studies is quite the white knight and unifier that it represents itself as being. That sentiment is shared by some of the historians and anthropologists who have been most associated with the field, yet who continue to stress its problematic nature. Lynn Hunt, for example, whose The New Cultural History was required reading in the 1990s, has more recently published Beyond the Cultural Turn.17 The anthropologist Sherry Ortner goes even further, putting culture in quotation marks in her edited volume The Fate of “Culture.” 18 Things in quotation marks— the “Enlightenment,” Athenian or Jacksonian “democracy”— are clearly things that raise questions, not answer them or make them moot. So if cultural studies can’t provide a unified field theory, and most world history does not involve gender, and most women’s and gender history focuses on the United States, is there much promise of interchange? I think there is, and I would like to end with several examples of work in which I see this promise becoming reality, work that brings together world history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. Most of these studies do not explicitly present themselves as world history, but they use concepts or investigate topics that have been extremely influential in world history: encounters, borderlands, frontiers, migration, transnational, national and regional identities, and heterogeneity. Manning is absolutely right that studies of colonialism and postcolonialism seem to be leading the way— so much so, in fact, that we are already into revision and selfcriticism in work on gender and colonialism. The Winter 2003 issue of the Journal of Women’s History was a special issue: “Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women:

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Beyond Binaries,” with articles on Australia, Indonesia, India, lgboland, Mozambique, and the U.S. Midwest.19 That issue also had a separate section on historians, sources, and historiography of women and gender in modern India that emphasized “dissolving” and “rethinking” various boundaries. It is not surprising that this section focused particularly on India, for among colonized areas, South Asia has seen the most research. Feminist historians of India, including Tanika Sarkar, Kamala Visweswaran, and Manu Goswami, have developed insightful analyses of the construction of gender and national identity in India during the colonial era and the continued, often horrific and violent, repercussions of these constructions today.20 Sarkar in particular highlights the role of female figures— the expected devoted mother, sometimes conceptualized as Mother India, but also the loving and sacrificing wife—in nationalist iconography. Though the theoretical framework in this scholarship is postcolonial, Sarkar and Visweswaran also take subaltern studies and much of postcolonial scholarship to task for viewing actual women largely as a type of “eternal feminine,” victimized and abject, an essentialism that denies women agency and turns gender into a historical constant, not a dynamic category. The large number of works on India has led some scholars of colonialism to argue that Indian history has become the master subaltern narrative, and that Indian women have somehow become iconic of “gendered postcolonialism.” I was not surprised to find the cover image on a recent issue of Radical History Review, an issue titled “Two, Three, Many Worlds: Radical Methodologies for Global History,” a photograph of two Indian women, the environmentalists Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla.21 This choice of image makes sense given the lead article in the issue, which focuses on the aftermath of Bhopal, and given the powerful role of Indian women in global environmental movements. (Along with these two women, Vandana Shiva has become especially prominent on issues of biodiversity and the globalization of resources.) But it does reinforce the iconography. Because it would be impossible to do justice to the many studies of South Asia, I would like to mention some excellent recent work on other parts of the world.22 Gender and nationalism has clearly been a key area of scholarship, with edited collections and monographs.23 There are articles on gender and nationalism in many of the new collections on nationalism, and a special issue in 2000 of the new journal Nations and Nationalism titled “The Awkward Relationship: Gender and Nationalism.” Feminist Review, Gender and History, and Women’s Studies International Forum have all had special issues on nationalism, and there are chapters on nationalism in the new collections on global gender history, such as Bonnie Smith’s Women’s History in Global Perspective, and in Teresa Meade and my Companion to Gender History. Thus the interpenetration is going both ways, as it must: gender is making it into considerations of nationalism, and nationalism into considerations of gender. The construction of nationalism and the imagined nature of national communities are important themes in this work, but women are viewed as important agents in that construction, and actual nations do

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result. Gender is also beginning to show up as a category of analysis in transnationalism, such as the new collection by Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation, and the new journal Meridians: Feminism, Race Transnationalism.24 The construction of gendered ethnoracial categories has been another strong area of research, including Jane Merritt’s At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 and Nancy Appelbaum’s Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948.25 This is also the focus of Susan Kellogg’s “Depicting Mestizaje: Gendered Images of Race in Colonial Mexican Texts” and Martha Hodes’s “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story.”26 Some of this work, and much of the scholarship on gender in colonial South Asia, is about discourse and representation—in this Gerda Lerner would not be pleased—but much of it is explicitly political, part of the burgeoning feminist work on gender and the state. Studies that are clearly in what we usually think of as the realm of social history are fewer, but here I would highlight two articles from last year in the Journal of World History, both about North American women in Japan: Manako Ogawa’s on missionary women’s establishment of a settlement house in Tokyo right after World War I and Karen Garner’s on the World YWCA visitation to occupied Japan right after World War II.27 Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery explores the way that work and reproduction both shaped the economic value, gendered identity, and day-to-day lives of African women in West Africa and the New World.28 The ways gendered patterns of consumption shaped trade and production worldwide over very long periods emerge in Michelle Maskiell’s study of Kashmiri shawls and Maxine Berg’s analysis of European response to Asian luxury goods.29 Several of the thematic essays in Teresa Meade and my Companion to Gender History address social history topics: labor, the family, popular religion, schooling.30 M. J. Maynes and Anne Waltner provide suggestions of how to do comparative or global social history in several articles focusing on marriage.31 This brief survey is certainly not exhaustive, but even a more complete list would not be as long as it should be, and would also be skewed toward certain issues: race, political rights, slavery, representations of the “Other.” There is far less social and economic history in gendered global history than one would expect. These trends are a reflection of what has happened in history as a whole, of course; one can hardly expect a subfield that has been seen as a “fad” now for thirty years to avoid whatever is the newest trend. But they are also a reflection, as I argued earlier, of historians of women and gender being more eager to take on what seem to be less likely fits—the Renaissance; the French, American, Haitian, and Scientific Revolutions; the Meiji Restoration—to make sure that the stories of formalized power relationships and of intellectual change do not remain stories of ungendered men. As Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar wrote in the introduction to U.S. History as Women’s History, the most significant

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task has been “to discover how gender serves to legitimize particular constructions of power and knowledge, to meld these into accepted practice and state policy.”32 That point still needs to be made, for gender remains what Randi Warne has called an “expertise of the margins” in global political and intellectual history, where there are huge areas that have not been analyzed at all in terms of either women or gender, to say nothing of sexuality.33 (There are now nearly thirty books on the history of English masculinity, so won’t someone please, please do the manly Mongols?34) But I think that world history might provide historians of women, gender, and sexuality with an opportunity to also work on social history topics without seeming too fuddy-duddy. Lerner’s survey of recent work in U.S. women’s history finds that books, articles, and dissertations on African American women tend to focus much more on women’s organizations and on class than does the rest of U.S. women’s history, and to be “more interested in the realities of lives of the past than they are in interpretation and representation.”35 The first of these areas—women’s organizations—has seen many studies from a world-history perspective, as so many of those organizations had a global reach and mission. Gendered class analysis from a global perspective, however, is another matter, and one where the insights gained through investigating the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race, and the role of gender in constructions of the nation and national identity, can be fruitfully applied. We may now be at a point where the opposite paths of world history and women’s and gender history— one toward convergence, and the other toward divergence— could be coming together. In his discussion of the emphasis on convergence in world history, David Northrup commented that this may have been an overly “cherished framework,” and that divergence now needs more attention from world historians.36 On the other side, historians of women and gender are clearly more willing to pay particular attention to instances of encounter and convergence, as is clear from the exploding amount of scholarship on gender and empire. Increased interchange between world history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality can help develop what we might choose to call the “new, new social history.” This would not be the breathlessly totalizing unified field theory that cultural studies presents itself as (what the physicist Michio Katu has called “an equation an inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God”), but one that builds on the strengths of many subfields: the tradition of collaborative and collective work in radical and feminist history; the emphasis on interaction, exchange, and connection from world history; the focus on the agency of everyday people from the “old” new social history; the attention to hegemony, hierarchy, and essentialism from queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory; the stress on difference and on intersections between multiple categories of analysis from women’s history. These are all lines of interchange that offer much, much promise. “Gender” and “global” are two lenses that have been used, largely separately, to re-vision history in the last several decades. Putting them together allows us to create both telescopes and microscopes, to

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see further and find new things we’ve never seen before, and to see very familiar things in completely new ways.

NOTES

1. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 2. Judith P. Zinsser, “And Now for Something Completely Different: Gendering the World History Survey,” in The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, ed. Ross E. Dunn (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 476–478, and “Women’s History, World History, and the Construction of New Narratives,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 3 (2000): 196–206; Bonnie Smith, “Introduction,” in Women’s History in Global Perspective Vol. 1, ed. Bonnie Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 1–8; Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Women’s History and World History Courses,” Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 133–150; and Margaret Strobel and Marjorie Bingham, “The Theory and Practice of Women’s History and Gender History in Global Perspective,” in Smith, Women’s History, pp. 9–47. 3. Manning, Navigating World History, pp. 208, 210. 4. Ibid., p. 210. 5. Zinsser, “Women’s History,” p. 197. 6. Manning, Navigating World History, p. 3. 7. David Northrup, “Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,” Journal of World History 16 (2005): 249–268. 8. Joan Scott, “Feminism’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 2 (2004): 10–29. With responses by Afsaneh Najmabadi, “From Supplementarity to Parasitism,” and Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Power and Politics in Feminism’s History— and Future.” 9. That conference, held in 1983, was titled “Religion and Society” and organized by Raphael Samuel, James Obelkevich, and Lyndal Roper, who subsequently edited a conference volume, Disciplines of Faith: Religion, Patriarchy and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). The conference ended with a session on “Women and Christianity Today,” which the conference organizers note in the book introduction “released a great deal of anger.” This is a very understated description of a scene I will never forget, with people shouting and standing on chairs, those in the back of the room calling for the heads of those who thought that the topic of the session could be discussed in a dispassionate way, and those in the front just as fervently arguing that it had to be. 10. Najmabadi, “From Supplementarity,” p. 32. 11. Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” Church History 67 (1998): 3. Clark also has a book-length consideration of the linguistic turn, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 12. Gerda Lerner, “U.S. Women’s History: Past, Present and Future,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 4 (2004): 10–27, with responses by Kimberly Springer, Kathi Kern, Jennifer M. Spear, and Leslie Alexander. The quotation is on p. 21. 13. Ibid., pp. 22, 24–25. 14. Colin Sparks, “The Evolution of Cultural Studies,” in What Is Cultural Studies? A

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Reader, ed. John Storey (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 14–30; Simon During, The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1999); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991); and Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 15. http://wwwnew.towson.edu/clst/. 16. During, Cultural Studies Reader, p. 1. 17. Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and (with Victoria Bonnell) Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 18. Sherry Ortner, ed., The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 19. Claire C. Robertson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., “Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women: Beyond Binaries,” special issue, Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (Winter 2003). 20. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) and “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra,” Economic and Political Weekly, 13 July 2002, pp. 2872–2876; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Kamela Visweswaran, “Small Speeches, Subaltern Gender: Nationalist Ideology and Its Historiography,” in Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 83–125. For more reading on gender and colonialism, see Temma Kaplan, “Revolution, Nationalism, and Anti-Imperialism,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (London: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 170–185; and Mrinalini Sinha, “Gender and Nation,” in Smith, Women’s History, pp. 229–274. 21. Duane J. Corpis and Ian Christopher Fletcher, eds., “Two, Three, Many Worlds: Radical Methodologies for Global History,” special issue, Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005). 22. For surveys of recent work on South Asia, see Barbara Ramusack, Geraldine Forbes, Sanjam Ahluwalia, and Antoinette Burton, “Women and Gender in Modern India: Historians, Sources, and Historiography,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (2003); Nupur Chaudhuri, “Clash of Cultures: Gender and Colonialism in South and Southeast Asia”; and Barbara Molony, “Frameworks of Gender: Feminism and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Asia,” in Meade and Wiesner-Hanks, Companion, pp. 430–444 and 513–539. 23. See, e.g., Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford International, 2000); Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoa Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Social Text Collective (Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat), eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: SAGE Publications, 1997); and Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

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24. Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, eds., Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 25. Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); and Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 26. Susan Kellogg, “Depicting Mestizaje: Gendered Images of Race in Colonial Mexican Texts,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 3 (2ooo): 69–92; and Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (2003): 84–118. 27. Karen Gamer, “Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947,” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 191–228; and Manako Ogawa, “‘Hull-House’ in Downtown Tokyo: The Transplantation of a Settlement House from the United States into Japan and the North American Missionary Women, 1919–1945,” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 359–388. 28. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 29. Michelle Maskiell, “Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000,” Journal of World History 13 (2002): 27–66; and Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 85–142. 30. Meade and Wiesner-Hanks, Companion. 31. Mary Jo Maynes and Anne B. Walmer, “Women’s Life Cycle Transitions in a World Historical Perspective: Comparing Marriage in China and Europe,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 4 (2001): 11–21, and “Family History as World History,” in Smith, Women’s History, pp. 48–91. 32. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women’s History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 7. 33. Randi Warne, “Making the Gender-Critical Turn,” in Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives, ed. Tim Jensen and Mikhail Rothstein (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), pp. 249–260. 34. In the oral presentation of this paper, I estimated that there were more than ten such studies, and then I decided to count them, which almost tripled my estimate. Many of these have a world history angle, but their primary focus is on British men. 35. Lerner, “U.S. Women’s History,” p. 19. 36. Northrup, “Globalization.”

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 2 Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250– 1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. The author argues that the evolution of the modern world economy began in the thirteenth century by integrating three subsystems in Europe, the Middle East (including North Africa), and Asia. It challenges the Euro-

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centrism of world systems theorists who argue that the modern world emerged from sixteenth-century Europe. Bentley, Jerry H. Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. This book established Bentley’s reputation as the leading proponent of world history as the study of cross-cultural interactions. The opening chapter sets forth the author’s idea of “modes of conversion” as a conceptual scheme for investigating the interrelations of societies in Afroeurasia from Han-Roman times to the sixteenth century. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. This provocative book challenges Eurocentric world systems analysis by arguing that the world economy has most consistently been centered in East Asia. Frank argues that a brief period of Western dominance, related to Eastern decline starting around 1800, is now coming to an end. The world economy is again returning to its previous orientation with the rise of China as the dominant world economy. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Intended for use as a textbook, Hodgson’s monumental, complex, and in some ways idiosyncratic work was still in progress when he died in 1968. Rubin Smith finished the third volume, working from Hodgson’s drafts and notes. In volume 1 Hodgson delineates his ideas about civilization, Eurocentrism, and the study of world history. Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. The author’s wide-ranging and authoritative manual for researching and teaching world history invites professionals to think systematically and self-consciously about the field as a whole. Manning addresses, among other topics, the historiography of world history from the early modern centuries through the 1990s; the area and global studies movements; the world-historical dimensions of social, economic, ecological, and other categories of research; the question of variable scales in time and space; research design; and the challenges of building graduate programs. McNeill, William H. “The Changing Shape of World History.” History and Theory 34, 2 (May 1995): 8–26. In the long course of his professional career, the shape of world history continually changed in William McNeill’s mind. This essay is an emphatic statement of his desertion of “civilization” as the primary and natural component of world-historical investigation and his full embrace of the “fluctuating whole,” whether hemispheric or global, as the essential spatial unit. His concluding observation is as apt today as it was in 1995: “How to reconcile membership in vivacious primary communities with the imperative of an emerging cosmopolitanism is the most urgent issue of our time.” Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pomeranz challenges the metageography of “East versus West” by focusing his comparison on northwest Europe and the Yangzi Delta region of China as two core economic regions suitable for potentially sustained industrial growth. He then constructs an argument about why industrialization occurred during the nineteenth century in northwest Europe but not in China, focusing on northwest Europe’s easy access to fossil fuels and the bonanza of primary product imports from the Americas.

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Stearns, Peter N. World History: The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2011. Stearns synthesizes decades of deep reflection on world history through his writings and college teaching. The book is not a synoptic history of the world but a manual for educators, especially for those who wish to think carefully and self-consciously about why they teach the subject, how they should structure it, and what they believe students should gain from investigating the past on a global scale. Strasser, Ulrike, and Heidi Tinsman. “Engendering World History.” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 151– 64. This article focuses on the pedagogical challenges of making gender and sexuality central to the teaching of world history. The authors discuss in detail how they designed their course, World History: Gender and Politics, 1400–1700, as part of their feminist praxis. It provides a detailed syllabus as well as reflections on student responses. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. This short book is Wallerstein’s late-career recapitulation of the world-systems model and the arguments he developed from the 1970s through the 1990s. Wallerstein’s work launched a debate that continues to oblige scholars and teachers to come to grips with global economic history, conventional assumptions of Europe’s centrality, and the historical agency of peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. Gender in History: Global Perspectives. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010. This concise world history overview focuses on the construction of gender in world cultures. It introduces readers to the theoretical constructs of gender and sexuality, including the origins of patriarchy, and then applies these concepts in thematic chapters. Each chapter has a broad chronological framework, with the largest spanning the Paleolithic era to the present.

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3 REGIONS IN WORLD-HISTORICAL CONTEXT

IN T R O D U C T I O N

Nearly everyone who plunges into world history brings to the experience expertise in particular academic specialties. Because of the prevailing structure of graduate education, this usually means that researchers and teachers have advanced training in one or more of the conventionally defined world regions. The typical collegiate world history teacher, for instance, is often first an Africanist, Europeanist, Latin Americanist, or some variety of Asianist. Precollegiate school teachers who do not hold graduate degrees in history nevertheless have strengths and interests in particular fields and periods usually defined along regional lines. Novice world history instructors naturally build on their existing fund of knowledge and are likely, at least at first, to emphasize topics related to the regions they know most about. Veteran teachers will necessarily extend their range of knowledge into new regions and subjects. Some courses and textbooks that aim to correct the traditional magnification of Europe’s place in world history may nonetheless disregard large chunks of the inhabited globe. They may leave two or three gaping regional holes, sometimes owing to a civilizational bias that pushes nonurban and less densely populated parts of the world off the map. One way of bringing in a neglected region is to research it and develop a “unit” on it. Another way, however, is to identify good historical questions whose investigation will encourage definition and inclusion of the region at different points in the course. For example, teachers may think they have neither the time nor inclination in a busy semester to pull together a presentation on Australia’s indigenous population before

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the coming of Europeans. In a history course that stresses significant questions rather than regional “coverage,” however, Australian Aboriginal peoples may be incorporated logically in the context of particular historical problems. Why did bands of Homo sapiens migrate to Australia perhaps twenty thousand years earlier than they reached Europe? How did Aboriginal people’s foraging economies also use “fire stick agriculture,” and how did that practice compare with agrarian systems in other parts of the world? Why did contact with Europeans lead to a drastic decline in Aboriginal populations compared to similar phenomena in Argentina, Siberia, and the Island Pacific? All the authors represented in this chapter are interested in posing significant world historical questions that involve the regions they know well rather than simply arguing for their inclusion in world-historical narratives. Historians and social scientists generally recognize nine or ten land masses as primary world regions. Scholars often refer to them as though their spatial dimensions are self-evident and categorical, even though they would also likely admit that these territories are historical and cultural constructs and therefore contested, not natural, entities. The number and definition of primary world regions accepted as conventional have changed over time. Moreover, their unifying characteristics, whether topographical, ecological, cultural, or political, have always been creations of particular groups that for one reason or another have possessed the power to demarcate and name them. During and after World War II, the U.S. government and the experts who advised it devised a classificatory scheme of world regions to help rationalize military and foreign policy decision making and to organize “area studies,” whose purpose was to correct the deficiencies in knowledge of other parts of the globe that many US citizens exhibited. The Cold War added urgency to this project, prompting Congress in 1958 to pass the National Defense Education Act, which authorized the creation of “language and area centers” at American universities. The original eight regional names—“Africa,” “Europe,” “Far East,” “Latin America,” “Near East,” “Russia,” “South Asia,” and “Southeast Asia”— soon achieved general acceptance in American academia, government, and popular media, notwithstanding minor changes in the ensuing years. The “Near East” became the “Middle East,” the “Far East” became “East Asia,” and “Russia” became, until the 1990s, “The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” Thus, the United States’ postwar political and cultural clout in the world also gave it preeminent “naming power.” Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen observe: The world regional grid gradually acquired a life of its own outside of American institutions. In the years since the area studies scheme emerged in the 1950s, its influence has spread across the globe, and by now its regional categories are well on their way to being indigenized, especially where they correspond at some level with local metageographical traditions. . . . The mere fact that functionaries in the U.S. State Department regard a given area as constituting a distinct world region helps to make it so, inasmuch as local elites [in other countries] find it expedient to follow their usage.1

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However orthodox these regional names and their spatial contours have become worldwide, they nonetheless display certain confusing or illogical meanings, as well as various classificatory inconsistencies or omissions. Moreover, they are not all defined by identical topographical, cultural, political, or other properties. We may ask: What makes either Africa as a traditionally designated “continent” or Southeast Asia as an assortment of peninsular and archipelagic states a coherent region in any cultural, linguistic, religious, or political sense? How did the Middle East defined as including both Morocco and Afghanistan become a primary region by any reasonable geographic criterion? Since the “Latin” in Latin America refers in its nineteenth-century origins to the Spanish, Portuguese, and French languages, how did areas where English, Dutch, and various African languages have been spoken get absorbed into Latin America? Despite the peculiarities of the conventional classification system, world historians have in their scholarly literature, textbooks, syllabuses, and conference programs generally accepted the standard taxonomy, mainly because it is conventional and therefore allows them to get on with their work. Since the 1990s, however, historians have, to their credit, also modified the regional map in useful ways. Inner Eurasia (or Central Asia) has gained status as a region of distinctive historical developments. Australia is more widely understood as a locus of historical development before Europeans settled there, rather than as a site of historically static peoples— Aboriginal peoples trapped in a perpetual stone age. Historians have given Oceania, or the Island Pacific, much greater attention as a historical region of human colonization and interchange, albeit a watery one. And in the past several years, the historical profession has inched toward the idea of teaching U.S. history in global context and incorporating North America as a major region more firmly into world history courses. These conversations about reconceptualizing regions are not intended to replace one agreed-upon taxonomy with another. Instead, they aim to tailor regional configurations to historical questions being asked, not to create a different set of fixed spaces. In this chapter we consider regions to be large land areas, though in the case of Asia our consideration extends to seas and islands of Southeast Asia. The selected texts share this presumption of land-based regions. We have not aimed to represent all the world’s large regions, but instead to facilitate continued conversation about how regional changes contributed to— and were shaped by— global processes. Chapter 4 considers other configurations of space that historians have conceived as useful contexts for posing world historical questions. Readers looking for geographical coverage of regions in world history will be struck by the absence of essays on East Asia and Africa in this chapter, especially given the centrality of China in global debates and the number of contributions Africanists have made to the world history field. We reiterate the point that one need not survey every major region to understand the conceptual challenges of situating regional specificity within common global processes. We encourage readers to explore the treatment of these and other regions through the suggestions in Further Reading. In the first selection, Julia Clancy-Smith adopts “Middle East and North Africa,” or

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“MENA,” as the name for a region whose principal unifying cultural characteristics are Islam as the majority religion and Arabic as the dominant language west of Iran and south of Turkey. Several decades ago academics began gradually to use this compound term, as well as “Southwest Asia and North Africa,” instead of simply “Middle East,” a moniker that came into fashion in the 1930s in connection with Britain’s regional military command structure. In the Orientalist intellectual tradition that took shape in the nineteenth century, both “Middle East” and “Near East” referred to the part of the “Orient” that was geographically closest to Europe, though, as Clancy-Smith points out, Europeans regarded that region as culturally remote from the West, that is, as the nearest “Other.” Eventually, however, experts who discarded Orientalist presuppositions acknowledged that North Africa does not lie east of any region of Afroeurasia. After all, part of Morocco extends longitudinally west of Ireland. Nevertheless, “Middle East” remains in common use to refer to the lands extending from the eastern Mediterranean shore, usually including Egypt, to Afghanistan. “MENA” has gained more acceptance because it is a geographically more sensible name for the wider, predominantly Muslim and Arab region, than “Middle East.” Clancy-Smith argues, however, that scholars and teachers who think in world-historical terms have in both intellectual and institutional ways been breaking down walls between MENA and the world beyond it. First, they have demonstrated the permeability of the borders between MENA and other regions in terms of historical interaction and encounter. The Mediterranean Sea has become a space of complex and multidirectional human interconnectivity from ancient to modern times rather than an imaginary barrier between Christian and Muslim societies. The emergence of predominantly Muslim and Turkic-speaking states in Inner Eurasia in the post-Soviet era has encouraged new exploration of historical connections between that region and the Middle East. Second, Clancy-Smith examines institutional border crossing by highlighting the lively intellectual mingling and network building that since the 1990s has taken place between professionals whose primary affiliation is the Middle East Studies Association and those whose main intellectual home is the American Historical Association, which represents the whole discipline. Clancy-Smith makes clear that this marriage has taken place partly owing to the world history movement’s influence on both organizations, notably the growth of comparative and interregional research. The author also queries the state of world-historical approaches among scholars native to MENA states, where investigation of the national experience has traditionally prevailed over even regional study, let alone world history. She asks whether “historians from the region are at liberty to dismantle the dominant nationalist narrative regarding how the nation came to be.” She sees signs of a world-minded shift in Turkey, though less evidence of it in other countries so far. Similarly to Clancy-Smith, Lauren Benton contends that new insights into the historical experience of Latin Americans will emerge from “giving greater prominence to the transnational ties that link the region to the rest of the world. What is required, ulti-

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mately, is a reorientation of world history and a repositioning of Latin America within it.” Traditionally, scholars have not only accepted Latin America as a primary world region akin to a self-contained cultural entity but have also characterized its historical experience as atypical compared to all other world regions. The perception of Latin America as “odd region out” is founded on such developments as its falling to European territorial rule much earlier than African or Asian lands did, the drastic decline of its population following exposure to Afroeurasian diseases, the formation of postcolonial states in the nineteenth century rather than the later twentieth century, the failure to industrialize alongside the United States in the nineteenth century, and the puzzling hybridity of the region as both Western and non-Western. Benton believes that the world history discipline has advanced to the point where a “spatial reordering” of the Latin American past is possible. Release from what she calls “narratives of difference” will be achieved with more research and teaching that explore processes connecting Latin Americans to historical actors in other places. More historians will also undertake comparative analysis that draws case studies from Latin America, including not only projects that compare phenomena occurring contemporaneously in different world regions but also in different eras, for example, comparison of developments in the Spanish-American empire with those in the Roman or Han Chinese empires. In “Southeast Asia in World History,” Craig Lockard describes several ideas and inventions of world historical significance that peoples of Southeast Asia autonomously generated, including food plant domestications, maritime technologies, the prominence of women in public life, and the distinctive blending of Hindu and Buddhist practice. The author, however, does not hesitate to stress Southeast Asia’s external connections from ancient times to the near present on the grounds that the region’s history cannot be made fully intelligible without them. “It may be possible,” he states, “to write the history of Japan or of southern Africa or perhaps, some might argue, even of China before 1500 without paying very much attention to the links with other world regions, but it is not possible for Southeast Asia.” Accepting the established definition of Southeast Asia as the mainland and maritime lands south of China, Lockard sees the region as a sprawling hub of interlocked sea lanes joining East Asia to India and lands farther west since ancient times. A thinner web of routes reached into the Island Pacific. The movement of people, domesticated plants, goods, and ideas in and out of this hub profoundly shaped the character of Southeast Asian culture and society. In the twentieth century, the region remained as important as ever as a commercial pivot, but as Lockard writes, “the much greater degree of integration of Southeast Asia into the rapidly expanding world economy and imperialism-driven sociopolitical system had profound consequences for the region’s political, economic, social, and cultural life, greatly reducing its autonomy and challenging traditional patterns.” Lockard organizes his chronological review of Southeast Asian history around seven topics of change, all of which set the region in either a hemispheric or global frame.

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The global framing of world regions that Lockard and others have accomplished has until recently largely ignored North America, notably in world history classrooms. The American experts who contrived the world regional classification scheme after World War II excluded North America altogether because their job was to categorize foreign areas to serve the foreign policy interests of the United States. (Canada was presumably not foreign enough to deserve separate area status.) Similarly, both world history and Western Civ began as projects to expose American youth mainly to parts of the world besides the United States. In the K–12 schools of many states, as well as in some public colleges and universities, introductory courses in US history have for a long time been statutory, or at least strongly recommended. Curriculum decision makers have therefore tended to perceive world history, world civilizations, or world cultures as the containers of assorted subject matter that is not US history. Separating the United States from the rest of the globe has, by the way, also meant largely ignoring Canada, which indeed the postwar world area makers did. On the other hand, Mexico, the third large North American state, has had ample room within the Latin American regional container. Two ideas about North American history have gained significant academic support in the past two decades. First, world history studies should incorporate this primary region as much as others, and, second, US history should be “internationalized.” One reason for this development is growing public consciousness of the many ways, from immigration and trade to atmospheric pollution and international terrorism, that globalization imposes itself on the daily routines of US citizens. A second is greater academic recognition that globalizing forces have a deep past and that setting American history in transnational and interregional contexts will inevitably yield new bodies of knowledge and fresh interpretations. Although in recent years world history textbooks and curricula have in some degree incorporated North America, the mission to globalize US history has received more formal attention. In the late 1990s, for example, the Organization of American Historians and New York University sponsored four international conferences whose primary objective was to “rethink American history in a global age.” “The LaPietra Report,” the project’s summative statement, contends that because “history is a contextualizing discipline, . . . connections and comparisons in our thinking about nations and cultures beyond the borders of the United States are essential. American history, so often sharply distinguished from the histories of the wider world, must be linked to that world, as the experiences of Americans have been for centuries.”2 A leading participant in the LaPietra project, Carl Guarneri published America in the World: United States History in Global Context in 2007. The final selection in this chapter is part of Guarneri’s introductory chapter, “American History as if the World Mattered (and Vice Versa).” Declaring that “in the context of global change, every nation’s history is part of world history,” the author argues for both American history in world context and world history that includes the United States. He describes several ways in which the study of American history is changing under the influence of historians seeking “larger contexts and connections.” He also suggests a four-era periodization of US his-

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tory that emphasizes relatively large-scale developments, thereby eliminating many traditional details but more effectively synchronizing the American experience with changes in the world at large. Guarneri also asks, “What aspects of world history look different when an enlarged American history is taken into consideration?” He offers five examples of how presentation of topics in a world history course might change if North America were no longer a blank spot on the narrative map.

NOTES

1. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 168– 69. 2. Thomas Bender, “The LaPietra Report: A Report to the Profession,” Organization of American Historians, September 2000, http://www.oah.org/about/reports/reports-state ments/the-lapietra-report-a-report-to-the-profession/; Carl J. Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” The History Teacher 36, 1 (November 2002): 37– 64. See also Debbie Ann Doyle, “Rethinking America in Global Perspective: A Report on the Institute,” Perspectives in History: The News Magazine of the American Historical Association 43, 6 (September 2005), http://www.historians.org/publica tions-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2005.

T H E M I D D L E E A S T A N D N O R T H A F R I C A IN WO R L D H I S T O R Y Julia A. Clancy-Smith

Since 2000, when my essay “The Middle East in World History” appeared in the New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, the epistemological categories that world history originally set out to question have been subjected to relentless scholarly scrutiny.1 Today, few professional historians deploy constructs such as “the West” or “civilization” uncritically. Indeed, my recent monograph, titled Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, asked: where was Europe and who was a European during the long nineteenth century?2 The ability to formulate that query came from years of thinking about world history in the company of scholars similarly engaged. This revised and expanded essay has two objectives. First, it revisits my earlier chapter, which covered late antiquity through the early modern era, to assess recent shifts in historical thinking on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In that chapter I argued two things: that older scholarly literature tended paradoxically to “distance” MENA’s past because of its proximity to something called “the West,” notably after the rise of Islam during the seventh century CE; and that by localizing the historical experiences of the region’s highly diverse peoples, cultures, and states, which have always Note: Previously unpublished essay

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enjoyed intense exchanges with adjoining “areas,” a more satisfactory global big picture emerges.3 Second, it explores world history’s impact on the historiography of MENA for periods not treated previously—the early modern and modern eras— and thereby teases out a few intellectual and institutional forces that produced convergence or dialogue in the past decade or so of research. However, a few general trends currently reshaping historical work should first be noted. Of late, the chronological lines between the modern and premodern have become rather fuzzy, particularly for Afroeurasia. In addition, the notion of “transnationalism,” which gained traction as historians wearied of the “nation-state” and the “empire,” has comingled with world history in strange and wonderful ways; at times these two “containers” are employed interchangeably, which has generated debate. As significantly, women’s and gender history have fundamentally altered the historical sciences for all world regions.4 Closer to home for MENA, historians of the “eastern Mediterranean” have come to realize, owing to the purchase of world history, that the story line does not halt at the western borders between Libya and Egypt. Hence, Northwest Africa’s (the Maghrib’s) former status as a historical sidebar has changed; it is no longer subsumed (or semiconcealed) under the larger (and contested) construct of “Middle East.” At the same time, practitioners of Jewish history, one of the most vibrant, long-standing fields in “minority studies” have come to reevaluate the very concept of “religious minority.” Scholars in that field now seek out connections and exchanges as much as differences.5

M E N A I N L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y A N D T H E “ M I D D L E P E R I O D S ”

Interpretations of the early and “middle periods” of MENA’s history have undergone dramatic historiographical transformations. The coming of Islam into the Mediterranean world of late antiquity is interpreted less as an unfortunate rupture and disruption than as a multifaceted example of continuity.6 Nor are the Arabs and Muslims portrayed, as older literature did, as interlopers in the Middle Sea.7 The book Panorama: A World History recasts the “classical periods” to juxtapose Persia, Greece, Carthage, and Rome as intersecting empires— and equals— during the millennium from 550 BCE to 600 CE, a novel chronological and interpretive approach.8 Moreover, histories of Iberia under Muslim rule (ca. 711–1500) used to assert that those centuries constituted a mere “occupation,” thereby erasing deep political, religious, and cultural entanglements. The current tsunami of studies on medieval and early modern Iberia, North Africa, and the Western Mediterranean has not only profoundly altered the narrative but also created a new regional unit of analysis for investigating unsuspected connectivities through a comparative methodology informed by world history principles.9 Historians now argue that no community in Islamic Spain was hermetically sealed off, because religious, legal, and political borders were porous and elastic.10 “Mediterraneanism” has reawakened scholarly passion for the Inner Sea that is both cause and consequence of related growth fields, such as migration and neoimperial

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studies that long figured in the world history canon.11 Reimagining the Mediterranean Basin as comprising contact zones of varying scales and tempos, rather than as a single sea, means that its Muslim shores are no longer quarantined from broader historical processes or patterns. This perspective relinks, for example, the previously severed histories of Islamic- and Norman-ruled Sicily and southern Italy with Muslim Spain.12 By privileging individuals or microcommunities of men and women, slaves and free persons, converts and conversos (and not simply “Muslims, Jews, and Christians”) in multireligious military borderlands, in densely populated cities, in households, or on the high seas, “medieval” MENA appears less exceptional.13 The Age of Discovery, earlier viewed as a quintessentially European phenomenon, tended to be mono-vocal. However, recent anthologies of travel writings and observations from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries include the Moroccan writer Leo Africanus or the Mughal emperor Babur, along with Columbus, Vespucci, and Sir Walter Raleigh; cross-cultural journeys and experiences far from home were not the sole purview of Europeans. The life trajectories of individuals such as Ibn Battuta, or lesser known figures like the Iraqi Christian priest Ilyas bin Hanna al-Mawsuli who landed in seventeenth-century Latin America, demonstrate the power of biography to localize as well as expose larger, more-complex nodes of displacement and change.14 Finally, conceptualizations of the “early modern maritime orders” as “ocean studies” foregrounded the Atlantic or Indian Ocean worlds, but current work reinserts the Mediterranean into that international order, which in turn has spun off new subfields.15 The history of comparative slave systems is now a full-fledged and increasingly crowded domain. Even when largely focused on Mediterranean actors, research looks to practices of enslavement, forced migration, captivity, and labor extraction elsewhere on the globe because laws, procedures, and practices governing slavery and enslaved persons migrated far and wide.16 For later periods the major issues are the following: first, when and why did modernities take hold in MENA; second, how can historians usefully deconstruct the powerful mythologies associated with modern empires and nation-states; and, finally, how did world history reorient research on MENA during the modern period, and what are the consequences for the discipline in general, which itself has undergone far-reaching transformations?17

W H E R E A R E W E , A N D H OW D I D W E G E T H E R E ?

Global political upheavals, together with intellectual, institutional, and other shifts, have caused a reterritorialization of MENA. The Soviet Union’s disintegration after 1989 and the formation of Muslim Turkish republics pushed out the fungible boundaries of “the Middle East,” which has lately gotten bigger. Moreover, its contours, and the coherence or viability of some of its states, are at present uncertain, in large measure because of successive military and other interventions by the United States and its allies: Gulf War I (1991), the Afghan wars, the second Iraqi invasion in 2003, and the Arab Spring popu-

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list prodemocracy uprisings that erupted in 2011 and continue unabated. Indeed, the centenary of the Great War of 1914 presents a cruel paradox; some of the “Arab” states that victorious European powers hastily manufactured in the war’s aftermath seem on the verge of collapse. One core mission of the World History Association (WHA), and the wider movement for world history, has been to rethink older periodizations, conventional analytical units (e.g., civilizations or regions), and well-worn tropes such as “the West and the rest.” Characterizations of MENA as a space of incorrigible otherness, which discouraged comparative thinking and theorizing, are no longer credible, at least in most academic circles. In this, the WHA’s abiding concern with cross-cultural encounters, in multiple registers across the globe, played a key part, even if the definition of “culture” is subject to debate. Critical research frontiers, such as women’s/gender studies and environmental and migration history, have aligned MENA’s past not only with European or Asian histories but also with trans-Atlantic histories.18 Some time ago, women’s studies scholars aimed to internationalize a field that initially privileged Western women’s historical experiences. One major obstacle to globalizing was the problem of documentation and archives, which inspired feminists to “find women in the sources,” to uncover evidence in unlikely places.19 Richer sources permit transregional historical comparisons of, for example, “palace women”—those who served and resided in royal courts from the Americas to Istanbul and to China— or daughters and fathers in Islam.20 Along similar lines scholars no longer treat “Ottoman port cities” as a distinct category but rather as theoretically comparable to maritime centers around the Mediterranean Basin, the Indian Ocean, or the globe. This kind of approach also incubated the novel idea that the Ottoman state, in its different configurations over the centuries, responded to challenges—in demography, the allocation of scarce resources, or climate—in ways similar to those of other global imperial formations.21 The same argument can be advanced for the Mughal Empire of South Asia or the Qajar Dynasty on the Iranian Plateau.22 The confluence of colonial studies and histories of the environment has produced significant insights into “environmental imaginaries.” From circa 1800 on, European travelers and polemicists depicted MENA as “an ecological disaster zone” whose majority Muslim inhabitants were responsible for agricultural degradation, deforestation, and mismanagement of scarce water resources. Thus, both the land and people yearned for salvation by outside powers.23 Ecological redemption stories proved extremely attractive for European–North American audiences during the heyday of empire, and they regrettably still inform some “development” thinking and policy for the region, notably in nonacademic circles, and especially for modern Palestine.24 Nevertheless, professional historical studies on topics as diverse as the emergence of transregional social media networks, international campaigns for women/human rights, or refugees and war, routinely incorporate MENA into the complex genealogies of global modernities.25 Let us take a quick tour of a few scholarly associations and venues to trace the ways

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in which world history forged a space for, and thereby legitimized, MENA’s histories within the discipline. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American Historical Association (AHA) organize annual meetings with panels, papers, events, plenary sessions, and bustling book exhibits. Of the two, the AHA is by far the oldest and biggest; its members hail from all history subfields, time periods, and approaches. MESA meetings encompass disciplines—from religious studies and ethnomusicology to language-acquisition pedagogies— although history panels normally dominate the program. Nevertheless, historians of MENA did not attend AHA meetings in large numbers until recently, a not uncommon pattern among area specialists. Historians of MENA who frequented AHA meetings or wrote for its premier journal, the American Historical Review, were somewhat marginalized; their papers, panels, and articles favored topics of long-term interest to European historians, notably the Ottoman Empire’s relations with Europe, American foreign policy in MENA, or French Algeria. Currently, MENA enjoys a much more prominent presence at annual AHA meetings, as well as in the association’s myriad other activities, above all teacher outreach.26 At the same time, MESA conferences attract scholars who, in the older disciplinary culture, might not have presented their work. Members of the Society for French Historical Studies or French Colonial Historical Studies, whose interests now extend to the Mediterranean’s Muslim shores through imperial and comparative studies, are increasingly involved in MESA meetings. And the older default option of panels and papers on French and British imperialism in MENA have been replaced, although not entirely, by projects that consider comparative empires across time and space. American Historical Review articles reveal new lines of inquiry influenced by world history paradigms; two issues in 2011 offered research on diasporic “Baghdadi Jews” in China and drug trafficking in the interwar Middle East as case studies that advanced theories of law, identity, and territorialization.27 In sum, the AHA has evolved into a house of many histories because scholars who specialize in the Americas or Europe can speak with and to those whose expertise lies in MENA.28 Yet we need to travel beyond conventional borders to take into account intellectual trends, opportunities, and constraints for historians in the region itself.

POSTSCRIP T

Critical to MENA’s future in the field of world history is the incorporation of local historians’ research findings into broader conceptualizations of the modern; this in turn depends on whether those scholars are at liberty to interrogate, or even dismantle, powerful nationalist narratives regarding how the nation came to be.29 Some Turkish historians, either at home institutions across Turkey or in North American and European universities, have embraced world history because of the greater accessibility of the rich Ottoman archives and the intellectual autonomy to question the early nationalist

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canon on the late Ottoman Empire and early republic. In addition, Turkish scholars are increasingly engaged in environmental history, a dynamic field for understanding the intersections of disease, resource structures, climatic events, and population fluxes for state and society in the longue durée.30 Somewhat paradoxically, Iranian history is another growth area, thanks in large measure to world history, and despite limitations upon field work in on-site archives or collections.31 The same does not hold true for national universities, research centers, and archives in many MENA countries, where research on the modern or postcolonial eras stops at the portal of the ruling party. Entrenched political groups, often supported by transnational corporate and great-power interests, manipulate access to public higher education, print media, and electronic media as well as the allocation of scarce research resources. In today’s North Africa, university or national libraries still concentrate overwhelmingly on the nationalist past, even to the exclusion of historical works on neighboring countries. Worse, invasion, occupation, and warfare have brought ruin to cities, schools, archives, museum collections, and archaeological sites—not to mention the immeasurable human costs. World history and the discipline have discarded the “Plato to NATO series,” and its sequel “the Prophet Muhammad to OPEC profit narrative,” thanks to decades of national and international institutes, workshops, symposia, meetings, and deep research in recondite archival sources. Book exhibits at conferences and the catalogues of university as well as nonacademic presses offer a menu of publications and teaching materials previously unavailable in such abundance. In these very same places, however, we witness the nefarious consequences of 9/11—the expansion of the lucrative global terror industry. The cacophony of resolutely antihistorical “policy experts” and their sheer output deliberately stoke Islamophobia by creating the impression of a broad monolithic Muslim stance on politics, religion, women, gender, and state.32 Ahistorical treatments cast MENA as a space of implacable and inexplicable, almost genetic, violence through a deliberate strategy of discursive slippage. When convenient, they locate the region within an internationalist frame. Yet when attempting to explain outbreaks of warfare or conflict, they apply a national frame, which conveniently places all of the blame and failure to keep the peace on local communities, governments, and people. In addition, serious challenges confront the profession in other realms, notably in current resistance to the legally mandated requirement for timely declassification of US government documents, which are always revealing as to what really has transpired in MENA. Moreover, venerable scholarly organizations, such as the Council of American Overseas Research Centers or various Fulbright programs, which facilitated field research in MENA as well as dialogue with local academic institutions and scholars, are in constant financial peril. Events in Egypt in 2013 forced the Social Science Research Council to momentarily suspend on-site research for its grantees there. Under these conditions, one wonders what the future holds for history and historians in MENA.

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NOTES

1. Julia Clancy-Smith, “The Middle East in World History,” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2000), 293–300. An earlier version of this article appeared in World History Bulletin 9 (Fall–Winter 1992– 93): 30–34. 2. Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800– 1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). See also, Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Gaspar, eds., Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 3. In Molly Greene’s A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), the localizing strategy is to examine the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and the early modern Mediterranean from the vantage point of Crete; the strategy revealed that similarities, not fatal differences, characterized both Venetian and Ottoman rule over the island. 4. Bonnie G. Smith, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5. Robin Waterfield’s Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) argues that Roman conflicts with Carthage and Hannibal in the western Mediterranean influenced warfare in Greece. For the nineteenth century and minority history, Julia Phillips Cohen’s Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) traces Jewish political integration into the modernizing Ottoman state. See also Sarah A. Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 6. Among the scholars arguing for an extended transition rather than rupture is Walter Kaegi in Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); see also Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a truly wide-angle analysis that ranges over millennia, see Linda T. Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (London: Routledge, 2013). 7. The special issue of the Journal of North African Studies, “Facets of Exchange between North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula,” edited by Miriam Ali-de-Unzaga and Adam Gaiser, vol. 19, no. 1 (January 2014) treats Spain, Gibraltar, and North Africa as a unified space of continual fusion and synthesis. 8. Ross E. Dunn and Laura J. Mitchell, Panorama: A World History (New York: McGrawHill, 2014). For an example of the modern history of MENA treated within the context of world history, see Julia Clancy-Smith and Charles D. Smith, The Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 9. Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 10. See Janina M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 11. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) is a critical work that set off the Mediterranean

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stampede among scholars. See also Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 12. A few examples are works by the following: Brian Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050– 1300 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Alex Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Ramzi Rouighi, The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifriqiya and Its Andalusis, 1200– 1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); and Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 13. Numerous institutional and academic forums now exist for studying the Mediterranean in a world-historical manner. One example is the Center for Mediterranean Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which has organized seminars and other activities involving eight University of California campuses. Similar initiatives have been under way in Europe and elsewhere. 14. Ramön E. Duarte, “Producing Yeni Dünya for an Ottoman Readership: The Travels of Ilyas bin Hanna al-Mawsuli in Colonial Latin America, c. 1675–1683,” in East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Transcultural Experience in the Premodern World, vol. 14 of Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Peter C. Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A SixteenthCentury Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006). Ross E. Dunn’s study of the fourteenth-century globe-trotting Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta created the template for life stories as world history: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 15. Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 16. Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 17. Isa Blumi, Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State (New York: Routledge, 2012) is a compelling study of multiple modernities that eschews a Eurocentric approach. Blumi’s work raises a broader question: how can world historians develop nonlinear, nonteleological narratives attentive to the interplay of historical serendipity with structures, and “chaotic human agency” in its relations with “systems.” 18. The Journal of World History’s first issue featured Nikki R. Keddie’s “The Past and Present of Women in the Muslim World,” Journal of World History 1, 1 (Spring 1990): 77– 108. See also Alan Mikhail, ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Akram F. Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870– 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860– 1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); James L. Gelvin and Nile

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Green, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); and Julia Clancy-Smith, “Mediterranean Historical Migrations: An Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, ed. Immanuel Ness (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). 19. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 20. Anne Walthall, Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), with chapters devoted to the Middle East; Alyssa Gabbay and Julia Clancy-Smith, eds., “Fathers and Daughters in Islam,” special issue, Journal of Persianate Studies 4, 1 (2011); Amy Aisen Kallander, Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); and Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). The Sixteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, held in Toronto in 2014, boasted more panels and papers devoted to women/gender in MENA than ever before. 21. This was one of the main arguments made by Faruk Tabak’s The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550– 1870: A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 22. The volume edited by Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly, Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) was among the first to compare port cities and trade zones. See also John-Paul A. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Catia Antunes, Leor Halevi, and Francesca Trivellato, Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000– 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), which examines the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds. The World History Association’s symposium “Port Cities in World History,” hosted by the Jaume Vicens i Vives University Institute for History at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, in 2014 will surely produce more monographic studies. 23. Similar, even identical, ecological arguments were made much closer to home in regard to the Mediterranean islands, notably Sicily. In a sense, these run parallel to, and intersect with, other imperial claims about MENA’s women or religious or ethnic minorities who were also in need of socio-moral improvement and thus outside protection. 24. Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III, eds. Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011); see also Edmund Burke III, “The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 BCE–2000 CE,” in The Environment and World History, eds. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); and Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). John R. McNeill’s work was among the first to systematically compare regional environments on both sides of the Mediterranean: The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 25. For examples, see Sarah D. Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy on the Eve of World War Two (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Ian

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Law, Mediterranean Racisms: Connections and Complexities in the Racialization of the Mediterranean Region (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which maps the entire basin in comparison with racialization globally in the contemporary period. 26. The AHA publication Perspectives, which focuses on pedagogy, teaching, and outreach, had systematically incorporated MENA into its issues long before 9/11, as has the sister publication, the Bulletin of World History. 27. Sarah A. Stein, “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Persistence of Empire,” American Historical Review 116, 1 (February 2011): 80–108; and Cyrus Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin; or What Narcotics Trafficking in the Interwar Middle East Can Tell Us about Territorialization,” American Historical Review 116, 2 (April 2011): 273–306. The convergence of world history with MENA history is also evident in the expanding number of books reviewed under the rubric “Comparative/World” in American Historical Review issues. Along parallel lines, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, MESA’s flagship journal, now features special issues devoted to world history questions, for example, in 2010 an entire issue devoted to environmental histories. 28. The December 2013 issue of the Journal of World History (24, 4: 737– 822) offered a forum on new approaches to disease and health that features a piece by Nükhet Varlik, “From Bête Noire to le Mal de Constantinople: Plagues, Medicine, and the Early Modern Ottoman State” (741– 70). This essay was grouped with research on global commerce and international health during the age of revolutions and the aging in the United States in the post–World War II era. 29. Current research on North African student activism during the early spring of 1968, predating the Parisian street protests in May, argues that transnational perspectives, such as the “global sixties,” at times unconsciously favor Eurocentric perspectives, because the research of local historians remains unknown and thus not incorporated into bigger frames. On this, see Burleigh Hendrickson, “March 1968: Practicing Transnational Activism from Tunis to Paris,” in Julia Clancy-Smith, ed., special issue of International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, 4 (November 2012): 755– 74. During an international conference held in 1998 (hosted by the American Institute of Maghreb Studies and the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis) on “North Africa in World History,” the organizers belatedly realized the insurmountable obstacles faced by local historians. University library shelves from Rabat to Tripoli lacked the monographic literature necessary for systematic comparison across time and place, and thus for “doing world history.” Although the Internet has (only) partially offset the empty library book shelves, access to the Internet is, needless to say, highly politicized. 30. Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean; Sam White, “Rethinking Disease in Ottoman History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, 4 (November 2010): 549– 67; Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Ronnie Ellenbaum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950– 1072 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 31. Among numerous recent works, see Farzin Vejdani, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 32. On this, see Sherifa Zuhur, “Dispatches from the Global Terror Industry,” Review of Middle East Studies 44, 2 (Winter 2010): 223–26; quote 225.

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N O LO N G E R O D D R E G I O N O U T: R E P O S I T I O NIN G L AT IN A ME R I C A IN WO R L D H I S T O R Y Lauren Benton

The history of Latin America has been instrumental to the rise of world history as a research field. Some of the seminal works of world history have highlighted Latin American- centered events, from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples to Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange. The region has also provided important subject matter for groundbreaking studies on topics that have become the bread and butter of global historians: diasporas, transnational movements, and the rise of global capitalism. It might seem, then, that the relationship between Latin American history and world history has been a close one and that the two fields have informed each other more than they have developed in isolation. Yet the reality is both more complex and more troubling. In the main paradigms of world history, Latin America has been placed not in the foreground, but off to the side, inhabiting a space that is not so much insignificant as it is simply strange. Many comparative analyses have cast the region as a contrast to patterns of change that in turn take on the character of historical models. Together, the trends produce a tendency to view the continent as “odd region out”—home to anomalous processes and perpetually out of sync with global historical periodization. Curiously, emphasis on the region’s oddities is perhaps most muted in the historiography of the pre-Columbian period. Here, though we might expect exceptionalism to attach itself to representations of Aztec and Incan Empires as, at the very least, technologically different from their counterparts in other world regions, historians and anthropologists have instead operated largely within a comparative framework that emphasizes shared structures of symbolic practices, social hierarchies, and agricultural regimes.1 The treatment of later periods departs from this pattern. The Spanish Conquest is seen as mainly atypical for its time. The formation of the Latin American republics is represented as an idiosyncratic mix of models of governance, popular politics, and elite rivalries. And twentieth-century development is measured— and comes up short— against industrialization in Europe and Asia. It is possible to read the region’s history differently in global context, but to do so will require us to follow innovative leads in both regional and world historiography. The view of Latin America as atypical will resist change, in part because it is founded on selective, but not completely wrong, historical observations. Consider first the history of Latin American conquest and colonization from a world historical perspective. The most strikingly “odd” feature of the conquest was that it happened at all. European interactions with Asians and Africans were evolving along a different trajectory. The Lauren Benton’s “No Longer Odd Region Out: Repositioning Latin America in World History” was originally published in Hispanic American Historical Review 84, 3 (August 2004): 423–30. Reprinted with permission from Duke University Press.

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Portuguese and Dutch limited their territorial and sovereignty claims and instead established a network of fortified posts in Africa and Asia to channel trade. This strategy was linked to older patterns of protected trade diasporas, including the model of Venetian trade in the eastern Mediterranean.2 The creation of a territorial empire places Latin America in a special category. In fact, the term “colonial,” as applied to the sixteenth century, is usually reserved for Latin America and not used to describe either the enclaves of European control elsewhere in the world or the expansion of non-European polities such as the Mogul Empire. The difference in chronology is important, because one of the favored rubrics of world history has been the global economy. European trade in Africa and Asia was structured around both fortified trading posts and participation in local, or “country,” trade. Painted with a broad brush, this history is one of contact but not conquest—relations were often violent but were also characterized by negotiation and mutual regulation of trade. Further, European long-distance trade was still dwarfed by the volume of non-European interregional trade. The history of the Latin American economy can be interwoven with this narrative, but the economic story that has received most attention here is the transformation of labor and production. Thus, while the flow of silver is one that world historians suggest marks the origins of a truly global economy, the Latin American position within the global circulation of silver was unique— again highlighting the region’s difference.3 Older, civilizational approaches have shared the problem: Latin America could not be placed squarely in the West, yet it was also not wholly “other.” This conundrum predated the Enlightenment and extended even to characterizations that situated Spain on the margins of the West and regarded the Pyrenees as the border of Europe.4 Stepping outside this framework has not proven easy. Serious and sophisticated scholarship on Christianization, for example, has found that religious syncretism in the region illuminates broader patterns of religious change but also confirms that Latin America’s experience of mass conversion, though both forced and incomplete, contrasts with a global pattern of much more limited change. Even the spread of Islam, while vast in scope, was less sweeping in the sense that it left room for the formal recognition of religious difference alongside Islamization. Thus, in the sphere of religion, cultural change in Latin America again appears atypical. Of all the globalizing forces, one might guess that the most likely to lead us to view Latin America as deeply connected to the rest of the world is biology. Yet even here narratives of difference dominate. Biological approaches highlight the impact of imported pathogens on a region isolated from the Eurasian ecumene. Crude comparative environmental approaches do not necessarily fare better and may even replicate older European ideas about the New World as climatically, and therefore culturally, unique.5 Even in the study of the more recent global economy, with its emphasis on the powerful integrating forces of markets and transnational investment, scholars have tended to point to Latin America for its idiosyncrasies. Efforts to sort out the factors

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that accounted for the rapid growth of newly industrializing Asian economies in the 1980s led scholars of economic development to juxtapose these success stories with the persistent structural weaknesses of the fastest-growing Latin American countries.6 More recently, Argentina has emerged as a canary in the coal mine, a case that warns advanced economies of the dangers of debt overload. It is understood that the extremity of financial disorder there makes the example into a good cautionary tale. Even the Left has taken its turn marking the historically novel character of Latin America’s dependent development, while political scientists have portrayed populism in the region as both more entrenched and more resilient than similar political currents elsewhere. In working against such traditions, we must go beyond searching for commonalities and giving greater prominence to the transnational ties that link the region to the rest of the world. What is required, ultimately, is a reorientation of world history and a repositioning of Latin America within it. The potential for such moves already exists in recent world historical research, and several new paths are coming into clear view.7 Questioning the master narratives of global economic change, civilizational orders, and biological connections is an important first step. This is not to say that we should abandon topics such as trade, culture, or disease. But emphasis on these themes has been so consistent that it has become difficult to break away from expectations about orderly progression— and such assumptions are the foundation for the image of Latin America as “odd region out.” Institutional world history offers one alternative.8 Fifteen years ago, such a term might have been taken to mean attention to international ordering in the form of global market regulation, interstate agreements, international law, or imperial administration. But the term institutions now signifies a broader range of phenomena, from labor regimes to routines for marking religious difference. Combining the study of cultural categories with analysis of political and economic change has opened world history to new topics and unorthodox comparisons. Recent studies have uncovered, for example, homologies between the legal structures of Islamic and Christian empires, a reordering of assumptions about the relative timing of economic growth in East and West, and the circulation of colonizing personnel and ideas within empire as well as between colonies and metropole.9 The approach is particularly important in the positioning of Latin America: it moves us away from the unproductive question of the extent to which the region belongs to the West and disaggregates the phenomenon of colonialism so that the timing of colonial transitions in Latin America no longer presents an obstacle to the region’s incorporation in comparative study. Before we follow this notion further, consider a third promising development: the emergence of transregional histories in the areas bordering Latin America. Atlantic history has been around for longer than many people think; nearly 40 years ago, Pierre Chaunu was attempting to transpose Braudel’s ideas of Mediterranean interconnections onto the Atlantic by tracing shipping links. The last decade has seen signs that the field is coming of age, with participation from leading scholars from all the subregions of

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the Atlantic world and attempts to reconfigure familiar research questions to reflect interregional perspectives.10 While there has not yet emerged an organized scholarly community focused on Pacific history, there are indications here, too, that attention to cross- and pan-Pacific influences is rapidly expanding and generating new research, from innovative approaches to Chinese diasporas to long-overdue analyses of Hawaii as a global entrepôt and site of U.S. colonialism.11 Also promising is the recent move by scholars to incorporate North and South America in a single narrative framework.12 From a world historical perspective, these transregional fields pose, of course, new puzzles about the nature and history of not only intraregional connections but also global regional boundaries. Geography does not “explain” such boundaries; in fact, much new research has emphasized the ways in which movements of people, goods, and knowledge defined sometimes oddly shaped circuits that may have been particularly concentrated within Atlantic or Pacific basins but reached into other spheres, simultaneously blurring and shaping those boundaries.13 One example is the overlap of seventeenth-century Atlantic-style colonizing, piracy, and slave trading with maritime politics in the Indian Ocean, and the parallel reach of routine raiding expeditions by the Dutch, English, and French to the Pacific coast of South and Central America.14 A map merging representations of Braudelian “distance in time” with imaging of Atlantic travelers’ “cognitive geography” might render both Madagascar in the Indian Ocean and the island of Juan Fernández, off Chile, as Atlantic islands in the late seventeenth century.15 A third relevant trend in world history is the study of global empires. While the modern historiography of the Spanish and Portuguese empires may have begun with Charles Boxer’s scholarship, recent research has pushed more resolutely to integrate the stories of different parts of the Iberian empire. The attention includes both promising efforts to recover the movements of personnel across the empires, more rigorous comparative analysis of different sites of empire, and a closer look at the shifting politics of what Nicholas Thomas has called “colonial projects” spanning colonies and metropoles.16 More broadly, and still relevant to Latin America, this trend has been paired with the critique of civilization approaches to world history, so that the comparative analysis has extended to the operation of empires of all kinds and in all places, as well as to the complex relations between empires.17 In this approach, we can imagine historical change as taking place not through cultural diffusion or some systemic logic but through similar sets of conflicts and parallel responses to globalizing influences. Taken together, these new trends in world history scholarship propose changes to global historical narratives that, in turn, have special significance for spatial and temporal representations of Latin America. The spatial reordering suggested by these developments can be imagined as mirroring developments in recent astrophysics: “wormholes” thread through seemingly unconnected parts of the globe, linking noncontiguous regions. Some of these improbable connections may be traced by following the circulation of goods, ideas, people, capital, and microbes. But others emerge from open-ended comparisons. Just as borderlands historians have drawn attention to the

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similarities of otherwise unconnected regions within Latin America, it becomes possible to insert Latin American subregions into world analytic frameworks— but not necessarily as traditionally bounded subregions such as the Caribbean, Central America, or the Southern Cone.18 For example, analysis of pastoral economies encompasses specific areas within Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and other countries, and links them with the histories of the western United States, the Cape Colony, and New South Wales. Comparative study of urban slavery complicates the straightforward incorporation of the Caribbean and Brazil within an Atlantic world framework and invites pairings as geographically remote, perhaps, as Lima and Macau. We can only guess at the spatial possibilities for a study of Marian movements in Latin America and elsewhere. Added to these and similar groupings scattered across space, we can also anticipate new studies of space itself. Questions about the origins of regionalism focus attention on the production of knowledge about world geography in Latin America.19 Periodization will also be affected. While the traditional division between colonial and independence periods has already been critiqued from within Latin American history, world historical perspectives leave it barely standing.20 In fact, if this transition is entirely replaced with a broader one over the long nineteenth century toward a global inter-state order, Latin America moves from its position as an atypical colonialism to a central example of the complexities of state making. A global perspective on the problem of liberalism has the same effect; the old characterization of Latin American elites as failed importers of a Western constitutionalism fades in the context of global trends toward legal codification, territorial sovereignty, and the ascendancy of commercial elites.21 Even resilient ideas about the relatively slow pace of change in Latin America appear to be less historically accurate and more the product of a peculiar discourse about difference. “Macondo,” after all, took hold as a metaphor for timelessness in the region precisely at the same moment that twentieth-century globalization rapidly accelerated economic, environmental, political, social, and cultural change. It may take some time for the full force of such reconfigurations to become clear. But we should keep our eyes open for opportunities to contribute to Latin American history by radically restructuring world historical narratives. In the meantime, portraying Latin America as “odd region out” may have reached its limit as a rhetorical device and a framework for serious historical research.

NOTES

1. George Collier, ed., Aztec and Incan States, 1400–1800 (Boston: Academic Press, 1981). 2. Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984). 3. Historians are just beginning to appreciate the role of Japan as a source of silver in the same period. See Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid–Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002).

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4. On this point, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002). 5. On this view in its early modern form, see Cañizares, How to Write the History of the New World. For an example of environmental determinism in world history, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). 6. A sophisticated example of this genre is Gary Gereffi and Donald L. Wyman, eds., Manufacturing Miracles (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990). 7. For an overview of various strands of world historical research that brought us to this point (with a different view of the field’s future directions), see Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 8. For further discussion of institutional world history, see Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400– 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002); and Lauren Benton, “From the World System Perspective to Institutional World History: Culture and Economy in Global Theory,” Journal of World History 7 (1996, no. 2): 261– 95. 9. For example, Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000); see also Thomas Metcalf’s ongoing research on the circulation of colonial plans and personnel from India to other regions of the British Empire. 10. For a good overview, see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–30. 11. Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900– 1936 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002); Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). 12. James Dunkerley, Americana: The Americas in the World around 1850 (Or “Seeing the Elephant” as the Theme for an Imaginary Western) (London: Verso, 2000). 13. Examples are Adam McKeown’s research on Chinese diaspora and Alison Games’s ongoing research on English cosmopolitan-colonialists. 14. Lauren Benton, “Oceans of Law” (paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges conference, Library of Congress, February 2003.) 15. On Atlantic cognitive geography, see Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001); on the unity of perceptions of islands, see John Gillis’s forthcoming book on the subject. 16. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994). The history of the movement of personnel around empires is one in need of further research; an introduction to the topic in the Portuguese world is John Russell-Wood, A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415– 1808 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992). 17. See Frederick Cooper, “States, Empires, and Political Imagination,” in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 18. On borderlands, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to

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Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 ( June 1999): 814–41. 19. Jerry Brotton, “Territorial Globalism: Mapping the Globe in Early Modern Europe,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 71– 89; and Lauren Benton, “Lost in Atlantic Space: Colonizing and Intelligence in Riverine Regions, 1450–1650” (paper presented at the conference “Lost Colonies,” Philadelphia, Mar. 2004). 20. On the critique of this break within Latin America, see Jeremy Adelman, Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin America (London: Routledge, 1999). 21. See Lauren Benton, “‘The Laws of the Country’: Foreigners and the Legal Construction of Sovereignty in Uruguay, 1830–1875,” Law and History Review 19 (2001, no. 3): 479–512; and Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

S O U T H E A S T A S I A IN WO R L D H I S T O R Y Craig A. Lockard

In various writings over the past 25 years I have noted how world history texts and many academic studies on world history, not to mention history departments in North American colleges and universities, have tended to ignore Southeast Asia, especially for the centuries prior to 1800. In the Anglo-American view of world history, “Asia” has meant essentially China and India, with perhaps a brief nod to Japan. When Southeast Asia finally appeared in a few brief paragraphs in world history texts it was usually in the context of Western exploration, colonialism, nationalism, decolonization, Cold War global rivalries, and the U.S. war in Vietnam. The prevailing attitude toward Southeast Asia and its peoples seemed to be similar to that once expressed about African history by renowned British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper: “The unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”1 Even with the trend toward a more comprehensive world history in the past decade or so, only a few collegelevel texts offer anything like reasonable coverage of this important region.2 How did Southeast Asia fit into world history and world history into Southeast Asian history? In this paper I identify several key themes that closely connected Southeast Asia to what Marshall Hodgson called the wider Afro-Eurasian Historical Complex3 and hence can serve as a basis on which to integrate Southeast Asia into world history as more than a sideshow of marginal importance. In contrast to strictly national or regional history, world history emphasizes all societies, the connections between them, and the larger patterns of trans-regional or global significance. To be sure, Southeast Asian historians must seek to explain the diverse and distinctive societies

This is an excerpted version of Craig A. Lockard’s “Southeast Asia in World History,” which was originally published in World History Connected 5, 1 (October 2007). Copyright 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

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and cultural traditions that arose in the region, societies very different from those of other regions. Yet, many historians of Southeast Asia have also paid attention to connections, since the encounters over 2500 years with India and China, and later with the Middle East, Europe, and North America, greatly influenced Southeast Asian states, religions, arts, and economies.4 Like the Japanese, Southeast Asians borrowed ideas from others. Like Chinese, Indians, and West Africans, they supplied commodities to the world. Like Arabs, Indians, and Chinese, they transported trade goods around vast ocean basins. It may be possible to write the history of Japan or of southern Africa or perhaps, some might argue, even of China before 1500 without paying very much attention to the links with other world regions, but it is not possible for Southeast Asia. Among the major concepts relevant to connecting Southeast Asia to world history are: borrowing and adaptation, migration and mixing, the diffusion of religions, maritime trade, the expansion of Dar al-Islam, Western expansion and colonialism, and the rise of the global system.

B O R R OW I N G A N D A D A P TAT I O N I

Like northwestern Europeans, Southeast Asian peoples developed on the fringes of expansive and densely populated societies, in this case China and India. For many centuries Southeast Asians, like Europeans and Japanese, have been receptive to influences emanating from outside. Traditionally China and India provided political, religious, and cultural ideas, although the impact of these varied greatly from society to society. Later, the Middle East, Europe, and finally North America and Japan provided some models, imposed in part by force. To be sure, Southeast Asians were also creative. The early inhabitants developed agriculture and metalworking. Rice was first domesticated in the general region about 5,000–6,000 years ago; Southeast Asians may also have been the pioneers in cultivating bananas, yams, and taro, and likely first domesticated chickens and pigs, perhaps even cattle. Southeast Asians mastered bronze making by 1500 BCE and iron by 500 BCE. These early Southeast Asians also built sophisticated boats capable of sailing the oceans, beginning the maritime trade that soon linked Southeast Asia to China, India, and points beyond over networks of exchange.5 Yet despite centuries of borrowing and sometimes foreign conquest, Southeast Asians rarely became carbon copies of their mentors; they took ideas they wanted from outsiders and, like the Japanese and Europeans, adapted them to their own indigenous values and institutions, creating in the process a synthesis. Historians are impressed with the resilience and strength of the many indigenous beliefs and traditions that have survived the centuries of borrowing and change. In many Southeast Asian societies women long held a higher status and played a more active public role—including dominating small-scale commerce— than was true in China, India, the Middle East, and even Europe.6

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M I G R AT I O N A N D M I X I N G

The distant ancestors of many Southeast Asians migrated from China and Tibet. Over the course of some 5,000 years, peoples speaking Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages took part in an extensive population movement, migrating into Southeast Asia from Taiwan, spreading out around the archipelago and Malay peninsula, and pushing across the Pacific as far as Hawaii, Tahiti and New Zealand as well as westward to the island of Madagascar (much of whose population derives from Indonesian migrants who arrived 1,300–2,000 years ago). Trade networks linked the central Pacific islands such as Fiji with Indonesia. Indonesians were apparently the major seafaring traders of Asia several centuries before the beginning of the Common Era; they pioneered the commerce between China and India and also carried Southeast Asian foods (especially bananas) and musical instruments to East Africa, which were adopted by the peoples there. The chronic migration and mixing of peoples over the centuries was as important a theme in Southeast Asia as in Europe, Japan, or southern and eastern Africa. This process closely resembled the migrations and assimilation of various “barbarian” peoples in Western Europe as well as the spread of Bantu peoples in Africa through the first millennium of the Common Era. By 500 BCE or earlier a few small states had emerged in the lowlands, especially in Cambodia and Vietnam, based on irrigated rice agriculture, just as sedentary farming peoples like the Greeks were establishing vigorous states around the northern Mediterranean basin. By 2,000 years ago varied Southeast Asian societies carried on maritime trade with each other.

B O R R OW I N G A N D A D A P TAT I O N I I

Between 250 BCE and 200 CE China and India began exercising a stronger influence; China even colonized Vietnam in the second century BCE, ruling for the next thousand years. Some scholars see these contacts as a generator of state building, others as a response to it. Indian traders and priests began regularly traveling the oceanic trade routes, some of them settling in mainland and island states. They brought with them Indian concepts of religion, government, and the arts. At the same time, Southeast Asian sailors were visiting India and returning with new ideas. Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism became a strong influence in a process often termed “Indianization” (or, more recently, “southernization”), which continued over many centuries and synthesized Indian with indigenous ideas.7 This occurred about the same time as classical GrecoRoman “civilization” was spreading around the Mediterranean in a similar process. For a millennium many Southeast Asians were closely connected to the more populous and developed societies of southern Asia, partaking in the general historical trends of the Afro-Eurasian Historical Complex to a greater degree than most of the peoples on the western and northern fringes of post-Roman Europe between 500 and 1400.

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Due partly to the stimulus from outside, the great classical states developed near the end of the first millennium CE, with their main centers in what are today Cambodia, Burma, the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, and Vietnam, which managed to throw off the 1,000 year Chinese colonial yoke in the 10th century CE. In this period many Southeast Asian states made brilliant and selective use of Indian models in shaping their political and cultural patterns. Historians differentiate coastal and inland states in this era. Coastal states, especially those in the Malay peninsula and the western Indonesian archipelago, which were adjacent to major international trade networks, mainly thrived from maritime commerce.8 The Straits of Melaka between Sumatra and Malaya had long served as a crossroads through which peoples, cultures, and trade passed or took root in the area, with peoples of many societies following the maritime trade to this region. The prevailing climatic patterns in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean of alternating monsoon winds allowed ships sailing southwest from China, Vietnam and Cambodia and southeast from India and Burma to meet in the vicinity of the Straits, where their goods could be exchanged. This process had already commenced by 200 BCE. Sumatra and Malaya had long enjoyed international reputations as sources of gold, tin and exotic forest products; the Romans referred to Malaya as the “golden khersonese.” Between the fourth and sixth centuries CE the overland trading routes between China and the West (the “Silk Road”) were closed off by developments in central Asia, increasing the importance of the oceanic connection. Srivijaya, for example, in southeast Sumatra, was the hub of a major trade network linking South and East Asia as well as a center for Mahayana Buddhism. Gradually a more complex and increasingly integrated maritime trading system emerged that linked the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, East African coast, Persia, and India with the societies of East and Southeast Asia.9 Over this network the precious spices of Indonesia (especially cloves, nutmeg and pepper), the gold and tin of Malaya, and the silks and tea of China traveled to Europe, sparking interest there in reaching the sources of these eastern riches. Inevitably, then, a vigorously mercantile variation of Indianized classical culture emerged to capitalize on this growing exchange. The largest inland state, Angkor in Cambodia, built an empire over a large section of mainland Southeast Asia. This empire flourished for half a millennium, and compared favorably to the fragmented states of medieval Europe, bearing some resemblance to the expansive Carolingian realm. By the twelfth century its bustling capital city, Angkor Thom, and its immediate environs had a population of perhaps one million, much larger than any medieval European city but comparable to all but the largest Chinese and Arab cities of that era. And even interior states were linked to international trade. Angkor enjoyed an active and multifaceted trade with China and housed many resident Chinese merchants.10 The great Indianized kingdoms gradually came to an end between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, for reasons both internal and external. The Mongols helped destroy the Burman kingdom of Pagan, but were unable to extend their domination into

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Southeast Asia generally, failing in attempts to conquer Vietnam, Champa, and Java. Hence, Southeast Asians were among the few peoples to successfully resist persistent efforts at integrating them into the vast and powerful Mongol empire, a tribute to their skill and might as well as their distance from the Eurasian heartland. However, Angkor was eventually unable to resist invasions by the Thai-Lao peoples migrating down from China. The empire disintegrated, and the capital was abandoned.

RELIGION AND MARITIME TR ADE

Two other forces, the arrival of new religions and the expansion of maritime trade, were also at work. By the 1300s two of the great universal religions were filtering peacefully into the region: Theravada Buddhism and Islam. Theravada Buddhism from Sri Lanka became the dominant religion of the major mainland societies (except Vietnam) by incorporating the rich animism of the peasant villages and the Hinduism of the courts. Sunni Islam arrived from the Middle East and India, spreading widely in the Malay peninsula and Indonesian archipelago while gradually displacing or incorporating the local animism and Hinduism; it was closely tied to international trade. Through this process of trade and religious networks, Southeast Asia became even more firmly linked to the peoples of Southern and Western Asia. These trends inaugurated a new era that persisted until the acceleration of European conquest in the nineteenth century.11 Beginning in the fourteenth century a new pattern of world trade was developing that more closely linked Asia, Europe and parts of Africa. There was no particular center but Southeast Asia, especially the archipelago region, became an essential intermediary as long voyages were replaced by shorter hops and more frequent trans-shipment. This enhanced the value of regional ports and a half dozen distinct commercial zones arose in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian peoples like the Malays and Javanese played active roles in the interregional trade, which also spurred the growth of cities. Changes in the international maritime economy beginning around 1400 fostered an unprecedented commercial prosperity and an increasing cultural cosmopolitanism, most especially in the archipelago. A new type of maritime trading state arose to handle the increased amounts of local products dispatched to distant markets.

E X PA N S I O N O F D A R A L- I S L A M A N D T R A N S - R E G I O N A L T R A D E N E T W O R K

By the fourteenth century Muslim merchants (mostly Arabs and Indians) were spreading Islam along the great Indian Ocean maritime trading routes. The arrival of Islam coincided with the rise of the great port of Melaka, on the southwest coast of Malaya, which became the region’s political and economic power as well as the crossroads of Asian commerce. During the 1400s Melaka was a flourishing trading port attracting merchants from many lands including Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Vietnamese, Burmese, Jews, Indians, and even a few Swahilis from East Africa. Observers reported that

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Melaka boasted 15,000 merchants and more ships in the harbor than any port in the known world, induced by stable government and a free trade policy. Melaka’s rulers sent tributary missions to China and their port became an important way station for the series of grand Chinese voyages to the Western Indian Ocean in the early 15th century led by Admiral Zheng He, the greatest seafaring expeditions in history to that point. Soon Melaka became the southeastern terminus for the great Indian Ocean maritime trading network and one of the major commercial centers in the world, very much a rival to Calicut, Cambay, Canton, Hormuz, Kilwa, Aleppo, Alexandria, Genoa and Venice. An early-sixteenth-century Portuguese visitor noted the importance of Melaka to peoples and trade patterns as far away as Western Europe: “Melaka is a city that was made for merchandise, fitter than any other in the world . . . Commerce between different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to Melaka . . . Whoever is lord of Melaka has his hands on the throat of Venice.”12 The spread of Islam and the expansion of commerce developed simultaneously in many places, ultimately creating a Dar al-Islam (“Abode of Islam”), an interlinked Islamic world stretching from Morocco, Spain and the West African Sudan to the Balkans, Turkestan, Mozambique, Indonesia, and China, joined by a common faith and trade connections. Muslim merchants and sailors became central to the great Afro-Eurasian maritime trading network. By the mid-fifteenth century Melaka had become the main center for the propagation of Islam in the Malay peninsula and Indonesian archipelago.

S O U T H E A S T A S I A , W E S T E R N E X PA N S I O N , A N D T H E E M E R G I N G GLOBAL SYS TEM

Southeast Asia had long been a cosmopolitan and wealthy region where peoples, ideas and products met. The intrepid Italian traveler Marco Polo had passed through in 1292 on his way home from a long China sojourn; his writings praised the wealth and sophistication of Indochina, Java, and Sumatra, fostering European interest in these seemingly fabulous lands. The Moroccan Ibn Battuta stopped by on his way to China in his lifelong tour of the Dar al-Islam in the fourteenth century.13 Vietnam and the Siamese kingdom of Ayuthia were two of the powerful and prosperous states that stretched across Asia from Ottoman Turkey to Tokugawa Japan in the 1600s. By the end of the fifteenth century a few Portuguese explorers and adventurers, who came from a country with superior military technology, unparalleled missionary zeal, and a compelling appetite for wealth but a standard of living little if any higher than that of Siam, Vietnam, Melaka or Java, would enter Southeast Asia in search of, as the explorer Vasco da Gama put it, “Christians and spices.”14 They were the forerunners of what would ultimately be a powerful and destabilizing European presence to gradually alter the history of the region between 1500 and 1914. The Europeans would prove the bloodiest of the new forces reaching the region in these centuries. The Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511 and the Spice Islands of Eastern Indonesia

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a few years later marked the beginning of a turning point for the region. They would be followed in the next several centuries by the Spanish (who colonized the Philippines), the Dutch (Indonesia), the English (Burma and Malaya), the French (Indochina), and finally the Americans (who replaced the Spanish in the Philippines), products of a Western world rapidly transformed by expansionism, capitalism, and later industrialization. First the Portuguese and then the Dutch gained some control over the Indian Ocean maritime trade by force, altering its character and diminishing its vibrancy. Eventually the Western powers would impact nearly all the societies of Southeast Asia in various ways and, by the beginning of the 20th century, had colonized the entire region except for adaptable Siam, whose wise leaders convinced the British and French to make the country a buffer between British Burma and French Indochina. Still, Southeast Asian states like Siam, Vietnam, Burma, Johor, and Acheh were strong enough that it took 400 years of persistent effort for Westerners to gain complete political, social and economic domination. Once an equal of Europe, the region gradually became a dependency dominated by the West. Just as Europe was in transition from feudalism to capitalism during this period, with profound consequences in all phases of life, the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries was a time of transformation for Southeast Asia toward somewhat more economically dynamic systems. Southeast Asia became an even more crucial part of the developing world economy, with the Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish exporting luxury items like Indonesian spices but also bulk products like tin, sugar, and rice from their newly-colonized possessions.15 Some historians attribute the beginning of a true global economy to the trans-Pacific trade between the Philippines and Mexico that commenced with the rise of Manila as a major hub in the 1570s.16 The Manila Galleons, which annually carried Southeast Asian agricultural products as well as Chinese silk and porcelain across the Pacific for distribution in Spanish America and Europe, symbolized the new reality; vast amounts of American silver to pay for these items was shipped westward across the Pacific, draining Spanish imperial coffers. But until the nineteenth century the West was neither dominant in political nor economic spheres except in a few widely-scattered outposts. Furthermore, the still peripheral European interlopers had to compete with Chinese, Arab, and Southeast Asian merchants as well as local mercantile states. Hence, the West did not come into a decaying and impoverished region but rather a wealthy, open, and dynamic one. By the nineteenth century, however, little was left of this once vibrant local society as Western powers began to expand or intensify their colonial enterprise.

WES TERN COLONIALISM, SOUTHE A S T A SIAN RESURGENCE , AND THE GLOBAL SYS TEM

By 1914 the various Southeast Asian societies had become part of a global system dominated economically and politically by various Western European nations and the United States, more firmly connecting these peoples to global patterns and networks. The much

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greater degree of integration of Southeast Asia into the rapidly expanding world economy and imperialism-driven sociopolitical system had profound consequences for the region’s political, economic, social and cultural life, greatly reducing its autonomy and challenging traditional patterns. For example, between the mid-nineteenth century and World War II the region became a major producer of raw materials needed by the industrializing West and its markets, including rubber, tin, coffee, rice, sugar, timber, gold, and oil. Some of the major agricultural exports, such as rubber and coffee, had originated in other parts of the world, part of the overall shuffling of the world’s biota that accompanied the great era of Western exploration and colonization. Commercialization of land and proletarianization of labor shifted the balance to commodity exports rather than subsistence food growing and handicrafts, and reshaped life for millions of Southeast Asians now enmeshed in a world economy subject to rapid fluctuations in prices and demands.17 Colonialism served to transfer much wealth from Southeast Asia to the West. For example, the Dutch based much of their industrialization on profits derived from their control of the enormously lucrative coffee and sugar exports from Indonesia while British, French, and American capitalists derived extraordinary capital accumulation for investment from colonial enterprises in Malaya, Indochina, and the Philippines. It is hardly inaccurate to argue that the exploitation of their colonies in Southeast Asia and elsewhere was critical to the rise of Western wealth, power, and modernization. Millions of workers from other regions of Asia, especially China and India, migrated into the region temporarily or permanently to undertake plantation labor, mining, or trade, helping reshape ethnic patterns and reshuffle genetic pieces. In some colonies immigrant Chinese and their descendants came to account for a substantial portion of the population; they also became generally dominant in the commercial sphere throughout the region.18 And Christianity from the West became a major regional religion, especially in the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, Malaya, and several regions of Indonesia. But the traffic in ideas was not entirely one way. Anticolonial nationalism, a major phenomenon of the 20th century world, originated in Southeast Asia in the Philippines, in the struggle against the Spanish and then the Americans beginning in the second half of the 1800s, an inspiration to many colonized peoples. Indeed, the Philippine Revolution is sometimes called the first true war of national liberation, with astonishing parallels to the later ill-fated American experience in Vietnam.19 Later, the Vietnamese communists under Ho Chi Minh in their ultimately successful 50 year fight against French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and then American intervention would stimulate both a wave of revolutionary efforts to overthrow Western domination as well as a surge of student militancy in the West. The Vietnamese communist defeat of the United States in 1975 certainly constitutes a major development in 20th century world history, marking the temporary decline of the “American Century” of unrivaled economic, political and military power in the world. In the 1980s and 1990s several Southeast Asian nations (Malaysia, Thailand,

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Singapore and, to some extent, Indonesia) have generated some of the fastest growing economies in the world by borrowing development models from Meiji Japan. Vietnam, borrowing models from post-Mao China, now joins them in its rapid pace of economic growth. These rapidly industrializing Little Tigers, with their distinctive mix of free market and state-stimulated economics with semi-authoritarian politics, may offer the best available model for development in the global south. As they have for centuries, Southeast Asians mixed local traditions and foreign influences to create eclectic new cultures oriented to the wider world.20 With nearly 500 million people, the region already accounts for nearly a tenth of the world’s population. Southeast Asia, then, with its long, rich connections to the wider world and persistent ability over the millennia to integrate ideas and institutions from abroad with varied but still powerful indigenous traditions, has made its mark on world history and will likely continue to do so in the near future.

NOTES

This paper was read at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association in Atlanta, January 5, 2007. I would like to thank Anand Yang for arranging and chairing the session. An earlier, and longer version, was published in The History Teacher, 29/1 (November, 1995). For a much more detailed study of this subject, see Craig A. Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 1. Quoted in Philip Curtin, “African History,” in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 113. 2. For a recent text with extensive coverage of Southeast Asia and its role in world history, see Craig A. Lockard, Societies, Networks, and Transitions: A Global History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 3. For Hodgson’s conception see his Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, edited, with an Introduction and Conclusion by Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 3–28. 4. Some of the general historical studies of Southeast Asia that also address in some form the wider context include John Bastin and Harry J. Benda, A History of Modern Southeast Asia (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968); Mary Somers Heidhues, Southeast Asia: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Milton Osborne, Southeast Asia: An Introductory History, 7 th ed. (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997); Norman Owen et al., The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005); David Joel Steinberg et al., In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History, revised ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985); Nicholas Tarling, Southeast Asia: A Modern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History.

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5. On ancient Southeast Asia see, in addition to the general studies, Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, revised ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Higham, The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Dougald J. W. O’Reilly, Early Civilizations of Southeast Asia (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2007). 6. Scholars debate the status and experiences of women and gender issues in Southeast Asian history and modern society. See, e.g., Barbara Watson Andaya, ed., Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2000); Jane Monnig Atkinson and Shelly Errington, Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, eds., Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Penny Van Esterik, ed., Women of Southeast Asia (DeKalb: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, 1996). 7. On Indianization the classic work is George Coedes, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1968). For more recent approaches see Osborne, Southeast Asia and Tarling, Cambridge History, vol. 1. On southernization see Lynda Shaffer, “Southernization,” Journal of World History, 5/1 (Spring, 1994), 1–22. 8. Among the key studies on early maritime trade in Southeast Asia are Kenneth Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985) and Lynda Norene Shaffer, Maritime Southeast Asia to 1500 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1996). 9. On the Indian Ocean maritime trade routes, see, e.g., K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Milo Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Routledge, 2004); Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder: Westview, 1995). 10. On Angkor see, e.g., David P. Chandler, A History of Cambodia, 4th ed. Updated (Boulder: Westview, 2007); Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, The Khmers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); and Charles Higham, The Civilization of Angkor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 11. On the international connections and transformation of archipelago Southeast Asia, see Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Bangkok: Silkworm, 1999); Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 and 1993); and Reid, ed., Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). For the somewhat different situation for the mainland societies, see Lieberman, Strange Parallels. 12. Tomé Pires, quoted in Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 291. On Melaka and its role in trade see, e.g., Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malay-

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sia, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001); Sarnia Hayes Hoyt, Old Malacca (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993). 13. See Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 248–258. 14. On Southeast Asian wealth and a standard of living that may have been comparable to, or even higher than, that of Europe in the 16th and 17 th centuries, see Reid, Charting the Shape, pp. 216–226. 15. On the Southeast Asian export economy in these centuries, see, e.g., David Bulbeck et al., compilers, Southeast Asian Exports Since the 14th Century: Cloves, Pepper, Coffee, and Sugar (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998). 16. See Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History, 6/2 (Fall, 1995), 201–222. 17. For the colonial impact on Southeast Asia, see, e.g., Andaya and Andaya, History of Malaysia; Ian Brown, Economic Change in South-East Asia, c.1830–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); John A. Larkin, Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Owen, Emergence; Tarling, Southeast Asia; D. R. Sar Desai, Southeast Asia: Past and Present, 5th ed. (Boulder: Westview, 2003); Steinberg, In Search; and Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 18. For a brief overview of the Chinese in Southeast Asia as part of the broader Asian migrations, see Craig A. Lockard, “Asian Migrations,” in William H. McNeill, ed., Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, vol. 1 (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2005), 191–197. 19. See David Joel Steinberg, The Philippines: A Singular and Plural Place, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1994), p. 66; Gary R. Hess, Vietnam and the United States (Boston: Twayne, 1990); Craig A. Lockard, “Gunboat Diplomacy, Counterrevolution and Manifest Destiny: A Century of Asian Preludes to the American War in Vietnam,” Asian Profiles, 23/1 (Feb., 1995), 35–57. 20. For a study of how popular music and cultures have reflected a mix of indigenous and imported influences, see Craig A. Lockard, Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997).

A ME R I C A N H I S T O R Y A S I F T H E WO R L D M AT T E R E D (AND VICE VERSA) Carl Guarneri AMERIC AN HIS TORY IN GLOBAL PERSPEC TIVE

In recent decades, scholars dissatisfied with the insularity of traditional American history have sought its larger contexts and connections. Opening a dialogue with world history,

This selection is an edited version of “American History as if the World Mattered (and Vice Versa),” the introduction to Carl Guarneri’s America in the World: United States History in Global Context (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 1–22. Reprinted with permission from McGraw-Hill Education.

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they are relating American events to global trends, tracking ideas and movements across national boundaries, and analyzing American history comparatively. This book incorporates their findings and adds some insights of my own. Examining selected American history topics in international context it is meant to illustrate how this approach offers new perspectives on episodes like the slave trade, the Revolution, westward expansion, the Civil War, the Progressive movement, and the youth revolt of the 1960s. How does an “internationalized” American history look different from traditional accounts? Dozens of specific examples will be given in the chapters that follow. Meanwhile, speaking more broadly, we can identify at least five ways that adopting a more globalized view has already begun to reframe the traditional narrative of American history.

N E W S TA R T I N G P O I N T S A N D P L A C E S

Placing American history in a wider setting stretches its dimensions in space and time. The old-fashioned starting points, the Jamestown colony in Virginia (1607) and the Pilgrim settlement of Massachusetts (1620), open the story far too late, for Spanish and Portuguese colonization in the Americas preceded British efforts by more than a century and influenced them in crucial ways. To fix on the early 1600s is to shrink American history to mean only United States history, whereas its most revealing context in the early modern world was hemispheric rather than continental, “the Americas” rather than America. Thus, 1492 seems a more logical starting point, with its epochal encounter of two worlds that had previously been quite ignorant of each other. Yet even Columbus’s journey must be examined as a product of European expansion in the 1400s and, earlier, the thriving European trade with Asia. If we think of America as an extension of Western civilization we should also keep in mind the high points of that civilization from ancient times onward. As historian Paul Gagnon has written, “The plain fact is that American history is not intelligible . . . without a firm grasp of the life and ideas of the ancient world, of Judaism and Christianity, of Islam and Christendom in the Middle Ages, of feudalism, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, of the English Revolution and the Enlightenment.”1 Nor is Europe the only place to study, for we must also look across the south Atlantic for the origins of the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the New World, and westward to Asia for the land crossing that brought the first humans—Native Americans—to the Western Hemisphere about 20,000 years ago. Whether we enter American history by analyzing American Indian civilizations or by digging deeply into the European past, a more global approach offers multiple places and earlier starting points for us to consider as we create its narratives.

D EC EN T ER I N G E A R LY A M ER I C A

Taking a more global approach means at times assigning America to the wings of the historical stage rather than the center. From early on, events elsewhere have directed

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American national life. From the opening of the Portuguese slave trade in 1444 and the reform of British colonial tax policy in 1763 to the assassination of Emperor Frantz Ferdinand of Austria, which triggered World War I in 1914, life in America has been transformed at many times by outside influences. Shifting our focus to the places where these originated makes us recognize that before the mid-1800s the United States was a minor nation tucked in a corner of the world, a satellite orbiting on the edge of mighty Europe’s gravitational field. Its survival depended upon developments beyond its borders, such as the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), which preoccupied the European powers during the first decades of the United States’ fragile national existence, or the decision by Great Britain not to intervene on the side of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

F O R EI G N R EL AT I O N S

Dependence on other peoples meant that from the outset the United States had to become involved in foreign affairs, contrary to a strong streak of isolationism that cautioned Americans against making alliances or commitments to other nations. Placing the United States in world history means paying special attention to the nation’s involvement in the world beyond American borders. This can start with the struggle for independence, which Americans won largely because of help from France and Holland. In the following decades, leaders of the young United States tried to play off the European powers against one another to preserve America’s neutrality and give it time to build viable institutions. Meanwhile, the saga of westward expansion in the 1800s, which is usually cast in national terms, should be reframed as a story of international conflict and negotiations stretching from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Mexican War of 1846–48. As the United States grew in size and power, its actions on the world stage became less defensive and more aggressive. During the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Americans crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in search of markets for their products and ideals, and they intervened frequently in the affairs of Latin America. By 1945 the United States’ involvement in two world wars and its position as the dominant “superpower” made its international commitments impossible to miss. Broadly considered, foreign relations entail more than contacts between governments. As historians now emphasize, transnational affairs encompass a wide spectrum of contacts between individuals and groups across national borders, including international trade, technology transfer, cultural exchange, missionary work, migration, and tourism. Each of these ties has played a part in shaping the lives of Americans, and many have influenced peoples around the world. All are fitting and important topics for a “globalized” American history.

CO M PA R I S O N S A N D CO N N EC T I O N S

The task of comparing and connecting the American experience to societies elsewhere adds a fourth feature to an internationalized American history: it pictures the United

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States as more enmeshed in worldwide trends and less exceptional than Americans like to believe. Many things we think of as uniquely American are not. Did the United States begin as a frontier outpost of European traders and settlers? So did many other nations. Did its colonists encounter native peoples, import African slaves, and eventually declare their independence from the mother country? So did many New World societies. Did it face political fragmentation, secession and civil war? The postcolonial “new nations” of nineteenth-century Latin America and twentieth-century Africa and Asia encountered similar problems. Did it receive millions of immigrants and become a multiethnic society? Nations such as Argentina, Australia, and Malaysia were also decisively shaped by immigration, and today (according to one estimate) there are fewer than 20 nations in the entire world whose population comes almost exclusively from one ethnic group. Refining National Comparisons. Topics like the frontier, slavery, and immigration invite us to compare U.S. history with that of other nations. The purpose of these comparisons is not to dismiss the notion of American uniqueness, but rather to test it against the facts and, where it remains valid, to define it in less absolute terms. Sophisticated comparisons help us to see the United States in the context of larger patterns and to develop a sense of the weave of similarities and differences that have created its national fabric. After we place the United States firmly in the world, we can break down simplistic dichotomies between America and a homogenized “other” that is the rest of the world. When this happens, we often discover that there remain subtle but important differences between American and many national histories. We learn, for example, that the United States has taken in newcomers from a wider variety of countries of origin than any other immigrant receiver, creating the foundation of its rich and sometimes conflicted “melting-pot” society. Tracking Imports and Exports. Connecting features of American history to larger global processes demonstrates how, contrary to isolationist mythology, the United States has always participated in international systems and trends. Throughout their history, Americans have taken in people, goods, and ideas from elsewhere and often transformed them in the process. Their importing of religious revivalism, an industrial revolution, and the “welfare state” are noteworthy examples. Looking outward, Americans have exported world-changing foods and manufactured products, from codfish and cotton to sewing machines and computers. They have broadcast innovative ideas abroad, such as democratic self-government and free-market capitalism, and they pioneered developments that surfaced later in other developed countries, such as assembly-line production and mass consumer culture. Broadly speaking, the dominant flow has shifted over the centuries from a time when the United States was primarily an importer of money, goods, and ideas, to an era when it is a major exporter, able to project its economic and cultural power worldwide. American influence abroad has become a flashpoint of conflict as political and cultural contro-

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versies rage over worldwide changes that have been variously described as “American empire,” “Americanization,” or “cultural imperialism.”

R E T H I N K I N G P ER I O D I Z AT I O N

Finally, when we stand back to see how America fits into the big picture of world history, it becomes clear that we should arrange its periodization (its division into chronological segments) into fewer units covering more time. Because world history spans several millennia and surveys major changes across societies, it is usually divided into themes that stretch across centuries. By contrast, U.S. history, covering just a few hundred years, traditionally chronicles short-term changes in detail. It is typically divided into presidential administrations, which last only four to eight years; into decades, such as the “Roaring Twenties” or the turbulent 1960s; or at most into periods of two or three decades, such as the Jacksonian (1828–48) or the Progressive (1890–1920) eras. To relate American history meaningfully to developments in the wider world, it makes sense to adopt a “macro” not a “micro” approach, one that synchronizes with the longer time spans of world history and addresses its larger themes and processes.

F O U R S TA G E S O F A M ER I C A N H I S T O R Y

This book divides American history into four overlapping stages that reflect the nation’s global origins, its internal development, and its relation to other societies. During the Age of Exploration and Contact, 1530s–1680s, North America was a “frontier” in a double sense. First, it was a remote extension of European colonization, a process that had begun earlier and developed more rapidly in the Caribbean islands, Mexico, and South America. Second, like those places it became a tense borderland between European and native societies. The contacts, collisions, and exchanges among peoples along this borderland transformed lives in the New and Old Worlds and set the pattern for European conquest settlement, and rivalry in North America. In the Colonial Era, 1607–1783, Britain’s North American possessions, like the New World colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, and Holland, took their place in an Atlantic commercial and capitalist system based mainly on crops and commodities produced by enslaved Africans. Plantation production and overseas trade transformed these colonies into complex societies featuring hierarchies of race and class at the same time it enriched European merchants and consumers. Beginning in the 1680s, a century-long global war between Britain and its imperial rivals shaped the conditions of the British and other European colonists’ lives and ultimately ignited independence movements that erupted from Boston to Buenos Aires. After independence, the United States, like other New World colonies that broke from European rule, embarked on the task of constructing viable national institutions. The American Age of Nation-building, 1776–1930s, stretched over a century and a half and

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divided into two overlapping phases. In the first stage the United States, like other New World nations, consolidated its national government against the threat of secession and moved inland to overtake native peoples and stretch its rule as far as possible. Second, by the mid-1800s, in tandem with other targets of British economic domination such as Germany and Japan, the United States began a program of modernization designed to ensure the nation’s economic independence. Forging an American version of the Industrial Revolution, immigrant workers, business entrepreneurs, and political leaders transformed the nation into an economic giant. Although industrialization generated unprecedented wealth and underpinned the nation’s rise to global power, it exposed problems of exploitation and inequality that turned Americans toward other industrialized nations in search of remedies such as labor unions, socialist movements, and welfare-state protections. The United States’ westward expansion in the 1800s was in many respects an imperial project but in the Age of Empire, 1880s–present, Americans took decisive steps to project their power overseas. As the nation’s economic influence grew, its trade activities escalated into government intervention abroad. Beginning by joining Europe’s race for trade privileges and colonies in Asia, American imperialism evolved into informal economic domination of developing nations, especially in Latin America. Meanwhile, involvement in two world wars propelled the United States to global leadership as American institutions and policies filled the void left by the collapse of European powers and their overseas empires. After World War II, the United States and an emerging rival with equally globalizing interests and ideas—the Soviet Union— engaged in a long and costly contest in which America’s home front and foreign relations took on an imperial cast. At the Cold War’s end, Americans and the world’s other peoples faced the challenge of determining a stable new world order that avoided both the perils of American global domination and the chaotic free-for-all of capitalist globalization. The four-part schema of frontier, colony, nation and empire produces a bird’s-eye view of America’s place in the world, one that makes many of its major events and themes look different. Hovering above the nation rather than being bounded by its horizons from the ground, we can track events elsewhere that shared a common history and influenced one another. We can, for example, follow the African slave trade to several New World destinations whose plantation economies, population characteristics, and colonial or national policies shaped allied but somewhat different emancipation struggles and racial categories. We can locate the American Revolution in a series of colonial revolts that erupted when the overseas rivalries of Spain, France, and England escalated into external wars and internal disputes over taxes. We can place Americans’ westward expansion in the context of the inland penetration by European settlers and descendants on imperial and national frontiers in Latin America, Asia, South Africa, and Australia. We can relate America’s traumatic Civil War to struggles for national unification that were raging in contemporary Europe and Latin America. And so on, through the later themes of immigration, industrialization, war, and empire.

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WORLD HIS TORY WITH AMERIC A INCLUDED

What about the other side of the question? What aspects of world history look different when an enlarged American history is taken into consideration? Although the primary focus of this book is on American history in world context, its analysis has implications for world history, too. There are at least five ways that incorporating U.S. history (and before it North American history) changes the way historians describe key features of world history.

N O R T H A M ER I C A’ S I M PA C T O N E U R O P E

The impact of North America upon its Old World colonizers was far reaching. Adam Smith, the famous Scottish economist declared in his Wealth of Nations (1776) that “the discovery of America” and the passage around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope were “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” Even allowing for hyperbole, it is clear that colonial America helped to transform the world beyond it. Its unexpected “discovery” by Europeans forced them to reexamine old ideas about geography, biology, and human history. More concretely, the “Columbian Exchange”—the global diffusion of plants, foods, animals, and diseases that took place after the voyages of exploration—altered the human geography and natural environment of all the world’s inhabited continents. And the migration of tens of millions of people to the Americas (whether voluntary, in the case of most white settlers, or coerced, in the case of slaves) redistributed the world’s population and often changed the society that migrants left behind as much as the one they entered. It is not always possible to isolate single factors that produced huge transformations. Was exploitation of New World resources the reason Europe advanced beyond the great Asian civilizations in power and influence, or was the “great divergence” of East and West based on technological inventions like the steam engine? How much did the New World’s precious metals contribute to the development of western capitalism? How indispensable were America’s slaves and the cotton they raised to Britain’s industrial revolution? Historians continue to debate these questions and may never agree on the answers. Yet few deny that during the era of colonization important influences crossed the oceans from the Western Hemisphere as well as to it.

VA R I AT I O N S O N W O R L D H I S T O R Y T H EM E S

Including the North American colonies and the United States also enriches world history by considering their features as variants of important global processes. Generalizations about slavery or colonialism in the Western world would be useless if they did not take into account American experiences. Less obvious but equally true, world history topics that span oceans and continents, such as the rise of nationalism, the global

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industrial transformation and the spread of socialism and the welfare state, ought to be framed with the United States in mind, either as an example or (in the case of socialism) a possible exception. Many world historians are interested in large interpretive schemas borrowed from the social sciences. The United States can serve as an important case study verifying or questioning these broad hypotheses. How does the American experience fit into sociological generalizations about the nature of slavery, race relations, revolutions, or frontiers, for example? Does its history square with influential theories that nations, empires, or economies evolve in clear and predictable stages? Because many global developments had counterparts in the United States, American events can be used to test generalizations about trends in world history and demonstrate the range of particular cases they encompass. The tension between general patterns and particular cases is intrinsic to historical analysis, but it is especially important to world history. Analyzing global changes in their American context can help us understand it.

A N AT L A N T I C S Y S T EM O F T R A D E A N D M I G R AT I O N

Incorporating the North American colonies and the United States into global history may not only modify old categories but also suggest new ones. For example, by tracing exchanges between America and other parts of the world, we can uncover a comprehensive “Atlantic system” of trade and migration. Originating with Caribbean and South American commerce and joined by the North American colonies in the 1600s, this elaborate network carried peoples and products across the Atlantic Ocean in both directions from four continents. Built initially on gold and silver, then drawing primarily upon slavery and staple-crop production, it forged economic and cultural ties that integrated Europe, Africa and the Americas into its nexus and affected Asian societies as well. The Atlantic system supplemented and eventually superseded the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regional trading systems of earlier eras. It redirected wealth and power westward, underwrote the developing British Empire, and endured into the nineteenth century.

S H I F T S I N G LO B A L P O L I T I C A L A N D ECO N O M I C P O W ER

Placing the Atlantic system into a larger historical trajectory illustrates a fourth feature of world history with America included: its analysis of the westward shift in world power toward the United States. America’s ascent to global influence was given a crucial boost when the nation emerged victorious and virtually unscathed from World Wars I and II while its European rivals were devastated. How did American policies shape Europe’s politics and economy between and after these wars? What impact did growing U.S. economic clout exert on the technological and consumer revolutions of the twentieth

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century and the globalized capitalism ascendant at its end? Answering such questions will highlight the extent of U.S. power beyond the nation’s borders. It may also suggest its limits, for some of the twentieth century’s most important developments, from the rise of communism and fascism to decolonization in Asia and Africa, derived from nonAmerican sources and often played themselves out beyond American control.

T H E U N I T ED S TAT E S A S A D I S T I N C T I V E C I V I L I Z AT I O N

Finally, coming to grips with the impact of the United States beyond its borders allows us to assess its special contributions to world history. Historian Gerald Early has famously quipped that “there are only three things America will be known for two thousand years from now: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.”2 It’s worth noting that all three are descendants of mixed-continent marriages. The Constitution drew heavily on British legal precedents; jazz represents a blend of African and American idioms; and baseball derives from bat and ball games that have been traced as far back as medieval Europe. All demonstrate how an internationally aware American history complicates assertions of American uniqueness. Does America represent a distinctive new civilization to compare with other major societies in world history? What is the relevance of America’s experiments in representative government and multiracial diversity to the rest of the world? If, on the other hand, the United States has simply inherited leadership of the West from Great Britain or Europe generally, has it acted in distinctive ways? Do American ideals shape U.S. foreign relations, or does America act the way great powers have traditionally acted? Does the spread of American-style capitalism herald a new stage in world economic development? These are big and difficult questions, but addressing them opens some of the widest vistas on American history and engages important controversies over the place of the United States in the great sweep of world history.

T H E D E B AT E O V E R A M E R I C A N E X C E P T I O N A L I S M

Whether we begin with American history and look outward to the rest of the world or start with world history and place the United States in it, a central problem facing us concerns the distinctiveness of American society. The issue of American exceptionalism looms over most attempts to place U.S. history in a wider context. A Chosen People. Virtually every nation thinks of itself as unique, but the belief in their

own nation’s uniqueness— and superiority—is especially deeply rooted among Americans. The notion that Americans are a “chosen people” with a special destiny was voiced in so many ways by politicians, preachers, and patriotic orators that it became a ready assumption among Americans and only recently has been widely questioned. Of course,

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uniqueness is a comparative statement and a matter of degree. In its boldest and most powerful formulation, however, exceptionalism uses absolute language. It declares that the United States is unique, and singularly blessed, because it has been exempt from the forces and problems that have troubled societies in Europe and the rest of the world. Few persons familiar with the conflicts of American history and its engagement with other continents can accept this statement without reservations. But there are other, less sweeping, versions of exceptionalism that many thoughtful scholars support. Some refer to a particular trait or factor that has made American history unique. Others acknowledge contacts across borders and oceans but argue that on the whole the United States developed on a separate path from other countries. Europeans Invent American Exceptionalism. Ironically, American exceptionalism was

invented by Europeans. After Columbus’s landing, the American continents served as blank canvases upon which early modern Europeans could paint their dreams, fantasies, and hopes (as well as their fears). Columbus himself thought that he had found in Venezuela the river that flowed from the Garden of Eden. Many European explorers and settlers embraced such utopian ideas, whether based on Biblical stories, popular legends about lost cities of gold, or the Enlightenment notion that a better civilization could be built from the ground up on “virgin land.” Most such dreams ignored the presence of native populations and the stubborn realities of the American landscape. All placed their hopes upon a fresh start in a place Europeans christened the “New World.” “America,” the great German writer Goethe rhapsodized, “you have it better than our continent, the old one.” Americans Adopt Exceptionalism. Exceptionalist ideas arrived on the English settlers’ first ships. John Winthrop, preaching in 1630 as the Puritans approached the Massachusetts coast, hoped that the Puritan colony could become “a city upon a hill,” lighting the world with its example. After achieving nationhood, the people of the United States absorbed exceptionalist notions of themselves as eagerly as they took over the name “Americans” from the rest of the hemisphere. Declaring cultural as well as political independence from Britain, Americans built their national identity around the contrast between the United States and Europe rather than their common history and continuing ties. Americans’ belief in their superior ways allowed many to brush aside their tainted record of racial conflict and the Civil War. Instead, they harped upon the nation’s westward expansion, attraction to immigrants, economic success and apparent military invincibility as evidence that theirs was a unique “promised land.” Wittingly or not many American historians have taken part in this celebratory, nation-building enterprise. Most accounts of U.S. history have emphasized the fortunate distinctiveness of the American experience. Many writers simply assume America’s uniqueness, but others have attempted to explain it. Why is it that America’s history seems to diverge fundamentally from Europe’s?

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T H E C A S E F O R E X C EP T I O N A L I S M

The Frontier. One enormously popular answer has been the frontier, which historian

Frederick Jackson Turner eulogized in 1893 in a famous essay. On the westward-moving line where advancing settlers confronted the wilderness, Turner wrote, Old World ideas and habits were broken down and the democratic and individualistic traits that made Americans distinctive were formed. A rough equality of opportunity overcame distinctions of birth, and immigrants “melted” into a new people. Workers migrating to the frontier raised their condition as well as the demand for labor in the east, thus easing class pressures that in Europe erupted into violence. When looser frontier ways drifted eastward into more settled areas, Americans became purged of Old World influences and found their special national character. Turner’s ideas have not gone unopposed. Critics point out that relatively few urban workers or enslaved African newcomers reached the frontier. Others note that violence, race prejudice, and environmental plunder characterized life on the American frontier at least as much as Turner’s virtues. Those who have compared the American frontier with similar environments in Canada, Latin America, and Russia— a task Turner never attempted— find common patterns of exploitation and inequality that fail to sustain Turner’s claims about the frontier’s democratic effects. Other Exceptionalist Theories. Scholars who favor exceptionalist views have highlighted

other factors that, they claim, developed a separate American way of life. One popular explanation is the absence of a feudal past. Although vestiges of European class privileges and vast landed estates appeared in a few British North American colonies, the availability of cheap land doomed hopes of duplicating the Old World system of titled nobles and bound peasants. America’s rural white population—its founding majority— was made up of independent farmers or renters working toward ownership. Other scholars have pointed out how America’s independence struggle spawned democratic ideals and political institutions quite different from Europe’s. Universal white male suffrage and mass political parties created a stable framework for resolving disputes and absorbed radical and third party movements into the mainstream. Compared to Europe, the American political spectrum was narrow. (Some scholars argue that the labels “Right” for conservative views and “Left” for radical ones, which originated with the French Revolution, cannot be applied to the United States.) American politics excluded monarchists, marginalized socialists, and opened up ample middle ground for compromise. Another cluster of exceptionalist theories centers on American abundance. Cheap land and vast natural resources encouraged entrepreneurship and attracted hardworking migrants. The possibility of becoming rich or at least attaining middle-class status, motivated ordinary workers and dampened economic resentments. “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” a German sociologist asked, then answered it by pointing to

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the “roast beef and apple pie” on the tables of working families. Ironically, it was Karl Marx’s followers who first coined the term “exceptionalism.” In their usage it referred to the puzzle of why the United States had not followed the Marxist dictum that the most advanced capitalist nation ought to develop the most robust socialist movement. Other candidates have been nominated to explain American exceptionalism. Many scholars have found America’s uniqueness in its diverse population created by massive immigration and frequent intermixture—its “melting pot” or cultural “mosaic.” Others assert the unusual importance of religion in American life, due in part to the absence of an established church or “state religion.” Separation of church and state, they argue, stimulated a healthy competition for religious loyalties and saved religious life from decline or destruction when political winds shifted, as happened in many other nations. Weighing Successes and Shortcomings. Exceptionalist arguments harmonize with the mythology of America as a unique “experiment” and they usually pay compliments Americans like to hear. These include the notions that Americans are more religious than other societies, more pragmatic and less interested in socialism and other “isms,” and more inclusive of diverse peoples. They are all middle-class, or at least potentially so since they live in the “land of opportunity.” To be persuasive, however, the exceptionalist position must also encompass less flattering features of American uniqueness. Americans’ unusually high per capita rates of violence and their strong opposition to “big government” for example, demonstrate that their rabid individualism can endanger the poor and unprotected. The treatment of native peoples by western settlers and their government— an issue not encountered inside modern Europe—led to their near extinction. Perhaps most obvious, the presence of slavery and the racist attitudes that outlived it bequeathed a legacy of racial conflict in the United States that had no parallel across the Atlantic. The problem of racial oppression in the land of the free became an iconic “American dilemma,” in the words of one influential European observer.

A G A I N S T E X C EP T I O N A L I S M

Viewed from the standpoint of world history, on the other hand, the United States emerges as an offshoot of European civilization. European influence was obvious in the colonial era. The dominant white settlers brought with them European ways of worshipping God, organizing families, and making a living that they practiced in their new environment. When the colonists declared independence from Britain they justified it with natural rights theories developed in the European Enlightenment, and the new nation’s Founders consulted the precedent of Greek confederacies and Roman republics while setting up their own. The United States as Europe’s Frontier. As they moved westward, inhabitants of the young

United States pushed the boundaries of European influence just as white explorers,

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missionaries, and traders had been doing for three centuries. “Frontier of What?” an historian of Europe asked when confronted with Turner’s assertion that the frontier was the key to American experience. From the first fur traders onward, the American West became integrated into a global economic network that was dominated by the powerful nations of western Europe. Unlike the isolated, self-sufficient pioneers of legend, western settlers just this side of the wilderness furnished animal hides, crops, and minerals for areas of the world far across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Turner’s frontier was just the latest frontier of an expanding European capitalism. Transatlantic Trends. After independence, American history paralleled trends common in

western Europe. The spread of democratic ideas and the rise of popular political movements revolutionized both places: America’s Jacksonian era (1828–48), which brought universal white male suffrage and mass political parties, was paralleled by parliamentary reform in Britain and by continental revolutions that toppled monarchies. America’s industrial revolution was a direct offshoot of Britain’s and progressed through similar stages. As the Civil War raged between northern and southern states, Germany, Italy, and other European countries faced similar struggles over national unification. Labor movements arose from similar grievances in western Europe and the late nineteenthcentury United States, and they drew from common ideological sources, Marxist and otherwise. When reformers of the Progressive Era (1890–1920) expanded government’s responsibility for improving urban and industrial life, they looked to European programs of planning and “social insurance” for their models. In some instances, the United States pioneered changes that occurred later in Europe. In others, Americans adopted or imitated changes that Europeans had begun. Both cases demonstrate how Americans and Europeans maintained close contacts and how the flow of ideas, money, goods, and people continued in the modern era. The fact that the United States rose to world significance just as major western European nations, such as Britain began to decline can also be used to underscore America’s Old World “inheritance.” When New York replaced London as the world’s banking center in the 1930s and the United States assumed leadership in the Cold War alliance after World War II, America demonstrated its ability to succeed at the great-power game first developed in Europe.

A N A S S E S S M EN T

Which side is right, then: those who view the United States as exceptional, or those who interpret it as an extension of Europe? It should be clear that the evidence is mixed and that neither position can encompass all the facts of American history. Large-scale changes common to Western society were played out in both Europe and the United States. Yet in each place distinctive conditions led to different outcomes. Exceptionalists must acknowledge European inheritances and influences, but those who view the

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United States as part of the West must also factor in its unique environment, including its Native American and African populations. Only by analyzing specific features of American history carefully in internationally comparative terms can we measure the mix of outside forces and local conditions that created the nation’s life. Against Triumphalism. Charting the United States’ rise to world power is not the same as

saying that it was preordained or will last forever. If exceptionalists are prone to exaggerate American uniqueness, “triumphalists” tend to overestimate America’s influence at every step toward its “rendezvous with destiny.” Some scholars go so far as to assert that world history has “ended” with the victory of American-style democracy and capitalism and the demise of communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. Historians must remain skeptical about such claims. Despite John Winthrop’s hope that the eyes of the world would be trained on New England’s “city upon a hill,” the fact is that the United States began its history as a tiny colony in a corner of the world obscure to Europeans. Far from being smoothed by “destiny,” its path to world power was halting and unsteady, nearly cut off by a disastrous civil war and held back by isolationist fears. The degree to which America dominates today’s world is hardly absolute, and the effects of America’s actions for good and ill are hotly debated at home and abroad. How long “the American Century” that journalist Henry Luce proclaimed in 1941 will last remains unclear, for the histories of previous great powers chronicle their “decline and fall” as well as their rise. Whether we view current events as the product of an American empire or the result of a more diffuse globalization we can be sure that the present world order is subject to change. Barring some unforeseen global catastrophe, human history does not end or even stand still. The most accurate historical theories—indeed the only plausible ones—are those that depict societies and economies continuing to evolve into new relationships. Describing these changing international connections and determining the role of the United States in them is a crucial task for those who study American and world history.

NOTES

1. Paul Gagnon, “Why Study History?” Atlantic Monthly, November 1988, 46. 2. Quoted in the film Baseball, direction by Ken Burns (PBS, 1994).

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 3 Bender, Thomas. A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill & Wang, 2006. In six thematic chapters, Bender recasts the familiar narrative of American history in a global and comparative context. The author outlines the emergence of national histories as the basis for creating citizens and then argues that placing American history in global context can help form global citizens. By arguing that “global history

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commenced when American history began,” the book retains America at the center of world history. Christian, David. “Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History.” Journal of World History 5, 2 (Fall 1994): 173– 84. The author argues for Inner Eurasian historical coherence on political, geographic, and ecological grounds. First, the region has a history dating to the sixth century CE of repeated large-empire formation. Second, it “is dominated by the largest unified area of flatlands in the world,” a factor that profoundly shaped its history. Third, ecological factors have starkly limited the region’s economic productivity and population. Nevertheless, the region’s towns and oases have served as hinges of long-distance overland communication, linking most of Afroeurasia’s dense agrarian regions with one another. Day, David. Antarctica: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. This is one of the few books that focuses on the largely uninhabited land mass of Antarctica. By centering the narrative on human encounters with the landscape, the author historicizes the meaning of territorial possession. The book provides a detailed analysis of changing knowledge about and attitudes toward the region from the 1770s to the present. Ehret, Christopher. “Africa in World History: The Long View.” In The Oxford Handbook of World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, 455– 74. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. By addressing world history from the emergence of humankind, this essay places Africa at the center of two great transitions: first, from foraging to farming, and, second, from small-scale settlements to urban centers and state formation. The article integrates Africa into world history from the Holocene to the Atlantic Age. Golden, Peter B. Central Asia in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Golden argues that the region of Central Asia—from the Volga River to Manchuria and the northern Chinese borderlands— has been a central region of cultural interaction between Europe and Asia for millennia. The book traces the region from the rise of nomadism to the end of the twentieth century. Kramer, Paul A. “Regions in Global History.” In A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop, 201–12. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Kramer argues that of the four principal scales of historical analysis—local, national, regional, and global—it is the regional that is the most elusive. Though the local, national, and global can be “nested” in a neat triad, the concept of “region” is ambiguous. The author traces the etymology of the term as referring to both space and orientation. Palmié, Stephan, and Francisco A. Scarano, eds. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. This collection of thirty-nine essays is grouped in seven thematic sections, organized chronologically. It covers the geographical description of the Caribbean as an archipelagic, coastal mainland, and an oceanic environment through a general synthesis of history from precolonial times to the present. The book’s central themes are empire, colonialism, and globalization. Reynolds, Jonathan T. “Africa and World History: From Antipathy to Synergy.” History Compass 5, 6 (September 2007): 1998–2013, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com.libproxy .sdsu.edu/cgi-bin/fulltext/118491951/HTMLSTART. Reynolds credits the post–World War II area studies movement with providing institutional bases for the serious study of Africa, and he finds rich evidence of professional synergy between Africanists and world

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historians. From the 1970s, however, debates arose over the proper balance between African regions as locations of autonomous historical development and Africa as a land mass intricately connected since ancient times to other parts of the world. To fail to position Africa within the wider world threatens to lead straight back to fables of isolation and historical immobility concocted in nineteenth-century Europe. Reynolds also recognizes, however, that obsessive attention to external connections may encourage the notion of Africans as weak agents of change within their own societies. Ropp, Paul S. China in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Within a long chronological overview of China from earliest times to the present, Ropp narrates the development of Chinese civilization alongside other contemporaneous civilizations globally. He analyzes their similarities and differences, the mutual effects of contact, and changes and continuities in China. Sater, William F. “Joining the Mainstream: Integrating Latin America into the Teaching of World History.” In Perspectives on Teaching Innovations: World and Global History, with an introduction by Robert Blackey, 70– 80. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1999. The author contends that instructors may effectively situate the region into world history, not by trying “to cram all of Latin America into a world history course” but by paying more attention to broad interconnective trends and to opportunities for comparison with developments in Europe, North America, or other regions. Smith, Bonnie G., and Donald R. Kelley. “Europe and Russia in World History.” In The Oxford Handbook of World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, 475– 92. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Employing the concept of “Europa,” this essay traces the larger regional narrative of multicultural civilizations and empires from ancient to modern times through the evolution of modern nation-states and the reemergence of the European Union in the late twentieth century. It focuses on the changing meaning of “Europe” and thereby challenges the conventional narrative of European history.

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4 RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL SPACE

IN T R O D U C T I O N

The introduction to Chapter 3 describes how the classification of major world regions— regions defined as primary divisions of the earth’s terrestrial surface—has remained quite stable in the past half century, despite some modifications in the regions’ number, names, and topographical shapes. Moreover, these world regions, along with civilizations, continents, and nation-states, have served as standard spatial boxes for most historical inquiry since the dawn of the modern profession. Nevertheless, world history emerged as a distinctive field as its seminal thinkers discovered that the conventional geographical categories were inadequate for the particular historical problems they wished to explore. William McNeill needed the “Eurasian ecumene,” not just Eurasia’s separate civilizations, to develop his thesis in The Rise of the West that encounters between societies unequal in cultural and technical skills largely drove change within those societies. Marshall Hodgson posited the idea of an “Afro-Eurasian historical complex,” a single multicivilizational region defined by long-term interactions among peoples. Thus, he claimed, this “civilized zone as a whole had its own history.”1 Such reframing of the geographic underpinnings of world historical inquiry has been central to the field’s development, though the challenges to conventional regional thinking and the construction of alternative spatial units of analysis have taken many forms. Early in his career Fernand Braudel studied sixteenth-century Spanish diplomacy in the Mediterranean region but then turned to “the sea itself” as a compelling

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locus for understanding economic and social change in societies along its rim and on its islands. Philip Curtin and Alfred Crosby were among the early scholars to identify the Atlantic Ocean and the lands facing it as an integral region of investigation, Curtin by studying the demography of the African slave trade and Crosby by demonstrating the global consequences of the flow of living organisms between Afroeurasia and the Americas after 1492.2 Immanuel Wallerstein insisted that individual political states were inadequate primary units for explaining the inception of the modern capitalist economy. He proposed, rather, the emergence of a “world-system” of economically unequal societies, a zone of relationships that eventually encompassed the globe.3 The new ways of organizing historical space that these and other seminal thinkers proposed had no general impact on the practice and teaching of history in the short term. Jerry Bentley observed only a little more than fifteen years ago that the standard spatial units, especially nation-states, “have structured conceptions of the world so thoroughly that scholars generally do not even recognize the depth of their influence.”4 Or, as Arif Dirlik puts it, units of civilization and nation-state “have been essential in giving modernity its shape and meaning. The organization of the world around these spatialities is part of our consciousness.”5 Indeed, the great majority of professional historians continue to prefer to study change in the context of nation-states or conventional regions. In 1999 the American Historical Review introduced a new category of book reviews called “Comparative/ World.” In that year’s first issue, the new heading included reviews of ten works. In the same issue, however, there were sixty-seven reviews under “Canada and the United States” and fifty-two under “Europe: Early Modern and Modern,” including both regional and country-centered works. Fifteen years later the journal’s June 2014 issue listed twenty-one reviews under the heading that was by then called “Comparative/ World/Transnational.” By comparison, the numbers in the Canada/United States and Europe categories were seventy-one and fifty-four, respectively. In both the 1999 and 2014 issues, many fewer books were reviewed under other conventional world regional headings— Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Middle East. In short, the geographical ordering of historical research did not change greatly in that decade and a half. Works that make use of global or interregional constructions of space remained relatively few. Even so, the profession today generally accepts such constructions as perfectly legitimate. Especially in the past quarter-century, more historians have ventured to formulate problems and design narratives founded on what Steven Feierman has called “a fluid and situationally specific understanding of historical space.”6 The basic criterion for locating a study in a particular geographical area is that the chosen space is the appropriate context for investigating the historical question at hand. When historians approach the spatial dimensions of their research or teaching subject flexibly, they may position themselves to explain larger-scale implications of events more comprehensively, pull together threads of data that reveal unexpected patterns, and open new possibilities for comparing developments in different societies. Adam McKeown has argued that

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“world-historical explanations” require such flexibility: “It is hard to imagine a genuinely global explanatory narrative emerging while our knowledge remains divided into familiar geographic units. The units that make up those narratives may instead have to be chronological, event-centered, network-centered, or rooted in geographical spaces other than those framed by area studies.” 7 In other words, scholars and teachers may determine that the appropriate geographical unit for studying a historical process may be an empire, a river valley, a sea basin, an area of shared language, or indeed any zone of intercommunication, that is, any spatial field within which humans have interacted in historically significant ways. The profession also accepts the idea that all places on the map are constructions of human thought and language. We can talk and write about places, whether nationstates, cultural areas, or mountain ranges, only because at some point in the past groups with some form of cultural authority gave those places names, marked out their dimensions, and described their distinctive features. Moreover, because places have humanly ascribed identities, not ones bestowed by God or nature, they are subject to contestation. Is it the “Persian Gulf” or the “Arabian Gulf”? Is it the “Sea of Japan,” as Japanese call it, or is it the “East Sea,” as Koreans would like it to be known? Understanding that humans assign shape and meaning to places has no doubt made it easier for scholars and teachers to think of geographical spaces as malleable conceptual tools, useful for explaining particular historical developments but not necessarily having any actuality in time or space apart from those developments. For example, “Inner Eurasia” has proven helpful as a regional concept for situating a number of important world-historical events, including the development of Silk Road commerce, the rise of the Mongol empire, or the expansion of the Russian empire— events that spanned several cultural and ecological regions. But any project to fix the boundaries of Inner Eurasia, describe its cultural essence, or determine which events took place exclusively inside it would yield little of analytical value. In other words, Inner Eurasia is historically useful as a dynamic, mutable spatial construct, much less so as a solid blob on a map.8 As historians began to engage with geographic space in new ways, they transcended explanations of the political economy or social life of cartographically bounded places. They explored not only different regional spaces such as Inner Eurasia but also the dynamics of ocean and desert basins as sites of human action and interaction. Although seas and oceans have received the most attention, recent research on the Sahara also shows intellectual promise. Africanist scholars have long asserted the continent’s significant connections to other world regions. They have also demonstrated that perceptions of the Sahara as a howling, nearly uninhabited wilderness that divides the African land mass into “white” and “black” regions having little to do with one another is grossly inaccurate. Instead, the Sahara has served as a conduit of trade, religious ideas, scholarship, and people since the Roman era and was a crucible of technological innovation in Paleolithic times, when the region was wetter than it is today.9 Another helpful development in the geography of world history, proposed by Marshall

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Hodgson, is the recognition of Afroeurasia, that is, all of Eurasia and Africa together plus neighboring islands, as a single spatial field in which humans have interacted in complex ways since our biological ancestors first walked out of eastern Africa.10 Some historians use the term “Afro-Eurasia,” as Hodgson did, though in our view the hyphen perpetuates the misleading notion of a historical and cultural division between two territorial blocks. The spatial unit of Afroeurasia does not imply that people living in all parts of it, whether the Congo rainforest, Britain, or eastern Siberia, interacted directly or indirectly with one another in all eras. Rather, communication among peoples in distant parts of that giant land mass was not only physically possible but, as new evidence continues to reveal, more extensive than earlier generations of historians thought possible. David Christian highlights the extensive and long-term interaction among peoples within Afroeurasia as a single ground of historical development by juxtaposing this “supercontinent” against the Americas and Australasia, which owing to the rising sea levels that attended the end of the last ice age, remained almost entirely separate zones of human interaction from about 12,000 to a little more than 500 (the Americas and Afroeurasia) or less than 250 (Australasia and the other two) years ago. In those millennia, large-scale patterns of human development can be described in the context of just three primary “places”—perhaps adding the Island Pacific as a fourth—within which human interaction took place.11 Probably the greatest impediment to intellectual acceptance of the concept of Afroeurasia as a teaching and research device has been the geographical doctrine that the earth is made up of seven primary areas called continents and that these land masses are not only physically distinct from one another but also possess special cultural and historical characteristics. According to this principle, the immense Afroeurasian land mass is not one spatial entity but three—Africa, Asia, and Europe, each with its own historical identity. According to this creed, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Ural Mountains are, despite the record of regular if not continuous human exchange across these spaces since Paleolithic times, the ever-abiding partitions between three continents. In the first essay in this chapter, Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, one a geographer and the other a historian, demonstrate that the concept of seven continents as the world’s primary divisions, a concept that still enjoys canonical status in most school books, atlases, and the popular media, is based not on geophysical realities but on human imaginings. The authors describe the long history of “continent-making” from the first millennium BCE to the recent past. They show that Afroeurasia as an identifiable land mass— the “world island” of the ancient Greeks—receded gradually from literate discourse over the centuries. The principle that Africa, Asia, and Europe are three distinct parts of the world that happen to adjoin one another achieved cultural preeminence, though only in the twentieth century. The selection presented here comes from the first chapter of The Myth of Continents, the critical analysis of metageography (the “spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world”) that Lewis and Wigen published in 1997. This study, which dismantles a number of familiar

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metageographical constructs, including nation-state, civilization, culture area, world system, and the binary idea of “the East” and “the West,” has had considerable influence on the way world historians think about the interplay between history and geography. The authors argue that the seven-continents scheme is close to useless for the study of cultural geography or world history. Indeed, it has perpetrated great mischief insofar as people have attributed to this construct, especially to its components named “Europe,” “Asia,” and “Africa,” essential cultural or historical traits or have put them in service to political or racial ideologies. World historians acknowledge “Southernization,” the essay Lynda Shaffer published in 1994, as a classic study of a set of historical processes that may be understood only in an Afroeurasian spatial context. Shaffer argues that the region encompassing both South Asia and Southeast Asia, plus contiguous bays and seas, emerged by the fifth century CE as the world’s most important center of agronomic, technological, and scientific innovation. Major advances in this region in mathematics, maritime technology, commercial crop production, and long-distance trade gradually affected and transformed neighboring regions, first China and Southwest Asia, later the Mediterranean lands and northern Europe. The author proposes “southernization” as an appropriate name for these key developments, which took place over a span of about 1,300 years. She contends that southernization may in some respects be fairly compared to “westernization” in the modern era. Shaffer is not, however, interested in inventing a “South” that displays core cultural characteristics mirroring the essential traits that some scholars have ascribed to Europe, or more broadly, to the West. Rather, she describes southernization as a fluid, dynamic set of developments that originated in south-central Afroeurasia and eventually affected a much larger part of the landmass— and ultimately the whole globe. In a commentary on Shaffer’s essay, John Voll credits her with challenging the civilizationism (or, we might add, the continentalism) that has constricted the study of large-scale and long-term processes. As he writes, “Rather than a world made up of large, clearly identifiable blocks, called civilizations, Shaffer’s approach makes it possible to see a world with many different overlapping networks of relationships of varying degrees of intensity.”12 The developments Shaffer describes involved the formation of transportation networks that connected communities around the rim of the Indian Ocean basin. The peculiar characteristic of basins as a useful concept for studying history is that relatively few people live within them. This fact applies equally to sea, ocean, and desert basins. This geomorphological feature has acquired historical utility mainly because people living in relatively large numbers along the edges and hinterlands of basins discovered at some time in the past how to move back and forth across them, thereby bringing strangers into regular contact. Cramped by the traditional geographical containers for studying the past, however, historians took time to recognize that societies separated by large stretches of water or parched land might nonetheless have interacted in ways having great historical significance.

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Sea and ocean basins have emerged as zones of encounter and exchange in different eras. People ventured into the Mediterranean at least 130,000 years ago, when foraging bands, the fossil record shows, sailed or paddled to the island of Crete from a neighboring shore. From then on, interactions within the basin became progressively denser and more complex. Mariners began navigating the northern rim of the Arabian Sea, a “sub-basin” of the Indian Ocean, in the third millennium BCE to connect Indus River valley cities with Mesopotamia. The Bay of Bengal became a conduit of exchange not much later. The Atlantic as a historically significant space dates to only a little more than 500 years ago, when people acquired the technical skill to cross it regularly and in reasonable safety. The Pacific Ocean is an exceptional case because in contrast to the Atlantic or Indian Oceans thousands of islands dot its expanse. The peopling of islands within the basin started as early as 60,000 years ago and continued for millennia thereafter. Despite the voyages of the Manila galleons between Mexico and the Philippines starting in the sixteenth century, the urban societies along the eastern and western shores established complex lines of intercommunication barely two hundred years ago. Historians have recognized the historical significance of still other maritime regions, including the Baltic Sea, South China Sea, Caribbean Sea, and the southern end of the Red Sea, as sites of historical development, though often without using the terms basin or rim as analytical constructs.13 Thinking with oceans alongside more conventional terrestrial regions has been a particularly dynamic aspect of world history with roots that go back to Braudel’s pioneering work on the Mediterranean.14 In this chapter we include two essays that explore more recent uses of sea basins as historical tools. Rainer Buschmann introduces us broadly to what he calls “aquacentric history,” a field of inquiry that until the past two or three decades has been largely limited to the study of the maritime connections of one modern European empire or another. Starting with the ancient Greek idea of the thalassocracy, or seaborne empire commanding one sector or another of the eastern Mediterranean, Buschmann reviews key scholarly work that established the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans as useful organizing categories for historical investigation. Each of these maritime spaces now boasts a robust literature, a diversity we cannot adequately capture in the space available here. We include, as an example of oceancentered history, Alison Games’s contribution to a special forum in the American Historical Review on Atlantic history because it both showcases scholarship on the region and provides theoretical insights widely applicable to ocean-centered scholarship. She offers a detailed synthesis of that region as a scholarly and teaching subject and surveys the debates over competing definitions of the field. She contrasts research that compares developments in different parts of the Atlantic region or that analyzes aspects of imperial systems with investigations that address the movement of people, goods, ideas, and cultural practices “around and across the ocean.” Studies in the latter category, what

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David Armitage calls “circum-Atlantic history,” have appeared in growing numbers, and this type of inquiry deserves more attention.15 In particular, Games calls for more scholarship that draws Africans into the study of Atlantic social, cultural, and economic interchange but that also takes on subjects other than slavery and the slave trade. Both Buschmann and Games caution against transforming the Atlantic, or any other sea basin, into a bounded historical unit “hermetically sealed off,” as Games puts it, “from the rest of the world.” In Afroeurasia, for example, sailors and merchants began in ancient times to create links not only among ports and hinterlands within a particular sea basin but between one basin and another. The proper geographical context for examining particular developments in the Indian Ocean region, notably the local effects of long-distance commercial or cultural exchange, might therefore be a zone that also includes the Mediterranean and the two China seas. In the early modern centuries, maritime technology not only coupled Europe and Africa to the Americas by Atlantic routes but also connected all three of those lands masses more firmly to Asia by way of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Thus, as Jerry Bentley observes, “the opening of the world’s waters and the globalization of exchange after the sixteenth century complicates efforts to construe the world in terms of distinctive sea and ocean basins: To some extent, maritime history after the sixteenth century resolves into global history.”16

NOTES

1. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17. 2. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). 3. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 4. Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, 2 (April 1999): 221. 5. Arif Dirlik, “Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World History,” Journal of World History 16, 4 (December 2005): 393. 6. Steven Feierman, “African History and the Dissolution of World History,” in Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities, ed. R. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and J. O’Barr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 172. 7. Adam McKeown, “What Are the Units of World History?” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 82. 8. See David Christian, “Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History,” Journal of World History 5, 2 (Fall 1994): 173– 84. 9. Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-

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Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa, repr. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 10. Ross E. Dunn, “Afro-Eurasia,” in Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, ed. William H. McNeill, vol. 1 (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2005), 44–50; Ross E. Dunn, “Big Geography and World History,” Social Studies Review 29, 1 (Spring–Summer 2010): 14–18. 11. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 212–14. In later writing Christian posited the idea of four world zones, adding Oceania, or the Island Pacific. See David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014), 143. 12. John Obert Voll, “‘Southernization’ as a Construct in Post-Civilization Narrative,” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, ed. Ross E. Dunn (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000). 13. Interesting approaches to sea basins include W. Dirk Raat on the Caribbean, “Innovative Ways to Look at New World Historical Geography,” The History Teacher 37, 3 (May 2004): 281–306; Andrew J. Abalahin on the East and South China Seas, “‘Sino-Pacifica’: Conceptualizing Greater Southeast Asia as a Sub-Arena of World History,” Journal of World History 22, 4 (December 2011): 659– 91; and Barry Cunliffe on the “four oceans of Europe,” Europe between the Oceans, 9000 BC– AD 1000 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 14. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 15. David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500– 1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11–27. 16. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins,” 220. Peter A. Coclanis, in “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, 1 (Spring 2002): 176, has warned historians of European or North American expertise “not to give too much weight to the Atlantic Rim, separate Northwest Europe too sharply both from other parts of Europe and from Eurasia as a whole, accord too much primacy to America in explaining Europe’s transoceanic trade patterns, and, economically speaking, misrepresent through overstatement the place of Europe in the order of things.”

T H E A R C H I T E C T U R E O F C O NT INE NT S : T H E D E V E LO P ME NT O F   T H E CO N T INE N TA L S C H E ME Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen

In contemporary usage, continents are understood to be large, continuous, discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water. Although of ancient origin, this This selection is an edited version of the original publication. “The Architecture of Continents: The Development of the Continental Scheme” by Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen originally published in The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 21–33. Reprinted with permission from University of California Press.

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convention is both historically unstable and surprisingly unexamined; the required size and the requisite degree of physical separation have never been defined. As we shall see, the sevenfold continental system of American elementary school geography did not emerge in final form until the middle decades of the present century.

CL ASSICAL PRECEDENTS

According to Arnold Toynbee, the original continental distinction was devised by ancient Greek mariners, who gave the names Europe and Asia to the lands on either side of the complex interior waterway running from the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, the Black Sea, and the Kerch Strait before reaching the Sea of Azov.1 This water passage became the core of a continental system when the earliest Greek philosophers, the Ionians of Miletus, designated it as the boundary between the two great landmasses of their world. Somewhat later, Libya (or Africa) was added to form a three-continent scheme.2 Not surprisingly, the Aegean Sea lay at the heart of the Greek conception of the globe; Asia essentially denoted those lands to its east,3 Europe those lands to its west and north, and Libya those lands to the south. A seeming anomaly of this scheme was the intermediate position of the Greeks themselves, whose civilization spanned both the western and the eastern shores of the Aegean. Toynbee argued that the inhabitants of central Greece used the Asia-Europe boundary to disparage their Ionian kin, whose succumbing to “Asian” (Persian) dominion contrasted flatteringly with their own “European” freedom.4 Yet not all Greek thinkers identified themselves as Europeans. Some evidently employed the term Europe as a synonym for the northern (non-Greek) realm of Thracia.5 In another formulation, Europe was held to include the mainland of Greece, but not the islands or the Peloponnesus.6 Still others— notably Aristotle— excluded the Hellenic “race” from the continental schema altogether, arguing that the Greek character, like the Greek lands themselves, occupied a “middle position” between that of Europe and Asia.7 In any case, these disputes were somewhat technical, since the Greeks tended to view continents as physical entities, with minimal cultural or political content.8 When they did make generalizations about the inhabitants of different continents, they usually limited their discussion to the contrast between Asians and Europeans; Libya was evidently considered too small and arid to merit more than passing consideration. Twofold or threefold, the continental system of the Greeks clearly had some utility for those whose geographical horizons did not extend much beyond the Aegean, eastern Mediterranean, and Black Seas. But its arbitrary nature was fully apparent by the fifth century BCE. Herodotus, in particular, consistently questioned the conventional threepart system, even while employing it. Criticizing the overly theoretical orientation of Greek geographers, who attempted to apprehend the world through elegant geometrical models, he argued instead for an “empirical cartography founded on exploration and travel.”9 One problematic feature of the geography that Herodotus criticized was its

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division of Asia and Africa along the Nile, a boundary that sundered the obvious unity of Egypt.10 After all, as he noted, Asia and Africa were actually contiguous, both with each other and with Europe: “Another thing that puzzles me is why three distinct women’s names should have been given to what is really a single landmass; and why, too, the Nile and the Phasis— or, according to some, the Maeotic Tanais and the Cimmerian Strait— should have been fixed upon for the boundaries. Nor have I been able to learn who it was that first marked the boundaries, or where they got their names from.”11 Similar comments, suggesting a continued awareness that these were constructed categories, echoed throughout the classical period. Strabo, writing in the first century BCE, noted that there was “much argument respecting the continents,” with some writers viewing them as islands, others as mere peninsulas. Furthermore, he argued, “in giving names to the three continents, the Greeks did not take into consideration the whole habitable earth, but merely their own country, and the land exactly opposite. . . .”12 Under the Romans, the continental scheme continued to be employed in scholarly discourse, and the labels Europe and Asia were sometimes used in an informal sense to designate western and eastern portions of the empire.13 In regard to military matters, the term europeenses was deployed rather more precisely for the western zone.14 Asia was also used in a more locally specific sense to refer to a political subdivision of the Roman Empire in western Anatolia.

M E D I E VA L A N D R E N A I S S A N C E C O N S T R U C T I O N S

For almost two millennia after Herodotus, the threefold division of the earth continued to guide the European scholarly imagination. The continental scheme was reinforced in late antiquity when early Christian writers mapped onto it the story of Noah’s successors. According to St. Jerome (who died circa A.D. 420), translator of the Vulgate Bible, “Noah gave each of his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, one of the three parts of the world for their inheritance, and these were Asia, Africa, and Europe, respectively.”15 This new theological conception had the merit of explaining the larger size of the Asian landmass by reference to Shem’s primogeniture.16 It also infused the Greeks’ tripartite division of the world with religious significance. This sacralized continental model would persist with little alteration until the early modern period. Medieval Europe thus inherited the geographical ideas of the classical world, but in a calcified and increasingly mythologized form. Whereas the best Greek geographers had recognized the conventional nature of the continent— and insisted that the Red Sea made a more appropriate boundary between Asia and Africa than the Nile River17— such niceties were often lost on their counterparts in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Martianus Capella, whose compilation of knowledge became a standard medieval text,18 took it as gospel that the world was divided into Europe, Asia, and Africa, with the Nile separating the latter two landmasses.19 Other influential encyclopedists of the period, including Orosius and Isidore of Seville, held similar views.20

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During the Carolingian period, by contrast, the inherited framework of Greek geography began to recede from view. The term Europe (in one form or another) was sometimes used to refer to the emerging civilization in the largely Frankish lands of Latin Christendom, which were occasionally contrasted with an increasingly fabulous Asia to the east.21 In fact, proponents of both Carolingian and Ottonian (German) imperialism, as well as the papacy, employed the concept of Europe as “a topos of panegyric, [and] a cultural emblem.”22 But until the late Middle Ages, reference to the larger formal continental scheme was largely limited to recondite geographical studies, finding little place in general scholarly discourse.23 Africa in particular did not figure prominently in the travel lore and fables of medieval Europeans. The southern continent at the time was dismissed as inferior, on the mistaken grounds that it was small in extent and dominated by deserts.24 Scholarly geographical studies, of course, were another matter. Here the tripartite worldview of the Greeks was retained, but transposed into an abstract cosmographical model, abandoning all pretense to spatial accuracy. The famous “T-O” maps of the medieval period, representing the earth in the form of a cross, reflect the age’s profoundly theological view of space. The cross symbol (represented as a T within the circle of the world) designated the bodies of water that supposedly divided Europe, Asia, and Africa; these landmasses in a sense served as the background on which the sacred symbol was inscribed. The Nile remained, in most cases, the dividing line between Africa and Asia. Classical precedence joined here with theological necessity, converting an empirical distortion into an expression of profound cosmographical order.25 With the revival of Greek and Roman learning in the Renaissance, the older continental scheme was revived as well, becoming endowed with an unprecedented scientific authority.26 The noted sixteenth-century German geographer Sebastian Münster, for example, invoked “the ancient division of the Old World into three regions separated by the Don, the Mediterranean, and the Nile.”27 Despite the considerable accumulation of knowledge in the centuries since Herodotus, few Renaissance scholars questioned the boundaries that had been set in antiquity. On the contrary, it was in this period that the continental scheme became the authoritative frame of reference for sorting out the differences among various human societies.28 The elevation of the continental scheme to the level of received truth was conditioned in part by an important historical juncture. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, just as classical writings were being revalued, the geography of Christianity was in flux on several fronts at once. Turkish conquests at its southeastern edge were causing the remaining Christian communities in Asia Minor to retreat, while Christian conquests and conversions in the northeast were vanquishing the last holdouts of paganism in the Baltic region. Meanwhile, the rise of humanism was challenging the cultural unity of the Catholic world from within. These historical circumstances combined to give the Greek continental scheme new salience. On the one hand, as Christianity receded in the southeast and advanced in the northeast, the boundaries of Christendom increasingly

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(although never perfectly) coincided with those of the Greeks’ Europe. On the other hand, humanist scholars began to search for a secular self-designation. As a result, these centuries saw Europe begin to displace Christendom as the primary referent for Western society.29 As Western Christians began to call themselves Europeans in the fifteenth century, the continental schema as a whole came into widespread use. But it was not long before the new (partial) geographical fit between Europe and Christendom was once again offset. Continuing Turkish conquests, combined with the final separation of the Eastern and Western Christian traditions, pulled southeastern Europe almost completely out of the orbit of the increasingly self-identified European civilization.30

OLD WORLDS, NEW CONTINENTS

Once Europeans crossed the Atlantic, they gradually discovered that their threefold continental system did not form an adequate world model. Evidence of what appeared to be a single “new world” landmass somehow had to be taken into account. The transition from a threefold to a fourfold continental scheme did not occur immediately after Columbus, however. First, America had to be intellectually “invented” as a distinct parcel of land— one that could be viewed geographically, if not culturally, as equivalent to the other continents.31 According to Eviatar Zerubavel, this reconceptualization took nearly a century to evolve, in part because it activated serious “cosmographic shock.”32 For a long time, many Europeans simply chose to ignore the evidence; as late as 1555, a popular French geography text entitled La Division du monde pronounced that the earth consisted of Asia, Europe, and Africa, making absolutely no mention of the Americas.33 The Spanish imperial imagination persisted in denying continental status to its transatlantic colonies for even longer. According to Walter Mignolo, “The Castilian notion of ‘the Indies’ [remained] in place up to the end of the colonial empire; ‘America’ [began] to be employed by independentist intellectuals only toward the end of the eighteenth century.”34 Yet by the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese cosmographer Duarte Pacheco and his German counterpart Martin Waldseemüller had mapped the Americas as a continent.35 While cartographic conventions of the period rendered the new landmass, like Africa, as distinctly inferior to Asia and Europe,36 virtually all global geographies by the seventeenth century at least acknowledged the Americas as one of the “four quarters of the world.” As this brief account suggests, accepting the existence of a transatlantic landmass required more than simply adding a new piece to the existing continental model. As Edmundo O’Gorman has brilliantly demonstrated, reckoning with the existence of previously unknown lands required a fundamental restructuring of European cosmography.37 For in the old conception, Europe, Africa, and Asia had usually been envisioned as forming a single, interconnected “world island,” the Orbis Terrarum. The existence of another such “island” in the antipodes of the Southern Hemisphere— an Orbis Alte-

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rius— had often been hypothesized, but it was assumed that it would constitute a world apart, inhabited, if at all, by sapient creatures of an entirely different species. Americans, by contrast, appeared to be of the same order as other humans,38 suggesting that their homeland must be a fourth part of the human world rather than a true alter-world. Thus it was essentially anthropological data that undermined the established cosmographic order. In the long run, the discovery of a distant but recognizably human population in the Americas would irrevocably dash the world island to pieces. Over the next several centuries the fundamental relationship between the world’s major landmasses was increasingly seen as one of separation, not contiguity. In 1570 Ortelius divided the world into four constituent parts, yet his global maps did not emphasize divisional lines, and his regional maps sometimes spanned “continental” divisions.39 By the late seventeenth century, however, most global atlases unambiguously distinguished the world’s main landmasses and classified all regional maps accordingly.40 The Greek notion of a unitary human terrain, in other words, was disassembled into its constituent continents, whose relative isolation was now ironically converted into their defining feature. Although the possibility of an Orbis Alterius was never again taken seriously, the boundaries dividing the known lands would henceforth be conceived in much more absolute terms than they had been in the past. Even as the accuracy of mapping improved dramatically in this period, the conceptualization of global divisions was so hardened as to bring about a certain conceptual deterioration.

NEW DIVISIONS

As geographical knowledge increased, and as the authority of the Greeks diminished, the architecture of global geography underwent more subtle transformations as well. If continents were to be meaningful geographical divisions of human geography, rather than mere reflections of an ordained cosmic plan, the Nile and the Don obviously formed inappropriate boundaries. Scholars thus gradually came to select the Red Sea and the Gulf and Isthmus of Suez as the African-Asian divide. Similarly, by the sixteenth century, geographers began to realize that Europe and Asia were not separated by a narrow isthmus, that the Don River did not originate anywhere near the Arctic Sea, and that the Sea of Azov was smaller than had previously been imagined. While the old view was remarkably persistent, a new boundary for these two continents was eventually required as well.41 The difficulty was that no convenient barrier like the Red Sea presented itself between Europe and Asia. The initial response was to specify precise linkages between south- and north-flowing rivers across the Russian plains; by the late seventeenth century, one strategy was to divide Europe from Asia along stretches of the Don, Volga, Kama, and Ob Rivers.42 This was considered an unsolved geographical issue, however, and geographers vied with each other to locate the most fitting divisional line. Only in

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the eighteenth century did a Swedish military officer, Philip-Johann von Strahlenberg, argue that the Ural Mountains formed the most significant barrier. Von Strahlenberg’s proposal was enthusiastically seconded by Russian intellectuals associated with Peter the Great’s Westernization program, particularly Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev, in large part because of its ideological convenience.43 In highlighting the Ural divide, Russian Westernizers could at once emphasize the European nature of the historical Russian core while consigning Siberia to the position of an alien Asian realm suitable for colonial rule and exploitation.44 (Indeed, many Russian texts at this time dropped the name Siberia in favor of the more Asiatic-sounding Great Tartary.)45 Controversy continued in Russian and German geographical circles, however, with some scholars attempting to push the boundary farther east to the Ob or even the Yenisey River, while others argued for holding the line at the Don.46 Tatishchev’s and von Strahlenberg’s position was eventually to triumph not only in Russia but throughout Europe. After the noted French geographer M. Malte-Brun gave it his seal of approval in the nineteenth century, the Ural boundary gained near-universal acceptance.47 Yet this move necessitated a series of further adjustments, since the Ural Mountains do not extend far enough south— or west—to form a complete border. In atlases of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the old and new divisions were often combined, with Europe shown as separated from Asia by the Don River, a stretch of the Volga River, and the Ural Mountains.48 From the mid-1800s on the most common, although by no means universal,49 solution to this problem was to separate Asia from Europe by a complex line running southward through the Urals, jumping in their southern extent to the Ural River, extending through some two-thirds the length of the Caspian Sea, and turning in a sharp angle to run northwestward along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains.50 Indeed, as recently as 1994, the United States Department of State gave its official imprimatur to this division.51 The old usage of the Don River, arbitrary though it might have been, at least required a less contorted delineation. Moreover, the new division did even more injustice to cultural geography than did the old, for it included within Europe such obviously “non-European” peoples as the Buddhist, Mongolian-speaking Kalmyks. While this geographical boundary between Europe and Asia is now seldom questioned and is often assumed to be either wholly natural or too trivial to worry about, the issue still provokes occasional interest. In 1958, for example, a group of Russian geographers argued that the true divide should follow “the eastern slope of the Urals and their prolongation the Mugodzhar hills, the Emba River, the northern shore of the Caspian Sea, the Kumo-manychskaya Vpadina (depression) and the Kerchenski Strait to the Black Sea”52— thus placing the Urals firmly within Europe and the Caucasus within Asia. Other writers have elected to ignore formal guidelines altogether, placing the boundary between the two “continents” wherever they see fit. The 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, defines the Swat district of northern Pakistan as “a region bordering on Europe and Asia”53 —“Europe” perhaps connoting, in this

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context, all areas traversed by Alexander the Great. Halford Mackinder, on the other hand, selected a “racial” criterion to divide Europe from Africa (although not from Asia), and thus extended its boundaries well to the south: “In fact, the southern boundary of Europe was and is the Sahara rather than the Mediterranean, for it is the desert land that divides the black man from the white.”54

T H E C O N T I N U I N G C A R E E R O F T H E C O N T I N E N TA L S C H E M E

Despite the ancient and ubiquitous division of the earth into Europe, Asia, and Africa (with the Americas as a later addition), such “parts” of the earth were not necessarily defined explicitly as continents prior to the late nineteenth century. While the term continent— which emphasizes the contiguous nature of the land in question—was often used in translating Greek and Latin concepts regarding the tripartite global division, it was also employed in a far more casual manner. In fact, in early modern English, any reasonably large body of land or even island group might be deemed a continent. In 1599, for example, Richard Hakluyt referred to the West Indies as a “large and fruitfull continent.”55 Gradually, however, geographers excluded archipelagos and smaller landmasses from this category, adhering as well to a more stringent standard of spatial separation. By 1752 Emanuel Bowen was able to state categorically: “A continent is a large space of dry land comprehending many countries all joined together, without any separation by water. Thus Europe, Asia, and Africa is one great continent, as America is another.”56 The division of the world into two continents certainly forces one to recognize, as Herodotus did many centuries earlier, that Europe, Asia, and Africa are not separated in any real sense. Indeed, perspicacious geographers have always been troubled by this division. As early as 1680, the author of The English Atlas opined: “The division seems not so rational; for Asia is much bigger than both of the others; nor is Europe an equal balance for Africa.”57 Several prominent nineteenth-century German geographers, Alexander von Humboldt and Oskar Peschel among them, insisted that Europe was but an extension of Asia; many Russian Slavophiles, perennial opponents of the more influential Westernizers, concurred.58 Such clear-headed reasoning was not to prevail, however. By the late nineteenth century the old “parts of the earth” had been definitively named “continents,” with the separation between Europe and Asia remaining central to the scheme. The Oxford English Dictionary (compiled in the decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century) recounts the transition as follows: “Formerly two continents were reckoned, the Old and the New; the former comprising Europe, Asia, and Africa, which form one continuous mass of land; the latter, North and South America, forming another. These two continents are strictly islands, distinguished only by their extent. Now it is usual to reckon four or five continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, North and South; the great island of Australia is sometimes reckoned as another.”59 Regardless of the term used to denote them, the standard categories of antiquity,

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with the addition of the “new world(s),” continued to comprise the fundamental framework within which global geography and history were conceived.60 Yet minor disagreements persisted as to the exact number of units one should count. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world atlases, which generally printed the world’s major units in different colored inks, one can find fourfold, fivefold, and sixfold divisional schemes. North and South America might be counted as one unit or two, while Australia (“New Holland”) was sometimes colored as a portion of Asia, sometimes as a separate landmass, and sometimes as a mere island.61 All things considered, however, the fourfold scheme prevailed well into the 1800s. Whatever the exact form it took on maps, the division of the world into great continents became an increasingly important metageographical concept in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Montesquieu, the foremost geographical thinker of the French Enlightenment, based his social theories on the absolute geographical separation of Europe from Asia, the core of his fourfold continental scheme.62 The most influential human geographer of the mid-nineteenth century, Carl Ritter, similarly argued (in his signature teleological style): “Each continent is like itself alone . . . each one was so planned and formed as to have its own special function in the progress of human culture.”63 Ritter also attempted to ground the entire scheme in physical anthropology. Conflating continents with races, he viewed Europe as the land of white people, Africa that of black people, Asia of yellow people, and America of red people64 — a pernicious notion that still lingers in the public imagination. It was with Arnold Guyot, the Swiss scholar who introduced Ritter’s version of geography to the United States in the mid-1800s, that continent-based thinking reached its apogee. Guyot saw the hand of Providence in the assemblage of the continents as well as in their individual outlines and physiographic structures. The continents accordingly formed the core of Guyot’s geographical exposition— one aimed at revealing “the existence of a general law, and disclos[ing] an arrangement which cannot be without a purpose.”65 Not surprisingly, the purpose Guyot discerned in the arrangement of the world’s landmasses entailed the progressive revelation of a foreordained superiority for Europe and the Europeans. From his position on the faculty of Princeton University, Guyot propagated his views on the subject for many years, influencing several generations of American teachers and writers. As the continental system was thus formalized in the nineteenth century, its categories were increasingly naturalized, coming to be regarded, not as products of a fallible human imagination, but as real geographical entities that had been “discovered” through empirical inquiry.66 E. H. Bunbury, the leading Victorian student of the history of geographic thought, went so far as to label Homer a “primitive geographer” for his failure to recognize “the division of the world into three continents.”67 Bunbury also took Herodotus to task for his “erroneous notion” that Europe was of greater east-west extent than Asia and Libya [Africa] combined. Herodotus came to this conclusion, however, not because his spatial conceptions were any less accurate than those of his peers, but

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because he eschewed using the north-south trending Tanais (Don) as the continental border, preferring instead east-west running rivers such as the Phais and Araxes (in the Caucasus region). To the Victorian Bunbury, this was not an issue on which educated people could disagree.68 What nineteenth-century geographers had lost was Herodotus’s sense that the only reason for dividing Europe and Asia along a north-south rather than an east-west axis was convention. In fact, by scientific criteria, Herodotus probably had the better argument. Certainly in physical terms, Siberia has much more in common with the far north of Europe—where Herodotus’s boundary would have placed it—than with Oman or Cambodia.

INTO THE T WENTIETH CENTURY

Since the early eighteenth century, one of the most problematic issues for global geographers was how to categorize Southeast Asia, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific. Gradually, a new division began to appear in this portion of the world. According to one popular Victorian. work of world history, “It was usual until the present century to speak of the great divisions of the earth as the Four Quarters of the World, viz. Europe, Asia, Africa, and America,” while insisting that a “scientific distribution” of the world’s “terrestrial surfaces” would have to include Australia and Polynesia as separate divisions.69 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Australia was usually portrayed as a distinct part of the world, albeit often linked with the islands of the Pacific.70 The notion of Oceania as a fifth (or sixth, if the Americas were divided) section of the world grew even more common in the early twentieth century, when several cartographers marked off insular Southeast Asia from Asia and appended it to the island world.71 In the early twentieth century, world geography textbooks published in Britain and the United States almost invariably used the continental system as their organizing framework, typically devoting one chapter to each of these “natural” units. This pattern may be found in works on the natural world as well as in those concerned with human geography. Scanning through these textbooks, one notices only slight deviations from the standard model. The International Geography, edited by Hugh Robert Mill,72 for example, places Central and South America in a single chapter, while devoting another to the polar regions. Leonard Brooks, in A Regional Geography of the World; follows the conventional scheme—with successive chapters on Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, and Australia—but devotes an additional chapter to the British Isles alone.73 Here Eurocentrism yields pride of place to Britanocentrism, suggesting the emergence of a new virtual continent in the north Atlantic. Yet not all geographical writers in the early twentieth century viewed continents as given and unproblematic divisions of the globe. In the popular Van Loon’s Geography of 1937, for example, the author describes the continental scheme with a light and almost humorous touch, concluding that one might as well use the standard system so long as one remembers its arbitrary foundations. Van Loon viewed the standard arrangement

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as including five continents: Asia, America, Africa, Europe, and Australia.74 While it might seem surprising to find North and South America still joined into a single continent in a book published in the United States in 1937, such a notion remained fairly common until World War II.75 It cannot be coincidental that this idea served American geopolitical designs at the time, which sought both Western Hemispheric domination and disengagement from the “Old World” continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.76 By the 1950s, however, virtually all American geographers had come to insist that the visually distinct landmasses of North and South America deserved separate designations. This was also the period when Antarctica was added to the list, despite its lack of human inhabitants,77 and when Oceania as a “great division” was replaced by Australia as a continent along with a series of isolated and continentally attached islands.78 The resulting seven-continent system quickly gained acceptance throughout the United States. In the 1960s, during the heyday of geography’s “quantitative revolution,” the scheme received a new form of scientific legitimization from a scholar who set out to calculate, through rigorous mathematical equations, the exact number of the world’s continents. Interestingly enough, the answer he came up with conformed almost precisely to the conventional list: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania (Australia plus New Zealand), Africa, and Antarctica.79 Despite the implicit European bias of the continental scheme, its more recent incarnations have been exported to the rest of the world without, so far as we are aware, provoking any major critical response or local modification. In the case of Japan, a European-derived fourfold continental schema came into use in the 1700s and was ubiquitous by the middle 1800s.80 Subsequent changes in Japanese global conceptualization closely followed those of Europe—with the signal difference that Asia almost always ranked as the first continent.81 Geographers in the Islamic realm, for their part, had adopted the ancient threefold global division from the Greeks at a much earlier date,82 although the continents generally played an insignificant role in their conceptions of the terrestrial order before the twentieth century.83 South Asians and others influenced by Indian religious beliefs employed a very different traditional system of continental divisions, one much more concerned with cosmographical than with physical geographical divisions.84 With the triumph of European imperialism, however, the contemporary European view of the divisions of the world came to enjoy near-universal acceptance. Scholars from different countries may disagree over the exact number of continents (in much of Europe, for instance, a fivefold rather than a sevenfold scheme is still preferred), but the basic system has essentially gone unchallenged. Paradoxically, almost as soon as the now-conventional seven-part continental system emerged in its present form, it began to be abandoned by those who had most at stake in its propagation: professional geographers. Whereas almost all American universitylevel global geography textbooks before World War II reflected continental divisions, by the 1950s most were structured around “world regions.”85 Yet the older continental divisions have persisted tenaciously in the popular press, in elementary curricula, in

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reference works, and even in the terminology of world regions themselves. Anyone curious about the contemporary status of the continental scheme need only glance through the shelves of cartographic games and products designed for children.86 Nor is such pedagogy aimed strictly at the young. A recently published work designed primarily for adults, entitled Don’t Know Much about Geography, locates the “nations of the world” according to their “continental” positions. The author further informs us that cartographers only “figured out” that Australia “was a sixth continent” in 1801. And his repetition of the familiar claim that Australia is at once “the world’s smallest continent and its largest island”87 confirms as well the continuing invisibility of the “world island,” encompassing Europe, Asia, and Africa.

NOTES

1. Toynbee 1934–61, volume 8 (1954), pages 711–12. 2. See Tozer 1964, page 67; see also Herodotus 1954, page 135. Hecataeus, perhaps owing to his “symmetrical turn of mind,” was a strong proponent of the twofold system, subsuming Libya into Asia (see Bunbury, 1959, page 145). 3. It has been suggested that the term Asia originally referred only to the plains to the east of Ephesus—the “sunrise” direction from that Greek city of Asia Minor (see Lyde 1926, page 6). This thesis, predicated on the notion that Asia and Europe were derived from words for sunrise and sunset (see note 11, below), is no longer widely held. 4. Toynbee 1934–61, volume 8 (1954), page 718. 5. De Rougemont 1966, pages 36–37. 6. See Tozer 1964, page 69. This position of Europe in Greek thought is tremendously confused. According to one interpretation of the ideas of Euphorus, for example, “. . . Europe means first of all the Greek world or the world occupied by the Greeks” (Van Paassen 1957, page 254). Stoianovich (1994, page 2) argues that originally Europe referred only to central Greece. 7. See Aristotle 1932, pages 565–67: “The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so they are in continuous subjugation and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent.” 8. See P. Burke 1980. According to common Greek notions of environmental determinism, however, physical geographical differences could be translated into distinct cultural differences between Europe and Asia. This is notable in the works of Herodotus, Aristotle, and especially Hippocrates (Glacken 1967; Van Paassen 1957). 9. Aujac 1987, page 136. 10. Herodotus, 1954, pages 134–35. 11. Ibid., page 285. 12. Strabo 1854, page 102.

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13. De Rougemont 1966, page 41. 14. P. Burke 1980, page 23. 15. De Rougemont 1966, page 19. As Denys Hay (1957, page 9) relates, this idea can be traced back to Josephus in the first century A.D. 16. Woodward 1987, page 334. As Beazley (1949, volume 2, page 577) relates, some medieval maps showed Europe as larger than Asia. 17. See Strabo 1854, page 55. 18. On the importance of Martianus Capella, see Lindberg 1992, page 145. 19. See Capella 1977, pages 231–32. 20. See Kimble 1938, pages 20, 24. 21. See D. Hay 1957, pages 25, 52. 22. Leyser 1992, page 37. 23. See P. Burke 1980; W. H. Parker 1960. 24. See Wright 1925, page 74. 25. As Woodward (1987) explains, “accuracy” of spatial representation was not the aim of the creators of the T-O maps. It should also be noted that medieval cartographers sometimes depicted additional unknown continents (see Beazley 1949, volume 2, pages 571–72; Wright 1925, page 157; J. Friedman 1994, page 67). 26. W. H. Parker 1960, page 281. 27. Glacken 1967, page 365. 28. See P. Burke 1980, page 23. 29. See D. Hay 1957. 30. Toynbee (1934–61, volume 8 [1954], pages 720–21) thus argues that the Renaissance actually saw a deterioration in geographical conception, as continental terms such as Europe were imbued with social and cultural rather than mere physiographic qualities. 31. See O’Gorman 1961. 32. Zerubavel 1992, page 69. 33. See Lach 1977, page 273. 34. Mignolo 1993, page 240. Mignolo contends that the Spaniards preferred the notion of the Indies over that of the Americas in part because it linked its colonial possessions in the Western Hemisphere with the Philippines. 35. See Zerubavel 1992, pages 79–81. 36. See Mignolo 1993. The Americas were often viewed as the distinct realm of nature through the early nineteenth century, and many Enlightenment thinkers considered nature in the Americas to be inferior to that in the Eastern Hemisphere (see Pratt 1992; Glacken 1967). 37. O’Gorman 1961, see especially pages 55, 127–137. 38. Of course, rumors of “monstrous” peoples in the Americas persisted for some time (see Dathorne 1994, page 32). 39. See Ortelius 1570, map 1. His map 50, of Turkey (Turcicum), shows both the Asian and the European components of the Ottoman Empire; by the eighteenth century virtually all atlases rigorously separated “Turkey-in-Asia” from “Turkey-in-Europe.” 40. See, for example, Sanson 1674.

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41. Medieval world maps sometimes had no exact Europe-Asia divide (see Beazley 1949, volume 2, page 565). 42. W. H. Parker 1960, page 282. 43. See Bassin 1991b, page 6. 44. As Forsyth (1992, page 146) elaborates, “It is noticeable that by now [1700s] in the vocabulary of Russian officialdom not only was [Asiatic] ‘unreliability’ attributed to the Siberian peoples, but ‘Asiatic’ had come into use as a self-explanatory pejorative term.” 45. See Bassin 1991a, page 768. Scholars in western Europe, however, often had different ideas. To Montesquieu (1949, pages 264–65), and most of his contemporaries, for example, Great Tartary was located south of Siberia, constituting, in essence, modern Central Asia. Considering the derivation of the term Tartary, this is a more accurate definition. Many western European atlases from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, did label Siberia as part of Tartary. 46. See Bassin 1991b, page 8. 47. See W H. Parker 1960, page 286. Malte-Brun (1827, volume I, page 285) contended that Russian geographers in St. Petersburg had recently “proved” that the Urals formed the natural division between the two continents. 48. See, for example, S. Butler 1829, map 2; Cary 1808, map 3; Finley 1826, map 1; D’Anville 1743, map 1; R. Wilkinson 1794, map 1; G. Robert de Vaugondy and D. Robert de Vaugondy 1798, map 1. The Don-Volga-Urals scheme was used as late as 1849 by S. Augustus Mitchell (map 44). 49. Some cartographers, for example, placed Russian Transcaucasia within Europe (W. Johnston 1880, map 2); several others relied on Russian provincial boundaries to include both Transcaucasia and the area immediately east of the southern Urals, while excluding from Europe a small slice of territory to the west of the Ural River (B. Smith 1899, map 73; Hammond’s Modern Atlas of the World 1909, map 79; Gaebler 1897, map 5; Patten and Homans 1910, page 67). Several atlases of the mid-twentieth century, on the other hand, used political criteria to place the Europe-Asia boundary along the crest of the northern and southern Urals, but in the central portion they pushed the Asian boundary to the west so as to exclude the Perm district from Europe (Rand McNally 1932, page 197; Encyclopedia Britannica World Atlas 1949, pages 8–9; Hammond’s Ambassador World Atlas 1954, page 26). 50. See, for example, S. Hall and Hughes 1856, map 1; Stieler 1865, map 5; Colton 1856, map v. 51. See Dillion 1994, page 19. 52. Encyclopedia Britannica 1963, volume 8, page 836. 53. Encyclopedia Britannica 1963, volume 21, page 632. 54. Mackinder 1904, pages 428–29. John Kirtland Wright—who argued at a very early date that Europe was but a conventional name for the far west of Asia— similarly included the entire “Africo-Arabian arid region” within the “European area” (1928, pages 4– 6). He did so largely for historical rather than racial reasons. 55. Quoted in Oxford English Dictionary 1971, volume I, page 536. 56. Bowen 1752, page 3. 57. Pitt 1680, page 14. 58. Bassin 1991b, pages 9–10.

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59. Oxford English Dictionary 1971, volume 1, page 536. There is a further problem here, however, in the use of the terms old and new. While the “New World” is usually taken to encompass North and South America, Australia and New Zealand are not uncommonly placed within it as well. In fact, in the sixteenth century, all areas unknown to Ptolemy (including most of East and Southeast Asia) were classified as part of the New World (see Lach 1977). In the late nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for mapmakers to use the term continent in both the old and the new senses concurrently. Bartholomew (1873, page vii), for example, states in the same paragraph that the world is divided into two continents and into six continents. 60. By the late 1800s, it must be admitted, world maps found in atlases were much less often colored to indicate continental divisions; instead, political divisions were increasingly highlighted. Still, continents have remained the central organizational feature of most atlases up to the present. 61. For North and South America conceived as a single unit, see Sanson 1674; Geographischer Atlas Bestehen . . . 1785; Pitt 1680; Bowen 1752; D’Anville 1743; Woodbridge 1824; Butler 1829; for North and South America conceived as two units, see R. Wilkinson 1794; G. Robert de Vaugondy and D. Robert de Vaugondy 1798; Bonne 1771; Kitchin 1773; Palairet 1775; Finley r826; Cary 1808; for Australia conceived as a part of Asia, see Palairet 1775; Kitchen 1773; Finley 1826; for Australia conceived as a separate division, see R. Wilkinson 1794; G. Robert de Vaugondy and D. Robert de Vaugondy 1798; Bonne 177 1; for Australia conceived as an island, see D’Anville 1743; Geographischer Atlas Bestehen . . . 1785; Cary 1808; Woodbridge 1824. 62. See Montesquieu 1949, volume 1, pages 264–69 especially. 63. Ritter 1864, page 183. Ritter occasionally argued that the distinction between continents and islands was to some extent arbitrary, contending that Australia could be counted either as the world’s smallest continent or its largest island, and that even Java or Britain might be considered continents. Elsewhere, however, he virtually reverted to the classical threefold system, holding Europe, Asia, and Africa to be the world’s primary landmasses (see Ritter 1863, page 72). In the end he opted for global vision structured around the fourfold continental system, seeing each continent as a divinely planned location for a different part of the story of humanity’s rise. On Ritter’s essentially religious conviction that continents form natural units, see also R. Dickinson 1969 (page 38). 64. See the discussion in James and Martin 1981, page 129. The linking of continents and racial groups stems from the work of Linnaeus, who differentiated four color-distinguished races, each located on one of the four quarters of the world (see Linnaeus 1735, first table under “Regnum Animale”; see also Pratt 1992, page 32). Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1865)— sometimes called the “Father of Physical Anthropology”—later modified the Linnaean system, employing a fivefold classificatory system with each race linked to, but not exactly identified with, each of the four continents plus Oceania. The Caucasians, Blumenbach maintained, could be found in Europe, North Africa, and Asia west of the Ganges and north of the Amur. (He called this “race” Caucasian, it should be noted, because he considered the Georgians [an “Asian” people] to be its most perfect representatives [page

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269].) A belief in the direct correlation between continents and races based on skin color was also popular in China in the late 1800s and early 1900s (see Dikötter 1992, page 78). 65. Guyot 1970, page 28. Guyot embraced a sixfold scheme, according continental status to South America and Australia, a rather rare position at the time. 66. Of course, not all Victorian scholars followed this kind of geographical reasoning to its logical end. Friedrich Ratzel’s History of Mankind, for example, is of interest for its marked deviation from the standard spatial architecture of continents and civilizations— even though it used standard continental terminology. 67. Bunbury 1959, page 38. 68. Ibid., page 163. Most classical geographers held Asia to be the largest continent; some, like Ptolemy (1932, page 160), also considered Africa to be larger than Europe, but most regarded Europe as much more extensive than the southern continent. 69. Maunder 1854, page 30. 70. See Colton 1856, map v (which includes New Zealand but excludes New Guinea); Stieler 1865, map 3; Greenleaf 1842, map 1; S. Hall and Hughes 1856, map 1. 71. As early as 1827, the noted French geographer M. Malte-Brun adopted a strict physical definition, based on fixed sea limits, and thus excluded the entire insular realm of “Southeast Asia” from the continent. Instead, he appended it to Oceania, a region anchored by Australia, which he regarded as forming a fifth portion of the world (see Malte-Brun 1827, volume I, page 286 ). Such a view became very common in world atlases. 72. H. R. Mill 1922. 73. Brooks 1926. 74. See Van Loon 1937, page 74. 75. From the mid-1800s onward, however, it was more common to find North and South America treated as separate landmasses in atlases published in the United States; in those published in Europe, on the other hand, a united American continent remained the norm. See, for example, Greenleaf 1842, S. A. Mitchell 1849, Colton 1856, Bartholomew 1873 (page vii), and Rand McNally 1881 (page 23+) for America views; see Cortambert 1869, Stieler 1865, S. Hall and Hughes 1856, and W. Johnston 1880 for European views. Another alternative sometimes employed in the United States was to map both of the Americas as a single continent, but then to emphasize its subcontinental division into North, Central, and South America (see The Columbian Atlas of the World 1893, page 150). 76. Charles Beard (1940, page 12) defined this country’s traditional, and in his view correct, foreign policy as one of “continental Americanism,” a system based on “nonintervention in the controversies and wars of Europe and Asia and resistance to the intrusion of European and Asiatic powers . . . into the western hemisphere.” For a contemporary critique of this thesis, see Eugene Staley’s (1941) “The Myth of the Continents.” Staley advocated maritime rather than continental solidarity, and ridiculed the notion that the United States had any kind of natural relationship with South America based on their common location on the American continent. 77. The old hypothesized Terra Australis had sometimes counted as a virtual continent, and in 1680 the author of The English Atlas (Pitt 1680, page 4) speculated that land under the South Pole might count as a part of the world on the same taxonomic level as Europe, Asia, and Africa. In S. Augustus Mitchell’s atlas of 1849 (map 1) Antarctica is labeled as a

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continent. Relatively few atlases, however, classified it as such until after World War II. For an early depiction of the now-standard (in the United States) sevenfold scheme, see Hammond’s Ambassador World Atlas of 1954. 78. When Southeast Asia was conceptualized as a world region during World War II, Indonesia and the Philippines were perforce added to Asia, which reduced the extent of Oceania, leading to a reconceptualization of Australia as a continent in its own right. This maneuver is apparent in postwar atlases (see, for example, Encyclopedia Britannica World Atlas 1949, pages 210–21; Bartholomew 1950, page 104; Hammond’s Ambassador World Atlas 1954). 79. See Warntz 1968, pages 3, 24. 80. The most influential Japanese world map of the eighteenth century, known as the Chikyu bankoku sankai yochi zenzusetsu, was one of the earliest to depict European-derived continental divisions. This map did, however, categorize Arabia and Turkey as part of Europe. A Russian-influenced map from the same period (Chikyuzu), on the other hand, employed the “modern” Ural-Caucasus division— at a time when most European maps still used the older boundaries. (See Kobe City Museum 1989, pages 13, 16.) 81. The most important Japanese work in global geography from the late Edo period, the Konyo Zushiki Ho, employed the then-standard fourfold continental scheme (Asia-EuropeAfrica-America), appending insular Southeast Asia to Australia and the Pacific islands in a residual fifth category (Mitsukuri Shogo 1845; see also the brief discussion of this text and its accompanying world map in Kobe City Museum 1989). As early as 1875, however, at least one prominent Japanese geography textbook (Shiozu 1875) had adopted the sixfold scheme of Guyot, with its three northern continents paired off against three southern counterparts. 82. See Barthold 1937, page 33. 83. See Yapp 1992, page 139. 84. See Schwartzberg 1992, 1994; Gole 1989, pages 21–22. Some systems of Indic cosmography posited the existence of a series of concentric “continents” and oceans; others a fourfold system of completely discrete island continents. The “known continent,” dominated by South Asia, typically covered only a small portion of such maps. A unique Korean cartographic tradition posited the existence of a central continent (of the “known world”), surrounded by “an enclosing sea ring, which itself is surrounded by an outer land ring” (Ledyard 1994, page 259). Most of the places depicted on these traditional Korean world maps were imaginary. 85. Even such an obviously noncontinental unit as Latin America is still often referred to as a continent (see, for example, Alba 1969, page 4)— showing the persistence of the continental ideal. 86. See, for example, the delightful little juvenile book, Blast Off to Earth: A Look at Geography (Leedy 1992), which is structured entirely around the sevenfold continental scheme. 87. See K. Davis 1992, pages 135–36, appendix 3. In another recently published popular work in geography (Grillet 1991), this one constructed in a quiz format, the author similarly takes the continental divisions to be the most basic facts of world geography.

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BIBLIOGR APHY

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van Loon, Hendrik Willem. Van Loon’s Geography; the Story of the World. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937. Van Paassen, Christiaan. The Classical Tradition of Geography. Groningen, Wolters, 1957. Warntz, Christopher W. The Continent Problem; Geography and Spatial Variance. Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography 9. Cambridge: Laboratory for Computer Graphics, Dept. of City and Regional Planning, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 1968. Wilkinson, Robert. A General Atlas. London: R. Wilkinson, 1794. Woodbridge, William Channing. Modern Atlas on a New Plan: To Accompany the System of Universal Geography. Hartford, Conn.: O.D. Cooke, 1824. Woodward, David. “Medieval Mappaemundi.” In The History of Cartography, edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward, 1:286–370. University of Chicago Press, 1987. Wright, John Kirtland. The Geographical Basis of European History. New York: H. Holt and Co., 1928. ———. The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe. New York: American Geographical Society, 1925. Yapp, M. E. “Europe in the Turkish Mirror.” Past & Present 137, no. 1 (November 1, 1992): 134–55. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

S O U T H E R NI Z AT I O N Lynda Shaffer

The term southernization is a new one. It is used here to refer to a multifaceted process that began in Southern Asia and spread from there to various other places around the globe. The process included so many interrelated strands of development that it is impossible to do more here than sketch out the general outlines of a few of them. Among the most important that will be omitted from this discussion are the metallurgical, the medical, and the literary. Those included are the development of mathematics; the production and marketing of subtropical or tropical spices; the pioneering of new trade routes; the cultivation, processing, and marketing of southern crops such as sugar and cotton; and the development of various related technologies. The term southernization is meant to be analogous to westernization. Westernization refers to certain developments that first occurred in western Europe. Those developments changed Europe and eventually spread to other places and changed them as well. In the same way, southernization changed Southern Asia and later spread to other areas, which then underwent a process of change. Southernization was well under way in Southern Asia by the fifth century CE, during the reign of India’s Gupta kings (320–535 CE). It was by that time already spreading to Lynda Shaffer’s “Southernization” was originally published in Journal of World History 5, 1 (Spring 1994): 1–21. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press.

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China. In the eighth century various elements characteristic of southernization began spreading through the lands of the Muslim caliphates. Both in China and in the lands of the caliphate, the process led to dramatic changes, and by the year 1200 it was beginning to have an impact on the Christian Mediterranean. One could argue that within the Northern Hemisphere, by this time the process of southernization had created an eastern hemisphere characterized by a rich south and a north that was poor in comparison. And one might even go so far as to suggest that in Europe and its colonies, the process of southernization laid the foundation for westernization.

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Southernization was the result of developments that took place in many parts of southern Asia, both on the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia. By the time of the Gupta kings, several of its constituent parts already had a long history in India. Perhaps the oldest strand in the process was the cultivation of cotton and the production of cotton textiles for export. Cotton was first domesticated in the Indus River valley some time between 2300 and 1760 BCE,1 and by the second millennium BCE, the Indians had begun to develop sophisticated dyeing techniques.2 During these early millennia Indus River valley merchants are known to have lived in Mesopotamia, where they sold cotton textiles.3 In the first century CE Egypt became an important overseas market for Indian cottons. By the next century there was a strong demand for these textiles both in the Mediterranean and in East Africa,4 and by the fifth century they were being traded in Southeast Asia.5 The Indian textile trade continued to grow throughout the next millennium. Even after the arrival of European ships in Asian ports at the turn of the sixteenth century, it continued unscathed. According to one textile expert, “India virtually clothed the world” by the mid-eighteenth century.6 The subcontinent’s position was not undermined until Britain’s Industrial Revolution, when steam engines began to power the production of cotton textiles. Another strand in the process of southernization, the search for new sources of bullion, can be traced back in India to the end of the Mauryan Empire (321–185 BCE). During Mauryan rule Siberia had been India’s main source of gold, but nomadic disturbances in Central Asia disrupted the traffic between Siberia and India at about the time that the Mauryans fell. Indian sailors then began to travel to the Malay peninsula and the islands of Indonesia in search of an alternative source,7 which they most likely “discovered” with the help of local peoples who knew the sites. (This is generally the case with bullion discoveries, including those made by Arabs and Europeans.) What the Indians (and others later on) did do was introduce this gold to international trade routes. The Indians’ search for gold may also have led them to the shores of Africa. Although its interpretation is controversial, some archaeological evidence suggests the existence of Indian influence on parts of East Africa as early as 300 CE. There is also one report

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that gold was being sought in East Africa by Ethiopian merchants, who were among India’s most important trading partners. The sixth-century Byzantine geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes described Ethiopian merchants who went to some location inland from the East African coast to obtain gold. “Every other year they would sail far to the south, then march inland, and in return for various made-up articles they would come back laden with ingots of gold.”8 The fact that the expeditions left every other year suggests that it took two years to get to their destination and return. If so, their destination, even at this early date, may have been Zimbabwe. The wind patterns are such that sailors who ride the monsoon south as far as Kilwa can catch the return monsoon to the Red Sea area within the same year. But if they go beyond Kilwa to the Zambezi River, from which they might go inland to Zimbabwe, they cannot return until the following year. Indian voyages on the Indian Ocean were part of a more general development, more or less contemporary with the Mauryan empire, in which sailors of various nationalities began to knit together the shores of the “Southern Ocean,” a Chinese term referring to all the waters from the South China Sea to the eastern coast of Africa. During this period there is no doubt that the most intrepid sailors were the Malays, peoples who lived in what is now Malaysia, Indonesia, the southeastern coast of Vietnam, and the Philippines.9 Sometime before 300 BCE Malay sailors began to ride the monsoons, the seasonal winds that blow off the continent of Asia in the colder months and onto its shores in the warmer months. Chinese records indicate that by the third century BCE “Kunlun” sailors, the Chinese term for the Malay seamen, were sailing north to the southern coasts of China. They may also have been sailing east to India, through the straits now called Malacca and Sunda. If so they may have been the first to establish contact between India and Southeast Asia. Malay sailors had reached the eastern coast of Africa at least by the first century BCE, if not earlier. Their presence in East African waters is testified to by the peoples of Madagascar, who still speak a Malaya-Polynesian language. Some evidence also suggests that Malay sailors had settled in the Red Sea area. Indeed, it appears that they were the first to develop a long-distance trade in a southern spice. In the last centuries BCE, if not earlier, Malay sailors were delivering cinnamon from South China Sea ports to East Africa and the Red Sea.10 By about 400 CE Malay sailors could be found two-thirds of the way around the world, from Easter Island to East Africa. They rode the monsoons without a compass, out of sight of land, and often at latitudes below the equator where the northern pole star cannot be seen. They navigated by the wind and the stars, by cloud formations, the color of the water, and swell and wave patterns on the ocean’s surface. They could discern the presence of an island some thirty miles from its shores by noting the behavior of birds, the animal and plant life in the water, and the swell and wave patterns. Given their manner of sailing, their most likely route to Africa and the Red Sea would have been by way of the island clusters, the Maldives, the Chagos, the Seychelles, and the Comoros.11

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Malay ships used balance lug sails, which were square in shape and mounted so that they could pivot. This made it possible for sailors to tack against the wind, that is, to sail into the wind by going diagonally against it, first one way and then the other. Due to the way the sails were mounted, they appeared somewhat triangular in shape, and thus the Malays’ balance lug sail may well be the prototype of the triangular lateen, which can also be used to tack against the wind. The latter was invented by both the Polynesians to the Malays’ east and by the Arabs to their west,12 both of whom had ample opportunity to see the Malays’ ships in action. It appears that the pepper trade developed after the cinnamon trade. In the first century CE southern India began supplying the Mediterranean with large quantities of pepper. Thereafter, Indian merchants could be found living on the island of Socotra, near the mouth of the Red Sea, and Greek-speaking sailors, including the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, could be found sailing in the Red Sea and riding the monsoons from there to India. Indian traders and shippers and Malay sailors were also responsible for opening up an all-sea route to China. The traders’ desire for silk drew them out into dangerous waters in search of a more direct way to its source. By the second century CE Indian merchants could make the trip by sea, but the route was slow, and it took at least two years to make a round trip. Merchants leaving from India’s eastern coast rounded the shores of the Bay of Bengal. When they came to the Isthmus of Kra, the narrowest part of the Malay peninsula, the ships were unloaded, and the goods were portaged across to the Gulf of Thailand. The cargo was then reloaded on ships that rounded the gulf until they reached Funan, a kingdom on what is now the Kampuchea-Vietnam border. There they had to wait for the winds to shift, before embarking upon a ship that rode the monsoon to China.13 Some time before 400 CE travelers began to use a new all-sea route to China, a route that went around the Malay peninsula and thus avoided the Isthmus of Kra portage. The ships left from Sri Lanka and sailed before the monsoon, far from any coasts, through either the Strait of Malacca or the Strait of Sunda into the Java Sea. After waiting in the Java Sea port for the winds to shift, they rode the monsoon to southern China.14 The most likely developers of this route were Malay sailors, since the new stopover ports were located within their territories. Not until the latter part of the fourth century, at about the same time as the new allsea route began to direct commercial traffic through the Java Sea, did the fine spices— cloves, nutmeg, and mace—begin to assume importance on international markets. These rare and expensive spices came from the Moluccas, several island groups about a thousand miles east of Java. Cloves were produced on about five minuscule islands off the western coast of Halmahera; nutmeg and mace came from only a few of the Banda Islands, some ten islands with a total area of seventeen square miles, located in the middle of the Banda Sea. Until 1621 these Moluku islands were the only places in the world able to produce cloves, nutmeg, and mace in commercial quantities.15 The Moluc-

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can producers themselves brought their spices to the international markets of the Java Sea ports and created the market for them.16 It was also during the time of the Gupta kings, around 350 CE, that the Indians discovered how to crystallize sugar.17 There is considerable disagreement about where sugar was first domesticated. Some believe that the plant was native to New Guinea and domesticated there, and others argue that it was domesticated by Southeast Asian peoples living in what is now southern China.18 In any case, sugar cultivation spread to the Indian subcontinent. Sugar, however, did not become an important item of trade until the Indians discovered how to turn sugarcane juice into granulated crystals that could be easily stored and transported. This was a momentous development, and it may have been encouraged by Indian sailing, for sugar and clarified butter (ghee) were among the dietary mainstays of Indian sailors.19 The Indians also laid the foundation for modern mathematics during the time of the Guptas. Western numerals, which the Europeans called Arabic since they acquired them from the Arabs, actually come from India. (The Arabs call them Hindi numbers.) The most significant feature of the Indian system was the invention of the zero as a number concept. The oldest extant treatise that uses the zero in the modern way is a mathematical appendix attached to Aryabhata’s text on astronomy, which is dated 499 CE.20 The Indian zero made the place-value system of writing numbers superior to all others. Without it, the use of this system, base ten or otherwise, was fraught with difficulties and did not seem any better than alternative systems. With the zero the Indians were able to perform calculations rapidly and accurately, to perform much more complicated calculations, and to discern mathematical relationships more aptly. These numerals and the mathematics that the Indians developed with them are now universal—just one indication of the global significance of southernization. As a result of these developments India acquired a reputation as a place of marvels, a reputation that was maintained for many centuries after the Gupta dynasty fell. As late as the ninth century ‘Amr ibn Bahr al Jahiz (ca. 776–868), one of the most influential writers of Arabic, had the following to say about India: As regards the Indians, they are among the leaders in astronomy, mathematics—in particular, they have Indian numerals— and medicine; they alone possess the secrets of the latter, and use them to practice some remarkable forms of treatment. They have the art of carving statues and painted figures. They possess the game of chess, which is the noblest of games and requires more judgment and intelligence than any other. They make Kedah swords, and excel in their use. They have splendid music . . . They possess a script capable of expressing the sounds of all languages, as well as many numerals. They have a great deal of poetry, many long treatises, and a deep understanding of philosophy and letters; the book Kalila wa-Dimna originated with them. They are intelligent and courageous . . . Their sound judgment and sensible habits led them to invent pins, cork, toothpicks, the drape of clothes and the dyeing of hair. They are handsome, attractive and forbearing,

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their women are proverbial, and their country produces the matchless Indian aloes which are supplied to kings. They were the originators of the science of fikr, by which a poison can be counteracted after it has been used, and of astronomical reckoning, subsequently adopted by the rest of the world. When Adam descended from Paradise, it was to their land that he made his way.21

T H E S O U T H E R N I Z AT I O N O F C H I N A

These Southern Asian developments began to have a significant impact on China after 350 CE The Han dynasty had fallen in 221 CE, and for more than 350 years thereafter China was ruled by an ever changing collection of regional kingdoms. During these centuries Buddhism became increasingly important in China, Buddhist monasteries spread throughout the disunited realm, and cultural exchange between India and China grew accordingly.22 By 581, when the Sui dynasty reunited the empire, processes associated with southernization had already had a major impact on China. The influence of southernization continued during the Tang (618–906) and Song (960–1279) dynasties. One might even go so far as to suggest that the process of southernization underlay the revolutionary social, political, economic, and technological developments of the Tang and Song. The Chinese reformed their mathematics, incorporating the advantages of the Indian system, even though they did not adopt the Indian numerals at that time.23 They then went on to develop an advanced mathematics, which was flourishing by the time of the Song dynasty.24 Cotton and indigo became well established, giving rise to the blue-black peasant garb that is still omnipresent in China. Also in the Song period the Chinese first developed cotton canvas, which they used to make a more efficient sail for ocean-going ships.25 Although sugar had long been grown in some parts of southern China it did not become an important crop in this region until the process of southernization was well under way. The process also introduced new varieties of rice. The most important of these was what the Chinese called Champa rice, since it came to China from Champa, a Malay kingdom located on what is now the southeastern coast of Vietnam. Champa rice was a drought-resistant, early ripening variety that made it possible to extend cultivation up well-watered hillsides, thereby doubling the area of rice cultivation in China.26 The eleventh-century Buddhist monk Shu Wenying left an account explaining how the Champa rice had arrived in China: Emperor Cheng-tsung [Zhengzong (998–1022)], being deeply concerned with agriculture, came to know that the Champa rice was drought-resistant and that the green lentils of India were famous for their heavy yield and large seeds. Special envoys, bringing precious things, were dispatched [to these states], with a view to securing these varieties. . . . When the first harvests were reaped in the autumn, [the emperor] called his intimate ministers to taste them and composed poems for Champa rice and Indian green lentils.27

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In southern China the further development of rice production brought significant changes in the landscape. Before the introduction of Champa rice, rice cultivation had been confined to lowlands, deltas, basins, and river valleys. Once Champa rice was introduced and rice cultivation spread up the hillsides, the Chinese began systematic terracing and made use of sophisticated techniques of water control on mountain slopes. Between the mid-eighth and the early twelfth century the population of southern China tripled, and the total Chinese population doubled. According to Song dynasty household registration figures for 1102 and 1110—figures that Song dynasty specialists have shown to be reliable—there were 100 million people in China by the first decade of the twelfth century.28 Before the process of southernization, northern China had always been predominant, intellectually, socially, and politically. The imperial center of gravity was clearly in the north, and the southern part of China was perceived as a frontier area. But southernization changed this situation dramatically. By 600, southern China was well on its way to becoming the most prosperous and most commercial part of the empire.29 The most telling evidence for this is the construction of the Grand Canal, which was completed around 610, during the Sui dynasty. Even though the rulers of the Sui had managed to put the pieces of the empire back together in 581 and rule the whole of China again from a single northern capital, they were dependent on the new southern crops. Thus it is no coincidence that this dynasty felt the need to build a canal that could deliver southern rice to northern cities.30 The Tang dynasty, when Buddhist influence in China was especially strong, saw two exceedingly important technological innovations— the invention of printing and gunpowder. These developments may also be linked to southernization. Printing seems to have developed within the walls of Buddhist monasteries between 700 and 750, and subtropical Sichuan was one of the earliest centers of the art.31 The invention of gunpowder in China by Daoist alchemists in the ninth century may also be related to the linkages between India and China created by Buddhism. In 644 an Indian monk identified soils in China that contained saltpeter and demonstrated the purple flame that results from its ignition.32 As early as 919 CE gunpowder was used as an igniter in a flame thrower, and the tenth century also saw the use of flaming arrows, rockets, and bombs thrown by catapults.33 The earliest evidence of a cannon or bombard (1127) has been found in Sichuan, quite near the Tibetan border, across the Himalayas from India.34 By the time of the Song the Chinese also had perfected the “south-pointing needle,” otherwise known as the compass. Various prototypes of the compass had existed in China from the third century BCE, but the new version developed during the Song was particularly well suited for navigation. Soon Chinese mariners were using the southpointing needle on the oceans, publishing “needle charts” for the benefit of sea captains and following “needle routes” on the Southern Ocean.35 Once the Chinese had the compass they, like Columbus, set out to find a direct route to the spice markets of Java and ultimately to the Spice Islands in the Moluccas. Unlike Columbus, they found them. They did not bump into an obstacle, now known

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as the Western Hemisphere, on their way, since it was not located between China and the Spice Islands. If it had been so situated, the Chinese would have found it some 500 years before Columbus. Cities on China’s southern coasts became centers of overseas commerce. Silk remained an important export, and by the Tang dynasty it had been joined by a true porcelain, which was developed in China sometime before 400 CE. China and its East Asian neighbors had a monopoly on the manufacture of true porcelain until the early eighteenth century. Many attempts were made to imitate it, and some of the resulting imitations were economically and stylistically important. China’s southern ports were also exporting to Southeast Asia large quantities of ordinary consumer goods, including iron hardware, such as needles, scissors, and cooking pots. Although iron manufacturing was concentrated in the north, the large quantity of goods produced was a direct result of the size of the market in southern China and overseas. Until the British Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, no other place ever equaled the iron production of Song China.36

T H E M U S L I M C A L I P H AT E S

In the seventh century CE Arab cavalries, recently converted to the new religion of Islam, conquered eastern and southern Mediterranean shores that had been Byzantine (and Christian), as well as the Sassanian empire (Zoroastrian) in what is now Iraq and Iran. In the eighth century they went on to conquer Spain and Turko-Iranian areas of Central Asia, as well as northwestern India. Once established on the Indian frontier, they became acquainted with many of the elements of southernization. The Arabs were responsible for the spread of many important crops, developed or improved in India, to the Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic Spain. Among the most important were sugar, cotton, and citrus fruits.37 Although sugarcane and cotton cultivation may have spread to Iraq and Ethiopia before the Arab conquests,38 only after the establishment of the caliphates did these southern crops have a major impact throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The Arabs were the first to import large numbers of enslaved Africans in order to produce sugar. Fields in the vicinity of Basra, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, were the most important sugar-producing areas within the caliphates, but before this land could be used, it had to be desalinated. To accomplish this task, the Arabs imported East African (Zanj) slaves. This African community remained in the area, where they worked as agricultural laborers. The famous writer al Jahiz, whose essay on India was quoted earlier, was a descendant of Zanj slaves. In 869, one year after his death, the Zanj slaves in Iraq rebelled. It took the caliphate fifteen years of hard fighting to defeat them, and thereafter Muslim owners rarely used slaves for purposes that would require their concentration in large numbers.39 The Arabs were responsible for moving sugarcane cultivation and sugar manufactur-

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ing westward from southern Iraq into other relatively arid lands. Growers had to adapt the plant to new conditions, and they had to develop more efficient irrigation technologies. By 1000 or so sugarcane had become an important crop in Yemen; in Arabian oases; in irrigated areas of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and the Mahgrib; in Spain; and on Mediterranean islands controlled by Muslims. By the tenth century cotton also had become a major crop in the lands of the caliphate, from Iran and Central Asia to Spain and the Mediterranean islands. Cotton industries sprang up wherever the plant was cultivated, producing for both local and distant markets.40 The introduction of Indian crops, such as sugar and cotton, led to a much more intensive agriculture in the Middle East and some parts of the Mediterranean. Before the arrival of these crops, farmers had planted in the fall to take advantage of autumn rains and harvested in the spring. In the heat of the summer their fields usually lay fallow. But the new southern crops preferred the heat of the summer, and thus farmers began to use their fields throughout the year. They also began to use a system of multiple cropping, a practice that seems to have come from India. This led to an increased interest in soil fertility, and to manuals that advised farmers about adding such things as animal dung and vegetable and mineral materials to the soil to maintain its productivity.41 Under Arab auspices, Indian mathematics followed the same routes as the crops.42 Al-Kharazmi (ca. 780–847) introduced Indian mathematics to the Arabic-reading world in his Treatise on Calculation with the Hindu Numerals, written around 825. Mathematicians within the caliphates then could draw upon the Indian tradition, as well as the Greek and Persian. On this foundation Muslim scientists of many nationalities, including al-Battani (d. 929), who came from the northern reaches of the Mesopotamian plain, and the Persian Umar Khayyam (d. 1123), made remarkable advances in both algebra and trigonometry.43 The Arab conquests also led to an increase in long-distance commerce and the “discovery” of new sources of bullion. Soon after the Abbasid caliphate established its capital at Baghdad, the caliph al-Mansur (r. 745–75) reportedly remarked, “This is the Tigris; there is no obstacle between us and China; everything on the sea can come to us.”44 By this time Arab ships were plying the maritime routes from the Persian Gulf to China, and they soon outnumbered all others using these routes. By the ninth century they had acquired the compass (in China, most likely), and they may well have been the first to use it for marine navigation, since the Chinese do not seem to have used it for this purpose until after the tenth century. After their conquest of Central Asia the Arabs “discovered” a silver mine near Tashkent and a veritable mountain of silver in present-day Afghanistan, a find quite comparable to Potosi in South America. The Arabs mined and coined so much silver that by 850 its value, relative to gold, had fallen from 10:1 to 17:1.45 By 940 the ratio had recovered to 12:1, in large part because the Arabs had access to larger quantities of gold. After the conquest of North Africa they had discovered that gold came across the Sahara, and they then became intent on going to Ghana, its source.

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Thus it was that the Arabs “pioneered” or improved an existing long-distance route across the Sahara, an ocean of sand rather than water. Routes across this desert had always existed, and trade and other contacts between West Africa and the Mediterranean date back at least to the Phoenician period. Still, the numbers of people and animals crossing this great ocean of sand were limited until the eighth century when Arabs, desiring to go directly to the source of the gold, prompted an expansion of trade across the Sahara. Also during the eighth century Abd al-Rahman, an Arab ruler of Morocco, sponsored the construction of wells on the trans-Saharan route from Sijilmasa to Wadidara to facilitate this traffic. This Arab “discovery” of West African gold eventually doubled the amount of gold in international circulation.46 East Africa, too, became a source of gold for the Arabs. By the tenth century Kilwa had become an important source of Zimbabwean gold.47

D E V E L O P M E N T S A F T E R 12 0 0 : T H E M O N G O L I A N C O N Q U E S T A N D T H E S O U T H E R N I Z AT I O N O F T H E E U R O P E A N M E D I T E R R A N E A N

By 1200 the process of southernization had created a prosperous south from China to the Muslim Mediterranean. Although mathematics, the pioneering of new ocean routes, and “discoveries” of bullion are not inextricably connected to locations within forty degrees of the equator, several crucial elements in the process of southernization were closely linked to latitude. Cotton generally does not grow above the fortieth parallel. Sugar, cinnamon, and pepper are tropical or subtropical crops, and the fine spices will grow only on particular tropical islands. Thus for many centuries the more southern parts of Asia and the Muslim Mediterranean enjoyed the profits that these developments brought, while locations that were too far north to grow these southern crops were unable to participate in such lucrative agricultural enterprises. The process of southernization reached its zenith after 1200, in large part because of the tumultuous events of the thirteenth century. During that century in both hemispheres there were major transformations in the distribution of power, wealth, and prestige. In the Western Hemisphere several great powers went down. Cahokia (near East St. Louis, Illinois), which for three centuries had been the largest and most influential of the Mississippian mound-building centers, declined after 1200, and in Mexico Toltec power collapsed. In the Mediterranean the prestige of the Byzantine empire was destroyed when Venetians seized its capital in 1204. From 1212 to 1270 the Christians conquered southern Spain, except for Granada. In West Africa, Ghana fell to Sosso, and so did Mali, one of Ghana’s allies. But by about 1230 Mali, in the process of seeking its own revenge, had created an empire even larger than Ghana’s. At the same time Zimbabwe was also becoming a major power in southern Africa. The grandest conquerors of the thirteenth century were the Central Asians. Turkish invaders established the Delhi sultanate in India. Mongolian cavalries devastated Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate since the eighth century, and they captured

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Kiev, further weakening Byzantium. By the end of the century they had captured China, Korea, and parts of mainland Southeast Asia as well. Because the Mongols were pagans at the time of their conquests, the western Europeans cheered them on as they laid waste to one after another Muslim center of power in the Middle East. The Mongols were stopped only when they encountered the Mamluks of Egypt at Damascus. In East Asia and Southeast Asia only the Japanese and the Javanese were able to defeat them. The victors in Java went on to found Majapahit, whose power and prestige then spread through maritime Southeast Asia. Both hemispheres were reorganized profoundly during this turmoil. Many places that had flourished were toppled, and power gravitated to new locales. In the Eastern Hemisphere the Central Asian conquerors had done great damage to traditional southern centers just about everywhere, except in Africa, southern China, southern India, and maritime Southeast Asia. At the same time the Mongols’ control of overland routes between Europe and Asia in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries fostered unprecedented contacts between Europeans and peoples from those areas that had long been southernized. Marco Polo’s long sojourn in Yuan Dynasty China is just one example of such interaction. Under the Mongols overland trade routes in Asia shifted north and converged on the Black Sea. After the Genoese helped the Byzantines to retake Constantinople from the Venetians in 1261, the Genoese were granted special privileges of trade in the Black Sea. Italy then became directly linked to the Mongolian routes. Genoese traders were among the first and were certainly the most numerous to open up trade with the Mongolian states in southern Russia and Iran. In the words of one Western historian, in their Black Sea colonies they “admitted to citizenship” people of many nationalities, including those of “strange background and questionable belief,” and they “wound up christening children of the best ancestry with such uncanny names as Saladin, Hethum, or Hulugu.”48 Such contacts contributed to the southernization of the Christian Mediterranean during this period of Mongolian hegemony. Although European conquerors sometimes had taken over sugar and cotton lands in the Middle East during the Crusades, not until some time after 1200 did the European-held Mediterranean islands become important exporters. Also after 1200 Indian mathematics began to have a significant impact in Europe. Before that time a few western European scholars had become acquainted with Indian numerals in Spain, where the works of al-Kharazmi, al-Battani, and other mathematicians had been translated into Latin. Nevertheless, Indian numerals and mathematics did not become important in western Europe until the thirteenth century, after the book Liber Abaci (1202), written by Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa (ca. 1170–1250), introduced them to the commercial centers of Italy. Leonardo had grown up in North Africa (in what is now Bejala, Algeria), where his father, consul over the Pisan merchants in that port, had sent him to study calculation with an Arab master.49 In the seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon observed the “force and virtue and consequences of discoveries,” he singled out three technologies in particular that “have

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changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.”50 These were all Chinese inventions—the compass, printing, and gunpowder. All three were first acquired by Europeans during this time of hemispheric reorganization. It was most likely the Arabs who introduced the compass to Mediterranean waters, either at the end of the twelfth or in the thirteenth century. Block printing, gunpowder, and cannon appeared first in Italy in the fourteenth century, apparently after making a single great leap from Mongolian-held regions of East Asia to Italy. How this great leap was accomplished is not known, but the most likely scenario is one suggested by Lynn White, Jr., in an article concerning how various other Southern (rather than Eastern) Asian technologies reached western Europe at about this time. He thought it most likely that they were introduced by “Tatar” slaves, Lama Buddhists from the frontiers of China whom the Genoese purchased in Black Sea marts and delivered to Italy. By 1450 when this trade reached its peak, there were thousands of these Asian slaves in every major Italian city.51 Yet another consequence of the increased traffic and communication on the more northern trade routes traversing the Eurasian steppe was the transmission of the bubonic plague from China to the Black Sea. The plague had broken out first in China in 1331, and apparently rats and lice infected with the disease rode westward in the saddlebags of Mongolian post messengers, horsemen who were capable of traveling one hundred miles per day. By 1346 it had reached a Black Sea port, whence it made its way to the Middle East and Europe.52 During the latter part of the fourteenth century the unity of the Mongolian empire began to disintegrate, and new regional powers began to emerge in its wake. Throughout much of Asia the chief beneficiaries of imperial disintegration were Turkic or TurkoMongolian powers of the Muslim faith. The importance of Islam in Africa was also growing at this time, and the peoples of Southeast Asia, from the Malay peninsula to the southern Philippines, were converting to the faith. Indeed, the world’s most obvious dynamic in the centuries before Columbus was the expansion of the Islamic faith. Under Turkish auspices Islam was even spreading into eastern Europe, a development marked by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. This traumatic event lent a special urgency to Iberian expansion. The Iberians came to see themselves as the chosen defenders of Christendom. Ever since the twelfth century, while Christian Byzantium had been losing Anatolia and parts of southeastern Europe to Islam, they had been retaking the Iberian peninsula for Christendom. One way to weaken the Ottomans and Islam was to go around the North African Muslims and find a new oceanic route to the source of West African gold. Before the Portuguese efforts, sailing routes had never developed off the western shore of Africa, since the winds there blow in the same direction all year long, from north to south. (Earlier European sailors could have gone to West Africa, but they would not have been able to return home.) The Portuguese success would have been impossible without the Chinese compass,

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Arabic tables indicating the declination of the noonday sun at various latitudes, and the lateen sail, which was also an Arab innovation. The Portuguese caravels were of mixed, or multiple, ancestry, with a traditional Atlantic hull and a rigging that combined the traditional Atlantic square sail with the lateen sail of Southern Ocean provenance. With the lateen sail the Portuguese could tack against the wind for the trip homeward. The new route to West Africa led to Portugal’s rounding of Africa and direct participation in Southern Ocean trade. While making the voyages to West Africa, European sailors learned the wind patterns and ocean currents west of Africa, knowledge that made the Columbian voyages possible. The Portuguese moved the sugarcane plant from Sicily to Madeira, in the Atlantic, and they found new sources of gold, first in West Africa and then in East Africa. Given that there was little demand in Southern Ocean ports for European trade goods, they would not have been able to sustain their Asian trade without this African gold.

THE RISE OF EUROPE’S NORTH

The rise of the north, or more precisely, the rise of Europe’s northwest, began with the appropriation of those elements of southernization that were not confined by geography. In the wake of their southern European neighbors, they became partially southernized, but they could not engage in all aspects of the process due to their distance from the equator. Full southernization and the wealth that we now associate with northwestern Europe came about only after their outright seizure of tropical and subtropical territories and their rounding of Africa and participation in Southern Ocean trade. In the West Indies and along the coast of South America, the Dutch, the French, and the English acquired lands where for the first time they were able to become producers of sugar and cotton, though with African labor on Native American land. In West Africa the Dutch seized the Portuguese fort at Elmina, Portugal’s most important source of gold. And in the East Indies, the Dutch seized Portuguese trading posts in the Moluccas and in 1621 conquered the Banda Islands, thereby gaining a stranglehold on the fine spices. Without such southern possessions the more northern Europeans had been unable to participate fully in the southernization process, since their homelands are too far north to grow either cotton or sugar, much less cinnamon, pepper, or the fine spices. Even though the significance of indigenous developments in the rise of northwestern Europe should not be minimized, it should be emphasized that many of the most important causes of the rise of the West are not to be found within the bounds of Europe. Rather, they are the result of the transformation of western Europe’s relationships with other regions of the Eastern Hemisphere. Europe began its rise only after the thirteenth-century reorganization of the Eastern Hemisphere facilitated its southernization, and Europe’s northwest did not rise until it too was reaping the profits of southernization. Thus the rise of the North Atlantic powers should not be oversimplified so that it appears to be an isolated and solely European phenomenon, with roots

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that spread no farther afield than Greece. Rather, it should be portrayed as one part of a hemisphere-wide process, in which a northwestern Europe ran to catch up with a more developed south— a race not completed until the eighteenth century.

CONCLUSION

The patterns of southernization become apparent when one considers “the long duration,” more or less from the fourth century to the eighteenth. It began as a Southern Asian phenomenon and spread through the warmer latitudes of the Eastern Hemisphere north of the equator. Both in China and in the Middle East it stimulated new developments and acquired new elements, and its potential continued to unfold. After 1200 the radical transformations throughout the Eastern Hemisphere brought about by the Mongolians and many others created conditions that led to the spread of southernization to Europe and Europe’s colonies in the Western Hemisphere. Ultimately it transformed East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean, northwestern Europe, and portions of the Western Hemisphere, more or less in that order. Southernization was not overtaken by westernization until the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. At that time the nations of northwestern Europe were catapulted into a position of global dominance, an event marked by the British takeover of Bengal and other parts of India. By the nineteenth century, using the new “tools of empire” provided by the Industrial Revolution, the northern powers for the first time were capable of imposing their will and their way on the rest of the world.53 Both the ocean crossing that knit together two hemispheres and the Industrial Revolution were indeed unprecedented. But their roots are inseparable from the process of southernization. Only after the northwestern Europeans had added to their own repertoire every one of the elements of southernization did the world became divided into a powerful, prestigious, and rich north and an impoverished south perceived to be in need of development.

NOTES

1. Andrew Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700– 1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 32. 2. Mattiebelle Gittinger, Master Dyers to the World: Technique and Trade in Early Indian Dyed Cotton Textiles (Washington, D.C.: Textile Museum, 1982), p. 19. For a discussion of the significance of cotton textiles in Indonesia, see Gittinger, Splendid Symbols: Textiles and Tradition in Indonesia (Washington, D.C.: Textile Museum, 1979). 3. Moti Chandra, Trade and Trade Routes of Ancient India (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977), p. 35. 4. Ibid., p. 126. 5. Gittinger, Splendid Symbols, pp. 13, 19.

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6. Ibid., p. 15. 7. Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula Before A.D. 1500 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 188. 8. D. W. Phillipson, “The Beginnings of the Iron Age in Southern Africa,” in UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 2: Ancient Civilizations of Africa, ed. G. Mokhtar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 679–80, 688–90. In the same volume, see also M. Posnansky, “The Societies of Africa South of the Sahara in the Early Iron Age,” p. 726. Phillipson indicates that there is evidence of exchange between Zimbabwe and the coast in this early period, and Posnansky refers to the work of R. F. H. Summers who believes that early prospecting and mining techniques in East Africa reveal Indian influence. The description of Ethiopian merchants seeking gold in East Africa is from Steven Runciman, Byzantine Style and Civilization (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 132. Information about the monsoon is from A. M. H. Sheriff, “The East Africa Coast and Its Role in Maritime Trade,” in Ancient Civilizations of Africa, ed. Mokhtar, pp. 556–57. 9. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988–93), 1:4. 10. Keith Taylor, “Madagascar in the Ancient Malaya-Polynesian Myths,” in Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History: The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft, ed. Kenneth Hall and John Whitmore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1976), p. 39. An excellent source on the early spice trade is James Innes Miller, The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B.C. to A.D. 649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 11. Taylor, “Madagascar,” pp. 30–31, 52. 12. George Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Medieval Times (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 102. 13. Kenneth Hall, Maritime Trade and State Formation in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), p. 20. 14. Ibid., p. 72. 15. Henry N. Ridley, Spices (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 105. 16. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Formation, p. 21. 17. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). The date 350 CE appears in “A Chronology of South Asia,” a pocket insert in the atlas. 18. For a discussion on its domestication in southern China by the ancestors of the Southeast Asians, see Peter Bellwood, “Southeast Asia before History,” in Nicholas Tarling, ed., Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1:90–91. Also see Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 19. Mintz agrees with those who argue that sugar was domesticated in New Guinea. He also suggests that crystallized sugar may have been produced in India as early as 400–300 BCE. 19. Chandra, Trade and Trade Routes of Ancient India, p. 61. 20. Georges Ifrah, From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers, trans. Lowell Blair (New York: Viking, 1985), pp. 382, 434. This is an excellent book that explains many myster-

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ies and contradictions in the literature. Even those who are not mathematically inclined will enjoy it. 21. ‘Amr ibn Bahr al Jahiz, The Life and Works of Jahiz, trans. from Arabic by Charles Pellat, trans. from French by D. W. Hauter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 197–98. 22. See Liu Xinru, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, A.D. 1–600 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). 23. Ifrah, From One to Zero, p. 461. 24. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 6 vols. to date, vol. 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp. 40–50. 25. Lo Jung-pang, “The Emergence of China as a Sea Power during the Late Sung and Early Yuan Dynasties,” Far Eastern Economic Review 14 (1955): 500. 26. Ho, Ping-ti, “Early-Ripening Rice in Chinese History,” Economic History Review 9 (1956): 201. 27. Ibid., p. 207. 28. Ibid., pp. 211–12. 29. Ibid., pp. 205–6. 30. Ibid., p. 206. 31. Thomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 68, 38–40. 32. For a reference to the Indian monk, see Arnold Paley, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand Year History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 16. Other information on gunpowder included here comes from Joseph Needham, “Science and China’s Influence on the World,” in Raymond Dawson, ed., The Legacy of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 246. This article is an excellent brief account of Chinese science and technology and their global significance. James R. Partington’s A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1960), is still useful. 33. Lo, “The Emergence of China as a Seapower,” pp. 500–501. 34. Lu Gwei-Djen, Joseph Needham, and Phan Che-Hsing, “The Oldest Representation of a Bombard,” in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 7: Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), appendix A, pp. 580–81. (I am indebted to Robin Yates for this information.) 35. Lo, “The Emergence of China as a Seapower,” p. 500. Other useful articles by Lo include: “Maritime Commerce and Its Relation to the Song Navy,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 12 (1969): 57–101; and “The Termination of the Early Ming Naval Expeditions,” in Papers in Honor of Professor Woodbridge Bingham: A Festschrift for His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. James B. Parsons (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1976), pp. 127–41. 36. Robert Hartwell, “A Revolution in the Chinese Iron and Coal Industries during the Northern Sung, 960–1126 A.D.,” Journal of Asian Studies 21 (1962): 155; and Hartwell, “Markets, Technology, and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the EleventhCentury Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of Economic History 26 (1966): 54. See also Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial China: Coal and Iron in Northeast

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China, 750–1350,” Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 10 (1967): 102–59. For an excellent overview of the transformations in Tang and Song China, see Mark Elvin, The Patterns of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973). 37. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World, pp. 78–80. 38. Sheriff, “The East African Coast,” p. 566. 39. William D. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 76. 40. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World, pp. 29, 39–41. 41. Ibid., pp. 123–25. 42. Ifrah, From One to Zero, p. 465. 43. R. M. Savory, Introduction to Islamic Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 116–17. 44. C. G. F. Simkins, The Traditional Trade of Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 81. 45. Sture Bolin, “Mohammed, Charlemagne, and Ruric,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 1 (1953): 16. In the past, Sture’s interpretation of the Carolingians has been disputed. The article has, however, stood the test of time. For example, see the assessment of it in Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). The information about Scandinavia’s relationship with the caliphates is especially valuable. 46. Anthony Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 82. 47. F. T. Masao and H. W. Mutoro, “The East African Coast and the Comoro Islands,” in UNESCO General History of Africa, vol. 3: Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, ed. M. El Fasi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 611–15. 48. Robert S. Lopez, “Market Expansion: The Case of Genoa,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 447–49. See also Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” in Economic History Review 9 (1956): 219–40. The latter includes a discussion of the relationship between western European coinage and the trans-Saharan gold trade. 49. Ifrah, From One to Zero, pp. 465, 481. See also Joseph and Frances Gies, Leonardo of Pisa and the New Mathematics of the Middle Ages (New York: Crowell, 1969). 50. Bacon is cited in Needham, “Science and China’s Influence on the World,” p. 242. 51. Lynn White, Jr., “Tibet, India, and Malaya as Sources of Western Medieval Technology,” American Historical Review 65 (1960): 515–26. This is an important, if little-known, article. 52. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976), pp. 133, 145. 53. The term comes from Daniel Headrick’s excellent book, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

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O C E A N S O F WO R L D H I S T O R Y: D E L INE AT IN G AQ UAC E N T R I C N O T I O N S IN T H E G LO B A L PA S T Rainer F. Buschmann

Oceans and seas make up about two-thirds of our planet, yet historical attention to such bodies of water has been minimal at best. There is good reason for this. Ever since its emergence as an academic discipline, history’s analytical gaze has focused on nation-states. Oceans and seas generally fit into the framework of historical traditions emphasizing successful Euro -American expansions and emerging large-scale maritime empires.1 In this light, nineteenth-century historians, grappling with a sense of national urgency, engaged the oceans as a crucial lifeline to cultural exchange, imperial designs, forced and voluntary migration, and trade. This emphasis has changed, however, since the second half of the twentieth century. While oceans still play a significant role in trade, the aircraft has replaced their leading role in passenger travel. The eclipse of the maritime dimension in history was coupled to an increasing interest in oceans outside the humanities. Disciplines such as oceanography placed the study of these waters firmly within the realm of the natural sciences.2 However, new possibilities of recapturing oceans and seas in history have emerged as interest in global approaches to the past increase. The field of world history is itself barely more than 20 years old.3 But over these past two decades, world history has exerted two liberating influences on the study of oceans. First, it liberated oceanic history from the shackles of European imperial history. Secondly, rather than regarding oceans as barriers to human affairs, world historians currently view sea and ocean basins as important regions in emerging global interconnections.4 It is the purpose of this article to recapture some of the “aquacentric” approaches to the global past and to delineate their importance in the study of world history. Aquacentric approaches to history are by no means new. In classical times, the Greeks developed the notion of thalassocracy (from Thalassa, the sea) that applied to those societies that managed to exercise deliberate control over maritime affairs in the Mediterranean Sea. While the intellectual roots of the term are obscure, it appears in the work of Herodotus and Thucydides to describe Minoan hegemony over the eastern Mediterranean. Later classical historians, such as Eusebius in his Chronikon, used “thalassocracy” to list some seventeen Aegean or Levantine societies that existed from the fall of Troy to the Persian wars. The authenticity of this chronology has been frequently debated, especially since recent writers have maintained that “maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean was hard won, loosely maintained and quickly lost.”5 The veracity of the Thalassocracies aside, it is fair to say that the Mediterranean Sea figured as an Rainer F. Buschmann’s “Oceans of World History: Delineating Aquacentric Notions in the Global Past” was originally published in History Compass 2 (2004): 1–10. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons.

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important factor in the telling of historical events in the classical world. The archetypal story remains Homer’s Odyssey in which the story’s hero sails through much of the sea and encounters a number of the classical thalassocracies. Moreover, Odysseus’ voyages on the Ocean River take him to the edge of the classical world. Classical geographers argued that this river, which derives its name from the titan Oceanus, surrounded the known world and supplied water to the Mediterranean as well as all major rivers. Later geographers, most importantly Ptolomy, disputed this claim, but it provided the classificational material for expanding Europeans.6 While the Greco-Roman tradition was instrumental in the conceptualization of the world’s oceans, it is easy to overlook the fact that such taxonomies competed with other, non-western conceptions. In Oceania, for instance, aquacentric notions were the norm rather than the exception in local historical imagination.7 The Pacific Ocean, which covers roughly one-third of the planet, had an enormous impact on its first settlers. Mythology in the regions commonly known as Micronesia and Polynesia abounds with accounts of human or superhuman settlers or creators of island realms. Early twentiethcentury researchers overstated the historical value of mythology, leaving subsequent generations of anthropologists and historians cautious and even dismissive about this source of information.8 Yet investigations into local maritime lore have also revealed important connections among far-flung island realms. Western historians are quick to point out that the Pacific is in fact a European artifact, and they generally allow for little indigenous involvement.9 Renewed attention to an oceanic aquacentric consciousness, however, illustrates important regional connections within the Pacific. Inter-island exchange and marriage became important factors in creating regional subzones, which were further cemented through mythological and genealogical ties. While certainly regional in nature, these interaction zones reveal important long distance interconnections prior to Magellan’s arrival.10 Similar concerns are central also to historical analyses of the Indian Ocean. Over the past two decades, historians have realized the importance of this ocean and how its regulating monsoon patterns governed trade and exchange. Long before Islam provided at least an outward cultural and religious unity to the region, traders roamed the northeastern shores of this ocean, providing scholars with evidence of an exchange system to question the emerging hegemonic European world system of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.11 But as Edward A. Alpers has suggested, “To come to grips with the world of the Indian Ocean takes more than a mere recounting of the ships sailed, the goods traded, the ideas exchanged and transformed, and the historical links created by such transactions. What it takes is imagination.”12 Such imagination requires aquacentric notions. Alpers noted that the common civilizational approaches to Indian Ocean studies often bind observers to their particular vantage points of their region. Alpers suggests instead employing the works of Arjun Appadurai and James Clifford, who are at the forefront of the field of cultural studies seeking to encompass alternate explana-

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tions of the contemporary world.13 Alpers’s own research on the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean is instrumental in this regard. The forceful dispersal of Africans into the Indian Ocean predates and surpasses that of the Atlantic Ocean. Alpers finds that slavery’s expanded time-frame as well as the different accommodation of African slaves in the Indian Ocean, has created a historical recollection that differs radically from Africans inhabiting the western hemisphere of the Americas.14 Such aquacentric imaginations also govern the Atlantic Ocean, which has become a hotbed for diasporic consciousness. For almost two decades now, scholars have marveled at the hybrid nature of Caribbean cultures, which derive from the second largest migration in human history: the transatlantic slave trade.15 Historians generally agree that the Atlantic emerged as an artifact of European expansion following the fifteenth century. Nonetheless, they differ greatly in their evaluation of African and European impact.16 The hybrid African cultures of the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean spurred a number of inquiries greatly inspired by the so-called literary turn in the humanities and social sciences.17 These studies greatly enlarged the nature of the historical source material beyond European written accounts. They now include, among other things, literature, music, painting, poetry, and sculpture. The best-known example of this is Paul Gilroy, whose Anglophone “Black Atlantic” continues to inspire theorists of the African diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic.18 The importance of redefining the oceans within a diasporic framework cannot be overstated. European predominance in the creation and maintenance of ocean basins is still very much engrained in the historical literature. A recent book on the Atlantic Ocean makes this all too clear: “The long crossing through the centuries towards which its history beckons, makes us understand more vividly the dreams and the realities that inspired the development of a Western civilization that deserves the name ‘Atlantic.’”19 Aquacentric approaches to history receive further fuel from a contemporary rethinking process surrounding the construction of geographical space. In a path breaking study about “metageography,” Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen question the unexamined western constructs dominating the geographical division of the world. Arguing for alternative conceptualizations, Lewis and Wigen suggest that “[o]nly a sea-centered perspective is capable of revealing [oceanic] economic regions, which carve up conventional land-centered blocks in unexpected ways.”20 Their continuing inquiries led to the establishment of the Oceans Connect initiative at Duke University. This project brought together a number of historians, geographers, and literary critics from universities around the United States.21 Four distinct groups were formed to explore the Mediterranean Sea, the Eurasian seas, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean.22 The generally encouraging voices seeking to explore novel maritime geographies compelled world historians to pay attention. Realizing the awkwardness of basins for two major problems in world history, geographical delineation and periodization, Jerry Bentley admonishes: “It would be pointless to do away with the myth of continents, civilizations, area, and national states only to replace them with an equally misleading myth of sea and ocean basins.”23

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Bentley raises an important caveat for world historians, namely, that before launching into unexamined analysis of “liquid space” historians would be best advised to review past sea- and ocean-centered approaches to global history. Often forgotten, or simply ignored due to its militant character, is Alfred Thayer Mahan’s attempt to revive Greek thalassocracy and apply it to a global level. As a naval officer, Mahan witnessed the growing importance of naval power in international politics. Consequently, he focused his historical investigations on what he deemed were the decisive factors of naval engagements.24 His historical renditions of the importance of naval power were timely and he won much acclaim in the late nineteenth century. His work served as justification for imperial expansion and explained the expenses for global arms races. While one can certainly fault Mahan for his Eurocentric outlook on history, it remains an early attempt to capture the importance of the earth’s oceans in the course of history.25 Far more influential is Fernand Braudel’s attempt to fit the Mediterranean Sea into the civilizational or regional approaches familiar to world historians. Perhaps it would go too far to argue that macro-history was born on the seas, but the structuralism attributed to the French Annales School is best remembered by Braudel’s magnum opus The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.26 His attempt to write a total history of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean has repeatedly drawn criticism over the years. Labeling him a romantic, Sir John Elliot recently wrote, “it may legitimately be asked whether Braudel did not use his mythical conception of the Mediterranean to impose an artificial unity on two very different civilizations, those of Latin Christendom and Ottoman Islam. . . . If ‘Mediterranean history’ is itself problematic, we may justifiably wonder how much more problematic is the history not of an inland sea but of a vast ocean.”27 Despite Elliot’s reservations against the application of a Braudelian model to other bodies of water, Braudel’s work, which was translated late into the English language, inspired others to do so for larger realms. K. N. Chaudhuri’s work on the Indian Ocean openly acknowledges his debt to Braudel.28 Several works on the Atlantic Ocean also find their origins there.29 The Pacific, by far largest of the world’s oceans, is awaiting similar treatment.30 Braudel’s tripartite approach to the Mediterranean Sea explains the continuing appeal of his historical work. The classical division of the historical Mediterranean into longue durée —long term history—referring to the interplay between humans and their environment), conjuctures (the shorter cycles of social history), and l’histoire événmentielle (short term diplomatic or political history) continue to inspire scholars and graduate students of history. Although not necessarily acknowledged, Braudel’s approach reemerges in historical literature. For the Indian Ocean, for instance, it was James de Vere Allen who suggested a three layer analysis—racial unity through Malay and other migration, cultural unity emerging from India, and the religious unity provided by Islam.31 Less racially oriented is David Armitage’s tripartite division for the Atlantic Ocean. His labels of circum-, trans-, and cis-Atlantic approaches are useful abstractions for the world historian.32

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If applied on a global rather than an Atlantic scale, Armitage’s approaches could look like this: a circum-oceanic approach focuses on oceans as a geographic and historical whole. A circum-oceanic historian investigates how oceans constituted not only barriers to human communications, but also present incentive for further technological advancement.33 Similarly, such an approach could contrast the historical dimensions of individual oceans. On a trans-oceanic scale, the historian is able to investigate the comparative dimensions of an individual ocean. Such investigations could overcome the frequently cited tensions between rim and basin areas within a particular ocean. The last perspective, cis-oceanic, essentially explores national history within an oceanic context. This might entail, for instance, the exploration of U.S. history within the realm of the Pacific Ocean. There are two sweeping implications to an aquacentric view of studying the global past. One is in the classroom where the ever-increasing need for world history instruction demands appropriate conceptual frameworks. This is particularly true for the issue of periodization, which, already difficult in surveys of national histories, becomes almost impossible in world history surveys.34 Even if imperfect, an analysis centering on oceans and seas can be of much use in this case. The Mediterranean, for instance, serves as a crossroads for important societies. Expanding out to include the Black Sea and Red Sea will then bring in a large area culminating ultimately in a discussion of the Indian Ocean. Tracing the spread of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam in these regions leads into a discussion of their foundations that invites reflections on the JudeoChristian tradition. Outside the Eurasian context, instructors should emphasize the Austronesian dispersal in the Pacific Ocean, the maritime traditions of the indigenous societies of the Caribbean, and the participation of East African societies in the Indian Ocean exchange. The latter also allows for a reflection on the early-modern lure of Africa, and by emphasizing the Kingdom of Mali this could lead to a shift in perspective from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. The Atlantic is already well represented in world history and requires little discussion here beyond the period from 1500–1800, covering the Columbian exchanges, the transatlantic slave trade, and the interplay between important revolutions. Intellectual changes in the Atlantic allow for a shift to the Pacific Ocean where the voyages of the Enlightenment invite discussions on cultural contact and the integration of the Pacific Ocean as a major global region. The slowly declining Manila Galleon trade gives rise to American whaling fleets and the Canton exchange system. Other topics to be covered include the societal and cultural implications of the spread of diseases, imperial expansion (fueled by advances in shipping and the internal combustion engine), transoceanic women’s movements, Pan-Africanism, and international socialism. The course could end with an analysis of the environmental factors affecting oceans and human life. Beyond the classroom, aquacentric views open alternative perspectives on the conceptualization of world history. To date, the great majority of oceanic approaches, most

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of them addressing a single ocean rather than the two-thirds of the watery surface of our planet, hinge upon economics and trade. Such analyses introduced much needed reorientations in historical research.35 Yet, at the same time, they have been unnecessarily limiting to those people residing outside of economically vital areas such as Eurasia. Rather, it is important to recognize that an exploration of aquacentric points of view on the past uncovers important historical conceptualizations that share, despite their differences, certain communalities of significance. While investigations into such a consciousness exist, they do, however, remain the playground of anthropologists, who are, almost by definition, more concerned with local rather than global events.36 Although this essay has been able to provide only a glimpse of the possibilities, such investigations are a worthwhile pursuit, as they would integrate not only the voyaging Eurasian navigators, but also other peoples who were caught in their wake or provided a foundation for oceanic expansion.

NOTES

I wish to thank Celine Dauverd, Shannon Farley, Jeffrey Auerbach, and two anonymous reviewers for reading earlier drafts of this essay. The term aquacentric derives from a conversation with Ken Curtis. 1. Alfred Crosby would entitle this the “Bardic Version or Interpretation,” in other words, a celebratory version of European conquests and their consequences. See A. Crosby, The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchanges, and their Historians (Washington, D.C., American Historical Association, 1987), pp. 1–4. 2. For a survey of the development of oceanography over the last century see M. Deacon, T. Rice, and C. Summer Hayes, Understanding the Oceans: A Century of Ocean Exploration (London, UCL Press, 2001). 3. For a recent overview of this historical subdiscipline see, J. Bentley, Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, D.C., American Historical Association, 1996); R. E. Dunn, The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion (Boston, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000); and P. Manning, Navigating World History (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 4. J. H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” The Geographical Review, 89, 1999, pp. 215–24. 5. A. B. Knapp, “Thalassocracies in Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean Trade: Making and Breaking a Myth,” World Archaeology, 23, 1993, p. 337. A similar critical view of the term appears in J. D. Tracy, “Herring Wars: The Habsburg Netherlands and the Struggle for Control of the North Sea, ca. 1520–1560,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 24, 1993, pp. 249–50. 6. For a review of the literature on the conceptualizations of oceans and seas, consult M. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” The Geographical Review, 89, 1999, pp. 188–214. 7. An important call to return to this historical consciousness can be found in E. Hau’ofa’s “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific, 6, 1994, pp. 148–61. 8. The best example of this is S. P. Smith who devoted much of his life to reconstruct the original migration of the Maori people of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Restudies of his nar-

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rative revealed that Smith cut and pieced together different tribal voyaging traditions to fit his purposes, see D. Simmons, The Great New Zealand Myth (Wellington, N.Z., A. H. and A.W. Reed, 1976). Simmons’s contention that Maori traditions talked mostly about internal migrations within New Zealand have been challenged through experimental voyaging, see B. Finney, “Myth, Experiment, and the Reinvention of Polynesian Voyaging,” American Anthropologists, 93, 1993, pp. 383–404. While acknowledging the exaggeration of Smith’s methods, he seeks to rehabilitate the historical value of Polynesian mythology. 9. O. H. K. Spate, “South Sea to ‘Pacific Ocean’: A Note on Nomenclature,” The Journal of Pacific History, 12, 1977, pp. 205–11. 10. For a comparative version of Polynesian and Micronesian subzones, see G. Petersen, “Indigenous Island Empires: Yap and Tonga Considered,” The Journal of Pacific History, 35, 2000, pp. 5–27. Paul D’Arcy is the lone scholar focusing on the identification of Pacific subzones prior to the sixteenth century; see, e.g., his “Connected by the Sea: Towards a Regional History of the Western Caroline Islands,” The Journal of Pacific History, 36, 2001, pp. 163–82. Much work remains to be done, however, in linking these regional systems to the mythological conceptions in Oceania. 11. For an incisive criticism of these approaches, see J. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989); see also K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization in the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990). 12. E. A. Alpers, “Imagining the Indian Ocean World,” Opening Address to the International Conference on Cultural Exchange and Transformation in the Indian Ocean World (UCLA, April 5–6, 2002). 13. Alpers is particularly taken by Appadurai’s notions of “Ethnoscapes,” i.e., the mapping of the human shifting patterns of identity. See A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Similarly, Alpers finds Clifford’s rendition of the term diaspora useful, i.e., moving populations that are often at odds with the overarching narratives propagated by nation-states and autochthonous populations. See J. Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology, 9, 1994, pp. 302–38; an expanded and enlarged version of this article is available in his Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997). 14. E. A. Alpers, “Recollecting Africa: Diasporic Memory in the Indian Ocean World,” African Studies Review, 43, 2000, pp. 83–99. 15. By 1840, the migration of Europeans across the Atlantic approached the numbers of African shipped to the “New World” earlier. The abolition of the slave trade and improvements in shipping technology made the European migration the largest in world history. It numbered 35 million by 1914. See P. Butel, The Atlantic (trans. Iain Hamilton Grant) (New York, Routledge, 1999), pp. 241–42. 16. Compare and contrast D. Armitage and M. J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, Palgrave, 2002) with J. Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992). 17. For a critical overview of this body of literature consult R. Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997), chapter 6.

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18. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993). 19. Butel, The Atlantic, p. 4. Emphasis mine. Butel’s work is part of a new series edited by prominent Maritime Historian Geoffrey Scammell. Besides Butel’s volume, D. Kirby and M.-L. Hikkanen wrote a book on The Baltic and the North Seas (New York, Routledge, 2000). Works on the Indian and the Pacific Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea are forthcoming. 20. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), 199. 21. The outcome of this is collected in a number of intriguing articles in an issue of the The Geographical Review, 89, 1999. M. Lewis and K. Wigen, “A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies,” The Geographical Review, 89, 1999, pp. 161–68. 22. M. Lewis and K. Wigen, “A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies,” The Geographical Review, 89,1999, pp. 161–68. 23. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins,” p. 218. 24. Thayer’s most influential works are: The Influence of Sea Power in History, 1660–1783 (Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1890); and The Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812, 2 vols. (Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1892). 25. Mahan’s popularity in the late nineteenth century owes much to Matthew Fontaine Maury’s popularizing account of The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology, ed. J. Leighly (Cambridge, Mass, Belknap Press, 1963 [1855]). 26. F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. S. Reynolds (New York, Harper & Row, 1976; first published in 1949). The wider significance of this work was just explored in a number of conferences co-sponsored by the Clark Library and UCLA’s Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies in 2002 and 2003. 27. J. H. Elliot, “Afterword, Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, eds. D. Armitage and M.J. Braddick (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 28. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985) and his Asia Before Europe. 29. P. Curtin, The Rise and the Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990). For an alternative view see J. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992). 30. Some consider O. H. K. Spate the “Braudel of the Pacific,” yet his three-volume compendium The Pacific Since Magellan (Canberra, Australian National University, 1979–1988) remains mostly a European affair. More Braudelian is D. Flynn and A. Giráldez’s compendium of significant articles on the history of the Pacific Ocean in their series The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500–1900 (Brookfield, VT, Ashgate). It should not be forgotten. 31. J. de Vere Allen, “A Proposal for Indian Ocean Studies,” in Historical Relations across the Indian Ocean, The General History of Africa, Studies and Documents 3 (Paris, UNESCO, 1980); cited in Alpers, “Imagining the Indian Ocean,” pp. 10–11.

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32. D. Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, eds. D. Armitage and M. Braddick (New York, Palgrave, 2002), pp. 11–27. 33. G. Scammell, “Preface” in Kirby and Hikkanen, The Baltic. 34. See for instance the collection of articles dedicated to the topic of periodization in Dunn, The New World History, pp. 359–406. 35. Witness A. G. Frank’s ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998). 36. A regional assertion of such a consciousness can be found in Hau’ofa’s “Our Sea of Islands,” which forcefully asserts: “We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in tiny spaces that we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places, and from which we have recently liberated ourselves.”

AT L A N T I C H I S T O R Y: D E F INI T I O N S , C H A L L E N G E S , A N D O P P O R T U NI T I E S Alison Games A historical study centered on a stretch of water has all the charms but undoubtedly all the dangers of a new departure. —FERNAND BRAUDEL1

Fernand Braudel launched his massive history of the Mediterranean with an epigraph by the sixteenth-century priest José de Acosta. “To this day,” wrote Acosta in his own equally massive Natural and Moral History of the East and West Indies, “they have not discovered at the Indies any mediterranian sea as in Europe, Asia and Affrike.”2 The irony is delicious in hindsight. While Europeans never found their own Mediterranean in the Americas, historians have since discovered the Atlantic as a unit of historical analysis. The very ocean that Acosta crossed to undertake missionary work in America has become an organizing principle through which scholars investigate the histories of the four landmasses it links. Yet the Atlantic does not have the coherence that Acosta first identified for the Mediterranean, nor that Braudel proposed and delineated centuries later; nor, indeed, is it possible to speak with confidence of an Atlantic system or a uniform region. Attempts to write a Braudelian Atlantic history— one that includes and connects the entire region— remain elusive, driven in part by methodological impediments, by the real disjunctions that characterized the Atlantic’s historical and geographic components, by the disciplinary divisions that discourage historians from speaking to and writing for each other, and by the challenge of finding a vantage that is not rooted in any single place. But if a broad vision of the Atlantic such as the one BrauAlison Games’s “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities” was originally published in American Historical Review 111, 3 (June 2006): 741– 57. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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del sought for the Mediterranean is elusive, it nonetheless remains desirable. Scholars working in the field of Atlantic history have demonstrated the explanatory power of this geographic region as a unit of analysis: Atlantic perspectives deepen our understanding of transformations over a period of several centuries, cast old problems in an entirely new light, and illuminate connections hitherto obscured. Braudel remarked in 1972 that he believed that two “truths” of his analysis remained “unchallenged.” His first truth was what he characterized as the “unity and coherence of the Mediterranean region.” The Mediterranean itself was, as Braudel put it, a “complex of seas,” but nonetheless the self-contained nature of the sea and the common features of the kingdoms and empires that it linked enabled Braudel and those who followed him to insist on the value of writing about the region in its entirety, privileging commonalities and connections over discrete and local features.3 As Acosta recognized, the unit had long historical precedent, made visible on maps of ancient empires whose holdings circled the sea and whose dominion provided political unity to much of the region. Here we confront the first crucial divergence between the Atlantic and the spatial perspective that animated Braudel’s Mediterranean. The path of hurricanes on their western trek from Africa to the Caribbean and up the North American coast reminds us annually of the environmental connections of the Atlantic, but the landmasses surrounding the Atlantic are characterized by their enormous variety, with hundreds of microclimates, from the swath of the Sahara Desert to the tropical rainforests of equatorial regions to the tundra of Nunavut. The people who lived around the ocean inhabited different disease environments, and those who lived in the Americas had long enjoyed a geographic isolation that had catastrophic consequences in their lack of immunity to Eurasian diseases. Such coherence as Atlantic history might offer will not come from its environmental features. These differences were echoed in political and social practices. The challenges that Braudel identified in his history of the Mediterranean resonate deeply with historians of the Atlantic. His great regret (or so he avowed in his preface) was his uneven treatment of the states of the region. He deplored specifically his inability to come to terms with the Ottoman Empire. Magnify this challenge a thousandfold, and it is possible to begin to appreciate the difficulties of making sense of the individual pieces of the Atlantic and the ways in which these parts ultimately converged or interacted. The kingdoms, states, and empires that became involved in Atlantic exchanges together contained thousands of different languages (two thousand in the Americas alone, with considerably less variation in those European and African states oriented toward the Atlantic). The most fundamental features of many of the people of the Atlantic remain dimly understood. Historians debate population sizes in the Americas, and must estimate where, exactly, people lived. John Thornton’s meticulous efforts to map the political boundaries of Atlantic Africa remind us of the absence of some of the crucial building blocks for an ocean-based history: for three of the four landmasses surrounding the ocean, we do not know with the certainty that historians like who lived where, under what jurisdiction, and with how many other people.4

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If the Atlantic is a less obvious and coherent unit than the Mediterranean, it is also an anachronistic one. Historians have first had to invent the region: the emergence of the Atlantic as a single unit of analysis reflects trends in historical geography. What we call the Atlantic Ocean, our ancestors perceived as several distinct seas. The regions we have since labeled the North and South American continents are similarly modern creations.5 Well into the nineteenth century, no one had an accurate idea of what these landmasses looked like or whether they were even connected to the Eurasian landmass. The components of Atlantic history— two of the four continents and even the ocean itself— are modern impositions. And yet this unit of analysis, however artificially constructed it might be from the perspective of historical geography, has become sufficiently compelling to drive historical scholarship. Who are these scholars, and what is their impetus toward an Atlantic perspective? In one of the first efforts to articulate the history of this emerging field and to explain the origins of the current interest in the region, Bernard Bailyn argued that Atlantic history was a product of twentieth-century political developments.6 But it is also possible to identify other converging strands of historical inquiry. Indeed, this North Atlantic diplomatic longue durée cannot alone explain the passion that has developed for all things Atlantic. Three converging strands have delineated different and sometimes incompatible Atlantics. First and foremost, historians of the transatlantic slave trade have been especially insistent about putting an Atlantic perspective at the center of their work, starting with Philip D. Curtin’s painstaking efforts to calculate the size of the trade, and continuing with the innovative and extensive research on the African diaspora.7 This vital field has opened up the ocean as a coherent unit of study by following the captives who moved across it, fanning out to Europe, to the islands of the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and to the American landmasses, especially Brazil. This approach, unfettered by state borders, pursues the logical lines of the trade, and puts people at the center, tracking the transmission of all elements of culture, from political identity to material goods to language to religion, all around the Atlantic basin. No other field has been so aggressively engaged for so many decades in pursuing an Atlantic vision and in framing the field as a whole. One of the most important conceptualizations of the Atlantic emerged from this vantage in 1993, when Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.8 A second source of energy toward Atlantic perspectives comes from historians of colonial societies in the Americas. Three factors have prodded their geographic expansion into and across the ocean. First, colonial historians are often trained in early modern European history, in addition to the history of the region of their research, and thus an Atlantic perspective can be a natural outgrowth of graduate training and reading. Second, historians of colonial societies often take comparative approaches to their subject, reading, for example, about colonization in other European empires in addition to their own, thus opening up possibilities of at least hemispheric connections. A third impetus comes from the frustration of trying to write a colonial history within historio-

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graphic traditions centered around modern nation-states. In this respect, the Atlantic potentially shares what Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, in their essay on the Mediterranean in this forum, describe as the political neutrality of these new regions. It is precisely this political neutrality that encouraged scholars seeking to escape the restrictions of the nation-state to move toward the borderless world of the Atlantic. For them, the Atlantic offers the liberation of the promised land. Finally, historians of empires have long encompassed the Atlantic (among other ocean basins) within their purview.9 The main constraint these approaches impose on the Atlantic is their tendency to see the region primarily from the perspective of Europe and to look mainly within a single imperial geography, an approach that can divvy up the world in strange ways—most apparent, perhaps, in studies of the islands of the Caribbean, each of which existed within its own imperial trajectory even while sometimes sharing space with a rival power and participating in common regional transformations. These two approaches (colonial and imperial) have converged most vigorously among historians of the British Atlantic. Both British historians and historians of colonial British America work within national paradigms characterized by exceptionalism: Britain’s relationship to the European continent and the mythical exceptionalism of the United States traditionally set these two nations apart from their neighbors. Atlantic history offers scholars in both fields intellectual solutions to the burden of exceptionalism by privileging interactions and comparisons and by rejecting nationalism altogether for new analytic categories. It is no accident that the sole recent volume that exists for any single empire’s Atlantic is David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick’s edited collection The British Atlantic World, 1500– 1800, which offers a thematic analysis of subjects ranging from the economy to politics to race, all investigated deliberately within an Atlantic framework.10 Although the existence of explicit Atlantic orientations dates from the middle of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1970s that a cadre of scholars emerged who selfconsciously embraced Atlantic projects. In that decade, the Johns Hopkins University Press launched a series, the Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture. But it was the 1990s that saw the greatest explosion of Atlantic scholarship. Greatly bolstered by the support of Harvard University’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World under the direction of Bernard Bailyn,11 historians who are engaged in different aspects of Atlantic history—particularly those at the beginning of their career, for whom the seminar is intended—find regular opportunities to present research at seminars, colloquiums, and workshops. International conferences, particularly in North America and Europe, bring together scholars who investigate different aspects of the subject.12 A new interdisciplinary e-journal, Atlantic Studies, published its first issue in 2004. Colleges and universities advertise for positions in Atlantic history. Atlantic history is taught at the college level in both introductory and advanced classes. Graduate students at some institutions, including New York University, Michigan State University, Florida International University, and the University of Texas at Arlington, can

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pursue degrees in Atlantic history, and elsewhere students can cobble together informal fields in Atlantic history. Atlantic history has arrived with a vengeance, making a rapid transition between 1995 and 2005 from novelty to establishment. In January 2000, the AHA hosted a session whose title reflected the tentative nature of this new endeavor, “Atlantic History: Emerging Themes in a New Teaching Field.” Only five years later, the AHA featured a “critical reassessment” of the field in Seattle. These trends together reflect the emergence of Atlantic history as a field in which people give papers and organize panel sessions for professional meetings, in which departments offer employment, in which publishers offer book series (such as Routledge’s new series, New World in the Atlantic World), and in which the AHA now awards a prize, first offered in 1999.13 All this activity is a surprisingly recent phenomenon, given how long ago historians such as Curtin delineated some of the potential for a transoceanic history. These indicators may suggest that Atlantic history is hale and hearty. But there continue to exist a range of impediments to an oceanic history. Atlantic history means different things to different people, and it is for the most part appropriate that this breadth of opinion and perspective exists. But the Atlantic history that many historians produce is rarely centered around the ocean, and the ocean is rarely relevant to the project. Horden and Purcell point to the difference between history in and history of the Mediterranean. For Atlantic history, the relevant distinction is between a history of places around the Atlantic versus a history of the Atlantic. Of the former, there is an abundance. Of the latter, there are far fewer examples.14 In fact, a survey of work that professes to be Atlantic reveals a lot of exclusively land-based (and sometimes landlocked) history, material that looks, as James Williams has said, like old wine in new bottles, or in this case the old colonial history repackaged as Atlantic history. In a forum on oceans-based history, the Atlantic lurks on the sidelines like a surly middle sibling, tagging along behind the Mediterranean and the Pacific (for each of which there are now a range of journals specifically devoted to the study of the region and its various subfields; and, as Matt Matsuda tells us in his essay, the first chair in Pacific history was established at the Australian National University in 1954), and in the throes of an adolescent identity crisis. Atlantic history is all the rage, yet very few works exist that have attempted to capture the entire Atlantic across imperial, regional, and national boundaries.15 It is time to restore the ocean to Atlantic history: if circulation around and across the ocean—not simply north-south hemispheric connections between Africa and Europe or within the Americas, but transatlantic connections—is not a fundamental part of historical analysis and does not in itself provide explanatory power to the subject under discussion, then we would do well to define these projects by some other name. To be sure, a history that requires attention to the Atlantic ends up privileging certain kinds of interactions (the migration of people and commodities, for example), but many historians have also effectively traced the circulation of ideas, tastes, preferences, and other less easily calculated and quantified aspects of exchange. Assessing the different ways in which historians approach the Atlantic, David Armit-

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age has identified three types of Atlantic history: “circum-Atlantic history,” which takes the Atlantic unit as a whole; “trans-Atlantic history,” which emphasizes a comparative approach; and “cis-Atlantic history,” which looks at a particular place within an Atlantic context.16 Cis-Atlantic history is the most accessible way for historians, particularly graduate students eager to research and write a manageable dissertation, to get into an Atlantic perspective, since it is less likely to require archival research in multiple languages and countries. There are numerous good examples of local histories oriented toward the Atlantic. April Lee Hatfield’s Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century privileges English, Dutch, and indigenous economic and cultural interactions, depicting a Virginia vastly different from the one that has emerged over the past three decades from a historiography addicted to tobacco.17 Hatfield argues that we cannot understand the development of one place, in this instance colonial Virginia, without looking well beyond that place, across the Atlantic, to the complex variables and interactions that converged to produce a particular set of local conditions. Armitage’s “trans-Atlantic history” focuses on comparisons, and there is certainly a distinguished history of such approaches, long predating the current self-conscious passion for Atlantic history, and especially focused on some of the common processes and developments of societies in the Western Hemisphere.18 These works have tended to focus on the western Atlantic, comparing labor systems and colonial societies, and fall into an established tradition of a history of the Americas, something Herbert Bolton identified back in 1933 as “The Epic of Greater America.”19 It is circum-Atlantic history that remains the most challenging enterprise for Atlantic historians. From a circum-Atlantic perspective, Atlantic history is most literally the study of a large geographic region: the four continents that surround the Atlantic Ocean and the people contained therein. It especially focuses on those people whose societies were transformed by the intersection (or what Alfred W. Crosby referred to so memorably as the Columbian Exchange) of the four landmasses after Christopher Columbus’s momentous voyage in 1492.20 These societies are not necessarily places along the Atlantic Ocean itself: one thinks immediately, for example, of Peru, or of the western coast of North America, or of the region surrounding the North American Great Lakes, or of the river deltas and valleys reaching deep into Africa and South America. Places and people on the Pacific coast of the Americas were engaged in processes originating from the Atlantic, regardless of their actual geographic location. Africans who lived hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coast were nonetheless ensnared in the slave trade and its varied economic, social, demographic, and political repercussions, while diets everywhere were altered by the new products of the Americas. Many Native Americans found their world transformed by pathogens, animals, and plants well before they laid eyes on a European. Nor is Atlantic history only about the literal points of contact (ports, traders, or migrants, for example), but rather about explaining transformations, experiences, and events in one place in terms of conditions deriving from that place’s location in a large, multifaceted, interconnected world.

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If the beginning point of Atlantic history is relatively fixed, with European and African trade interactions in the mid-fifteenth century and especially Columbus’s 1492 voyage generally providing a good starting point for an exploration of the emergence of an Atlantic world, its terminus is more fluid and contested, shaped largely by one’s perspective on the Atlantic. The so-called age of revolution and independence (through 1825) marks one possible ending, and the abolition of slavery (by 1888 in the Western Hemisphere, but not until the middle of the twentieth century in parts of Atlantic Africa) provides another: from a circum-Atlantic perspective, neither is entirely satisfactory, since both reflect developments of only local or hemispheric significance.21 This single region enjoyed a coherence for almost four hundred years, creating a viable unit of analysis within which we can understand the destruction and emergence of empires, the movement of people, the evolution of new cultural forms, and the circulation of ideas. This coherence, however, has a specific chronology, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the region was being drawn more fully into a world system even as patterns specific to the intellectual currents and political dynamics of the region (such as abolition) continued. The Columbian Exchange illustrated this balance between the regional and the global from the first return trips across the ocean. The unique American commodities that crossed the ocean transformed diets not only in Europe and Africa, but in Asia as well. Silver from American mines traveled to Europe, but it moved in equal amounts west across the Pacific, into Asian economies.22 Europeans who occupied and profited from territory in the Americas were similarly, and often more fully, engaged in commercial and extractive enterprises around the globe. These global ties intensified in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century post-emancipation labor crisis illustrates three core features of these new webs of connection: sugar production and marketing in a world economy, a world labor market and transoceanic labor migrations, and global imperialism. The expanded need for labor derived from the continued global migration of sugar. The plant’s journey out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic continued into the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the deployment of Indian indentured migration was linked to efforts by British sugar planters to expand production to new regions, including some in the Atlantic (Guiana and Trinidad) and others around the globe (Mauritius, Natal, and Fiji). The continuity and intensification of migration across the Atlantic continued to reinforce the region’s ties, always numerically eclipsing the newcomers from Asia; yet these new laborers from outside the Atlantic indicated the global economic and imperial forces that would ultimately reposition the region within a world system. Atlantic history, then, is a slice of world history. It is a way of looking at global and regional processes within a contained unit, although that region was not, of course, hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world, and thus was simultaneously involved in transformations unique to the Atlantic and those derived from global processes. The Atlantic, moreover, is a geographic space that has a limited chronology as a logical unit of historical analysis: it is not a timeless unit; nor can this space fully explain all changes

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within it. Nonetheless, like other maritime regions, the Atlantic can offer a useful laboratory within which to examine regional and global transformations.23 This lengthy exploration of the region’s geography and chronology, and of the shifting balance within the Atlantic between global and regional catalysts for change, points to the importance of flexibility in understanding and interpreting changes within the region. Some pointed critiques of Atlantic history have originated from scholars who insist on the superiority of world history perspectives, most notably Peter A. Coclanis.24 But historians should work on geographic units that make sense for the questions they ask; the Atlantic is obviously not an appropriate laboratory for exploring all types of historical change. April Lee Hatfield has vigorously made the case for the necessity of multiple perspectives for Virginia in the seventeenth century. “Each of these constructions— Atlantic world, Virginia, local region, international colonial America, North America, and English Atlantic—functioned in slightly different ways, and each was relevant under different circumstances. They coexisted and intersected. All are necessary for understanding the reality of life in seventeenth-century Virginia that was connected to different parts of its wider world in very different ways.”25 Her refreshingly sensible and expansive methodology offers a model worth emulating. By any number of measures, this Atlantic world was interconnected, and indeed historians have relied on the metaphor of the bridge to make sense of these links.26 We know that the diseases that ravaged American populations came from thousands of miles away in Europe and Africa; we know that the political opportunities that indigenous people in strategic locations enjoyed derived from imperial rivalries elsewhere; we know that demographic transformations in Africa that led to the practice of polygyny were consequences of the transatlantic slave trade and its gender imbalances; we know that new staple crops in Africa (the peanut or the yam) and in Europe (the potato) were species unique to the Americas that traveled across the ocean on European vessels. The Atlantic, in short, was linked in ways that disregard the modern political boundaries that have defined departmental field structures and specializations. Atlantic history ultimately privileges and requires history without borders. In this respect, it joins other challenges to conventional geographic regions as units of analysis. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen have argued this point most forcefully in The Myth of Continents. They illustrate the intellectual histories (often self-serving to people with political power) of continents and the conflation of geography with politics and culture. While we might find ourselves moving someday toward a corollary “myth of oceans,” we are not there yet, and a history centered on the region of the Atlantic offers a logically viable space of analysis for particular questions with a range of methodological and pedagogical benefits.27 Atlantic history is more than simply the study of a geographic unit; it is also a style of inquiry that reflects the impulse that drew historians in specific fields to Atlantic history in the first place.28 Within the space of these four centuries and these four continents, historians who adopt an Atlantic perspective explore commonalities and convergences,

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seeking larger patterns derived from the new interactions of people around, within, and across the Atlantic. The large geographic unit requires a different approach, one that by necessity deemphasizes any single place, although obviously some regions within and around the Atlantic enjoyed disproportionate political power at different points in time. If this is history without borders, then it should also be history without an imperial perspective. It thus implements some of the arguments about the intellectual construction of geographic space that Lewis and Wigen make in The Myth of Continents: Atlantic history can offer a case study of the ways in which historians can break down not only old regional barriers and paradigms, but also modes of analysis based on modern cultural and political hierarchies. Atlantic history may deal with European dominion, but it should not be Eurocentric. It may cover a space dominated numerically by African migrants, but it need not be Afrocentric. The most dynamic changes of the period of contact may be most immediately evident in the Americas, but it should not be an expanded history of the colonial Americas. It requires a different kind of perspective, one ideally not fixed in any one location. Atlantic history poses paired challenges: linking several regions, in which no one historian can have the competence or expertise that scholars desire, and doing so through multiple perspectives. This problem of perspective is only one of many impediments that hinder efforts to craft a genuine oceanic history of the Atlantic. A second challenge derives from the uneven interest in Atlantic history among scholars who work on the individual regions of the early modern Atlantic world. Some fields of history have been more aggressive than others in attempting to convey an Atlantic vision. The working papers presented at the Harvard Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World offer one rough indicator of this pattern and reveal a preponderance of scholars from the British Atlantic.29 This measurement is merely suggestive, of course, since it reflects the availability and interests only of those who apply to the seminar and are accepted, not of the entire sample of all scholars working on the Atlantic. Historians of the African diaspora, for example, might find a more stimulating intellectual mix at the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora at York University, which hosts a similarly extensive series of seminars and workshops.30 A number of unintended consequences have resulted from the disproportionate intellectual energy expended by historians of the North Atlantic. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has faulted these historians for merely creating what he calls a “new paradigm [which] in fact sanctions Eurocentric cultural geographies for North America.” He also rejects an emphasis on transoceanic ties in favor of hemispheric connections and comparisons.31 His complaint obliquely addresses an important issue: the Atlantic tends to look very different when viewed from different vantages and within different imperial or commercial frameworks. While it is clumsy and counterproductive to divide the Atlantic into imperial or linguistic units, these divisions reflect fundamental organizing schemes of graduate programs in history. One central point about Atlantic history is that its evolution has been directly affected, and indeed defined, by peculiarities of departmental

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structures and fields. Historians need to find jobs, and, thankfully, history departments train graduate students to that end. But the consequence of this imperative for employment is that graduate students are still trained within conventional fields because that is how most hiring takes place. Even positions advertised as Atlantic tend to contain other departmental agendas: an Atlantic historian often needs to be able to teach a regional or national field. So invariably historians initially approach the Atlantic from one vantage, from one national or imperial historiographic tradition, and within the context of limited language training. It would be a mistake to assume that the ways in which people in one part of the Atlantic were transformed by their engagement with a larger unit would necessarily apply elsewhere: Africans and Americans had diametrically different experiences with European incursions. In Africa, Europeans traded at the largesse of African merchants and rulers, and secured political power in only a few places. In the Americas, Europeans occasionally replicated the culture of the trade factory, but they also pursued more bellicose styles of displacement and benefited from the demographic catastrophe visited on Americans. Some Europeans never pursued large-scale migration as part of their settlement strategy. The French and Dutch regions were characterized by tiny European minorities and large indigenous, African, subject, enslaved, or allied populations. Some European powers, especially the Dutch, were equally or more occupied by commercial activities elsewhere around the globe. If historians of the Anglophone world rarely doubt the existence of a British Atlantic, Pieter C. Emmer and Wim W. Klooster have argued that there was no Dutch Atlantic.32 There was, moreover, no uniform style of cultural encounter or exchange around or within the ocean, even within a single imperial entity. The French along the St. Lawrence River valley and those in Saint-Domingue interacted differently with the non-French people around them. It is impossible to talk about an “Atlantic” style of interaction, or a single “Atlantic” culture, or even, as Pieter Emmer has argued, an Atlantic “system.”33 As these comments suggest, historians who work on the Atlantic have been sensitive to the complexity and variety within it, and this careful appreciation of diversity is essential.34 Wim Klooster, building on Braudel’s multiple “skeins of history,” has proposed at least eight zones of Atlantic influence for the Americas alone.35 The Harvard sample notably demonstrates the special enthusiasm of colonial historians for Atlantic history. An inadvertent consequence of this admirable initiative is that “Atlantic” and “Americas” have become conflated. Thus Atlantic history may resemble or mirror the history of colonial societies writ large. We can see this tendency in a number of indicators, most vividly in the ways in which historians have tried to conceptualize the period from 1775 to the 1820s as the age of revolution and the end of empire. This characterization is certainly appropriate for several places in the Atlantic, but not for all. Many of the colonies on the American landmass had achieved their independence by 1830, but many colonies remained (including Canada and the colonies on the northern coast of South America). Brazil was a kingdom, not a colony, and with the exception of Haiti, every single island in the Caribbean remained subject to a European power. And

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that is only in the western Atlantic, where clearly fewer than half of all colonies achieved independence in this period. In the eastern Atlantic, Europeans increased their trade presence in parts of Africa; and in some regions, outside powers (the French in Senegal, the British in Sierra Leone, the United States in Liberia) enhanced their political dominance. But in the Eastern Hemisphere, this age was neither one of the end of empire nor distinguished by the emergence of independence. Viewed from an Atlantic perspective, the period evokes themes of political redefinition for some and of political subordination for many. Revolution and independence cannot do the period justice. Closely linked to this tendency to let one small part of the Atlantic define the whole are barriers caused by terminology. Both problems derive from the challenge of perspective: How do we escape historiographic conventions to find a language and a framework that encapsulates the whole Atlantic? Words get in the way. Historians continue to invoke the Americas with the Eurocentric “New World,” despite the logic they may apply as Atlantic historians that, in fact, if the entire region is a logical unit of analysis, it is so precisely because it was a new world for all involved in it. Historians who approach the region from colonial or imperial perspectives are similarly inclined to slip into the language of imperial dynamics, speaking, therefore, about centers, peripheries, and margins. It is difficult to identify processes shared by the entire Atlantic region, and this challenge speaks both to the lack of coherence of the region and to the continued difficulties of assimilating so many different fields of scholarship. All of these geographic markers reflect perspectives rooted firmly in national, regional, and imperial, not Atlantic, historiographies. It is similarly difficult to find models that are easily portable from one historiographic tradition to another. Take Ira Berlin’s concept of the “Atlantic creole,” an imaginative and original formulation of the Atlantic and its inhabitants.36 Berlin coined the term to describe those polyglot Africans who moved so adeptly among different societies in the early decades of the slave trade. Derived from linguistics and employed to highlight cultural mixture, fluidity, and innovation, “Atlantic creole” generates some confusion for historians of the Americas, who generally have employed “creole” to describe people of European or African descent who were born in the Americas. “Atlantic creole” poses a second challenge viewed in an Atlantic context: it replicates many of the cosmopolitan characteristics that historians of the Americas have come to attach to the term “cultural broker,” those people in the Americas, indigenous, European, or of mixed race, who moved freely between cultures and who played important roles in mediating the moments when mutually incomprehensible societies conflicted or engaged in any number of ways. Just like “Atlantic creoles,” “cultural brokers” were people who were culturally bi- or multilingual. They also looked like lançados or Eurafricans. Words to describe indigenous people, African or American, constitute another semantic stumbling block, including “tribe,” “Indian,” “First Nation,” and “native,” which can raise hackles in one place while being commonly used elsewhere. Atlantic historians need to think more self-consciously about the possibility of a common language.

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The words that trip us up are reflections of a larger issue of reading broadly and deeply outside our customary fields, since few historians would knowingly use words that are so likely to grate on the ears and sensibilities of our readers and colleagues or to hinder their comprehension of our arguments. The Mediterranean, Braudel wrote, “speaks with many voices; it is a sum of individual histories.”37 So, too, is the Atlantic, but for Atlantic historians it is especially urgent to delve into historiographies of other regions and people in order to sketch the patterns contained in the Atlantic. Our failure to do so produces some peculiar disconnects, easily illuminated by thinking about migration in the Atlantic. This gap between fields that are so logically connected is readily illustrated by looking at the ways in which historians of English and early American social history engaged in a protracted dialogue of the deaf in the 1970s and 1980s, a period characterized by an explosion of scholarship in early modern British social history. This was the great age of demographic history. English historians, starting with Peter Laslett, delineated an early modern English world characterized by high rates of migration.38 Laslett demonstrated that the world we have lost was one of high mobility. At the very time that historians uncovered this unexpected world of high migration within England, historians who investigated migration from England to North America emphasized the static nature of relocation. They turned these migrants into “settlers” or “colonists,” as if this one transatlantic migration were an anomaly in otherwise sedentary lives. While historians of British parishes and towns employed local records to identify mobility, historians of British North America used town and church records to privilege stability and generated a score of town studies.39 Far more troubling is another failure to communicate in the study of Atlantic migration. Some 12 million Africans and maybe 3 million Europeans in the same period migrated west across the Atlantic. Yet until the efforts of David Eltis to integrate multiple incompatible historiographies, these populations were treated separately, with “migrants” shaping one set of historiographic questions, and “slaves” another. Moreover, historians have been slow to pursue the implications of Eltis’s arguments and evidence.40 In light of these many challenges, will the Atlantic find its own Braudel? If so, s/he is likely to approach the Atlantic from a few distinctive vantages, not necessarily geographic locations but rather methodological perspectives. Some of the most exemplary works in Atlantic history have been written by historians whose topics have no necessary connection to or investment in a single nation or empire— environmental history, historical geography, the African diaspora, migration, economic history, the history of commodities. These fruitful approaches give us hints about what a Braudelian Atlantic might look like. It will be archival, not synthetic, because the most innovative work on the Atlantic continues to be anchored in original research. It will set the Atlantic more explicitly in the context of global transformations, thus emphatically embracing the cosmopolitanism that Peter Coclanis has called for, even if it does so within a single slice of the world, helping us to identify what exactly was particular to the Atlantic world and

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what this region shared with other ocean basins. It will be transnational, transregional, oceanic, and integrative.41 The most urgent and immediate challenge is to restore Africa to the Atlantic. Given the roots of Atlantic history, it is odd and disturbing that this needs to be said. Positions advertised as “Atlantic history” used to mean the black Atlantic; now those positions may encompass any field or subject.42 The comparative absence of Africa in conceptualizations of the Atlantic is a consequence both of the dominance of Atlantic history by historians of the North Atlantic and of enduring Eurocentrism. The first ocean voyages from Europe inaugurated sustained contact between previously isolated landmasses and, far more important, their inhabitants. But these voyages west—initiated by Europeans—have had an unfortunate lingering impact on the intellectual construction of the Atlantic, and many scholars still see the region as a story of Europeans and Americans.43 Despite all the books and articles that Africanists have published to enlighten nonspecialists, other historians have been stunningly slow to find ways to put Africa fully into Atlantic history, not simply as a place associated with slavery and the slave trade. Donald R. Wright and James H. Sweet, for example, have illustrated two very different and equally fruitful ways of thinking about Africa and Africans and their varied relationships with the Atlantic and, indeed, wider world.44 If non-Africanists fail to assimilate such approaches, Atlantic history will begin to look like a new comparative imperial history set within the laboratory of the Atlantic basin. The English translation of Paul Butel’s The Atlantic memorably referred to Africa as the “dark continent”— and this was as recently as 1999.45 In 2005, Bernard Bailyn approached the Atlantic largely as the study of Europe and the Americas.46 The study of people and the study of products suggest how historians might capture the whole Atlantic in their research, thus sketching a region that is liberated from any single national, colonial, or imperial framework. Both subjects open themselves to the full methodological richness that historians savor, leading scholars toward culture, environment, ideology, quantification, or whatever one might wish to pursue. They also, moreover, put the ocean at the center of the analysis, since people moved around the Atlantic, and commodities did as well. The ocean was not only the vehicle of circulation, but also the unique space within which goods and people were created, defined, and transformed. People, especially migrants (European, African, or American), offer useful ways to see tangible evidence of the utility of a history without borders. Studies of migration across the Atlantic (almost invariably from east to west) have for decades offered largescale assessments of one of the important processes by which the Atlantic became a region of study. The generation of computer-aided databases such as the monumental slave trade database further refined these studies, with the result that historians of European and African migrations have been able to delineate specific patterns of migration and settlement and to trace the migration not simply of people, but of distinctive cultures and subcultures.47 Studies of return and repeat migration demonstrate how

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individuals knit the Atlantic world together and illustrate the cultural impact that even a very small contingent of return migrants had on their former home cultures.48 There has also been an enhanced interest in the experiences of individuals who themselves lived in different parts of the Atlantic. These biographies help readers grasp the vitality and variety of the Atlantic. Some of these individuals circulated within single imperial systems. Such was the case for Ayuba Ben Suleiman, Little Ephraim Robin John, and Ancona Robin John. All three men were ensnared in the slave trade in the eighteenth century; all three circulated in the British colonies; all three found their way first to England and then home again. Sir Walter Raleigh hosted several Native Americans at his home in England: some of these interpreters assisted English settlement efforts in the Americas, while others were more hostile to their erstwhile hosts.49 Other individuals crossed imperial and national lines. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua did just that. Enslaved in Africa, he was shipped to Brazil, escaped in New York, and lived in Cuba, the United States, and Canada before traveling (as far as his biographers can tell) across the Atlantic to Europe. These are, admittedly, picaresque tales.50 Throughout their travels, these men, and others like them, had experiences that altered them. They learned new languages, they converted to new religions, and they made new friends and new enemies. The ocean was not just a place within which people circulated: it was itself the place within which they had transformative experiences.51 And this oceanic movement also permitted the circulation of news with each newly arrived ship and each garrulous passenger. With enough such stories, we might piece the Atlantic together in new, richly detailed, complex ways, putting people in the middle of a chaotic kaleidoscope of movement. Like people, commodities link the Atlantic in distinctive ways, through production, consumption, and commerce. They reveal the movement of people to produce them, the emergence of new or revitalized commercial centers whose fortunes rose and fell with single commodities in all places of the Atlantic, and the evolution of tastes and fashion. They can help us reach deep into households (European, African, and American alike) and factories and plantations and ranches and mines far from the ocean itself. Commodities are not necessarily Atlantic in scope, but they can be; and several illustrative studies argue forcefully that the Atlantic is the most appropriate context within which to understand certain products in specific historical periods. We can, moreover, see distinctive aspects of Atlantic history in the different goods that circulated within the ocean. Chocolate, of course, like so many other delectable and addictive American plants and products, came to have a career well outside the Atlantic. But its initial introduction in Europe was shaped by the unique context within which some Europeans—particularly Spaniards— encountered cacao and the many beverages with which it was made. Marcy Norton argues that the Spanish had to learn to like chocolate, and that they did so within the specific context of Spanish occupation and settlement in the Indies. The asymmetries of conquest, the peculiar demography of early Spanish migration to central America, the reliance of Spanish men on indigenous women, the challenges

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of Atlantic transport: all shaped the ways in which Spaniards learned to like chocolate and what kind of chocolate they would consume in Europe.52 Madeira offers a second example of a product that emerged in a uniquely Atlantic setting. David Hancock has set the wine’s “product innovation” in the context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic: Madeira was invented as a result of conversation and exchange around and across the Atlantic between 1703 and 1807. Producers and consumers learned how to communicate tastes and preferences, and the result was a new drink.53 If chocolate emerged in a unique colonial dynamic, and if Madeira wine resulted from communication within the Atlantic, sugar created an entire world in the tropics, but it was one that affected places far from the site of production.54 The study of sugar links plantations to coffee houses, and slave ports in Africa to the rum used in European-Indian diplomacy in North America. Commodities and plantation production also wrought unique changes. Sugar, of course, nestled in the Atlantic as only part of its protracted world tour. But within the Atlantic, it generated its own peculiar world. This world of sugar production, J. R. McNeill argues, required the transformation of the tropics to make them more conducive to sugar cultivation and processing. Sugar created an unprecedented demand for plantation labor, which was met almost exclusively through the transportation of African captives. The unique convergence of European and African immigrants and creoles and a new disease environment characterized by mosquito-borne illnesses transformed the tropics and shaped the rise and fall of Atlantic empires.55 Tracing products and people within the Atlantic introduces us to the rich and varied world that the region contained and suggests ways in which the region emerges as a logical unit of historical analysis, providing a geographic space, for a fixed period of time, within which we can understand processes and transformations that otherwise might remain inexplicable.56 Although there are numerous impediments to a Braudelian vision, more oceanic histories of the Atlantic are yet be written. They will be generated by historians who work deliberately to integrate their particular findings into a larger unit, who read broadly, who are open to interdisciplinary approaches, and who are committed to moving beyond parochial frameworks dictated by conventional historiographic divisions toward an Atlantic perspective. Writing Atlantic history requires considerable optimism, fearlessness, and the conviction that a leap into the ocean will not end tragically in a wrecked heap in the Bermuda triangle, but rather will land you safely in a new, unexpected, and stimulating place. Jump in. The water’s great.

NOTES

I wish to thank readers who looked at earlier versions of this article, especially Wim Klooster and the anonymous reviewers for the AHR, and colleagues who heard and commented on aspects of this piece at conferences. I also thank Douglas Egerton, David Hancock, Kris Lane, John McNeill, Jennifer Morgan, Marcy Norton, Adam Rothman, John

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Tutino, Jim Williams, and Donald Wright for many helpful conversations on the challenges of teaching and writing regional, Atlantic, and global histories. 1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 1: 19. 2. This precise phrasing is from José de Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies (London, 1604), 151. Braudel cited the 1558 edition, p. 94. 3. Braudel, Mediterranean, 1: 14, 17. My thanks to Markus Vink for sharing with me an early version of his “From Port City to World System: Spatial Constructs of Dutch Indian Ocean Studies, 1500–1800,” Itinerario 28, no. 2 (2004): 45–116. 4. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400– 1800 (New York, 1992; 2nd ed., 1998), x–xxxvi. 5. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Calif., 1997). 6. Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20, no. 1 (1996): 19–44. William O’Reilly shares Bailyn’s emphasis on the link between twentieth-century politics and diplomacy and the emergence of Atlantic history. See O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 66– 84. 7. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis., 1969). 8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). 9. The classic and seminal works include Charles Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, Conn., 1934–1938), and Clarence Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York, 1947). 10. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500– 1800 (London, 2002). Benjamin Schmidt’s Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570– 1670 (New York, 2001) is a rare and exemplary study from the vantage of the European mainland. 11. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/atlantic/index.html. 12. The University of Leiden hosted one of the earliest such conferences in 1999, at which participants were invited to summarize different aspects of Atlantic history. The papers were published as “Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48–173. 13. James H. Williams has tabulated the appearance of “Atlantic” panels or papers at the annual (or biennial) conferences of four different professional organizations—the AHA, the OAH, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), and the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI)—between 1990 and 2002. His statistics reveal a modest presence of Atlantic history at the AHA, but in 2000, for the first time, “Atlantic World” was listed as a topic in the program index. “Atlantic” made its first appearance at FEEGI in 2000. The biggest growth industry was the OIEAHC, which in 2001 offered no fewer than thirteen Atlantic panels or papers. Williams, “The Atlantic World: An Idea in Need of Conceptualization,” paper presented at the FEEGI biennial conference, San Marino, Calif., February 2002. The OAH has been less engaged in Atlantic history, which perhaps reflects that professional organization’s greater emphasis on the national, not colonial, period in North America, but trends in the first years of the

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twenty-first century suggest a shift. The OAH Magazine of History (designed for history teachers) devoted a topical issue to the Atlantic world in 2004 (18, no. 3 [April]), and the OAH has featured “state of the field sessions” on Atlantic history at the regional and national conferences. 14. For exemplary studies of Atlantic history, see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735– 1785 (New York, 1995), and David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000). 15. The few works that profess to describe the entire Atlantic tend to have perspectives very firmly rooted in one place. Paul Butel’s The Atlantic, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London and New York, 1999), for example, neglected to engage the relevant and abundant literature on Africa. 16. David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 11–27. 17. April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, Pa., 2004). 18. Slavery and labor systems are among the most typical points of comparison. For early examples of scholarly interest in these approaches, see, for example, Carl N. Degler, Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971), or Richard R. Beeman, “Labor Forces and Race Relations: A Comparative View of the Colonization of Brazil and Virginia,” Political Science Quarterly 86 (1971): 609– 636. 19. Herbert Bolton, “The Epic of Greater America,” AHR 38, no. 3 (April 1933): 448–474. See also Silvio Zavala, “A General View of the Colonial History of the New World,” AHR 66, no. 4 (July 1961): 913– 929. 20. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972). 21. For a plea for an Atlantic history that moves into the modern era, see Donna Gabaccio, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 1–27. One of the rare books oriented toward the classroom that takes Atlantic history through the late nineteenth century is Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill, eds., Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492– 1888 (London, 1992). 22. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391–427. 23. Jerry Bentley, “Seas and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 215–224. 24. Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 169–182. 25. Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia, 227. 26. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 8– 9. 27. On the creation of oceans, see Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 188–214. 28. For a thought-provoking view of the Mediterranean as process, see David Abulafia, “Mediterraneans,” in W. V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005), 64– 93. 29. My own rough calculations suggest that out of 268 papers presented between 1996 and 2004, 115 focused on the British Atlantic (including non-British subjects in British

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territories, such as Dutch- or German-speaking or African inhabitants of British colonies), 57 on the Spanish Atlantic, 18 on the French, 12 on the United States, 9 on Portugal or Portuguese Brazil, 8 on the Dutch Atlantic, 5 on Africa, and 1 on the Danish. Of the remaining 43 papers, a few are explicitly comparative across national and imperial borders, some are topical (demography and commodities), some are centered on Europe, and a still larger number take a single land-based region as their unit of analysis but investigate it over a period of multiple imperial invasions. In North America, Louisiana and the region of New Netherland/New York fall into this category, as does Panama in central America. 30. www.yorku.ca/nhp/. 31. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Some Caveats about the ‘Atlantic’ Paradigm,” History Compass, www.history-compass.com. 32. Pieter C. Emmer and Willem W. Klooster, “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: Expansion without Empire,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48– 69. See the different Atlantics that emerge through approaches centered around imperial expansion in the accompanying essays by Silvia Marzagalli, Carla Rahn Phillips, and David Hancock, ibid., 70–126. In the same issue, Debra Gray White explores the Black Atlantic (127–140), and David Eltis sets the Atlantic in global perspective (141–161). 33. Pieter Emmer, “The Myth of Early Globalization: The Atlantic Economy, 1500–1800,” European Review 11, no. 1 (2003): 37–47. 34. In “Drang Nach Osten,” Peter Coclanis has criticized those who work on the Atlantic for overemphasizing unity and integration. 35. Wim Klooster, private communication with the author. 36. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of AfricanAmerican Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 53, no. 2 (April 1996): 251–288. 37. Braudel, Mediterranean, 1: 13. 38. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965). 39. Virginia DeJohn Anderson was one of the first scholars to break through this impasse by putting mobility at the center of her history of New England. See Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1991). 40. Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery. See also James Horn and Philip D. Morgan, “Settlers and Slaves: European and African Migrations to Early Modern British America,” in Carole Shammas and Elizabeth Mancke, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md., 2005), 32– 74. Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2005), is an excellent example of an essay collection that explicitly connects a range of historiographic problems often regarded separately. 41. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten,” 181. 42. My thanks to Jennifer Morgan for stating this problem so clearly. 43. Here I share Peter Coclanis’s concern with the tendency among Atlantic historians to overemphasize Europe’s importance within the region. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten,” 180. 44. Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globaliza-

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tion in Niumi, the Gambia (Armonk, N.Y., 1997; 2nd ed., 2004); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441– 1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003). 45. Butel, The Atlantic, 185. 46. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 59–111. 47. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). 48. Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay, eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (London, 2001); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). 49. Alden T. Vaughan, “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters, 1584–1618,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 59, no. 2 (April 2002): 341–376. 50. “Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bondu,” in Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered (Madison, Wis., 1987), 18– 59; Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (Princeton, N.J., 2001); Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 51. On the unique maritime and class cultures of the Atlantic, see especially Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000). 52. Marcy Norton, “Conquests of Chocolate,” Magazine of History 18, no. 3 (April 2004): 14–17. 53. David Hancock, “Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: The Invention of Madeira Wine,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 2 (1998): 197–219. 54. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York, 1990). 55. J. R. McNeill, “Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1650–1825,” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 3 (April 2004): 9–13; McNeill, Mosquito Coasts: Plantation Ecology, Disease, War and Revolution in the American Tropics, 1640– 1920 (forthcoming). 56. Studies of rice and corn suggest a new interest in studying commodities and the environment within the Atlantic. See, for example, James C. McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500– 2000 (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), and Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 4 Austen, Ralph A. Trans-Saharan Africa in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Placing the history of this complex environmental region within the context of African history, Austen connects the histories of West and North Africa and the Mediterranean through the conduit of the Sahara Desert, which he argues was historically a

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region of interaction, as opposed to empty space. Austen examines the caravan economies, the competition for control over trade routes, the role of Islam and Islamicate state formation, the effect of European colonialism, and the Sahara’s reemergence as contested postcolonial space. Bentley, Jerry, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, eds. Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. Wigen’s introduction claims maritime history to be a unique but neglected realm of historiography. Chapters examine contested political control between states, empires, maritime communities, and “illegal” piratical activity in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans and in the Mediterranean. The contested realm of maritime labor is examined in case studies of Caribbean and South Asian seafarers. Burke, Edmund III. “Toward a Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean, 1750– 1919.” Journal of World History 23, 4 (December 2012): 907–39. Burke faults the “northern European models of modernity” that emerged in the nineteenth century for scholarly neglect of the modern Mediterranean. Rather than ponder regional ecological considerations and global economic circumstances that might help explain differences within the region, northern intellectuals conjured theories of cultural deficiency, especially in predominantly Muslim areas. When that narrative is set aside, the Mediterranean can again be seen as alive with interesting comparative questions about the political, economic, and social upheavals that characterized the sea basin in general for about two centuries. Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. One of the first monographs to outline the history of the Indian Ocean as an integrated region, the book describes overlapping trading systems that reached from the South China Sea to the eastern Mediterranean. Employing the methodology of Braudel’s longue durée, the author focuses on the intertwined structure of Indian Ocean commerce and the cultural contexts of trade and consumption. Greene, Jack P., and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Original essays from major historians in the field cover the British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch empires’ Atlantic histories. Essays critiquing Atlantic historiography emphasize the disproportionate effect of Atlantic history on African, American, and European regional histories. Hemispheric and global historical approaches move beyond the notion of the Atlantic as singular space. Gunn, Geoffrey. History without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000– 1800. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. Focusing on economic contact, particularly trade, this book examines the wide connections of Southeast Asian history. Gunn argues that within the context of a region characterized by diverse societies, connections with China, Korea, and Japan to the east, and India, Sri Lanka, and the wider Indian Ocean to the west created a vast maritime region with shifting boundaries and without a fixed center. As European capital and Chinese diasporic networks came to have decisive economic and political impacts over the second millennium, the dynamic region of Southeast Asia changed orientation. Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road: A New History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Hansen argues that instead of the silk road being the stereotype of a superhighway for the silk trade from China through central Asia to Iran, it was a network of highly diverse routes and markets through which people exchanged myriad goods and ideas. This emphasis on interconnected networks challenges easy geographic categorization along conventional regional lines. Hansen examines trade and cultural interactions in fascinating detail by drawing on archaeological and archival records, and she brings to life eight of the major oases that were places of cosmopolitan exchange. Holden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Covering three thousand years of Mediterranean history, the authors conceptualize the region as a complex web of microecologies that were linked together through shifting networks of economic and cultural exchange. By framing the book as a historiographical critique, Peregrine and Purcell introduce readers to concepts of the Mediterranean. They focus on four regions in Lebanon, Italy, Libya, and the Aegean basin that highlight connectivity and local distinctiveness in economic and cultural history. Challenging Braudel, they present a kaleidoscope of ecologies of social lives embracing both land (e.g., cities) and sea (e.g., pirates). Igler, David. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Igler examines the age of empire in the Pacific, from Captain Cook to the intervention of American traders, whalers, and explorers. This study of Euro-American production of knowledge about Pacific peoples and environments highlights how emerging scientific fields shaped the idea of the Pacific as a region in an era of increasing globalization, linking the destinies of lands bordering the ocean. Foreign incursions severely disrupted indigenous archipelagic communities, devastated marine and local species, and permanently altered natural environments. Katzenstein, Peter. A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Rejecting claims of the dominance of either nationstates or of continuing globalization, Katzenstein argues that the post– Cold War world is regionalized within a global system that is dominated by American territorial and nonterritorial power (i.e., the “imperium”). The American imperium’s interaction with Europe and Asia, examined through case studies of the core regional states of Germany and Japan, shows regions as both porous and persistent. Concluding with comparisons of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the author argues that the contemporary world is fundamentally shaped by the American imperium, which itself is shaped through its interactions with this system. King, Charles. The Black Sea: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. By asking the question “Is the Black Sea a region?” King is able to explore this body of water, its surrounding lands, and their communities and states over the long period from early human settlement to the end of the twentieth century. This meeting point of southeastern Europe and western Asia is a zone of interaction characterized by localized rivalries as well as imperial claims, and ultimately by the emergence of post-Soviet nation-states in the coastal regions. Readman, Paul, Cynthia Radding, and Chad Bryand, eds. Borderlands in World History, 1700– 1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Defining borderlands as “ecumenes”

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or areas associated with boundaries “recognized and contested by ordinary people on the ground,” this edited collection explores contact zones of cross-cultural interaction. Historiographical case studies about the creation of borders (and thereby borderlands) in North America are contrasted with other international cases in Europe, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, as well as with interregional cases in Britain, Australia, Liberia, and Kenya.

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5 RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL TIME

IN T R O D U C T I O N

For practitioners of a discipline that traces its origins back to chronicles and that depends on chronologies in order to make sense, historians have an inordinately hard time grappling with ideas about time. In general they tend to avoid directly confronting its problems: what it is, how it works, whether it changes, and why it matters. It is common practice to take for granted presumptions about time—its linear, directional, regular, and constant characteristics— and then focus on periodization as the issue up for debate.1 Not all practitioners have taken the easy road, though. Although time has not been at the center of the most visible historical debates, reflections on time have claimed steady attention in the profession over the past century, building a foundation that supports more recent interrogations of the uses, political stakes, and moral implications of the way historians either address or evade temporal thinking. The growth of world history, in particular, has generated renewed interest in the field’s temporal underpinnings, forcing scholars to grapple productively with an elusive concept and provoking teachers to make explicit their choices about chronology and periodization. Notions of time are omnipresent in historical thinking, whether in an archive or a classroom. Functional definitions of chronology and periodization are fairly easy to nail down. Chronology is the sequential ordering of events, such as in the genealogies of the book of Genesis, the king lists preserved in Mande oral traditions, and entries in the

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logbook of the HMS Bounty. Chronology is also the baseline for investigating causality. Did colonial slave labor in South Africa cause apartheid, just because it happened first? Establishing temporal relationships is part of a historian’s work, but chronology alone is insufficient to understand past events. Identifying key turning points (such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and perceiving the prevalent characteristics that constitute an era (the features of Pharaonic Egypt, for example) are also crucial for historical analysis. Such periodizations structure courses, provide parameters for research, and are familiar to most undergraduates. Defining time, though, requires consideration of both cultural perceptions and the evolution of scientific knowledge about our known universe. Many historians share a set of presumptions about time that are rooted in European and Christian thought. In Christian theology individuals move in one direction through time, from birth, to life in the material world, and on to an afterlife. Our fundamental measure of time, the Gregorian calendar, is anchored to the birth of Jesus Christ and was implemented to solve doctrinal concerns about when to celebrate Easter—the religious commemoration of Christ’s resurrection. Now the most widely used civil calendar in the world, the Gregorian system organizes international air travel and the trading hours of stock markets, among other mundane and secular activities. Although based on astronomical observations and implemented globally, this calendar is neither natural nor universal. The Hijri, or Muslim calendar, is also linear and directional, but it is anchored to Mohammed’s move from Mecca to Medina. In Buddhist cosmology time is cyclical, premised on reincarnation and the recirculation of life. Historians generally recognize the multiplicity of temporal reckonings in the world’s history but also concede the necessity of working with a single concept of time in order to craft a meaningful historical narrative. Making such a choice is a practical necessity. Laying such choices bare acknowledges the assumptions that undergird our scholarship. Cultural presumptions also inform putatively objective, scientific reckoning. In Newtonian physics, time is a measurable entity. Whether in hours or nanoseconds, time elapses evenly and consistently; it is an element of a knowable universe, a component of repeatable experiments, and the basis of scientific laws of motion. In Principia Mathematica (1687), Newton captured a notion of time and represented its function in tidy equations. More than two centuries later, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) complicated this understanding of time, connecting time and space in a four-dimensional world. Building on this insight, Stephen Hawking has described time warps and the possibility of time marching— or at least fleeting—backward, presenting a real and physical disruption to Western cultural and social notions of time that are deeply intertwined with modern science.2 Empirical thinking by physicists and historians alike is rooted in the examination of evidence. For scientists this involves a set of practices based on observations of the natural world and verifiable experiments. That same science now calls into question

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certainties about the linear, directional, and progressive march of time. Understanding of time warps and black holes, and serious postulations about time travel, suggest that Newtonian time has limits for explaining our physical universe. This means that historians have to contend with the consequences of changing notions of time both in the history of science and in the multiplicity of cultural constructs about time. If time is not a single, physical certainty, then it follows that notions of time— and by extension ways of differentiating between past, present, and future— are culturally constructed. The presumed (and Newtonian) time of most academic history is decidedly Eurocentric, embedded in practices of historical scholarship that emerged in the late nineteenth century and that valued positivist, empiricist methods. This approach, championed by the German historian Leopold von Ranke (see Chapter 1), sought to uncover verifiable facts and objective truths about the past with the goal of understanding “how it really was” in earlier times. This approach also presumes that all societies, present and past, share the same notions of time. By extension, societies not engaged in a Western, modernizing project were seen as timeless, or out of time.3 Since the middle of the twentieth century, however, historians have questioned the notion that a single, objective representation of the past— anyone’s past, anywhere—is possible to achieve.4 Influenced by insights from anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism and by the political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, historical scholarship increasingly acknowledged the validity of multiple perspectives, accepting cultural relativism and the uncertainties of postmodern thought.5 Area studies programs also began to flourish in the 1960s, bringing significant new knowledge about peoples and histories of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania to European and North American universities. The perspectives of the Western academy genuinely diversified. Over time the quest for a single, objective understanding of the past was largely replaced by the task of recovering multiple viewpoints. The insights from these many historical perspectives have only recently provoked scholars to ask about the consequences of working predominantly in a single temporal register. Despite a generation of scholarship critical of the premise of uniform economic development, ideas about universal stages of historical development persist.6 Even some recent scholarship presumes a single world chronology in which processes, such as the development of agriculture, which happened later in some parts of the world compared to others, were somehow “delayed” on a global timetable.7 This uncoupling of time from the recognition of other manifestations of cultural and historical diversity consigns some peoples or societies to the “waiting room of history,” always a “step behind” the more dynamic agents of change, usually located in the global north.8 Scholars began to address the political, intellectual, and pedagogical consequences of this temporal divergence in the early years of the new millennium. World historians have been especially active in these conversations. It is not that time operates differently for world historians but rather that the challenges of moving from local or national to global scales bring the problems of temporal thinking into sharp relief.

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Accounting for the world’s history makes the scope of time potentially infinite (granted, 13.5 billion years is not exactly infinite, but for most history classrooms and monographs it may as well be). When easy presumptions no longer work, we need explicit organizing principles— or theories— of time in order to orient our thinking. Daniel Segal’s essay in this chapter eloquently makes the case for the role of theory in world history. Recognizing that Newtonian, universal conceptions of time, like Rankian objectivity, offer but one lens on the past is a step toward the kind of explicitly analytical thought Segal calls for. Whereas multiple time scales have only recently received sustained scholarly attention, periodization has been a long-standing challenge for the new world history. Its early practitioners were writing against a tradition of universalist narratives that were admittedly Eurocentric (see the introduction to Chapter 1). Breaking away from the presumption that terms such as “iron age” or “medieval” had fixed dates and made sense in every region of the world was an important task for the field, as was establishing temporal parameters for organizing the structure of global inquiry. Contending periodization schemes had their clearest expressions in the classroom: for example, the problems of organizing college surveys, K–12 curriculum and content standards, and the textbooks that support those courses. In the last decade of the twentieth century, as many world history courses were being established or rethought, paying careful, critical attention to periodization was central to conversations about what constituted world history, why it was possible, and how students could engage meaningfully in the investigation of a genuinely global history of humankind. There was a lot at stake in constructing periodizations that did not simply project the temporal units of European or Western civilization courses onto the world at large—where their fit is either awkward or downright misleading. There is now considerable consensus around the proposition that world history is not simply Western Civ plus some other “civilizations” and that this global project merits its own temporal structure. This does not mean, however, that debates about periodization have been put to rest. One only has to look at the tables of contents of competing K–12 or collegiate textbooks to see that although there is some convergence around turning points in world history (the advent of agriculture, the initial sustained links between Afroeurasia and the Americas, and the Industrial Revolution, for example), plenty of productive disagreement remains about other turning points and about what constitutes a meaningful era or coherent unit of study. For example, the federally funded project in the early 1990s to develop national standards for history in schools sparked a spirited debate among educators over world history periodization. One group promoted a world history of multiple chronologies, each one associated with a particular civilization or region. Others, however, advocated a fundamentally global time framework that would encourage students to include in their studies large-scale developments that cut across different civilizations. Under the influence of members of the World History Association who were working on the project, the

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governing council agreed on a unitary scheme of nine world-encompassing eras from Paleolithic times to the present.9 The essays in this chapter showcase a range of temporal thinking by world historians, moving from considerations of periodization to critiques of the imposition of Eurocentric time. Jerry Bentley’s essay on periodization holds up, twenty years after its original publication, because of his forceful assertion that cross-cultural interactions provide a meaningful and truly global framework. What’s more, the periodization scheme he advanced in 1996 continues to structure conversations in the field, not to mention plenty of high school and college history classes. Bentley notes the challenges of devising a workable temporal structure that can integrate most of the world’s history without losing sight of important local variations. He acknowledges that shared categories encompassing the Eastern Hemisphere, Western Hemisphere, and Oceania before 1500 are tenuous. He nevertheless advances a structure that makes sense in each region, even though those regions were not then materially connected, achieving what he calls “a principle for identifying coherent periods of history from a global point of view.” Bentley identifies three “processes of cross-cultural integration” that serve as analytical devices for exploring the past on large scales: cross-regional trade, mass migration, and empire building. He explores examples of these processes in Afroeurasia before 1500 to work through his argument, making a particular effort to demonstrate the longterm and widespread significance of long-distance trade in premodern times. While readers familiar with recent works in world history might take this for granted, making a case for the consequences of exchanges that were often eclipsed in economic value by local trade pushed against the scholarly currents of the 1990s. To support his claim, Bentley articulates in his essay five reasons why historians should pay more attention to the connections forged by long-distance trade than an assessment made only on financial value might warrant: (1) trade helped to establish and maintain political authority, (2) the trade in precious goods in some cases led to bulk trade, (3) some premodern trade pushed large regions toward economic integration, (4) trade routes transmitted technological and biological diffusions, and (5) long-distance trade had significant implications for cultural and religious change. Bentley’s assertion— that cross-cultural connections forged through trade, migration, and empire building reveal global processes— still works as an organizing principle for world historical time. His periodization scheme also affords an observation about the chronological scope of world history as a teaching field. He divides just over five thousand years of human history into six eras, only two of which include dates after 1000 CE, the beginning of a millennium whose documentation and historiographical complexity attract the attention of the bulk of the history profession and whose subject matter makes up the majority of the history classes taught in American colleges and universities. World history, with its attention to human origins and earliest accomplishments, is a place for scholars and students alike to think in the very long term. It is

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equally important to note that world history courses are the only space in K–12 and college curricula in which most students glimpse any of the past before 1500. So the long time frame and deep context for more-recent events afforded by world history periodizations remain important to the temporal thinking of the field. In addition to debates about the appropriate division of time, scholars and teachers have also spilled considerable ink discussing the appropriate starting point for world history: The birth of the universe or our planet? The emergence of Homo sapiens? The advent of agriculture? Or the start of written records? The essays by David Northrup and David Christian both nicely summarize the shift in thinking that propelled many historians to abandon the notion that rigorous and evidenced-based investigation of the past could rely only on written records. As both authors point out, working exclusively with written documents limits the scope of historical inquiry to literate elites and to the past five thousand years or so—the point at which writing emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt. This approach excludes the majority of people for most of human existence— hardly a complete picture and not at all in keeping with the aim of including morediverse historical perspectives that scholars advocated after the 1970s. But abandoning the firm disciplinary conviction that historical inquiry equates entirely with written evidence opened a Pandora’s box of possible starting points for world historians. Northrup’s overview of this new quest for an appropriate starting point centers on the question of prehistory. He notes the practical and theoretical challenges of following big history back to the origins of the planet. But rather than dwelling on the multidisciplinary skill set and general shift in mind-set required of historians trained to work primarily with written sources, Northrup points to a crucial observation about the difference between natural history (meaning planetary and biological processes) and human history (meaning culturally driven change). Big history situates humans as part of natural history, prompting Northrup to observe: “Human history is different in a fundamental way from natural history. Human history began at the point when cultural change shot past biological evolution as the primary force shaping humankind’s relations with the rest of the world.” For Northrup the issue is to identify the moment when history— understood as human-initiated change— overtook biological change in human development. Northrup suggests that current scholarship cannot produce a satisfying turning point, or moment of “creative explosion,” but he convincingly shows that the long period between human origins and the advent of agriculture is where the interesting questions— and their answers—lie. Like Bentley, Northrup argues that premodern history matters for understanding the world’s past; he simply directs our gaze to an even earlier era. Northrup’s essay problematizes prehistory but fundamentally accepts it as a temporal and analytical category, a precursor to the era of written sources. Christian’s and Daniel Segal’s essays, by contrast, challenge the validity of prehistory as an organizing principle of historical time. Christian unequivocally and unapologetically situates human history as a recent temporal slice in the planet’s long evolution. In the essay

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excerpted here, he identifies two major turning points in humans’ ability to organize time and our ideas about the past. He identifies the advent of writing not as a fundamental marker of different sociopolitical organization or a way of demarcating modes of historical analysis. In his view all eras are valid terrains of historical analysis as far back as the Big Bang. Instead, writing, or the first chronometric revolution, changed how people could mark and measure time. It was the conceptual ability to determine absolute dates only through written evidence that limited historians to working in the literate era until the middle of the twentieth century. The second chronometric revolution, radiocarbon dating, enabled scholars to establish absolute dates in the millennia before writing emerged. This technological breakthrough, Christian argues, facilitates a genuinely historical perspective on the planet’s long past, enabling historical inquiry by biologists, geologists, cosmologists, and paleontologists as well as historians. In this view the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods of the human past are not set off from eras that followed, thus obviating the utility of the term “prehistory.” Christian and others show that rigorous historical inquiry is possible without written records. Daniel Segal effectively uses this insight to launch theoretical, political, and pedagogical challenges to the uncritical use of world historical time. His essay examines the use of two images in a Western Civilization textbook to point out the empirical and political problems that arise from the unexamined use of a time scale rooted in Western history. The essay underscores an argument central to world historical inquiry: simply adding people or evidence from other regions to a narrative rooted in European history does not make for a genuinely global story. As Bentley, Northrup, and Christian all assert, world history requires a different temporal framework. Segal’s essay powerfully shows why this observation matters beyond a network of scholars and teachers who identify as world historians. Segal draws our attention to two photographs taken by anthropologists in the late twentieth century. These images were used as illustrations of prehistoric and late Neolithic life in The Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age, published in 1995. The use of photographs of people living in the 1970s and 1980s as illustrations of life three thousand to ten thousand years ago is problematic, confirming sharp critiques of the academic notion that people outside of Western Europe and North America are fundamentally out of time and without history.10

NOTES

1. David Christian, “History and Time,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 57, 3 (September 1, 2011): 353. 2. We would like to thank Scott Evans of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for consulting with us on the physical properties of time. 3. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, repr. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

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4. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacobs, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). 5. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1982); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Victoria E. Bonnell, Lynn Avery Hunt, and Richard Biernacki, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 6. An early and particularly clear model of uniform economic development is W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Economists and historians alike were quick to point out the model’s shortcomings. See, for example, Yoichi Itagaki, “Criticism of Rostow’s Stage Approach: The Concepts of Stage, System and Type,” The Developing Economies 1, 1 (March 1, 1963): 1–17. For a more recent and especially trenchant critique of the neoliberal, unilinear progress narrative that Rostow’s model exemplifies, see James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 7. John Coatsworth et al., Global Connections, vol. 1, To 1500: Politics, Exchange, and Social Life in World History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 113. 8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7– 9. 9. National Standards for History, Basic Edition (Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996). 10. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

C R O S S - C U LT U R A L IN T E R AC T I O N A N D P E R I O D I Z AT I O N IN WO R L D H I S T O R Y Jerry H. Bentley

Periodization ranks among the more elusive tasks of historical scholarship. As practicing historians well know, the identification of coherent periods of history involves much more than the simple discovery of self-evident turning points in the past: it depends on prior decisions about the issues and processes that are most important for the shaping of human societies, and it requires the establishment of criteria or principles that enable historians to sort through masses of information and recognize patterns of continuity and change. Even within the framework of a single society, changes in perspective can call the coherence of conventionally recognized periods into question, as witness Joan Kelly’s famous essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” or Dietrich Gerhard’s concept of “old Europe.”1 Jerry H. Bentley’s “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” originally appeared in American Historical Review 101 (June 1996): 749– 56.

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When historians address the past from global points of view and examine processes that cross the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions, the problems of periodization become even more acute. Historians have long realized that periodization schemes based on the experiences of Western or any other particular civilization do a poor job of explaining the trajectories of other societies. To cite a single notorious example, the categories of ancient, medieval, and modern history, derived from European experience, apply awkwardly at best to the histories of China, India, Africa, the Islamic world, or the Western hemisphere— quite apart from the increasingly recognized fact that they do not even apply very well to European history.2 As historians take global approaches to the past and analyze human experiences from broad and comparative perspectives, however, questions of periodization present themselves with increasing insistence. To what extent is it possible to identify periods that are both meaningful and coherent across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions? What criteria or principles might help historians to sort out patterns of continuity and change and to distinguish such periods?3 This essay suggests that efforts at global periodization might profit by examining participation of the world’s peoples in processes transcending individual societies and cultural regions. From remote times to the present, cross-cultural interactions have had significant political, social, economic, and cultural ramifications for all peoples involved. Thus it stands to reason that processes of cross-cultural interaction might have some value for purposes of identifying historical periods from a global point of view. Moreover, with cross-cultural interactions as their criteria, historians might better avoid ethnocentric periodizations that structure the world’s past according to the experiences of some particular privileged people. Scholars increasingly recognize that history is the product of interactions involving all the world’s peoples.4 By focusing on processes of cross-cultural interaction, historians might more readily identify patterns of continuity and change that reflect the experiences of many peoples rather than impose on all a periodization derived from the experiences of a privileged few. Two caveats about the periodization proposed here deserve some consideration. In the first place, a periodization based on cross-cultural interaction cannot pretend to embrace literally all of the world at all times. For most of history, the Eastern hemisphere, the Western hemisphere, and Oceania were largely self-contained regions whose peoples encountered each other infrequently and sporadically, if at all. Within each of the three regions, however, cross-cultural interactions took place regularly and shaped the experiences of all peoples involved. The understanding of early interactions is particularly strong for Eurasia and much of Africa, so that cross-cultural interactions serve well as the basis for periodization in much of the Eastern hemisphere even before modern times. From the sixteenth century forward, cross-cultural interactions provide a foundation for a genuinely global periodization of world history. In the second place, global periodizations do not represent the only useful or appropriate frames for historical analysis. It goes without saying that developments internal to

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individual societies—such as the building of states, social structures, and cultural traditions—have profoundly and directly influenced the historical experiences of the lands and peoples involved. (Of course, these “internal” developments have generally taken place within a much larger context that helps to account for local experiences.) Moreover, different peoples have participated in large-scale processes to different degrees, so global periodizations often chart historical development in approximate rather than finely calibrated fashion. Thus global periodizations must allow for alternatives that are sensitive to the nuances of local experiences. Peter Brown’s concept of “late antiquity,” for example, has great power for the effort to understand historical development in the Mediterranean basin and Southwest Asia, even if it does not resonate on a hemispheric or global scale.5 Periodizations of individual lands and particular regions will often be more subtle and specific than global periodizations, since they have the potential to reflect more accurately local patterns of continuity and change. Thus, while striving to understand historical development on the large scale, global historians must acknowledge that their periodizations do not always apply equally well to all the lands and regions that they ostensibly embrace. Nevertheless, global periodizations have their place in contemporary historical scholarship. To the extent that historians consider it valuable to examine the past from global and comparative points of view, they need to identify periods of history that coherently situate historical development in large geographical and cultural contexts. Moreover, global periodizations also have the potential to establish pertinent larger contexts for the understanding of local and regional experiences. For purposes of constructing these global periodizations, the analysis of cross-cultural interactions and their results holds rich promise. When dealing with the past five centuries, efforts at global periodization clearly must take cross-cultural interactions into account. Since the year 1492, the regions of the world have come into permanent and sustained contact with each other, and crosscultural interactions have profoundly influenced the experiences of all peoples on earth. Legions of scholars have examined the effects of cross-cultural interactions in modern times while exploring themes such as long-distance trade, exchanges of plants, animals, and diseases, transfers of technology, imperial and colonial ventures, missionary campaigns, the transatlantic slave trade, and the development of global capitalism.6 For earlier periods, however, it might seem that founding a global periodization on cross-cultural interactions stretches a point beyond usefulness. Granting that the world’s peoples did not live in isolated, hermetically sealed societies until 1492, it remains a legitimate question whether cross-cultural interactions were intensive and extensive enough to provide frameworks for periodization in pre-modern times. It is a reasonable concern, for example, that a periodization founded on crosscultural interaction might accord undue privileges to that tiny fraction of humanity that undertook long-distance travel or that otherwise became directly engaged in cross-cultural interactions in premodern times.

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Yet, even in pre-modern times, processes of cross-cultural interaction had implications that went far beyond the experiences of the individuals who took part in them. Three kinds of processes in particular had significant repercussions across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions: mass migrations, campaigns of imperial expansion, and long-distance trade. Mass migrations had the potential to bring about political, social, economic, and cultural transformations in the lands they touched. The migrations of Indo-European, Bantu, Germanic, Turkish, Slavic, and Mongol peoples all worked profound effects across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions. These migrations touched almost every corner of the Eastern hemisphere before modern times. Meanwhile, the migrations of ancient Siberian and Austronesian peoples led to the establishment of human societies in the Western hemisphere and the Pacific islands. Alongside migrations, empire building also influenced historical development across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions. The establishment of large-scale empires did not necessarily imply the extension of close, centralized supervision to all lands and peoples falling within imperial boundaries. “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away,” according to a Chinese proverb, which acknowledged a degree of de facto independence enjoyed by local and regional authorities of pre-modern empires. Even in the absence of effective central supervision, however, pre-modern empire building deeply influenced human societies. Quite apart from the imposition of foreign rule and taxes on conquered peoples, imperial expansion also favored the establishment of commercial and diplomatic relations between distant peoples, as well as the spread of cultural traditions. Granting the importance of mass migrations and imperial conquests, questions might still remain about the significance of long-distance trade in pre-modern times. Traditional wisdom holds that long-distance trade in pre-modern times dealt largely if not exclusively with luxury goods of high value relative to their bulk. Traffic in such goods might make for a fascinating topic of inquiry, since it sheds light on the ingenuity of merchants and the development of markets. Nevertheless, so the traditional wisdom suggests, trade in luxury goods had limited significance for pre-modern social and economic history for several reasons: it involved a tiny proportion of the populations of producing and consuming societies, it mainly affected political and economic elites, and it did not generate a division of labor or otherwise restructure the economies and societies of trading parties.7 Recent research has called much of this received wisdom into question and has suggested that long-distance trade had more important effects than scholars have commonly realized. This research represents several lines of thought. One comes from the perspective of economic anthropology and draws attention to the cultural and political significance of pre-modern trade in luxury commodities. Even though trade in preciosities directly involved only small numbers of people, it involved some very important people. Apart from their economic value, exotic commodities often served as symbols

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of power, status, and authority. The ability to display them, consume them, or bestow them on others was crucial for the establishment and maintenance of political and social structures. Thus, even when its economic value was small, trade in luxury goods often had large political and social implications. Kingfisher feathers, tortoise shells, and rhinoceros horns might strike modern analysts as commodities of little economic significance. In pre-modern China, however, the rarity of such items conferred on them high value, which ruling elites appropriated as symbols of power, status, and authority. To the extent that trade in exotic items figured in the establishment or maintenance of political authority, it was a very important affair, regardless of its economic significance.8 A second line of argument emerges from studies of cross-regional commerce. It suggests that even when long-distance trade had its origins in the exchange of preciosities, it had the potential to expand rapidly and develop into bulk trade affecting large numbers of people rather than just political and economic elites. An example of this sort of development comes from trade in Buddhist paraphernalia between India and China. Buddhism reached China by the second century BCE, but it did not become a popular faith there until the late fifth and sixth centuries CE. The growth of a Chinese Buddhist community generated high demand for exotic commodities such as coral, pearls, gems, crystals, semi-precious stones, glass, incense, and ivory, as well as symbolic items (such as statues or representations of the Wheel of the Law) used in Buddhist rituals or as decorations for stupas and monasteries. By the sixth century C.E., this demand had stimulated a high volume of trade in commodities that during earlier centuries had figured as luxury goods traded only in small quantities.9 Quite apart from the cultural and political significance of the spread of Buddhism to China, this trade had important economic effects in both India and China. A third line of research suggests that pre-modern trade occasionally became voluminous enough to push large regions toward economic integration and thus to shape economic and social structures across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions. The Indian Ocean basin represents the most important case in which trade encouraged the economic integration of an especially large region in pre-modern times. By the seventh century CE, large numbers of Persian merchants, soon followed by Arabs, ventured throughout the Indian Ocean basin from East Africa to India and beyond to Southeast Asia and China. By the tenth century, trade generated enormous revenues in port cities throughout the basin. More important, this trade was by no means limited to luxury goods but also involved heavy and bulky commodities. Cargoes of dates, sugar, building supplies, coral, timber, and steel crossed the ocean in large quantities. (Often, they did double duty, serving both as ballast during voyages and as marketable commodities in port cities.) As trade linked the lands of the Indian Ocean basin, comparative advantages encouraged the organization of large and sophisticated regional industries: silk textiles in China and India, cotton textiles in India, ceramics in China, steel and iron production in China, India, and Southwest Asia, and the breeding of horses, cattle, and camels by nomadic and pastoral peoples in Central Asia, Southwest

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Asia, and Arabia. Thus, far from being an economically insignificant affair involving exchanges of luxuries between elites, long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean helped structure economies and societies in the various regions of the Indian Ocean basin.10 When pre-modern societies engaged in long-distance trade on a regular and systematic basis, trade routes not only facilitated the transportation and exchange of commodities, they also served as avenues of technological and biological diffusions. In some cases, these diffusions profoundly influenced the development of societies engaged in trade, which suggests a fourth reason for the significance of long-distance trade in pre-modern times. Technologies involving transportation, metallurgy, weaponry, animal energy, and natural sources of power all diffused throughout most of Eurasia and Africa, largely along trade routes. Meanwhile, long-distance trade and campaigns of imperial expansion sometimes combined to encourage biological diffusions in pre-modern times. During the half-millennium from about 600 to 1100 CE, for example, Islamic conquests and trade in the Islamic world sponsored a remarkable diffusion of food and industrial crops throughout much of the Eastern hemisphere, resulting in population growth and increased production from China to Europe and North Africa. Similarly, during the era of the ancient silk roads and again during the age of the Mongol empires, traffic over long-distance trade networks facilitated the spread of lethal pathogens beyond their original homes, leading to disease epidemics in much of Eurasia.11 Finally, besides its political, social, economic, and biological significance, longdistance trade also had implications for cultural and religious change in pre-modern times. When merchants traded regularly across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions, they established diaspora communities and brought cultural and religious authorities from their homelands into those communities for their own purposes. Their cultural and religious traditions sometimes attracted interest among their hosts, particularly when foreign merchants came from a well-organized society possessing the capacity to provide significant political, diplomatic, military, or economic benefits for their hosts. In several notable cases, the voluntary association of individuals with the cultural and religious traditions of foreign merchants helped to launch processes of large-scale conversion, by which societies made a place for foreign cultural or religious values. Merchants played prominent roles, for example, in the processes that led to the establishment of Hinduism and Buddhism in Southeast Asia; of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity in Central Asia; and of Islam in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.12 Thus recent research has made a persuasive case for the significance of long-distance trade, even in pre-modern times. Pre-modern trade did not wield an influence approaching that of cross-cultural commerce in modern and contemporary times. In combination with processes of mass migration and imperial expansion, however, it is clear that longdistance trade had strong potential to shape historical experiences across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions even in pre-modern times. To the extent that mass migration, imperial expansion, and long-distance trade engaged peoples of different

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societies in significant cross-cultural interactions, these interactions might serve as a basis for the periodization of world history in pre-modern as well as modern times. A periodization of world history consisting of six major eras [is] distinguished principally by differing dynamics of cross-cultural interactions that worked their effects across the boundary lines of societies and cultural regions. The six eras are: an age of early complex societies (3500–2000 BCE), an age of ancient civilizations (2000–500 BCE), an age of classical civilizations (500 BCE–500 CE), a post-classical age (500–1000 CE), an age of transregional nomadic empires (1000–1500 CE), and a modern age (1500 CE to the present).

NOTES

This article began as a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., December 1992. For their suggestions concerning ways to improve the essay, thanks go to William Cummings, Elton L. Daniel, E. L. Jones, James P. Kraft, John A. Mears, I. A. Newby, and the AHR’s three anonymous readers. 1. Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” orig. pub. in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, 1977), 137– 64; rpt. in Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 19–50. Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000–1800 (New York, 1981). 2. On the last point, see Gerhard, Old Europe; and C. Warren Hollister, “The Phases of European History and the Nonexistence of the Middle Ages,” Pacific Historical Review, 61 (1992): 1–22. 3. Several scholars have already offered thoughtful reflections on periodization from a global point of view. Some explicitly argue or implicitly assume that human societies evolve in reasonably similar fashion, so that periodization depends on the identification of stages that all societies pass through. Apart from the large body of Marxist evolutionary scholarship, see, for example, Robert McC. Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Chicago, 1966). Others have proposed hemispheric and global cycles as foundations for periodization: see Andre Gunder Frank, “A Theoretical Introduction to 5,000 Years of World System History,” Review, 13 (1990): 155–248; and the essays in Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London, 1993). Yet others envision periodizations based to some extent on cross-cultural interactions: see Ross E. Dunn, “Periodization and Chronological Coverage in a World History Survey,” in Josef W. Konvitz, ed., What Americans Should Know: Western Civilization or World History? Proceedings of a Conference at Michigan State University, April 21–23, 1985 (East Lansing, Mich., 1985), 129–40; Peter N. Stearns, “Periodization in World History Teaching: Identifying the Big Changes,” History Teacher, 20 (1987): 561–80; and William A. Green, “Periodization in European and World History,” Journal of World History, 3 (1992): 13–53. See also William A. Green, “Periodizing World History,” History and Theory, 34 (1995): 99–111. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963), does not address the issue of periodization directly but nonetheless contributes to its understanding by offering an integrated history of the world from

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a global point of view. See also McNeill’s reflections on “The Rise of the West after TwentyFive Years,” Journal of World History, 1 (1990): 1–21. This essay draws inspiration from the contributions cited above, and it seeks to complement them by proposing a principle for identifying coherent periods of history from a global point of view. 4. A few examples of recent works that nicely illustrate this point about the modern world: Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in EighteenthCentury Virginia (Princeton, N.J., 1987); John E. Wills, Jr., “Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination,” AHR, 98 (February 1993): 83–105; Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Ronald T. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston, 1993); and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). 5. Of Peter Brown’s many thoughtful and penetrating works, see especially The World of Late Antiquity, A.D. 150–750 (London, 1971); and The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). In the form of mass migrations, of course, cross-cultural interactions were a prominent feature of late antiquity. In his own work, however, Brown has concentrated on the cultural and religious history of the Mediterranean basin, and to a lesser extent of Southwest Asia, without placing the experiences of those regions in a larger Eurasian or hemispheric context and without directly addressing the theme of cross-cultural interaction. 6. See, among others, Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (New York, 1984); Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York, 1988); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modem World-System, 3 vols. (New York, 1974); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976); and two works by Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972); and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York, 1986). 7. There are works that take long-distance trade seriously even in pre-modern times: see especially Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History; and C. G. F. Simkin, The Traditional Trade of Asia (London, 1968). For several works that in various ways express the view that early long-distance trade was an enterprise of limited significance—and that do so from radically different perspectives—see Wallerstein, Modern World-System I: 19–21, 39–42; W. W. Rostow, How It All Began: Origins of the Modern Economy (New York, 1975), 14–15; Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present (New York, 1989), 32–33, 78, 121–22; and Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies (Oxford, 1989), 22–24, 33–34. In the interests of fairness and precision, I would like to point out that these authors do not absolutely deny the significance of early long-distance trade: Cameron, for example, holds that it helped to integrate the economy of the Mediterranean basin under the Roman empire. In all cases, however, these authors and others convey the clear impression that long-distance trade was not an activity of large economic significance until modern times. 8. See Jane Schneider, “Was There a Pre-capitalist World System?” Peasant Studies, 6 (1977): 20–29; and Robert McC. Adams, “Anthropological Perspectives on Ancient Trade,” Current Anthropology, 15 (1974): 239–58. For broader analyses along similar lines, see also Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographi-

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cal Distance (Princeton, N.J., 1988); and Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). On the political significance of long-distance trade in early Southeast Asia, see Kenneth R. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 1985). On the taste for exotic commodities and the uses made of them in pre-modern China, see especially two volumes of Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley, Calif., 1963); and The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley, 1967). 9. It is impossible to calculate the value of this trade, but literary and archaeological sources make it clear that by the sixth century C.E., trade in Buddhist paraphernalia had become quite large. See Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea (Kuala Lumpur, 1958); and Liu Xinru, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, A.D. 1–600 (Delhi, 1988). 10. On the economic integration of the Indian Ocean basin, see especially two recent volumes of K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985); and Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990). See also George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, N.J., 1951); the first volume, with four additional volumes projected, of Andre Wink, “AlHind”: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Leiden, 1990); and an article in which Wink outlines his larger vision of the Indian Ocean basin, “‘Al-Hind’: India and Indonesia in the Islamic World-Economy, c. 700–1800 A.D.,” Itinerario, 12 (1988): 33–72. 11. On the diffusion of technologies, see Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Oxford, 1990); Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); and Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962). On biological diffusions, see McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge, 1983); and Lynda N. Shaffer, “Southernization,” Journal of World History, 5 (1994): 1–21. 12. See Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993), which examines cases of conversion encouraged by the voluntary association of host peoples with the cultural and religious traditions of foreign merchants.

W H E N D O E S WO R L D H I S T O R Y B E G IN? ( A N D W H Y S H O U L D W E C A R E?) David Northrup

At a time when many historians seem to be focusing their research on ever smaller segments of the recent past, advocates of world history are struggling to include the entire history of humanity in their narrative and, if some have their way, a great deal more. David Northrup’s “When Does World History Begin? (And Why Should We Care?)” was originally published in History Compass 1 (2003). Reprinted with permission from John Wiley & Sons.

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In 1991, David Christian (then at Macquarie University, Australia) proposed beginning the world history survey with the Big Bang. A dozen years after that modest proposal in the Journal of World History, his Big History idea was the subject of a feature story in the New York Times. Big History has become big news.1 Starting the traditional survey 10 or 20 billion years earlier, Christian argues, will enable historians to probe the really big questions about life, nature, and patterns of change. The idea is not really new. The Hebrew and medieval Christian chroniclers of universal history also went back to the beginning in search of larger meaning. But whereas their intent was to celebrate humanity’s place at the apex of God’s Creation, the advocates of Big History have a secular environmentalist bent and seek to remind us of our humble origins and our debt to the rest of nature. Many teachers of world history (myself included) have reservations about Big History, but the proposal has the great virtue of provoking a serious reexamination of the proper beginning point for history. The pioneers of modern world history, who wrote in the years after the Second World War, were inclined to accept the received wisdom among historians that history began when the first written records showed up in Mesopotamia and Egypt some 5,000 years ago. Although these pioneers were well aware that literate texts did not mark the start of human social transformations, writing marked the beginning of history that was knowable. “In the beginning human history is a great darkness” began William McNeill’s classic The Rise of the West, consciously echoing the words and perspective of the opening sentence of the book of Genesis that had been written down some three millennia earlier. McNeill recounted what was known of human evolution and the development of agriculture, but his account moved quickly to chapter two, “The Breakthrough to Civilization in Mesopotamia.” In The Origin and Goal of History, published a dozen years earlier, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers had drawn a similar line between history and prehistory: History is that section of the past which, at any given time, is clearly visible to man; it is the sector of things past which he can make his own, it is consciousness of origins. Prehistory is that section of the past which, although it is in fact the foundation of all that comes after, is itself unknown.

Even so, Jaspers was passionate about the importance of prehistory, as the foundation of all that came later and the period where the answers to so many of the great questions about the past lay hidden. He insisted that the 5,000-year sliver of the human past then knowable should be just as open to new information from earlier times as to additions from the unfolding future.2 In the decades since Jaspers and McNeill wrote, archaeology, linguistics, and DNA evidence have added a tremendous amount of new information about human evolution, migration to all the inhabitable land masses, and the development of society and culture. Prehistory is no longer dark and unknowable. But I would venture to guess

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that most historians in North America would rather accept the notion in Samuel Noah Kramer’s title, History Begins at Sumer, than contemplate the possibility that ninety-nine percent of history lies earlier. Part of the problem may be the ambiguity of the word “prehistory,” which means “before history” to some and “the beginning of history” to others. Jaspers used it both ways, arguing that prehistory was the foundation of all history and that it lay outside the practical compass of historical studies. A more important point is that the word “prehistory” also carries some dubious conceptual baggage. The word came into use in Europe in the middle third of the nineteenth century, to designate a previously unknown period of the human past for which new evidence was then coming to light. Prehistory was born in controversy, not because it was based on nonliterary evidence but because it revealed a story of human development that was strikingly different from that in Genesis, and immensely earlier than the long-accepted dating of Creation to 4004 BC by Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656). There is no need to rehearse here the enormous uproar that soon greeted Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man, but one should keep it in mind in seeking to understand why historians in the West preferred to leave the investigation of prehistory to the scientists even after the Darwinian brouhaha had ceased.3 Another troubling aspect of nineteenth-century thinking was also embedded in the exclusion of nonliterate societies from “real” history. Until the past century, most people in most societies were illiterate, and the way in which historians wrote their accounts of the past strongly reflected the hierarchical and patriarchal vision of society presented in written records. Thus the laboring classes, social minorities, and most women entered history only in terms of their subordinate relations with the dominant élite. Reinforced by the rising belief in the racial hierarchies, the peoples of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and the South Pacific were similarly excluded from “real” history until they were discovered by Europeans and brought under their dominion. This kind of thinking is quite explicit in the thinking of Karl Jaspers, despite his contrary advocacy of a more globally inclusive history. In his schema of historical development, Prehistory is followed in Eurasia by the era of Ancient Civilizations and then the Axial Period in which the classical civilizations were formed, but the “primitive peoples” of Africa and the Americas are placed outside that structure in an ongoing “later prehistory” that continued until their colonization. Other unnamed “scriptless peoples in the orbit of the civilisations” inhabit a sort of limbo in between those two. Thus the majority of humanity was conventionally consigned, often in language rougher than that of Jaspers, to the darkness of prehistory for millennia after the point when the light of history dawned for some. I do not mean to criticize earlier historians unduly for faults less of their own doing than reflecting the prejudices of their times. One may be sure that the failings of those writing today will in time be exposed as well. The point is that such failings are, like history itself, clearest in retrospect and their correction has been the goal of much revisionist work during the past half-century. In Eric Wolf’s telling phrase, the “people without

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history” have been discovered and brought into the historical narrative.4 Women and nonélite classes have been shown to be not just worthy of historical investigation but also important forces in the shaping of history. In addition, the once neglected histories of indigenous Americans, Africans, and Pacific Islanders have become hot areas of research and writing. High-quality professional historical journals have been founded to report on this new research, such as Ethnohistory (1954), the Journal of African History (1960), and the Journal of Pacific History (1965). Jerry Bentley’s inauguration of the Journal of World History in 1990 marked the emergence of a more integrated view of all of human history. Many of the elected leaders of the American Historical Association in recent years have been specialists in these new fields of historical research. The presentation of this new research has varied in interesting ways. Reflecting the fact that the history of “Latin” and “Anglo” America was identified with the history of European settlers, historians (and historically minded scientists and social scientists) studying the indigenous peoples of the Americas devised a separate category of history, ethnohistory, which has remained closely associated with Amerindian studies.5 With a shorter and smaller settler presence to contend with, the new historians of Africa have made African history synonymous with the history of the native peoples of the continent. Whether they call themselves historians or ethnohistorians, the investigators of the American, African, and Pacific pasts (like those of Western women, peasants, and workers) are united in their interdisciplinary approaches to history and in their exploitation of nonliterary sources of information, including material remains, oral traditions, linguistic evidence, and human ecology. The progress of these fields of specialization may be measured by the fact that articles from them now regularly appear in scholarly journals that once saw their scope in narrower terms. Cultural politics has played its role in all this, but it seems clear that such mainstream publication owes more to the quality of this historical writing and research than to paternalistic political correctness. The new thinking and new research techniques behind the mainstreaming of social history and area studies are also reflected in the incorporation of “prehistory” into world history, but there are some significant differences as well. The similarities are most striking in the proliferation of astonishing new information about humans before 5,000 years ago and the happy interdisciplinary marriages that have enhanced understanding of this vast period. New finds and theories regularly get featured in the mass media and in popular journals such as the National Geographic. It would be very hard to assert today what Karl Jaspers wrote with some considerable regret a half-century ago: “all nonverbal artifacts from prehistoric excavations seem to us lifeless in their dumb silence.”6 What is significantly different is that historians have not been in the vanguard of reclaiming prehistory, and in North America they are scarcely to be found at all. While, in much of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, prehistory is taught as a part of cultural or social history, at least from the beginning of the Neolithic, in academic America prehistory is the province of people with degrees in archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and a variety of hard science specialties.7 This does not mean that books

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written on the period for students and the general public would seem foreign to students of history—far from it. Their chronological narratives are full of social, cultural, and (in later periods of prehistory) political history. They tell of migrations and adaptations to new environments, specialization by gender, age, and social category, and the development of religious beliefs, esthetic sensibilities, and elaborate technologies. Who could question that a skillful and prolific writer such as archaeologist Brian Fagan is producing anything but history? Nor do he and other prehistorians feel any compunction to stop when they come to territory commonly claimed (and neglected) by the history profession.8 Thus there is no difficulty in bringing prehistory into the history survey course. Teachers and researchers in world history are particularly sensitive to the artificiality of boundaries and the preconceptions that lie behind them, and recognize that to be fair and balanced global history must include all of humanity, even if all parts of the world do not merit equal treatment in all eras. Written documents are a great resource, but are not the sine qua non for inclusion in the narrative. Likewise, world history at its best seeks to makes sense of the entire temporal range of the human experience. However tempting it may be, on pragmatic grounds, to abbreviate the narrative, it makes no more sense to omit the early millennia of human existence than it does to end the survey centuries short of the present day. Nevertheless, Big History does not appear to be gaining the support of more than a small coterie of world historians, even if many more respect its goals and sympathize with its agendas. In part, the reasons are practical, but they are also theoretical. While correctly reminding us that human history is a part of what was called natural history in the time before big science, Big History may be giving too little regard to what makes human history fundamentally distinctive and thus worthy of study on its own. Natural history is concerned with the mindless and random (but patterned) processes by which matter coalesced into celestial bodies, chemical interactions generated simple life forms, and random genetic changes fed biological evolution, favoring traits and species with the greatest survivability. Human history is different in a fundamental way from natural history. Human history began at the point when cultural change shot past biological evolution as the primary force shaping humankind’s relations with the rest of the world. (Obviously “culture” is used in its broadest sense, to include all of those ways of working, living, dressing, thinking, and speaking that define and distinguish human societies.) While at some level cultural changes are expressions of human nature, they result primarily from ideas, inventions, accumulated knowledge, and time-tested strategies for survival and interaction. The slow process of evolution did not cease when history in this sense began, but it became insignificant compared to the capacity of humans to adapt themselves with ever greater speed to new environments and situations, to theorize about their circumstances and devise new tools and techniques for improving them, to move beyond strategies for material survival to develop esthetic and intellectual life,

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and to construct larger and more complex forms of social organization that distinguish humankind from all other existing forms of life. One must be careful not to exaggerate the degree to which history is the result of human planning and rationality. Jared Diamond’s widely read and admired survey of historical change reminds us that culture is not destiny. Diamond correctly faults older explanations of the historical differences among regional and national groups for being ethnocentric at best and racist at worst. In their place, he proposes: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”9 While his thesis is elaborated with elegance and erudition, Diamond’s proposition still seems more that of a student of natural history (among other things, he is a biologist) than of a student of history. Environments are powerful forces in history (as prehistory demonstrates most dramatically), but the historical record is also full of individuals, groups, and entire societies that have made much of unpromising environments. Culture is not destiny and neither is environment. Historians tend to love tripartite explanations and are likely to feel more comfortable with attributing the fates of societies to a mixture of cultural factors, environment factors, and a healthy dose of luck, both good and bad. While culture does not lift humanity above nature, it does differentiate history from natural history. So when did history overtake natural history in human development? Where, as some have put it, is the line between modern and primitive? When was the “creative explosion” some have sought that marked humanity’s emergence from the darkness? As yet, there is no generally agreed-upon answer— except that the shift came much earlier than the important events in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. One publication from the American Historical Association begins history ten millennia ago, with the commencement of agriculture.10 Many world historians would happily accept that starting point, but choosing it puts them in an odd dilemma. For the evidence is increasingly clear that the different agricultural revolutions around the world that marked the beginning of the Neolithic era were less a brilliant cultural invention than an unhappy compromise forced upon societies by global climate changes.11 Rather than the spark of human genius first appearing with the domestication of plants and animals, it seems to have been well-established among the much earlier hardy bands of hunters and gatherers who had spread from the Tropics and colonized the Earth’s temperate and arctic zones, in the process acquiring and displaying extraordinary knowledge about minerals, plants, and animals. Long before settled agricultural societies, people devised new religious practices, created forms of art (and presumably music and dance), and invented languages whose rhetorical and poetic qualities they would not have been slow to recognize. Was there a clear watershed in those earlier transformations that might be seen as the beginning of history? Some have seen an apparent quickening of human creativity some 15,000 years ago in the extraordinary cave art of Lascaux and elsewhere. But the diligent archaeologists keep pushing the

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frontier deeper into the past. For a time, the creative explosion was put at about 35,000 years ago, but the Blombos Cave site in South Africa now yields compelling evidence of stone tools from 70,000 years ago, that are so finely worked that the motivation for their making had to have been artistic rather than utilitarian.12 The quest for the “creative explosion” that marked the beginning of human history may be as elusive as that for the Snark. The evidence is mounting that no such event occurred. Rather than cultural creativity evolving after the beginnings of biological humanity, we are getting near to concluding that the anatomically modern Homo sapiens of one or two hundred thousand years ago were fully modern culturally and intellectually as well.13 Some would argue that the members of Homo erectus, an earlier human species with smaller brains, were nevertheless clever enough to make their way from Africa to Java by 1.8 million years ago. Either date is a far cry from the conventionally accepted debut of history 6,000– 10,000 years ago, and even further from Big History’s starting point, with the Big Bang now recalculated to some 13 billion years ago. If the quest is elusive, it is also instructive. Thoughtful people will differ on where to start a survey of world history, but questioning where history begins forces us to confront the prejudices and once excusable ignorance that have defined history so narrowly that it excludes not just the thousands of years before despotic civilization but also much of humanity since that time. Concern for where the human story begins is not a quest for completeness for its own sake, nor for political correctness. Rather, as David Christian perceived, it is a matter of finding the appropriate context for asking those big questions that students of history need to wrestle with: Where did we come from? What makes us different from the rest of nature? What, for all our special gifts, ties our species’ fate to that of our living planet?

NOTES

1. D. Christian, “The case for ‘Big History,’” Journal of World History, 2, 1991, pp. 223–38; E. Eakin, “For Big History, the past begins at the beginning,” New York Times, January 12, 2002. 2. W. H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1963), quotation from the New American Library edition, p. 19; K. Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, tr. M. Bullock (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; first German edition 1949), pp. v, 28. 3. I am indebted to M. J. Hudson’s essay on “Prehistory” in the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (London, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), pp. 958– 9. 4. E. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982). 5. For a quick overview, see J. G. Reid, “Ethnohistory,” Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, ed. K. Boyd (London, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), pp. 267– 8. 6. Jaspers, p. 28.

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7. P. J. Watson, “Prehistory,” in The American Historical Association’s Guide to Historical Literature, 3rd edn., ed. M. B. Norton (New York, Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 33–4. 8. B. Fagan, The Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World (London, Thames and Hudson, 1990); B. Fagan, From the Black Land to the Fifth Sun: The Science of Sacred Sites (Reading, Mass., Perseus Books, 1998); B. Fagan, World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction, 4th edn. (New York, Longman, 1999); B. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York, Basic Books, 2000). 9. J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, Norton, 1977), p. 25. 10. Watson notes pragmatically, “For the purposes of this section, the coverage of prehistory starts with the Neolithic and ends when documentation (ancient history) begins” (p. 34). 11. A good summary of the evidence and bibliography will be found in R. J. Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind’s First Three Million Years, 4th edn. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 268–330. 12. J. N. Wilford, “Artifacts in Africa suggest an earlier start of modern human behavior,” New York Times, December 2, 2001. 13. See the compelling arguments lucidly put forth by S. McBreaty and A. S. Brooks, “The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution, 39, 2000, pp. 453– 563. I owe this reference to D. Christian.

H I S T O R Y A N D S C I E N C E A F T E R T H E C H R O N O ME T R I C R E VO L U T I O N David Christian

This paper describes a transformation in our understanding of the past, a transformation whose full significance has not yet been adequately appreciated. The transformation is associated with a revolution in the techniques used to date past events. I will argue that this “chronometric revolution,” which occurred in the middle of the 20th century, has large implications for our understanding of both history, and of the relationship between history and science. The first part of this essay reviews the changing relationship between history and the sciences in the western world over several centuries. The second part describes the “chronometric revolution.” The discipline of history has been transformed by two great chronometric revolutions. One occurred several millennia ago, after the appearance of writing. Written records made it possible, for the first time, to assign absolute dates to events many generations in the past. The second revolution occurred soon after the Second World War. It allowed us to assign reliable absolute dates to events extending back

This selection is an edited version of the original publication. David Christian’s “History and Science after the Chronometric Revolution,” is from from Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context, ed. Steven J. Dirk and Mark L. Lupisella (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2009), 441– 62.

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to the very origins of the universe. The third part explores some of the consequences of the chronometric revolution. By expanding our vision of the past to eras well before the appearance of our own species, the chronometric revolution historicized disciplines such as cosmology, geology, and biology and brought them closer in their methodologies to the discipline of history. The fourth part argues that the idea of increasing complexity offers a powerful thematic link between this newly discovered cluster of historically oriented disciplines. Over 13 billion years, increasingly complex entities have appeared in the universe, and modern human society may be one of the most complex of all these entities. Finally, the expanded vision of the past made possible by the chronometric revolution raises important questions about the distinctive nature of human history. I will argue that our species is distinguished by two complementary “emergent” properties. The first is an exceptional ability to adapt to different environments. The second is a unique capacity for seeking and finding “meaning.” As a species we have a quite exceptional ability to keep finding new ways of adapting to our environments. I will argue that the source of this ability is “collective learning”— the ability, unique to our species, to share learned information with precision and in great volume. That ability in turn is linked to our propensity for finding “meaning” through the sharing of symbols. In the light of these arguments, I will suggest that the expanded past revealed by the chronometric revolution allows us to redefine our sense of the past in general and of human history in particular.

“ C H R O N O M E T R I C ” R E VO L U T I O N S

By “chronometry,” I mean the techniques used to assign absolute dates to past events. Chronometry is fundamental to historical thought. Without absolute dates, we can say nothing rigorous about the past because our evidence consists of a disorganized mass of information with no chronological structure. A rigorous understanding of the past requires not just evidence in general, but evidence that can be ordered chronologically, because without a precise sense of temporal order, we cannot discuss causation. As Collingwood wrote, the historian’s business is “to apprehend the past as a thing in itself, to say for example that so many years ago such-and-such events actually happened.”1 Unfortunately, chronometry is one of those issues that is so fundamental that it can easily drop out of our consciousness. In his massive study of the evolution of modern European historiography, Hayden White writes that “chronicle,” or the ordering of events in time, is the most basic level of “conceptualization in the historical work.” He then proceeds to ignore problems of chronology almost entirely in the 400 pages that follow.2 A simple analogy may help to more clearly bring out the fundamental significance of chronometry. Imagine that looking at the past is like looking into a cave. Sunlight may allow us to map the entrance to the cave quite precisely. Further in, we may be able to see things, but the relationship between objects gets harder to gauge, and our mapping soon loses precision. Then there is total darkness. We have no idea how far back the cave

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goes, or what is there. So we really don’t know if the bits we can see are representative of the whole cave or not. The truth is that our knowledge of the cave depends less on what is actually there than on the available illumination. The same is true of our knowledge of the past. Without knowing the full extent of the past, we have no idea whether the events we can see are typical of larger patterns or simply contingent products of particular eras, societies, or conjunctures. A statistician might say that the sample from which historians generalize is seriously skewed for the simple reason that we have no idea how or by how much it is skewed! If that is true, it makes all the larger generalizations of historians suspect. Until recently, historians tended to ignore the problem because there was little that could be done about it. In practice, history meant the study of those parts of the past for which we could construct chronologically structured narratives, whether or not they were representative of the past in general. As this argument suggests, our understanding of the past is critically dependent on “chronometry.” So we need to think very carefully about chronometric techniques and how they have shaped the history discipline and our sense of the past in general. Chronometric techniques have passed through two large revolutions. In societies without writing, dates depended entirely on human memory. But memory could assign plausible dates for only a few generations. It is true that oral traditions can retain a vast amount of information about the past; the difficulty they face is how to order that information chronologically. Where the chronological precision of collective memory fades, the past loses shape, turning into what Aboriginal Australians call the “dreamtime,” a time with lots of events but little chronology. The first chronometric revolution was a by-product of the invention of writing from about five millennia ago. Writing made it possible to assign plausible absolute dates to events that had occurred centuries or even millennia before the present. And it was the only reliable method of doing so. That is why it became the basis for the discipline of history, the discipline that specialized in reconstructing the past. Written documents or inscriptions lit up new areas of the past. But of course the illumination they provided depended on the existence of writing. And this was a more severe limitation than is generally recognized. History based on written documents can assign dates only to human history (not to natural history unless it was described by someone); and only to those parts of human history recorded by the scribes of religious or governmental bureaucracies. History therefore tended to exclude the natural world. Even worse, it excluded most humans, with the exception of those elite groups who wrote: government officials, rulers, and literati. These limitations shaped our understanding of the very nature of history well into the 20th century. H. G. Wells regretted that, in his attempt to write a universal history, he could assign no dates before the first Olympiad, 776 BCE.3 Geologists and archaeologists had begun to construct increasingly sophisticated systems of relative dating in the 19th century, but they could offer no absolute dates before the appearance of written records.4 As a result of the first chronometric revolution, in all literate societies and for several

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millennia, history came to mean something like: the study of the past on the basis of written documents. Unfortunately, the dominant role of written evidence made it all too easy to confuse the past as illuminated by written documents with the past in general. Eventually, this view of how we should study the past came to seem so natural that it was built into our taxonomies of knowledge. “No documents, no history,” wrote Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos in a textbook published in English in 1898.5 “History cannot discuss the origin of society,” wrote Leopold von Ranke despairingly, as he attempted a universal history, “for the art of writing, which is the basis of historical knowledge, is a comparatively late invention. . . . The province of History is limited by the means at her command, and the historian would be over-bold who should venture to unveil the mystery of the primeval world, the relation of mankind to God and nature.”6 That our sense of the past must be based on written evidence is still a widely held view among historians. Let me quote Appleby and her colleagues once more: “Because they are most often found in texts, the remnants of the past usually present themselves in words.” 7 All in all, though the first chronometric revolution extended our chronologies by many generations, it also left us with an extremely distorted vision of the past. Our “sample” of the past excluded most of the natural world, most of the Paleolithic era and at least half of the Agrarian era. And even within the periods that it could describe, most humans remained invisible until the last century or two. The situation was transformed by a second chronometric revolution that dates to the middle of the 20th century. This cast a flood of light on those parts of the cave of the past that had remained in darkness, and by doing so it promised to revolutionize our understanding of history in general. The second chronometric revolution began with the discovery of radioactivity by Marie and Pierre Curie in the 1890s. Then in the first decade of the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford realized that radioactive materials decay with such regularity that they could provide a sort of clock for events in the natural world. If you could measure accurately the extent to which a lump of radioactive material had decayed, by measuring the by-products of radioactive decay, you could estimate when the lump was formed. Rutherford illustrated these ideas by attempting to date a lump of pitchblende (an ore of uranium). He found it to be about 500 million years old, much older than the standard contemporary estimates of Earth itself.8 Arthur Holmes used similar techniques to estimate absolute dates for the geological time scale soon after Rutherford’s demonstration. However, many practical difficulties had to be overcome before these techniques could be used routinely, and that is why they did not revolutionize our sense of the past until after World War II. Willard Libby, from the University of Chicago, had worked on the Manhattan project, specializing in the difficult task of separating different isotopes of uranium from each other. These were precisely the skills needed to develop the program Rutherford had imagined half a century earlier. After the war, Libby applied the same techniques to the task of separating out different isotopes of carbon in order to measure precisely

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the rates of decay of materials containing radioactive isotopes of carbon (carbon 14). In 1952, he published the first edition of a pioneering text on Radiocarbon Dating. Though important difficulties remained, such as the need to calibrate C14 dates carefully, from the 1950s, radiometric dating techniques began to be used more generally by archaeologists. They worked well for dates since about 50,000 years ago. Other radiometric techniques were soon developed that used other materials with different rates of decay, so they could determine dates at larger scales. One of the most important depended on the decay of uranium to lead, a sequence that allows measurements over many hundreds of millions of years. In 1953, Clair Patterson, of the California Institute of Technology, used this sequence to establish that Earth itself was about 4.55 billion-years-old, by estimating the breakdown of uranium to lead in a meteorite from the Barringer crater in Arizona. From the 1950s, a whole series of radiometric dating techniques were developed, as well as other, entirely unrelated techniques such as dendrochronology (the counting of tree rings), genetic dating (used to estimate when different species diverged from each other), and a series of special techniques for measuring the expansion of the universe that now allow us to date the very beginnings of the universe to 13.7 billion years ago. Suddenly, it turned out that it was possible to construct rigorous chronologies not just for human history, but also for the history of living organisms (by dating fossils), Earth itself, and even the entire universe. It was as if the entire cave of the past had been illuminated by fires reaching right back to the very deepest part. For the first time, it became possible to start mapping the past in its entirety rather than just those few patches that were dateable using written evidence. This was the chronometric counterpart of the construction of the first modern world maps in the sixteenth century. At last, we could see (at least in outline), and we could even date, the entire past!

HIS TORY AND SCIENCE AF TER THE CHRONOMETRIC R E VO L U T I O N : S H A R E D S T O R I E S A N D M E T H O D S ?

Within a decade or two the dateable past had expanded from just a few thousand years to many billions of years. This transformed the relation between history and science, because it gave science itself a historical dimension. Geology, biology, and astronomy all became rigorous historical disciplines, just as history had once tried to become a science.9 Cosmologists began to describe in detail the history of a universe that had evolved over 13 billion years; geologists reconstructed the history of Earth, its interior, and its atmosphere over 4.5 billion years; and biologists began to reconstruct the history of life itself, from the first single-celled organisms that had appeared almost 4 billion years ago, to the immense variety of species present today. No longer could history claim to be the only scholarly discipline interested in rigorous reconstructions of a vanished past. Once equipped with plausible chronologies of their own, cosmology, geology, and biology became more interested in reconstructing the histories of the entities that they dealt with. And as they did so they found themselves

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facing the same fundamental challenge as historians: that of reconstructing a vanished and somewhat wayward past from the few scraps of evidence that had survived into the present. The challenge was similar even if different disciplines used different archives— historians using, say, those of the papacy (Ranke’s favorite archive), while cosmologists studied the cosmic background radiation. Like history, such disciplines could no longer base their truth claims primarily on experimental data repeatable more or less at will.10 The chronometric revolution also has the potential to transform the traditional history discipline by making available to it a much more complete account of the past. This should allow historians to more rigorously pursue questions about the typicality of the behaviors and the communities they study using conventional kinds of evidence. How typical are the state-level societies that have been the main focus of a discipline largely dependent on the written record? It is now possible to say, reasonably precisely, that such societies have emerged only in the most recent millennia of a human history that extends back more than 100,000 years. Chronologically speaking, state-level societies are atypical. They represent the result of a long period of very slow change extending back through at least two Ice Ages. Historians have been studying only the tip of a chronological iceberg. How typical are human beings, themselves? We now have powerful reasons for believing that the types of community studied by historians have never existed before in the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth. This means that, in principle at least, it should now be possible to identify more precisely than ever before what is unique about human history in general.

NOTES

This essay develops some ideas first explored in “Historia, Complejidad y Revolución Cronométrica” [“History, Complexity and the Chronometric Revolution,”] an article commissioned for Revista de Occidente, April 2008, no. 323, 27– 57. 1. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History. rev. ed., Jan van der Dussen, Oxford University, Paperback, 1994, p. 3. 2. Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, p. 5. The word, “chronicle,” appears only once in the index, and White’s real focus is on the challenges that begin after each known event has been arranged “as an element of a series.” p. 7. 3. H. G. Wells, Outline of History. 3rd ed., 1921 [1st ed., 1920], p. 1102. 4. As Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn put it: “Before World War II for much of archaeology virtually the only reliable absolute dates were historical ones—Tutankhamun reigned in the 14th century BC, Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC.” Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: Methods and Practice. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991, p. 101. 5. Cited in Dan Smail, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (December 2005): 1337–1361, 1351. 6. Cited in Dan Smail, “In the Grip of Sacred History.” p. 1350. 7. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History, p. 252; Ranke’s opinion counts because

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he is so widely regarded as the founder of the modern tradition of solid, archive-based empirical historical scholarship. 8. His demonstration immediately challenged the contemporary idea that Earth was at most 100 or 200 million years old, which was based on calculations by Lord Kelvin of the speed at which an Earth-sized body should have cooled down. 9. For a good short discussion, see W. H. McNeill, “History and the Scientific Worldview,” History and Theory 37, no. 1 (1998): 1–13. 10. In fact, the argument that historical knowledge could not be scientific because the past could not be replicated experimentally had always been flawed. Towards the end of his life, Karl Popper, who spent much of his life trying to establish clear “demarcation criteria” to distinguish science from nonscience, rejected the idea that historical disciplines (and he was referring, in this instance, to biology and the principle of natural selection), were nonscientific because they did not deal with replicable events. He wrote: “some people think that I have denied scientific character to the historical sciences, such as paleontology, or the history of the evolution of life on Earth; or to say, the history of literature, or of technology, or of science. This is a mistake, and I here wish to affirm that these and other historical sciences have in my opinion scientific character: their hypotheses can in many cases be tested. It appears as if some people would think that the historical sciences are untestable because they describe unique events. However, the description of unique events can very often be tested by deriving from them testable predictions or retrodictions.” Karl Popper. [Letter on] Evolution. New Scientist 87, no. 1215 (Aug. 1980): 611, 621.

WO R L D IN G H I S T O R Y Daniel A. Segal The West is not in the West. It is a project not a place. —EDOUARD GLISSANT, Caribbean Discourse

For as long as history has been a discipline, which is to say a century or so, history has been tied to a subset of humanity, one commonly identified in geographic terms. As a discipline, history has focused primarily on Europe or, more broadly, on the West, construed as an extension of Europe— as “Europe plus,” one might say. Concomitantly, history has paid relatively little attention to the rest of the world. This essay examines both this circumscribed gaze on humanity by disciplinary history and the difficulties of overcoming it—that is, the difficulties of worlding history. I argue that history’s provincialism—what I would term its “Western problem”— cannot be overcome by means of an empiricist strategy of simply adding the history of other places and peoples to history as we know and teach it. The reason for this is that exclusion from history is something This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Daniel A. Segal’s “Worlding History” is from Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Perspectives on Social Science History, ed. Harvey J. Graff et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 81– 98.

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more than simply neglecting Others. Rather, exclusion from history is organized along a gradient scale of social evolution defined, at its apical point, by the European/Western Self. It is not, in short, that Others are simply overlooked, but more precisely that they are placed before history or, at the very least, at various points or stages before history’s leading edge. Adding accounts of the past of other places and other peoples does not itself remove, or even speak to, this organizing principle; quite to the contrary, additional histories are all too easily captured by and placed into this social evolutionary scheme. Worlding history thus requires not just histories of more and more places but a deployment of theory. It is in this sense that I advocate a dialogue between history and particular strands of the social sciences, most notably anthropological critiques of social evolutionary models and anthropological relativizing and defamiliarization.1 It is worth noting that historical writing and research, even as practiced in Europe and the West, has not always exhibited the specific pattern of geographic provincialism with which we are familiar. This pattern itself is a historical phenomenon. Back in the nineteenth century— to lean on an arbitrary division of time—historical scholarship in Europe and North America foregrounded national units much more than any supranational unit, whether Europe or the West. In this context, history contributed a great deal to the project of substantiating the existence of specific national units, be they units crafted along the lines of previously existing monarchal realms (as with France) or units with novel borders (as with Germany).2 Much, though certainly not all, of this nationalist and nation-making historical scholarship was produced by scholars who focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the national unit with which they shared an “identity” (e.g., French historians who wrote about France, U.S. historians who wrote about the United States, and so on).3 So too, those historians who did focus their work on nations other than “their own” generally exhibited high levels of identification with, if not chauvinism about, their chosen national subject. If one looks in the aggregate at the various national units that were the foci of various historians’ gazes, one finds that together they comprise the supranational unit of Europe/the West, for very little of this nationalist historical practice focused on places outside of, or other to, Europe/the West. One could then say that this earlier practice of history prefigured, or prepared the way for, the discipline’s subsequent linkage to the larger European and Western civilizational units. Yet it is important to see that this linkage with a larger areal and civilizational unit was incompletely realized before the early twentieth century. The differences in the geographies of historical practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are subtle but nontrivial. To begin with, let us recall that in the nineteenth century, the larger civilizational unit that contained the aggregate of nationstates we now deem “Western” was most commonly identified not as “Western” but as “Christian.” Moreover, as much as the national units within Christian civilization were themselves treated as historical objects, this was largely not the case for “Christian civilization” itself. Rather, what substantiated Christian civilization as a totality was

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less historical representation than appeals to the revealed “Truth of the Gospel.” By contrast, during the first decades of the twentieth century, historians increasingly took European/Western civilization as a subject of historical study and used this larger civilizational unit, in a variety of ways, to enframe more narrowly focused studies of national units. Thus, the movement upward in scale of the historian’s gaze—from nation-state to a larger civilizational unit—took place as an aspect of a refashioning of that civilizational Self, from “Christian” to “Western.” This new linkage of history with “the West” was at the same time an aspect of history’s refashioning as an academic discipline, for in its day this shift was understood as involving a departure from nationalist historical work that was chauvinistic and romantic, in favor of work that was cosmopolitan and disinterested, even scientific. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that part of what imbued “the West” as a historical subject with (seemingly) universal status was that “the West” was a unit above and beyond the often divisive nationalisms that had been championed by the earlier (and protodisciplinary) instantiation of historical practice. In the United States, the new cosmopolitanism of disciplinary history was accelerated, if not pioneered, by the New Historians, and under their influence it came to be manifest in the discipline’s signature course offering for undergraduates—“Western Civ,” which emerged in the 1920s and became an established pedagogic genre in the 1930s. More generally, the new cosmopolitanism of disciplinary history was manifest in the gradual emergence of a model stipulating that departments of history, in order to be accorded a certain level of professional status, had to have sufficient coverage of the entire “Western tradition” and not just their own national(ized) history. In this way, in both scholarship and the curriculum of higher education, national histories, as much as they continued to be produced, were placed in a new context and, concomitantly, were no longer quite what they had been in an earlier moment: whatever was true of the work of an individual historian, history as a discipline now placed national histories in a larger, more cosmopolitan, framework. Indeed, even when no mention of a larger civilizational unit occurred in a historical work, this new, more cosmopolitan, stance or voice could itself indicate and provide a new contextualization of national histories. In recent decades, however, the larger Western framing provided by disciplinary history has ceased to be seen as robustly cosmopolitan. In the wake of the dismantling of European empires and of the diversification of student bodies at U.S. colleges and universities, history’s privileging of the West now appears as provincial, much as overtly nationalist histories appeared chauvinistic and romantic (i.e., unscientific) in the early twentieth century, as history coalesced as a discipline. Moreover, in this new context, the political valence of Western Civ has shifted dramatically: it has become a neoconservative cause. So too, the cosmopolitan impulse that had previously produced Western Civ now animates concerted efforts to world history—that is, to shift the unmarked locale of history upward once more, from the West to the world. This can be seen in at least two sites or projects. One of these projects aims to extend further the geographic coverage

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of history departments, a move that is heavily dependent on both the way positions are defined upon retirements of senior faculty and the distribution of areal expertise among new Ph.D.s. The second project aims to formulate a survey of World History that would take the place in the curriculum once held by Western Civ—that is, as both a widely accepted element of general education and as the standard introductory course to the study of history. It is this second project that I will focus on here. My comments on this project reflect a doubled or twofold perspective. In recent years, the primary focus of my scholarly work has been the history of undergraduate level Western Civ survey courses, from their initial emergence in the 1920s up through the present moment.4 Yet along with pursuing this research on the history of Western Civ, I have also been developing and teaching a survey of modern world history, one designed and represented as a more worldly, less provincial, alternative to Western Civ. In short, I myself have participated in the pedagogic project of worlding history. My coeval positioning as a scholar and practitioner has made me keenly aware of what I term a “gotcha-hermeneutics.” What I mean to invoke by this confessedly improbable term is the extent to which much contemporary cultural criticism proceeds by catching practitioners (museum curators, filmmakers, and so on) in unwitting articulations of ideologies of domination without ever indicating fully just what would count as a satisfactory reform of their practice. As valuable as much of this work of cultural critique is (and I have participated in it myself), what is worrisome to me is that it risks suggesting that it is only critics and theorists who can do antihegemonic work. My goal, by contrast, is to look for ways to bring criticism and theory into practice— and specifically into pedagogic practice. When we review attempts to world history in recent decades, we find that the most common strategy for carrying out this project has been to add histories of other places and other peoples: given the West, add the rest. This is in no case more visible than in the way many publishers in the 1990s produced world history textbooks for undergraduate level survey courses. Taking an already published Western Civ textbook for which they held the copyright, these publishers produced a cognate work for the world history market by hiring new authors to write chapters on other parts of the world, and then inserted those chapters into the existing text. On its own, without any further refinement, such an additive approach is an empiricist strategy. It seeks to world history by filling in geographic gaps with additional material about other places. While no one can doubt that worlding does indeed require greater attention to other parts of the world, this additive strategy quickly gives rise to a compelling reason not to take worlding too far or too seriously. The objection is that given limits of time, one can add only so much; teaching history— and in particular, teaching a survey course—would be impossible if one kept adding more and more of the world. To develop a more focused and effective approach to worlding history requires that we recognize that history’s provincialism is something more than the neglect of the rest of the world. As a means of illustrating how better to understand the provincialism of

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Figure 1 Photograph of a !Kung woman used in Challenge of the West as a figure in the text’s prologue, “Before Civilization.” The photograph was taken by anthropologist Marjorie Shostak in the 1970s. [The photo that appears in the original essay was not available for this edited reprint. The image above is a close-up view of the same woman and in the same setting as appears in the photo in the original essay. Photo courtesy of Daniel A. Segal and AnthroPhoto, www.Anthrophoto.com.]

history— and specifically, of history as taught to our undergraduates—I want to turn to two figures from a recent Western Civ textbook, The Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age. Published in 1995, this textbook was authored by a team of prestigious historians led by Lynn Hunt. Before focusing on the two images I have selected however, it is worth pausing to reflect on the very title of this textbook. For my purposes, what is striking is that in the title itself, we find not one but two voices.5 As any faculty member considering using this book would know, in an earlier moment, the words preceding “the West’’ in the title of a work of this genre would have been something like “The Rise of . . .” or “The Heritage of . . .” For faculty then— and for some students as well— the phrase, “The Challenge of the West,” reads exactly as if a traditional or older voice has been replaced or corrected by a revisionist voice. Yet the result is not a happy one, for if the reader moves past the title to the work itself, s/he finds no clear explanation of what is meant by the phrase “the challenge of the West,” nor any evidence that this phrase reflects the text’s contents. Rather, if one reads the text itself, one finds a largely conventional narrative of the history of Western Civ modified, most notably, by attention to gender.

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One thus might hypothesize that the title has more to do with positioning and marketing this textbook— as one that avoids either celebrating or demonizing the West—than encapsulating it. Turning to the two images I have selected from this text, the first is a photograph of a !Kung San woman living in the Kalahari (see figure 1). Though it is reproduced here in black and white, in Challenge of the West it appears in color. The photograph was taken sometime in the 1970s, and the photographer is the anthropologist Marjorie Shostak, author of Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981), a work that has been widely used in introductory level courses in both anthropology and women’s studies.6 In Challenge of the West, this photograph appears very close to the beginning of the work; it is printed on the third page of the prologue, which is itself titled “Before Civilization.” To be even more specific, it appears in a section of the prologue given the subtitle, “The Paleolithic Period,” a phrase that appears, as a running head, immediately above the photograph. Moreover, the legend beneath the photograph tells us that “this woman . . . exemplifies the only way human beings could support themselves before the invention of agriculture.” Elsewhere on the same page, the text reports that “the !Kung San” are among the “few small groups of people” who “still live” in the manner of “prehistoric groups” (1995, xxxix). In short, at the very beginning of a text that serves as an overall history of Western civilization, we have a full-color photograph of a dark-skinned, African woman, more or less coeval with ourselves, deployed as an illustration of human life in “the Paleolithic period” of “prehistory”— and of human life “before civilization.” The second photograph, also produced in color in the textbook, is of a man and a woman— each recognizably “Middle Eastern”—working in a field of grain (see figure 2). This photograph was also taken by a prominent anthropologist—namely Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1986); though not taught as widely as Nisa, this too is a work that has gained considerable usage in undergraduate courses. The photograph is from Abu-Lughod’s ethnographic research with Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins, though the textbook conflates the photographed subjects— quite discordantly, as they would see it—with Egyptians. In Challenge of the West, this photograph appears in chapter one, a chapter concerned with the general topic of “First Civilizations” and placed, in the narrative, immediately after the prologue, “Before Civilization.” As laid out on the page, Abu-Lughod’s photograph is paired with a reproduction of a painting from ancient Egypt, in which we also find people working with grain. The didactic point of the pairing is made explicit in the legends that accompany these images. The first legend tells us that “techniques of harvesting and winnowing grain . . . have changed little in many parts of contemporary Egypt.” The second adds, “Some people”— an inchoate referential phrase the photograph serves to illustrate—“still use the method of winnowing grain that ancient Egyptians used, throwing it into the air by hand” (Hunt et al. 1995, 12). So here we find brown-skinned persons of “the Near East,” persons alive (like us) in the time of color photography, figured as the equivalents of an earlier time and earlier civilization— one of the very “first,” we are told.

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Figure 2 Photograph of an Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin man and woman winnowing barley that was used in Challenge of the West as a figure in Chapter 1, “First Civilizations.” The photograph was taken by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, most likely in 1987 (e-mail from L. Abu-Lughod to the author, January 20, 1999). [Photo courtesy of Lila Abu-Lughod, Daniel A. Segal, and AnthroPhoto, www.anthrophoto.com.]

Moreover, just as the photograph of these persons is situated in a chapter that follows an account of “prehistory,” itself graced by a photograph of a black African woman, it in turn is followed by a much more extensive and historical narration of the West. The sequencing of colors, places, times, and civilizational stages is anything but nuanced. It is worth noting that both of these photographs moved from the sites where they were taken (the Kalahari and the Egyptian western desert) to their locations in this textbook (in sections on “before civilization” and “first civilizations,” respectively) without the knowledge of either Shostak or Abu-Lughod, and vice versa, without the authors of The Challenge of the West knowing very much about the persons in the photographs or their immediate cultural-social contexts. There are a number of reasons why the circulation of these images did not also involve a circulation of greater biographical and/or ethnographic knowledge about the persons represented in them. To begin with, historians generally do not, as part of their professional practice, read ethnographic texts. In addition, much of the work selecting and obtaining illustrative material for textbooks is handled not by academic authors but by a photography editor or researcher in the employ of the publisher. For persons in such positions, what is of import is not the cultural-social context outside of the photographic frame, but the visual content of an image and access to legal rights to reproduce it. In this regard, let us note that in U.S. and international law, these legal rights are only rarely attached to the subjects of photography, as distinct from the person who operates the camera (“the photographer”). Moreover, in the case of both photographs, the chain of connections between the authors of Challenge of the West and the photographed subjects was even more extended and indirect, for both Shostak and Abu-Lughod had deposited their photographs (and the legal rights to reproduce them) with a specialized photographic agency, AnthroPhoto File, an institution whose role in the circulation of ethnographic images has been undeservedly neglected by historians of anthropology.7 Given this constellation of factors, it is not surprising that the exchange that mediated the movement of these images into Challenge of the West and their consequent recontextualization therein, was not a rich cross-cultural (or even cross-disciplinary) dialogue, but a monetary and legal transaction— specifically, a royalty payment. What these images illustrate, moreover, is that the Western-centrism of Western Civ is not a matter of simply neglecting non-Western Others, but of inserting them into a preexisting social evolutionary emplotment of human existence: it is this emplotment that is, quite precisely, the new context that has been provided for these images. Moreover, this same pattern of emplotment—with no more than minor variations— can be found throughout the history of the teaching of Western Civ, going back to the publication of the very first Western Civ textbook in 1926. Others have always been present between the covers of Western Civ texts, but always located as precursors to the West.8 So too, and of more immediate importance to my discussion of worlding, we can find very much this same emplotment of human diversity in the way publishers over the last decade have retrofitted Western Civ texts as World History texts. What publishers have

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added to the former to make the latter is revealed by noting the areal expertise of the authors hired to write the supplement that is added to the older, Western texts. To give one example, the cover of Civilization in the West lists three authors, all historians of Europe; the cover of the “World History’’ sibling of this work, Societies and Cultures in World History, lists one additional author, a professor of East Asian history.9 Similarly, if one compares Western Civilization with its sibling work, World History, the additional author is also a professor of East Asian history.10 As these examples suggest, the primary ingredient that “worlds” history in these textbooks is the area formerly known as “the Orient”—which is to say the non-European Other that, for some two centuries, has most been accorded the status of a “civilization,” albeit an “ancient” and “stagnant” one. Thus, even when this worlding of history brings in a fair amount of historical information about China and Japan, it inscribes anew the division of humanity into civilization and “peoples without history.”11 It follows from these observations that to “world” history in a robust manner requires not just a supplement—not just adding Others—but a pursuit of the more complex project of contesting received linkages of peoples with times and developmental statuses. This requires dismantling both the practice of encasing human difference in sequenced stages of time and, what is fundamental to this entrenched practice, the very division of human time into prehistory and history. Only by dismantling this binary can we begin to locate all of humanity in history—rather than placing some of humanity before “history” and before “civilization.” A corollary of these points is worth noting as well. As is evident from the example of these two photographs, the social evolutionary matrix I have identified is an interdisciplinary one, for it involves not history as an isolate but history set in relation to anthropology. It thus follows that we cannot contest this matrix unless we are open to reconfiguring the relationship between history and anthropology, and concomitantly, open to reconfiguring the two disciplines themselves. How could it be otherwise, we might ask, given the extent to which the intellectual division of labor between history and anthropology has been based upon a decomposition of humanity into peoples with and without history respectively? But what then is to be done? How can we, as teachers, contest the social evolutionary matrix that links black Africa to prehistory, the Middle East to the beginnings of civilization, and the West to history? To do this effectively requires that we recognize that when a college-level textbook, such as Challenge of the West, places human variation into a social evolutionary matrix, it is unlikely that the textbook is introducing students to ideas unknown to them. Rather, when a textbook does this, it is trafficking in a way of thinking with which students are almost certainly conversant long before they arrive at college. Thus, to contest this scheme, one must do more than abandon it: one must make it visible and open to inquiry. As an initial illustration of what this would involve, consider merely the use of the term “civilization.” Both in responses to my own work on these issues and in other

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contexts, I have heard textbook authors and some faculty who teach these texts assert that in using the concept of “civilization”— as in the phrase “Before Civilization”—the textbooks are not, in fact, subscribing to any scheme of social evolution or ranking of social forms. The argument that is deployed to support this claim is that “civilization” is somehow used in the textbooks in a purely technical sense—that is, to refer to social groups of a certain scale or those possessed of a certain technology— and that no grander theory or understanding is intended or articulated. Such a defense of the term strikes me as naïve, if not disingenuous. Who can believe that even if a textbook stipulates some such technical definition of “civilization,” that doing so is sufficient to exorcise the cluster of evaluative and social evolutionary meanings that today saturate this word? How can conventionalized meanings that are so powerfully enforced in so many other contexts be removed simply by definitional fiat in a textbook? Surely it would be better not to pretend that the word does not mean what it most certainly does mean for most students and, instead, offer our students the tools needed to reflect on the term and its complex history. In this regard, it is worth noting that though they all make use of the civilization concept, in the ways illustrated by Challenge of the West, not a single existing Western Civ or World History textbook provides a sustained discussion of uses and critiques of this concept. What must be added to our textbooks—if we are serious about worlding history, as distinct from being satisfied with the presence of Others behind history—is not just history about more places but the sort of argument Steven Feierman provides. The civilization concept, says Feierman, involves “a complex of elements” that are said to cohere “political and economic hierarchy, towns, commerce and intercommunication, writing, the plough, high densities of population and historical dynamism” (1993, 177). When we look carefully at African histories, however, we find numerous cases in which “the interrelations do not hold” (177), and thus we have no basis for continuing to treat these elements as indices of some distinct stage or form of human sociality. As Feierman concludes: “The elements have no explanatory significance if treated as a check list” (178). Moreover, if we stubbornly insist on using the civilization “complex” when looking at African history, we will disregard and overlook other, quite different, linkages of social institutions. To give just one example, drawing on research by John Janzen, Feierman discusses how trade in the Kongo in the seventeenth century—involving, on an annual basis, ivory from as many as four thousand elephants and as much as forty tons of copper—was supported not by anything recognizable as a “state” per se, but by a dispersed “healing association” or “drum of affliction” (178). The overall point then is that the “civilization” concept serves us poorly in Africa—which is itself sufficient to conclude that it is ill-suited to the project of worlding history. There is a more general lesson here as well. The example of “civilization” shows us that we cannot move forward with the project of worlding history unless we bring theory—by which I mean a self-conscious and critical examination of our own concep-

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tual schemes—into our pedagogy and textbooks. But doing this is no simple matter. Textbooks— as any of us who have read or taught them know— are written in a steadfastly monologic and authoritative voice. They offer a series of declarative sentences about their chosen subject matter, presenting these claims—in Clifford Geertz’s apt phrase— as a “view from nowhere” (2000, 137). By contrast, critical reflection requires a multiplicity of voices: to examine a concept such as “civilization” requires both that we ventriloquate, with as much integrity as possible, voice(s) that endorse and use this concept, and that we respond with other, critical, voices and perspectives. So too, critical reflection about such a concept requires that we self-consciously look at language and habits of representation, and that we suspend our easy comfort with making declarations about the world “out there,” as if it were possible to know that world without the mediation of language, broadly construed. In sum, critical reflection— or if one wishes, “theory”—is always both dialogic and metalinguistic. As this suggests, for our textbooks to provide students entrée to critical reflection about a concept such as “civilization” would involve a fundamental change, not just in the geographic coverage of textbooks but in their prose. And we should not expect that this would be welcomed, or even permitted, without a struggle. The writing that would result would be “complex”; it would be “demanding.” It would require that students read not just words and sentences, but that they track voices as they read and that they reflect on the constitutive powers of language and the conventional character of representations. But it is just such writing, at least as much as any matter of content, that is policed and disciplined by the editors employed by textbook publishers, as expressed in their demands that textbook prose be “accessible” and transparent. My point is certainly not to advocate or excuse bad writing or murkiness. Nonetheless, if we are serious about worlding history, we must be prepared to write and speak against the grain of common sense, for it is in common sense, as much as in our textbooks, that Others are located not in history but in its wake. NOTES

1. For a discussion of the distinctive character of anthropological relativizing and defamiliarization, see Segal 1999. 2. On the relationship of U.S. nationalism to the more frequently studied European cases, see Segal 1994. 3. On the cultural specificity of notions of identity, see Handler 1994. For an account of nation-states that registers their contingency, see Segal 1988, Handler and Segal 1996. 4. For a fuller account of this research, see Segal 2000. 5. My discussion of voicing in this passage and later in this article draws on the work of Bakhtin, notably Bakhtin 1981, 1984. 6. I was unable to obtain much specific information about this photograph or the woman depicted in it. Marjorie Shostak died before I began to investigate the image. I have

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spoken about the image with her husband, anthropologist Melvin Konner, who also worked with the !Kung, but he did not recognize the woman in the photo or know of the specific circumstances in which the photo was taken. 7. For information about Anthro-Photo, I am grateful for discussions with Lila AbuLughod, as well as with Nancy De Vore, who runs Anthro-Photo. 8. For documentation of this point, see Segal 2000. 9. Compare Kishlansky, Geary, and O’Brien, Civilization in the West, 2d ed., with Kishlansky, Geary, O’Brien, and Wong, Societies and Cultures in World History. In the fuller list of credits given inside this textbook, five additional scholars are identified as having contributed smaller supplements to the text. Of these five, one contributed still more material on China, two contributed material on the Middle East, another contributed material on Africa, and the last contributed material on Latin America. The lesser billing given to these five authors indicates accurately the lesser attention given to the additional parts of the world for which they had the responsibility. Moreover, the patterns of coverage and exclusion are complex. One needs to consider, for example, the absence of any contributors with expertise about Oceania or Native Americans, as well as the selection of topics within, say, African or Latin American history. 10. Compare Spielvogel, Western Civilization, with Duiker and Spielvogel, World History. 11. This paragraph is drawn from Segal 2000, 797–98; the phrase, “peoples without history,” is drawn from Eric Wolf’s (1982) own ironic use of the phrase.

REFERENCE LIST

Abu-Lughod, L. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist and edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duiker, W., and J. Spielvogel, 1994. World History. Minneapolis: West Pub. Co. Feierman, S. 1993. “African Histories and the Dissolution of World History.” In Africa and the Disciplines, edited by Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. 2000. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Handler, R. 1994. “Is ‘Identity’ a Useful Cross-cultural Concept?” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by David Levinson and Melvin Amber. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Hunt, L., T. Martin, B. Rosensqein, R. O. Hsia, and B. G. Smith. 1995. The Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age. Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath. Kishlansky, M. P. Geary, and P. O’Brien. 1991. Civilization in the West, 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins.

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Kishlansky, M., P. Geary, P. O’Brien, and B. Wong. 1995. Societies and Cultures in World History. New York: HarperCollins. Segal, D. A. 1988. “Nationalism, Comparatively Speaking.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (3): 300–321. ———. 1994. “Living Ancestors: Nationalism and the Past in Post-Colonial Trinidad and Tobago.” In Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, edited by Jonathan Boyarin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1999. “Ethnographic Classics, Ethnographic Examples: Some Thoughts on the New Cultural Studies and an Old Queer Science.” In Kulturstudien heute (The Contemporary Study of Culture), edited by I. Korneck et al. Wien: Turia und Kant. ———. 2000. “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education.” American Historical Review 105 (3): 770–805. Shostak, M. 1981. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spielvogel, J. 1994. Western Civilization, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: West Pub. Co. Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 5 Cajani, Luigi. “Periodization.” In The Oxford Handbook of World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, 54– 71. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. The author surveys the intellectual history of concepts of periodization, from ancient chronologies that blended myth and history to the recent schemes of William McNeill, Jerry Bentley, and the Big Historians. Cajani expands on the question of why, until the second half of the twentieth century, presumably universal periodizations invariably excluded some, if not most, parts of the inhabited world. Christian, David. “History and Time.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 57, 3 (September 1, 2011): 353– 65. Christian builds on Norbert Elias’s essay Time to emphasize that time is a culturally constructed concept, different from the natural rhythms of daylight and seasons that structure biological life. Recognizing the diversity of the human experience of time is crucial for world historians. Elias, Norbert. Time: An Essay. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Repr. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. This essay grapples with the characteristics of time and how various societies measure and understand its passage. Elias differentiates between the idea of time and the activating of timing, or scheduling, as one way to connect time to specific historical processes. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Repr. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Among this book’s many contributions to anthropology is an early critique of the notion that non-Western societies are consigned to a different time scale. Fabian challenges the notion that anthropologists inhabit the “here and now,” while their subjects represent “there and then.” National Center for History in the Schools. National Standards for History. Basic Edition. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los

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Angeles, 1996. The national guidelines for world history, which continue to serve as an important resource for history educators, broke with curriculum and textbook tradition by organizing study of the past by global eras rather than by different regions and civilizations, each in its own chronological box. This structure was designed to encourage attention to large-scale developments and comparative investigation. Pomeranz, Kenneth. “Teleology, Discontinuity and World History: Periodization and Some Creation Myths of Modernity.” Asian Review of World Histories 1, 2 (2013): 189– 226. http://dx.doi.org/10.12773/arwh.2013.1.2.189. Historians have explored the problem of the origins and meaning of modernity through different lenses of time and space. Pomeranz presents four of these approaches, from the very large scale of evolutionary time to a much smaller one of a few centuries. He argues that no single time scale is adequate to explain modernity. Scholars, he declares, need “to be more careful and explicit than historians often are in thinking about periodization and the implications of using different timescales.” Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Smail argues that recent advances in neuroscience encourage us to think differently about the past, abandoning the idea of prehistory and creating a deep chronology of the evolution of humankind. Stearns, Peter N. “Periodization in World History Teaching: Identifying the Big Changes.” History Teacher 20, 4 (January 1987): 561– 80. Stearns proposes that teachers and textbook authors learn to be more conscious of periodization as a methodological problem, thus encouraging students to see history as something other than “one damn thing after another.” Ward, Kerry. “1745: Ebbs and Flows in the Indian Ocean.” In Asia Inside Out: Changing Times, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 163– 85. Ward argues that tracing events in a single year in the Indian Ocean basin presents different challenges than writing terrestrial history. The seasonal regularity of climate and ocean currents contrasts with cultural variability in marking time and space. Wills, John E., Jr. 1688: A Global History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Eschewing conventional historical explanation for the unfolding panorama of people, places, and events, Wills weaves a detailed tapestry of the glorious diversity that characterized the world in 1688.

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6 WORLD HISTORY AS COMPARISON

IN T R O D U C T I O N

Most world history writing and teaching is in some measure comparative. Like all practitioners of the discipline, world historians work with empirical evidence. Their explanations of historical change, whatever the scale in time, space, and subject matter, must be anchored in examples, cases, or historical moments. And these data are often examined in relation to one another. The scholar who investigates a large-scale development encompassing several regions or localities must, in order to make sense of the data, show how that development played out similarly or differently in a number of places or among a variety of groups. The teacher who introduces students to such global phenomena of modern times as colonialism, nationalism, or the progress of women’s rights must describe specific cases in order to make historical generalizations concrete and intelligible. In most introductory world history courses, instructors probably use comparative strategies informally and spontaneously. In readings and lectures students may often encounter comparison and accompanying classifications, taxonomies, and generalizations without really knowing that a specific methodology is being applied. In their world history educations, students should learn how particular authors, including textbook authors, use comparison. They should also learn how to apply comparative analysis in their essays and exams. Indeed, any class activity that involves comparative thinking— a lecture that models a good example of it, a discussion that prompts inductive reasoning from a set of cases, an exam that assesses the ability to identify

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relevant variables rather than merely set two or more cases side by side—may help students sharpen their critical skills. Comparison, and generalization from comparison, introduces students to a basic analytical technique of the social sciences. It dislodges exceptionalist and parochial assumptions. It highlights the variety and complexity of human experience. It helps fit events into larger wholes. It shows how the apparently inconsequential may be significant. It uncovers possible causal relationships among events occurring in distant parts of the world. It provokes students to consider whether a particular run of events or a distinctive way of doing things in one society was inevitable or natural. As Raymond Grew has written, “Comparison is a means of breaking out of the trenches dug by received conceptions. . . . Conceived comparatively, the historical problem is then more likely to determine the scope of the research—investigation that may require chronological, geographical, and social dimensions that are quite unconventional.”1 The pioneering world history graduate program that Philip Curtin initiated at the University of Wisconsin in 1959 featured comparative analysis both in his lecture course (The World and the West) and in research seminars that examined a historical problem through student presentations of cases drawn from different world areas. Curtin’s description of his own seminar elucidates his comparative method: Over a semester, a group of students worked on a single problem in comparative history. The topic had to be chosen with some care. It had to be divisible into fifteen or twenty cases for comparison, so that each student could present one or two cases for discussion during the course of the semester, and information on each case had to be available in the secondary literature. As the semester progressed, student discussions helped to refine the questions being asked of each new case. Some cases had to be rejected as inappropriate, while others did not work well for lack of sufficient evidence. If all went well, the seminar would arrive at a general statement based on the comparisons. That statement might not be the last word about the problem at hand, but it could usually tell something about the patterns, uniformities, or lack of patterns illustrated by the topic chosen.2

In his introduction to the edited volume Islamic and European Expansion, published in 1993, Michael Adas, a student of Curtin’s in the late 1960s, offers a succinct description of a comparative analytical approach to history of interregional or global scope. In this and other writings, Adas insists that the differences between world history, or what he has more recently termed “grand narrative” or “macronarrative,” and comparative history need to be identified and understood.3 Adas observes that in the 1960s and 1970s, when William McNeill and others were writing emphatically macronarrative works, world historians of the grand narrative persuasion diverged from those who identified themselves as comparativists in significant ways. The former were committed to tracing key themes and processes in a broad global perspective; the latter were intent on the rigor-

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ous application of a method of historical analysis that had long been nurtured mainly by fellow travelers in other social science disciplines.4

For Adas, serious comparative analysis in historical writing means more than casually calling up similarities and differences or making quick analogies. It involves doing what Curtin taught in his research seminars, that is, choosing a world historical process, pattern, or theme worthy of investigation, then selecting a limited set of relevant cases for detailed, systematic study. From the examined cases that prove to be apt, the historian reasons inductively to formulate general inferences and conclusions regarding the historical problem at hand. Prophets of Rebellion, which Adas published in 1979, is a model of precise, systematic comparison of cases drawn from Africa, Asia, and Oceania that illuminates general patterns in millenarian movements as a form of resistance against European colonial rule.5 Adas does not argue that the comparative approach is superior to other ways of studying world history. Rather, deep case comparison and broad narrative can work synergistically to advance understanding of the human past. This requires, however, that historians be self-conscious and explicit about the analytical methods they are using. Patrick Manning, who entered the Wisconsin comparative world history program two years ahead of Adas, addresses comparative methodology in Navigating World History, his professional manual on world-scale research and teaching. In the excerpt we have chosen, Manning addresses the multiple meanings of both “case study” and “comparison” as analytical tools. Like Adas, Manning regards comparison as a specific analytical strategy, which he sets alongside two others. One is the quest to understand connections between historical phenomena; the other is the proper chronological sequencing of developments and thus their relations of cause and effect. Manning posits three distinct historical situations of particular use to comparativists. The first is comparison of cases that have similarities but no historical connection to one another. The second is comparison of cases that are embedded in a single system or process (for example, different cities within the Mongol empire) but that do not significantly influence one another (city A in Iran does not in the context of Mongol imperialism have a known impact on city B in China). The third is comparison that “refers to units that are in contact with one another and that influence one another.” Manning also mentions a fourth meaning of comparison that is most familiar to social scientists: deductive analysis of similar cases to test a particular hypothesis or theory. Lauren Benton, a Curtin student during his tenure at The Johns Hopkins University, is a world historian who has achieved a reputation for her rigorous comparative method. Benton contrasts comparative study with what she calls the “circulationist” strategy. She defines this approach as the study of “movements around the globe of—in no particular order— commodities, capital, ideas, people, germs, and ways of marking ethnic and religious difference.” She acknowledges, moreover, that circulationist world history is the prevalent mode of research.

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By contrast, comparative history, she writes, is the study of “structural similarities,” an approach that “has the advantages of privileging the kind of careful case analysis that historians claim as their strength.” She cites her 2002 book Law and Colonial Cultures, which models deep comparative analysis of legal systems in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and West Africa during the period from 1400 to 1900.6 These are the centuries when complex global commercial and cultural webs were forming and when Europeans were introducing their legal systems abroad. Her focus on case studies rather than on general processes leads her to conclude that “the emergence of a global interstate order was the product of politics in particular places, rather than the result of metropolitan or Western designs, or of some incontrovertible systemic logic.” Evoking Manning’s second type of historical situation that invites comparative study, Benton’s cases exist within a global system of intercommunication that included this international legal order. Benton argues, however, that the very creation of that order resulted from connections among numerous local juridical regimes. Among comparative studies of recent years, Kenneth Pomeranz’s book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy has received the most public attention.7 In the fourth essay in this chapter, Pomeranz offers some observations on the value of what he calls “trans-regional history.” Like the other authors in this chapter, however, he distinguishes between this approach and systematic comparative study. One of the successes of world history as an emerging field has been its challenge to an older tradition of comparative study, associated especially with the social theorist Max Weber, that sought to explain modern state formation and the advance of capitalism by comparing Europe and with other parts of the world. This earlier work, Pomeranz writes, assumed Europe to represent “the pattern of true change and development.” This type of comparison aimed almost exclusively to demonstrate difference, not similarity. Logically, therefore, the investigator had only to explain how China, India, the Ottoman Empire, or some other non-European region jumped the rails of economic and political development rather than stay on Europe’s track to success. Recent scholarship has by contrast aimed for “balanced comparison.” R. Bin Wong, another well-known comparativist, describes this as a matter of recognizing the fact of dynamic change in all the cases selected, not just one of them, and the possibility of significant similarities in those cases. “Differences alone,” he writes, “cannot create comparability. . . . My strategies of comparison recognize, whenever possible, the virtues of beginning with similarities in order to establish a clear basis for assessing the nature and importance of differences.”8 Pomeranz contrasts older with more recent comparative approaches in terms of four elements. First, the exponential growth of historical knowledge has made possible substantive comparison of cases whose settings are places other than Europe. Second, the historian does not allow one case (the dynamic of European capitalism, for example) to predetermine the categories or assumptions that apply to all other cases. Third, and again echoing Manning, the scholar is attentive to mutual influences between one

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case and another owing to networks and systems of interregional contact. And, fourth, comparison should start, as Bin Wong argues, with “a baseline of significant similarities.” England and China’s Yangzi Delta, the main regions that Pomeranz compares in The Great Divergence, present an abundance of developmental parallels before the nineteenth century. Understanding this widens the scope for perceiving and explaining the differences. Comparative analysis à la Pomeranz and Wong is also relevant to the next chapter, “Debating the Question of Western Power.”

NOTES

1. Raymond Grew, “The Case for Comparing Histories,” American Historical Review 85 (October 1980): 770. 2. Philip D. Curtin, “Graduate Teaching in World History,” Journal of World History 2 (Spring 1991): 86. 3. See Michael Adas, “Comparative History and the Challenge of the Grand Narrative,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrup (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 229–43. 4. Ibid., 230. 5. Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 6. Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400– 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 7. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 8. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 2– 7.

G LO B A L A N D C O MPA R AT I V E H I S T O R Y Michael Adas

Recent writers and teachers of global history have been less concerned than their predecessors with comprehensiveness or providing a total chronology of human events— though these concerns are often evidenced in world history textbooks or mandated by state school boards. In the past two or three decades global and comparative history has tended to be thematically focused on recurring processes, such as changes in military organization and patterns of colonization, or on such cross-cultural phenomena as the spread of disease, technology, and trading networks. In approaching these topics, recent scholars have more consciously employed techniques of comparative analysis than ear-

Michael Adas’s “Global and Comparative History,” is from from Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), ix–xi.

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lier writers, who tended to forage rather erratically and randomly across cultures and civilizations. In fact, one of the key advances in the writing of cross-cultural history in the past few decades has been the rigorous application of the comparative method. In contrast to virtually all earlier works on global history, where case evidence from different cultures was juxtaposed but rarely systematically compared, recent scholarship has often thoroughly integrated the techniques of comparative analysis that have been refined mostly by practitioners of the other social sciences. Here it is important to stress that though they are routinely conflated, world and comparative history represent quite distinct approaches. Both are cross-cultural; both aim at identifying larger historical trends and recurring patterns. But while world history involves mainly questions of perspective, genuinely comparative history requires the application of a distinct methodology. Central to the comparative technique are the systematic selection of case examples and the mastery of the historical materials relevant to each of these. As Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers have argued,1 case selection involves testing to determine that the case contexts are in fact comparable, the identification of constants to link the different parts of the comparison, and the determination of independent (or causal) and dependent (or outcome) variables. Care must be taken that the variables are consistently employed across each of the cases— a process that involves further choices regarding the specific method of comparison an author wishes to employ. As Skocpol and Somers implicitly illustrate, historians tend to favor the contrast-of-contexts approach, which reflects a disciplinary stress on the importance of empirical evidence, often at the expense of grand theorizing. But as numerous and influential works written on cross-cultural phenomena in the past two or three decades have shown, historians can deal effectively with macrocausal issues, develop meaningful typologies, and test hypotheses. As in the other social sciences, analytical payoff provides the main rationale for the application of the comparative technique. The key contributions that comparativists have made in recent decades to debates over slavery and revolution, for example, which have preoccupied social scientists in a variety of fields, are alone sufficient to justify the serious application of the comparative technique by professional historians. The great proliferation of studies by area specialists in the post–World War II era has in many ways facilitated serious comparative history and cross-cultural analysis. Area specialists’ monographs have provided contemporary scholars with a good deal more data on different cultures and societies throughout the globe than was available to earlier writers who attempted comparative or world history. As a result, the best recent works in these fields have displayed far greater sensitivity than earlier, more comprehensive, world surveys to cultural nuances and to the intricacies of the internal histories of the societies they cover. Sensitivity to the diversity and complexity of the human experience deters most contemporary cross-cultural and comparative historians from the search for universal laws or attempts to discern an overarching teleological meaning in world

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history. Their main concerns are the identification of patterns and recurring processes, and the study of the dynamics and impact of cross-cultural interaction. Much contemporary work on global and comparative history has been focused on non-Western cultures and societies, or the regions lumped together as the Third World before the recent collapse of the Second World and with it the credibility of Cold War ideology. The spread of Islamic civilization, European overseas expansion, the rise and decline of the South Atlantic slave trade, industrialization and the completion of Europe’s drive for global hegemony, all have key European (or North American) components. But each of these processes has been grounded in the historical experiences of non-Western societies, and each in turn has been profoundly influenced by the responses of African, Asian, Latin American, or Oceanic peoples. Practitioners of the new world history have very often adopted this perspective because they see it as the most effective way of bringing the experience of the “people without history” into the mainstream of teaching and scholarship. Over the past two or three decades, global and comparative history have proved compelling vehicles for relating the development of Europe to that of the rest of the world and of challenging the misleading myth of exceptionalism that has dominated much of the history written about the United States.

NOTES

1. “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosociological Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980): 174–97.

F R A ME WO R K S FO R G LO B A L H I S T O R I C A L A N A LYS I S Patrick Manning

The framework of historical analysis, as I define it, includes the objects of study and the procedures for study. The objects of study are usually known as cases.1 A case is generally understood to be a coherent and localized unit such as an individual or a polity though I shall also argue that a network provides an interesting and relevant sort of case. In selecting an object of study, one defines its boundaries. Thus, national history focuses on nations as cases; comparative history may also focus on nations as cases; and world historians have options on whether to view the world as an aggregation of national cases, as a single planetary system or otherwise. The procedures for study in history include, most basically, descriptions of the elements and the relationships within the object of study. Going beyond description, the This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Patrick Manning’s “Frameworks for Global Historical Analysis” was originally published in Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 276– 80. Reprinted with permission from Palgrave Macmillan.

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basic analytical procedures are comparison (looking for similarity and difference), linkage (looking for connections), and chronology (ordering elements in time). Cases, networks, comparisons, and linkages thus provide the basic grammar of our review of historical frameworks and the object and procedures for study within them.2 At a more general and complex level, the objects of study are systems, and the procedures of comparison, linkage, and chronology can be used to catalogue any system and its constituent subsystems. The systems framework, along with its application to historical studies, is explored in detail in this chapter. Interpretations and narratives are the actual solutions developed by historians to the problems they have set. Debates, as we will see, may focus on the framework, the strategy, the interpretation, or a mixture of these three aspects of analysis. In seeking to focus on the framework and strategy of historical analysis, I emphasize the lens through which we view the past. But as will be apparent as soon as we get into examples, one can never maintain the distinction between the lens and the situation that is observed through it. In treating a set of port towns as historical cases, the historian will almost always find it difficult to persist with thinking about the cases as analytical abstractions for exploring the past (for that is how they were chosen) and will begin to think of them as real and complex social situations. Of course, the latter represents the history we seek to reconstruct, but it is best not to forget that the formerly living past is quite distinct from the documents and categories through which we analyze it. Units of study include cases and networks. The case study is a time-honored form of historical analysis and presentation. From the biography and the family history to the study of a locality, monarchy, or nation, historians have developed the skills of researching and telling an individual story in relative isolation from other stories. These stories are expected to be relevant to the broader study of history, and to draw upon the lessons of other studies, but the connections are neither explicit nor formal. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was clearly understood by its readers to be offering a parallel between the situations of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Britain, but that parallel operated between the lines of text.3 The inherited idea of the historical case study is that each history is worthy in its own right and that the research and telling of each history is mostly a matter of locating the documentary evidence and assembling it into an orderly and logical narrative. This vision of historical writing, which can be traced far back in time in the European tradition as doubtless in other traditions, received a particular sort of reinforcement in the era of national history. Professional history, under the inspiration of Leopold von Ranke, focused primarily on location and analysis of textual documents (especially diplomatic, in Ranke’s case), and on reconstruction from them of the past, to present the reader with history “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” That Ranke himself went on to launch a study of world history, of which he completed eight volumes before his death, suggests that he had a vision of history that went beyond the case study.4 But the term case study can have more than a single meaning. In the social sci-

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ences, particularly sociology, the case study has a role somewhat analogous to that of the laboratory test in the experimental sciences. That is, a positivistic theory may be tested with a group of case studies that may show, in the aggregate, whether the theorized relationship can be observed in history. Thus a case study might be an isolated inquiry, or it might be seen as one of many possible observations that might add up to a larger pattern. As a twist on the latter sort of reasoning, Immanuel Wallerstein’s analysis of the modern world-system is presented as the study of a single and unique case, as it is the first world-system and encompasses the whole world.5 In the literature on Atlantic slavery Peter Wood’s Black Majority provided a study of a single region, South Carolina, establishing its uniqueness as a rice-growing colony, yet also emphasizing its connections to Barbados and to Sierra Leone. Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll made a single case out of the whole antebellum U.S. South, combining wide-ranging data into a deeply nuanced but nonetheless singular and cross-sectional view of the character of U.S. slavery.6 Still, for all its importance in historical studies generally, the approach of the case study cannot be of much importance for world history. Or, to be more cautious, case studies cannot be of importance in world history until we have a more fully tested conception of the overall structure of world history and how cases might appropriately be defined within it. Otherwise, case studies tend to reify the isolated vision of selfsufficient national and regional histories. Cases in history need not be limited to individuals, regions, and nations. The network, defined as a transregional grouping of individuals, families, or other organizations, is of particular interest for the study of world history. The network is a particular sort of case. Hugh Thomas’s Atlantic Slave Trade, in many ways a very old-fashioned, biographical study of the topic, can be said to focus on the commonalities and connections among slave merchants around the Atlantic. In work on other topics, Adam McKeown’s work on the Chinese diaspora relies heavily on the notion of the network.7 The notion of the network has considerable metaphoric power. This can be thought of as connective social tissue holding the world together. Networks can be seen as a space, though not a locality. Migratory networks make up a space of global circulations. Viewed in this way, migrants are not just moving among settled people; they form a unit unto themselves. Networks can be seen as having a structure that, in mechanical terms, consists of strings and knots. Languages can define networks of communication, especially as they link to migrants. The early modern Portuguese and Dutch empires, which fit poorly into the analysis of empires as land-based polities, can perhaps be seen more successfully as military and commercial networks. The same may be said for the commercial networks of Armenians and Bugis.8 We turn now from units of study to procedures for study and, therefore, comparison. In a world of case studies, any sort of comparison is cosmopolitan and, for that reason, daunting. By the logic of case studies, and assuming one were comparing two national

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or local units, one now had to master two sets of archives, literatures, and perhaps languages. The Wisconsin program in comparative tropical history (later comparative world history), in which I studied during the 1960s, was explicitly comparative in this fashion. One was expected to master a home territory, then develop historical questions that could be explored by comparison with other regions. One learned to absorb the secondary literature on the more distant region and to dip into its primary sources as time allowed.9 Studies of slavery have been a particular center for comparative studies. Frank Tannenbaum’s classic Slave and Citizen (1946) compared slavery in Protestant and Catholic countries. Carl Degler followed this up with a comparison of slavery in Brazil and the United States, and Herbert Klein began his work with a comparison of slavery in Cuba and Virginia. Even Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade, while it yielded global conclusions, was organized as a comparative analysis of the volume of slave exports for each of the European powers. Extending this approach from slavery to racism, George Frederickson and John Cell published comparative studies on the United States and South Africa. This sort of comparative approach did lead the authors to wide reading and to development of interpretations on a transnational scale, but it did not explore in detail the variations in approach included within the term comparison.10 The novelty of transnational studies was such that even into the nineties, it was common to hear historians use the term comparative to refer to all studies beyond the national level. But the term comparison, as is usual for important words, has multiple meanings. To compare is to bring two or more things together (physically or in contemplation) and to examine them systematically, identifying similarities and differences among them. Comparison has a different meaning within each framework of study. Any exploration of the similarities or differences of two or more units is a comparison. In the most limited sense, it consists of comparing two units isolated from each other. These two separated units might be undergoing some sort of influence causing them to change: studies of the responsiveness of colonized societies to the impact of metropolitan rule fall within this framework, as do the studies on comparative frontiers in history. In such comparative studies, one of the main choices is whether to give greater emphasis to the similarities or the differences among the cases. These units under comparison might be seen as parts of a larger system. The studies of individual colonized societies might be seen as contributing to the understanding of a larger imperial system, including colonies and metropole. Or the individual civilizations or societies examined by Spengler and Toynbee in their grand reviews of history may be seen as elements of the larger evolution of human history. For all of these uses of the term comparison, however, the general assumption is that the objects of comparison do not influence each other. That is, the colonies, frontiers, and civilizations in the examples might influence each other and be influenced by historical processes overall, but one colony or frontier is not assumed to have influenced others.11 It is a third and more specialized meaning of comparison that refers to units that are in contact with one another and that influence one another. The political systems

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of France, England, and Germany, while distinctive as any static comparison of them would show, have nonetheless influenced each other greatly through direct intervention, emulation, or alienation. The comparison of Japan, Korea, and China is not complete until it includes, in addition to their similarities and differences, the list of ways in which each has influenced the other. If we think of the work of economic and demographic historians, in addition to the work of social and civilizational historians, another distinction of approaches within comparative history becomes possible. Historical studies that collect multiple observations on similar cases, as would be the case for trade statistics in economic history provide a basis for hypothesis-testing—which may in this sense be seen as a technique for developing conclusions in comparative history. These might be labeled as “microcomparisons,” in contrast to the “macrocomparisons” of large and complex units, which address many more variables and whose conclusions are developed by informal inspection rather than through a formal procedure. NOTE

1. Also known as units of analysis. 2. These are the inner boundaries, segments, and structures of historical analysis, set by the historian. They are related to the boundaries and structures assumed to exist in the historical situations. 3. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. (London, 1776–1778). 4. Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte, 8 vols. (Leipzig, 1883–1887). 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy (Cambridge, 1974). 6. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1976). 7. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (New York, 1997); Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii (Chicago, 2001); Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1975). William McNeill, in the preface to the Frank and Gills volume on the world-system, argues for an emphasis on networks as a basis for analysis. W. McNeill, in Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand (New York, 1993), xii. 8. Curtin theorized Armenians and others as a “trade diaspora.” It would be of interest to compare in detail the models of trade diaspora and network. Philip D. Curtin, CrossCultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984). 9. Philip D. Curtin, “World Historical Studies in a Crowded World,” Perspectives 24 (January 1986), 19–21; Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, 1979). 10. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946); Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States

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(New York, 1971); Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago, 1967); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI, 1969); George Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York, 1982). 11. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: 1918–1922); Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1933–1961); Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Boston, 1952); Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981).

H OW T O W R I T E T H E H I S T O R Y O F T H E WO R L D Lauren Benton

In one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories a royal mapmaker is asked to fashion increasingly accurate maps of the kingdom until, finally, he covers the kingdom with a map. This parable is a warning to all historians but especially to world historians, who may struggle more than others with pressures simply to “cover” time and territory. Reaching beyond mere coverage is crucial to the field’s development, and to its status within the profession. How can we write the history of the world in a way that is not just broad but also broadly influential? This question poses itself at a time when world history has already arrived as a serious research enterprise. Once the nearly exclusive realm of a few—William McNeill, Philip Curtin, Alfred Crosby, and some others—the field now draws scholars who no longer consider an association with world history as a mark of hubris, a paean to mass marketing, or evidence (God forbid) of a preoccupation with undergraduate teaching. The field has its own journal, the Journal of World History, which has seen the quality of its articles rise steadily and now routinely publishes both original research, much of it done by junior scholars, and important synthetic pieces. Meanwhile, scholarly interest in the topic of globalization has helped to forge an interdisciplinary audience with an interest in the longue, longue durée. Yet questions remain about the sorts of methodologies aspiring world historians might embrace and promote. Aiming for comprehensiveness and relying on older narrative techniques are not serious options. Without a conceptual framework, the data threaten to overwhelm argument. Otherwise, we could sensibly choose to produce a 5,000-book series, each title evoking John E. Wills’s recent book 1688: A World History; that is, we could write the history of the world one year at a time. Whatever else its virtues, world history has not produced a significant volume of methodologically thoughtful discussions or theoretically influential studies. There are, Lauren Benton’s “How to Write the History of the World” is from Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 5, 4 (March 2004), 5– 7. ©2004 The Historical Society. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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to be sure, discernible methodological patterns and debates in the literature of world history, and some of these do contain lessons for other subfields. Following the title of Donald Wright’s well-crafted book from 1997, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, one approach involves alternating attention between global processes and local experiences. This methodology informs a number of prominent world history initiatives, including efforts to place formerly insular national histories in global perspective. But the approach may ultimately prove less important to world historical writing, and to fields seeking a connection to world history, than two other common strategies. One of these approaches we might label circulationist. Its objects of study are the movements around the globe of—in no particular order— commodities, capital, ideas, people, germs, and ways of marking ethnic and religious difference. Like so many tops spinning, these circuits together comprise what C. A. Bayly has called “archaic globalization” in the early modern period and what observers of the contemporary scene call simply “globalization” (forgetting, sometimes, that it has a history). By shifting our gaze from one sphere of circulation to another, we simulate a perception of the whole of global interconnectedness. Following Arjun Appadurai, we can give these circuits names— either his unwieldy labels of ethnoscape, bioscape, financescape, and so on, or the more traditional Latinate categories we already associate with established areas of study, such as migration, diffusion, or expansion. Another approach to globalization in its early and late forms is less familiar but just as important. Rooted in comparisons, it purports to uncover the structural similarities of polities that may be distant in place and time. Here the historian finds globalizing influences by surmise, and by arithmetic; so many similarities in so many places suggest common connections to forces crossing borders and oceans. When done well, this technique reveals hidden continuities. It focuses our eyes not on global circulation but on its imprint, origins, and contexts: for example, status and class distinctions, strategies of resistance, institutions of rule, and nationalism. Circulationist projects appear to be in much greater supply. In part, this is because of a certain transparency of social theoretical constructs related to the movement of people, commodities, and ideas. For example, the concept of “networks” has worked its way into mainstream historical studies and has provided a vocabulary for historical writing on topics as diverse as European migration, Third World urbanization, and the transnational diffusion of ideas. In part, the proliferation of circulationist studies reflects the institutionalization of regional historical studies and their logical development. For example, the acceptance of Atlantic history as a bona fide area of research provides legitimacy— and professional cover—for scholars wishing to map Atlantic circuits and follow them wherever they might lead, even if this means overstepping the boundaries of an already expanded Atlantic world. Yet it is also true that many circulationist projects remain relatively undeveloped. Thirty years after Pierre Chaunu mapped, in Braudelian fashion, the movement of shipping from and to Seville, we still do not know enough about regional or global circuits of people and goods (let alone microbes). As Alan Karras’s study of New World Scottish

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“sojourning,” Karen Barkey’s work on Ottoman qadis, Alison Games’s research on cosmopolitan English colonists, and other complex migration stories remind us, patterns and understandings of long-distance movements are much more varied than historians of a generation ago believed. Many of these circuits are still in need of documentation, including the movement of both official and non-official personnel within and across empires. As for commodities, scholarly interest in consumption has played an important role in widening and deepening the analysis of global trade. But here again, one has the clear impression that we are at the edge of a vast and varied area of study, with much more to explore and explain besides commodification, symbolic capital, and circuits of silver. As developed and promising as circulationist world history may be, structural approaches to world historical analysis are newer still— and, in combination with studies of movement, perhaps potentially more revealing. This is somewhat paradoxical because comparative world history has some of its roots in a familiar, old-fashioned comparative approach. As David Armitage has pointed out in surveying trends within Atlantic history, an older comparative history juxtaposed different civilizational areas and sought explanations for their diverging trajectories. This kind of comparison is still with us, as we have been reminded by new attention in the work of Bernard Lewis and others to the old question of where the Islamic world has “gone wrong.” We also find it in the continuing debate about the timing of European versus Asian economic development that has seized the attention of the so-called California school of economic historians. There is another strand of comparative history, though, with roots that are better established in historical sociology than in sociological history. This approach analyzes multiple cases involving broadly similar historical processes in order to advance generalizations about “big history.” In sociology, we think of Charles Tilly, Jeffrey Paige, and Theda Skocpol as prominent comparativists in this vein; in history, exemplary works include Michael Adas’s early book on millenarian movements, Philip Curtin’s study of trade diasporas in world history, or Patricia Seed’s flawed but interesting comparison of European ceremonies of possession. Rather than comparing trajectories and tallying up the factors “needed” for historical change of a certain kind, such comparative studies examine the structural logic of conflicts or processes in particular places. Global patterns are seen as emerging out of the repetition and replication of similar social tensions and practices, while these are in turn understood as influenced by familiar global circulationist currents. The methodology has the advantages of privileging the kind of careful case analysis that historians claim as their strength and of placing social conflicts and discourse, broadly defined, at the heart of the problem of defining international order. I began with this approach in conducting research for my book Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). The noticeable dearth of historical studies treating law as a global phenomenon has no doubt had something to do with the imperfect fit between traditional legal history and

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circulationist models. Departing from both, the book analyzes the ways in which law constituted an element of global ordering before the emergence of international law and the interstate order. In early modern empires, including European overseas empires, and in other sorts of polities, too, legal orders were characterized first and foremost by jurisdictional complexity. Religious minorities, communities of traders, and subject populations were expected to exercise limited legal authority over their own community members. The claims of states did not include a monopoly over law, and membership in a legal community was only sometimes defined territorially. This dynamic of multicentric law was both rooted in particular places and so widespread as to constitute an element of international ordering. To give just one example, Portuguese agents arriving in West Africa in the 15th century were aided in setting up trading posts by the homology that existed between their understanding of their limited jurisdiction over Christian subjects and Africans’ acceptance of the legal authority of diasporic traders over their own community affairs. Jurisdictional complexity produced both discernible institutional patterns and also, sometimes, transformative conflicts. Legal pluralism established rules that were there to be broken or changed, and legal actors at all levels of the colonial order proved to be adept at maneuvering through and, in the process, altering the legal order. One of the interesting conclusions of colonial legal histories is that pressure for the creation of colonial states came sometimes from indigenous actors rather than from the metropole, which in many cases labored to limit its own jurisdictional claims and minimize administrative costs. Over the course of the long 19th century, institutional configurations shifted— gradually and sometimes only partially—in the direction of state claims to legal supremacy. In this way, the emergence of a global interstate order was the product of politics in particular places, rather than the result of metropolitan or Western designs, or of some incontrovertible systemic logic. This example shows that comparative analysis need not propose a model or experience (of capitalist development, state formation, or modernity) to be used as a benchmark for the study of divergent trajectories. It is also important to note that global circuits— of labor, capital, and ideas— are not irrelevant to patterned social conflicts but also do not necessarily hold the key to their understanding. In some ways, this sort of comparative approach builds on the same strengths that make historians so good at placing local histories in global context. Attention to the local is indispensable to the ability to generalize about the global. Yet the technique of juxtaposing broad trends with the history of any “very small place” cannot by itself confirm broad insights about global shifts and their origins. Comparisons of this type, it turns out, may be surprisingly compatible with approaches influenced by postmodern perspectives. Both post-colonial histories and a recent strain of scholarship in British imperial history have analyzed iterative structures within various arenas of discourse on imperialism. Here the echoing effect of structural similarities occurs not across a range of cases but within different facets of a global

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enterprise. As Nicholas Thomas told us nearly a decade ago, a version of world history can be rendered vertically, as the study of “projects ” stretching from centers of rule to imperial borderlands. Both horizontal and vertical variations of comparative world history present theoretical and practical challenges. Comparing structures across many cases may suggest functionalism if one is not careful to emphasize the contingency of outcomes in all cases. And asserting the essential similarities of various unconnected arenas of discourse may border on the banal, as when David Cannadine in Ornamentalism promotes “hierarchy ” as an organizing trope of British imperialism. While a combination of care and flair may provide an escape from these shortcomings, there is also no question that we are describing merely a comparative perspective, not a theoretical answer to the problems of writing global history. At the same time, we can affirm that world history may be written with the express purpose of producing theoretical insights and methodological innovations. Coverage is dead; long live theory. Regarding practical challenges, the central problem may become one of sheer effort. Mastering the complexities of conflicts or discourse in a range of places or cultural milieux requires a great deal of time, expertise, and travel to collections, not to mention mastery of multiple languages. Yet these obstacles may appear less formidable as multi-sited research becomes more accepted by funding agencies and as the boundaries of regional subdisciplines continue to be eroded by the circulationists. Despite these and other obstacles, there are compelling intellectual reasons for making comparative history at least as common as circulationist projects in world history. The approach lends itself to the study of a wide range of social, cultural, and political conflicts and their local-global interconnections. This translates into an opportunity to expand world historical inquiry from its more established base in economic history and its more recent, sometimes disturbingly seductive move toward biological-environmental narratives. Institutions should also be objects of study for world historians—not just transnational institutions, which operated fitfully if at all in most historical periods, but global institutional regimes that have emerged out of common cultural practices and patterned political conflicts. And for those who think institutions are a bore no matter how they are discussed, there are plenty of other topics that do not always lend themselves to fruitful study through a circulationist approach. Aesthetic practices and sensibilities, for example, may be widespread without having come to be so through processes of diffusion. I anticipate— and hope—that the better-established methods of world history writing will stay with us. We need more well crafted studies analyzing specific local-global interconnections and also more research into the circulation of people, commodities, ideas, discourse, and, yes, microbes. I also hope that these efforts will be joined by the multiplication of studies that build on the best kinds of comparative analysis, moving beyond questions about different developmental trajectories and probing unlikely elements of global order and disorder. Unlike Borges’s mapmaker, we will not have to cover the world with a map in order

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to understand it. Nor will we be limited to other mapping exercises, such as projecting small-scale studies onto a global plane. Instead of cartography, the relevant scientific analogy might turn out to be contemporary astrophysics. Its preoccupation with multiple, unseen dimensions in universes we can only imagine offers the combination of precise analysis and broad conjecture to which world historians might now aspire. And then there’s the lure, however remote, of a grand, unified theory—nothing less than a theoretically compelling history of the world.

W H AT I S WO R L D H I S T O R Y G O O D FO R ? Kenneth Pomeranz

World history tends to undermine arguments that the modern world sprang almost entirely from endogenous factors in Europe. This applies both to diffusionist arguments, which suggest that the rest of the world is “modern” insofar as it has successfully imitated European models, and to world systems or dependency models, which argue that the existence of a poor and exploited periphery is an intrinsic part of “modernity” and has been largely generated by a capitalist world system based in the North Atlantic countries.1 Instead, world history points to the continuous significance in all parts of the world of distinct regional features, which become part of varied modern conditions rather than being obliterated by a homogeneous modernity. These differences may be found in different ways of apprehending experience that are nonetheless consistent with mass literacy, elections, industry, and other “modern” features of external reality, as analyzed, for instance, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s discussions of middle-class Bengalis; but they may also inhere in public institutions and social relations.2 If, for instance, one takes seriously the notion that distinctively East Asian ways of managing firms (and economies more generally) have developed that have contributed to that region’s success (instead of dismissing them as “crony capitalism” or a remnant of “peasant society,” and a hindrance to development)3 one has a different kind of “multiple modernities.” And in neither Chakrabarty’s Bengali case nor the East Asian one does it diminish the point if we note that these regionally distinctive ways of acting are not purely local creations but draw on foreign influences as well (British ideas about public and private in the Bengali case, German ideas about state-business relations transferred through Japan in the East Asian one). On the contrary, this makes it all the clearer that world regions are not separable puzzle pieces, each with its own essence, but permeable and changeable artifacts of global interaction, which require a world history framework. It is also important to remember that while the degree of transregional interaction in our own day is unprecedented, premodern periods of history are also characterized by crucial long-distance influences, whether in the form of the spread of the “great reliPreviously unpublished essay.

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gions”; of critical technologies; of diseases; or of the movement of merchants, mercenaries, and other bearers of important tools of control. In many ways it is the relatively recent period, in which nations were taken to be both a natural social unit and one which represented a crucial broadening of people’s horizons above the parochial (forgetting that nations were also, in some ways, created by restricting more cosmopolitan allegiances) that is historically peculiar. Marshall Hodgson’s comment that in premodern times what mattered to most people happened either on the very local (village) level or on the level of the entire Afro-Eurasian ecumene—which was, for instance, the relevant unit for technological diffusion, and often for intellectual developments as well—seems apposite here.4 Consequently, despite the important work that has been done by various selfconsciously “postcolonial scholars,” I think postcolonialism as an intellectual movement has often taken too narrow an approach, which treats hybridity as an exclusively recent phenomenon, and which treats non-European cultural legacies as significant largely as they are mobilized to respond to and/or overcome European intrusions. World history provides additional depth, and it makes a larger range of human experience relevant. Because world history sees regions as artifacts of history, rather than as geographically determined or as expressions of a particular cultural essence, it also highlights the importance of long-distance relationships in the formation of all regions of the world, including Europe. These can include trade, migration, conquest, direct cultural diffusion (i.e., the adoption of some practice or idea found elsewhere) or indirect cultural influence (i.e., the reformulation of some idea, practice, or identity in reaction to encounters with others, even if what emerges is sharply opposed to its counterpart in the other culture[s]). Moreover, it requires that we at least consider the possibility that the history of the earth itself— as manifested in climate changes, for instance— has been of great importance for understanding human societies and their interactions at particular moments; Mike Davis’s work on late nineteenth-century famines, El Niño events, and imperialism is a case in point.5 None of this, however, requires us to deny that at certain moments, parts of Europe have had an impact on the rest of the globe that was greatly disproportionate to their geographic size and demographic weight. Nor does it necessarily imply the abandonment of all grand narratives. David Christian’s Maps of Time, for instance, while it works on the very largest of scales, is valuable in part because it insists on writing the history of humans as a species before we break that story down into regional components, rather than as a synthesis of preexisting histories of Europe, East Asia, North America, and so on.6 William and John McNeill’s The Human Web pursues a related strategy on a slightly less enormous scale.7 By arguing that what distinguishes human history is collective learning, and that both the scale on which that learning occurred and the location of the principal nodes at which knowledge accumulated shifted significantly with early-modern developments in navigation, trade, and so on, this kind of network-based analysis offers a new understanding of the “rise of the West,” among many other things. In arguing that histories on such enormous scales are useful—but useful in large

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part because of the ways that they intersect with more conventional kinds of history—I would distinguish between “grand narratives” and “master narratives.” It is good, even necessary, to sometimes think on very large scales, and certainly often worthwhile to ask to what extent particular histories do or do not resemble a hypothetical large-scale pattern. The problem comes when a grand narrative becomes a master narrative: one that is assumed to be more significant than narratives utilizing other scales and other emphases. One story that is greater than any other is not what we should be seeking when we think on scales beyond the nation or “civilization”; on the contrary, part of what makes world history useful as a way of teaching historical thinking is precisely the way that it highlights the need to move back and forth continually among different geographical units and periodizations, treating all of them as provisional constructs that are good for illuminating some questions and bad for others. As this suggests, research need not try to encompass the whole world to be “world history,” and thinking in terms of networks of mutual influence also changes the units we think of when we do subdivide the world. In recent years studies of the Indian Ocean,8 the Eurasian steppe,9 maritime Southeast Asia,10 and other areas have joined the better-established fields of Atlantic and Mediterranean studies, in each case defining their object of study as a multicultural field of interaction rather than along the lines favored by older area studies programs such as “South Asia” or “Latin America.” These older regions, of course, remain potentially quite useful if we use them self-consciously. They are the units most of us were trained to think in, and the ones that the larger public that we must ultimately try to address takes for granted, as nicely analyzed by Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis in The Myth of Continents.11 And so do nation-states, which, for better or worse, are not fading away, and which remain indispensable units of analysis or comparison for many issues that involve law, public policy, state formation, and so on. The point is not to assume they are the natural units for all comparisons simply because they are the units around which so much data is organized. Nor, of course, does world history need to be the history of everything, any more than French history has to be the history of everything within the borders of France. While many practitioners of world history began their careers working on some form of political economy (which in some ways travels more easily across regional and cultural boundaries than other kinds of training do), most of the standard types of history— social history, family history, intellectual history, gender history, working-class history, and so on—make just as much sense on a transnational scale as on a national or local scale. Indeed, breaking free of national and regional boundaries may be especially valuable for some kinds of history that seek to highlight a particular type of human experience (as in at least some varieties of gender history). And for some other topics— environmental history, the history of science, and the history of migration, for instance—it is becoming difficult to even conceive of the subject within national or regional boundaries, at least for recent times. While I have thus far focused more on transregional connections than on compari-

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sons, the latter naturally remain a critical part of any serious world history. Contemporary studies of world history can move beyond the Weberian tradition of comparisons “aimed at identifying a European specificity” by doing what R. Bin Wong and other scholars have called “balanced comparisons.”12 The problem with so many comparisons of Europe and other places in the Weberian tradition (or some variants of the Marxist tradition, for that matter) was not only that they were usually based on inadequate knowledge of the non-European side of the comparison but also that they worked within traditions in which a stylized version of the “European experience” (usually, in fact the British or French experience, and so not very representative of Europe, either) was presumed to represent the pattern of true change and development. Thus, these comparisons took it for granted that the “European path” represented what should have happened as history unfolded, and one need not ask why it did not look more like the history of the non-European comparator; however, the other term in the comparison was implicitly or explicitly examined in order to see what it lacked that had caused it to “fail” to develop (along European lines). While some postmodernist scholars have taken this problem of Eurocentrism so much to heart that they would now avoid comparison altogether (along with all “grand narratives,” which they rarely distinguish from “master narratives” in the way that I have here), I would argue that that is no solution: the tendency of European comparisons (either explicit or implicit) to frame all the histories we write (at least of modern times) needs to be confronted, not denied. Balanced comparisons can make us conscious of what we are doing when we compare, and ask what we learn from assessing Europe (or portions thereof) against a non-European standard, as well as vice versa. To take an example from my own work, much of my book The Great Divergence compares England with China’s wealthy Yangzi Delta region (where per capita income probably remained close to England’s until roughly 1750). But the book asks not only why the Yangzi Delta did not become England (a relatively familiar strategy) but also why England did not become the Yangzi Delta: a highly successful agricultural, commercial, and handicraft economy with dense population, high living standards, and so on, which took reasonably full advantage of the opportunities for growth that existed with its resource endowments and relatively slow-changing technologies but which never developed heavy industry, and which beginning in the nineteenth century began to suffer economically and ecologically as Smithian growth based on increased trade and division of labor could no longer continue providing higher living standards for a very large population.13 By also asking this less familiar question, I was able to differentiate parts of the English story that were undoubtedly important but could not be sufficient because they were shared by the Yangzi Delta—for example, relatively secure property rights and well-developed markets—from elements that were more distinctive. The most important of those distinctive elements had to do with the role of the coal industry on the one hand and England’s relations with resource-rich areas abroad on the other, both elements that helped England break free of pressures on the land that it shared

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in some measure with most other prosperous and densely populated areas in an era when food, fuel, construction materials, and clothing fiber all came mostly from vegetative growth. Comparisons, of course, always yield an account of difference, and one can still read balanced comparisons as an alternative strategy for “identifying a European specificity.” But a number of things are different in current world history comparisons from what one finds in classic historical and social science comparisons. First, the comparison need not involve Europe at all (though it does in the examples above). Second, as noted, we look for comparisons that treat each term as peculiar from the vantage point of the other. R. Bin Wong’s observation of how odd the relative inattention to rural welfare issues in early-modern European state-making appears when we look at it from a Chinese perspective is one example. Third, at least some of our comparisons now acknowledge that we are often not comparing truly independent entities, but entities that already affect each other through shared membership in some large system. (Charles Tilly refers to these as “encompassing comparisons.”)14 Fourth, in order to be useful, comparisons must lay out a baseline of significant similarities instead of asserting that everything is different—in which case we can have no idea which of these differences really matter— or that some particular deep-seated difference has such sweeping effects as to shape everything in both societies (which ultimately amounts to the same thing). And because we are now heirs to a wealth of monographic studies on almost all parts of the world— something neither Weber nor Marx could call upon—we are now equipped to make the kind of narrower and more useful comparisons that start from a baseline of similarity. Consider the difference, whether I turn out to be right or not, between my “great divergence” hypotheses—which focus on differences in patterns of long-distance trade, colonization, and mining, and the specific policies affecting them— and sweeping contrasts between, for instance, “freedom” and “Oriental despotism,” or a Western “Promethean urge” versus an “Oriental” insistence that humans accommodate themselves to nature. These latter constructs give us contrasts so basic that were either one descriptively accurate, it would be impossible to understand how China could have remained close to Europe in its level of prosperity until the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Balanced comparisons that begin by constructing a baseline of significant similarities have another merit as well: they are good for undermining myths of national or civilizational exceptionalism. (This feature is perhaps particularly attractive to those of us based in the United States, where claims of historical uniqueness are particularly persistent, and often dangerous.) One can accomplish a good deal by taking a familiar episode from national history and putting it in global context. The settling of the American Great Plains, for instance, is often told as an implicitly unique story of hardy migrants taming nature and providing a “release” that prevented a sharpening of class conflict in eastern cities. One can, of course, complicate this story within a US frame by pointing to those excluded from it (African American cowboys, Mexicans in the Southwest, Chinese

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miners in California, Native Americans, etc.), or by pointing to the existence of other more or less similar frontiers in the same period (in Canada, Australia, Argentina, and South Africa). Yet another strategy would try to establish some similarities between the settling of the Great Plains and a contemporaneous episode that at first seems much more radically different: the clearing of the great Southeast Asian river deltas (Irrawaddy, Chaophraya, Mekong) to create export-oriented rice bowls in the late nineteenth century, treating them both as episodes in the rise of global agribusiness. In each case, both migrants from within the country and immigrants (mostly Chinese and Indian in Southeast Asia, European in the United States) moved to the frontier, killed off the large mammal that had been the area’s predominate species (bison in one case, elephants in the other), turned a diverse ecology into a monoculture, exported much of the staple they created, and in doing so, pushed down agricultural prices in the countries they came from, intensifying rural distress and encouraging further emigration in a self-catalyzing cycle. Clearly this enumeration of similarities leaves intact many important differences, above all the colonial context in Southeast Asia and thus the absence of any chance for the migrants to become full-fledged citizens. But I have found that the comparison’s initial force, derived in part from the fact that it brings together two settings and two groups (“farmers” in America, “peasants” in Asia, though in many languages other than English the word is the same) often thought to have nothing in common, is extremely useful in getting American students to rethink an important part of our national mythology. This last potentiality of world history is particularly important because we should not expect it, or even want it, to completely redefine the discipline. National histories will remain important, both in the historical profession and for the wider public: most departments in most countries, I suspect, will continue to hire more people for jobs as historians of Germany or Brazil, or of Europe or Latin America, than for world history jobs. Other people will be hired as environmental historians, gender historians, and so forth, but they will continue to view themselves as primarily concerned with some particular place for which they know the languages, archives, and so on. Consequently, much of what we need to achieve by inserting world history into our teaching and research is to train people who continue to have geographic specialties but have a less provincial view of whichever particular place they focus on, and that would be no mean feat. To make that possible, those of us who think of ourselves as world historians will also need to keep a foot in whatever regional specialties we were trained in.

NOTES

1. For a well-known diffusionist view, see David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); for a seminal work of world-systems theory, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the Modern World Economy (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

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2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 3. For some of the many different approaches to this issue, see the essays in Meredith Woo-Cumings, ed., The Developmental State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Kaoru Sugihara, “The East Asian Path of Economic Development: A Long-Term Perspective,” in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives, eds. Giovanni Arrighi, Hamashita Takeshi, and Mark Selden (London: Routledge, 2003): 78–123; Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century (London: Verso, 2007). 4. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 5. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002). 6. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). However, treating humanity in general as the subject of history has its own problems; see, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222; and Kenneth Pomeranz, “Teleology, Discontinuity, and World History: Periodization and Some Creation Myths of Modernity,” Asian Review of World Histories 1, 2 (July 2013): 189–226. 7. John R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (W. W. Norton, 2003). 8. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); M. N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003). 9. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); David Christian, “Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History,” Journal of World History 11, 1 (2000): 1–26; Denis Sinor, ed., The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450– 1680 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); François Gipouloux, La Mediterranée Asiatique: Villes portuaires et réseaux marchands en Chine, au Japon, et en Asie de sud-est, XVIe—XXIe siecle (Paris: CNRS, 2009); Hamashita Takeshi and Kawakatsu Heita, eds., Ajia kōekikan to Nihon kōgyōka, 1500– 1900: Shinpan (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2001). 11. Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 12. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 13. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).

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F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 6 Adas, Michael. “Bringing Ideas and Agency Back In: Representation and the Comparative Approach to World History.” In World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, edited by Philip Pomper, Richard H. Elphick, and Richard T. Vann. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998: 81–104. In the context of a critical assessment of major world historians and their methodologies, Adas argues that the inclusion of contingencies, ideologies, and the actions of individuals produces a richer comparative world history. ———. Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Adas analyzes millenarian rebellions against European colonial rule in Indonesia, New Zealand, India, Tanzania, and Burma. He argues that despite widely different contexts, these five rebellions had common features as cultural revitalization movements inspired by resistance to colonization. This is a foundational text in comparative methodology. Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400– 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. In this global comparative study of the institutional and cultural origins of the modern international order, Benton argues that legal regimes in early modern empires were pluralistic, the products of religious and cultural differences between colonial rulers and indigenous subjects. The nineteenth-century emergence of state-centered legal systems was partly a response to the contested legal status of subjects in colonial empires and provided the basis for the postcolonial legal order. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Empires have been the most enduring political entities in world history. This book compares empires across time and space to argue that territorial conquests, strategies of domination, and the creation of differences among populations are constituent characteristics of imperial power and governance in many regions and across long time spans. Curtin, Philip D. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. A pioneering exploration of comparative method on a global scale, this book seeks to understand the causes and consequences of economic exchange among different societies. It also provides an early example of an attempt to move beyond Eurocentrism in world history, examining trade in Africa; in the ancient world; in East, Southeast, and Southwest Asia; in North America; and between the Mediterranean world and China. Lieberman, Victor B. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800– 1830. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007–2009. Lieberman’s two-volume opus represents a paradigmatic shift in comparative world history. Volume 1 argues that broad patterns of state, cultural, and economic integration occurred simultaneously across parts of Eurasia. Volume 2 compares the responses in maritime Southeast Asia and Japan to processes of integration that were pervasive across Eurasia. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pomeranz reframes the classic question of why industrialization occurred in Europe rather than Asia. By focusing on the similarities between Northwest Europe and the Yangzi Delta region up until the mid-eighteenth century, Pomeranz locates the explanation of Northwest Europe’s sustained growth in its access to coal and New World resources.

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Tracy, James, ed. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350– 1750. Studies in Comparative Early Modern History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———, ed. The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350– 1750. Studies in Comparative Early Modern History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. These two volumes argue that long-distance trade in the early modern world took place in an age of partnership and competition in which European merchants and the states they increasingly came to represent began to unevenly assert themselves over their rivals. Contributors offer various explanations for the surge in European dominance, including one that attributes it to Europeans’ sustained use of violence in pursuit of commercial gain. Walthall, Anne, ed. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. The essays in this book offer a comparative view of women of all social statuses who lived and labored in royal courts around the globe. By focusing on women at court, the essays explore the gendered dimensions of power and social roles as they changed over time in a variety of cultural contexts.

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7 DEBATING THE QUESTION OF WESTERN POWER

IN T R O D U C T I O N

The great expansion of world historical knowledge in the past several decades has inevitably generated scholarly debates on numerous questions that were previously uncontroversial or had never been asked at all. Historians have argued intensely over topics ranging from human acquisition of symbolic thought and the early peopling of the Americas to the origins of nationalism and the significance of twentieth-century globalization. But perhaps no issue has produced as much sustained academic heat or has attracted as much public interest as the problem of the origins and development of Western global power. The question is straightforward. How did the people of Western Europe, a thinly populated, mostly rural, economically weak corner of Eurasia compared to the great urban societies that rose and fell in the premodern millennia, come to exert massive military, political, economic, and cultural sway in the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Universal historians and social thinkers of past decades— G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Oswald Spengler among them— grappled with the question of Western power.1 Those writers, however, worked from philosophical and moral premises, and they presumed that Europe’s ancient Greco-Roman and Christian origins gave it a historical dynamism and purposive movement that other societies lacked. After World War II, new knowledge of Asia, Africa, and Native America rapidly accumulated. Bolstered by mounting evidence, scholars increasingly questioned the assumption that Europe’s

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global dominance could be explained only with reference to its own past and to the internal evolution of unique cultural and social traits. Fresh research amply demonstrated that peoples on all continents produced dense agrarian, urban societies that were innovative, dynamic, and fully as historical as Europe. Analysis of Western ascendancy therefore required open-minded comparison with the histories of other societies (rather than comparison to expose their relative deficiencies). It also demanded attention both to developments external to Europe that bore on its history and to large-scale hemispheric or global changes that involved both Europe and other regions. Marshall Hodgson argued with remarkable insight back in 1963: “When we look at human historical life as a whole, it will not do simply to give more attention to ‘Eastern’ societies— either for their own interest or as influencing or contributing to Europe. We must learn to recognize the Occident [Europe] as one of a number of societies involved in wider historical processes to some degree transcending or even independent of any given society.”2 Among other world history pioneers, William McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein took up the problem of European power, which they saw as central to the global transformations that define the modern age: capitalist commercial expansion, industrialization, soaring global population, mass migrations, accelerating scientific and technological advances, immense state power, and liberal democratic ideology. In The Rise of the West, McNeill argued that Europe’s emergence as a complex urban region in medieval times owed a great cultural debt to premodern Asian and northern African societies. Writing in the early 1960s, McNeill approached world history, at least for periods up to 1850, using “the civilizational envelope.”3 Consequently, he put great emphasis on Europe’s largely internal “transmutation”— the development of distinctive political, economic, and cultural traits—to explain that region’s growing wealth and power. The modern era, which he dated to the early sixteenth century, took shape as Europe exerted influence on older civilizations and as its ideas and technologies diffused around the world. However, as criticism of his Eurocentrism mounted and, probably more importantly, as the field expanded and matured, McNeill seriously rethought his views, as he candidly explains in his essay “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years,” reprinted in Chapter 2. Like McNeill in The Rise of the West, Wallerstein, who published the first volume of The Modern World-System in 1974, placed the advent of modernity in the sixteenth century.4 Wallerstein contended that individual states were the wrong units of analysis for understanding the inception of modern capitalism. Rather, a world system of unequal economic relationships emerged in the 1500s and eventually encompassed the globe. That system was unlike any preceding one because it involved “a structural priority given and sustained for the ceaseless accumulation of capital.”5 It also produced drastically unequal relations of power and well-being in the world, a system weighted heavily to the benefit of capitalist Western Europe. The Modern World-System was widely praised as a powerful critique of “modernization theory,” a progressivist way of looking at the global economy posited on the idea of Western states as beacons of modernity charged with the task of guiding underdeveloped countries to prosperity and democracy.6

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Wallerstein’s work also provoked a critical debate. For many world historians who wished to address patterns of social and cultural change, his economic and materialist preoccupations were too limiting. For other critics he had too little to say about economic developments of interregional scale before 1500, or he emphasized structural change to the point of ignoring the historical defenses and innovations that peoples outside Europe initiated under capitalist pressures. And, perhaps most troublesome of all, he conceived of Western Europe as the core region of modern capitalist development by virtue of a set of economic and political institutions and practices that he presumed to be special to that region. Moreover, he saw Europe as maintaining its centrality in an expansive and finally worldwide system of capitalist production, trade, exploitation, and inequality straight through from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. (Chapter 1 includes additional discussion of the world systems approach.) The explanatory force of Wallerstein’s brand of Eurocentrism gradually weakened as research continued to reveal complex interregional networks of production, migration, and exchange that predated 1500 and in which Western Europe held a relatively peripheral position well into the 1700s. In 1989 Janet Abu-Lughod postulated in Before European Hegemony that the first genuine world system had no single core region but rather involved the operation of eight overlapping circuits of Afroeurasian exchange. This world system, she argued, emerged not in the sixteenth century but in the thirteenth, when the great Mongol states arose. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills followed in 1993 with their thesis that the modern world system has deep origins in the systemic commerce of ancient times and that European economic growth and overseas activity after 1500 must be seen as representing a relatively recent and gradual shift of economic power relations in the Afroeurasian world system as a whole.7 Those two books exemplified a broader scholarly trend to revise, modify, and enlarge upon the world systems approach. As a result, the term acquired broader, more flexible meanings. World historians began to apply the concept to historical developments, including the formation of social, cultural, and religious networks, that were different from what Wallerstein regarded as crucial.8 This more-pliable application of the world systems idea proved useful to teachers trying to get out of civilizationist silos. It also meant, however, that discussion of the model as Wallerstein originally proposed it gradually faded out. Nevertheless, debate over the origins of Western hegemony remained very much alive. For some intellectuals the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European Communist regimes demonstrated that capitalist Europe and North America had long possessed the right political and cultural stuff and that the late twentieth century was witnessing the West’s liberal and democratic values coming to full flower. Both Samuel Huntington and David Landes argued that Western ascendancy from the late medieval period onward may be attributed to that region’s special cultural milieu, which nurtured exceptional qualities and advantages that other regions lacked.9 In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington declared that “the West differs

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from other civilizations not in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other societies.”10 Huntington also cautioned, however, that Western civilization might lose out to competing civilizations (e.g., Islam, China) if it does not preserve and strengthen its essential principles. For other scholars, the fall of the Soviet system seemed a less important event of the late century than the remarkable rise of Asian industrial economies, especially China’s. This phenomenon prompted questions not only about the current and future state of European and North American economic primacy but also about the character and duration of the Asian eclipse before the later twentieth century. Did the large agrarian regions of Asia weaken economically relative to Europe as early as the sixteenth century? Were the economic conditions that characterized parts of Europe, China, India, and Southwest Asia in the early modern centuries really so different from one another? In the late 1990s a group of historians and historical sociologists began to produce new work on global shifts in the main centers of economic power from early modern times through the Industrial Revolution. The members of this informal band, which became known as the “California School” because they all either taught or published in that state (and some still do), included Dennis Flynn, Andre Gunder Frank, Arturo Giráldez, Jack Goldstone, Richard von Glahn, Robert Marks, Kenneth Pomeranz, Feng Wang, John Wills Jr., and R. Bin Wong.11 These scholars have taken either of two closely related approaches to the history of the modern world economy. One tack evokes Hodgson’s vision of multiple societies, including Europe, entangled in historical processes that transformed Afroeurasian interrelations as a whole. These writers have posited that major economic changes in Afroeurasia— and around the world after 1500—have been pluralistic, not concentrated in or derived from a single region. These developments have involved the operation of interconnected networks of human exchange whose principal nodes have been centers of production, large cities, and strategic ports. The emergence of a globe-girdling economy in the early modern centuries—its productive growth, capital formation, long-distance trade, technological advance, and configurations of military and political power—is inexplicable in any other context than the inhabited world as a whole. It cannot be explained merely by examining the traits of particular societies as bounded social and cultural spaces. The other California School approach differs from the first mainly in its more rigorous comparative methodology. Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong, the best known comparativists, have undertaken deep analyses of China and Europe. Or more accurately, they have compared parts of China (the Yangzi River delta) and Europe (the northwestern region and especially Britain) that both had dense populations, complex agrarian economies, and a general trend of economic growth. These underlying conditions made these regions good choices for comparison.12 Both Pomeranz and Wong argue that in the approximate period of 1500 to 1750, the selected regions of both China and Western

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Europe exhibited remarkable similarities in living standards, life expectancies, market behavior, commercialization of agriculture, and handicraft industrial advance. Thus, the developmental paths of these two regions did not radically diverge from each other any time before 1750. The early rise-of-the-West scholarship saw these various factors as germinating from seeds deeply planted in Europe’s cultural and institutional soil. But if similar conditions also prevailed in the Yangzi delta, and perhaps in comparable regions of Japan and India, they cannot by themselves explain Western Europe’s, or even England’s, breakthrough to intensive capitalist industry in the nineteenth century. More broadly, Pomeranz, Wong, and some other California School writers contend that the cultural and institutional traits claimed for Europe turn out to be present historically in other societies in well, though in various forms and degrees of importance. The California School generally subscribes to a historical methodology that acknowledges the strength and persistence of cultural values and practices in particular societies but that also recognizes their susceptibility to alteration or displacement. In regard to a civilization’s core traits, Marshall Hodgson wrote in the 1970s that “any seminal evaluation of their historical effects must take into account the full ecological setting of a given generation— that is, all the conditions (including both geographically and socially given resources as well as current interrelations with other groups) that would determine the effective advantage of various possible lines of action.”13 Robert Marks develops this idea in terms of three historical phenomena that must figure in any narrative of changing power balances in the past six hundred years:14 contingency (change that does not follow an inevitable path but is dependent on conditions and circumstances prevailing at particular moments), accident (events that are historically significant but that humans cannot control), and conjuncture (change that occurs when conditions and events previously independent of one another interact). On the question of changing economic power relations between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, contingencies, accidents, and conjunctures all played out in hemispheric or global space, and they were bound to affect mightily what Europeans did or did not do (or could or could not do), irrespective of Europe’s particular cultural characteristics or lines of development. Both Pomeranz and Wong identify contingencies they believe were instrumental in the shift of world productivity and wealth from Asia to Western Europe in the nineteenth century. Pomeranz stresses Britain’s ready access to coal (and attendant technological capacity to extract it from deep mines) and its ability to exploit American riches in cotton, grain, lumber, and other commodities. The Yangzi delta had a variety of economic endowments in the late eighteenth century, but not these in that period. Wong sees a rather sudden conjuncture of developments in Western Europe in the spheres of technological innovation, fossil fuel energy control, and capitalist finance. These interacting developments produced an unforeseen rupture in the prevailing patterns of life and had huge economic consequences. Andre Gunder Frank (see Frank’s essay in Chapter 2) argues that the rise of the West should be viewed in the long term as the consequence of a conjuncture between cyclical ecological changes and economic contractions in Asia,

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which served to accelerate Western Europe’s impressive but not previously transformative economic growth. All three authors interpret Britain’s coal-driven industrialization not as a culmination of local developments originating in medieval times but as a global aberration that could have happened, but did not, in some other part of the world. Once Britain’s serious divergence from other societies got under way, it had stupendous worldwide consequences in just a few decades. It could not therefore have happened independently a second time anywhere else. Economists and economic historians have offered additional interpretations. Robert C. Allen, for example, focuses on Britain’s relatively high wages, arguing that controlling labor costs provided motivation for manufacturers to develop labor-saving mechanisms in order to increase production without paying higher wages.15 This focus on rational choice is one of several responses that economists have contributed to the “why Europe?” debate. After Kenneth Pomeranz’s book The Great Divergence appeared in 2000, many scholars took another look at Bin Wong’s China Transformed, which had proposed a similar thesis three years earlier. Together, the two books produced much academic commotion, challenging as they did the conventional Eurocentric narrative. In 2002 the American Historical Review published a forum, “Asia and Europe in the World Economy,” in which both Pomeranz and Wong reflected further on the fates of these regions in the early modern centuries. In Pomeranz’s essay, included in this chapter, he reviews the argument in The Great Divergence regarding the ecological and economic similarities in the most developed parts of China and Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Pomeranz also contends that conditions leading to a potential Malthusian crisis—the theory advanced by Thomas Malthus in 1798 that when population growth outpaces food production, living standards must plummet—were no more evident in eighteenth-century China than in Western Europe. Rather than asking, as other scholars have done, why China did not industrialize like England did, Pomeranz closely examines China’s experience to ask “Why wasn’t England the Yangzi delta?” That is, why did England not remain on a Yangzi-like path of steady but slow growth as people made continuous but small technological improvements and worked more intensively to increase farming and manufacturing productivity. For Pomeranz England may well have followed that road into the nineteenth century were it not for the contingencies of access to coal and bounteous American resources. Wong’s subsequent partnership with economist Jean-Laurent Rosenthal deepens the Europe-Asia comparison, arguing that political stability—linked to territorial size and the frequency of military disruptions—influenced the degree of urbanization and the location of manufacturing facilities, thereby directly affecting economic growth.16 They set out to explain Europe’s economic success while also accounting for “China’s earlier achievements and more recent rise.” They conclude that “the rise of capital-intensive methods of production in Europe was the consequence of persistent political strife. In contrast, China, which was often peaceful and unified, developed large-scale markets and took advantage of the division of labor.”17

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The publication of new and more-detailed data, along with dramatically reconceptualized comparisons of economic change in northwestern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia, has not entirely upended scholarship that seeks to understand cultural factors embedded in political economy. David Landes, for example, carries forward the intellectual tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Weber, attributing the widening gap in Chinese and European economic performance in the nineteenth century mainly to differing values, institutions, and political decisions.18 Pomeranz maintains that if contingent factors had played out differently than they did, England’s industrialization might have petered out at an early stage. Landes, by contrast, assumes Europe’s cultural characteristics and economic trajectory to be normative relative to the rest of the world, then highlights Chinese attitudes and practices that veer from that norm to explain China’s relative economic failure in the nineteenth century. Joseph M. Bryant, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, shares Landes’s view of the importance of long-term cultural developments in any explanation of the shift of global economic and political power to Europe. In the 2006 essay included in this chapter, Bryant offers a much more direct and detailed critique of the revisionist work of California School members, mainly Pomeranz, Wong, and Jack Goldstone. Bryant also critically appraises Jack Goody’s 2004 book Capitalism and Modernity, which, like several California School writings, offers a comparative and polycentric, rather than European-focused, approach to global change in the early modern centuries. The selections we have chosen from Bryant’s long essay exclude his discussion of Goody’s work. Bryant draws on critical scholarship of the six years following publication of The Great Divergence to challenge some of its evidence, both qualitative and statistical, about China’s economic expansion and demographic restraint in the early modern centuries. More broadly, Bryant questions the historical methodology of Pomeranz and like-minded revisionists. He faults them for maximizing the importance of contingencies in explaining nineteenth-century industrialization while playing down the ways in which cultural traits, institutions, and ongoing transformations, especially in England, must have shaped the effects of contingencies and accidents, like England’s possession of abundant coal. Bryant does not accept “a conception of world history that slights or minimizes the extent to which social phenomena are subject to path-dependent logics, whereby the prior states of a system order and limit the developmental possibilities for subsequent states of that system.” Bryant also asks how such an abrupt and epic transformation as the Industrial Revolution could have started in Western Europe if that part of the world had not already constructed firm social relations, technological capabilities, and capitalist institutions that were more favorable to big change than those existing in the Yangzi valley. In his contribution to this chapter, Jack Goldstone responds directly to Bryant’s critique. Like his California School associates, Goldstone claims a general comparability of economic growth trends in all of Afroeurasia’s major agrarian regions from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He contends that Bryant misconstrues this

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point. It is not, Goldstone writes, that all these regions were on runways to industrial takeoff; rather, none of them was. The only exception was Britain. But even that country showed no clear signs of “modernizing development” until sometime in the eighteenth century, or even after 1800. Goldstone rejects Bryant’s assertion that Europe could not have surged ahead as it did without an extended prelude in which enabling institutions and innovations germinated and took root. Goldstone believes this kind of historical thinking is excessively “linear.” He argues rather that “sudden and dramatic ‘jumps’ can develop from slight tips or deviations in underlying functions or relationships.” Goldstone reasons that in the context of the past six hundred years or so neither Europe nor any single country within that region constituted anything approaching a bounded system of cultural continuity in which successive developments built on one another. Rather, contingencies, conjunctures, and accidents, some of them of interregional or global scope, pushed change in new directions abruptly and on a large scale, even in a place as small and culturally homogeneous as England. For Goldstone, in contrast in some measure to Pomeranz and Wong, the short-term development that precipitated Britain’s “sudden and dramatic jump” into industrialization was an extraordinary set of conditions in which scientific discovery, precise instrument making, and machine engineering not only reinforced one another but found wide acceptance and participation throughout British society. When applied to the problem of steam power and coal extraction, this culture of innovation propelled Britain into uncharted productivity and growth. According to Goldstone, however, this development was not a consequence of long-accumulating advances in Europe but an unforeseen deviation from the agricultural, craft-, and trade-based growth that prevailed not only in China, India, and the Muslim lands but also in France, the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe well into the nineteenth century. Prasannan Parthasarathi’s essay in Maxine Berg’s edited volume Writing the History of the Global is principally a commentary on comparative methodology. For this chapter we have excerpted only the section of the essay in which Parthasarathi reviews the main arguments in his 2011 book Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not.19 A relatively recent contributor to the debate over developmental divergence among major economies before 1800, the author shares the California School’s rejection of the idea of Europe’s experience as normative and therefore as the standard against which the economic histories of other societies may rightly be measured. He criticizes Wong and Pomeranz, however, for conceiving of “economic development as following one of two paths, the European and the non-European or the industrial or the non-industrial.” Parthasarathi proposes a more pluralistic understanding of the pre-1800 world: all the large agrarian societies of Afroeurasia struggled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to achieve economic growth and improvement but could do so only within the ecological and other constraints peculiar to their own region. Historians who study similarities and differences between societies should not neglect “rigorous and careful consideration” of the diverse local contexts within

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which individuals—rulers, merchants, manufacturers, consumers—made economic decisions. Fathoming the great divergence that took place after 1800, Parthasarathi believes, requires comparative analysis of multiple cases of development, each of whose ecological, economic, social, and political settings were different. The author engages with Wong and Pomeranz regarding the Chinese context of development, particularly the imperial government’s policies about coal consumption, but he also introduces the cases of India, France, and the Ottoman Empire. He argues that comparing economically developed regions of India to Britain presents difficulties because the contexts of cotton textile manufacture and wood resources were so different— even though India’s economic decline in the nineteenth century requires explanation. He finds underlying similarities between Britain and both the Ottoman Empire and France a more promising foundation for examining differences in the economic trajectories of these places in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly differences in the attitudes and policies of the state.

NOTES

1. See the essays in Chapter 1. 2. “The Interrelations of Societies in History,” in Marshal G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, ed. with an introduction and conclusion by Edmund Burke III (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 28. 3. William McNeill, “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years,” Journal of World History 1, 1 (Spring 1990): 19. 4. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974–1989). 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, “World System versus World-Systems: A Critique,” in The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand, ed. by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills (London: Routledge, 1993), 293. 6. C. F. Black was a key exponent of modernization theory. See The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 7. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250– 1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Frank and Gills, The World System. Also see Frank’s seminal essay in Chapter 2 of this book. 8. See, for example, John Obert Voll, “Islam as a Special World System,” Journal of World History 5 (Fall 1994): 213–26. 9. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); and David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). See also Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 10. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 311. 11. Leaving aside the California connection, the list of like-minded revisionists may be expanded to include James Blaut, Jack Goody, John Hobson, James Lee, and Prasannan Parthasarathi. Jack Goldstone is to be credited for the moniker “California School.”

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12. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 13. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1: 36. 14. Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 10–13. 15. Robert C. Allen, British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 17. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, “Before and Beyond Divergence: A New Look at the Economic History of China and Europe,” in Institutions and Comparative Economic Development, ed. M. Aoki, T. Kuran, and G. Roland, International Economics Association Conference Volume no. 150– 51 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 65. 18. David S. Landes, “Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, 2 (Spring 2006): 3–22. 19. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600– 1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y A N D E CO LO G Y O N T H E E V E O F IN D U S T R I A L I Z AT I O N : E U R O P E , C H IN A , A N D T H E G LO B A L C O N J U N C T U R E Kenneth Pomeranz

This article combines one familiar and one unfamiliar project. The first involves bringing our knowledge of Chinese economic history closer to parity with what we know about Europe, largely by making estimates for consumption, income, and availability of natural resources. The results suggest that many important economic variables had similar values in the more advanced parts of China and Europe circa 1750. Even more surprising, they suggest that, despite their very dense populations, the Yangzi and Pearl River deltas in 1750 were not facing appreciably worse ecological pressures than those faced by the most developed areas in Europe: thus these strains cannot, by themselves, explain much of the huge divergence between East and West in the nineteenth century.1 Thus a second, more unusual, project: to use Chinese experiences to examine Europe. I take two eighteenth-century cases that are conventionally treated as already set This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Kenneth Pomeranz’s “Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture” was originally published in American Historical Review 107, 2 (April 2002): 425–46. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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on opposing paths—toward dramatic growth in Europe and stagnation in China—and find much that they shared, suggesting that their divergence was a discontinuous and partly exogenous development. Thirty years ago, the European side of this divergence was described in terms of an “Industrial Revolution” with several agreed-upon features. First, it constituted a fundamental and fairly sudden break with “pre-industrial” times. Second, it was British in origin, with new best practices later diffusing to the continent. Third, its essence was a string of spectacular breakthroughs in a few key industries (first cotton, then coal, then iron, steel, and land transport), rather than the steady but more modest gains in many other activities. Finally, Britain’s foreign trade was central—especially for textiles—with some (though far from all) scholars emphasizing colonies and slavery. But the literature since then has questioned all of this. Increasingly, European industrialization appears as just part of long, slow processes: market expansion, division of labor, many small innovations, and millions of people accumulating small profits. And since this gradual European story begins well before Europe had much extra-continental trade, and includes countries for which such trade never mattered as much as for Britain (much less Lancashire), it is much less global than the old British one. In a recently published book, I argue that this picture is misleading—not because Europe’s gradual market-driven growth did not matter but because it does not differentiate Europe from East Asia (or perhaps other places). Smithian dynamics worked just as well in China as in Western Europe, but they did not transform basic possibilities— eventually, highly developed areas faced serious resource constraints, in part because commercialization and handicraft industry also tended to accelerate population growth. Europe’s escape required new technologies plus coal, New World resources, and various favorable global conjunctures— or, more properly, Britain’s escape, since protoindustrialization in places such as Flanders and even Holland led to results more like the Yangzi Delta or Japan’s Kantō plain than like England. (Not to mention Denmark, where very labor-intensive solutions to similar ecological pressures yielded agrarian prosperity, but with little growth of even handicraft industry until after 1850, and falling returns per labor hour.)2 Industrialization did not follow naturally from any region’s proto-industrialization; we can as easily see Europe as “China manqué” as vice versa. On the other hand, since I will argue that the most advanced parts of China in many ways resembled parts of the European mainland that initiated mechanized industrialization within a few decades of Britain—and are no longer seen, as they once were, as having been “blocked” from development by virtue of that relatively short lag—I would argue that our histories of Chinese core regions should also move away from too strong a focus on supposed blockages and developmental blind alleys.3 In a particularly powerful “gradualist” account, Jan de Vries has subsumed the Industrial Revolution in what he calls the “industrious revolution.” In the first phase of this process, which spanned roughly 1550–1850, households in northwestern Europe worked more hours and allocated more of their labor to production for the market,

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while saving time for that labor by purchasing some things that they once made for themselves. The industrious revolution, then, involves both increasing labor (a result of preferences shifting toward various goods over leisure) and Smithian specialization, with the expected gains in efficiency.4 But this describes the more commercialized parts of sixteenth to eighteenth century China (and probably Japan, too) as well as it describes eighteenth-century Europe. Thus European industrialization must still need a separate explanation. I will argue below that the reasons why the industrious revolution played out so differently in European and East Asian cores have less to do with economic institutions, attitudes, or demographic processes in these core regions themselves than with the fortuitous location of coal, and with the very different, politically structured, relationships between these cores and their respective peripheries. (Of course, it also had something to do with the process of invention itself, but—to put things briefly—the important differences there seem to be external to the economy per se.) Jan de Vries’ industrious revolution helps resolve a paradox. The grain-buying power of Europeans’ per-hour or per-day wages fell sharply between about 1430 and 1550, and it did not return to 1350 levels until 1840 or later (depending on the country).5 Yet comparing death inventories over the same period (especially after 1650) shows clear increases in what ordinary people owned. These trends are compatible because people increased the time they spent working for the market; this let them buy both consumer durables and their increasingly expensive bread. This may have decreased people’s leisure time. It certainly decreased the time they spent making things for their own households: instead of making, say, their own candles, people specialized in weaving and bought their candles with cash. The same thing was happening in China. The rice-buying power of day laborers’ wages probably fell from about 1100 on,6 but even ordinary people seem to have increased their consumption of “non-essentials,” especially between 1500 and 1750. Many of these are the same non-essentials as in Europe: tobacco, sugar, more and better clothes, eating utensils, and so on. But first let us consider basic foodstuffs. Most estimates of caloric intake in eighteenth- century China compare well with Europe, whether we take averages for the whole population or figures for the hardest-working laborers.7 Comparable or even superior nutrition is also suggested by the rough parity between rural Chinese and English life expectancies around 1750, with both higher than most figures for continental European populations.8 Moreover, recent studies suggest that Chinese birth rates were equal to or lower than European ones throughout the 1550–1850 period,9 while the overall rate of population growth was first faster (1550–1750) and then similar (1750–1850);10 this also indicates that Chinese death rates were probably lower. Poor Chinese reached these nutritional standards without spending any more of their incomes on basic foodstuffs than did poor Europeans. Fang Xing estimates that Yangzi Delta farm laborers (the poorest non-beggars in the region) spent 55 percent of

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their earnings on basic grain supplies in the 1600s and very slightly less in the early 1800s.11 Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins come up with 53 percent for the rural English poor in the 1790s.12 Moreover, Fang’s method of calculation almost certainly understates both household earnings (he omits women’s earnings entirely, for instance) and misses many non-grain expenditures.13 Chinese could have simply buried their “extra” income under the house, but they did not.14 Numerous domestic commentators described (and usually decried) increases in popular consumption; lists of products in local histories and in fiction that was meant to be realistic describe a broad range of goods for sale even in rather remote towns; other texts describe the food, clothing, and home furnishings of families at various social levels.15 We also have accounts from various European visitors, most of whom (before 1800) compare levels of consumption favorably with those back home.16 Quantitative estimates confirm these impressions. They are necessarily inexact, but I have tried hard to make them conservative, and still came up with surprisingly high numbers. [. . .] In each case, Chinese per capita consumption seems at least comparable to Europe’s at the same or a later date; this is no great surprise for tea and silk but is quite unexpected for sugar and total cloth. And despite numerous data problems, per-capita cloth output for the Yangzi Delta in 1750 appears close to that for England in 1800. Similar numbers may have different meanings. But here, too, I see broad similarities over the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries—the urbanization of elites, decline of retinues as a main mark of status, published guides to consumption, a long series of ineffective sumptuary laws (which are not even updated in China after about 1550). Peter Burke, a leading historian of early modern European consumption, has concluded that the Chinese and Japanese sources available in translation suggest more East-West similarities than differences, at least at the elite level.17 China’s high standard of living could conceivably have been produced by institutions that were a barrier to further development: this is often implied by scholars who refer to “involution” or a “high-level equilibrium trap.”18 But there is no convincing evidence that factor markets in either eighteenth-century China or Western Europe were clearly closer to neo-classical ideals than the other. Land was generally less encumbered in China and guild restrictions on artisanal activities far less important.19 European capital markets were better places to raise really large sums of capital, but the relevance of this to productive activity prior to the railroad era was limited: Europe’s biggest debtors borrowed mostly for war-making (and overseas colonization, on which more later). Chinese interest rates were higher, perhaps in large part because penalties for default were less severe; this combination of higher rates and lower risk may well have been preferred by the millions of households who made most of the investments for both agriculture and proto industry. (Mechanized industry would have been profitable even at interest rates much higher than either Europe’s or China’s.) The best-known argument that China’s rural economy grew along self-limiting lines fundamentally different from Europe’s is Philip Huang’s argument about “involution.”

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(Zhao Gang and Jack Goldstone have made different, though related, arguments.)20 Essentially, Huang claims that because China was so densely populated, people engaged in self-exploitation, working ever-increasing hours for minimal returns, as they tried to meet fixed consumption targets from their shrinking farms. But since (among other things) paddy rice yields far more per acre than wheat, we will see that land hunger may have been no worse in eighteenth century China than in most of Europe. Huang’s more promising argument is that because Chinese women were strongly discouraged from working outside the home, there was no market for their labor; and since they had to be fed anyway, their families pushed them into more and more hours of very low return, home-based work for the market (mostly textile production) without buying goods that would have decreased their domestic burdens. Thus here, the intensification of labor was not accompanied by any meaningful reallocation of time in response to the market (or much specialization) and did not create a mass market for manufactures: consequently, it led to “involution,” not development.21 Huang’s argument is controversial; there is no room to rehearse the discussion in the present essay.22 But two points from my own work are worth adding. First, the consumption estimates above make it doubtful that Chinese in 1750 were no further above subsistence than before. Second, Huang’s estimates of the returns to spinning and weaving—the basis of his argument that women’s work earned a subsubsistence wage— are based on data from the 1690s, when cotton cloth prices reached one of their two lowest points in the entire 1450–1850 period, while raw cotton prices were relatively high.23 In short, whatever other effects the culturally specific features of Chinese patriarchy may have had, it appears that, at least in this period, women’s earnings more closely approximated men’s than in Europe.24 Thus there was every reason for Chinese families to consider the opportunity costs of both men’s and women’s time in making their purchases, and there are many indications that they did. So to a rising standard of living, we should add, at least provisionally, a calculating approach to using the family’s resources. Thus the Chinese and European pictures look quite similar, both for production and consumption. But these resemblances did not last. Between 1750 and 1900, both population and per-capita consumption soared in Europe. But in China, population growth slowed significantly by 1800, and per-capita non-grain consumption declined: early twentiethcentury figures for cloth, sugar, and tea are well below even my most conservative estimates for 1750.25 As we shall see later, this is not because the eighteenth-century estimates were too high. Ecological differences explain much of this divergence—but not because, as some people have suggested, the most developed parts of China were uniquely “overpopulated.” Rather, Malthusian pressures seem to have been about equally relevant to core regions at both ends of Eurasia (as comparable life expectancies and living standards suggest). I will briefly review them in terms of Thomas Malthus’s four necessities that compete for land: food, fuel, fiber, and building materials.

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In neither place was a shortfall in food production imminent, although in Britain there was not much room left to expand agricultural production without either exhausting the soil or using techniques that were not yet available in 1800 (such as mined or synthesized fertilizer). Much of mainland Europe still had lots of slack capacity, thanks to institutions that encouraged too much fallowing, delayed the draining of swamps, and slowed the spread of mixed husbandry in pre-Napoleonic Western Europe (and even longer farther east). From a Chinese perspective, this looks like a surprisingly slow spread of best practices due to peculiar institutional rigidities.26 Britain had adopted these changes more readily, to the point where there was little more improvement to be expected from them on the eve of a greater than ever population boom: indeed, British agricultural yields changed very little between 1750 and 1850.27 The only available methods for increasing per-acre yields still further in an ecologically sustainable way were, like those used in Denmark, highly labor intensive—so much so that England’s profit-seeking, labor-hiring farmers would not have undertaken them—and these still created only limited gains.28 Even in dry-farming North China (generally a much more vulnerable ecosystem than South China), our limited data suggest, the nutrient balances for grain growing were more favorable than in England circa 1800.29 (They were probably less favorable for North China’s cotton lands—of which more later.) And in China’s rice-growing areas, known techniques could still raise yields without exhausting the soil.30 Both fuel and building needs drew heavily on forests. Here we might assume that China’s cores would be far worse off than Europe’s, given their denser population and the country’s horrible deforestation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but this seems not to be true around 1750 or even 1800. The British Isles already had severe wood shortages before 1650, as did northern Italy; by 1800, Britain had perhaps 5 percent forest cover, and the rest of “insular and peninsular Europe” about 10–15 percent.31 Even France, which was relatively well-forested by West European standards, was about 16 percent forest in 1789—compared to about 33 percent in 1550.32 This meant that, even if no wood were ever wasted, France by 1789 would have needed about 90 percent of its annual forest growth just to meet people’s minimum heating and cooking needs, leaving little for building, much less for expanding fuel-hungry iron forges (which often functioned only a few weeks a year for lack of fuel33) or other industries. For China, anecdotal evidence suggests that even in the extremely densely populated Lower Yangzi, the ecological effects of clearing the highlands did not become severe until about 1820. Wood was not plentiful in North China, but apparently few people were desperately short of fuel.34 On the aggregate, the only figures I know of for 1700 yield a perfectly acceptable 37 percent forest cover for all of China proper, but disastrous deforestation was widespread by 1900. Interpellating for dates in between is tricky. To try to fill the gap, I have done a rough reconstruction of land use for southwest Shandong circa 1800—an interesting area because it was quite densely populated but did not import much timber, and was horribly deforested as of the 1930s.35 Despite

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making every effort I could to make the 1800 situation look bad, it came out much like that of France: 13 percent forest cover and a sustainable fuel supply per year about 20 percent above probable minimum needs.36 This surely meant great hardship for many people, since distribution was uneven and wood was also needed for other uses, but this was also true in France. But what of still more densely populated rice-growing China? Calculations are impossible for the Lower Yangzi, since we have no figures on this area’s huge timber imports; but they can be done for Lingnan, China’s second richest macro-region (focused on Canton). Lingnan has about 70 percent of France’s land area; it had 17.5 million people in 1753 and 30 million in 1853. Yet even in 1853, Lingnan had considerably more forest than France in 1789; and although a far denser population relied on those trees, available wood per capita was double French levels in 1793 and still above France’s 1789 levels in 1853. Thanks to a milder climate, fuel-saving cooking methods, and the burning of crop residues, the difference in wood available for non-fuel uses (assuming fuel needs were met first) was enormous: six times France’s 1789 per-capita levels in 1793 and still more than double France’s 1789 levels in 1853. So despite its denser population, various Chinese efficiencies seem again to suggest that China may have faced no more “Malthusian” stress than Europe as of 1800. Even with efficient fuel-gathering and use, population and proto-industrial growth were pressing hard on forest resources. Timber prices in both China and Europe were high and rising in the eighteenth century,37 and even if popular subsistence was not threatened yet, there were serious impediments to significant growth in per-capita energy use. In Britain and Belgium, the wood crisis was greatly alleviated by a late-eighteenthand nineteenth-century coal boom. However, mineral energy did not become central for most of Europe until quite late in the nineteenth century. Moreover, coal did not end the wood shortage, it just alleviated it— construction and the growing demand for paper kept European timber supplies very tight until North American imports eased the pressure. (Forested acreage roughly leveled off in Europe by 1850, but even that impressive holding action meant less wood per capita.) The coal boom, as E. A. Wrigley has pointed out, represents a fundamental discontinuity. He calculates that the annual energy yield from British coal around 1820 (when output was five times that of 1750 and almost eight times that of 1700)38 was the equivalent of the sustainable yield from 15 million forest acres.39 A more standard conversion would make this 21 million “ghost acres”: more than all of Britain’s pasture and crop land combined. This breakthrough required technical innovation and geographic good fortune. Huge coal seams with visible outcroppings lay relatively close to London: this provided both a rich and needy market and a pool of craftsmen who made crucial improvements in pumps, steam engines, and so on. By contrast, China’s best coal deposits lay in Shaanxi, several hundred landlocked miles from the Yangzi Delta: a bit like if Europe’s

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coal had mostly been under the Carpathian Mountains. The technical challenges also differed. British mines needed water pumped out constantly. For this, a coal-fired steam engine, which would later also solve the transport problem, was a great solution. Conversely, the availability of almost free coal at the pit-head made even the inefficient early steam engines worth deploying for this one use, and so worth tinkering with until they became efficient enough for use elsewhere. By contrast, China’s largest coal deposits were in mines where ventilation was a much bigger problem. Change these geophysical accidents and it becomes a lot harder to imagine such an early escape from the limits of an organic economy; it becomes a lot easier to see Western Europe as a potential Lower Yangzi, with growing ecological pressures eventually outstripping the gains from further division of labor. Eighteenth-century Europe needed more fiber if far more people were going to have more clothes per capita and to ship cloth overseas in return for primary products. But raising more wool would simply take too much land away from more intensive uses. Flax is both very hard on the soil and very labor intensive. This made it a garden crop in much of Western Europe, something grown on a small scale in peri-urban areas with plenty of nightsoil and labor. Parliament repeatedly enacted heavy subsidies for flax during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but British production rose very little, and continental production not much more (except in Russia, where the soil could be given a long rest after a couple of flax crops).40 Matching the fiber supply that came from New World cotton by 1830 with domestic sources would have required an implausible thirty-fold increase in English flax production. Cotton, the principal East Asian fiber source, is less labor intensive than flax, but it, too, is hard on the soil. The Lower Yangzi’s huge imports of Manchurian soybeans went mostly to sustain cotton lands; so did most of Japan’s vastly increased fishing after 1750. Europe, of course, eventually turned to cotton, too—not by growing it with imported fertilizer but by importing huge amounts of American cotton. Thus fiber brings us to the more general issue of long-distance trade. As densely populated cores faced shortages of various land-intensive products, they sought them in less densely populated areas that could produce surpluses of timber, cattle, or grain but that produced few of the manufactures that cores had in abundance. Thus England and the Netherlands turned first to the Baltic (and the Mediterranean for cotton) and later to the New World; and the Lower Yangzi imported rice and timber from upstream, wheat and soybeans from Manchuria, and raw cotton from North China. The Yangzi Delta’s trade for these primary products dwarfed anything elsewhere in the eighteenth-century world;41 the Pearl River Delta was beginning to follow suit. But this kind of trade tended to run up against limits: one more characteristic of East Asia, one of Europe. Where families in the peripheries were more or less free to allocate their own labor, an export boom and commercialization would often stimulate population growth, both from natural increase and immigration.42 Moreover, as the best land filled up (or the most accessible forests were cleared),

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some labor would move into handicrafts: since most technology was not yet embodied in very expensive capital goods, and high transport costs on bulky items provided some protection for infant industries, this sort of import substitution was a much more “natural” process than today.43 Together, these changes reduced raw materials surpluses for export and demand for imported manufactures. This is precisely what happened in much of the Chinese interior in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The Middle and Upper Yangzi grew very rapidly,44 reducing their rice and timber surpluses; some of the extra hands available began making coarse cloth that replaced shipments from the Lower Yangzi.45 In North China, population growth was so rapid that it probably required the reconversion of some cashcrop land to grain production;46 and at any rate, much more of the region’s huge raw cotton crop was spun and woven locally, rather than sent south. To some extent, the Yangzi Delta compensated by finding new, more remote markets (in Manchuria, Southeast Asia, and to some extent in the West) and by specializing more in fancier fabrics for elites, moving up the value-added ladder as an established industrial area should. Nonetheless, it faced serious economic pressures that inhibited any further specialization in industry. These trends might have been less pronounced if people had migrated from the increasingly full peripheries to the Yangzi Delta—as they “should” have, given its higher standard of living. This might have allowed primary product exports from the peripheries to stay higher for longer; it also should have lowered Yangzi Delta wages, making its manufactured exports more competitive. Here, however, Chinese institutions and values did matter. Cloth production was an overwhelmingly female activity, and women almost never migrated alone. They moved as part of male-headed households, and most rural men were farmers. Most industry was rural, and there were few places to live in the countryside for somebody who had neither kin to move in with nor access to land; this was not a landscape with great landlords looking for “cottagers.” Delta land was expensive, and even renting it often required a large deposit; thus poor couples from the interior had reasons to stay put unless they were completely landless. On the other hand, Chinese institutions had been very successful (with government loans of seed, animals, etc.) in facilitating migrations of poor people toward areas with better land-to-labor ratios throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: much better than in Europe, where institutional arrangements made land-rich Eastern Europe uninviting to any West European seeking a better life, while high migration costs limited poor people’s migration to the pre-1800 New World to those willing to be indentured on terms that landowners found competitive with the chance to purchase slaves. As long as there was land to go to, facilitating those flows probably mattered far more to integrating labor markets than any flows toward the Yangzi Delta would have. Thus, on the whole, Chinese labor markets may still have been somewhat better integrated than Europe’s.47 But as land frontiers disappeared, the difficulties of moving

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toward manufacturing or service jobs in highly developed regions became more significant. Meanwhile, the cultural ideal of the “man plows, woman weaves” household which came to be realized far more often in the Qing dynasty,48 although it was still often set aside where economic incentives to violate it were strong enough (as in the tea country), meant that frontier families also produced cloth if possible. We thus see unfolding over time a phenomenon noted by Saito Osamu for Tokugawa Japan: the elaboration of a family division of labor that to some extent substituted for the deepening of geographic specialization.49 As incomes rose in some of China’s rice-exporting regions, and as Qing officials helped spread cotton growing and weaving in these regions, more families could keep their women employed inside, as they preferred; and, in doing so—rather than, for instance, doing more double-cropping of rice, as other Qing officials urged50 — they reinforced the ecological pressures on downstream areas. We can now reconsider how Britain escaped the Yangzi Delta’s fate. One central factor was technological change—particularly steam and coal, which relaxed the land constraint in a more fundamental way than any other innovation before turn-of-thecentury chemicals and electricity. But another part—at least as important as the small changes in numerous sectors that have been emphasized in recent decades—lay in its relations with its peripheries, which differed sharply from those we have just discussed. The importance of these resources becomes even greater when we remember that, once begun, the mechanization of industry need not have been sustained, any more than previous bursts of growth had been; indeed, it could not have been sustained had what seemed to be pressing resource and environmental strains not been alleviated even while both population and per-capita consumption soared. Western Europe’s early modern trade with Eastern Europe was not squeezed by rising population and import substitution like that in the Chinese interior. East European serfdom and other institutions meant that agricultural improvement and population growth were slower than one would expect in a free-labor periphery: few people would immigrate from crowded but freer areas, and there was little of the wage labor that allowed people elsewhere to form families without inheriting land. Nor could peasants switch into handicraft activity on any great scale. In the crucial hundred years before 1860, the New World did much more to relax northwest Europe’s land constraint: both its natural bounty and its history facilitated this. Old World diseases removed millions of indigenes, and much of the labor force was replaced by slaves—who were imported at a cost that consumed about one-quarter of export earnings in late eighteenth-century Brazil and the Caribbean.51 Moreover, these slaves often did not meet their own subsistence needs (unlike most coerced cash-crop workers in the Old World). Consequently, the circum-Caribbean slave region (from Brazil to the southern United States) became the first “modern”-looking periphery, with large bills for the import of capital goods (in this case, kidnapped ones) and for mass consumer goods (such as cheap cloth for slaves). Thus, unlike Old World peripheries, the New World kept expanding as a source of land-intensive exports, allowing Europe to become

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ever more specialized in manufacturing. (Manufactures were the bulk of the goods used to buy slaves in Africa, and they were also sold to North America, which earned much of the cash for its purchases with grain and timber for Caribbean plantations.52) In the long run, exports from free North America would be still larger, but that too, mostly postdates 1860; and, as John McCusker and Russell Menard show, North American settlement was also tied for quite a while to the capacity to export.53 For present purposes, consider how much New World commodities did to relax Britain’s land constraint, even as early as 1830. Replacing Britain’s 1801 consumption of Caribbean sugar with locally grown calories would have required 850,000 to 1.2 million acres of the best wheat land; by 1831—still before the great fall in sugar prices and quintupling of per-capita consumption that followed—the figure is 1.2 to 1.6 million. Enough wool to replace Britain’s American cotton imports in 1830 would have required over 23 million acres: more than either Britain’s total pasture and crop land54 or E. A. Wrigley’s circa 1820 figure for the impact of coal.55 Thus Britain got an extended window in which to solve certain resource constraints partly because markets did not work in its peripheries as well as they did in East Asia, thanks to bound labor, colonial monopolies, and such factors. Land-saving New World imports kept soaring as industrialization proceeded, keeping pace with the central contribution of fossil fuels. Britain’s coal output would increase fourteen times from 1815 to 1900,56 its sugar imports roughly eleven-fold,57 and its cotton imports a stunning twenty times.58 It also began to use huge amounts of American grain, beef, lumber, and other primary products; and the New World also became a vast outlet for surplus population from various parts of Europe. As these migrants brought with them European tastes, as technological progress created mechanical capital goods (rather than the enslaved human ones of an earlier era) in high demand across the Atlantic, and as independent New World governments emerged with their own reasons for paying the costs of frontier expansion, the various peculiar institutions that had helped create a flow of land-intensive New World exports were no longer important, but they had been crucial while the colonies and transatlantic trade were taking shape. Without both fossil fuels and access to the New World, which together removed the need to manage land intensively, Europe, too, could have wound up on an “East Asian,” labor-intensive path. Indeed, there are many signs of such tendencies in eighteenth-century Europe: in the decline of meat eating from roughly 1400 to 1800, in certain aspects of English agriculture and proto-industry, and in almost everything about Denmark.59 The East-West difference in labor intensity was not essential but contingent; take away the “resource shocks” of coal and the New World and it is not hard to imagine continued European convergence toward a much more labor-intensive world, in which many more people worked on the land, increasing yields while preserving fertility through more marling, more careful manuring, and more gathering of crop residues. Progress along such a path might well have maintained or even slightly improved living standards, but it would not have brought Europe any closer to our energy-intensive, capital-intensive world. Indeed, to the extent to which additional laborers on the land really were produc-

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tive— so that removing them from farm work would push up agricultural prices— and to the extent that such labor-intensive “solutions” to land constraints gradually decrease the rewards for solving the problem in a different way, they could have made breakthroughs like the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth-century version of the Agricultural Revolution60 progressively less likely with time. The processes that have best been captured in the recent literature on early modern growth and “how the West grew rich” are important, but most of them are also the parts that Europe shared with some other parts of the early modern world. Those shared processes alone could have led to a Lower Yangzi result (or a Danish, Dutch, or Flemish result) instead of an English one: not because of any institutional “failures” but due to basic ecological realities and to limits on the ability of labor and capital to substitute for land in the era before fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizer, and the like. To explain East-West differences, we need to look at how those constraints were relaxed in Europe. Part of the story—which I have largely neglected here—is technological innovation; since we cannot take that for granted, we cannot argue that, with similar resource bonanzas, China would have had its own industrial revolution. But neither was inventiveness alone sufficient to relax the land constraint and create self-sustaining growth between 1750 and 1850; and without the land saving that coal and the New World provided (without being very labor intensive), one can imagine the focus of inventive efforts themselves being very different. Thus understanding the “European miracle” (once we place it back in the nineteenth century) requires that we look again at some topics from earlier scholarly generations—coal, empire, English exceptionalism, and the discontinuity of the industrial revolution—as they appear in a Chinese mirror.

NOTES

1. The Yangzi Delta, consisting of the core prefectures of what G. William Skinner, “Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems,” in Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif., 1977), calls the Lower Yangzi macro-region, had some 36.5 million people in 1770 as its borders were defined by Yeh-chien Wang, “Secular Trends of Rice Prices in the Yangzi Delta, 1638–1935,” in Thomas G. Rawski and Lillian M. Li, eds., Chinese History in Economic Perspective (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 35–68; I will sometimes use a slightly more restrictive definition, yielding an area with 31.5 million. Either way it is clearly large enough to bear comparison with European nations of the time, in spite of not being an independent political unit. For more on the desirability of comparing China to Europe as a whole (rather than to individual countries), and parts of China to European states, see R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997). 2. Thorkild Kjærgaard, The Danish Revolution 1500–1800: An Ecohistorical Interpretation (Cambridge, 1994), 151–54, 158, 160. 3. For a pioneering work that helped reverse the focus on “backwardness” and “failure” in France, see Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780–1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978).

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4. Jan de Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (1994): 249–70. 5. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life, Siân Reynolds, trans. (New York, 1981), 134–35; Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, Olive Ordish, trans. (New York, 1980), 121, 136, 161, 199; Gregory Clark, “Yields per Acre in English Agriculture 1250–1860: Evidence from Labour Inputs,” Economic History Review 44, no. 3 (1991): 446. Recent unpublished research by Peter Lindert and Philip Hoffman and by Robert Allen that adjusts standard real wage indices for early modern Europe by factoring in housing costs suggests that the trends for most people may have been even worse than those suggested by the “grain wage” alone. 6. Kang Chao [Zhao Gang], “Zhongguo lishishang gongzi shuiping de bianqian,” Zhonghua wenhua fuxing yuekan 16, no. 9 (September 1983): 57. There are some problems with the way Zhao makes his argument—most importantly that he sometimes reports only cash wages, ignoring what was often a large in-kind supplement— but the general trend is probably nonetheless correct. 7. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 38–39. See also Ming-te Pan, “Who Was Worse Off?” Preliminary draft of paper delivered at 1998 meeting of Chinese Historians in the United States (typescript in possession of the author), 10–11; Robert B. Marks, “Rice Prices, Food Supply, and Market Structure in Eighteenth-Century South China,” Late Imperial China 12, no. 2 (1991): 77–78. See Gregory Clark, Michael Huberman, and Peter H. Lindert, “A British Food Puzzle, 1770–1850,” Economic History Review 48, no. 1 (1995): 223–26; Ming-te Pan, “Rural Credit Market and the Peasant Economy (1600–1949): The State, Elite, Peasant, and Usury” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1994), 327, for some of the key figures. For some French figures, which are considerably worse, see Maurice Aymard, “Toward the History of Nutrition: Some Methodological Remarks,” in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Food and Drink in History (Baltimore, 1979), 6–7. 8. Compare William Lavely and R. Bin Wong, “Revising the Malthusian Narrative: The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (August 1998): 714–48 (especially Table 2 and Figure 3); and James Lee and Cameron Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (Cambridge, 1997), 79; with E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981), 230, 708–13 (and see Peter Razzell, “The Growth of Population in Eighteenth Century England: A Critical Reappraisal,” Journal of Economic History 53 [December 1993]: 757–63, for a suggestion that these figures are too high; Razzell’s suggested adjustment for infant mortality alone would bring a life expectancy at birth of 37.0 down to somewhere between 31.6 and 34.0). For continental examples, see John Knodel, Demographic Behavior in the Past (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 68–69; and Yves Blayo, “La mortalité en France de 1740 a 1829,” Population (November–December 1975): 138–39 (showing a lower life expectancy in France). 9. Li Zhongqing, “Zhongguo lishi renkuo zhidu: Qingdai xingwei ji qi yiyi,” in Li Zhongqing and Guo Songyi, eds., Qingdai huangzu renkou xingwei de shehui huanjing (Beijing, 1994), 3.

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10. Li Bozhong, “Kongzhi zengchang yi bao fuyu-Qingdai qian, zhongqi Jiangnan de renkou xingwei,” Xin shixue 5, no. 3 (September 1994): 32–34; compare Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, eds., Atlas of World Population History (New York, 1978), 28–29. 11. Fang Xing, “Qingdai Jiangnan nongmin de xiaofei,” Zhongguo jingji shi yanjiu 11, no. 3 (1996): 93, 95. 12. Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (London, 1981), 14. 13. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 137 and n. 110. 14. Charles P. Kindleberger, “Spenders and Hoarders,” in Kindleberger, ed., Historical Economics: Art or Science? (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 35–85, does indeed suggest that Chinese were “hoarders” rather than “spenders,” but gives little evidence for this. 15. Particularly striking accounts may be found in the novels Lin ping mei and Xingshi yinyuan zhuan— striking in part because they deal with a medium-sized city and a small town, respectively, in North China rather than with any of the country’s great metropolises. For some reflections on consumption in China by a leading historian of early modern European consumption, see Peter Burke, “Reset Verba: Conspicuous Consumption in the Early Modern World,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), 148–61. I deal with this at much greater length in Pomeranz, Great Divergence , 127–52. 16. For instance, George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1799), 2: 48; George Macartney (1793) in J. L. Cranmer-Byng, ed., An Embassy to China: Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during His Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, 1793–1794 (London, 1962), 225; Louis Dermigny, La Chine et L’Occident: Le commerce à Canton au XVIIIe siècle, 1719–1833, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964), 3: 1253; Gaspar da Cruz in C. R. Boxer, ed., South China in the Sixteenth Century, Being the Narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar da Cruz, O.P. [and] Fr. Martín de Rada, O.E.S.A. (1550–1575) (London, 1953), 106, see also 99. 17. Burke, “Res et Verba,” 158. 18. See Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford, Calif., 1990); Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973). Elvin himself sees the barriers as more environmental than institutional, but others have changed the emphasis. 19. I compare these at much greater length in Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 69–107. 20. Kang Chao [Zhao Gang], Man and Land in Chinese History: An Economic Analysis (Stanford, Calif., 1986); Jack Goldstone, “Gender, Work and Culture: Why the Industrial Revolution Came Early to England But Late to China,” Sociological Perspectives 39 (1996): 1–21. 21. Huang, Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 91, 110. 22. See, for instance, the summary in R. Bin Wong, “Chinese Economic History and Development: A Note on the Myers-Huang Exchange,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 3 (1992): 600–611. I add a number of further points in Kenneth Pomeranz, “Beyond the East-West Binary,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (2002), which also includes a response to Huang’s objections to my work. 23. Zhang Zhongmin, Shanghai cong Kaifa dao Kaifang, 1369–1842 (Kunming, 1988), 207–8; compare Huang, Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 84–86.

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24. For English data, see Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, “Women’s Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family, 1790–1865,” Economic History Review 48, no. 1 (1995): 102–3. 25. See, for instance, the estimate of roughly 2.2 pounds of sugar consumption per capita for the 1930s cited by Daniels, “Agro-Industries,” section 42a: 85. Chang Chung-li, The Income of the Chinese Gentry (Seattle, 1962), 303, cites a 1930s estimate for tea consumption of 1.3 pounds, which would be much higher than my estimate for 1840; but the 1840 estimate, because it counts only tea that entered long-distance trade and paid internal customs, is surely an underestimate. 26. See Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 73–80. 27. F. M. L. Thompson, “Rural Society and Agricultural Change in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in George Grantham and Carol S. Leonard, eds., Agrarian Organization in the Century of Industrialization: Europe, Russia, and North America (Greenwich, Conn., 1989), 189, 193; Clark, “Yields per Acre in English Agriculture,” 456–59; Brinley Thomas, “Food Supply in the United Kingdom during the Industrial Revolution,” in Joel Mokyr, ed., The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (Totowa, N.J., 1985), 145–46. 28. On Denmark, see Kjærgaard, Danish Revolution, 37–38, 55–56, 123, 151–58; on the difference between capitalist and peasant strategies for dealing with ecological strain, see Mauro Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350– 1850, Mary McCann Salvatorelli, trans. (Cambridge, 1997). 29. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, Appendix B and chap. 5. 30. Li Bozhong [Po-chung Li], Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620–1850 (New York, 1998), 119–27. 31. Michael Williams, “Forests,” in B. L. Turner II et al., eds., The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (New York, 1990), 180–81. 32. J. P. Cooper, “In Search of Agrarian Capitalism,” in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe (New York, 1985), 139 n. 2. 33. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, Vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce, Siân Reynolds, trans. (New York, 1982), 367. 34. Staunton, Authentic Account, 2: 141–42; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 123–27; more details in Pomeranz, “The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1900–1937” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1988), Appendix F. 35. Pomeranz, Making of a Hinterland, 123–37. 36. Pomeranz, Making of a Hinterland, 124–25; Kenneth Pomeranz, “How Exhausted an Earth? Some Thoughts on Qing (1644–1911) Environmental History,” Chinese Environmental History Newsletter 2, no. 2 (1995): 7–11; also see Pomeranz, Great Divergence, Appendix B. 37. For continental Europe, see, for example, Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 186; Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIeme siècle (1933; rpt. edn., Paris, 1984), 343, 346–47, finding a larger price increase for fuel wood than for any other commodity in France between 1726 and 1789, with the rise continuing into the early nineteenth century.

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Britain is discussed later in this text. For China, see Li Bozhong, “Ming Qing shiqi Jiangnan de mucai wenti,” Zlwngguo shehui jingji shi yanjiu 1 (1994): 86–96. 38. Michael W. Flinn (with the assistance of David S. Stoker), The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 2: 1700–1830, the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1984), 26. 39. E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (New York, 1988), 54–55. 40. Alex J. Warden, The Linen Trade, Ancient and Modern (1864; rpt. edn., London, 1967), 32–40; George Grantham, “Agrarian Organization in the Century of Industrialization: Europe, Russia, and North America,” in Grantham and Leonard, Agrarian Organization in the Century of Industrialization, 13–14; Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1961), 333–34. Note that Warden, writing in The Linen Trade, despaired of increasing British flax imports from the continent. 41. Food imports from the Middle Yangzi alone fed approximately 6 million people per year in the Lower Yangzi, and the soybeans that the Lower Yangzi imported could have fed at least another 3 to 4 million had most of them not been used as fertilizer. Even Shandong, a not particularly commercialized province with perhaps 23 million people in 1800 (Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China [Stanford, Calif., 1985], 322), imported enough food to feed 700,000 to 1 million people, and exported a like amount. By contrast, the Baltic grain trade fed about 600,000 people a year at its peak, and all of Europe’s long-distance grain trade put together fed at most 2.5 million people at its pre1800 peak. For numbers on these different flows, see Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (New York, 1976), 17, 56; Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 127; Adachi Keiji, “Daizuhaku ryūtsū to Shindai no shōgyō teki nōgyō,” Tōyōshi Kenkyū 37, no. 3 (1978): 35–63; Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming, Zhongguo zibenzhuyi de mengya (Beijing, 1985), 277; Xu Tan, “Ming Qing shiqi Shandong de liangshi liutong,” Lishi dang’an 57 (1995): 86; Marks, “Rice Prices, Food Supply, and Market Structure,” 76–79; Yeh-chien Wang, “Food Supply and Grain Prices in the Yangtze Delta in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Second Conference on Modern Chinese Economic History, 3 vols. (Taipei, 1989), 2: 423–30; Lu Hanchao, “Arrested Development: Cotton and Cotton Markets in Shanghai, 1350–1843,” Modern China 18, no. 4 (1992): 493; Li Bozhong, Agricultural Development, 113–14, 209 n. 35. 42. Rising incomes tend to lower death rates and sometimes raise birth rates, too; increased demand for wage labor often makes earlier marriages possible than if couples have to wait to inherit property. 43. I present the argument in a more formal model, adjusted to various possible assumptions about prices and other variables in Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 285–92. The model draws heavily on the work of Joel Mokyr, Industrialization in the Low Countries, 1795–1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1976). 44. G. William Skinner, “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China,” in Skinner, City in Late Imperial China, 213; he then notes elsewhere the likelihood that this growth reduced the long-distance trade in rice between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. 45. Li Bozhong, Agricultural Development, 108; Yamamoto Susumu, “Shindai Shikawa no chi-iki keizai [Regional Development in Qing Dynasty Sichuan],” Shigaku Zasshi 100, no. 12 (December 1991): 7–8, 10–11; and for a general survey, Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 242–51. 46. See Pomeranz, Great Divergence, Appendix F.

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47. The same point could be made about other markets, too. The numerous ways in which both Europe and China differed from an ideal-typical market economy are important to bear in mind, lest we choose one Chinese barrier to growth and say “Aha! It was economic institutions after all!” 48. Li Bozhong, “Cong ‘fufu bing zuo’ dao ‘nan geng nu zhi,’” Zhongguo jingji shi yanjiu 11, no. 3 (1996): 99–107; Susan Mann, “Household Handicrafts and State Policy in Qing Times,” in Jane Kate Leonard and John R. Watt, eds., To Achieve Security and Wealth: The Qing Imperial State and the Economy, 1644–1911 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 75–96. 49. Saito Osamu, Puroto-Kogyo no jidai: Seio to Nihon no hikakushi (Tokyo, 1985). 50. On Qing encouragement of cotton work in areas that did not have it, see Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 160–65, 176; on a failed campaign to increase double cropping in the Middle Yangzi, see Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 131–35. 51. Calculations based on slave prices from Joseph C. Miller, “Slave Prices in the Portuguese Southern Atlantic, 1600–1830,” in Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade (Madison, Wis., 1986), 70; numbers of slaves from Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), 216; and Armin K. Ludwig, Brazil: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston, 1985), 314; Caribbean export figures from Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London, 1949–50), 193–203 (British Caribbean), and 235–42 (French Caribbean); plus British import data from B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (New York, 1988), 462–64; Brazilian export figures for 1821–26 from Ludwig, Brazil, 107; and for 1796 and 1806 from Michel Morineau, lncroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux: Les retours des trésors americains d’après les gazettes hollandaises (XVI-XVIIIe siècles) (New York, 1985), 177–78. 52. Herbert Klein, “Economic Aspects of the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade,” in James D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 1990), 291; James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (New York, 1972), 43–44; David Richardson, “The Slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic Growth, 1748–1776,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 4 (1987): 765–66. 53. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 18, 23, 28–30. 54. About 18 million acres when first systematically counted in the mid-nineteenth century, though probably higher earlier; see Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 186. 55. See Pomeranz, Great Divergence, Appendix D, for derivation of all figures on “ghost acreage.” 56. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 247. 57. Calculated based on Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 709–11. 58. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 334–35. Imports peaked in 1912 at twenty-eight times 1815 levels. 59. Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 196; and Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-industrial Europe (Hassocks, Sussex, 1979), 13–14, on declining meat consumption; Ambrosoli, Wild and the Sown, and David Levine, Family Formation in an Age

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of Nascent Capitalism (New York, 1977), on English agriculture and proto-industry; Kjærgaard, Danish Revolution, on Denmark. 60. See F. M. L. Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815–1880,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 21, no. 1 (1968).

THE WES T AND THE RES T REVISITED: D E B AT IN G C A P I TA L I S T O R I G IN S , E U R O P E A N C O LO NI A L I S M , A N D T H E A DV E N T O F M O D E R NI T Y Joseph M. Bryant

There is a pattern to intellectual controversies in the human sciences, and its logic is dialectical. Following an initial phase of exploration, an interpretive consensus commonly emerges, which informs ongoing research during a period of knowledge accumulation. Over time, lacunae and strains within the established paradigm become apparent, and revisionist challenges arise to unsettle the field. New insights are proclaimed, decisive refutations are alleged. Texts formerly deemed canonical are suddenly subject to dismissal, and yesterday’s authorities are censured for the errancy of their guidance. As word of the uprising spreads, paladins of the entrenched order are roused to action, and countering fire is directed against the insurgency. A grand interpretive battle is joined. The claims of partisans notwithstanding, victories here—in marked contrast to the natural sciences— are rarely total, and the new positions agreed to are seldom supersessional of the old. Continued factionalism is commonplace, but accommodations do also occur, as reigning paradigms selectively incorporate those revisionist contributions that offer greater analytical comprehension or enrich our range of empirical reference. For students of comparative world history, this is a time of unexpected exhilaration, and unease. Long established certainties have come under sustained questioning in recent years, and the new interpretations being proposed are not limited to issues of marginal importance. Several of the classic concerns of social science inquiry—the origins of capitalism, the global ascendancy of Europe, the fashioning of that cultural and institutional nexus commonly styled “modernity”— are all up for fresh consideration. Though debate is ongoing, the contending parties have engaged with critical force along the major fronts, such that the main lines of argument are now fully discernable. Refinements factual and analytical are to be expected, but a general assessment is presently feasible, and perhaps also timely for identifying those interpretive problems that call for closer attention. Fundamentally at issue is the alleged “Eurocentric” bias that is said to inform and debase the orthodox account which, summarized most broadly, views the making of This is an excerpted version of Joseph M. Bryant’s “The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity”; the original was published in Canadian Journal of Sociology 31, 4 (Autumn 2006): 403–44. Reprinted with permission from the Canadian Journal of Sociology.

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the modern world as a correlate and consequence of the rise of capitalism, a globalizing form of social power initially harnessed and deployed by western Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The fortunate beneficiaries of an advantageous ecology (temperate climes, deep soils, navigable rivers and abundant coastlines, pronounced resource diversity) and a unique institutional and cultural inheritance from the past (Greek philosophy and science, Roman law, a monotheism hostile to animistic conceptions of nature, citizenship ideals and representative forms of governance, segmentary and competing sovereign ties, an accumulating technological competence), these formerly laggard Europeans were able to exploit this manifold endowment, synergistically, and so progressively modernize their societies. As older forms of communalism, tradition, and hierarchy gave way to the surging currents of “restless rationalism” and “possessive individualism,” a connected series of revolutionary transformations—in their modes of production and exchange, in their polities and military capabilities—would impart to these upstarts a range of potencies so enhanced that, carried forcibly outwards by the fluxions of conquest and commerce, an extended period of world supremacy and domination would come their way. United in their opposition to the triumphalism they detect in this grand narrative of enlightened empowerment and exemplary enrichment, the proponents of revision lack a convenient identifying label. Their shared objective, however, is an account of world history that is suitably “de-centred” or, more expressly, “polycentric” in orientation. The partiality of the Eurocentric paradigm, they insist, has unjustly excluded from view the “multiple modernities” that have conjunctively shaped the course of world history, resulting in distorted renderings of both past and present. Properly situated, the story of the European ascendancy must shed many of its claims to distinctiveness, and temper its self-legitimating appeals to both historic and enduring superiorities in customs, practices, and institutions. There can be no downplaying the radicalness of this revisionist dissent. The orthodox consensus, viewed as an assemblage of largely congruent interpretations and mutually reinforcing empirical disclosures, is easily the most formidable and imposing edifice of sustained collective scholarship yet produced. Any reading list of the essential contributions to this many-sided subject—involving a complex interplay of political, military, economic, cultural, scientific, and technological developments—would run to a great many pages, and preoccupy a lifetime of study. Taking guidance from the founding insights of Adam Smith and Henry Maine, Karl Marx and Max Weber, a diverse array of scholars has since fortified, expanded, and refined their initial reconnaissance. To all this one must add that immense and proliferating body of specialist research that addresses those facets of culture and social structure deemed contributory to the European passage to modernity: (i) its distinctive patterns of civic urbanization; (ii) legal-juridical developments that extended rights and protections to persons, subjects, and their claims to property; (iii) productive innovations in agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing; (iv) reforms in military organization and

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decisively lethal upgrades in weaponry and logistical capabilities; (v) the rise of bureaucratized, territorially consolidated polities, as legitimized by representational and constitutional compacts with the governed; (vi) unprecedented advancements in scientific understanding, and an accelerating capacity for technological application; (vii) the onset of a vibrant and popular print culture; (viii) shifting relations and mobilities between classes and estates; (ix) nationalist stirrings and mobilizations; (x) a demographic transition that sustained expanding internal markets and ventures in colonialism; and, not least, (xi) a massive fissure within Latin Christendom that facilitated, quite unintentionally, a multifaceted secularizing dynamic that would refashion not only the institutional orders of Europe, but the mentalities of its inhabitants as well. Any attempt to overturn our reigning comprehension of the key determinants in the European trajectory, from ancient beginnings to modern consequences, would thus appear to be an audacious, unpromising venture. Yet the revisionist ambition is more challenging still, for there stands another consensus requiring subversion. I refer to that significant body of scholarship on Europe’s foremost rivals in power and contenders for civilizational primacy—India, China, and the Islamic world—whose distinctive patterns of social organization and developmental histories have been explored and detailed with analytical sophistication and exacting empirical specificity. If less voluminous in output relative to the privileged focus on Europe, this fund of knowledge lays claim to contributors no less distinguished in stature and importance. From the work of Middle Eastern and Asian specialists, it has become the prevailing view that neither in the Indian subcontinent, nor in China, nor in the Islamic world was a breakthrough to capitalist modernization in the offing. And why should such be expected? The leading powers of the East— the Ottoman empire, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, China’s Ming and Manchu dynasties—were keyed to their own specific institutional arrangements and cultural traditions, and situated within historical currents that flowed accordingly. Matters would change dramatically, however, with the violent remaking of the globe that commenced c. 1500, as the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French began seeking their fortunes far beyond their own national domains. Early forays and encroachments eventually led on to more substantial and permanent forms of presence and acquisition, with the profits and plunder so gained flowing back to stimulate still greater economic expansion and continued advances in military capabilities. As industrialization ushered in a revolutionary transformation in material production and transport, the European advantage passed over into worldwide predominance. Indeed, this was a reality so manifest at the time that a variety of reformist movements came to the fore within the societies threatened or subordinated, openly calling for “selfstrengthening” programs that would restore lost autonomy and greatness by selectively adopting Western technologies and practices— economic, military, educational, political—while otherwise preserving core cultural conventions. Such efforts typically proved belated and inadequate (Meiji Japan being the most notable exception), as reform efforts

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were routinely stymied by the conservatives still dominant and the massive impracticalities of modernizing societies still locked into peasant-based agrarian systems. How, then, to account for this global re-ordering, and the astounding historical fact that such strikingly small numbers of intruders from the West were able to impose their aggrandizing will and purpose in lands so distant and populous, and in civilizations so accomplished? Hitherto, scholarly attention has concentrated on identifying the principal sociological differentia that seem to be implicated in these fateful dispensations, with the aim of explicating both the European rise and the protracted decline and fall of the Eastern empires. As befits the scope and scale of the interpretive challenge, the body of historical comparative research on this subject is both deep and ranging, resistant to easy summation. A broad base of agreement does exist, however, on what might be called the fundamental axis of difference: the nascent European fusion of mercantilist imperialism with a technologically driven capitalistic transformation of production and exchange was the decisive development; and the prospects for any comparable coalescence elsewhere were greatly limited, largely owing to the patterns of culture and social organization there prevailing. Of the purported “constraints” or “barriers” that are thought to have combined to forestall an indigenous capitalist modernization within the major Eastern powers, the following arrangements receive prominent mention: (i) the persistence of centralized forms of imperial autocracy, and an attending confinement of politics to court factionalism and dynastic cycles; (ii) a state-directed economy keyed to the stable extraction of a sustainable surplus, drawn chiefly from the peasant masses through taxation and corvée; (iii) a corresponding control over mercantile and craft sectors, in the form of official markets, price regulations, trade restrictions, licensed brokerages, and state monopolies both in production (armaments and prestige goods, most notably) and in the procurement of strategic resources (such as metals and salt); (iv) a functional symbiosis within elite ranks between state service (administrative or military) and landholding opportunities, with officials and gentry alike dependent for salaries and incomes upon the taxes and rents yielded up by peasant cultivators; (v) a general situation wherein proprietary rights remained insecure, chronically vulnerable to both official graft and arbitrary seizures— hazards that prompted hoarding and other wealth concealment strategies in response; (vi) urban centres under the administrative sway of imperial governors and officials, and whose ruled inhabitants lacked legal-juridical status as citizens; (vii) a tendency to concentrate handicrafts and manufacturing (textiles most notably) within the domestic sphere of peasant production, thereby limiting the possibilities for economies of scale and a wider mass market in consumption; (viii) a customary avoidance of primogeniture, with partible inheritance leading periodically to excessive land parcellization; (ix) the persistence of collective status orders—kinship lineages in China, castes in India, the dhimmis or “protected” religioethnic minorities within Islam—which provided an organizing basis for the mobilization of labour, occupational specialization, and enterprise pursuits that resisted any full subordination to strict market criteria; and (x) a diverse set of institutionalized and cultural restrictions on modes of inquiry, as vari-

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ously imposed by religious and political authorities, such as the “closing of the gate” of legal interpretation (ijtihad) in Sunni Islam, following codification of the four approved schools in the mid-ninth century, or the educational conservativism that was enshrined in China’s imperial examination system, a sorting mechanism for the recruitment of scholar-officials on the basis of their memorization of ancient classic texts, musicalpoetical sensitivities, skills in calligraphy, and adeptness at ritual grace and propriety. In presenting these abbreviated expositions of the two prevailing comparative accounts of modern world history, no suggestion is being made that all matters of interpretation have been settled, or that every relevant circumstance and detail has found secure integration. These are synthesizing narratives of immense complexity, with weaker and stronger strands of analysis and evidence interwoven in patterns and textures of uneven clarity and solidity. Controversies and disputes within each paradigm continue accordingly. But even as the ideal of full explanatory closure proves elusive, epistemological caution invites reflection. Is it likely that either of these accounts— so complementary in all essential points— could have achieved such wide and lasting recognition, if the evidentiary materials upon which they are based have been grossly misread or mythologized? Is it likely that such productive lines of inquiry could have been sustained for so long if, in actuality, they are projections more ideological than scientific? Accusatory labels such as “Eurocentric” or “Orientalist” are valuable to the extent that they alert us to the realities and the possibilities that socially encoded biases have infiltrated and canted the theories and presuppositions in deploy. They cannot be used, in dismissive license, to circumvent the task of documenting the presence of the alleged bias, as it manifests in the specifics of the interpretations in question.

I. THE REVISIONIS T CHALLENGE: A B E L AT E D A N D I N C I D E N TA L R I S E O F T H E W E S T ?

An opportune and fitting point of entry into this ranging and pivotal dispute is Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (2004), a recent offering by the endlessly productive Jack Goody, an inveterate comparativist now well into his sixth decade of scholarly publication. Himself an early dissenter from the mainstream consensus, Goody has long provided a distinctive take on history’s multiple pathways to the present, instructively attentive to such central issues as marriage and inheritance patterns, the social consequences of literacy, technology and state formation, and the cultural expressions of class and power. From his vantage as a specialist in sub-Saharan Africa, it is perhaps not surprising that Goody should be inclined to highlight that continent’s distinctiveness —historical, social, ecological—while also discerning far greater parallels, continuities, and connections across the major societies of the vast Eurasian landmass. The conventional East-West binary has thus consistently struck Goody as an untenable conceptual framework, and much of his work has been devoted to “washing out” many of the key lines of demarcation (1996).

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Never entirely alone in his contrarian leanings, the revisionist ranks have grown perceptibly over the last decade, and Goody is now able to incorporate a wider range of specialist scholarship to inform and supplement his arguments, even as his own contributions afford direction to others rallying to the polycentric persuasion. An expanding armature of mutually supportive citations is suggestive that a “school” is attaining maturity, its leading advocates drawn promisingly from a variety of disciplines. In addition to anthropologist Goody, noteworthy contributions have been made by Marshall Hodgson (1993), an Islamicist; Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), a historical sociologist; Andre Gunder Frank (1998), the iconoclastic economist; James Blaut (1993, 2000), a geographer; Jack Goldstone (2000, 2002), historical sociologist; Roy Bin Wong (1997) and Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), economic historians of China; and John Hobson (2004), a specialist in international relations. What unites this core group of revisionists is a basic agreement on a two-fold claim, strikingly conveyed in the assertion that the European rise to preeminence was, in historical fact, both “late and lucky.” That is to say, not only were there no appreciable differences between the major European powers and those of the Middle East and Asia—in regards to economic productivity, commercial vitality, urban dynamism, and general living standards—up until c. 1800, when an industrial revolution did launch the West into a truly global ascendancy; but, in addition, Europe’s movement beyond the general Eurasian pre-industrial pattern was itself fortuitous, an accidental breakthrough made possible by a convenient abundance of English coal and the plundered gains and resources obtained through colonial conquests in the Americas. What is explicitly rejected in all this is any notion that the rise of the West should be explained in terms of a unique set of institutional and cultural transformations that unfolded cumulatively over the longue durée, or that European societies were differentially organized in ways that provided them with an inner dynamic that led progressively towards capitalist modernization. In proposing this astonishingly novel historical sociology—markedly ahistorical and non-sociological in its underlying premises—the revisionists incur a challenging string of large explanatory obligations. Three appear to be particularly pressing. If, as alleged, decisive European advantages in social capabilities only arose in the wake of industrialization, how are we to account for the preceding three centuries of European encroachment and conquest, and the increasingly manifest incapacity of the Asian powers to repulse the predatory incursions of an unwelcome interloper? Correspondingly, on the revisionist assumption that the major Asian economies were no less technologically inventive and commercially vibrant than those in Europe up to the end of the 18th century, why were the Eastern imperial states incapable of channeling a measure of that prosperity into greater military preparedness and effectiveness, particularly once the European armed presence left little doubt as to the threats posed for regimes losing control over borders, territories, and populations? Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, if there was no long-term dynamism within the West—i.e., if the societies of western Europe were simply on a developmental par with the pre-industrial civilizations of the

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East—how could an abrupt breakthrough to industrialization have been even possible, absent a preparatory process that altered the social relations of production, yielded the advanced technological capacities and skills required for machine-based manufacturing, or created the circuits of financing and exchange that provided the requisite capital for sustained investments?

I I . E U R A S I A N E F F L O R E S C E N C E S A N D E Q U I L I B R I U M T R A P S A L LR O U N D? G E O G R A P H I C A L C O N T I N G E N C I E S A N D T H E G R E AT DIVERGENCE

Having discounted orthodox claims that the European passage to capitalist modernity is to be explicated in terms of distinctive institutional and cultural developments that unfolded over centuries, the revisionists proceed to a second and related line of critique: a repudiation of long-standing assumptions that the Eastern civilizations were mired in protracted equilibrium or even stagnation—economic, technological, political, cultural—prior to the catalytic disruptions occasioned by the European onslaught. Where the orthodox model identifies the major Islamic, Indian, and Chinese imperial powers as “societies of replication,” i.e., as enduring systems that were regularly reconstituted as agro-managerial patrimonial autocracies (with peasant uprisings and periodic military and ecological crises providing grounds for the latest dynastic takeover), the revisionist optic discerns societies of vibrant economic and cultural dynamism, each progressing along its own modernizing course of development. For revisionists, it is China of the Ming and Manchu periods that is said to provide the strongest grounds for abandoning the received dynamism-stasis binary, with developments in Japan, Mughal and Hindu India, and the Islamic Middle East more selectively invoked. Two major publications, Wong’s China Transformed (1997) and Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000), both attempt to make the case that late Imperial China, from roughly 1400 to 1800, experienced massive growth in its economy, brought on by significant gains in agricultural productivity, market-driven commercial expansion, and an incipient industrialization (largely rural) that stimulated inter-regional trade as well as a significant rise in exports. The data mobilized in support of these claims are typically drawn from the most advanced and prosperous regions—principally the Yangzi delta, and the coastal areas active in sea-borne commerce—but this is defended methodologically as a way of comparing “leading edge” sectors, and of avoiding misleading portraits based on aggregate national estimates, where extreme social differences can obscure local trends and potentials for wider development. Pomeranz, expanding upon earlier suggestions by Wong, paints a surprisingly shimmering portrait of Chinese society, highlighted by standards of living and productive practices he claims were comparable or even superior to those found in Europe: in public health and sanitation, medicine, caloric intake, life expectancies, domestic consumption, soil conservation, scientific and technological competence, agricultural

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yields, market efficiencies, and even a more balanced income distribution (2000; 2002). Gazing westwards, he can detect little in the European case to suggest that an internally generated breakthrough was in the offing. Across Eurasia, he insists, the more prosperous sectors were proceeding along similar paths— expanding their output through Smithian market specialization and intensifications—but steadily approaching developmental limits, owing to resource and energy constraints under existing productive techniques. Pomeranz accordingly proposes that neither in Europe nor in Asia was a sustainable “take-off” to modern economic growth historically imminent. On the contrary, the likely destiny for all the more commercially vibrant regions was a “common ‘proto-industrial’ cul-de-sac” (2000: 207), as existing “best practices” would have required ever greater intensifications just to keep pace with population growth and rising resource and energy costs. That the English would be the first to escape this fate was largely fortuitous, attributable to the combined “accidents” of a geology that placed massive deposits of coal within convenient access, and a geography that situated the African and New World continents within proximal predatory and colonizing range. Absent these “exogenous” advantages of coal and colonies, Pomeranz reasons, the leading European economies would not have overcome the energy bottlenecks that beset all other organically fueled societies, nor benefitted from the “windfall gains” of plunder and optimizing trade that attended the expropriation of Amerindian lands, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and establishment of overseas settlements that expansively transformed the domestic economy through maximally stimulative import-export linkages. So concise and bold a reinterpretation of world history, supported by many dense pages of econometric calculations and critical reappraisals of earlier lines of scholarship, has justifiably attracted immense interest and recognition. But how cogent are the claims informing Pomeranz’s compounded thesis, of “surprising Eurasian similarities” and a “contingently fortuitous” shift in possibilities, with the Europeans gaining lucky access to a range and quantity of resources that suddenly propels and makes possible their divergent modernization? Intensive criticism, from European as well as Chinese specialists, is steadily mounting, directed not only at the empirical foundations of Pomeranz’s argument, but also against the ordering narrative he proposes to explicate his “late great divergence.” For Pomeranz’s historiography is not so much based on bringing to light new or unfamiliar sources of information, but is carried in the main by recalculations and realignments of existing data. Moreover, as all authorities here acknowledge, it is exceedingly difficult to construct reliable quantitative indices for the economic history of premodern China, given the unevenness and paucity of relevant statistics and quantifiable records— on prices, wages, costs, incomes, resources, output, etc.—for any period much earlier than the Republican era. Pomeranz himself concedes that his quantifying efforts are based on “admittedly spotty data” and often involve a complicated series of “backward projections” from later and indirect evidentiary sources. To read his book’s six technical

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appendices— or better, to peruse his critical exchanges with those who take issue with his estimates and calculations, is to immediately appreciate that econometric historiography is an enterprise admirably long on ambition, arduous if not arcane in its operations, and unsettlingly speculative in its findings. Perhaps no issue has stirred greater controversy than Pomeranz’s assertion that the more prosperous regions in late Imperial China featured productive practices and living standards that either matched or bettered those found in comparable European settings. Critics contend, however, that his surprising recalculations and estimates— on life expectancies, consumption patterns, earnings, productivity yields, soil conservation, etc.—impart an unwarranted positive tilt to the Chinese scenario, while minimizing confirmed European achievements in these and related areas (as detailed in Huang, 2002, 2003; Brenner and Isett, 2002; Duchesne 2004). Arbitration here must await continued sifting by the specialists, but with the issues so deeply contested, it is clear that Pomeranz’s empirical claims are more provocative than proven. Central to the revisionist argument is a purported discovery of a Ming-Manchu “efflorescence” marked by rising productivity, widening networks of commercial exchange, and a robust expansion in rural-based manufacturing (chiefly in textiles)— a growth pattern allegedly no less dynamic than those occurring in the leading economic regions of western Europe. In confirmation of this “economic boom,” Pomeranz points to the sundry “living longer, living better” indices he has constructed, and thereupon deduces that the Chinese and English economies— at least in their advanced sectors— could not have been trending along significantly different trajectories. This latter inference is surely problematic. For even if one were to grant a general parity in abstracted indicators like life expectancy, tea and sugar consumption, home furnishings, and fertility rates, this does not necessitate or imply that the economies in question exhibited a corresponding isomorphism, seeing as life-quality measures have complexly diverse and multiple determinations. The crucial issues in contention, moreover, concern developmental possibilities, and the ways in which material surpluses were produced and differentially appropriated. Indeed, if the consensus view is to be overturned, what the revisionists must demonstrate is that China and western Europe were undergoing comparable structural transformations, in (a) shifting the balance of material production away from agriculture and increasingly towards industrial manufacturing, and (b) that profits from commodity exchanges and capital investments were correspondingly gaining ground against taxation revenues, rental fees, usury, pawnbrokerage, and other forms of economic traditionalism. No such comparative demonstration has been offered. That late Imperial China experienced phases of both overall and sectorial economic expansion has long been recognized. For proponents of the established view, however, this dynamic must be situated within the context of a rapidly multiplying population: rising from an estimated 100 million in 1500, to 150 million in 1700, passing beyond 300 million by 1800, and expanding to over 400 million by 1850. Given that core production technologies were not significantly improved over this period, most

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scholars have characterized Ming and Manchu era growth as largely quantitative, a multiplication of output and exchanges that reflected the sheer growing density of the human population and attending needs to intensify production. Hence Elvin’s familiar notion of a “high-level equilibrium trap” (1973, 1996), wherein a pre-modern production regime of considerable sophistication, based on advanced irrigation works and highyield agriculture, can sustain population growth and acceptable living standards quite durably, but only to a point. For in the absence of mechanization and the tapping of new energy sources, ecological constraints will inexorably begin to issue in resource shortages and diminishing returns on continued labour intensifications. Land clearance and reclamation projects (e.g., frontier expansion, deforestation, the draining of lakes and marshes, terracing at higher elevations), the switch to early ripening varieties of rice, double-cropping, an increasing use of beancake fertilizer, the adoption of New World cultigens for more marginal soils (corn, peanuts, sweet potatoes), the expansion of textile handicrafts within the peasant household, widening circuits of commercial exchange— all these enhancements in overall production do not appear to have generated a proportional growth in the available surplus, as an accelerating population surge literally consumed the higher levels of output that were being attained through intensifications. Here, then, is a major difficulty for the revisionist argument, for if China’s remarkable population growth more or less kept pace with (or drove) the quantitative expansion in material output, the Ming-Manchu “efflorescence” would more plausibly signal a maximizing of the potential within the existing means of production, rather than a transformative dynamism comparable to that which would carry England and northwestern Europe into capitalist modernization. Not surprisingly, therefore, the revisionist paradigm is accompanied by a revisionist demography. Dismissing the standard “Malthusian mythology” of a late Imperial China increasingly subject to social strains brought on by an unsustainable increase in population, a team of revisionist demographers—led by historian James Lee and sociologists Wang Feng and Cameron Campbell (2002)—proposes an alternative interpretation that posits significantly lower marital fertility rates and a correspondingly manageable population trajectory. While offering, paradoxically, even higher population estimates than those listed above for the orthodox view (125 million in 1500, 200 million in 1700, upwards of 350 million by 1800, and a staggering 500 million by 1900), Lee, Feng, and Campbell discount any notion that “overpopulation” was a significant factor in bringing on late Imperial China’s mounting social crises— large-scale famines, epidemics, peasant rebellions, rent strikes, protests against rising food prices, vagabondage, banditry and piracy, aboriginal uprisings, ecological degradation and resource depletions— and suggest instead that these are all attributable, in ways unspecified, to “political and organizational problems, not excess population per se” (2002: 594). This disjunctive interpretation is based on what they take to be their central discovery: Chinese couples had been limiting their reproduction rationally over many centuries, through a pattern of “late starting, long spacing, and early stopping.”

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The revisionist bid to dispel the Malthusian spectre of an increasingly unmanageable growth in population invokes the “rational birth control” inference as a decisive objection, and is insistent that the various social crises that destabilized the imperial order over the course of the nineteenth century were unconnected with the demographic increase that did occur. Evidence to the contrary, however, is substantial. Peasant uprisings are usually a strong indicator of agrarian distress, whether occasioned by intensified tax and tribute exactions from crown and bureaucracy, expropriating predations and “rent squeezing” by landed elites, or a “land hunger” crisis brought on by excessive population pressures. Though the Manchu state generally adopted a protectionist policy as regards its majoritarian peasant population, and its tax bite appears to have been modest (probably under 10%, in contrast to the 40% of the crop estimated to have been appropriated by Mughal imperial elites), the fiscal system did permit a massive “leakage” of resources and funds to the local officials who directed its operation and their gentry allies who effectively conspired to minimize their own share of the tax responsibility. Stern warnings and moralizing laments against the reality of massive corruption were repeatedly sounded in official pronouncements, but as every attempted reform intended the continuance of the imperial system, no effort was made to break the functional symbiosis (and circulation) between officials and gentry, whose shared social origins and economic interests precluded any curtailment of their customary privileges or opportunities for extortionate enrichment. Hard-pressed by these illegal exactions and the manipulated tax burdens, large numbers of peasant families were driven into unfavorable tenancy arrangements—perhaps upwards of 50% of the households in the core Yangzi provinces, and an estimated 20% in the poorer north and western regions (Esherick, 1981: 395). Customary rental fees could claim up to half the annual harvest, yet competition for these tenancy leases only intensified, in the wake of a population tide that added continuously to an already glutted supply of rural labour. As the population pressed ever more heavily upon the cultivable land, ecologically destructive deforestations and landclearing drainage projects resulted in only marginal gains and more frequent and devastating droughts and floods, disasters that carried malnutrition, famine, and epidemics in their wake. Little wonder that brigandage and piracy grew rampant, that aboriginal peoples rose against Han territorial encroachments and colonization, or that millenarian and messianic promises gave direction and hope to millions of impoverished and desperate people who took up arms repeatedly against an autocratic conquest regime and those of enriched privilege who benefitted from its inequitable dispensations. Against this backdrop of rising social disturbances and ecological stresses— abundantly attested to in the local gazetteers and in the official records— the revisionist discovery of an “economic boom,” an “efflorescence” of rising productivity and prosperity, stands out in puzzling incongruity. For how is it possible that an agrarian population could double or triple in size within a compressed temporal period and on a finite surface of quality arable, without accompanying technological advances or dramatic

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resource and energy capture, and yet still achieve productivity gains and rising living standards? Pomeranz, Wong, and Goldstone see the increasing commercialization and proto-industrialization of the countryside as the affluence-generating processes at work here— as in the advanced regions of Europe—but critics contend that they have falsely assimilated two radically different social-historical contexts, and so have erroneously assumed a uniform or broadly similar developmental dynamism. Given all these pronounced differences in social organization and in economic practices, is it sociologically plausible that the advanced regions of China and Western Europe were trending along a comparable developmental course, a shared trajectory that would have yielded similar outcomes, but for the “accidents” of geography? How can a society that remained overwhelmingly agrarian, increasingly overpopulated relative to resources and technologically stationary, and whose key social players were peasants, rentier landlords, merchants, and a stratum of governing officials whose training was literary rather than technical, have been open to the developmental possibilities of a society that was increasingly urban-based, effectively harnessing new scientific knowledge to technologies that were revolutionizing the means of production, and whose key social players were, as these changes unfolded, capitalistic farmers, proletarians, industrialists, and parliamentary representatives? To advance a “Eurasian similarity” thesis on the basis of data-poor econometric indexes and estimates— of life expectancy, fertility rates, consumption patterns, grain yields, textile output, and fertilizer levels—without a systematic effort to comprehend and explicate those findings by contextualizing them within their specific institutional and cultural settings, is to propose isomorphisms and parallels without having produced the requisite historical sociology. An abstractive economism that neglects or obscures the causally determinant implications of markedly variant social structures can hardly provide compelling grounds for a new narrative of comparative world history. Specificities of history and sociology likewise loom large in orthodox rejoinders to the Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz contention that it was “coal and colonies” that provided Europeans with their late and fortuitous “breakout” capacity. Apart from implausibly reducing questions of developmental growth and blockage to matters of resource availability, this contingency argument fails for a number of reasons. To begin with, standard “Eurocentric” accounts of the industrial revolution do recognize the importance of the shift to inanimate forms of energy, as well as the benefits derived from colonial expropriations. But industrializing processes were well underway prior to any significant utilization of coal, and likewise preceded, and would even make possible, major increases in the import-export trade (Vries, 2001). Coal in the ground counts for little without the technical means and mining skills to extract and process it into usable energy— as appears to have been the case with late Imperial China, which while abundantly endowed with this mineral (ranking third globally in verified reserves), failed to exploit its potential until after the inroads of Western capitalist penetration (and despite having pioneered coke and iron production centuries earlier in the Song period). Transoceanic

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colonies likewise did not simply become available as a “resource windfall,” but were seized and effectively utilized on the basis of advanced shipping and navigation capacity, political-administrative coordination, a pronounced and growing military superiority, and technologically dynamic economies that sustained and deepened these ventures in empire. In a word, the latent advantages of geology and geography only became manifest upon the development of new forms of European power projection. Revisionist polycentrism, both as history and as sociology, is lacking in explanatory coherence. Eurasian similarities and shared trajectories are alleged, but such presumptions are belied by the radically differing dispensations that would ensue. The protracted and forcible dominion of the West over the Rest was an occurrence of world-shattering, transformative consequences; it cannot logically be accounted for on the basis of fundamental similarities between conqueror and conquered, oppressor and oppressed, but must, in the very nature of so inequitable an outcome, register the relational consequences of differences and disparities—political, military, economic, technological, cultural, ecological— as these played out in a coercive contest for land, resources, mastery. The historic rise and fall of local as well as more extended systems of domination is ever keyed to these shifting and unequal equations of power, from which hegemonies and empires derive their social possibilities, whether Assyrian or Mongol, Aztec or Zulu, Han or Mughal, American or Soviet. By failing to place their purported isomorphisms and parallels within the larger problematic of why the various Middle Eastern and Asian empires would collapse or succumb before the European onslaught, from its mercantilepiratical beginnings to subsequent colonial settlement and industrialized militarism, the polycentric paradigm provides no insights as to how the modern global hierarchy came into being. Before and After have here lost their necessary connectedness.

I I I . W O R L D H I S T O R Y A S E P H E M E R A L C AU S AT I O N A N D R A D I C A L C O N T I N G E N C Y ? A C R I T I Q U E O F P O LYC E N T R I C A N A LY T I C S

Revisionist polycentrism proposes a sweeping new narrative for world history. Discounting as ideological the established consensus, which explicates the developmental histories of the major Asian, Middle Eastern, and European societies, as these were shaped by diverse ecological settings and resource endowments, varying institutional arrangements and cultural patterns, the revisionists offer an account that posits longstanding Eurasian similarities and a comparable modernizing dynamism. Repudiating the “old story line” of variant trajectories, parallel itineraries are alleged, with a late great divergence arising only through the boons of geography, which bestowed upon Europeans a resource windfall that made possible and sustained their industrial breakthrough. The empirical support for these innovative claims consists mainly of decontextualized econometric estimates, utilizing thin and uneven data sources; ethnographic testimony from contemporaries— a keystone in much of the orthodox historiography—is rarely invoked. Even more problematic is the theoretical logic that is implicit, and neces-

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sary, to render the revisionist narrative plausible. For what this perspective presupposes, as an ontology, is a fundamentally skewed understanding of how social structures cohere, how historical processes operate. In place of cumulative, path-dependent lines of causality and densely contextual interdependencies, the revisionist paradigm offers a more episodic and atomistic view of social change, wherein determinant efficacy is vested not with ongoing trajectories and systemic institutional configurations, but with the autonomous play of variables and the re-routings occasioned by extraneous contingencies. Hence the disavowal that Europe’s capitalist-industrial transition was the catenated outcome of successive turns and developments that unfolded over the longue durée, and the accompanying homogenizing claim that Eurasian civilizational histories were marked by enduring continuities and isomorphisms— in mercantile cultures, commercial dynamism, technological inventiveness, scientific rationalism, demographic patterns, etc.— dating from the Bronze Age. The epoch of Western ascendancy is thus attributed to a happenstance, a circumstantial rupture, rather than to a combinatorial consequence of the distinctive historical trajectories that produced a plurality of social worlds, all singularly endowed with resources and capabilities that would prove of uneven potency in the contests that carried the Europeans to global dominance. Is there a logical justification for this analytical transposition, of the episodic over the genealogical, the contingent over the structural? Should we reconceptualize socialhistorical change accordingly, and limit our causal inquiries to tracking only immediate influences and short-term trend lines? Are the turning-points of history comprehensible as radical contingencies, interruptive moments that effectively annul or suspend the workings of anterior structural arrangements? Historical social science must encompass an awareness of both proximate causality and contingency in its explanatory protocols; but neither can be comprehended as an autonomous principle, given that deeper historical temporalities and wider contexts necessarily govern their operation. The revisionist approach to explicating macro-historical eventualities—the European breakthrough to mechanized industrialization, the West’s forcible imposition of globally extended forms of dominance and colonialism, Imperial China’s abrupt shift from an alleged modernizing dynamism and efflorescence to mounting social crises and regime instability—is to invoke sudden ruptures and discontinuities, and to look to exogenous or conjunctural factors as the decisive causal keys. Consider again Pomeranz’s central claims: “Europe, too, could have wound up on an ‘east Asian,’ labor-intensive path. That it did not was the result of important and sharp discontinuities, based on both fossil fuels and access to New World resources, which, taken together, obviated the need to manage land intensively . . . The East-West difference that developed around labor-intensity was not essential but highly contingent” (2000: 13). Or, more sweepingly: “There was no western European advantage sufficient to explain either nineteenth- century industrialization or European imperial success. It seems more likely that no area was ‘naturally’ headed for the drastic discontinuity of industrialization, escape from shared resource constraints, and a role as ‘workshop of the world’” (2000: 111). As an interpretive cat-

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egory, this notion of social discontinuities, “sharp and drastic,” is rhetorically functional in licensing the excision of deep lines of historical causation from the analysis; but it conjures an ontological impossibility. The moving periodization we style “the present” is in all cases the outcome of a constitutive genealogy— a nexus of cascading and ramifying sequences of actions preceding— out of which the transmitted and the established are variously reproduced, reformed, or rejected. There is no historical creatio ex nihilo. A causal connectedness governs every transition from past to present, and even the most revolutionary of transformations is just that, an emergent “re-making” or “going beyond” on the basis of resources and opportunities that have been accumulating through prior developments. Without the enabling technologies, institutions, social relations, and cultural norms— all of which are mediated inheritances from the past—there can be no phased conversion to industrial modes of production or imperial forms of hegemony, regardless of the availability of “windfall” natural resources. The revisionist preference for restricting effective or salient causality to shorter-term and immediate processes is likewise prone to explanatory distortions. A reduced temporal horizon obscures the extent to which distal developments were either contributory to or necessary for current trends and arrangements, and insensibly exaggerates the malleability of social formations to abruptly alter course and re-order their institutionalized practices. But macrostructural processes rarely if ever confine their causal significance to short-term temporalities or the workings of abbreviated sequences. Kinship patterns, population dynamics, state-formation, status and class relations, technological and scientific advances, the fashioning of worldviews and moral codes, production and exchange, war-making capabilities, environmental degradation and resource depletions: these kinds of organized relations and pursuits are all governed by long- and medium-term developmental trends, and each is complexly conditioned by the larger constellations of mediating structures and processes within which they arise and function. A conception of world history that slights or minimizes the extent to which social phenomena are subject to path-dependent logics, whereby the prior states of a system order and limit the developmental possibilities for subsequent states of that system, will fail to register the depth-historical precedents and conditions that give form and direction to the social trajectories that variously intersect in the collective making of histories and societies. Radical contingency arguments are predicated upon a kindred ontological fallacy. In sundering the contingent from the contextual, and by equating the former with the “accidental” or “fortuitous,” revisionists misleadingly imply that macro-structural outcomes are subject to random or extraneous interventions of autonomous causal efficacy. But this is to miss the fact that a historical contingency entails a confluence of two causal orders: the so-called intervening cause or new condition, and an existing state of affairs, into which the intervention is subsumed or incorporated. Contingent causality, in other words, is a context-dependent phenomenon, and the hazards of fortune yield results relative to the situations in which they occur. That coal deposits and transoceanic distances

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were relevant factors in the West’s rise to global dominance is hardly in dispute; but these so-called “geological accidents” exerted their specific causal importance only upon their “timely activation” by human agents whose technical skills, culturally informed ambitions, and organizational powers had reached an enabling level of development. The diverse and changing geologies of the planet offer a range of latent possibilities for human uses and abuses; but how and when these enter the historical process is contingent upon the particular structural constellations that direct their utilization. And if assigning greater explanatory prominence to the fortuitous is a central revisionist objective, why stop with England, “lucky” in coal, and neglect a symmetrical recognition for China, “lucky” in rivers? Were the developmental accomplishments of the latter any less influenced by its ecological endowment than those of the former? As an explanatory category, sheer luck provides scant purchase on realities that are irreducibly relational.

NOTE

For helpful criticisms and suggestions on draft versions of this offering, I extend appreciation to Zaheer Baber, Bernd Baldus, Randy Collins, John Hall, Philip Huang, Chris Isett, Çaĝlar Keyder, Timur Kuran, Rod Nelson, Chris Wickham, Arthur Wolf, and Irv Zeitlin. Ricardo Duchesne generously supplied me with offprints of his important work in this area, and Liping Jia patiently answered a great many questions about matters Chinese. Thanks also to Nico Stehr for his support in developing this into a more challenging project. Earlier fellowship funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.

REFERENCES

Abu-Lughod, Janet 1989 Before European Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blaut, James 1993 The Colonizer’s Model of the World. New York: Guilford. 2000 Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford. Brenner, Robert and Christopher Isett 2002 “England’s Divergence from China’s Yangzi Delta: Property Relations, Microeconomics, and Patterns of Development.” Journal of Asian Studies 61/2: 609–62. Duchesne, Ricardo 2004 “On the Rise of the West: Researching Kenneth Pomeranz’s Great Divergence.” Review of Radical Political Economics 36/1: 52–81. Elvin, Mark 1973 The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1996 Another History: Essays on China from a European Perspective. Canberra: Wild Peony.

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Esherick, Joseph 1981 “Number Games: A Note on Land Distribution in Pre-Revolutionary China.” Modern China 7/4: 387–411. Frank, A.G. 1998 ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldstone, Jack 2000 “The Rise of the West— or Not? A Revision to Socio-economic History.” Sociological Theory 18/2: 173–94. 2002 “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History.” Journal of World History 13/2: 323–89. Goody, Jack 1996 The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004 Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hobson, John M. 2004 The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodgson, Marshall 1993 Rethinking World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huang, Philip C.C. 2002 “Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China?” Journal of Asian Studies 61/2: 501–38. 2003 “Further Thoughts on Eighteenth-Century Britain and China: Rejoinder to Pomeranz’s Response to My Critique.” Journal of Asian Studies 6211: 157–67. Lee, James, Cameron Campbell and Wang Feng 2002 “Positive Checks or Chinese Checks?” Journal of Asian Studies 61/2: 591–607. Wong, Roy Bin 1997 China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

C A P I TA L I S T O R I G IN S , T H E A DV E N T O F M O D E R NI T Y, A N D C O H E R E N T E X P L A N AT I O N : A R E S P O N S E T O J O S E P H M . B R YA N T Jack A. Goldstone

For many decades, there has been a “standard story” of the rise of the West. At some point after 1000 AD—whether it was with the medieval commercial expansion; or the early Renaissance rediscovery of ancient Greek thought; or the continental trade expansion based on the Hanseatic league, Champagne fairs, Bruges cloth trade, and Italian banking and Mediterranean trade; or the seafaring ventures of the Portuguese and Jack A. Goldstone’s “Capitalist Origins, the Advent of Modernity, and Coherent Explanation: A Response to Joseph M. Bryant” was originally published in Canadian Journal of Sociology 33, 1 (January 2008): 119–33. Reprinted with permission from the Canadian Journal of Sociology.

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Spanish; or the Reformation—not much later than 1500, “the West” developed a new dynamic institutional and cultural framework that began to lift it out of its post–Roman Empire torpor, and launched it on the path to modernity. Industrialization came as a later outgrowth of this earlier shift to capitalism or modernity, but it was a natural outgrowth of the earlier dynamism of Europe. This contrasted with institutional and cultural stagnation in the major civilizations of Asia—the Ottomans, India, China, and Japan— such that an increasingly advanced Europe was able to dominate and colonize Asian societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Against this view, a number of historians and historical sociologists of which I am one, and which I have identified as the “California School,” have argued that whatever their institutional and cultural differences, there was in fact no significant divergence of material living standards in Europe from those in the advanced Asian societies until much later, c. 1800.1 Despite the very different cultural and institutional frameworks of the major European states, the Ottoman Empire, and China, which admittedly took different approaches to governance, religion, and political organization, we argue that they nonetheless shared very similar overall political and economic dynamics until about 1850. The only exception is Great Britain, which, starting in the 18th century, embarked on a peculiar path of unique industrial innovations that gave birth to a modern world, which was quickly imitated and built upon by other European states and the United States in the 19th century, before spreading to the rest of the world in the later 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, this peculiar British move to industrial innovation was not simply an outgrowth of broad European patterns of culture and institutions, but a contingent outcome of conditions that happened to come together in Britain in a way that did not happen elsewhere, and very conceivably would not have happened in Britain either if it had followed a “typical” European trajectory. Joseph Bryant objects to this revisionist story as both “empirically suspect” and “analytically incoherent.” It is neither; rather Bryant misunderstands the argument. What Bryant does exceptionally well is identify why the debate is significant, what evidence is crucial, and which elements of the California School causal story are suspect. It is thus with great respect for his essay that I respond. Bryant states that the revisionists claim that “the major societies across Eurasia were all progressing along a comparable course of modernizing development” (p. 403). This is incorrect. Rather, the revisionist claim is that none of the major societies across Eurasia, including Europe, were progressing along a course of modernizing development. From 1500–1800 the major states of Europe, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire were all experiencing a similar course of advanced organic development, with absolutist bureaucratic states, highly productive agriculture, a sophisticated urban culture, and extensive long-distance trade in both luxuries and daily necessities. They all experienced periods of demographic expansion, price increases, and trade expansion from 1500–1850, interrupted by political and economic crises in the periods 1590–1660 and again from 1770–1850. Yet in all of them, the material standard of living c. 1800 was no

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greater than it had been c. 1500; no effect of cultural or institutional dynamics leading to a materially superior civilization in the West is evident. Quite the contrary; up to at least 1750, Asian trade and manufacturing were superior in quality and quantity to those of the West, Asian standards of agricultural productivity and consumption were higher than those in the West, and even Asian military technology was— at least in China and Japan—more than a match for that of the West. The revisionist argument is therefore that nothing like a “course of modernizing development” can be seen anywhere before 1800, except perhaps in Britain from the early 1700s where the invention of the steam engine and new techniques for producing and casting iron provided the basis for an industrialization of society that would really only bloom after 1800. Bryant claims that more evidence is required for the above assertions, and I agree; the evidence provided in the works produced before 2005 depended on partial evidence and can fortunately now be supported by much stronger evidence from a wider range of researchers. I provide this in my forthcoming book (Goldstone, forthcoming), but will offer some of the key new findings below. Bryant also claims that it is analytically incoherent to say that western society could make a sudden, contingent jump to modernity c. 1800; instead he argues that any social transformation on such a massive scale would require a prior period of preparation in which long-term social, political, and economic relationships are shifted and recast to allow and propel such rapid change. This latter charge, however, is a product of a “linear” style of thinking, in which change must be continuous, and large-scale changes must be grounded in substantial prior fundamental change. In fact, there is no reason why history cannot learn from the advances of physical sciences, in which quantum theory and chaos theory both argue that nature is not continuous, and that sudden and dramatic “jumps” can develop from slight tips or deviations in underlying functions or relationships. The revisionist view is precisely that small deviations in Europe, and particularly in Britain, started processes that in the course of the 18th century developed suddenly and contingently into massive changes in the 19th century that produced a modern, industrialized society. However, if the small deviations had been absent, or tipped the other way (as they in fact did in many European states), such industrialization might not have occurred. One can argue over what those deviations were, and whether the case for their impact is plausible and well-supported, but the idea itself that sudden and massive change can follow from relatively small deviations is not “analytically incoherent.” It is simply an argument for a different mode of historical causation.

EVIDENCE

I lack space here to deal with all the comparative evidence of European vs. Asian superiority or parity c. 1800, so let me focus on one issue only: material living standards, supplemented by a brief discussion of agriculture. It seems reasonable that if there arose in Europe from 1500 or earlier a “new dynamic,” then the rise of a commercial-

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ized society (the Hanse, the Champagne fairs, the Bruges cloth industry, the Italian Renaissance trading cities, oceanic trade, commercialized agriculture) in the 13th–18th centuries should be expected to bring some improvement in material conditions. But we just do not see it. Table 1 shows data on real incomes in major European cities from 1500 to 1850, real farm wages in the same period (these are from two different authors, none of whom were original members of the California School.) It is strikingly evident that there is no long-term trend in real wages for unskilled or skilled workers: in none of the most commercialized regions of Europe, the centres of the “dynamic structural changes,” are real wages significantly higher in 1750– 99 than they were in 1500–49. In Antwerp, they are about 5–10 percent higher, but in all other areas real wages are actually lower, often substantially lower, than they were two and half centuries earlier. In the most dynamic and advanced regions of Europe, the period from 1500–1800 was thus one in which real wages were stagnant or declined. Nor is this a “fluke” of comparing extreme periods. In every one of these regions wages were falling over the course of the 18th century. Even if we take the much lower average wages of the period 1550–1599 as a base, real wages in 1750– 99 were still only 20 percent higher 200 years later, hardly a great accomplishment. If we look at farm wages which were gathered from a more extensive base and are available on a decadeby-decade basis from samples all across England, we again see a remarkable lack of any trend across the centuries. If we now compare these wage levels with those of India and China, where our data is admittedly much more sketchy, we find no great differences in the 17th century. In the first half of the 1600s, unskilled wages for India and China—which are not urban wages, but general wages more comparable to the data for Southern England than for Antwerp or Paris—were actually higher than those in England, for both skilled and unskilled workers. Table 2 provides comparative data on another measure of living standards, namely life expectancy, for various periods. Life expectancy in mid-18th century France is comparable to that of Egypt in Roman times; life expectancy in rural China and Japan (range from 31–36) is comparable to that in France, England, and the Netherlands in 1800 (ranges from 32–37). To take yet another completely independently obtained body of evidence, forensic anthropologists have been obtaining measures of stature from skeletal remains across Europe for many centuries. The latest report on those findings is that stature in Europe remains unchanged from 100 AD to 1800 AD, only rising after 1800 (Koepke and Eaten 2005). In sum, multiple measures of living standards all agree that real income per capita in Europe never exceeds the late 15th to early 16th century peaks for the next two centuries and was generally headed downwards from 1700–1800. There is no evidence of long-term growth or dynamism in Europe. In addition, available data on wages and life

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TaBLe 1.

Evidence on Living Standards in Europe and Asia

A. Grain Wages of Unskilled and Skilled Building Workers in Europe, 1500–1799 (in kg. wheat/day ) 1500–49

1550–99 1600–49 1650–99 1700–49 1750–99

Unskilled workers Southern England

10.1

6.3

4.0

5.4

8.0

7.0

Antwerp

8.8

7.2

7.7

7.4

9.8

9.6

Paris

6.8

4.9

6.0

7.2

7.2

6.0

Florence/Milan

4.7

3.4

4.4

6.1

5.2

3.3

5.2a

4.5b

North and West India

4.5c

Yangzi delta, China Skilled workers Southern England

16.9

9.4

6.9

8.0

11.8

10.6

Antwerp

15.3

12.6

12.7

12.2

16.3

16.1

Paris

10.7

8.0

9.6

11.5

11.5

10.8

8.6

6.8

8.8

11.8

9.9

6.2

12.6a

8.3d

Florence/Milan North and West India

Data from Broadberry and Gupta (2006: 6). a

1595; b 1640; c 1550–1649; d 1637

B. Real Farm Wages of English Laborers, Day Wages Adjusted for Consumption, Index 1860–69 = 100, Decadal Averages 1500–1509

110

1680–1689

71

1530–1539

89

1710–1719

64

1560–1569

87

1740–1749

75

1590–1599

66

1770–1779

68

1620–1629

64

1790–1799

72

1650–1659

66

Data from Clark (2006: 100).

TaBLe 2.

Life Expectancy at Birth in Selected Countries and Time-periods, in Years Life Expectancy (e0)

Country and time Roman Egypt, 11–257 AD (villagers) England 1300–1348 (tenants)

28 < 28

England 1750–1800

37

London, 1750–99

23

France 1750

28

France 1800

34

The Netherlands 1800

32

Rural Japan 1776–1815

33

Rural China 1300–1880 (Anhui, males)

31

Rural China 1792–1867 (Liaoning, males)

36

Beijing 1644–1739, males

27

Livi Bacci (2007: 106); Lee and Wang (1999: 54); Clark (forthcoming: 114).

expectancy up to 1800 show no significant differences between levels in Europe and the leading regions of Asia. Bryant dismisses this evidence by suggesting it is incomplete— that will always be the case, but if separate data from urban skilled wages, rural farm wages, forensic anthropology of heights, and reconstructions of life expectancy from genealogies all give the same results, namely no long-term growth in Europe from 1500 to 1800, it is increasingly difficult to doubt. This is not even mentioning the extensive econometric work on the growth of European economies in the 18th century, which has shown a striking absence of marked economic growth in that era (Crafts and Harley 1992). Bryant also dismisses the data as not “historical,” because it lacks a story. That is, a rich descriptive-narrative literature points to so many distinct qualities separating Europe from Asia that surely there must be differences in economic performance. Bryant points to eleven characteristics of Europe and ten characteristics of Asia that have been developed in the comparative/historical literature that he believes are wellestablished. The problem with most of these, however, is that they are not truly factors that distinguish “European” from “Asian” societies. Many of them are either found in both Europe and Asia, or only in exceptional parts of Europe, or only rarely in Asia, and are thus not a sound basis for broad contrasts. For example, Bryant first points to “distinctive patterns of civil urbanization” in Europe, contrasted with “urban centers under the sway of imperial governors and officials, and whose ruled inhabitants lacked

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legal-juridical status as citizens,” in Asia (pp. 406, 408). This outdated contrast has been invalidated by numerous studies. In fact, by 1750 almost all the major cities of Europe—London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersberg, Vienna, Madrid, Naples—were administrative capitals, whose representation in Parliaments had either lapsed for centuries or was corrupted and controlled by patronage (e.g., pocket boroughs in England that had more representatives than Manchester or Birmingham). In Asia there were many major cities that were mainly thriving commercial centers— Osaka, Hangzhou, Surat, Izmir, Jingdezhen—focused on production for market or long-distance trade, and with a rich autonomous merchant culture. Similarly, Bryant notes the importance of “the onset of a vibrant and popular print culture” in Europe, but omits the enormous evidence for a vibrant commercial publishing industry in China on an even larger scale (Brook 1998). He condemns “state monopolies” in Asia, but prizes the impact of the British and Dutch East India companies, which were no less state monopolies that ended up being transformed wholly into government agencies. Bryant notes many reports of extreme poverty in China, but omits to mention the stories of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens that depict extreme poverty in England. The problem with history as stories is that without the testable baseline of data, stories can blossom into “just-so” stories that rationalize preferred interpretations. For example, Bryant lauds the productivity of British agriculture, noting that in the 18th century farm output doubled while the percent of population in agriculture fell by half. That is true, but it is not because people were released from agriculture due to higher productivity. Rather, control of land by primogeniture combined with population growth meant that most of the population added in the 18th century had to leave the land and search for work in cities or rural crafts. Overall farm output in Britain barely kept pace with overall population, even if the productivity of the farming population by itself did increase. Yet as farm wages and urban wages remained unchanged or declined in the 18th century, only commercial farmers and landlords benefited from the rise in productivity. Meanwhile, thousands of families, lacking the land to feed themselves, turned to desperate wage work as weavers on home looms. In the early 18th century, it was common for children under age 10 to work twelve-hour days. Bryant notes similar conditions in China, quoting stories of women who had to work long into the night at the loom to support themselves, because they lacked access to land. When discussing China, the conditions of overall agricultural output just keeping pace with total population, plus the need of landless families to work long hours at craftwork, are presented as a story of “involution” and poverty; when discussing 18th century England, the very same conditions are described as “dynamic” and “progress.” Without the discipline of hard facts, stories can wander. The hard facts show no real increases in material welfare in Europe before 1800. After 1800, things changed very fast. Conditions in Asia deteriorated sharply, as continuing population growth ran into the traditional energy and land limits that constrain

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all organic societies. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that Europe and Asia had similar material conditions because prior to industrialization all societies were limited in what they could produce by the ability of farmers to produce food with organic inputs and muscle power, and of manufacturers to produce products with organic raw materials and wind and water power. By 1900, material conditions in Asia and in many parts of Europe had declined as population outran the capacities of organic societies and precipitated a return to crisis conditions, as they had in the 14th and mid-17th centuries. By contrast, northwest Europe launched itself onto a new growth path in the 1800s, starting slowly but accelerating quickly, so that by the mid-1800s the gulf between Asia and the advanced parts of Europe had grown large, and by 1900 had become a chasm.

A N A LY S I S

To say that there is no evidence of change before 1750, but also noting (as the revisionists agree) that there was a very sharp and rapid divergence after 1800, of course leaves open the critical question of how that could have occurred. Here Bryant’s criticisms have substantial weight, for the California School is far from united, and thus far from coherent, on how the changes occurred. For Frank, China was suffering a temporary reversal due to internal conflicts in the late 18th through early 20th centuries that allowed Europe to temporarily overtake it. For Pomeranz, the contingent combination of coal and colonies provided Europe with resources that it managed to lever into a modernizing leap. For Wong, technological improvements in key fields of production in Europe in the 18th century opened a new pathway for progress, which the technological improvements that China made in other fields (hydraulics, botany) did not provide. For myself, I argue that a combination of changes in methods of scientific investigation and social networks of entrepreneurs and engineers, which emerged mainly in Britain in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, catalyzed a shift to an innovation-driven and energy-intensive economy that marked a sharp departure from the limits that had previously bound all organic economies.2 It would be inappropriate for me to try to defend all of these diverse views of what underlay the “great divergence.” Some of these may be vulnerable to Bryant’s charge that they are “ahistorial and non-sociological.” I myself find Pomeranz’s argument— that coal and colonies were the key factors— lacks necessary explanations of why Britain was able to exploit its coal more effectively than Belgium, Silesia, or the Beijing and Jingdezhen regions in China, where coal was also mined for many centuries, or why colonies did not lead to industrialization in Spain and Portugal, both of whom kept their colonies in the Americas longer than Britain. In probing explanations for the divergence, Bryant (pp. 410–411) poses three specific questions that deserve answers:

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If, as alleged, decisive European advantages in social capabilities only arose in the wake of industrialization, how are we to account for the preceding three centuries of European encroachment and conquest, and the increasingly manifest incapacity of the Asian powers to repulse the predatory intrusions of an unwelcome interloper?

This phrasing, objectifying “Europe” and “Asia” as wholes, with the latter bending to the former, is simply false. Europe and Asia were comprised of many different countries with a range of capabilities on both sides, and the history of their encounters is not one of continuous European victories. China and Japan, even Persia and Thailand, were able to repulse the Europeans and avoid colonization altogether. This is because they remained reasonably integrated societies during the period of European expansion. Until the 1840s, both China and Japan were in complete control of the European presence in their waters, and both confined Europeans to small and distant trading posts where they could be easily monitored and controlled (Macau and Canton in China, Nagasaki in Japan). Both the Portuguese and the Dutch were easily driven off of Taiwan by Chinese fleets, and, in the 17th century, it was the Chinese war junks of Coxinga that controlled the south China seas, not Europeans. The one area in which Europeans had marked success was in the Indian Ocean and then in India itself. The reason for this was straightforward—the Indian continent was highly fragmented under disintegrating Mogul rule by the time that Europeans arrived in force. The Portuguese were never able to penetrate the interior or make significant territorial gains; they built and occupied trading posts because the Moguls did not care much about the coasts, having a land-based empire, and the Portuguese often had to struggle to defend even these. The Dutch occupied the East Indies, a highly fragmented and disparate series of isolated island princedoms, and the British occupied India, using a combination of better artillery, vastly superior field tactics, but most of all, the treachery and complicity of Indian allies who turned against their rulers thinking that the British would help them. The Europeans certainly had some striking tactical advantages in superior artillery and drill (Parker 1996), but these did them absolutely no good against the Japanese (who developed superior firearms in the 16th century) or the Chinese (whose shore defenses were more than a match for European ships until the era of the steam gunboats). They succeeded in India much as the Vandals had succeeded against Rome, or the Mongols had succeeded against China—relatively small groups of warriors, using superior battle-tactics and bent on plunder, have often conquered much larger, richer, and more sophisticated civilizations if those civilizations were undergoing their own processes of internal division and decay. Why then, one might ask, didn’t the Chinese or Indians come to plunder Europe? The answer is that one has to ask where the riches are, where plunder can be found.

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In the 18th century, the richest producer of cotton cloth in all the world was India, particularly Bengal. The British noted with amazement that cloth merchants in Calcutta gained even more silver from their internal Asian trade—with Persia, Central Asia, and southeast Asia—than they did from trade with the Europeans. Similarly, the riches of gems, spices, silks—plunderable luxuries—were all found in the East, not in Europe. China, in fact, had sent huge fleets of armed ships as far as the coast of Africa before the Europeans had even ventured into the south Atlantic. But those ships hardly found anything to justify the expense of fitting them out. Only by going from Europe to Asia could one find goods whose value justified the cost of long-distance shipping; and Europe would not even have been able to profit from that by bringing luxuries home if they had not found abundant silver in the New World to finance that trade. Thus, from 1650–1850, we see mainly European expeditions of plunder and two significant cases of conquest in Asia: India and Indonesia, both fragmented or disintegrating states where Europeans found ready local allies to oppose regional powers. At the same time, we see four Asian countries: Persia, Thailand, China, and Japan, that successfully resist colonization, the latter of which remain firmly in control of their local seas and of European trade until the mid-19th century. So the notion of “three centuries of European encroachment and conquest” is a rather gross oversimplification and distortion of the more complex range of Europe/ Asia relations. [If] the major Asian economies were no less technologically inventive and commercially vibrant than those in Europe up to the end of the 18th century, why were the Eastern imperial states incapable of channeling a measure of that prosperity into greater military preparedness and effectiveness?

Japan certainly did. Its firearms production was extraordinary in the 16th century, its quality surpassing that of Europe in reliability; its shore batteries kept Europeans at bay until Commodore Perry’s modern steam powered fleet came to “open” Japan to trade in the 1850s. China under the Qing also greatly increased its logistic and military capacities, although these were turned to what the Qing considered their main threat—the Mongols and other Central Asian nomadic warrior kingdoms, not the few traders from far away that showed up on its coast. In the 18th century, China was busy doubling its size with new conquests in northern and central Asia, while not losing anything to the missionaries and traders from Europe. If one asks “why didn’t India repulse the British” the answer is that “India” as a whole neither existed at the time, nor saw the need to do so. By the 18th century, the Indian subcontinent was a patchwork of feuding sultanates, princedoms, and rajastans, in which the British were welcomed by some in the hope of overcoming others. The British skillfully made and broke alliances, obtained official titles and supports for their early conquests, and then unexpectedly acquired others by taking advantage of revolts or local defections from current rulers. As for the bulk of the Indian population, they

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were rather used to changing overlords and tax collectors—India had been a crossroads of Hindu, Persian, and other conquerors from Alexander to Nadir Shah— so they saw no great reason to oppose the British displacement of their former greedy overlords until the burden of colonialism grew dear in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The British only had to displace specific Indian rulers, not overcome determined nationalist resistance. Where there was determined resistance and favorable terrain— as in Afghanistan— local fighters cost the British dearly and even into the 18th and 19th centuries made it impossible for the British to maintain full control. [P]erhaps most crucially, if there was no long-term dynamism within the West—i.e., if the societies of western Europe were simply on a developmental par with the pre-industrial civilizations of the East— how could an abrupt breakthrough to industrialization even have been possible, absent a preparatory process that altered the social relations of production, yielded the advanced technological capacities and skills required for machine based manufacturing, or created the circuits of financing and exchange that provided the capital for sustained investments?

The answer is that little capital investment was required to set up machine-based manufacturing. The major capital suppliers of the 18th and 19th centuries funded states, foreign trade, and mortgages on land—not industrialization. The funds for building the first generations of collieries, cotton mills, and iron smelters came from family funds, usually raised in domestic trade, and from reinvesting profits. Most firms remained quite small—20–50 employees—well into the 19th century. As far as the “advanced technological capacities” for machine-based manufacturing, these were engineering breakthroughs that began in 1712 with the steam engine, and continued up through the 1820s with the invention and improvements of more efficient steam engines and their harnessing to smelting, spinning, brewing, and other activities. Throughout this period, Asia remained superior in its technologies for producing silk, cotton cloth, ceramics, and cast iron. What Asia lacked was steam power, which in the century from 1750 to 1850 went through a period of sustained development—from the simple Newcomen engine, to the far more efficient Watt engine, and then the even more efficient and compact high-pressure engines developed by Trevethick, Stephensen, and others. This development increased the available energy per person in Britain by a factor of ten (Nuvolari 2004; Goldstone 2002). It was an abrupt change; the application of this ten-fold increase in available energy per person to transport and manufacturing, which occurred mainly after 1830, is what then created the great divergence. The sudden appearance of steam-powered gunboats in Asian waters, and of steam-powered factory production of thread, then cloth, then a variety of goods from steel to paper in the middle third of the 19th century is what suddenly changed the balance of military and economic power between Europe and Asia. The steam engine, however, was not made possible by prior accumulations of capital,

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or technical skills. Rather, it was made possible by unique European advances in empirical science, which do have a long history going back to the 16th century in new discoveries in geography and astronomy, followed by new theories of matter, energy, and motion. I would never claim that European superiority “came out of nowhere” in a sudden flash. But I strongly claim that it did not come out of long-standing commercial, technological, or material superiority. Rather, it came out of intellectual developments in the means of empirical discovery through instrument-driven experimentation, which rather suddenly led to a host of new discoveries about atmospheric pressure and the measurement of heat and energy in the 17th century. These then more slowly led to new manufacturing and transport capabilities in the 18th and 19th centuries, although these new capabilities had little impact on material or military balances between Europe and Asia until the mid-19th century. At the beginning of the 1800s, even Europeans generally acknowledged the superiority of Asian manufacturing and the wealth of Asian societies, and had made only minor encroachments on inland Asia. At the end of that century, Europeans scorned Asian technology and controlled much of Asian wealth. The “sudden” difference was due to the application after 1770 of Europe’s prior scientific and engineering advances from 1500 to 1770, which previously had been mainly small scale and academic, to mining, manufacturing, transport, and military ends on an unprecedented and exponentially widening scale. The revisionists do claim that there was dynamism in China, but only in the exploitation of the possibilities of an organic economy. China did have an agricultural revolution as profound as that of Britain, at about the same time, and this revolution decisively shifted resources away from the state and into an expansion of manufacturing and trade. The spread of double cropping and new crop rotations in the late Ming and early Qing increased productivity and released labour for major increases in silk and cotton manufacture. What China lacked was an energy revolution, which made it impossible to increase manufacturing beyond what water and muscle power would support, and hence left a ceiling on productivity that population growth eventually hit. On page 394 of this volume, Bryant again poses the “Europe vs. China” contrast in ways that miss the actuality of Europe. He asks: “How can a society that remained overwhelmingly agrarian, increasingly overpopulated relative to resources and technologically stationary, and whose key social players were peasants, rentier landlords, merchants, and a stratum of government officials whose training was literary rather than technical, have been open to the developmental possibilities of a society that was increasingly urban-based, effectively harnessing new scientific knowledge . . . and whose key social players were . . . capitalistic farmers, proletarians, industrialists, and parliamentary representatives?” Although Bryant clearly has China in mind as the former society, it’s also a perfect description of 18th century France or Germany. Britain was the only country in 18th century Europe that was not overwhelmingly agrarian, and whose key players included parliamentary representatives. It was also the only country harnessing scientific knowledge to manufacturing, and where government officials showed evidence of technical

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training, at least in the basics of Newton’s laws and rudimentary mechanics (Newton was not even taught in schools in France until after 1790). So the key question is actually “Why was Britain so different and able to diverge from Europe?” more than “Why was Europe able to diverge from Asia?” That is why my forthcoming book is entitled A Peculiar Path—that is Britain’s path— and it leads through cracking the energy barrier and applying empirical science to engineering, rather than through Italian trading prowess or French sugar-slaving or Portuguese plundering. We will never understand the causes of the great divergence by looking for generalized differences between Europe and Asia, nor by washing out all differences between these regions. Rather, the answer must be found in looking at the particular conditions and trajectories of specific countries, and even sub-national regions, across Eurasia, to identify the specific trajectories that led to modern economic growth.

NOTES

The page numbers here refer to Bryant (2006). 1. The original California School was the work of Frank (1998), Goldstone (1991; 2000; 2002), Lee and Wang (1999), Pomeranz (2000; 2002), and Wong (1997), four of whom were based in California. Other authors with similar views include Blaut (1993; 2000), Goody (1996; 2004), Lieberman (1999; 2003) and Hobson (2004). 2. The distinction between “organic” and industrial economies, the latter depending on energy from coal harnessed for transport and manufacture instead of wind, water, and muscle, is from Wrigley (2004).

REFERENCES

Blaut, James. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World. New York: Guilford. ———. 2000. Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford. Brook, Timothy. 1998. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Broadberry, Stephen and Bishnupriya Gupta. 2006. The early modern great divergence: Wages, prices and economic development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800. Economic History Review 59(1):2–31. Bryant, Joseph M. 2006. The West and the rest revisited: Debating capitalist origins, European colonialism, and the advent of modernity. Canadian Journal of Sociologie/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 31(4):403–444. Clark, Gregory. 2007. A Farewell to Alms. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crafts, Nicholas FR. and C.K. Harley. 1992. Output growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A restatement of the Crafts-Harley view. Economic History Review 45:703–730. Frank, A.G. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldstone, Jack A. 1991. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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———. 2000. The rise of the West—or not? A revision to socio-economic history. Sociological Theory 18(2):173–94. ———. 2002. Efflorescences and economic growth in world history. Journal of World History 13(2):323–89. ———. Forthcoming. A Peculiar Path: The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goody, Jack. 1996. The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koepke, Nikola and Joerg Eaten. 2005. The biological standard of living in Europe during the last two millennia. European Review of Economic History 9:61–95. Lee, James, and Wang Feng. 1999. One Quarter of Humanity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lieberman, Victor, ed. 1999. Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lieberman, Victor. 2003. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Livi Bacci, Massimo. 2007. A Concise History of World Population (fourth edition). Oxford: Blackwell. Nuvolari, Allessandro. 2004. The Making of Steam Power Technology. Eindhoven, Netherlands: Technical University of Eindhoven. Parker, Geoffrey. 1996. The Military Revolution. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. Beyond the East-West binary: Resituating development paths in the eighteenth-century world. Journal of Asian Studies 61(2):539–90. Wong, R. Bin. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wrigley, E. Anthony. 2004. Poverty, Progress, and Population. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

C O MPA R I S O N IN G LO B A L H I S T O R Y Prasannan Parthasarathi

In the study of causes in history, the most fruitful and dynamic work of comparison within global history addresses the problem of the “Great Divergence,” as it has come to be known since the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s groundbreaking book of that title. This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Prasannan Parthasarathi’s “Comparison in Global History” was originally published in Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the History of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69– 82. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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For the question of divergence, . . . comparison has been critical since at least the late nineteenth century when Max Weber relied upon that method in his studies of the rationalization potentials of world religions. Eric Jones in his European Miracle undertook a broad-ranging set of comparisons that extended from Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Mughal India to China. David Landes’s Wealth and Poverty of Nations also operated with a broad comparative framework. The problem with Weber, Jones, and Landes, as well as much other comparative work on the problem of divergence, is that they operate with a deterministic world view. The European path of development is taken as the norm and those followed by other regions of the world as deviations from the normal or ideal path due to blockages or the lack of the proper preconditions. Such determinism is not inherent in the method of comparison. In his French Rural History Bloch himself uses comparison to reach some non-deterministic conclusions. There he attributes the different agrarian paths of late medieval Europe to contrasts in political and social conditions: “The depreciation of rents was a European phenomenon. So was the effort of the . . . seigneurial class at re-establishing its fortunes . . . But the differing social and political conditions of the various countries imposed different lines of action.”1 It was of course this insight that Robert Brenner developed further, giving rise to a famous debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.2 The problem then is not with the method of comparison but with historical determinism. One way out of this dilemma is the method of “reciprocal comparison,” which Bin Wong developed and Kenneth Pomeranz then deployed to great effect. According to Pomeranz, this method allows the historian to view “both sides of the comparison as ‘deviations’ when seen through the expectations of the other, rather than leaving one as always the norm.” The task then, is “to look for absences, accidents, and obstacles that diverted England from a path that might have made it more like the Yangzi Delta or Gujarat, along with the more usual exercise of looking for blockages that kept nonEuropean areas from reproducing implicitly normalized European paths.”3 This procedure denaturalizes the European path of development. However, it continues to operate within the framework of presences and absences, of things that Europe possessed but Asia did not. It therefore conceives of economic development as following one of two paths, the European and the non-European or the industrial or the non-industrial, rather than opening up to the plural possibilities for change that existed in the eighteenth century. This is the familiar determinist problematic of industrialization as the universal path of development, unless it is prevented from emerging. An alternative approach broadens the canvas to not just two, but to the multiple paths of economic development that existed in the early modern world. The path that was taken, to borrow the words of Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, was “the interaction of a whole constellation of social forces . . . that determined the sometimes wayward direction of change.”4 The method of comparison is then broadened beyond an enumeration of similarities and differences to a far more rigorous and careful consideration of context. And historical outcomes and paths are related to these contexts.

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To elaborate a little, as related to the divergence problem, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries states and economic actors across the great Eurasian landmass were seeking to improve their economic conditions. The form that this economic improvement took, however, varied widely. Unlike the nineteenth century, when industrialization became the universal yardstick for economic improvement and progress, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were following different paths of economic change as they each responded to their own economic, ecological, political, and social pressures and needs. Therefore, in the centuries before 1800, the paths of economic change were diverse, plural, and multiple. Given different economic and ecological contexts, it is not surprising that the advanced regions of eighteenth-century Eurasia followed strikingly different trajectories of change. It is not a contrast between a dynamic Europe and a stagnant Asia. Rather, it is a contrast between different needs and imperatives which led to different paths of economic and technological change. One of them, that of Western Europe, proved to be more revolutionary. But that is not because of stagnation or a failure to change in Asia. For, as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” If historical change is conceived as an interaction between agency and structures, economic, political, social, and ecological structures define the range of choices within which individuals operate and act. And these structures varied systematically—most critically because of different positions within the global economy and different ecological contexts— across the economically advanced and prosperous regions of Europe, India, and China. It is, therefore, not surprising that individuals focused on different issues and made different choices across these regions. These insights on comparison are developed in my Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, which examines the problem of divergence in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a focus on the advanced areas of India and Great Britain, the latter being the most economically prosperous part of Europe.5 Although the advanced areas of India and Britain serve as the two poles of the book, comparisons of these two regions comprise a small part of the total work, much of it confined to one chapter in which economic, political, and demographic institutions are shown to be roughly similar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, the chapter shows that interest rates, insurance premiums, family and household size, and standards of living were more similar in Britain and the advanced regions of India than has long been believed. The above comparisons are used to refute existing explanations for divergence and to establish the timing of divergence. On the former, differences in demographic, political, and economic institutions are not compelling factors in the divergence between Britain and India. On the latter, there were more similarities than differences in British and Indian economic life till the late eighteenth century, pointing to this late date as the moment when divergence commenced.

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The Indian-British comparisons in Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not are not used to explain why the path of economic development in Britain diverged from that of Bengal or South India, however. The book contends that an explanation for divergence cannot be found in such comparisons because of differences in economic context. Therefore, a comparison of Britain with advanced regions of the Indian subcontinent would not be comparing like with like. In order to compare places that are alike, we must identify regions that were in the same economic situation or context. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not the two crucial elements of the economic context for Britain in the eighteenth century were global economic competition, most critically in cotton textiles, and ecological shortages, most importantly in wood. With respect to cotton textiles, British manufacturers faced the competitive pressure of Indian cotton textiles, both at home and abroad, and these cloths were increasingly preferred to traditional British textile wares. These competitive pressures and the desire to match Indian cloth fuelled innovation in eighteenth-century textile manufacturing and gave rise to the spinning machinery that would revolutionize the world, including the jenny, the water frame, and the mule. With respect to wood, for several centuries Britain had faced growing shortages of wood, which propelled experimentation with coal as an alterative fuel. This experimentation led to advances in the steam engine and the use of coal in a number of industrial processes, perhaps the most important being the substitution of coal for charcoal in the smelting of iron. The advanced regions of India faced neither of these challenges. They were the source of the cotton textiles that British manufacturers were seeking to surpass. And most of the subcontinent, including the economically advanced areas, were heavily forested until the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries and did not face an energy crisis of the kind that was impinging on Britain from a much earlier date. A comparison of the advanced regions of India with Britain cannot help us understand the factors that led to the revolutionary British path because the Indian regions were not responding to the same economic situation. To reveal the factors that went into the British path, we must compare Britain with regions of the world that were in analogous positions. This is precisely what the bulk of the comparisons in Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not set out to do. To begin with cotton, in order to identify the reasons for the exceptional British path, Britain is compared with the Ottoman Empire and France, both places that also came under the competitive pressure from Indian cottons and where local cotton manufacturing arose in imitation of Indian goods. The Britain–Ottoman Empire comparison shows the importance of state policies for the development of cotton industries. While Britain, along with much of Europe, closed its borders to Indian cloth, the Ottoman Empire welcomed Indian imports. European political authorities operated in a mercantile world in which they aimed to minimize imports and maximize production at home. Ottoman authorities approached the economy from the vantage point of consumption and sought to make available abundant supplies of goods at low prices so as to provision the popula-

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tion. From this perspective, imports of Indian goods were welcome as they expanded the supply of cloth in the markets of the empire. Ottoman manufacturers who attempted to emulate the cottons of India faced unrelenting and continued competition from the Indian originals, which limited their success and confined their efforts to lower quality cloths, for which the costs of transport from India were a larger proportion of the final price. In Britain, by contrast, cotton manufacturers were insulated from Indian competition and the development of British cotton manufacturing closely corresponded to the policies of protection. In 1700 imports of Indian printed and painted cloth were banned and a local British printing industry grew rapidly to fill the void. In 1720 imports of Indian white cloth, which had been the raw material for the printers of Britain, were banned, which gave rise to British efforts to produce a locally made substitute. These efforts first produced in the 1730s a light cotton-linen mixture, which, however, was an imperfect substitute for all-cotton Indian goods, and culminated in the spinning inventions of the 1760s and 1770s, the jenny, water frame, and mule, which allowed British manufacturers to make an allcotton cloth that matched Indian standards. Protection alone cannot explain the British path, however, for Britain was not alone in Europe in closing its borders to Indian cottons. A comparison with France shows the importance of the form of protection. While Britain blocked Indian imports, it allowed the continued consumption of cotton goods, which were now of British manufacture; France, however, banned the use and wear of cottons altogether, which led to a thriving trade in smuggled cotton goods and restricted the development of local cotton manufacturing. France was also less involved in the commercial world of the Atlantic, especially the slave trade, which, for much of the eighteenth century, was the major source of demand for British cotton cloth. This meant that there was less pressure on France to manufacture cotton goods for export. What distinguished France from Britain with respect to cottons, therefore, was a combination of state policy and market opportunity. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not argues that the mechanization of cotton manufacturing in late-eighteenth-century Britain produced a dramatic transformation in the British economy and shifted the source of the world’s cotton cloth exports from the Indian subcontinent to northwestern Europe. However, cotton alone cannot explain the revolutionary remaking of European economic life in the nineteenth century. Coal, and the new energy economy to which it gave rise, lay at the centre of that economic change. Why did this energy complex emerge in Europe and not Asia? To answer this question, the book compares the economy of coal in Britain and the lower Yangzi Delta, the most prosperous region of eighteenth-century China. Both of these places came under pressures of deforestation and shortages of wood, unlike the advanced regions of India, which, as mentioned, had plentiful supplies of this material. Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that the adoption of mineral fuel was easier in Britain than in the lower Yangzi because of the more favourable location of coal deposits. In Britain coal was located near centres of demand and proximate to water, which eased

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transport, but in the lower Yangzi coal was less accessible as it was located at some distance in North China. This explanation underplays the innovations in transport that made possible the growing coal consumption in Britain and ignores the extensive evidence for coal consumption in the lower Yangzi. These indicate that more than just location is needed to explain the differing patterns of coal use. A major difference between Britain and China was in their respective state policies towards coal. While British political authorities supported and promoted the consumption of coal— especially via the coastal trade from Newcastle to London—their Chinese counterparts were at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, to the expanding use of coal. Chinese opposition reflected a more general fear of miners and the potential threat that they posed to the stability of the state. Since a major miners’ revolt in the fifteenth century, Chinese political authorities had tried to restrict the activity. The British state, on the other hand, encouraged the coal trade because the taxes collected from coastal shipping became an easy and reliable source of revenues and coal was essential for the well being of Londoners. Provisioning London with fuel became a political priority as it maintained the peace of the realm. With this in mind, the British state regulated the coal trade and protected shipping convoys with the Royal Navy. The Chinese state was not uninterested in provisioning its population, but Chinese provisioning focused on grain. The eighteenth-century Qing granary system moved grain from surplus to deficit areas and guaranteed the food security of millions. The granaries, however, absorbed the administrative energies of what was a limited central state apparatus and did not have the economic and technological ramifications that coal had in Britain. With coal, as with cottons, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not compares nations or regions of the world in similar situations in order to unravel the reasons for different paths of economic development. The advanced regions of India do not figure in these comparisons because their situations were different. They do feature in the final chapter of the book, however, which examines the question of why these regions, which ranked amongst the leading centres of the eighteenth-century global economy, were unable to emulate British industrial development in the decades after 1800. The core of this chapter consists of comparisons between the advanced regions of India and the nations of Europe, which all faced the same dilemma of cheap British exports of cotton textiles and iron. While Belgium, France, and the German areas of central Europe successfully developed their own industrial base, the advanced areas of India failed to do so and entered into a long-term decline. Although the comparison shows broad similarities in the availability of capital, entrepreneurial ability, and worker skills and knowledge, there was a striking difference in the contribution of the state to economic development. States in Europe, in order to amass their own power, promoted industrial forms of production, the expansion of knowledge, and technological capability. A variety of policies were used, including protection for new industries, state enterprises, state purchasing policies, and funding for education, study tours abroad, and recruitment of knowledgeable individuals from abroad for the transfer of know-how. In

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India, which had come under British rule, colonial officials did none of these things. They were opposed to protection for Indian enterprises because the market had to be kept open for British exports. Similarly, purchasing policies for things like armaments and later railways favoured British-made goods. Colonial authorities undertook little investment in enterprises, education, or knowledge production because that would have reduced the gains from colonial rule. As a consequence, colonialism produced not only economic decline but also a decline in knowledge in nineteenth-century India. To conclude, the method of comparison has a great deal to contribute to the writing of global history. It pushes global historians to be more analytic as it forces a problemcentred approach to the writing of history. It also provides a profound justification for the writing of history at a global level when comparison leads to mutual influences. This, in turn, demands a global context for the interpretation of these mutual influences. At the same time, global history enriches the method of comparison itself. The nondeterministic histories that global historians are now developing require a more sophisticated approach to the act of comparison. The use of comparison in global history, therefore, can lead to innovations in method, and produces more subtle, more sophisticated, and more contextual forms of history writing.

NOTES

1. Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), p. 126. 2. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 10–63. 3. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), p. 8. 4. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives.” Modern Asian Studies, 19 (1985), 637. 5. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge, 2011).

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 7 “Assessing Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: A Forum.” Historically Speaking 12, 4 (September 2011): 10–25. The five essays in this issue of the bulletin of the Historical Society had their inception with a panel session at the American Historical Association’s 2011 meeting to observe the tenth anniversary of the publication of Pomeranz’s distinguished and controversial book. Peter Coclanis, Jan de Vries, Philip Hoffman, and R. Bin Wong offer their assessments, and Pomeranz responds. Ferguson, Niall. Civilization: The West and the Rest. New York: The Penguin Press, 2011. Ferguson claims that the contemporary world is experiencing the end of five hundred

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years of Western dominance. The rise of the West was inaugurated through the six “killer apps” of competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic. Alongside the rise of China, the question remains when, not if, the West, especially the United States, will go from weakness to collapse. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Frank challenges Eurocentrism by arguing that global history should be understood in terms of an Asia-centered world. The rise of the West from around 1800 therefore becomes an interlude between two periods of East Asian dominance, the second of which is currently emerging. Goldstone, Jack. Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500– 1850. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. The rise of the West was contingent on several interconnected factors. The age of exploration forced a reassessment of traditional religious understandings of the world, inaugurating scientific paradigms that fostered innovation, technological invention, and work practices that underpinned the Industrial Revolution. These factors combined with access to local and colonial resources and markets, along with the exploitation of local and colonial labor, to produce economic growth that outpaced other regions and created the preconditions for dominance. Goody, Jack. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004. Goody provides an outline of the Why the West? debate. Rejecting the notion of European cultural supremacy, Goody argues that Western Europe shared common developments in mercantilism and manufacturing with other Eurasian states. The Industrial Revolution, fueled by European access to resources in the Americas and ignited by technological and communications innovations, was the decisive point of divergence between Europe and Asia. Jones, E. L. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. The first edition of this important book was published in 1981. Comparing the trajectories of India, China, the Ottoman Empire, and Western Europe, Jones argues that favorable conjunctures in Europe between environmental factors and the evolution of political systems with checks and balances that curtailed autocratic power ultimately resulted in the rise of the West in the period 1400 to 1800. Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Echoing Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Landes puts forward a neoliberal, neoclassical explanation for the rise of the West. The Industrial Revolution and the West’s sustained economic growth resulted from a combination of advantageous climate, political competition, promotion of science and secular knowledge, and cultural traits rewarding innovation, labor, and property accumulation. Landes also partly revives concomitant arguments about the disadvantages of tropical climates for economic development. Marks, Robert B. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. This brief but coherent world-scale account of the development of the world economy in the past six hundred years works well in world history classrooms. Marks offers an overview of both the European exceptionalist theory of the westward shift of economic

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power and the recent scholarly challenges to that interpretation. The author does not deny the power that Western states have wielded in the world in the past two centuries. But as he writes in his conclusion, “However influential Europeans and Americans may have been in the making of the modern world, they did not make it themselves, and the West certainly did not ‘rise’ over other parts of the world because of cultural (or racial) superiority.” Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600– 1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Using India as a case study, Parthasarathi argues that the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than not until the late eighteenth century, exhibiting similarly complex and dynamic economies and political institutions. He argues that India’s failure to industrialize in the nineteenth century was due to exploitative policies of the expanding colonial state rather than any inherent internal deficiencies. Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, and R. Bin Wong. Before and Beyond Divergence: A New Look at the Economic History of China and Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Systematically analyzing and rejecting conventional Eurocentric explanations for the rise of the West, the authors argue that long-term political developments in Europe and China explain their eventually divergent paths. Whereas China experienced stability and economic growth, the instability and fragmentation of European polities accelerated urbanization and technological innovation. These factors were in place well before the Industrial Revolution. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Wallerstein’s concise summary of world-systems analysis introduces readers to the field. He argues that long-term examination of emerging world-systems— rather than a focus on individual nation-states—provides the best framework for studying world history. The modern world-system as a transnational division of labor and markets emerged with the development of the capitalist world economy in the sixteenth century. Core countries in Europe (and later the United States) developed skilled labor and capitalintensive economic production while colonialism forced economies in regions Wallerstein classifies as semiperiphery and periphery to focus on low-skilled, labor-intensive production and the extraction of raw materials. This worldwide division of production created a dynamic of inequality that was difficult, but not impossible, to reverse. Wong, R. Bin. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Wong argues that Europe and China had different economic and political trajectories that cannot be adequately compared using European models as normative. Instead, the author compares Europe and China in three arenas: economic change since the early modern period, state building, and patterns of popular protest.

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8 WORLD HISTORY, BIG HISTORY, AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

IN T R O D U C T I O N

Scholars in the field of the new world history, interested in understanding and explaining humanity’s past, have paid particular attention to relationships between people and the environment. They have been equally attentive to creation stories that make a society’s place in the world meaningful, and to recent scientific narratives that document the consequences of our increasing exploitation of the world’s natural resources. Such attention to landscapes both metaphorical and material in world history emerged in concert with worldwide attention to the earth’s ecological health and to the concomitant growth of environmental history as a field of its own. These intellectual changes coincided with the flowering of the world history movement described in Chapter 1. An environmentally informed approach to history, situating humans in the context of landscape, climate, and the geographically constrained possibilities of production, defense, and trade, has discernable roots in the work of Fernand Braudel and other scholars of the Annales School that emerged early in the twentieth century. Braudel’s work is also an important touchstone for world historians, who are engaged in thinking about historical change in long time frames (see Chapter 5) and in reconceptualizing historical space, especially ocean basins as coherent zones of human interaction (see Chapter 4). Historiographically, then, environmental inquiry is but one facet of world history that merits specific attention.

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Environmental thinking runs especially deep in world history. Foundational categories of geographic and temporal organization implicitly rely on environmental ideas. Climate zones, the relative ease or difficulty of traveling between regions, or the measurement of time according to the passage of the sun and the moon all serve to organize world historical thinking. Even abstract periodization schemes rely on our perception of changes in how people live in the world: using stone tools, smelting metals, sustaining themselves through farming, or extracting massive amounts of energy from fossil fuels. Before there was a recognizable genre of global environmental history, pioneering world historians engaged in robust environmentally informed conversations. William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism, and Philip Curtin’s Death by Migration and The Rise and Fall of the Plantain Complex reveal a strongly environmental bent to scholarship that seeks to illuminate large-scale patterns in human experience.1 Since then, environmental history has taken off as a recognizable field, and its literature has burgeoned, especially in the last decade. J. Donald Hughes observed in 2005 that “attempts by historians to write environmental histories of the world have been few.”2 He could not have anticipated the profusion of work that has since appeared.3 These world-scale studies join a steady stream of books and articles that investigate issues of global significance, though focusing on a particular region or set of connections. Environmental history also draws on related fields, including the growing list of commodity histories,4 studies of migration and disease,5 and work that connects the history of science to processes of colonial expansion.6 The inherent interdisciplinarity of the field gives it a wide set of intellectual connections, as it not only taps into the work of philosophers, anthropologists, and geographers but also engages with physical and natural scientists. Environmental history’s relationship to ecologically minded political movements and to public awareness of issues such as pollution, waste management, conservation, and global warming has also created a growing audience for this work. As a coherent set of methodological and theoretical propositions, environmental history took shape in the context of nationally rooted scholarship, enjoying a particular push in the United States beginning in the late 1970s.7 As with other branches of world history, some scholars whose initial work was centered on a specific region began to explore comparisons or larger-scale patterns in their research. For example, Hughes, a historian of ancient Greece and Rome, and John Richards, a South Asianist, demonstrated the possibility of writing environmental histories on big geographic scales—the Mediterranean basin for Hughes and comparative case studies of the early modern world for Richards.8 Meanwhile, J. R. McNeill’s Something New under the Sun made an even stronger case for the necessity of investigating world environmental change. The book explicitly argues that some questions—the creation and consequences of air pollution, for example— simply cannot be studied adequately on a national scale and therefore require the theoretical and methodological apparatus of world history.9 As

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Kenneth Pomeranz observes, “In certain obvious ways, the perspectives of world and environmental history seem to fit together readily: land formations, wind patterns, and other geophysical phenomena pay no attention to borders, and the environmental effects of sheep, sugar production, and nuclear waste are temptingly easy to compare across cultural settings.”10 One particular manifestation of scholars’ long-standing interest in the relationships between humans and their environment emerged more than two decades ago as big history— an intellectual quest to situate the human species in the long physical and biological history of the universe. Big history and environmental history are not identical, nor is one a subset of the other. We bring them together in the same chapter, however, because of their shared concern with species-level questions about historical change and with analysis of nonhuman agency in the past. Big history by definition encompasses cosmic scales of investigation. Environmental history operates in several registers of time and space but not usually beyond the planetary realm. Alfred Crosby’s scholarly engagement with environmental change has spanned more than four decades. His pioneering study, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequence of 1492, appeared in 1973 and has proved so influential that his title phrase is now an item in the basic vocabulary of world history—including the vocabulary of textbooks and curriculum standards. Children of the Sun, published in 2006, charts the long-term changes in human energy use, differentiating among muscle power; the controlled use of fire; the release of biomass from burning wood, peat, and charcoal; and the consumption of fossil fuels. The chapter “The Columbian Exchange,” reprinted here, recapitulates the major arguments of The Columbian Exchange, situating the transatlantic exchange of crops, domestic animals, weeds, and diseases in the context of changing human food production that followed the control of fire, cooking, and advancing agricultural technologies. Crosby repurposed aspects of his well-known book to make arguments not just about the consequences of early modern maritime exchanges but also about the long-term technological innovations that have altered the way humans interact with the earth and its resources. Crosby’s essay displays three elements that are common in global environmental history: attention to the planet’s biological past; identification of clear pivot points in the relationship between human communities and the natural world; and explanation of how the development of specific technologies changed our ability to exploit natural resources—for example, harnessing the wind with sails and adapting food crops to new habitats. The full scope of Children of the Sun examines energy use and the relationship between the sun and the earth from the era of single-celled organisms through human attempts to produce controlled nuclear fusion. Frank Uekötter’s essay examines the ways in which environmental questions force historians to address scale in their analysis. He provides a succinct overview of world environmental history as a “scholarly endeavor,” identifying elements of the field that are currently languishing (mining and forest history, for example) and suggesting cur-

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rent events that have galvanized scholars to look more closely at the economic imperatives that drive natural resource use—regardless of time or place. He uses this reflection as an intellectual call to arms and as a means to advance an important theoretical and historiographical argument: “matter matters.” In paying close attention to the material basis of human cultural and political formations, Uekötter claims that environmental historians seek not just to build a “new room in the house of history” but also to “rethink the house from the cellar to the rooftop.” He supports this bold assertion in an ideological way, asserting that the new materialism within environmental history “is not really about a field that is waiting to be explored. It is a new way of looking at things that we thought we knew.” More importantly, Uekötter supports his claim materially, offering specific, physical examples of how attention to matter sheds new light on a persistent set of questions about the characteristics of modernity. He shows that “environmental history encourages a different reading of modern resource history,” pointing out that the value of resources compared to human labor has shifted toward resources in the modern era. “Modern societies,” he says,” need the flow of stuff, far more so than they need the people who manage it.” Equally important, human responses to resource scarcities changed significantly in the modern era. Uekötter’s perspective invigorates resource and commodity history by providing a fresh global argument for why local studies of extraction and regional studies of exchange are significant. More matter— or stuff— circulates around the world than people. Studies of migration and exchange networks have made important contributions to the field, but looking specifically at stuff in motion promises to yield even greater analytical payoffs. Uekötter’s emphasis on the conceptual benefits of a materialist approach differentiates his contribution from other work in environmental and big history. Another hallmark of these two fields is interdisciplinary engagement. In a notable example, historian John McNeill joined Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen (celebrated for his work on atmospheric ozone depletion) and chemist Will Steffen (recognized for his research on global climate change) to introduce the idea of the Anthropocene in the pages of a journal of science rather than one of the humanities or social science. They define the Anthropocene as “the current epoch in which humans and our societies have become a geophysical force.” This concept has been hotly debated, partly because of its embroilment with present-day politics of climate change and criticisms of Earth system science. Although strong scientific consensus has been reached about global warming, its specific causes and chronology remain a complex subject of investigation. Advocates of the Anthropocene idea argue that humans began to alter the physical and natural environment on a planetary scale when they began to use massive amounts of fossil fuel to power industrialization. Critics of this view contend that humans started changing the planet when they invented agriculture, or even much earlier when foragers burned land to flush out game, or when hunters drove megafauna to extinction. These critics contend that because human impact on the environment grew

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gradually and continuously over millennia, the developments of the past two centuries do not represent a decisive break in the Holocene pattern. To make their case in favor of the Anthropocene as a new planetary era, Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill aggregate a broad range of Earth systems data, then combine this evidence with geologic periodization and a historian’s sense of causation to demonstrate that human actions have had discernable and often unintended planet-wide consequences since 1800. The world’s energy consumption increased more than four hundred–fold between 1800 and 2000. At the start of that period, almost 100 percent of energy came from biomass. The burning of biomass fuels remained relatively constant over the following two centuries, but fossil fuel consumption accelerated dramatically. It now accounts for more than 80 percent of world energy use. The authors connect fossil fuel consumption to rising levels of methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Based on this changing atmospheric chemistry, Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill propose a three-stage periodization of the Anthropocene. In stage one, the industrial era (1800–1945), concentrations of carbon dioxide rose enough to demonstrate that this change did not result from random variation. Carbon dioxide accumulation rose much faster beginning around 1945, “when the most rapid and pervasive shift in the humanenvironment relationship began,” marking the start of stage two, or what the authors call the “Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene. The authors optimistically call stage three “Stewards of the Earth System?” They make a plea for sustainable management of energy use and the earth’s life support systems in order to minimize “human-induced stresses.” In 1991 David Christian first made the case for big history by proposing it as a radical extension of the scarcely less radical idea that history might be studied on the world scale. Christian proposed that big history begins with the Big Bang, that is, thirteen billion years ago. By placing the human venture in the context of that time scale, big history provides the ultimate frame for understanding our evolution as a species and our place in the cosmic order.11 Fred Spier is equally sanguine about big history’s potential to unite major scientific paradigms with a narrative of human history. As the essay excerpted here shows, he is particularly enthusiastic about this potential in classrooms as a way to foster interdisciplinary thinking. Spier approaches big history using the concept of “regime,” meaning “a more or less regular but ultimately unstable pattern that has a certain temporal permanence.” Whereas Christian presents big history as an experimental approach to world history, Spier connects the current thinking back to the nineteenth century, when the notion that the human past was linked to natural history influenced the milieu in which Darwin developed his theory of evolution. Later in that century, increasingly specialized disciplinary boundaries eventually undermined approaches that sought holistic explanations for phenomena concerning the planet, its inhabitants, and its relationship

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to other celestial bodies. Big history, Spier argues, resuscitates integrated thinking and has the potential to provide a “historical theory of everything, including human history.” To frame this ambitious goal, Spier invokes the “Goldilocks principle,” observing that the conditions of life, especially the bandwidths of energy flows, have to be “just right” to support relatively stable growth and allow complexity to develop over time. This Goldilocks principle can be used to explain the history of all forms of natural and human complex systems.

NOTES

1. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976); Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900– 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2. J. Donald Hughes, “The Greening of World History,” in Palgrave Advances in World Histories, ed. Marnie Hughes-Warrington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 243. 3. Work before Hughes’s assessment includes Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization (New York: Penguin, 1995); J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); and Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Examples of work since 2005 include John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California, 2006); Mark Cioc, The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009); Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Edmund Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Anthony N. Penna, The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 4. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, repr. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1986); Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500– 2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Kris Lane, Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich

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Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); and Arash Khazeni, Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 5. James Webb, Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 6. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600– 1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 7. J. R. McNeill, “The State of the Field of Environmental History,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35, 1 (2010): 345– 74. 8. J. Donald Hughes, Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 9. McNeill, Something New under the Sun. 10. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Introduction: World and Environmental History,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3. 11. David Christian, “The Case for ‘Big History,’” Journal of World History 2, 2 (Fall 1991): 223–38.

THE COLUMBIAN E XCHANGE Alfred W. Crosby All the trees were as different from ours as day from night, and so were the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and all things. —CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, Mariner (1492)1

When Jesus and Mohammed walked the Earth in the first centuries CE (Common Era), the towering majority of humans were members of societies that exploited the Sun via domesticated plants and animals. But as yet no single division of humanity tapped the full advantages of agriculture because access to the total sum of Neolithic innovation was limited by climatic contrasts and geographic distances, not to mention mountain ranges, deserts, jungles, and especially oceans. The Homo sapiens species had “invented” agriculture in at least nine different regions:

Alfred W. Crosby’s “The Columbian Exchange,” is from Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) 45– 57. Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Company.

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Southwest Asia, Southeast Asia, North China, South China, and sub-Saharan Africa in the Old World; eastern North America, central Mexico, the South American highlands, and the South American lowlands in the New World. At first, each of these centers had different sets of domesticates, plant and animal. For instance, central Mexico domesticated maize, squash, beans, and very little if anything in the way of livestock; South China domesticated rice, pigs, chickens, and water buffalo. The full exploitation of sun energy through agriculture, during the era when muscle was humanity’s foremost and nearly only prime mover, waited on sharing among the nine centers of agricultural innovation. For thousands of years the sharing of techniques and crops went on slowly and entirely within the two continental masses of the Old and New Worlds. For instance, rice and sugar cultivation migrated from Southeast Asia to India to the Middle East and then to Europe at something well less than a walking pace. Maize in Mexico dates as far back as 9000 BP, but wasn’t grown in the eastern United States until about seven thousand years later. Sorghum, a grain, was cultivated 5000–6000 BP in Africa, got to India no sooner than two thousand years ago, and from there on to China, perhaps via the Mongol conquerors, circa the thirteenth century. Sharing within both the Old and New Worlds was slow, but was well underway in the second millennium CE, and millions of people were dependent on domesticated plants and animals that had first been recruited for human service far, far away. In contrast, no cultivar or domesticated animal had crossed the Atlantic or Pacific and become established on the far side. The South American lowlands’ sweet potato somehow spread from there through the Polynesian Pacific, but not all the way across to Asia; and Asian rice, an excellent crop for tropical Pacific islands, one would think, somehow did not spread through Polynesia at all. To consider this long-lived insularity of the Old and New Worlds, we return to the subject of global warming circa 10,000 BP. The sunlight streaming down warmed the globe and the continental glaciers melted. Their water flowed into the oceans and sea levels rose, drowning the land connections between the British Isles and continental Europe, New Guinea and Australia, and, most portentously, between Northeast Asia and Alaska, that is, between the Old World and the New. Humans had yet to build seacraft capable of crossing oceans dependably and repeatedly— even the ancestors of the Polynesians were novice seafarers in 10,000 BP—but people had already traveled from Siberia to Alaska on foot over the Bering land bridge (a “bridge” as broad as Texas) and into the Americas. They brought with them the cultures of the Upper Paleolithic. These included all sorts of stone crafts, cooking techniques, such devices as the atlatl (throwing stick), and the dog (but not the reindeer). Then the sea level rose, Beringia— as the land bridge has been posthumously entitled— disappeared, and these first Americans and their dogs were left alone before the full blooming of agriculture anywhere. Fitful contacts between the Eastern and Western Hemisphere peoples seem to have continued. Bow and arrow technology passed from the former to the latter after the inundation, but little else. But the connection of Siberian and Alaskan chilly tundra could never have served effectively as a corridor for the exchange of plants and animals

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between the warmer latitudes of the two hemispheres, where the shift to agriculture was beginning. Between the flooding of Beringia and the ocean ventures of Christopher Columbus, Old and New World food procurers lived and evolved independently behind broad moats, and would continue to do so until somebody began crossing the oceans repeatedly and dependably. To cross oceans, the prime mover, muscle power, won’t suffice. Animals cannot be trained to row efficiently and for long periods. Humans can be, but that approach won’t work, either. Rowing on lakes or the Aegean is fine, but if you enlist (or enslave) enough men to row a ship across an ocean, you’ll have to take on board a lot of food, which will necessitate a bigger ship, which will require more rowers, who will also have to eat to function, and so on and on. Rowing across oceans is not a practical means of travel. Fortunately, the Sun provides another means. The Sun wherever it shines heats bodies of air differentially. These bodies expend that sun energy scurrying and blustering about as winds, swerving in obedience to the Earth’s rotation. Wind is a form of sun energy available on land and sea. In the centuries between Mohammed’s death and Columbus’s birth, mariners and shipbuilders of the China Sea, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Europe’s Atlantic coasts learned how to build large and truly seaworthy vessels, and to sail them, tacking against the wind if necessary, across the major oceans, utilizing the compass to find their way. The Chinese jumped ahead at first, dispatching enormous fleets as far as East Africa, but then reverted to traditional and continental concerns. The Europeans, with the Portuguese and Spaniards in the vanguard, took the lead. They were as good as any continental peoples in their seamanship and navigational skills, and more adventurous. The Portuguese and Spaniards learned how to tap the sun energy of the winds not only locally, but oceanically. They discovered the great clockwise systems of air flow that dominate the surfaces of the Atlantic and Pacific: easterly trade winds in the tropics and prevailing westerlies in the temperate zones. They utilized this knowledge to ride the trade winds from Iberia to America, from Acapulco to Manila, and then back again via the westerlies. While doing so, they carried the domesticated crops and livestock of the Old to the New World, and vice versa. (They also brought diseases like smallpox and malaria to America for the first time, killing millions. The Native Americans slyly countered with tobacco.) Agriculturalists on opposite sides of the Atlantic and Pacific worked with different sets of plants and animals. All the animals mentioned thus far— dogs, cattle, horses, sheep—were from the Old World. The people who would become Native Americans almost certainly arrived in the New World with dogs, so they were familiar with the concept of partnership with animals. It is not clear why they didn’t domesticate more animals, or at least more useful animals than they did. They certainly adapted to horses and cattle swiftly after 1492. Perhaps the megafaunal extinctions of the Upper Paleolithic, [. . .] which were more thorough in the New World than the Old, eliminated the likeliest local candidates for domestication such as the American horse. Native Americans

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established close alliances with the guinea pig, some fowl, but no large animals except the llama, which only lived in Andean South America. They had no ally they could ride or hitch to a plow, and none that they could depend on for milk. But Native Americans excelled as farmers. Of the major crop plants that serve today as staples of our species, a third to a half are of New World origin. This is remarkable considering that the Old World includes most of the planet’s dry land and, when agriculture was first evolving, surely was home to as great a proportion of human beings. Before we pursue that point further, let us appraise the Old World contributions to the New World agriculture. In the first few post-Columbian centuries, the imported cultivated plants effected great changes in those parts of America for which Old World experience had pre-adapted them. There were many localized successes— olives, wine grapes, peaches—but let us focus on the continental or nearly continental successes. Sugar cane, which originated in New Guinea, did wonderfully in the wet American tropics from the West Indies to the hump of Brazil. For the first time an intense sweet, which humans, like their apish ancestors, were genetically preadapted to like, was available in quantity. Europeans developed a sweet tooth, and millions of Africans were enslaved and shipped to the New World to work the cane fields to satisfy that taste. Let us consider wheat as another example. In the nineteenth century, the influence of Euro-American capitalism flowed inland and penetrated the North American plains and South American pampas. Its Myrmidons sowed a southwest Asian grass there— wheat—harvested the grain, and began shipping it out to the world to feed the urbanized labor forces of the industrial revolution everywhere. Wheat is still the biggest food item of transoceanic trade. The impact of Old World livestock on the New World was even greater than that of its cultivars in the short run and possibly in the long run, as well. Celebrities of the Old World Neolithic, mobile recipients of the sun’s largess—horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens—transmogrified the American biosphere and were running loose in the millions within two centuries of the Columbian voyages. Pigs led the way because most of the first European settlements were in the wet, wellwooded lands where they thrived, multiplied, and went wild. Soon after the founding of the Spanish colony in Española, their numbers were infinitos. “The swine doe like very well heere,” a visitor to Brazil wrote in 1601, “and they begin to have great numbers, and heere is the best flesh of all.” In early Virginia, they “did swarm like Vermaine upon the Earrh.”2 Cattle are not as well suited to the damp tropics as pigs, but they multiplied explosively after a while. A 1518 report to the king of Spain stated that thirty or forty stray cattle in the West Indies would increase to hundreds in as little as three or four years. When cattle reached the grasslands of northern Mexico and Argentina, their numbers soared into the millions. One careful observer estimated the number of wild cattle in the pampa alone circa 1700 at 48 million. Horses, a finicky species compared to pigs and cattle, lagged behind, but not far behind. By the end of the sixteenth century the plains of Buenos Aires were “covered

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with escaped mares and horses in such number that when they go anywhere they look like woods from a distance.”3 By the mid-eighteenth century they had reached Canada from Mexico, via Native American rustling, trading, and their own independent drifting. Livestock provided the inhabitants of America with food in large quantities as well as new sources of fiber and leather, and of strength. The enormous pyramids, buildings, and monuments of Mexico before Spanish conquest had all been raised by human muscle alone; now there was oxen muscle to help. No inhabitant of America had ever traveled overland faster than he or she could run. Now they mounted horses and galloped like the wind. The impact of New World livestock on the Old World, on the other hand, has been nil. Guinea pigs have proved useful in medical research and turkeys have graced a few tables, but nothing more significant than that. In contrast, the influence of New World crops there has been enormous. Let us turn to the sunshine staples, the calorie generators on which hundreds of millions in the Eastern Hemisphere have depended for at least two centuries. The most important are white potatoes and maize. White potatoes, often called Irish potatoes, came from northern Chile and Peru, where there are many species, wild and domesticated, obviously related to this cultivated tuber. Potatoes provide a variety of nutrients—vitamin C and even some protein—and are closer to being sufficient to support life all by themselves than any other major crop plant. But historically they have been chiefly important for their calories. In cool, damp climates they produced more calories per acre than any Old World crop and became a staple for the lower classes. In 1776, no less a seer than Adam Smith paid the potato its due in a backhanded compliment to the Celts: The chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers in London, and those Unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution.4

The cultivation of “this root” (it is a tuber, not a root) requires no more complicated or expensive tools than a spade. If you don’t have a spade, a digging stick will do. Potatoes have the advantage of keeping their edible parts underground, safe from feral livestock and all but the most determined thieves. The origin of maize seven to ten thousand years ago is one of archeo-botany’s deepest mysteries. Cultivated wheat is like wild wheat in appearance, but maize seems unlike any plant growing wild in its homeland, Mesoamerica (central Mexico and regions to the southeast). Perhaps it evolved so swiftly and radically under human influence that it doesn’t resemble its ancestor at all. Perhaps its ancestor is extinct. Perhaps maize turned Oedipal, crossed with its parent, and simply absorbed it genetically.

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The first cultivated maize of which we have examples bore cobs about an inch long and as thick as a pencil, with four to eight rows of kernels. The total food value of an average cob may have been less than one kernel of maize today. Fortunately, maize is one of the most genetically flexible of all crop species and in due time Native American plant breeders had it producing big cobs with plentiful kernels. They cultivated it from Canada to Argentina. Today, it turns out more calories per acre than any grain but rice. Maize was and is easy to cultivate, requiring in planting and cultivation no special tools or greater skill and strength than a ten-year-old might possess. Harvesting requires no tools but hands. At maturity the ears, encased in tight wrappings of leaves, can be left on the stalks until it is convenient to pull them off. Maize kernels, unlike potatoes, can be safely stored for years. The exiled American loyalist Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson), reminiscing about maize, praised it as “beyond comparison the most nourishing, cheapest, and most wholesome [food] that can be procured for feeding the poor.”5 (Peasants, often dependent on foods produced on infertile lands of marginal utility, e.g., alongside paths between rice paddies, were usually the earliest to commit their fates to American crops.) In return for nourishing humans, maize, like the horse, won survival. It is as dependent on farmers as are the tapeworms in their bellies. Maize kernels (seeds) left to their own pursuits rarely escape their sheath of leaves, and if they do, cannot scatter. Maize is an even more extreme example of the interdependence of plant and human than wheat. The most important thing about the different crop plants of the two independent Neolithics is just that: they were simply different—with different advantages and disadvantages, different ways of dealing with challenges to their growth and reproduction. Imagine the pre-Columbian populations of the Old and New Worlds as two individuals playing poker with nature, “betting against the house.” Each has five cards and wins once in a while. After 1492, they shared their cards. With ten cards collectively, they were able to put together winning hands much more often and the odds of starving to death dropped. Consider the story of American food crops in a land usually thought of as resistant to outside influences: China. No Old World people adopted these alien plants faster than the Chinese. The explanation for their eagerness probably is related to population pressure. Between 1368 and 1644, the years of the Ming dynasty, the Chinese population doubled, and so did the demand for food. Farmers of the traditional staples, such as wheat in the north and rice in the south, were running into problems of diminishing returns. They were close to raising as much food as they possibly could on available land using existing techniques. The problem must have been especially pressing in the south, where most of the level and near-level land close to sources of water for irrigation was already occupied by rice paddies. To return to the poker analogy, the Chinese needed to draw more cards. The Iberians, Portuguese and Spanish, provided the new cards. The port of Manila, newly Spanish and an easy sail from the China coast, was particularly significant in the transfer of Native American crops to China. The sweet potato, a calorically rich food,

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finally made it all the way across the Pacific and arrived on the China coast some time in the last years of the sixteenth century. This crop prospers in inferior soils, tolerates drought, resists insect pests, and does well with very little attention, so the peasants raised rice to sell and to pay taxes, and sweet potatoes to eat. By 1650, the crop was common in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, and on its way to becoming the staple of the poorer peasant wherever climate would allow. Today, China raises more sweet potatoes by far than any other nation. Maize arrived in China even before the mid-sixteenth century. It too was hardy and required little attention. It produced food faster than most crops and provided high yields in the relatively cool and dry uplands of the interior. Maize soon became a common secondary crop from Shanxi in the northwest to Yunnan in the southwest and eventually a primary crop in several inland provinces. Today, China is second only to the United States in maize production and, unlike America, devotes almost all of it to feeding humans, not animals. Farmers and gardeners were slower to adopt American cultivars at the other end of Eurasia. Not until the eighteenth century did the peasants of the northern half of Europe from the British Isles to Poland, an area suited in soil and climate for potatoes, plant the tubers in massive quantities. Next the Russians, for whom a day without at least one meal including potatoes is still a rarity, fell in line. It is questionable whether Northern Europe could have supported its population growth after 1750 or fed the laborers of the first century of its industrial revolution without potatoes. In the northerly latitudes of Europe, where summers were too short and wet for wheat, the farmers had chiefly depended on rye, a nourishing but nor very productive grain. Potatoes thrived there, producing four times more calories per acre than rye. Even better, they could be planted in fields lying fallow between rye plantings, converting seasons of zero food production in said fields to seasons of plenty. Maize played much the same role in northern Spain and Portugal and southern France, where in the 1670s John Locke saw fields of it, called blé d’Espagne locally, where it “serves the poor people for bread.”6 Between 1900 and 1914, the annual consumption of potatoes per capita in the United Kingdom was 97 kilograms; in France, 176; in Germany, 199; and in Belgium, 206.5. Even the Italians, for all their affection for maize, consumed 27.8 kilograms. According to the demographic historian Ping-ti Ho, writing about China, “During the last two centuries when rice culture was gradually approaching its limit, and encountering the law of diminishing returns, the various . . . food crops introduced from America have contributed most to the increase in national food production and have made possible a continual growth in population.”7 His statement can be appropriately extended co the entire Old World. His concept, if augmented with a sentence pointing to the influence of Old World plants and animals in the New World, accurately describes the influence of the Columbian Exchange on the entire population of the globe. Now humanity could exploit the full potential of all its Neolithic agricultures.

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NOTES

1. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Conquest of 1492 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 4. 2. Ibid., 79. 3. Ibid., 85. 4. Alfred W. Crosby, Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 157. 5. Ibid., 174. 6. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, 178. 7. Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 191–92.

M AT T E R M AT T E R S : T OWA R D S A M O R E “ S U B S TA N T I A L” G LO B A L H I S T O R Y Frank Uekötter

A ghost is haunting the world—the ghost of a new materialism. As in every nascent revolution, protagonists are gathering from multiple directions, and in all sorts of moods: enthused, belligerent, resigned. Some have noted gaping holes in our scholarly landscape, where disciplines like agricultural history, mining history, and forest history have recently been less than fashionable. Others have become alert through their energy bills, or through reports on coltan mining in the Congo or mercury-based gold washing in Latin American jungles. Some have even converted after becoming disaffected with a freewheeling cultural history. Together they form a growing group of people with a common purpose, and we can almost hear them chant what may emerge as the slogan of the new materialism: matter matters. Of course, it is preposterous, and perhaps a bit wrought-out, to start an essay with a paraphrase of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Revolutionary pamphlets rarely work out as planned, and academia has been wrestling with more than one overambitious call to arms over recent decades. However, the scholarly endeavor that these remarks intend to sketch is already evolving in a number of ongoing research projects, both theoretical and empirical in nature. In a way, the new materialism is already there, as it is not really about a field that is waiting to be explored. It is about a new way of looking at the things that we thought we knew.1 Historians have long taken note of the material base of human civilization. We have classics such as Daniel Yergin’s The Prize and Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power.2 We also have a growing number of popular histories that focus on a specific commodity, at times with the emphatic proclamation that they “changed the world.”3 And we certainly Frank Uekötter’s “Matter Matters: Towards a More ‘Substantial’ Global History” was originally published in World History Bulletin 29, 2 (Fall 2013): 6– 8. Reprinted with permission of the World History Association.

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do not need to alert environmental historians to the field, as we have quite a number of studies that discuss the environmental toll of resource extraction.4 Yet, it seems that environmental historians can provide more than insights about ecological costs. Environmental history is ultimately about changing our view of history. We do not just want a new room in the house of history—we want to rethink the house from the cellar to the rooftop. It seems all the more opportune to stress this mission as the field’s revolutionary fervor has been languishing a bit in recent years. Topics have become narrower as the number of scholars increased, and so have geographic and chronological scopes. Specialization is probably an inevitable by-product of academic growth, and certainly an important one, as the gaping holes in our historical knowledge are still legion. However, environmental historians know well that growth usually comes at a price. The merger of global history and environmental history may hold potential for both sides here, as globalization is a good way to encourage the kind of big thinking that once was a key attraction of environmental history. Matter matters: the rallying cry evokes a key concern of environmental history, namely the agency of non-human entities. Plants, animals and rocks are not merely backdrops against which the drama of human history is playing out. They are actors too, or actants, for those who have read the French sociologist Bruno Latour—players on the scene of history that have their own distinct rationales. From an environmental history perspective, modern history is also the history of ever growing quantities of stuff that circle the globe. By the end of the twentieth century, humans were moving some 42 billion tons of rock and soil per year, often over thousands of miles.5 For environmental historians, these huge masses are a conceptual provocation of the first order. If we look at modern history in physical terms, there is no way to deny that the material carries more weight nowadays than the human. If we divide 42 billion tons by the current world population of 7 billion, that makes 6 tons of matter annually for each of us. Should we really assume that this load leaves no imprint on our societies, economies, and mindsets? After all, masses are obstinate entities. We know from physics that masses have momentum: once set in motion, an object pursues its path until an outside force intervenes. If that is so, billions of tons surely have a kind of momentum that challenges human supremacy. One might object that this is merely a metaphor, as people could stop shuffling oil, wheat, and all the other commodities around the globe at any time. But can they? We know very well that modern societies will be in deep trouble unless we get to move our stuff around as we are accustomed. Wartime starvation, the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, and the recent scare over rare earth metals—whenever the constant flow of resources sputters, modern societies respond with concern, if not outright panic. During the modern era, the flow of resources has become second nature for people in the West. Resource problems were supposed to be temporary problems at best— shortterm exceptions to the general rule that resources were readily available. In modern times, resources were cheap and labor was expensive—for most of human history, it

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was the other way round. The transatlantic slave trade, where millions of humans died prematurely in the quest for precious commodities such as sugar, provides one of the more sobering cases in point. So what happens when we look at resource history in this way: as a story of huge amounts of stuff that get into motion? For one thing, we see that the world was flat long before Thomas Friedman.6 Commodities connected people in different parts of the world that never met in person. In fact, the material essence of the commodity was the only thing that connected these people. By themselves, resources do not know hierarchies: they only know producers, consumers, and people who bring them from the former to the latter. Commodity chain analysis has made significant strides towards a clarification of who profited along these supply lines and for what reason, and yet the unequal distribution of benefits is not the full drama at play here. There is also the fateful entanglement of everyone along the chain: if something goes wrong somewhere along the way, the flow of resources stops, with repercussions for all parties involved. With that, environmental history encourages a different reading of modern resource history. Conventional narratives of global trade focus on the people and corporations who built vast supply networks. However, the new materialism is more interested in the obstacles that they encountered and how they were overcome: What were the forces that influenced the speed and volume of global resource flows? What could curtail the stream of material or even block it in full? And when did the flow gain a momentum that challenged human supremacy? After all, the flow of material was merely a trickle throughout most of human history, and premodern societies had plenty of experiences in dealing with scarcities. When grain was getting scarce, home gardens, berries and mushrooms, or hunting skills assured survival. When a conflagration hit a city, the residents allowed forest use beyond sustainability rates for some time. Knowing about the risk of starvation, storing and preserving food for months ahead was a matter of common sense. In short, whenever a stream of resources dried up, premodern societies had other options in play— not because they were more intelligent than modern people but because reserves were what stood between them and disaster. Resource history thus highlights the fundamental difference between modern consumerist civilizations and their predecessors. In fact, few issues provide a better demonstration of the enduring merits of speaking about modernity than resource history: modern societies took a fundamentally new approach to the appropriation of material resources. Modernity rephrased the key challenge: rather than preparing for scarcity, humans focused on preventing it from occurring in the first place. Modern societies came to rely on a steady flow of resources: commodities were supposed to be cheap and readily available in every desired quantity. We can see the extent to which modern societies hedged their bet on a continuous flow in that premodern reserves were either sharply reduced or dismantled entirely. What had previously been a crucial safety mechanism was now seen as dispensable and wasteful.

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Yet even in modern times, the free flow of resources was never simply a given. Supply networks were fragile, and all sorts of things could go wrong: corporations could go bankrupt, ships could sink, politicians could impose taxes or import bans, and consumers could change their tastes. From a new materialist perspective, resource history is a constant repair job— a perennial fight against obstacles to the flow. John Soluri’s remark on banana plantations in Honduras has implications far beyond the topic: “Viewed from the ground level, export banana production appeared more like a series of improvisations (both creative and destructive in nature) than a well-scripted global power play.” 7 Modern societies did not really have a more secure resource base. They merely favored a different way to cope with crises, namely delegating the business of extraction and allocation to a specific group of people. Whereas dealing with resource scarcity was a challenge that involved everyone in premodern times, it was now a task for specialists: farmers, miners, foresters. Thanks to dramatic advances in output per capita, all these groups were shrinking throughout the twentieth century, and they increasingly operated in isolation from the rest of society. For most of the time, resource people could pretty much do as they pleased as long as they provided modern consumers with the cheap, hassle-free stuff that they desired. Looking at the flow of resources forces us to rethink the concepts that we usually take for granted in our research. In a way, resources were global before humans were, as the famous expeditions to the Land of Punt in ancient Egypt or trade along the Silk Road serve to attest. To be sure, the age of nationalism left its imprint on the flow of material, as global trade coevolved with a national branding of resources: there was Texas oil, Egyptian cotton, and Swedish iron ore. However, these nationalizations were always contested, and they mostly faded away in the decades after World War Two— decades which define our thinking about resources to the present day. Characteristically, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Anonymity was not simply there—it was manufactured. Resources without a face and a past were possible only in a society that took the flow of resources for granted. Nationalism was a relative thing when it came to resources, and so was the power of the nation-state. Generally speaking, the state was at its most powerful as a player of resource history when it was in deep trouble during the Second Thirty Years’ War, the crisis years of Europe between 1914 and 1945, when limitations on the global exchange of goods spurred the development of ersatz products, recycling and autarky regimes, and restrictions on consumption. In order to assure the flow of resources, states turned a blind eye to conditions that they would never have tolerated otherwise. Many mining regions became notorious for their lack of order and state control, making them tantamount to colonial areas right in the heart of the West. Perhaps most crucially, the flow of resources puts the power of key people and corporations into question. Resource history is full of powerful people who built monopolies and huge fortunes. But maybe their power was not so absolute after all: maybe they were merely captives of a flow of stuff that could collapse at any time. If we see resource man-

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agers as people who had to maintain a flow, and a specific course of the flow, at any cost, we see them not so much as drivers but as people who are caught in a stream beyond their control: they either come to work with the momentum of resources, or they drown. Modern societies need the flow of stuff, far more so than they need the people who manage it. In other words, corporations and people are dispensable entities, subject to replacement if need be. Even more, resource companies lack some of the assets that have come to assure the permanence of great corporations. Their claims to resource deposits are often contested, organic assets can be diminished by a freak insect or fungus in the blink of an eye, and reputation is primarily a matter of performance. Recent events like the Deepwater Horizon disaster, where one of the world’s largest companies was brought to its knees by a malfunctioning valve, reveal the elusiveness of stable structures in the resource business. All that makes for a distinct mindset: dealing with resources is not just about money and power but also about angst— the fear of getting overwhelmed by the flow. Thus, a new materialist perspective opens a new window upon the inherent brutality that so obviously characterizes resource extraction. Brutality was probably more than a character trait of unwholesome individuals: it was a structural requirement of a system in which the flow of resources had to be maintained at any price. Oil from SaudiArabia, rubber from King Leopold’s Congo, and sugar from the Caribbean are just the best-known cases. It is truly amazing how resource issues are lurking behind seemingly unrelated conflicts. Just consider the case of Sudan: in 1997, the U.S. government imposed economic sanctions in response to the country’s support for terrorists and its abysmal human rights record, but it sought to exempt gum arabic, a key ingredient for soft drinks that accounted for about half of Sudan’s exports to the United States. The Washington Post spoke of “soda pop diplomacy.”8 The more “substantial” history that the new materialism is aiming for is not a history devoid of emotions. Quite the contrary, we gain a deeper understanding of key agents once we recognize how they were struggling with a faceless giant that has momentum but neither morals nor memory. It is striking how material challenges produced similar experiences in different parts of the globe. Resources have left a powerful imprint on our collective imagination, and one that we rarely acknowledge—just look at how gold rush experiences unite California, Alaska, Australia, and South Africa’s Highveld. There are deeper issues at stake in a new materialist history that this essay can only touch upon. One of the most exciting questions is whether bringing resources in as actors challenges our ideas about causality. One might argue that resource history ends up with something approaching a post-causal history, where humans and materials are caught in a complex web of mutual entanglements, defying attempts to sort out causes and effects. Reciprocal mobilization is the defining feature of resource history in the twentieth century, and perhaps the most frightening aspect is its ever-increasing speed. Throughout the modern era, the flow of resources grew so much in scale and velocity

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that it looks uncomfortably reminiscent of a devastating vortex, drawing in humans without hope and escape. Of course, one may discuss whether such an endeavor is still environmental history. Many of the issues in this essay lap over into other fields, including political history, cultural history, economic history, and the history of science and technology. Maybe that is ultimately an advantage? Doing resource history makes one realize how fragmented the historian’s universe has become over recent decades, and that we are paying a price for a plethora of sub-disciplines. As long as the interest in resources remains spread among different communities, with each having its favored approaches, we are uncomfortably reminiscent of the famous parable about the blind men and the elephant. After his manifesto and the failed revolution of 1848, Marx spent the rest of his life grumbling about mistakes and dilettantism. The new materialists would be well advised to pursue a different path: a new resource history will thrive from books, both case studies and broad syntheses, that demonstrate the potential of the new perspective. Successful revolutions always grow from the ground up, and we shall see the new materialism not so much as a canonical theory but as a way to look at the world of resources. We need to take the material essence of our human existence more seriously, and see it as far more contested and conflict-ridden than we had thought. Decades of cheap, easy resources have nurtured a state of amnesia, and we can see it as a beneficial side effect of recent resource troubles that this mindset is now looking more questionable than ever. Future historians will surely be wondering about a society that perceived itself as immaterial and yet made its citizen the involuntary owners of bloodstained coltan, courtesy of the cell phones that a broad majority is using on a daily basis. Resource history is disturbing, and new materialist resource history is even more disturbing. But then, that is what good history, and certainly global history, should be all about.

NOTES

1. At the risk of stating the obvious, this article does not seek to provide an exhaustive discussion of the new materialism and its relevance for historical research. It follows one thread in looking at commodities and the flow of resources while leaving other dimensions of materiality (climate, disease, landscape, etc.) for others to explore. 2. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1991); Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). 3. Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (New York, 1997); Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York, 2002). 4. See, for instance, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl. The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford and New York, 1979); Duane A. Smith, Mining America. The Industry and the Environment, 1800–1980 (Lawrence, 1987); Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009).

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5. John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun. An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (London, 2000), 30. 6. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005). 7. John Soluri, Banana Cultures. Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin, 2005), 217. 8. Washington Post, November 8, 1997, p. A24

T H E A N T H R O P O C E NE : A R E H U M A N S N OW OV E R W H E LM IN G T H E   G R E AT FO R C E S O F N AT U R E? Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill INTRODUC TION

Global warming and many other human-driven changes to the environment are raising concerns about the future of Earth’s environment and its ability to provide the services required to maintain viable human civilizations. The consequences of this unintended experiment of humankind on its own life support system are hotly debated, but worstcase scenarios paint a gloomy picture for the future of contemporary societies. Underlying global change (Box 1) are human-driven alterations of i) the biological fabric of the Earth; ii) the stocks and flows of major elements in the planetary machinery such as nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, and silicon; and iii) the energy balance at the Earth’s surface (2). The term Anthropocene (Box 2) suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state. The phenomenon of global change represents a profound shift in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Interest in this fundamental issue has escalated rapidly in the international research community, leading to innovative new research projects like Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) (8). The objective of this paper is to explore one aspect of the IHOPE research agenda—the evolution of humans and our societies from hunter-gatherers to a global geophysical force. To address this objective, we examine the trajectory of the human enterprise through time, from the arrival of humans on Earth through the present and into the next centuries. Our analysis is based on a few critical questions:

This selection is an edited version of the original publication. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” by Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill was originally published in Ambio 36, 8 (December 2007): 614–21. Reprinted with permission of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

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• Is the imprint of human activity on the environment discernible at the global scale? How has this imprint evolved through time? • How does the magnitude and rate of human impact compare with the natural variability of the Earth’s environment? Are human effects similar to or greater than the great forces of nature in terms of their influence on Earth System functioning? • What are the socioeconomic, cultural, political, and technological developments that change the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature and lead to accelerating impacts on the Earth System?

PRE-ANTHROPOCENE EVENTS

Before the advent of agriculture about 10,000–12,000 years ago, humans lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers. In recent centuries, under the influence of noble savage myths, it was often thought that preagricultural humans lived in idyllic harmony with their environment. Recent research has painted a rather different picture, producing evidence of widespread human impact on the environment through predation and the modification of landscapes, often through use of fire (9). However, as the examples below show, the human imprint on environment may have been discernible at local, regional, and even continental scales, but preindustrial humans did not have the technological or organizational capability to match or dominate the great forces of nature. The mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene. Remnants of charcoal from human hearths indicate that the first use of fire by our bipedal ancestors, belonging to the genus Homo erectus, occurred a couple of million years ago. Use of fire followed the earlier development of stone tool and weapon making, another major step in the trajectory of the human enterprise. Early humans used the considerable power of fire to their advantage (9). Fire kept dangerous animals at a respectful distance, especially during the night, and helped in hunting protein-rich, more easily digestible food. The diet of our ancestors changed from mainly vegetarian to omnivorous, a shift that led to enhanced physical and mental capabilities. Hominid brain size nearly tripled up to an average volume of about 1300 cm3, and gave humans the largest ratio between brain and body size of any species (10). As a consequence, spoken and then, about 10,000 years ago, written language could begin to develop, promoting communication and transfer of knowledge within and between generations of humans, efficient accumulation of knowledge, and social learning over many thousands of years in an impressive catalytic process, involving many human brains and their discoveries and innovations. This power is minimal in other species. Among the earliest impacts of humans on the Earth’s biota are the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, a wave of extinctions during the last ice age extending from the

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BOX 1 Global Change and the Earth System

The term Earth System refers to the suite of interacting physical, chemical and biological global-scale cycles and energy fluxes that provide the life-support system for life at the surface of the planet (1). This definition of the Earth System goes well beyond the notion that the geophysical processes encompassing the Earth’s two great fluids— the ocean and the atmosphere— generate the planetary life-support system on their own. In our definition biological/ecological processes are an integral part of the functioning of the Earth System and not merely the recipient of changes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere part of the system. A second critical feature is that forcings and feedbacks within the Earth System are as important as external drivers of change, such as the flux of energy from the sun. Finally, the Earth System includes humans, our societies, and our activities; thus, humans are not an outside force perturbing an otherwise natural system but rather an integral and interacting part of the Earth System itself. We use the term global change to mean both the biophysical and the socioeconomic changes that are altering the structure and the functioning of the Earth System. Global change includes alterations in a wide range of global-scale phenomena: land use and land cover, urbanisation, globalisation, coastal ecosystems, atmospheric composition, riverine flow, nitrogen cycle, carbon cycle, physical climate, marine food chains, biological diversity, population, economy, resource use, energy, transport, communication, and so on. Interactions and linkages between the various changes listed above are also part of global change and are just as important as the individual changes themselves. Many components of global change do not occur in linear fashion but rather show strong nonlinearities.

woolly mammoth in northern Eurasia to giant wombats in Australia (11–13). A similar wave of extinctions was observed later in the Americas. Although there has been vigorous debate about the relative roles of climate variability and human predation in driving these extinctions, there is little doubt that humans played a significant role, given the strong correlation between the extinction events and human migration patterns. A later but even more profound impact of humans on fauna was the domestication of animals, beginning with the dog up to 100,000 years ago (14) and continuing into the Holocene with horses, sheep, cattle, goats, and the other familiar farm animals. The concomitant domestication of plants during the early to mid-Holocene led to agriculture, which initially also developed through the use of fire for forest clearing and, somewhat later, irrigation (15). According to one hypothesis, early agricultural development, around the midHolocene, affected Earth System functioning so fundamentally that it prevented the

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BOX 2 The Anthropocene

Holocene (‘‘Recent Whole’’) is the name given to the postglacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years as agreed upon by the International Geological Congress in Bologna in 1885 (3). During the Holocene, accelerating in the industrial period, humankind’s activities became a growing geological and morphological force, as recognised early by a number of scientists. Thus, in 1864, Marsh published a book with the title ‘‘Man and Nature,’’ more recently reprinted as ‘‘The Earth as Modified by Human Action’’ (4). Stoppani in 1873 rated human activities as a ‘‘new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of earth’’ (quoted from Clark [5]). Stoppani already spoke of the anthropozoic era. Humankind has now inhabited or visited all places on Earth; he has even set foot on the moon. The great Russian geologist and biologist Vernadsky (6) in 1926 recognized the increasing power of humankind in the environment with the following excerpt ‘‘. . . the direction in which the processes of evolution must proceed, namely towards increasing consciousness and thought, and forms having greater and greater influence on their surroundings.’’ He, the French Jesuit priest P. Teilhard de Chardin and E. Le Roy in 1924 coined the term ‘‘noösphere,’’ the world of thought, knowledge society, to mark the growing role played by humankind’s brainpower and technological talents in shaping its own future and environment. A few years ago the term ‘‘Anthropocene’’ has been introduced by one of the authors (P.J.C.) (7) for the current geological epoch to emphasize the central role of humankind in geology and ecology. The impact of current human activities is projected to last over very long periods. For example, because of past and future anthropogenic emissions of CO2, climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour over the next 50,000 years.

onset of the next ice age (16). The argument proposes that clearing of forests for agriculture about 8000 years ago and irrigation of rice about 5,000 years ago led to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) concentrations, reversing trends of concentration decreases established in the early Holocene. These rates of forest clearing, however, were small compared with the massive amount of land transformation that has taken place in the last 300 years (17). Nevertheless, deforestation and agricultural development in the 8000 to 5000 BP period may have led to small increases in CO2 and CH4 concentrations (maybe about 5–10 parts per million for CO2) but increases that were perhaps large enough to stop the onset of glaciation in northeast Canada thousands of years ago. However, recent analyses of solar forcing in the late Quaternary (18) and of natural carbon cycle dynamics (19, 20) argue that natural processes can explain the observed pattern of atmospheric CO2 variation through the Holocene. Thus, the hypothesis that the advent of agriculture thousands of years ago changed the course

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of glacial-interglacial dynamics remains an intriguing but unproven beginning of the Anthropocene. The first significant use of fossil fuels in human history came in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) (21, 22). Coal mines in the north, notably Shanxi province, provided abundant coal for use in China’s growing iron industry. At its height, in the late 11th century, China’s coal production reached levels equal to all of Europe (not including Russia) in 1700. But China suffered many setbacks, such as epidemics and invasions, and the coal industry apparently went into a long decline. Meanwhile in England coal mines provided fuel for home heating, notably in London, from at least the 13th century (23, 24). The first commission charged to investigate the evils of coal smoke began work in 1285 (24). But as a concentrated fuel, coal had its advantages, especially when wood and charcoal grew dear, so by the late 1600s London depended heavily upon it and burned some 360,000 tons annually. The iron forges of Song China and the furnaces of medieval London were regional exceptions, however; most of the world burned wood or charcoal rather than resorting to fuel subsidies from the Carboniferous. Preindustrial human societies indeed influenced their environment in many ways, from local to continental scales. Most of the changes they wrought were based on knowledge, probably gained from observation and trial-and-error, of natural ecosystem dynamics and its modification to ease the tasks of hunting, gathering, and eventually of farming. Preindustrial societies could and did modify coastal and terrestrial ecosystems but they did not have the numbers, social and economic organisation, or technologies needed to equal or dominate the great forces of Nature in magnitude or rate. Their impacts remained largely local and transitory, well within the bounds of the natural variability of the environment.

T H E I N D U S T R I A L E R A ( C A . 18 0 0 – 19 4 5): S TAG E 1 O F T H E A N T H R O P O C E N E

One of the three or four most decisive transitions in the history of humankind, potentially of similar importance in the history of the Earth itself, was the onset of industrialization. In the footsteps of the Enlightenment, the transition began in the 1700s in England and the Low Countries for reasons that remain in dispute among historians (25). Some emphasize material factors such as wood shortages and abundant water power and coal in England, while others point to social and political structures that rewarded risk-taking and innovation, matters connected to legal regimes, a nascent banking system, and a market culture. Whatever its origins, the transition took off quickly and by 1850 had transformed England and was beginning to transform much of the rest of the world. What made industrialization central for the Earth System was the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels, first coal and then oil and gas as well. Hitherto humankind had relied on energy captured from ongoing flows in the form of wind, water, plants,

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and animals, and from the 100- or 200-year stocks held in trees. Fossil fuel use offered access to carbon stored from millions of years of photosynthesis: a massive energy subsidy from the deep past to modern society, upon which a great deal of our modern wealth depends. Industrial societies as a rule use four or five times as much energy as did agrarian ones, which in turn used three or four times as much as did hunting and gathering societies (26). Without this transition to a high-energy society it is inconceivable that global population could have risen from a billion around 1820 to more than six billion today, or that perhaps one billion of the more fortunate among us could lead lives of comfort unknown to any but kings and courtiers in centuries past. Prior to the widespread use of fossil fuels, the energy harvest available to humankind was tightly constrained. Water and wind power were available only in favoured locations, and only in societies where the relevant technologies of watermills, sailing ships, and windmills had been developed or imported. Muscular energy derived from animals, and through them from plants, was limited by the area of suitable land for crops and forage, in many places by shortages of water, and everywhere by inescapable biological inefficiencies: plants photosynthesize less than a percent of the solar energy that falls on the Earth, and animals eating those plants retain only a tenth of the chemical energy stored in plants. All this amounted to a bottleneck upon human numbers, the global economy, and the ability of humankind to shape the rest of the biosphere and to influence the functioning of the Earth System. The invention (some would say refinement) of the steam engine by James Watt in the 1770s and 1780s and the turn to fossil fuels shattered this bottleneck, opening an era of far looser constraints upon energy supply, upon human numbers, and upon the global economy. Between 1800 and 2000 population grew more than six-fold, the global economy about 50-fold, and energy use about 40-fold (27). It also opened an era of intensified and ever-mounting human influence upon the Earth System. Fossil fuels and their associated technologies— steam engines, internal combustion engines—made many new activities possible and old ones more efficient. For example, with abundant energy it proved possible to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, in effect to make fertilizer out of air, a process pioneered by the German chemist Fritz Haber early in the 20th century. The Haber-Bosch synthesis, as it would become known (Carl Bosch was an industrialist) revolutionized agriculture and sharply increased crop yields all over the world, which, together with vastly improved medical provisions, made possible the surge in human population growth. The imprint on the global environment of the industrial era was, in retrospect, clearly evident by the early to mid-20th century (28). Deforestation and conversion to agriculture were extensive in the midlatitudes, particularly in the northern hemisphere. Only about 10% of the global terrestrial surface had been “domesticated” at the beginning of the industrial era around 1800, but this figure rose significantly to about 25–30% by 1950 (17). Human transformation of the hydrological cycle was also evident in the accelerating

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Figure 1 The mix of fuels in energy systems at the global scale from 1850 to 2000. Note the rapid relative decrease in traditional renewable energy sources and the sharp rise in fossil fuel– based energy systems since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and particularly after 1950. By 2000 fossil fuel– based energy systems were generating about 80 percent of the total energy used to power the global economy.

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number of large dams, particularly in Europe and North America (29). The flux of nitrogen compounds through the coastal zone had increased over 10-fold since 1800 (30). The global-scale transformation of the environment by industrialization was, however, nowhere more evident than in the atmosphere. The concentrations of CH4 and nitrous oxide (N2O) had risen by 1950 to about 1,250 and 288 ppbv, respectively, noticeably above their preindustrial values of about 850 and 272 ppbv (31, 32). By 1950 the atmospheric CO2 concentration had pushed above 300 ppmv, above its preindustrial value of 270–275 ppmv, and was beginning to accelerate sharply (33). Quantification of the human imprint on the Earth System can be most directly related to the advent and spread of fossil fuel–based energy systems (Fig. 1), the signature of which is the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere roughly in proportion to the amount of fossil fuels that have been consumed. We propose that atmospheric CO2 concentration can be used as a single, simple indicator to track the progression of the Anthropocene, to define its stages quantitatively, and to compare the human imprint on the Earth System with natural variability (Table 1). Around 1850, near the beginning of Anthropocene Stage 1, the atmospheric CO2 concentration was 285 ppm, within the range of natural variability for interglacial periods during the late Quaternary period. During the course of Stage 1 from 1800/50 to 1945, the CO2 concentration rose by about 25 ppm, enough to surpass the upper limit of natural variation through the Holocene and thus provide the first indisputable evidence that human activities were affecting the environment at the global scale. We therefore assign the beginning of the Anthropocene to coincide with the beginning of the industrial era, in the 1800–1850 period. This first stage of the Anthropocene ended abruptly around 1945, when the most rapid and pervasive shift in the human– environment relationship began.

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TaBLe 1. Atmospheric CO2 concentration during the existence of fully modern humans on Earth Year/Period 250,000–12,000 years BP2: Range during interglacial periods: Minimum during glacial periods: 12,000–2,000 years BP:

Atmospheric CO2 concentration (ppmv)1 262–287 182 260–285

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1 The CO concentration data were obtained from: (a) http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/trends.htm for the 250,000– 2 12,000 BP period and for the 1000 AD–2005 AD period. More specifically, data were obtained from (34; 250,000– 12,000 BP), (35; 1000–1950 AD), and (42; 1975–2000 AD). (b) CO2 concentrations for the 12 000–2000 BP period (the Holocene) were obtained from (36). 2 The period 250,000–12,000 years PB encompasses two interglacial periods prior to the current interglacial (the Holocene) and two glacial periods. The values listed in the table are the maximum and minimum CO2 concentrations recorded during the two interglacial periods and the minimum CO2 concentration recorded over the two glacial periods. According to mtDNA evidence, the first appearance of fully modern humans was approximately 250,000 years BP.

T H E G R E AT A C C E L E R AT I O N ( 19 4 5 – C A . 2 0 15): S TAG E 2 O F T H E A N T H R O P O C E N E

The human enterprise suddenly accelerated after the end of the Second World War (27) (Fig. 2) Population doubled in just 50 years, to over 6 billion by the end of the 20th century, but the global economy increased by more than 15-fold. Petroleum consumption has grown by a factor of 3.5 since 1960, and the number of motor vehicles increased dramatically from about 40 million at the end of the War to nearly 700 million by 1996. From 1950 to 2000 the percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas grew from 30 to 50% and continues to grow strongly. The interconnectedness of cultures is increasing rapidly with the explosion in electronic communication, international travel and the globalization of economies. The pressure on the global environment from this burgeoning human enterprise is intensifying sharply. Over the past 50 years, humans have changed the world’s ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other comparable period in human history (37). The Earth is in its sixth great extinction event, with rates of species loss growing rapidly for both terrestrial and marine ecosystems (38). The atmospheric concentrations of several important greenhouse gases have increased substantially, and the Earth is warming rapidly (39). More nitrogen is now converted from the atmosphere into reactive forms by fertilizer production and fossil fuel combustion than by all of the natural processes in terrestrial ecosystems put together (Fig. 3) (40). The remarkable explosion of the human enterprise from the mid-20th century, and the associated global-scale impacts on many aspects of Earth System functioning, mark the second stage of the Anthropocene—the Great Acceleration (41). In many respects the stage had been set for the Great Acceleration by 1890 or 1910. Population growth was proceeding faster than at any previous time in human history, as well as economic growth. Industrialization had gathered irresistible momentum, and was spreading quickly in North America, Europe, Russia, and Japan. Automobiles and airplanes had appeared, and soon rapidly transformed mobility. The world economy was growing ever more tightly linked by mounting flows of migration, trade, and capital. The years 1870 to 1914 were, in fact, an age of globalization in the world economy. Mines and plantations in diverse lands such as Australia, South Africa, and Chile were opening or expanding in response to the emergence of growing markets for their products, especially in the cities of the industrialized world. At the same time, cities burgeoned as public health efforts, such as checking waterborne disease through sanitation measures, for the first time in world history made it feasible for births consistently to outnumber deaths in urban environments. A major transition was underway in which the characteristic habitat of the human species, which for several millennia had been the village, now was becoming the city. (In 1890 perhaps 200 million people lived in cities worldwide, but by 2000 the figure had leapt to three billion, half of the human population). Cities had long been the seats of managerial and

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Figure 3 Global terrestrial nitrogen budget for (A) 1890 and (B) 1990 in Tg N yr-1 (41). The emissions to the NOy box from the coal reflect fossil fuel combustion. Those from the vegetation include agricultural and natural soil emissions and a combustion of biofuel, biomass (savanna and forest), and agricultural waste. The NHx emissions from the cow and feedlot reflect emissions from animal wastes. The transfers to the fish box represent the lateral flow of dissolved inorganic nitrogen from terrestrial systems to the coastal seas. Note the enormous amount of N2 converted to NH3 in the 1990 panel compared to 1890. This represents human fixation of nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process, made possible by the development of fossil fuel– based energy systems.

technological innovation and engines of economic growth, and in the Great Acceleration played that role with even greater effect. However, the Great Acceleration truly began only after 1945. In the decades between 1914 and 1945 the Great Acceleration was stalled by changes in politics and the world economy. Three great wrenching events lay behind this: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Taken together, they slowed population growth, checked— indeed temporarily reversed—the integration and growth of the world economy. They also briefly checked urbanization, as city populations led the way in reducing their birth

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rates. Some European cities in the 1930s in effect went on reproduction strikes, so that (had they maintained this reluctance) they would have disappeared within decades. Paradoxically, however, these events also helped to initiate the Great Acceleration. The lessons absorbed about the disasters of world wars and depression inspired a new regime of international institutions after 1945 that helped create conditions for resumed economic growth. The United States in particular championed more open trade and capital flows, reintegrating much of the world economy and helping growth rates reach their highest ever levels in the period from 1950 to 1973. At the same time, the pace of technological change surged. Out of World War II came a number of new technologies—many of which represented new applications for fossil fuels— and a commitment to subsidized research and development, often in the form of alliances among government, industry, and universities. This proved enormously effective and, in a climate of renewed prosperity, ensured unprecedented funding for science and technology, unprecedented recruitment into these fields, and unprecedented advances as well. The Great Acceleration took place in an intellectual, cultural, political, and legal context in which the growing impacts upon the Earth System counted for very little in the calculations and decisions made in the world’s ministries, boardrooms, laboratories, farmhouses, village huts, and, for that matter, bedrooms. This context was not new, but it too was a necessary condition for the Great Acceleration. The exponential character of the Great Acceleration is obvious from our quantification of the human imprint on the Earth System, using atmospheric CO2 concentration as the indicator (Table 1). Although by the Second World War the CO2 concentration had clearly risen above the upper limit of the Holocene, its growth rate hit a take-off point around 1950. Nearly three-quarters of the anthropogenically driven rise in CO2 concentration has occurred since 1950 (from about 310 to 380 ppm), and about half of the total rise (48 ppm) has occurred in just the last 30 years.

S T E WA R D S O F T H E E A R T H S Y S T E M? ( C A . 2 0 15 – ?): S TAG E 3 O F T H E A N T H R O P O C E N E

Humankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a universally accepted strategy to ensure the sustainability of Earth’s life support system against human-induced stresses is one of the greatest research and policy challenges ever to confront humanity. Can humanity meet this challenge? Signs abound to suggest that the intellectual, cultural, political and legal context that permitted the Great Acceleration after 1945 has shifted in ways that could curtail it (41). Not surprisingly, some reflective people noted human impact upon the environment centuries and even millennia ago. However, as a major societal concern it dates from the 1960s with the rise of modern environmentalism. Observations showed incontrovertibly that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was rising markedly (42). In

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the 1980s temperature measurements showed global warming was a reality, a fact that encountered political opposition because of its implications, but within 20 years was no longer in serious doubt (39). Scientific observations showing the erosion of the earth’s stratospheric ozone layer led to international agreements reducing the production and use of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) (43). On numerous ecological issues local, national, and international environmental policies were devised, and the environment routinely became a consideration, although rarely a dominant one, in political and economic calculations. This process represents the beginning of the third stage of the Anthropocene, in which the recognition that human activities are indeed affecting the structure and functioning of the Earth System as a whole (as opposed to local- and regional-scale environmental issues) is filtering through to decision-making at many levels. The growing awareness of human influence on the Earth System has been aided by i) rapid advances in research and understanding, the most innovative of which is interdisciplinary work on human-environment systems; ii) the enormous power of the internet as a global, self-organizing information system; iii) the spread of more free and open societies, supporting independent media; and iv) the growth of democratic political systems, narrowing the scope for the exercise of arbitrary state power and strengthening the role of civil society. Humanity is, in one way or another, becoming a self-conscious, active agent in the operation of its own life support system (44). This process is still in train, and where it may lead remains quite uncertain. However, three broad philosophical approaches can be discerned in the growing debate about dealing with the changing global environment (28, 44). Business-as-usual. In this conceptualisation of the next stage of the Anthropocene, the institutions and economic system that have driven the Great Acceleration continue to dominate human affairs. This approach is based on several assumptions. First, global change will not be severe or rapid enough to cause major disruptions to the global economic system or to other important aspects of societies, such as human health. Second, the existing market-oriented economic system can deal autonomously with any adaptations that are required. This assumption is based on the fact that as societies have become wealthier, they have dealt effectively with some local and regional pollution problems (45). Examples include the clean-up of major European rivers and the amelioration of the acid rain problem in western Europe and eastern North America. Third, resources required to mitigate global change proactively would be better spent on more pressing human needs. The business-as-usual approach appears, on the surface, to be a safe and conservative way forward. However, it entails considerable risks. As the Earth System changes in response to human activities, it operates at a time scale that is mismatched with human decision-making or with the workings of the economic system. The long-term momentum built into the Earth System means that by the time humans realize that

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a business-as-usual approach may not work, the world will be committed to further decades or even centuries of environmental change. Collapse of modern, globalized society under uncontrollable environmental change is one possible outcome. An example of this mis-match in time scales is the stability of the cryosphere, the ice on land and ocean and in the soil. Depending on the scenario and the model, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (39) projected a global average warming of 1.1– 6.4˚C for 2094–2099 relative to 1980–1999, accompanied by a projected sealevel rise of 0.18– 0.59 m (excluding contributions from the dynamics of the large polar ice sheets). However, warming is projected to be more than twice as large as the global average in the polar regions, enhancing ice sheet instability and glacier melting. Recent observations of glacial dynamics suggest a higher degree of instability than estimated by current cryospheric models, which would lead to higher sea level rise through this century than estimated by the IPCC in 2001 (46). It is now conceivable that an irreversible threshold could be crossed in the next several decades, eventually (over centuries or a millennium) leading to the loss of the Greenland ice sheet and consequent sea-level rise of about 5 m. Mitigation. An alternative pathway into the future is based on the recognition that the threat of further global change is serious enough that it must be dealt with proactively. The mitigation pathway attempts to take the human pressure off of the Earth System by vastly improved technology and management, wise use of Earth’s resources, control of human and domestic animal population, and overall careful use and restoration of the natural environment. The ultimate goal is to reduce the human modification of the global environment to avoid dangerous or difficult-to-control levels and rates of change (47), and ultimately to allow the Earth System to function in a pre-Anthropocene way. Technology must play a strong role in reducing the pressure on the Earth System (48). Over the past several decades rapid advances in transport, energy, agriculture, and other sectors have led to a trend of dematerialization in several advanced economies. The amount and value of economic activity continue to grow but the amount of physical material flowing through the economy does not. There are further technological opportunities. Worldwide energy use is equivalent to only 0.05% of the solar radiation reaching the continents. Only 0.4% of the incoming solar radiation, 1 W m–2, is converted to chemical energy by photosynthesis on land. Human appropriation of net primary production is about 10%, including agriculture, fiber, and fisheries (49). In addition to the many opportunities for energy conservation, numerous technologies—from solar thermal and photovoltaic through nuclear fission and fusion to wind power and biofuels from forests and crops— are available now or under development to replace fossil fuels. Although improved technology is essential for mitigating global change, it may not be enough on its own. Changes in societal values and individual behaviour will likely be necessary (50). Some signs of these changes are now evident, but the Great Acceleration

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has considerable momentum and appears to be intensifying (51). The critical question is whether the trends of dematerialization and shifting societal values become strong enough to trigger a transition of our globalizing society towards a much more sustainable one. Geo-engineering options. The severity of global change, particularly changes to the climate system, may force societies to consider more drastic options. For example, the anthropogenic emission of aerosol particles (e.g., smoke, sulphate, dust, etc.) into the atmosphere leads to a net cooling effect because these particles and their influence on cloud properties enhance backscattering of incoming solar radiation. Thus, aerosols act in opposition to the greenhouse effect, masking some of the warming we would otherwise see now (52). Paradoxically, a clean-up of air pollution can thus increase greenhouse warming, perhaps leading to an additional 1°C of warming and bringing the Earth closer to ‘‘dangerous’’ levels of climate change. This and other amplifying effects, such as feedbacks from the carbon cycle as the Earth warms (53), could render mitigation efforts largely ineffectual. Just to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of CO2, without taking into account these amplifying effects, requires a reduction in anthropogenic emissions by more than 60%— a herculean task considering that most people on Earth, in order to increase their standard of living, are in need of much additional energy. One engineering approach to reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is its sequestration in underground reservoirs (54). This “geosequestration” would not only alleviate the pressures on climate, but would also lessen the expected acidification of the ocean surface waters, which leads to dissolution of calcareous marine organisms (55). In this situation some argue for geo-engineering solutions, a highly controversial topic. Geo-engineering involves purposeful manipulation by humans of global-scale Earth System processes with the intention of counteracting anthropogenically driven environmental change such as greenhouse warming (56). One proposal is based on the cooling effect of aerosols noted in the previous paragraph (57). The idea is to artificially enhance the Earth’s albedo by releasing sunlight-reflective material, such as sulphate particles, in the stratosphere, where they remain for 1–2 years before settling in the troposphere. The sulphate particles would be produced by the oxidation of SO2, just as happens during volcanic eruptions. In order to compensate for a doubling of CO2, if this were to happen, the input of sulphur would have to be about 1–2 Tg S y–1 (compared to an input of about 10 Tg S by Mount Pinatubo in 1991). The sulphur injections would have to occur for as long as CO2 levels remain high. Looking more deeply into the evolution of the Anthropocene, future generations of H. sapiens will likely do all they can to prevent a new ice-age by adding powerful artificial greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Similarly, any drop in CO2 levels to low concentrations, causing strong reductions in photosynthesis and agricultural productivity, might be combated by artificial releases of CO2, maybe from earlier CO2 sequestration. And likewise, far into the future, H. sapiens will deflect meteorites and asteroids before they could hit the Earth.

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For the present, however, just the suggestion of geoengineering options can raise serious ethical questions and intense debate. In addition to fundamental ethical concerns, a critical issue is the possibility for unintended and unanticipated side effects that could have severe consequences. The cure could be worse than the disease. For the sulphate injection example described above, the residence time of the sulphate particles in the atmosphere is only a few years, so if serious side-effects occurred, the injections could be discontinued and the climate would relax to its former high CO2 state within a decade. The Great Acceleration is reaching criticality (Fig 4). Enormous, immediate challenges confront humanity over the next few decades as it attempts to pass through a bottleneck of continued population growth, excessive resource use and environmental deterioration. In most parts of the world the demand for fossil fuels overwhelms

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the desire to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. About 60% of ecosystem services are already degraded and will continue to degrade further unless significant societal changes in values and management occur (37). There is also evidence for radically different directions built around innovative, knowledge-based solutions. Whatever unfolds, the next few decades will surely be a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene.

NOTES

1. Oldfield, F. and Steffen, W. 2004. The earth system. In: Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure. Steffen, W., Sanderson, A., Tyson, P., Jäger, J., Matson, P., Moore, B. III, Oldfield, F., Richardson, K., et al. (eds). The IGBP Global Change Series, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelburg, New York, p. 7. 2. Hansen, J., Nazarenko, L., Ruedy, R., Sato, M., Willis, J., Del Genio, A., Koch, D., Lacis, A., et al. 2005. Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications. Science 308, 1431–1435. 3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1976. Micropædia, IX. London. 4. Marsh, G.P. 1965. The Earth as Modified by Human Action. Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 504 pp. 5. Clark, W.C. 1986. Chapter 1. In: Sustainable Development of the Biosphere. Clark, W.C. and Munn, R.E. (eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 491 pp. 6. Vernadski, V.I. 1998. The Biosphere (translated and annotated version from the original of 1926). Copernicus, Springer, New York, 192 pp. 7. Crutzen, P. J. 2002. Geology of mankind: the anthropocene. Nature 415, 23. 8. Costanza, R., Graumlich, L. and Steffen, W. (eds). 2006. Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. Dahlem Workshop Report 96, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 495 pp. 9. Pyne, S. 1997. World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 379 pp. 10. Tobias, P.V. 1976. The brain in hominid evolution. In: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia Volume 8. Encyclopedia Britannica, London, p. 1032. 11. Martin, P.S. and Klein, R.G. 1984. Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 892 pp. 12. Alroy, J. 2001. A multispecies overkill simulation of the End-Pleistocene Megafaunal mass extinction. Science 292, 1893–1896. 13. Roberts, R.G., Flannery, T.F., Ayliffe, L.K., Yoshida, H., Olley, J.M., Prideaux, G.J., Laslett, G.M., Baynes, A., et al. 2001. New ages for the last Australian Megafauna: continentwide extinction about 46,000 years ago. Science 292, 1888–1892. 14. Leach, H.M. 2003. Human domestication reconsidered. Curr. Anthropol. 44, 349–368. 15. Smith, B.D. 1995. The Emergence of Agriculture. Scientific American Library, New York, 231 pp. 16. Ruddiman, W.F. 2003. The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago. Climat. Chang. 61, 261–293.

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17. Lambin, E.F. and Geist, H.J. (eds). 2006. Land-Use and Land-Cover Change: Local Processes and Global Impacts. The IGBP Global Change Series, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 222 pp. 18. EPICA Community Members. 2004. Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core. Nature 429, 623– 628. 19. Broecker, W.C. and Stocker, T.F. 2006. The Holocene CO2 rise: Anthropogenic or natural? Eos 87 (3), 27–29. 20. Joos, F., Gerber, S., Prentice, I.C., Otto-Bliesner, B.L. and Valdes, P.J. 2004. Transient simulations of Holocene atmospheric carbon dioxide and terrestrial carbon since the Last Glacial Maximum. Global Biogeochem. Cycles 18, GB2002. 21. Hartwell, R. 1962. A revolution in the iron and coal industries during the Northern Sung. J. Asian Stud. 21, 153–162. 22. Hartwell, R. 1967. A cycle of economic change in Imperial China: coal and iron in northeast China, 750–1350. J. Soc. and Econ. Hist. Orient 10, 102–159. 23. TeBrake, W.H. 1975. Air pollution and fuel crisis in preindustrial London, 1250–1650. Technol. Culture 16, 337–359. 24. Brimblecombe, P. 1987. The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times. Methuen, London, 185 pp. 25. Mokyr, J. (ed). 1999. The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 354 pp. 26. Sieferle, R.-P. 2001. Der Europäische Sonderweg: Ursachen und Factoren. Stuttgart, 53 pp. (In German). 27. McNeill, J.R. 2001. Something New Under the Sun. W.W. Norton, New York, London, 416 pp. 28. Steffen, W., Sanderson, A., Tyson, P.D., Jäger, J., Matson, P., Moore, B. III, Oldfield, F., Richardson, K., et al. 2004. Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure. The IGBP Global Change Series, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 336 pp. 29. Vörösmarty, C.J., Sharma, K., Fekete, B., Copeland, A.H., Holden, J., Marble, J. and Lough, J.A. 1997. The storage and aging of continental runoff in large reservoir systems of the world. Ambio 26, 210–219. 30. Mackenzie, F.T., Ver, L.M., and Lerman, A. 2002. Century-scale nitrogen and phosphorus controls of the carbon cycle. Chem. Geol. 190, 13–32. 31. Blunier, T., Chappellaz, J., Schwander, J., Barnola, J.-M., Desperts, T., Stauffer, B. and Raynaud, D. 1993. Atmospheric methane record from a Greenland ice core over the last 1000 years. J. Geophys. Res. 20, 2219–2222. 32. Machida, T., Nakazawa, T., Fujii, Y., Aoki, S. and Watanabe, O. 1995. Increase in the atmospheric nitrous oxide concentration during the last 250 years. Geophys. Res. Lett. 22, 2921–2924. 33. Etheridge, D.M., Steele, L.P., Langenfelds, R.L., Francey, R.J., Barnola, J.-M. and Morgan, V.I. 1996. Natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric CO2 over the last 1000 years from air in Antarctic ice and firn. J. Geophys. Res. 101, 4115–4128. 34. Barnola, J.-M., Raynaud, D., Lorius, C. and Barkov, N.I. 2003 Historical CO2 record from the Vostok ice core. In: Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon

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Dioxide Information Analysis Cener, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, TN. 35. Etheridge, D.M., Steele, L.P., Langenfelds, R.L., Francey, R.J., Barnola, J.-M. and Morgan, V.I. 1998. Historical CO2 records from the Law Dome DE08, DE08–2, and DSS ice cores. In: Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, TN. 36. Indermuhle, A., Stocker, T.F., Fischer, H., Smith, H.J., Joos, F., Wahlen, M., Deck, B., Mastroianni, D., et al. 1999. High-resolution Holocene CO2-record from the Taylor Dame ice core (Antarctica). Nature 398, 121–126. 37. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems & Human Well-being: Synthesis. Island Press, Washington. 38. Pimm, S.L., Russell, G.J., Gittleman, J.L. and Brooks, T.M. 1995. The future of biodiversity. Science 269, 347–350. 39. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Summary for Policymakers. IPCC Secretariat, World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 18 pp. 40. Galloway, J.N. and Cowling, E.B. 2002. Reactive nitrogen and the world: Two hundred years of change. Ambio 31, 64– 71. 41. Hibbard, K.A., Crutzen, P.J., Lambin, E.F., Liverman, D., Mantua, N.J., McNeill, J.R., Messerli, B. and Steffen, W. 2006. Decadal interactions of humans and the environment. In: Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. Costanza, R., Graumlich, L. and Steffen, W. (eds). Dahlem Workshop Report 96. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 341–375. 42. Keeling, C.D. and Whorf, T.P. 2005. Atmospheric CO2 records from sites in the SIO air sampling network. In: Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, TN. 43. Crutzen, P. 1995. My life with O3, NOx and other YZOxs. In: Les Prix Nobel (The Nobel Prizes) 1995. Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm. pp. 123–157. 44. Schellnhuber, H.-J. 1998. Discourse: Earth System analysis: The scope of the challenge. In: Earth System Analysis. Schellnhuber, H.-J. and Wetzel, V. (eds). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, pp. 3–195. 45. Lomborg, B. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 548 pp. 46. Rahmstorf, S. 2007. A semi-empirical approach to projecting future sea-level rise. Science 315, 368–370. 47. Schellnhuber, H.J., Cramer, W., Nakicenovic, N., Wigley, T. and Yohe, G. (eds). 2006. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 406 pp. 48. Steffen, W. 2002. Will technology spare the planet? In: Challenges of a Changing Earth: Proceedings of the Global Change Open Science Conference. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 10–13 July 2001. Steffen, W., Jäger, J., Carson, D. and Bradshaw, C. (eds). The IGBP Global Change Series, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, pp. 189–191. 49. Haberl, H. 2006. The energetic metabolism of the European Union and the United States, decadal energy inputs with an emphasis on biomass. J. Ind. Ecol. 10, 151–171.

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50. Fischer, J., Manning, A.D., Steffen, W., Rose, D.B., Danielle, K., Felton, A., Garnett, S., Gilna, B., et al. 2007. Mind the sustainability gap. Trends Ecol. Evol. in press. 51. Rahmstorf, S., Cazenave, A., Church, J.A., Hansen, J.E., Keeling, R.F., Parker, D.E., Somerville, R.C.J., et al. 2007. Recent climate observations compared to projections. Science, 316, 709. 52. Andreae, M.O., Jones, C.D. and Cox, P.M. 2005. Strong present day aerosol cooling implies a hot future. Nature 435, 1187–1190. 53. Friedlingstein, P., Cox, P., Betts, R., Bopp, L., von Bloh, W., Brovkin, V., Doney, V.S., Eby, M.I., et al. 2006. Climate-carbon cycle feedback analysis, results from the C 4MIP model intercomparison. J. Clim. 19, 3337–3353. 54. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2005. Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage. A Special Report of Working Group III. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva, Switzerland, 430 pp. 55. The Royal Society. 2005. Ocean Acidification Due to Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Policy document 12/05. The Royal Society, UK, 68 pp. 56. Schneider, S.H. 2001. Earth systems engineering and management. Nature 409, 417–421. 57. Crutzen, P. J. 2006. Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma. Clim. Chang. 77, 211–220. 58. Raupach, M.R., Marland, G., Ciais, P., Le Quere, C., Canadell, J.G., Klepper, G. and Field, C.B. 2007. Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. in press.

B I G H I S T O R Y: T H E E ME R G E N C E O F A N OV E L IN T E R D I S C I P L IN A R Y A P P R OAC H Fred Spier

‘Big history’ is a fresh approach to history, in which human history is placed against the background of a coherent overview of the entire known past, from the beginning of the universe to life on Earth today. It thus deals with the origins of the universe; the emergence and development of galaxies, including our own Milky Way; the formation of the solar system; and the emergence and development of life on Earth as part of geological and climatological change. Next, the rise of early humans is discussed, followed by an overview of human history located in this overarching context. I have been teaching big history at the University of Amsterdam for fourteen years. Following the British/American/Australian historian David Christian’s pioneering initiative at Macquarie University in 1989,1 a big history course has been run in Amsterdam every year since 1994, for students from all departments, who follow the course as Fred Spier’s “Big History: The Emergence of a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach” was originally published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33, 2 (June 2008): 141– 52. Reprinted with permission from Maney Publishing.

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an elective module. From the very beginning, the big history course has been very popular, and in fact I now teach three different courses, two at the University of Amsterdam and one at Eindhoven University of Technology.2 Every year, hundreds of students have successfully completed these courses. At the University of Amsterdam, most students come from the social sciences and humanities, which reflects the general composition of the student population. At Eindhoven University of Technology, students from all departments take part. The Amsterdam big history course consists of a series of twenty-four lectures given by specialists ranging from astronomers to social scientists. They offer the latest views of what has been happening in their various fields, explained in language that all students are able to understand. As a result, we find psychology students engaged in hot discussions with biology students about how the universe might have evolved. History students become familiar with Darwin’s theory of evolution, while science students gain knowledge about human history over the past four million years. In this way, the big history approach offers a grand tour of all the major scientific paradigms, from big bang cosmology to the theory of biological evolution (human history itself does not yet have a general paradigm!). After having completed the big history course, our students have become scientifically literate to at least some extent, and our approach is clearly raising interest in science among a good many students who otherwise would perhaps not have become involved in these subjects, had they been offered separately. In particular, the coherent format of the big history approach, reuniting all the sciences into one narrative, helps students understand why science might be important for achieving a better understanding of why things have become the way they are. Today, there are a great many complaints about students losing interest in science. Yet in our big history courses we experience exactly the opposite. One way of stimulating an interest in science could therefore be to introduce big history courses into universities and secondary schools, and perhaps even at primary level. Teaching big history in primary schools may sound a little optimistic, yet in the Netherlands the primary-school teacher Jos Werkhoven has already successfully developed a big history course called “Life lines,” meant for children between eight and twelve years old,3 while David Christian is now writing a big history coursebook for secondary schools.

F R O M A M U LT I D I S C I P L I N A R Y T O A N I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A R Y A P P R O A C H

The big history course started as a multidisciplinary project. Based on David Christian’s programme in Australia, we began planning our course in 1993. The organisers were the sociologist Johan Goudsblom and myself (trained as a biochemist, cultural anthropologist and social historian), and in composing the preliminary lecture series we invited a number of key lecturers to take part. Most notably the positive response

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from the natural sciences was overwhelming: not only were astronomers, geologists and biologists willing to lecture for free (we had no budget at all in those days), they also offered us generous help in structuring the course as well as vital support in getting it established. This latter aspect was by far the largest problem at the time, since we had to convince the university management, split across the many rival departments, that the course was a good idea. Only a successful appeal to top management allowed us to get the big history course off the ground. Fortunately, more or less at the same time the Institute of Interdisciplinary Education was founded, thanks to the efforts of other academics. This institute is not located within any existing department; now called the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, it has proved to be a safe haven for big history up until today. The big history course has been a tremendous source of education not only for students but also for the organisers. Suddenly we found ourselves in contact with a great variety of prominent scholars, ranging from astronomers to sociologists, who were very sympathetic to the project and who freely offered us their latest knowledge. Yet in order to be able to discuss the contents of all their different lectures in a fruitful way, I needed to gain good overviews myself of all the fields involved, which required many years of intensive reading on a wide variety of subjects. Since the course was new and experimental, there was of course considerable room for improvement. Achieving a certain degree of coherence was not a major issue for the natural science portion of the course up to the emergence of humans, since in the natural sciences dominant historical paradigms exist that are accepted by most scholars: astrophysicists share the ‘big bang’ paradigm, geologists have plate tectonics, and biologists agree on natural selection. In each discipline there are controversies, of course, yet the core issues are usually not under attack (at least not all the time). As a result, it was fairly easy to transform this part of the course into a reasonably integrated whole. In human history, by contrast, no single paradigm exists that would unite even a majority of historians. As a consequence, it has been much more difficult to find suitable speakers for this section, while those who do participate are sometimes less willing to reflect upon their own place within the grand scheme. Over the course of time I have therefore found myself doing an increasing number of the human history lectures myself. Many of the discussions among the organisers and the invited speakers have taken place informally after the lectures while sharing a few drinks. This has been a wonderful way to achieve greater coherence. In this way and over many years, our big history courses have been evolving into a more integrated enterprise. While structuring the first big history programme, I realised that by doing so I was actually structuring big history itself. This exciting insight led to my 1996 book The Structure of Big History.4 I wrote that book believing I was the first to have formulated such an approach to all of history. A few years later, however, I discovered that the Austrian philosopher Erich Jantsch had got there first, with his 1980 analysis The Self-

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Organizing Universe.5 In this much neglected classic, Jantsch looked at all of history in terms of what he called ‘process structures’. The honour of being the first to design a general structure for big history should therefore go to Erich Jantsch. In my book I proposed to use the term ‘regime’ for all more-or-less structured processes that make up big history. I defined a regime in its most general sense as ‘a more or less regular but ultimately unstable pattern that has a certain temporal permanence’,6 a definition which can be applied to human cultures, human and non-human physiology, non-human nature, as well as to organic and inorganic phenomena at all levels of complexity. By defining ‘regime’ in this way, human cultural regimes thus became a subcategory of regimes in general, and the approach allowed me to look systematically at interactions among different regimes which together produce big history. I later recognised that my ‘regimes’ are very similar to Jantsch’s ‘process structures’, if not the same (interestingly, when things became very complicated, Jantsch himself often used the term ‘regime’ instead). Subsequently, I systematised the most important regimes in big history with emphasis on human history, since this was the only discipline which was still lacking a central paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s sense. By formulating this general approach for all of history, the multidisciplinary enterprise began to turn into an interdisciplinary approach,7 and the first contours of a general theory of big history began to emerge.

A SHORT HISTORY OF BIG HISTORY

While running our big history courses in the 1990s, both David Christian and I thought we were designing an entirely new way of looking at the past. Yet more recently, my research into the history of big history has revealed that this was not the case at all. In addition to discovering Jantsch’s work, I found that during the nineteenth century major such efforts had already been made, most notably by Alexander von Humboldt with his book series Kosmos (1845– 59), and also by the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers with his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844. Widely read and enormously influential, these books were translated into many languages. These studies very much paved the way for Darwin’s theory of evolution, by allowing a much longer time-span for natural history than was accepted in the versions of history inspired by Christian teachings. In the early nineteenth century, many of these scholars were multidisciplinary, or perhaps even interdisciplinary, but without knowing it, because at the time of course these terms did not yet exist. Alexander von Humboldt, for instance, called himself a ‘naturalist’, yet he was interested in subjects ranging from the sky to human history, while the ‘naturalist’ Charles Darwin was as good a geologist as he was a biologist. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the growing body of scientific knowledge led to the ever greater differentiation of academic studies. While more and more specialisations were defined, academic knowledge became more compartmentalised,

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which resulted in the disciplines with which we are all familiar today. In the real world, everything has remained connected with everything else. As a result of the ongoing ‘disciplinification’ of universities, however, this important insight, familiar enough to Alexander von Humboldt, was lost. It would take until the 1980s before a few dedicated scholars again began looking at the past as a whole. This was probably no coincidence. By the middle of the 1970s, the current scientific paradigms of the history of the universe, the solar system, the Earth and life had all become accepted within mainstream science. As a result, some innovative US scholars, including the geologist Preston Cloud at the University of Minnesota, the biologist Siegfried Kutter at Evergreen State College in Washington State, and the astronomers George Field and Eric Chaisson at Harvard University, started synthesising this knowledge. They offered university courses and wrote books on the science-based history of everything, with emphasis on their own specialisations. Then, a few years later, the historians David Christian and John Mears (Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA) began designing their ‘big history’ courses. Over the same period, the call for interdisciplinary approaches became stronger. Scholars became increasingly aware of the fact that although universities had undergone a process of ‘disciplinification’, the world out there had not. It was increasingly recognised that our world was more complex than had been realised before, and that the application of a variety of disciplinary approaches to tackle single problems could be quite productive. This recognition appears to have been caused partly by the fact that the world was becoming more complex as a result of human action. But there may have been more to it than that. As I see it, the call for interdisciplinarity may also have been an unplanned effect of the Apollo moon flights of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The views of the Earth as seen from space, most notably the so-called ‘Earthrise’ photo taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8 from lunar orbit, had an enormous impact in this respect. In the Earthrise photo, the Earth is seen rising above a stark and forbidding grey lunar landscape. This was the first time human beings had watched the Earth from a distance as a blue and white ball swinging through space. It is well known that the images of the seemingly fragile ‘Spaceship Earth’ provided an enormous impetus to the fledgling environmental movement. It may well be, however, that the Spaceship Earth pictures also stimulated the upsurge of interest in interdisciplinary studies, since scholars could suddenly see for themselves that in reality everything remained interconnected. The early nineteenth-century all-round scientific pioneers had one major advantage: they were not yet much hindered by institutional boundaries. More recent generations of students of nature and human life, by contrast, have had to deal with universities parcelled up into a great many disciplines. Today, as a result of decades of efforts to promote interdisciplinary studies, it is perhaps no longer so difficult to engage in such projects. Nevertheless, even at the present time, interdisciplinary studies in the form of theoretically integrated approaches are still rare.

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THE EMERGENCE OF A GENER AL THEORY OF BIG HIS TORY

Let me return to my own approach to big history. A number of years after finishing The Structure of Big History, I began to see that regimes could not only be very useful for structuring big history, but also for explaining it. Over the course of about five years, the elaboration of these insights led me to a new theoretical approach. As a result, the big history approach is now becoming more of an interdisciplinary project. A major stimulus came from the work of the US astrophysicist Eric Chaisson. Around 1980, together with the astronomer George Field, Chaisson had started teaching a course at Harvard University called ‘Cosmic evolution’. This was big history from an astronomical point of view, and being natural scientists, they paid relatively minor attention to human history. Over the course of time, Chaisson developed a general approach to cosmic evolution based on thermodynamics and complexity studies, which he summarised in his groundbreaking book Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, published in 2001.8 Summarising Chaisson’s approach in only a few sentences of course cannot possibly do full justice to his book. Yet the following may be a fair summary of his main argument. First of all, big history is the story of the rise and demise of complexity at all scales, ranging from galaxy clusters to the tiniest particles. This may well be the shortest possible description of big history. As a result, the explanation of history boils down to the question of how to explain the emergence and disintegration of all these forms of complexity. From a scientific point of view, the most general answer to this question is that complexity can emerge when energy flows through matter—this is just as much the case for stars as for ourselves—but after having emerged, it all depends: Rocks swinging through virtually empty space do not need any additional energy flows to maintain their structures, since they are close to thermodynamic equilibrium. Yet a great many other forms of complexity, ranging from stars to life forms, are not close to thermodynamic equilibrium, and can be said to consist of dynamic steady states. All of these regimes of matter need an energy flow to maintain their complexity. If this sounds austere, one need look no further than oneself. Clearly, human beings can maintain their complexity only by harvesting matter and energy on a regular basis while getting rid of unwanted forms of disorder, also known as entropy. This is not only the case for humans but applies to all life forms. Three general types of complexity can be discerned: physical inanimate nature, life, and culture. The first level of complexity, lifeless nature, ranges from nuclei to entire galaxies. All of this inanimate matter organises itself entirely thanks to the fundamental forces of nature. Although the resulting structures can be exquisite, in contrast to life, inanimate complexity does not make use of any information for its own formation or sustenance. The second fundamental level of complexity is life. In terms of mass, life is a rather marginal phenomenon. Yet the complexity of life is far greater than anything attained by lifeless matter. In contrast to the inanimate universe, life seeks to maintain the condi-

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tions suitable for its own existence by actively harvesting matter and energy flows with the aid of special mechanisms, which are maintained by using information stored in large molecules (mostly DNA). Over the past four billion years or so, both the energy flows and the energy levels on the surface of our home planet have been suitable for the emergence and continued existence of biological complexity. This fact is related to the special position of the Earth within the solar system: neither too close to the Sun, in which case it would become too hot, nor too far away to make it too cold. Although from a terrestrial point of view life can exist under an impressive range of conditions, ranging from hot geysers to arctic environments, from a universal point of view this range is still fairly limited. As soon as living things stop harvesting matter and energy on a regular basis, they will die, and their matter will return to lower levels of complexity (unless it is consumed by other life-forms). The third fundamental level of complexity emerged when living beings started to organise themselves with the aid of information stored in nerve and brain cells. The emergence of these brainy animals was a new strategy for obtaining ever greater matter and energy flows for survival and reproduction, while seeking not to become a matter and energy source for others. This suggests that the evolution of brains and intelligence may have been almost inevitable, given the long-term continuity of the rather mild temperatures and pressures on our planet. In order to quantify these energy flows through matter, Eric Chaisson defined the ‘free energy rate density’, the amount of energy per second that flows through a certain quantity of matter. Chaisson next showed that there is a clear correlation between the observed levels of complexity (more or less intuitively defined) and his calculated free energy rate densities. In general, life is far more complex than lifeless matter, and it is also able to generate far larger energy flows per unit mass. This may appear counterintuitive, yet the results of Chaisson’s calculations leave no doubt that stars produce far less energy per unit of mass and time than living things. Although stars deliver huge energy outputs, they are so heavy that the resulting energy flow per unit of mass is substantially smaller than that of even a simple bacterium. While humans may appear to be vanishingly small compared to most other aspects of big history, according to Chaisson human brains have generated the largest free energy rate densities on a continuous basis in the known universe. I became acquainted with Chaisson’s approach in the year 2000, thanks to his willingness to come over and lecture in our Amsterdam big history course. Subsequently, our small group of ‘big historians’ began to discuss his approach, while David Christian incorporated part of it into his book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History of 2004.9

THE GOLDILOCKS PRINCIPLE

As Eric Chaisson noted but did not elaborate, complexity emerges when the circumstances, most notably the energy flows and levels (including temperature, pressure

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and radiation), are right, while complexity is destroyed when the circumstances are not right, namely when for instance the energy flows and/or energy levels become either too high or too low for that particular type of complexity to persist. For example, without a sufficient energy flow, no biological regime, human life included, will continue to exist. Yet if an organism experiences energy flows that are too large, such as elevated temperatures, it will succumb to them. This is also the case for lifeless regimes, such as rocks, planets or stars, although our rocks swinging through space, or even entire galaxies, may continue to exist for long periods of time without any additional energy flow. Yet in the very long run these structures too will slowly but surely degrade, not least because their building blocks, the nuclear particles, are thought to be unstable over extremely long periods of time.10 In other words, all relatively stable ‘steady-state’ matter regimes are characterised by certain circumstances, certain bandwidths of energy levels and flows, within which they can emerge and continue to exist. In a reference to a popular Anglo-Saxon children’s story, I call this the ‘Goldilocks principle’.11 For those readers who are not familiar with this story, Goldilocks is a little girl who happens to wander into a house in a forest where three little bears live with their parents. The bears, however, are not at home. Goldilocks, hungry and adventurous as she is, tries out the porridge bowls on the counter-top. She finds that the porridge in the biggest bowl is too hot; the middle-sized bowl is too cold; but the little bowl is just right. Then she tries out the chairs: the biggest one is too hard; the middle-sized one is too soft; and the little one is just right. And so it goes on until the bears come home and don’t like what they see. As a result, Goldilocks has to flee.12 The Goldilocks principle derived from this story points to the fact that the circumstances must be right for any type of complexity to form or continue to exist. For instance, we humans cannot live below or above certain temperatures, while our needs also include a sufficient air pressure as well as a regular water supply. These are some of the Goldilocks circumstances that make our complexity possible. The Goldilocks requirements for stars, however, are very different. As a result of gravity, these huge balls consisting of mostly hydrogen and helium create so much pressure in their interiors that nuclear fusion processes ignite, thereby converting hydrogen into heavier (and thus more complex) helium while producing energy in the form of radiation. These stellar Goldilocks circumstances are very hard to reproduce on Earth, which explains why it is so hard to develop nuclear fusion as a way of generating electricity, while it is a great deal easier to make a thermonuclear bomb.13 The Goldilocks principle also helps to explain why there is no life on the surface of the Sun, let alone in its interior. While all of this may well appear obvious, surprisingly, perhaps, no one yet appears to have systematically elaborated the significance of these ideas for big history.14 In sum: in order to understand the rise and demise of complexity we must not only look at energy flows through matter but we must also systematically examine the Goldilocks circumstances prevailing. In the new big history book I am currently writing, I claim that the ‘energy-flows-through-matter’ approach combined with the Goldilocks

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principle provides a first outline of a historical theory of everything, including human history.15 While this theory cannot explain all the details, it does lend some structure to, and provides explanations for, what has happened in big history. All Goldilocks circumstances are characterised by a certain bandwidth. Stellar nuclear fusion, for instance, is possible at temperatures over ten million Kelvin, while its upper limit is imposed only by the size stars can physically attain. By contrast, humans unprotected by clothes or other inventions are only able to live within a rather restricted range of temperatures, possibly between fifteen and thirty-five degrees Celsius. In the natural sciences, these bandwidths are known as the upper and lower boundary conditions, outside of which that particular type of complexity will decay. Not only do life and human societies need certain very specific Goldilocks circumstances within which they can exist, they also create some Goldilocks circumstances themselves that help them to survive, and which may make life difficult for other lifeforms. These Goldilocks circumstances can be social and material in nature. Take for example traffic rules. These social regulations can be seen as defining human behaviour in a way that creates Goldilocks circumstances allowing all participants to reach their destinations relatively efficiently while preserving both their own complexity and the complexity of others. Material Goldilocks circumstances created by humans include clothes and housing, to name a few. The term ‘Goldilocks circumstances’ can thus be seen as a convenient shorthand concept for characterising a great many different situations in which greater complexity has emerged and has continued to exist, both in space and over time. Because I am following a new, rather unbeaten, track, right now I can only sketch the contours of this approach. Yet I believe, perhaps overly boldly, that this approach constitutes an entirely interdisciplinary research agenda, which, if pursued, would allow scholars ranging from astronomers to historians and anthropologists to collaborate in unprecedented ways while speaking a mutually intelligible language. This may sound idealistic, yet in actual practice this process has already begun.16

COMPLE XIT Y IN BIG HIS TORY

In this article, I cannot possibly summarise the history of the universe with the aid of the terms outlined above. In the concluding pages of this paper, I restrict myself therefore to a few observations. Today, the known universe mostly consists of islands of relatively basic forms of complexity (galaxies) surrounded by almost empty space, in which there is hardly any complexity at all. Virtually all the galactic complexity, mostly stars, comes in the form of self-regulating but non-adaptive regimes. Yet even within the galaxies, most space is still rather empty. This high degree of emptiness makes possible the emergence of greater complexity, because it functions as an entropy sink. Had the universe not been mostly empty, greater complexity would not have emerged. Life as we know it is powered either by sunlight or by energy emanating from within

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the Earth. This means that all life forms, that is complex adaptive regimes, are powered by complex non-adaptive regimes. It may well be that the first life-forms emerged as a result of energy flows from within the Earth generated by nuclear fission and perhaps also by the original accretion heat. Yet over time, as these energy flows from within decreased in intensity, life became more dependent on solar energy from outside, which is thought to have increased by about twenty-five percent over the past 4.6 billion years. As James Lovelock has argued with his Gaia hypothesis, it may well be that life has created conditions favourable to its own continued existence. In terms of the process of natural selection or, as some prefer, non-random elimination, this makes perfect sense. As I see it, surely any organism that created and maintained Goldilocks circumstances favouring its continued existence (or at least not hampering its survival) would have an easier time surviving than life-forms producing circumstances damaging to their existence. Yet what may be Goldilocks circumstances for one species may well be unfavourable circumstances for another, which, as a result, might be eliminated. The overall result of this process would be a biosphere occupied by species that are not diminishing their own chances for survival to the extent that they go extinct (at least in the short term), while they may actually be improving them. As a result of cosmic influences, the changing condition of the Earth’s surface through plate tectonics, and the dynamics of biological evolution interacting with the biosphere, Gaia keeps changing. Many animals have created what I call forms of ‘constructed complexity’. These are mostly means for protecting their own complexity or the complexity of stored matter and energy, such as nests, holes, hives, etc., as well as devices for harvesting matter and energy such as spider-webs. Any type of constructed complexity can only emerge when there is a sufficient energy flow available, which is usually the bodily energy expended by the animals producing it. These types of constructed complexity may not need energy flows for their continued existence for as long as they are not disturbed by outside events. Yet such disturbances are common, of course, and as a result the animals usually have to expend energy maintaining these forms of complexity. Today, humans have created by far the most constructed complexity on this planet. A major distinction between the ways humans and other animals have constructed complexity is that as early as perhaps three and a half million years ago, humans started using tools to create complexity (or to destroy it). Moreover, in contrast to other animals, over the course of time humans have also learned to employ external energy sources for doing so, first of all through fire control. This allowed humans to expand the range of constructed complexity far beyond anything other animals have achieved, for example with pottery and cooking, and even by changing the complexity of entire landscapes through controlled burning. Fire control also helped humans to increase their destructive capabilities. Subsequent external energy sources included animal power as well as the energy that could be harvested from wind and water flows. (It is only very recently that humans have begun using fossil fuels for such purposes.) The agrarian revolution, which took off about ten thousand years ago, can be seen as

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a process involving two types of complex adaptive systems, humans on the one hand and plants and animals on the other, mutually adapting to each other under human dominance, with the human aim of harvesting increasing amounts of matter and energy from the biosphere within a certain area. This process began about ten thousand years ago and is still continuing today, with the result that humans may now control between twenty-five and forty percent of the energy flows within the web of life. The subsequent process of state formation and development, starting between about six and five thousand years ago, can be seen as the institutionalisation of inequality among humans by social means. Within the emerging states, increasing numbers of humans derived their basic matter and energy flows no longer from working the land but from other humans. And since these matter and energy exchanges have always been based on the power and dependency relations prevailing, they have usually been unequal. As a result, to my knowledge there have been no states in human history in which humans have lived based on a more or less equal exchange of matter and energy in any way comparable to the situation among certain groups of hunter-gatherers in the very recent past. State formation may have occurred as a result of the fact that by practising agriculture, humans became tied to the land, while it also led to population growth. Among agrarian societies, it is profitable to have a considerable number of children—they are productive at an early age at the same time as, with luck, providing your retirement fund. Furthermore, as Robert Carneiro pointed out, the first states all emerged within very restricted ecological conditions, usually river valleys surrounded by deserts.17 These were, apparently, the Goldilocks circumstances for state formation. As a result of the emergence of states, humans learned to adapt to one another as part of an unequal power structure. These social structures were, of course, never completely uncontested. In addition, states as a whole and their neighbours in whatever form of societal development can be seen as complex adaptive systems in continuous need of adapting to one another depending on their power resources, ranging from attempts at complete destruction of neighbours to almost complete submission to them. For thousands of years, humans have been constructing forms of complexity using external energy sources to perform certain tasks, ranging from treadmills, wind- and watermills, to steam engines, electric motors, jet engines and moon rockets. This has been a unique human achievement: to my knowledge, in nature no examples exist of animals constructing forms of complexity that employ external energy sources to perform tasks. This has allowed humans to expand their constructive and destructive capabilities way beyond anything other life-forms have achieved, as well as to adapt nature to their wishes and desires for as long as there is sufficient matter and energy available, and while there is also enough space to get rid of the inevitable entropy that comes as a result of these efforts. All such human enterprises can be seen as efforts to produce certain Goldilocks circumstances for themselves, while sometimes seeking to destroy those of others, if not their entire complexity.

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As a result of the process of non-random elimination, in biological nature Gaia has produced a global trash recycling regime that allows life to deal with its entropy problem. Humans are now making some efforts to do this too, but as yet we do not appear to have found a lasting solution to the problem. At the same time, both matter (in the form of important natural resources) and energy may well become scarce in the near future. These may well be the most important issues facing humanity today. Are we able to adapt ourselves sufficiently to the changing circumstances we have brought about by our collective actions and maintain our complexity with the aid of different matter and energy sources, or will humanity be eliminated by Gaia as a result of a failure to do so?18 In sum: are humans perhaps genetically hard-wired by Darwin’s process of natural selection to always harvest a little more matter and energy to overcome the lean times, and if so, will we be able through our culturally acquired capacities to counter this genetic tendency? In our big history courses, we will of course not be able to resolve any of these issues. And given the space limitations of this article I have not been able either to elaborate any of the cultural mechanisms that have contributed to the current situation. Yet I feel strongly that this emerging interdisciplinary theory of history greatly helps to summarise big history in a simple way that has not yet been done before, while explaining not only how everything has come about but also what the major aspects are of issues that may threaten our common future. While not all of my guest teachers have embraced this approach, natural scientists in particular have begun incorporating it into their lectures. In my own teaching, I use this theory as my main focus, and I feel that most of my students not only grasp it, but actually find it very useful. It is in this way that big history in Amsterdam is turning from a multidisciplinary into an avowedly interdisciplinary enterprise.

A C K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

I am indebted to Machiel Keestra and Howard Cattermole for constructive criticism (and to the latter also for his almost endless patience).

NOTES

1. D. G. Christian: ‘The case for ‘big history,’” Journal of World History, 1991, 2, 223–238. 2. For more information on the history of the University of Amsterdam course, see F. Spier: “The small history of the big history course at the University of Amsterdam,” http:// worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/2.2/spier.html. 3. For more information on Jos Werkhoven’s course, see www.dearend.nl (in Dutch). 4. F. Spier: The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today; 1996, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 5. 5. E. Jantsch: The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution; 1980, Oxford, Pergamon.

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6. F. Spier: The Structure of Big History, p. 14 (see Note 4). 7. Although there has been a great deal of discussion of the meaning of the term ‘interdisciplinarity’, no general agreement has yet been reached. The most basic definition appears to be ‘the application of different disciplines to address a given problem’, which I would call a weak definition. My preferred definition is the much stronger and more challenging formulation: ‘research or study that integrates concepts from different disciplines resulting in a synthesised or co-ordinated coherent whole’. One of the earliest widely known studies of interdisciplinary approaches was L. Apostel et al.’s: Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities; 1972, Washington, DC, OECD, the result of a seminar on interdisciplinarity hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and held in Nice, France in September 1970. This report, which draws on the strong definition of interdisciplinarity, surveys the experiences and problems of university programmes in institutions worldwide in engaging with the concept. See also J. T. Klein: Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice; 1990, Detroit, MI, Wayne State University Press. 8. E. J. Chaisson: Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature; 2001, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. See also by the same author ‘Complexity: An energetics agenda’, Complexity, 2004, 9 (3), 14–21 and Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos; 2005, New York, NY, Columbia University Press. 9. D. G. Christian: Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History; 2004, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. 10. For an excellent exploration of the fate of the universe over a very long timescale, see F. Adams and G. Laughlin: The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity; 1999, New York, NY, Free Press. 11. I am certainly not the first to employ the term ‘Goldilocks principle’. Over the past ten years, a number of scientists have also begun using it. 12. For a modern version of the Goldilocks story, see for instance J. Marshall: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Retold and Illustrated by James Marshall; 1998, New York, NY, Puffin Books. 13. Although the process of ‘cold fusion’ has not yet been completely ruled out, it has been very largely discredited. 14. The idea of calling this the Goldilocks principle was first suggested to me by David Christian in March of 2003, while commenting on the first draft of what would later become my article ‘How big history works’, published in 2005. In the mean time, the term Goldilocks principle has become more popular. In addition to the authors mentioned elsewhere in this paper, a number of scientists including Vaclav Smil (Energy: A Beginner’s Guide; 2006, Oxford, OneWorld Publications) and Paul Davies (The Goldilocks Enigma; 2006, London, Allen Lane) have taken up the term. For Davies, though, it is only another way of stating the anthropic principle first formulated by Brandon Carter in 1973 and elaborated by John Barrow and Frank Tipler (The Anthropic Cosmological Principle; 1986, Oxford, Oxford University Press). In his book Humanity: The Chimpanzees Who Would Be Ants (2007, Santa Margarita, CA, Collins Foundation Press), the US astronomer Russ Genet mentions the term Goldilocks principle as ‘one of the general laws of the Universe’ (p. 24), using it in his description of cosmic history but, strangely, not for human history, which is the main thrust of his book.

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15. My working title is Big History: A Theory of Everything. 16. For instance, in 2004 two astronomers, Eric Chaisson and Tom Gehrels, took part in a big history panel during the Annual Conference of the Historical Society in Boothbay, Maine. In Russia, interdisciplinary conferences on big history have been organised in Belgorod (2004) and Dubna (2005). In Amsterdam in 2004, we organised a day conference on this theme with contributions from scholars ranging from an astronomer to a sociologist. In March of 2008, I attended the Santa Fe Institute workshop on ‘Complex adaptive systems in history’ in Waikiki, Hawaii. These have been among the liveliest and cheeriest scholarly meetings I have ever attended. 17. R. L. Carneiro: ‘A theory of the origin of the state’, Science, 1970, 169, 733– 738. 18. This was essentially the central question raised in the famous report The Limits to Growth commissioned by the Club of Rome (D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows, J. Randers and W. W. Behrens III: The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome Project on the Predicament of Mankind; 1972, New York, NY, Universe Books).

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 8 Brooke, John L. Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Conceptualizing global history through the earthsystem approach of new climate science, Brooke concludes with an examination of the Anthropocene as the culmination of human impact on the environment. Burke, Edmund, III, and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds. The Environment and World History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. This edited collection of thematic and regional essays explores the global impact of humans on the environment, arguing that since the early modern period this process has accelerated in regionally and culturally distinctive ways. Christian, David. This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2008. Four years after completing his magisterial work Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Christian published this slim volume, which sweeps from the Paleolithic to the modern era in 113 pages. This book is especially suitable for student readers. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900– 1900. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Crosby argues that European settlers displaced indigenous peoples and colonized the world’s other temperate climate zones largely through biological processes that attended the introduction of new diseases, animals, and plants. Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600– 1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Grove explores the significance of European ideas about humans’ relationship to the environment. He argues that these ideas influenced perceptions of foreign lands and encounters with other cultures, which in turn shaped colonialism. McNeill, J. R. Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. McNeill contends that during the twentieth century humans wrought unprecedented environmental degradation of the soil, water,

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and air—which created global ecological crises. Although environmental damage has local causes, the accumulation of the effects of these processes is having serious implications for the quality of life on earth. Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Since the 1950s historians have debated the causes and consequences of “the general crisis of the seventeenth century,” a prolonged period of political, military, and economic turmoil that gripped Europe. Investigating the crisis on a world scale in this exhaustively documented study, the author demonstrates that the social upheaval afflicted much of Eurasia and North Africa. He shows, moreover, that the global climatic cooling that persisted from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries (the Little Ice Age) had particularly severe consequences for human societies in the 1600s. Successive droughts, bad harvests, famines, and epidemics spurred competition for scarce resources, which ignited wars, riots, and revolutions in China, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. Radkau, Joachim. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Environmental action has always been political and cultural at every social scale, from villages, cities, and nations to global organizations. Radkau examines the history of environmental policies and how they have become simultaneously local, global, and interconnected. Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Richards explores the increasingly global impact of four processes that accelerated in the period 1500–1800 as a result of exploration, colonization, and migration: biological exchanges, commercial hunting and fishing, intensified human settlement along frontier zones, and energy scarcity. He develops case studies from the Americas, Afroeurasia, and the Arctic. Spier, Fred. Big History and the Future of Humanity. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Spier is the leading exponent of big history in Europe, His second book on the topic, following The Structure of Big History, which was published in 1996, constructs a narrative of change in the universe around questions of physical, chemical, biological, and, finally, cultural complexity. Webb, James. Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Malaria is an ancient disease that has affected human populations differently according to the region and time. Webb historicizes the way people sought to treat and prevent malaria in their local environments; traces the intersection between the disease and processes of imperialism and migration; describes the importance of malaria in the evolution of modern pharmaceuticals; and highlights the significance of malaria in contemporary global health initiatives.

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9 GLOBAL HISTORY AND GLOBALIZATION

IN T R O D U C T I O N

In the past quarter century, academic scholars, public officials, and the popular media have devoted considerable effort to making sense of accelerating change in the human condition. They have described these transformations in their many aspects, proposed theories to account for them, and raised fears for the future well-being, indeed survival, of humankind. Since Homo sapiens first appeared in evolutionary time, our species has demonstrated a much greater capacity than any other to engineer change. As Fred Spier writes, “During the entire history of life, no other organism has existed that has changed the face of Earth in such profound ways within such a short period of time. . . . Whereas many animals exhibit forms of cultural learning, only humans have used it to such a large extent for shaping both their own history and the surrounding natural environment.” Humans are capable of creating “unprecedented amounts of complexity,” which means in effect that our species in relation to its earthly environment has on the very large scale been in a continuous condition of transformation.1 The pace of change in technologies, institutions, and belief systems speeded up at a fairly consistent, undramatic rate for tens of thousands of years; then between two hundred and five hundred years ago, depending on the particular phenomenon one examines, it began to accelerate at an unprecedented rate. In just the past century or so, the planet has become a single arena of intense, dynamic interaction among humans in all elements of life. This complexity is displayed in trends of economic integration, cultural homogeniza-

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tion, and global problem solving, but also in social inequality, political conflict, environmental degradation, and the construction and reconstruction of local identities. These sometimes contradictory manifestations of high-speed change are what command the attention of so many thinkers and policy makers today. In the early 1990s, social scientists began to write extensively about globe-girdling developments that seemed to set the contemporary age off from all earlier eras. Searching for terms to describe the transformations they perceived in human society—notably the collapse of Soviet-style planned economies, the worldwide advance of neoliberal capitalism, the explosion of digitized information, and the astonishing shrinkage of time and space that the Internet made possible—they hit upon globalization as a useful covering term. This neologism appeared in print sporadically in the 1970s; by the end of the century both the scholarly literature and the popular media were invoking it incessantly.2 Journalists, educators, and politicians embraced the expression as a useful catchphrase to signify in some general sense the dense interconnectedness and interdependence of contemporary human society. Social scientists first applied the idea of globalization to new economic complexities of the late twentieth century— the great proliferation of commercial markets, financial transactions, international corporate activity, and labor migration. Others scholars, however, soon found the concept a useful tool in describing political, technological, sociocultural, and environmental changes of world-scale dimension. The Global History Reader, which appeared in 2005, addresses a wide range of topics: cyberculture, the information revolution, corporate multinationalism, social diasporas, migratory movements, huge cities, consumerism, environmental activism and policy, human rights, nongovernmental organizations, the weakening of the nation-state, epidemiology, terrorism, and cultural globalization in various forms, including music.3 Most of these topics have produced their own voluminous literatures. As a number of scholars have remarked, this flood of writing about globalization has drowned any possibility of general agreement on the meaning of the term.4 In the 1990s, moreover, the idea became politically charged, as contending groups argued and sometimes clashed in the streets— as they did at the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Seattle in 1999— over the social benefits and harms of large-scale economic integration. Does globalization enhance economic productivity and efficiency but also worsen inequality in the world? Does it strengthen cultural communication and sharing but also undermine local cultural identities? Does it promote political decentralization and the breakup of hegemonic power, or is it an instrument of Western economic and cultural imperialism? Some historians have wondered why their own discipline appeared, on the whole, to lag behind the social sciences in addressing globalization. They have attributed this relative indifference largely to the profession’s habitual devotion to teaching and research on local, national, or regional scales of history.5 This observation is accurate, though in fact the majority of historians in the United States have not undertaken, nor do they now undertake, research or advanced-level teaching on the interregional or comparative

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history of any period, let alone the recent globalizing past. This state of affairs applies even more aptly to historians in other countries.6 Furthermore, many practitioners of world history, whose absolute numbers have, as this book richly shows, dramatically increased since the 1970s, investigated world-scale developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without either introducing globalization as part of their analytical frame or using the word at all other than incidentally.7 Even so, a number of world historians have put their minds to globalization, convinced that the discipline should have skin in this game. We might also suggest that the very existence of a movement to advance world history teaching and scholarship is in part a consequence of humankind’s dawning consciousness of globalization and its implications for the future. In her essay in this chapter, Maxine Berg writes that scholars began sometime in the 1990s to ask the question “Does globalization have a history?” Jerry Bentley, who began teaching world history long before the new word came into fashion, answered this question in the affirmative, urging scholars to take up the challenge of “historicizing globalization.”8 Once historians entered the discussion, a corollary question soon cropped up: “When did globalization begin?” Some scholars have taken the broadest possible temporal view, reasoning that human colonization of the earth’s major land masses was a globalizing act, even though the process spanned tens of thousands of years.9 This proposition implies that because human groups continued to migrate long distances, interact with one another, and grow in numbers and social complexity, globalization has characterized the human venture in general. Critics of this approach contend that it drains the concept of much analytical value. “Labeling early examples of human communities drawing together as ‘globalization,’” writes Jürgen Osterhammel, “does not help to explain anything.”10 David Northrup has suggested that the era of globalization began around 1000 CE. He argues that from about that time, convergence among human societies owing to such developments as trade network expansion, empire building, and religious proselytizing came to predominate over factors that encouraged cultural and social divergence.11 Other scholars, including Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, who are represented in this chapter, have submitted the sixteenth century as the pivotal era because it was then that the globe became a single space of human intercommunication, a development of immense consequence thereafter.12 For the majority of historians and social scientists who write about globalization, the phenomenon is emphatically modern, getting under way either in the mid- to late 1800s, the early 1900s, after 1945, or even after 1970. Collectively, these scholars share no single definition of globalization but rather explain it as a complex set of world-scale developments that have intermeshed to produce what Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have called our “condition of globality.”13 Bruce Mazlish, one of the first historians to write extensively about globalization, lists a number of elements that characterize the phenomenon, then declares, in his essay in this chapter, that “what is essential to note is the synergy and synchronicity of these various factors—their unprecedented interac-

INTRODUCTION

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tion with one another, in ever-increasing extent and force, notwithstanding the origin of them all in a differentiated past. Globalization is the sum of their combined presences.” Collectively, the twenty-eight authors who contributed to The Global History Reader approach globalization almost exclusively as a phenomenon of the past one hundred years. Indeed, history is the primary discipline of only nine of them. Whether historians or not, scholars who have written about globalization have often also invoked the term global history. This phrase has come into vogue in scholarly and educational lexicons in the past twenty-five years, complementing the more established world history.14 Dominic Sachsenmaier has described the rising status that global history has enjoyed in both academic circles and popular media since 1990, including its appearance not only in books, scholarly essays, and news articles but also in the names of professional conferences, curricular programs, academic institutes, and websites.15 Leften Stavrianos, one of the progenitors of the world history movement, titled the high school textbook he and four colleagues published in 1962 A Global History of Man. In his numerous writings, however, Stavrianos used the terms global history and world history interchangeably, and practitioners of the field have done this routinely ever since. Some high school and university textbooks currently on the market use world in their titles or subtitles; others use global. A few use both.16 In the early 1980s, the founders of the World History Association discussed alternative names for the new society, including appellations that included the word global. They eventually chose world without much terminological dispute.17 They may have shied away from global owing in some measure to its association in precollegiate education in the United States with the globalism movement that thrived in the 1960s and 1970s. That project celebrated contemporary multicultural studies, internationalist values, and engagement with world affairs, all worthy objectives of citizen education. The movement faced growing criticism, however, and faded for a time. Historians disparaged it for dismissing classroom study of all but the recent past, social activists questioned it for displacing attention to American domestic problems, and some school boards and state legislators vilified it for undercutting the nation-loving aims of K–12 education or even for promoting world government.18 Leaders of the infant WHA, who were internationalists by definition, easily accepted global as a useful adjective in the vocabulary of world history. But they were also wary of the presentist connotations that global studies curricular programs typically carried, at least then. In more recent years, we should add, globalization has provided world-minded educators with a powerful trope in demanding that schools revive international and multicultural studies. The WHA experience shows that world and global are not value-free words but carry numerous and sometimes conflicting meanings in the way historians and social scientists have used them. Even if most people who teach and write about large-scale, bordercrossing topics are happy to use the two words as synonyms, they should remember that useful professional discourse depends on shared understanding of meaning, not only of these terms but also of other words and phrases currently in use, such as universal his-

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tory, world-system history, transnational history, connected histories, and the international turn in historiography.19 Near the end of What Is Global History? Pamela Crossley writes: “Up to now in this book, we have tended to use the term ‘global’ history to describe all history attempting to address a wide, sweeping, or universal prospect. But this does some injustice to the ways in which global history has developed to the present time, and without further specificity would certainly hamper a discussion of where global history will go from here.”20 One example of scholars aiming to assign “global history” a distinct meaning is the creation of the Journal of Global History (JGH) in 2006, sixteen years after the founding of the Journal of World History (JWH). The editors of the JGH intended the new periodical to have a mission somewhat different from that of the older journal. The editorial announcing the first issue declared that “processes of globalization themselves require more historical treatment, and establish a subtle difference between the closely related endeavors of global and world history.”21 In the first eight years of its publication, the JGH published a significantly greater percentage of articles whose topics addressed mainly post-1900 periods than did the JWH in the same eight-year sequence. Both journals, however, published many more articles that concerned the past five hundred years than any periods before 1500.22 Judging by the subject matter of articles, we could not discern any categorical differences in the editorial criteria the two journals have used to make selections. The Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO), the collaborative body that scholars from a number of countries founded in 2008, adopted both operative words, not to distinguish between two historical fields but to signify broad inclusion. “Qualified member organizations,” the NOGWHISTO statutes declare, “may include organizations of historians focusing on world, global, international, transnational, universal, comparative or big history (along with their equivalents in various languages), as well as disciplinary organizations in humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences which have systematic interest in historical analysis.”23 In the first selection in this chapter, Maxine Berg, co-director of the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick, reviews currents of research in the field in recent years. In her introduction to Writing the History of the Global, she highlights recent studies of empire that stress the historical agency of the colonized as much as the colonizer; the comparative work of Kenneth Pomeranz and others on economic “divergence” (see Chapter 7); research that aims not so much to compare different regions as to explain change resulting from the historical “entanglements” of one region with another; and biographical studies that approach global history from the ground up, placing the experiences of individuals within large social contexts. Berg calls on historians to undertake more research that will yield “narratives of interaction” in the social and cultural spheres, including the interconnections between international trade and changing patterns of consumer culture. She also contends that advances in global history will depend on greater collaboration among scholars with different disciplinary affiliations, methodological skills, and linguistic proficiencies.

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If the editors of the JGH see the difference between global and world history as “subtle,” Bruce Mazlish and a few other scholars have since the early 1990s appealed to historians to make the distinction substantive and clear-cut. In our second selection, Mazlish makes his case.24 In his view, “the heart and novelty” of global history is globalization. This phenomenon is contemporary, he declares, even though the global historian, focused steadfastly on the extraordinary state of affairs in which humankind now finds itself, may nonetheless peer back in time in search of the roots of our present condition. Mazlish honors the world history scholarly tradition for its “serious attempts to treat historical phenomena that arise on a world scale,” but he insists that the global history research project observes particular principles of selection that place it in a conceptual orbit of its own. In contrast to most world historians, moreover, Mazlish encourages attention to the idea of an emerging global consciousness. In Conceptualizing Global History, he writes: “Global history can be thought of as a diagram, in which a process called globalization gives rise to global consciousness or perspective, which, in turn, gives rise to global history; this then informs the globalization process itself, further heightening global consciousness, ad infinitum.”25 We have seen no sign that many historians wish to follow Mazlish’s lead, but his claims for global history as a special research field have generated continuing discussion for and against the world/global division.26 Whatever the value of the terminological debate, it echoes the much larger question of whether the path to the world’s present state of complexity was long-term and largely continuous or whether numerous strands of globalization came together only recently to produce a radically different kind of world. Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez are counted among the historians who believe globalization to be a useful device for understanding developments that took place well before the twentieth century.27 These two scholars, who have collaborated extensively on the economic history of the early modern world, identify globalization’s starting date with great precision: it happened in 1571, the year the Spanish explorer Miguel López de Legazpi, founded Manila in the Philippines. That port rose immediately as the key entrepôt through which American silver, exported on Spanish galleons from Mexico, flowed to China, whose demand for this metal in the late sixteenth century was insatiable. Silver also reached China from Western Europe, though most of it also originated in American mines, with European ports serving in some respects the same transshipping function that Manila did. Flynn and Giráldez challenge the traditional view that Europeans were more amenable to new and exotic merchandise than traditionbound, incurious Asians were and therefore sent “money” to China simply to maintain a reasonable balance of payments. The authors argue to the contrary that silver was a commodity like any other and that high demand for it in China resulted from changes in that country’s commercial economy and imperial finances. Flynn and Giráldez contend that neither Afroeurasian interconnectedness in ancient and medieval times nor the opening of transatlantic passages after 1492 made for a genuinely globalizing world. Direct, regular communication between the Americas

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and Afroeurasia across the Pacific was the missing section in the web of interregional exchange. There was no true globalization until that piece fell into place. Once it did, silver and numerous other products could stream around the world in both directions. “Globalization occurred,” Flynn and Giráldez contend, “when all populated continents began sustained interaction in a manner that deeply linked them all through global trade.” Writing in 2002, when globalization was still on the upswing as a catchword, these two scholars aimed to define the term more concretely as the long-term processes of economic integration that could only get under way when merchants traveling the major east-west trade routes never reached a dead end. The rules of their discipline have prompted some historians who have pondered globalization to warn of the dangers of teleology, in this case the notion that the phenomenon was designed from the start to bring about a certain kind of world. “Globalization,” Jürgen Osterhammel has observed, “is, at a fundamental level, wedded to the vision of a homogenizing trend in (modern) history. Convergence and the growth of shared experience are construed as the overall tendency of world development.”28 In the final selection in this chapter, Frederick Cooper, a historian of Africa and, more recently, comparative empires, examines globalization as an analytical construct and concludes that it both assumes too much about the directionality of history and largely evades the problem of how interconnections among societies have actually functioned. He argues that devotees of globalization, fixated on a world becoming ever more globalized, have too often ignored the sites where interconnectedness has been “lumpy,” that is, the places, past and present, “where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not, where social relations become dense amidst others that are diffuse.” Cooper questions the presentist bias of globalization discourse as a set of ideas postulated both to explain the special character of today’s world and to categorically separate it from all previous eras. He finds little value, however, in projects to push globalization back in time. Awarding this phenomenon a history, he writes, does not necessarily generate much interest in far more compelling and substantive problems. These are questions of how the institutions and mechanisms that connected groups across space operated, why they sometimes worked poorly or fell apart, why networks of interchange expanded in certain directions but met blockage in others, and why systems of power designed to standardize and integrate people across boundaries sometimes succeeded but other times failed. Globalization may be a handy byword for a variety of phenomena that we can readily name, Cooper admits, but if all that scholars want to demonstrate is how the world reached a presumed present state of wholeness, “the arguments fall victim to linearity and teleology.”

NOTES

1. Fred Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 111–12.

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2. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Globalizations,” in The Oxford Handbook of World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 90. Osterhammel claims that the term globalization was invented in the 1960s. See also Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 246. Chanda’s search of the Factiva database reveals the earliest use of the word only in 1979. He found it in a European Economic Community document published that year. 3. Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye, eds., The Global History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005). 4. See, for example, Jan de Vries, “Reflections on Doing Global History,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed., Maxine Berg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44–45; and Osterhammel, “Globalizations,” 90– 91. 5. Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 46–49; and Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 19–35. 6. Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, 59. Hunt observes: “Of some two thousand early-modern and modern historians in France surveyed in 2000, only twenty-nine were specialists in Russian or east European history; nineteen, in Chinese history; and fifteen in Japanese history. The majority worked on France itself.” Hunt implies that as of 2014 this situation had not changed much, despite emerging interest in French education in pan-European and global history. 7. One example is J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). This book can readily be counted among studies of world-scale change. McNeill has an entry for “globalization” in his index, but he refers the reader to “economic integration,” the term he prefers for processes that other authors might use the new byword to describe. 8. Jerry H. Bentley, “Globalizing History and Historicizing Globalization,” in Globalization and Global History, ed. Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 18–32. 9. For example, see Robert P. Clark, The Global Imperative: An Interpretive History of the Spread of Humankind (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); also Bentley, “Globalizing History,” 29. 10. Osterhammel, “Globalizations,” 95. 11. David Northrup, “Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,” Journal of World History 16, 3 (September 2005): 249– 67. See also Peter Stearns, Globalization in World History (New York: Routledge, 2010). Stearns supports this model with qualifications. 12. See also Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing Global Consciousness (New York: Zed Books, 2003); J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 155; Fred Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity, 168–173; and Stearns, Globalization in World History, 57– 89. 13. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100, 4 (October 1995): 1034– 60.

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14. The WorldCat database shows that as of April 2015 libraries worldwide held about 36,500 English-language books published since 1960 whose titles include the phrase world history. About 70 percent of those books have publication dates between 1990 and 2015. Libraries held only about 4,500 books whose titles include global history, and nearly 95 percent of them were published in that same twenty-five years. WorldCat figures change daily as libraries acquire or cull books. Also, the figures include different editions of particular titles. 15. Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 68– 69. 16. For example, Peter N. Stearns et al., World Civilizations: The Global Experience, 6th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2010); and Robert W. Strayer, Ways of the World: A Brief Global History with Sources, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012). 17. Ross Dunn recalls meetings where the WHA’s founders batted around alternative names for the new organization. 18. Gilbert Allardyce, “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course,” Journal of World History 1 (Spring 1990): 41–42. 19. The idea of transnational history came into vogue in the 1990s alongside global history, and debates about the analytical meaning of these two terms have often overlapped. See Akira Iriye, “Transnational History,” Contemporary European History 13, 2 (May 2004): 211–22. Iriye, a leading light in the field, has defined transnational history crisply as “the study of movements and forces that cut across national boundaries.” For other discussions of the problem of defining transnational history and distinguishing it from global, world, international, and multinational history, see Patricia Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History 14, 4 (November 2005): 421–39; “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, 5 (December 2006): 1441– 64; Matthew Hilton and Rana Mitter, “Introduction,” in “Transnationalism and Contemporary Global History,” supplement, Past and Present 218, 8 (2013): 7–28; and Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 20. Pamela Kyle Crossley, What Is Global History? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 106. 21. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Peer Vries, “Editorial,” Journal of Global History 1, 1 (March 2006): 1. 22. This table represents our comparative review of the tables of contents of the volumes of the two journals that were published between 2006 and 2013. The analysis excludes editorials and book reviews. The “Indeterminate” column includes articles that overlap two or more periods or that address no particular period. Total number of articles

Content mainly pre-1500

1500–1900

post-1900

Journal of World History 2006–2013

143

13%

54%

25%

8%

Journal of Global History 2006–2013

146

7%

40%

44%

9%

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23. Statutes, Network of Global and World History Organizations, http://research.uni -leipzig.de/~gwhisto/. 24. Mazlish first argued for global history as a special subfield of the discipline in Conceptualizing Global History, ed. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). 25. Ibid., 5. 26. For criticisms of Mazlish’s definitions, see, for example, Barbara Weinstein, “The World Is Your Archive: The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 73– 74; and Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History, 65– 78. And, more recently, see Diego Olstein, Thinking History Globally (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 46. Olstein has endorsed different definitions for global and world history: “World history subtlety differs from global history in that its world, the largest unit of analysis, is the world before it was encompassed and articulated by the processes of globalization.” 27. See also C. A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c. 1750–1850,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2002), 47– 73. 28. Osterhammel, “Globalizations,” 94.

G LO B A L H I S T O R Y: A P P R OAC H E S A N D NE W D I R E C T I O N S Maxine Berg

“Global history” encompasses a new approach to historical writing which has emerged during the past fifteen years. Debates over “globalization” and paradigms such as the “great divergence” stimulated historians in many specialisms to think about the historical formation of these phenomena. Just how unique, how distinctive, is our current condition of an intense interlinking of economies and polities? We are now rethinking our histories in relation to those of others beyond Europe or beyond the nations and regions in which we specialize. Global history first challenged the old national histories and area studies. It is now stimulating a recasting of imperial history, and of Atlantic world history. This volume brings together those who have written major books and articles shifting parts of the historical discipline in this direction, together with historians in fields including empire, area studies, the arts, and technology. It engages them in reflection and debate over what “global” approaches to history mean, how it has changed the questions they ask, and the ways they do history. It raises the limitations and problems of this approach to history, but also opens out new perspectives.

This selection is an edited version of Chapter 1 (“Global History: Approaches and New Directions”) in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–18. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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First, where does global history come from? Many connect global history to debates over globalization. The new level of international flows and connections among economies and polities which social scientists addressed from the 1990s soon attracted historians, who pointed to the long history of global connections, some going back to the prehistoric period, but more significantly to the interlinking of land and sea routes from the first millennium AD. Thus they asked, “does globalization have a history”?1 For many historians, however, an interest in the global did not stem from an attempt to join the globalization debate with its initial focuses on international politics, governance, and the economic 0rder. Instead, during this past ten years they have been profoundly affected by the turning to the global in our history writing and teaching. The recent appearance of “global history centres,” “world history groups,” and “transnational history centres,” along with university appointments focused on “wider world” and “global” research agendas, provides a new institutionalization of this direction in historical writing. The titles of conferences, “Global History of Science,” “Global Material Cultures,” World and Global History Congresses, and a new range of MA programmes and undergraduate courses convey just how far this has reached. These perspectives have also become central in the museum and art historical world. We have seen high profile events such as the “Encounters” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2003, the series of “Empires” exhibitions at the British Museum, and exhibitions with a similar focus in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. A total of 850,000 attended “The First Emperor” exhibition at the British Museum in 2007– 8; 54,000 bought the exhibition catalogue. The British Museum’s venture in 2010 into an extended radio series, “The History of the World in 100 Objects,” led by its Director, Neil MacGregor, was combined with a presentation on its website, and later a CD series.2 A seminal volume, Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, published in 2000, brought new agendas to the large-scale comparative histories that had reemerged in economic history, notably David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are so Rich and Some so Poor (1998). The great divergence demanded the research on China and India that would challenge histories of European exceptionalism, represented by texts such as that by Landes or Eric Jones’s earlier work, The European Miracle: Environments: Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (1981) or his Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (1988). For all the problematic hypotheses of these books, they did push us to think beyond Europe: there was a growing dissatisfaction with national histories and area studies. Those borders and boundaries needed to be crossed.3 Economic history was not the only source of this shift. From sociopolitical history there have been Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991) and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia” (1997), and more recently Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2004), John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: A Global History of Empire Since 1405 (2007), and Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2006).4

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A dissatisfaction with national histories and area studies brought a foregrounding of themes long studied in world history: environmental histories, migration, slavery, trade, and travel. But above all, the “global” in history writing emerged from postmodernist and postcolonial directions where “crossing boundaries” and going “beyond borders” joined aspirations to write a “new imperial history” and to undertake comparative studies of the West and the East. Earlier historiographies of colonialism and imperialism provided histories of East India companies and of private trade, leading on to colonial and territorial dominion. Subsequent histories have focused on the struggles of subaltern peoples and the new national histories of regions earlier marginalized as colonies. Historians of empire focused on Asia’s domination by Europe and its subsequent escape, but they gave less attention to the ways in which Asia reconfigured the cultural and economic landscape of Europe. In recent generations an area studies agenda has dominated with regard to many of these former colonies, with less emphasis on comparative research across these regions, and connective research on Europe and Asia. At the same time, many historians have pursued the wider concepts of “connectedness” and “cosmopolitanism” as these have developed in social theory. Many are now trying to move beyond unilateral comparisons between Europe and China, or Europe and India, and are investigating linkages and interactions between world areas.5 Global history, of course, had other earlier manifestations. It has a long pedigree stretching back to the ancient world, to Han and Tang China, and to Arab, Persian, and Hindu traditions.6 In the early years of the twentieth century there was a resurgence of interest in world history, coinciding with a new interest in China and Japan among Europeans, and with the peace movements of these periods. Global economic history courses at the London School of Economics (LSE) are now reviving (perhaps unknowingly) those comparative histories of trade and agrarian change between West and East taught there in the 1920s and 1930s.7 Craig Clunas tells us how Chinese art was part of the curriculum of the Courtauld Institute from 1933 until the Second World War, only to disappear thereafter.8 Other global approaches arose out of Marxism and the world systems method from the 1970s, which turned analysis of capitalist development outwards to consider reproductions of metropoles and peripheries. Large-scale comparative syntheses, from Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) to Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System (1974–89), challenged historians to make connective perspectives.9 These works, in turn, joined with histories of colonialism and imperialism, histories which continued to provide grand narratives of domination and resistance, and which have left us with enormous amounts of research on trade flows, migration, and slavery, all set within the trajectory of imperial dominion. Again, these have been mainly histories of individual European nations and of the nations arising out of former colonies. They have involved less comparative research across regions or the kinds of connective research on Asia or Eurasia advocated by Subrahmanyam as far back as 1997.10

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This has had some perhaps unintended consequences. Some of these were the result of national and radical political shifts in Europe: the 1974 revolution in Portugal led to the disappearance of Asian languages from the Portuguese humanities curriculum because they were associated with imperialism. The social-democratic shifts in Denmark and Sweden also led to a loss of historical interest in the former territories of the Danish and Swedish East India companies. Africa’s history was written as a history of the slave trade and coastal wider-world maritime connections, with a vast hinterland left under-investigated.11 New directions in the history of empire have sought a wider comparative perspective and a longer chronology, decentring Europe in the story of empire, and setting its study within the new historical writing on global history. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2003), Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (2007), and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empires in World History (2011) compare the wider political and economic dynamics of empire. Histories that compare the empires of Rome and China with those of Spain, the USA, and Russia, or chart a broad Eurasian story of empire from China and Japan across Russia, Iran, South Asia, and Europe, provide frameworks that are markedly different from those of an earlier generation of studies, represented for instance by The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998–99).12 Some see global history as an attempt to displace the exploitation narrative of colonialism; be that as it may, the global framework has recast Britain and Europe as the products of their colonial experience. Global historical agendas, set, as so many of them have been until very recently, within a framework of economics and politics, have adopted methodologies still dominated by comparisons of the West and the East. They carry with them new “centrism” issues. In many comparisons Europe remains the metropolis. The challenge is to convert Europe from a knowing subject to an object of global history. We also need to ask whether we have moved from a Eurocentrism to a Eurasian centrism. The “global” for former historians of Northern and Western Europe means comparison and connection with South, South East, and East Asia. “Atlantic world” history connected historians of northwest Europe and North America, but did not penetrate the north-south divide.13 The Spanish American and Pacific Ocean worlds still remain, for many historians, part of separate historiographies.

D I V E R G E N C E A N D C O M PA R I S O N

Historians responding to the global turn have raised questions of transitions to modernity, of divergence and convergence. They are engaging with sociologists in discussing concepts of modernity.14 Comparative history is now under discussion. The debate on divergence has opened a new space for economic history. That economic history now pursues frameworks of enquiry extending beyond Europe or America, beyond national histories into global comparisons and connections, and beyond this into material culture analysis. The development of different historiographies, as well

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as recent global perspectives, has reshaped frameworks for analysing the roots of industrialization. The “great divergence,” which has framed so much of our recent thinking in global history, has yielded large-scale comparative studies on differences in resource bases, capital inputs, population and wages, or institutional structures and state building among the major regions of the world. Investigating the sources of the “great divergence” attracts us because it challenges us to turn our sights away from our own internal histories, to compare, for example, the resource base of the Yangzi Delta with that of northwestern Europe, or to compare London wage rates with those of Beijing. Much data have been collected on such comparisons; the focus has moved out to include comparisons with India as well as China and Japan, and also the Ottoman and Spanish empires.15 The “divergence” debate has revived increasingly narrow and even moribund economic history: “Economic historians previously locked away in the study of their particular country and period have been forced to confront the inter-connectedness of their specialisms.”16 We have learned much, but there is a sense in which the divergence debate has reinforced a series of much older questions. First, it focused on what Europe had and Asia did not, subsequently using this as an explanation. Geography, ecology, and environment provided early key indicators of comparison. Pomeranz argued that ecological imbalance in access to coal followed by the development of technologies using coal set the course for a divergence in growth between Europe and Asia from the later eighteenth century. The ensuing debate among a wide group of European, Asian, and world historians has only left entrenched a long-standing emphasis on the part played by Britain’s superior coal reserves in her industrialization.17 Another major issue arising out of the divergence debate is that of wages and prices, which has coalesced into the old question of wages and the standard of living. Once again, intensive and now global effort is focused on demonstrating the higher wages and standard of living in Britain—indeed, not even Britain but England—than in the rest of Europe, and also the rest of the world, with the ensuing consequences for the development of labour-saving technologies.18 The “divergence” debate originally challenged historians to think outside their national boundaries, and to compare Europe with parts of Asia in the period before Europe’s industrialization. But economic historians risk turning back to a series of old methodologies and debates.19 A key issue in all these comparisons is the question of what is being measured and how. Historians making these global comparisons face the challenges of lack of data and of scholarly work creating comparable accounts from widely differing sources compiled under different assumptions and purposes.20 Where has the divergence debate left us? After more than a decade, the subject is no less attractive to historians. A panel at the American Historical Association Conference in 2011 entitled “Assessing Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: A Forum”

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brought together Peter Coclanis, Jan de Vries, R. Bin Wong, Philip Hoffman, and Kenneth Pomeranz. De Vries challenged Pomeranz’s “informal” methodology of comparison. We must ask what the theories, models, or assumptions are that underlie any comparison, otherwise we fall victim to comparing what might be two ways of achieving the same result, or just two different things. “More thought needs to be given to the methodology of a comparative history suitable for a globalized history.”21 De Vries’s critique of a neo-Malthusian analysis where chronologies of difference were more suited to the nineteenth century than to the industrial revolution raises new questions for sources of difference in labour productivity, in technology, and in changing structures of consumption. Hoffman and Wong point to other new agendas on science and technology (useful knowledge), war, and political competition and fragmentation.22 The “divergence” debate has invited economic historians into the wider comparative axis of Europe and Asia. The analysis derived has not changed our picture of Europe’s and even Britain’s transition in the eighteenth century. Ironically, it has if anything revived an economic history narrowly focused on English exceptionalism. What those large-scale comparative studies of resources, capital, and wages did not do was to investigate the extent to which connections between these parts of the world affected their subsequent development. It is time to move to some more open-ended questions concerning global connections: how did the transmission of material culture and useful knowledge across regions of the world affect the economic and cultural developments in any one of these regions? This leads us into narratives of interaction which could take us deeper into the analysis of imperial domination, but could equally lead us into the connections that contributed to economic development in Europe. Comparison has also generated new challenges to methodology from historians of the wider world. Gareth Austin has proposed a method of “reciprocal comparison” as a response to long traditions of approaching African history from the stylized facts of European historiography. He compares the differences in labour and land endowments of sub-Saharan Africa with those of East Asia and the West, discussing reasons why an abundance of cultivable land can generate technological and institutional factors that limit economic growth. He asks that Africa be compared, not with Europe, but with other relatively poor, formerly colonized regions, including India, South East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Furthermore, Americanists and European historians might find new perspectives from looking at their own continents “in an African mirror.”23 Likewise, the focus on China and Europe in the divergence debate has diverted historians from another significant comparative perspective, and one with a long historiography. This is the comparison of labour-intensive paths of industrialization, as in the case of Japan, with developments of proto-industrialization in Europe. Kaoru Sugihara’s concept of an “East Asian development path” that was labour-intensive can lead us to investigate the legacies of proto-industrialization in wider regions of Europe, and not

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to focus singularly on the English alternative of a capital-intensive path.24 And yet comparison from the standpoint of Africa, of Japan, or of China still leaves us grappling with essentialist frameworks. What we see is what Jean-Frederic Schaub calls a paradigm of asymmetries. Cultural and colonial encounters between ruling or ascendant powers and “other,” foreign or “alien” peoples reveal the capacities of such dominant groups to change other societies and to dominate cultural transfers.25

C O M PA R I S O N A N D C O NN E C T I O N

Running parallel to methods of comparative history and the histories of encounters and colonial domination there is a long lineage of histories of composite regions and of regions bordering oceans: Braudel’s Mediterranean world, Bailyn’s Atlantic world, Chaudhuri and Das Gupta’s Indian Ocean world. But these transoceanic perspectives have also been comparative histories of the maritime world.26 Recent global agendas drawing on social theory focus on concepts of “connectedness” or “cosmopolitanism,” of “entanglement,” and even “ecumenae.”27 In so doing historians now seek the connections that impacted on Europe’s and Asia’s cultures and development. These new agendas, however, also risk losing the vigour of those big questions previously raised in comparative studies. And yet, moving away from comparative histories brings us a whole new set of questions and subject areas: those of diasporas, of embassies and trading missions, of religious ideologies, of the connected histories of city life, of the transmission of material cultures, and of useful knowledge. Global history’s methodological agendas have also challenged another great divide between economic history, on the one hand, and cultural and social history, on the other. Economic histories of early modern Europe and its colonial empires are still separated off from social and cultural histories of consumption and material cultures. Jan de Vries set out to unite these histories in his concept of the “industrious revolution.”28 His pan-European study connected household behaviour with macroeconomic labour and capital markets. De Vries opened the gates of economic history to questions of consumer desire, taste, and sentiment that changed households and fostered incentives for large-scale productivity growth. He also linked consumer cultures in Europe to encounters with wider-world material cultures. It is now time to pursue the possibilities he opened up; to connect up those divided and comparative questions asked by economic historians.

MICROHIS TORIES AND GLOBAL HIS TORY

Global approaches challenge us to recast the method and scale of our research in much the same way that microhistory did in the early 1980s. Microhistorians wrote of episodes of everyday life or of individual experiences as “strange”; they thus required for analysis the insights of different disciplines such as cultural anthropology or literary

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textual analysis. Such microanalysis, once achieved, would, they believed, also provide access to the real. Such history was seen to convey a spirit of human agency, of sharing and communality, of sympathy and closeness. The issues of a different scale and a different point of view confronted by the microhistorians have their parallels in those issues confronting global historians. The search for an access to closeness and familiarity allowed by different historical and disciplinary methodologies is not so different from what we now seek to understand from distance and strangeness. Microhistory allowed interrogation of identity and human agency; it brought a critique of determinist history. But it often focused on the exception, on deviations; the microhistorian’s use of court records shaped the methodology. Such microhistories rejected the grand narratives, but their plots were shaped by those narratives. As John Brewer has argued, they still aspired to notions of “histoire totale,” of writing history from the ground up.29 Focusing on one individual or family, however, allowed transcendence of boundaries of identity and culture. Now historians found histories of families or of individuals migrating from one continent to another, as for example in Natalie Zemon Davis’s study of Leo Africanus in Trickster Travels.30 What many global histories missed out on were the historical actors and issues of agency so central to the plots of micronarratives. Linda Colley, in The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, used biography, and looked to smallness as a way of connecting to the large. She could investigate the lives of the conventionally marginalized—in this case, a literate but uneducated woman, a wife, a middle-class person of no wealth—through a research tool that globalization has given us—the World Wide Web. Although her story was of a woman in empire, she also wrote of all the global forces impinging on the lives of Marsh’s family, friends, and those she encountered. Elizabeth Marsh noticed, for example, that the Sultan of Morocco drank tea out of porcelain cups and the women in his court wore Indian muslins. A more recent treatment of family and individual histories across continents, Emma Rothschild’s The Inner Life of Empires, sets a court case centred on slavery and infanticide within a Scottish landed family whose members spanned the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Indian empires.31

METHODS

Beyond economic history the comparative histories have given way to investigations of connectedness, cosmopolitanism and entanglement, and now of ecumenae, concepts often referred to and just as often left undefined. We are rapidly moving, however, into a new stage where the global and the transnational have taken over from where empire left off. The global is rapidly becoming a brand, and one that is losing the edge and the clarity of focus, the frisson offered by those big comparative questions of divergence and convergence, of wealth and poverty, of the crisis of empires. We may not have liked those questions raised in the comparative histories of the 1980s and 1990s, such as “why are we so rich and they so poor?” But these were the questions that pushed us out of our introverted localism. Historians have moved the questions of “divergence” that

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dominated global history after 2000 out to other areas of the world: they have looked at regions, for instance the Islamic world and China; they have looked at composite zones, or, like Kaoru Sugihara, marked out an East Asian development path. We have the excitement as historians of moving out of our national borders and of connecting across our former area studies. This will require new methodologies of collaboration and interdisciplinarity as well as the rapidly disappearing tools of foreign languages. Languages become more, not less vital as historians move beyond the imperial and national archive. Area studies specialists who do have the languages central to their chosen regions are now also breaking into comparative and connective questions. These may require, for example, not just Korean and Japanese language skills, but also Russian. Linguistic constraints shape possible networks among historians. They also shape possibilities of engagement in debate, in meetings, and in collaborations. Just how we go forward will also depend on collaborations. Many of us are not archaeologists, geographers, geologists, or environmental scientists, nor are we curators, art historians, or historical sociologists. We have different questions, we research and write differently. But we now need to work with the theories, findings, and techniques of these groups, and indeed work with them in collaborations. We can move from traditional models of the lone researcher to alternative academic models, experimenting with teamwork, networks, and electronic forums; we can engage in joint publications based on transnational research networks. In recent years we have had great comparative studies of different empires in one region, such as John Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World, or of one empire in two different parts of the world, such as Peter Marshall’s The Making and Unmaking of Empires.32 Few of us can aspire to the mastery of printed and archival material at this level, and perhaps this is only possible among very senior historians. But historians who have grouped themselves as economic historians, as imperial, new imperial and postcolonial historians, as European historians, Indian or Chinese historians, can draw on the large amounts of valuable research in all these different historiographical traditions, and approach these with new questions.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Antony G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002) and Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, 2005). 2. I am grateful to J. D. Hill, British Museum, for this information. See his presentation at the Challenging the History of the Globe conference, May 2009, www2.warwick.ac.uk/ fac/arts/history/ghcc/resources. 3. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are so Rich and Some so Poor (New York, 1998); Eric Jones, The European Miracle:

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Environments: Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, 1981); Eric Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford, 1988). 4. Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, 1991); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, 31/3 (1997), 735–62; Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World (Oxford, 2004); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: A Global History of Empire Since 1405 (London, 2007), and Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London, 2006). 5. See, for instance, Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge, 2010). See the review article on this by Alan Strathem, “Reflections on Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels. Volume 2: Mainland Mirrors,” Journal of Global History, 7/1 (2012), 129–42. 6. P. K. O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History,” Journal of Global History, 1 (2006), 3–39. 7. Maxine Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889–1940 (Cambridge, 1996); also see William H. McNeil, “An Emerging Consensus about World History?” World History Connected, 1/1 (2003), 1–4. On American, German, and Chinese historiography see Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge, 2011). 8. Craig Clunas, “The Art of Global Comparisons,” this volume, Chapter 11. 9. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1979); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York, 1974–89). 10. Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories,” 735–62; Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Global History as Ecumenical History,” Journal of World History, 18 (2007), 465–90, at p. 466. 11. These points were raised in discussion at the Writing the History of the Global Conference 21–22 May, 2009. 12. Bayly, Modern World; Darwin, After Tamerlane; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2011); The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols (Oxford, 1998–99). 13. William O’Reilly, The Atlantic World 1450–1700 (London, 2012). 14. See AHR Roundtable, “Historians and the Question of Modernity,” American Historical Review, 116/3 (2011), 631–37; G. K. Bhambra, “Historical Sociology, Modernity, and Postcolonial Critique,” American Historical Review, 116/3 (2011), 653–62. Also see Joseph M. Bryant, “The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity,” Canadian Journal of Sociology, 31/4 (2006), 403–44. 15. The “divergence” debate generated many studies which first appeared in the conferences of the Global Economic History Network (GEHN), with a number published later in Itinernrio, The Journal of Global History, The Economic History Review, and The Journal of Economic History. 16. Stephen Broadberry and Steve Hindle, “Editor’s Introduction,” special issue: “Asia in the Great Divergence,” The Economic History Review, 64/S1 (2011), 7.

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17. E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988) and Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010). The case is reiterated in Paul Warde, Energy Consumption in England and Wales 1560–2000 (Rome, 2007) and Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2010). Also see Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600–1850 (Cambridge, 2011) which argues a case for lower energy constraints in India. Britain’s technological initiative was driven by fuel shortages, and hence the need to innovate in industrial uses of coal. See pp. 165–68; 175–82. 18. Robert C. Allen, “The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War,” Explorations in Economic History, 38/4 (2001), 411–47; also see S. N. Broadberry and B. Gupta, “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800,” Economic History Review, 59/1 (2006), 2–31; Robert C. Allen, Jean-Paul Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Wages, Prices and Living Standards in China, 1738—1925: In Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India,” special issue: “Asia in the Great Divergence,” Economic History Review, 64/S1 (2011), 8–38; Robert C. Allen, “Why the Industrial Revolution was British: Commerce, Induced Invention, and the Scientific Revolution,” Economic History Review, 64/3 (2011), 357–84. See, by contrast, the case made for higher standards of living in India by Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and India,” Past and Present, 158 (1998), 79–109. 19. Compare Liliane Hilaire-Perez, L’invention Technique au Siècle des Lumières (Paris, 2000); Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford, 1997); Joel Mokyr, “Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History, 65/2 (2005), 283–351; S. R. Epstein, “Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe,” Journal of Economic History, 58/3 (1998), 684–713; S. R. Epstein and Maarten Prak, Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008); Christine MacLeod, “The European Origins of British Technological Predominance,” in Exceptionalism and Industrialism: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688– 1815, ed. Leandro Prados de Ia Escosura (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 111–26. 20. Morten Jerven, “National Income Estimates in Global Economic History,” The Journal of Global History, 7/1 (2012), 107–28, especially pp. 109 and 111. 21. Jan de Vries, “The Great Divergence after Ten Years: Justly Celebrated yet Hard to Believe,” Historically Speaking, 4 (2011), 13–15; “Assessing Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: A Forum,” Historically Speaking, 4 (2011), 10–25. 22. Philip T. Hoffman, “Comment on Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence,” Historically Speaking, 4 (2011), 16–17; R. Bin Wong, “Economic History in the Decade after The Great Divergence,” Historically Speaking, 4 (2011), 17–19. Also see Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2011). 23. Gareth Austin, “Reciprocal Comparisons and African History: Tackling Conceptual Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa’s Economic Past,” African Studies Review, 50 (2007), 1–28 (at pp. 11 and 13). 24. Kaoru Sugihara, “The European Miracle in Global History: An East Asian Perspec-

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tive,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25. J.-F. Schaub, “Global History: Notes on Some Discontents in the Historical Narrative,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 26. Markus Vink, “Indian Ocean Studies,” Journal of Global History, 2 (2007), 41–62. 27. Sachsenmaier, “World History as Ecumenical History.” 28. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008). 29. For a recent discussion of microhistory see John Brewer, “Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 87–109; Pat Hudson, “Closeness and Distance,” Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 375–85; Filippo De Vivo, “Prospect or Refuge, Microhistory: History on the Large Scale,” Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 387–97. Also see Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 97–119. 30. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York and London, 2007). 31. Colley, Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, 2011). Also see other collective biographies of individuals in the British Empire, for example, Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2008). 32. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006); P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005).

C O MPA R IN G G LO B A L H I S T O R Y T O WO R L D H I S T O R Y Bruce Mazlish

The historical profession has been slow to appreciate the importance of globalization. One reason appears to be the confusion caused by the claims of world history, which has been struggling to achieve its own identity. In its fight against more traditional, national approaches, world history has generally seen global history—that is, the study of globalization— as a dilution of its challenge to the establishment. Hence, world historians have tended either to ignore the new global history or to claim that it is already encompassed by what they are doing. Is their response legitimate? What exactly is world history? And what is global history?

Bruce Mazlish’s “Comparing Global History to World History” was originally published in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, 3 (Winter 1998): 385– 95. Reprinted with the permission of the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. © 1998 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.

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WORLD HIS TORY

World history has accumulated a number of definitions, most of them reflecting different schools of thought. The “Invitation to Membership” of the World History Association (WHA) begins with the statement, “If you teach the whole history of the whole world in nine short months, you know the challenge of planning and organizing a meaningful course in world history.” Although adherents of the WHA often deny it, the implication seems to be that world history is “the whole history of the whole world,” thus offering no obvious principle of selection.1 Bentley, the editor of The Journal of World History, gives a more limited definition: “My impression is that most participants in the discussion [about the definition of world history] took interactions between peoples participating in large-scale historical processes to be one of the principal concerns of world history.” This conception of world history is also vague. For example, would every historian of the Industrial Revolution (even if restricted to one country)—surely, a large-scale historical process—necessarily be a world historian as well, and if not, why not? Bentley continues, “Thus, world history represents (among other things) a dialogue between the past and the present, in that it seeks to establish a historical context for the integrated and interdependent world of modern times.”2 McNeill is the premier figure of modern world history. He follows, by his own admission, directly in the line of Arnold Toynbee, who inspired him with an ecumenical vision. But McNeill translated this vision into more mundane historical practice. His Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, 1976) is intellectual worlds removed from Toynbee’s Study of History (New York, 1933–1954), 10 v. However, although, like Toynbee, McNeill takes civilizations as his framework of analysis, he does not construe them as hermetically closed but as open to cultural borrowings. Ralph Linton and Robert Redfield— anthropologists— also influenced McNeill. From them came his interest in “transcivilizational encounters,” which have shaped his definition of world history as the study of “interaction among peoples of diverse cultures.” Long-distance trade, the spread of religions and plagues, and a multitude of other transcivilizational factors have prominent places in McNeill’s world history. These concerns are always informed by a biological and ecological awareness that has no precedent in Toynbee’s work. Without specifically invoking the theory of evolution, McNeill lives and writes in its environment. The results have been brilliant treatments of processes occurring on a worldwide scale, such as the spread of disease or the emergence of military power.3 Other variants of world history exist alongside McNeill’s version. The crucial variable is the definition of world. Fernand Braudel seemed to have abandoned his fascination with civilizations in favor of “world systems”—that is, worlds constructed by trade and culture. Characteristically, his book, The Mediterranean (trans. Siäan Reynolds) (New York, 1972) carries the subtitle, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.

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Braudel’s disciple, Wallerstein, in The Modern World-System I (New York, 1976), shows in great detail how the modern commercial and capitalist world came into existence. In similar accounts, of course, Columbus’ voyage occupies a central place, adding a New World to an Old one. Wallerstein’s emphasis in the second volume is on the seventeenthcentury mercantile competition among the Western European nations. His is history in the grand style, but with its feet on the ground (or, perhaps one should say, in the sea).4 Carrying the world-system approach even further back in time, Abu-Lughod has suggestively argued for an earlier “system of world trade and even ‘cultural’ exchange.” She finds such a system in the period 1250–1350 A.D., which she designates as a “crucial turning point in history.” Though lacking an international division of labor, her system connects disparate areas of the world—Europe, India, and China—through trade between key cities. Applying this approach to even earlier periods, she speaks of the Roman Empire as the “first nascent world system.”5 What all these variants on world history— McNeill’s, Braudel’s, Wallerstein’s, and Abu-Lughod’s— share is a concern with systemic processes and patterns among a wide variety of historical and natural phenomena that affected diverse populations. Compared with earlier ecumenical histories, they are less keen about making predictions, and about tracing the course of civilizations through fixed cycles. In addition, though forced to rely heavily on secondary accounts, they stay close to the scholarship of ordinary historians, offering strictly secular accounts (even of religion). In short, these accounts are serious attempts to treat historical phenomena that arise on a world scale. And it is at this point that the meaning of the term “world” becomes especially crucial. It is the point at which a possible transition to global history occurs.6

GLOBAL HIS TORY

As with the competing definitions of world history, obfuscation also enters into the differences between world and global history. In the foreword to a series edited for the American Historical Association—“Essays on Global and Comparative History”—Adas announced a “‘new’ global or world history” which differs in fundamental ways from its predecessors. That difference, for Adas, led to virtually a paraphrase of McNeill’s version. Adas’ series included not only an account of Abu-Lughod’s thirteenth-century world system, but also such essays as “The Columbian Voyages” and “Gender and Islamic History.” It offered serious and worthwhile contributions to world history but unthinkingly misappropriated the title “Global History,” which needed to be defined afresh in its own proper terms. Even McNeill realized that something unprecedented was in the works, commenting, “I suspect that human affairs are trembling on the verge of a far-reaching transformation,” which he compared to the importance of the agricultural revolution.7 We encounter the same intuition in an important article by Geyer and Bright, the very title of which, “World History in a Global Age,” indicated the tenuous transition taking place. In their words,

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What we have before us as contemporary history grates against the familiar explanatory strategies and analytic categories with which scholars have traditionally worked. . . . This is a crisis, above all, of Western imaginings, but it poses profound challenges for any historian: the world we live in has come into its own as an integrated globe, yet it lacks narration and has no history. . . . The central challenge of a renewed world history at the end of the twentieth century is to narrate the world’s past in an age of globality.8

Our “imaginings” must leap from world history to global history. In making this jump, a look at the etymology of the words, world and globe, is helpful. Words are not just what individuals say they mean; they have a historical nature. World comes from the Middle English for “human existence”; its central reference is to the earth, including everyone and everything on it. Worlds can also be imaginary, such as the “next world,” meaning life after death, or they can designate a class of persons—the academic world, for instance. For many, the discovery of the New World marked the advent of world history. More recently, a first, a second, and a third world have been discerned, demarcating different levels of development. Such usage ill accords with the term global (one cannot substitute New Globe for New World in 1492, or third globe for third world today). It occupies a different valence, deriving from the Latin, globus, the first definition of which is “something spherical or rounded,” like a “heavenly body.” Only secondarily does the dictionary offer the synonym, earth. Global thus points in the direction of space; its sense permits the notion of standing outside our planet and seeing “Spaceship Earth.” (Incidentally, earth is a misnomer for our planet; as is evident from outer space, our abode is more water than earth.) This new perspective is one of the keys to global history. What are the other keys? These we can determine by dividing the definition of global history into two parts. The first focuses on the history of globalization; that is, it takes existing processes, encapsulated in the “factors of globalization,” and traces them as far back in the past as seems necessary and useful. The second signifies processes that are best studied on a global, rather than a local, a national, or a regional, level. The second definition is a continuation of much that is to be encountered in McNeill’s variation of world history, except that it begins in the present, openly acknowledging its informed global perspective. The first part of the definition—the history of globalization is both the heart and the novelty of global history, deciding the initial field of study and raising the questions, What is involved in globalization? and What are the factors at work in our contemporary “world”? An early attempt to answer them stated, The starting point for global history lies in the following basic facts of our time (although others could be added): our thrust into space, imposing upon us an increasing sense of being in one world “Spaceship Earth”—as seen from outside the earth’s atmosphere; satellites in outer space that link the peoples of the earth in an unprecedented fashion;

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nuclear threats in the form of either weapons or utility plants, showing how the territorial state can no longer adequately protect its citizens from either military or ecologically related “invasions”; environmental problems that refuse to conform to lines drawn on a map; and multinational corporations that increasingly dominate our economic lives.9

Among other “basic facts of our time” that could be added to this list are global consumerism (obviously related to multinationals), human rights, the displacement of an international political system by a global one (the Geyer–Bright article cited earlier is especially strong in this regard), the globalization of culture (especially music, as fostered by satellite communications), and so forth. What is essential to note is the synergy and synchronicity of these various factors—their unprecedented interaction with one another, in ever-increasing extent and force, notwithstanding the origin of them all in a differentiated past. Globalization is the sum of their combined presences. It is a reality that now affects every part of the globe and every person on it, even though in widely differing local contexts. In fact, one could say that much of global history has necessarily to devote itself to studying the factors of globalization in relation to a “local” reality, which can take many forms. The practitioners of global history— as in, say, artificial intelligence studies—include adherents of both a strong and a weak interpretation. The former are convinced that globalization is ushering in a new global epoch, which replaces existing attempts to construct such periods as the postmodern or the postindustrial. The adherents of the weak interpretation abstain from divisionary schemes, and are content to study the globalization process without further claims. For those who see globalization as introducing a new period, the issue of when the global epoch “began” is worth considerable attention (analogous to the issue of when modern history began). Some opt for the 1950s and others for the 1970s (I place myself in the epochal camp, and opt for the later time). This argument turns on the question of when enough synergy and synchronicity arises to justify the launch of a new periodization. Behind this argument is a conviction that time and space have been compressed in an unprecedented fashion. The roots of this compression reach far into the past. The development of sea vessels, from sail to steam, cutting distance and duration, forms one thread in this account. The invention of the telegraph, the laying of cables, the introduction of the telephone, and then of radio communication represent another wave of enormous changes. Now, satellites, with the aid of computer linkages, allow simultaneous communication between any spots on the globe—1 billion people watched the first step on the moon on their television sets— and they can go from one end of the globe to the other in less than a day. It should also be noted that with globalization has come the adoption of a uniform calendar.10 Another major thread to follow is mapping. Since the fifteenth century, Ptolemaic maps have guided the opening of a new world, in which half of a previously unknown globe spun into perspective. Yet, forgotten in this burst of vision was the fact that large

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areas of that globe were still “dark.” Parts of Africa remained unmapped until the end of the nineteenth century, and the poles were not adequately explored until recent expeditions. Only in our time has the globe come to be more or less fully known (including the depths of its seas). We have even seen it from outside, as one of many spherical bodies in space. Our map of the globe must now take its place as part of the mapping of outer space. Such brief investigations into some of the elements that enter into the factors of globalization indicate how they are rooted in the past. After all, global history is a historical inquiry, although its starting point is unabashedly close to the present, newly identified as a global epoch. The accounts of global historians are heavily tinged by scientific, technological, and economic “happenings” of recent times. Whether or not one approves of these happenings, global history, as the study of “Wie es eigentlich gewesen,” must inquire into them. The emergence of globalization was not simply a matter of science, technology, and economics; political developments were also requisite. First, the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States in space was essential for the creation of our increasingly satellite-dependent world, with its attendant communications revolution. Furthermore, the decline of communism eroded the old political–ideological divisions, leaving the way open for a genuinely global society, in which all countries can and must participate, though differentially. Modernization was primarily a Western imposition. Globalization, in contrast, is a global process in which numerous participants are creating a new “civilization,” to borrow the term from the world historians (for better or for worse). For example, Germany and Russia, not to mention the European Community, are major contributors; Japan has become almost as powerful as the United States; Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia are starting to make their presence felt; and China and India are looming increasingly on the horizon.11 Needless to say, the course of this globalization is not foreordained: Global history is not Whiggish. Or, more to the point, the shape it will take cannot be predicted. Like most historians, global historians are aware of the contingency and uncertainty of human affairs; they are not practicing ecumenical history. Nor are they practicing world history in the primitive sense of “The whole history of the whole world.” Rather, global historians, or at least historians of globalization, are trying to establish a more deliberate research agenda. They know that each of the factors of globalization requires rigorous empirical study, and that new actors will increasingly occupy the center of the historical stage—nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)— such as human-rights and environmental groups, along with other third-sector organizations; multinationals, which are almost equivalent in importance to nation-states (of the 100 entities possessing the largest gross domestic products (GDPs), forty-nine are multinationals); and the United Nations (UN), in all its aspects, but especially its nascent military role. Although global history is mainly transnational in its subjects of study, it would be a grave error to neglect the study of the nation as well. National history merits reexamina-

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tion in light of how the forces of globalization have affected the nation-state, and vice-versa. Nations will not be going away. They are still the preferred settings for large numbers of people to organize in behalf of common ends—protection of territory and property, economic production, and—last but not least—group identity. The literature on the subject is vast. In short, global history, though it seeks to transcend national history, is engaged nevertheless with the nation-state as a major actor on the international and global scene. The main focus of world history, as opposed to global history, has been civilizations. But as global historians are well aware, civilizations do not send up rockets, operate television networks, or organize a global division of labor. Empires, the carriers of civilizations in the past, are no more; they have been replaced by nation-states (more than 180 as of this writing and counting). Hence, global history examines the processes that transcend the nation-state framework (in the process, abandoning the centuries old division between civilized and uncivilized, and ourselves and the “other”; “barbarians,” that is, inferior peoples, no longer figure in global history, only momentarily less developed peoples).12 Global history is still an emerging project with many aspects to study. Does it make sense, for example, to talk about a developing global identity? Remember that before America became the United States, the original settlers had a colonial identity that was only gradually supplemented, and perhaps eventually replaced, by a national one. Can the same process occur with a global identity (even though it would be unattached to a world government, which for the foreseeable future appears utopian or even dystopian)? After all, people are connected today in actuality in a way that was only previously dreamt of in a vague aspiration to “humanity.” Will people’s sense of themselves begin to approximate their true situation? And will historians of global history be forced to reappraise their identifications, that is, their unconscious national attachments and perspectives?13 We could go on to say much more about various facets of global history, but, hopefully, enough has been sketched so as to support the assertion that it embodies a new consciousness, a new perspective—heavily involved with the work of science and technology that has allowed us to view our planet from space, while also highlighting our earth’s evolutionary and ecological nature—that separates it from previous endeavors, for example, in world history. Exactly how it will play out in empirical research will be apparent only in the work of future global historians.14 Historians, by trade and tradition, are generally suspicious of theory. In global history, however, theoretical considerations, emanating from the social as well as the natural sciences, are indispensable to particular inquiries. Historians are also distrustful of or indifferent to work done in other disciplines. In global history, multi- or interdisciplinary orientations move front and center. The very notion of globalization came from sociology. Future work will have to engage economists, economic historians, political scientists, and historians alike. Words do matter—in this case because they determine how we conceive of the work in which we are engaged. Of course, arbitrary definitions can be attached to the terms

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world and global history. And however we define them, ambiguity will cling to these terms, as well as overlaps. Still, if work is to go forward effectively, it is essential that we also be as clear as possible about the differences. There is space enough for world history to operate without taking an “imperial” turn to encompass global history in its domain. Greater definitional precision will allow each subfield of history, the world and the global, to flourish independently. Although world history and global history exist on a continuum, we must realize that we cross a significant boundary when we enter upon the history of globalization, or, more succinctly, global history.

NOTES

1. “Invitation to Membership” was an undated mailing from Richard Rosen, executive director of the WHA. 2. Jerry Bentley, review of Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (eds.), Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, 1993), H-NET Book Review (August 1995), 1. Of special interest concerning the topic at hand are the chapters in Conceptualizing Global History by Wolf Schafer— “Global History: Historiographic Feasibility and Environmental Reality,” 47– 69— and Manfred Kossok—“From Universal History to Global History,” 93–111. 3. William H. McNeill, “The Changing Shape of World History,” History and Theory, 34, 2 (May 1995): 14. 4. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600– 1750 (New York, 1980). 5. Janet Lipman Abu-Lughod, “The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor?” American Historical Association (Washington, D.C. [no date]), 2, 6. See also idem, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, 1989). 6. Despite their general disinclination to make predictions, a number of world historians have activist interests. McNeill, for one, is concerned with environmental trends, and Wallerstein’s Marxist inclinations implicitly push him in a predictive direction. 7. See, for example, Michael Adas, foreword to Abu-Lughod, “The World System in the Thirteenth Century,” vii. McNeill, “Changing Shape of World History,” 25. This is a recent comment; as I interpret it, contextually, McNeill is talking about the need for a new definition of world or global history rather than about one of his previous “transmutations.” McNeill was a participant at the first international conference on global history in Bellagio, Italy, 1991. Though, at the time, he denied any difference between world and global history, what others said may have influenced him. Others may find this inference hazardous, but I hold to it, based on personal acquaintance. 8. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review, 100:4 (1995), 1037, 1041. 9. Mazlish, “An Introduction to Global History,” in idem and Buultjens (eds.), Conceptualizing Global History, 1–2. 10. Mazlish, “Introduction,” in idem and Buultjens (eds.), Conceptualizing Global History, 17–20. More than 3 billion people are said to have seen the Coca-Cola commercials that accompanied the last Olympic games on television.

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11. The demise of the Soviet Union must be seen in a global context. As Charles S. Maier wrote, “The Communist collapse was a reaction to forces for transformation that have gripped West and East alike, but which Western Europeans (and North Americans) had responded to earlier and thus with less cataclysmic an upheaval.” (“The Collapse of Communism: Approaches for a Future History,” History Workshop, XXXVIII [1991], 34–59). 12. Samuel Huntington’s notion of an apocalyptic clash between Islam and the West in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York, 1996) is a recent and ill-informed attempt to view history in terms of civilization. A notion of the conflict between civilizations is also current in Russia, where it takes the form of a long-standing “Eurasian” ideology, which has been embraced by many nationalist/communist opponents of Boris Yeltsin and others perceived as “reformers.” 13. For the problem of a developing global identity, see Mazlish, “Psychohistory and the Question of Global Identity,” Psychohistory Review, XXV (1997), 165-176. 14. Some indications of global history’s direction are already apparent. Four international conferences have taken place. The first conference, “Conceptualizing Global History,” already cited, was held in Bellagio, in 1991 (see Mazlish and Buultjens [eds.], Conceptualizing Global History); the second, “Global Civilization and Local Culture,” in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1992; the third, “Global History and Migrations,” in Hong Kong in 1994 (see Wang Gungwu [ed.], Global History and Migrations [Boulder, 1996]); and the fourth, “Food in Global History,” in Ann Arbor, in 1996 (see Raymond Grew [ed.], Food in Global History [Boulder, forthcoming]). Future conferences on “Global History and the Cities” and “Mapping the Multinational Corporations” are also in the offing.

C YC L E S O F S I LV E R : G LO B A L I Z AT I O N A S H I S T O R I C A L P R O C E S S Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez

[G]lobalization is normally portrayed as a twentieth-century phenomenon, indeed mostly rooted in the post–World War II era: For some, the global connectedness of our age is its distinguishing characteristic, a new reality and a change in consciousness of which interest in global history is but one manifestation. This global era and its origins, including perhaps the last 50 or 100 years, should therefore be the subject matter of global history.1

This perception of recent globalization is buttressed by widespread recognition that the world has “become smaller” as a result of recent technological innovations, such as commercial aviation and the computer revolution. For a nineteenth-century example, consider the sparsely populated regions of western North America. Completion of the This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez’s “Cycles of Silver: Globalization as Historical Process” was originally published in World Economics 3, 2 (April– June 2002): 1–16. Reprinted with permission from World Economics.

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transcontinental railroads about 140 years ago in the US effectively reduced the formidable barriers presented by the Rocky Mountains (the “Great Continental Divide”) and the Sierra Nevadas. The point is, world regions have become more and more integrated over time, and globalization is a term applied to a final stage that eventually emerged during the second half of the 20th century. We agree that, in general, regions have become increasingly connected through time. Yet a central question remains: At what point does integration of world regions become “globalization”? The current literature offers neither objective criteria for determining a date for the inception of globalization, nor identifiable causes. Globalization trends today must be seen in evolutionary terms. The present is an inheritance from the past and explanations of globalization must include its origins. A powerful “world history” movement has been sweeping the United States in recent times [. . .] Spearheaded by the World History Association, this intellectual movement is expanding worldwide.2 “World historians” reject conventional, nation-state units of analysis and instead focus attention on long-distance connections, including climatic, geographic, economic, epidemiological, ecological, demographic, and cultural aspects. These scholars are, of course, correct in emphasizing the existence of deep interconnections throughout the Afro-Eurasian world for thousands of years, both via overland routes and connecting waterways. Where we take exception, however, is when some world historians describe such long-distance connections as “globalization.” The “Old World” long-distance connections they emphasize do indeed play a crucial role in our interpretation of the birth of globalization, but true globalization did not evolve until the Old World was directly connected with the Americas in 1571. The Pacific Ocean alone comprises one-third of the surface area of the earth. The Americas and the Atlantic Ocean account for around another one-third. Thus, the Afro-Eurasian complex—the “Old World”— comprises approximately the remaining one-third of the surface area of the globe. We believe that it is inappropriate to label Old World historical connections as “global.” Any definition of “globalization” that excludes two-thirds of the globe—most of the Atlantic, the Americas, and most of the Pacific—is an oxymoron. Globalization occurred when all populated continents began sustained interaction in a manner that deeply linked them all through global trade. Global trade emerged when 1) all heavily populated continents began to exchange products continuously— both with each other directly and indirectly via other continents— and 2) the value of the goods exchanged became sufficient to generate lasting impacts on all trading partners. It is true that important intercontinental trade existed prior to the 16th century, but there was no direct trade link between America and Asia before the founding of Manila as a Spanish entrepôt in 1571. Prior to that year, the world market was not yet fully coherent or complete; after that year it was. After more than 10,000 years of isolation, contacts between the Old World and the New World altered the trajectory of human evolution in profound (and sometimes disturbing) ways. For example, Old World diseases decimated the indigenous population

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of the Americas because New World inhabitants lacked immunity to Afro-Eurasian diseases, partly explaining why importation of African slaves was deemed a commercial necessity for exploitation of the vast resources of the New World. Europeans also introduced large domestic animals (horses and cattle) and numerous plants (wheat, sugar and oranges) into the Americas, permanently altering New World landscapes in the process. It is difficult to imagine places like Argentina, Mexico, and the United States in the absence of horses, cattle, and wheat today, for instance, yet these building blocks of society were entirely absent prior to contact with Europeans. Indeed, environments throughout the Americas were redirected along completely different trajectories as a result of new linkages with the Old World. Many such powerful forces of globalization were set in motion soon after Europeans arrived in the Americas, momentous forces that remain visible in the 21st century. However, it would be a mistake to think that the New World was merely an importer of agents of change. On the contrary, unique American plants and seeds were also exported, thus altering Old World landscapes fundamentally and permanently. Half of today’s human foodstuffs were introduced exclusively from the Americas, including corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, the peanut, beans, and scores of other plants, including tobacco. Scholars have admirably documented the history of these global linkages, and they make it clear that ecological and demographic consequences reverberated in multiple directions across the planet once the Americas were brought into the mix.3 Our own research attempts to explain the role played by the global silver market as an economic engine that helped to initiate and sustain structural transformations throughout the world.4 We explain how and why silver markets provoked the birth of global trade and the central role played by the world’s dominant economic power, China. In addition, we also emphasize that oceanic trade routes provided necessary vectors through which economic, ecological, and demographic forces spread globally. Today’s modern global system dates from the 16th century and China’s marketplace led the way.

E U R O P E A N DY N A M I S M?

After having explored the west coast of Africa earlier, Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the Americas (1492), sailed around the Cape of Good Hope (1497), and crossed the Pacific (1521), all within thirty years. Broadly speaking, this Age of European Exploration is overwhelmingly depicted by historians as having resulted from dynamism emanating from within Europe. European dynamism has been attributed to a variety of unique forces, including European science, advantageous geographic conditions, competition among numerous nation-states, favorable institutions, and even pro-capitalistic religious doctrines (in conjunction with other cultural factors). In other words, scholars have generally disagreed about the sources of European dynamism. The existence of Western Europe as a prime driving force on the world stage, on the other hand, has generally gone unquestioned.5

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Perceptions of European preeminence characterize the literatures on precious metals history as well. Specifically, 16th- and 17th-century monetary relations between Europe and Asia have been couched in terms that attribute dynamism to Europe and lassitude to non-Europe. The conventional interpretation can be summarized as follows. There was tremendous European demand for certain Asian products, including spices, ceramics, and silks that Europeans were incapable of producing. As a result, Europeans imported prodigious quantities of Asian products. Asian imports of European wares were paltry by comparison, on the other hand, partly because inward-looking Asian consumers were less adventuresome about purchase of foreign wares than were their European counterparts. From a European point of view, European imports from Asia were huge while European exports to Asia were meager. Europeans responded to massive net imports from Asia— a European balance-of-payments deficit—by sending cash monies to Asia decade after decade. Thus, the centuries-long flow of precious metals from Europe to Asia is ultimately attributable to lively purchasing habits by Europeans (compared with Asian consumers). Precious metals had to flow eastward to pay for net purchases from Asia. Again, this conventional explanation for global flows of precious metals is consistent with traditional “European dynamism” hypotheses. European consumers were far more receptive to Asian products than Asian consumers were regarding European products. A flow of monies from Europe to Asia was simply a reaction to European demand for non-monetary items produced in Asia. Our research casts a dramatically different light on monetary events and actors throughout the world, permitting a more balanced and less Eurocentric interpretation of the birth of globalization during this period. We unequivocally reject the conventional interpretation outlined immediately above. In other words, we dismiss the assertion that monetary metals flowed from Europe to Asia as passive balancing items that merely responded to an imbalance between the import and export of nonmonetary items. For if the conventional trade-deficit argument were true, then a variety of types of monies would have been expected to flow from Europe to Asia. Since several monetary substances were internationally recognized (such as silver, gold, copper, and cowry shells), merchants in Asia should have been indifferent about the particular mix of monies sent in payment by European purchasers. For example, reputable gold monies should have been just as welcome as reputable silver monies. But nothing of the sort actually happened. What did happen is that American silver flowed through (not “from”) Europe on its way to China (not to abstract “Asia”). Indeed, substantial volumes of another major monetary substance, gold, flowed in precisely the opposite direction simultaneously—from China to Europe—between the 1540s and 1640. Nor was this silver-forgold exchange a uniquely Europe-China phenomenon. Japan produced perhaps half as much silver as all of Spanish America during the 16th and 17th centuries. Virtually all Japanese silver was exported to the Chinese marketplace, and Japan simultaneously imported gold from China (as had Europe). Moreover, the Acapulco-Manila galleons carried 50 tons of American silver to China annually via the Pacific Ocean throughout the

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1600s, while gold flowed out of China and back to the Americas simultaneously. Thus, historical facts simply contradict the dominant trade-deficit hypothesis found in the historical literature today. The conventional thesis is powerless to explain why one particular monetary substance alone— silver—persistently flowed west-to-east along the Eurasian landmass and maritime routes, while another crucial monetary substance— gold— flowed east-to-west along these same trade routes. And it is obviously wrong to portray these monetary events in Europe-versus-Asia terms in any case; what would it mean to claim that Japan was “Western” in the 16th and 17th centuries? And a negligible fraction of the silver shipped through Europe was produced within Europe during our period. It was produced in America and was destined for China. Europeans also acted as intermediaries in the transshipment of Japanese silver to China. Not only are trade-imbalance arguments ineffective in elucidating why monetary substances flowed globally as they did, this conceptual apparatus precludes clear thinking on the topic.6 Historical evidence also contradicts trade-imbalance reasoning when we look at the other two main monetary substances in the world during this time period, copper and cowry shells. Sweden was the most important source of copper within Europe, but Japan produced perhaps twice as much copper as Sweden by the late 17th century. China again presented the largest end-market for Japanese copper, but substantial shipments also found their way to Europe. That is, Japanese copper flowed from Asian mines during a time when American silver continued to flow through Europe to Chinese markets. These monies never flowed systematically together. The world’s leading producer of cowry monies was the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean. Maldivian cowries were exported to markets throughout Asia, but European merchants also imported immense quantities of cowries (as ballast items) for the purpose of re-exporting them to West Africa at huge profit. Our central conclusion with respect to the world’s four leading monies, in other words, is that they never flowed in tandem anywhere in the world during these centuries. Since the conventional explanation claims that “money” in general flowed from Europe to Asia as a passive balancing item, contrary historical facts allow us to quite dogmatically reject the European-trade-deficit hypothesis. Modern economic theory, which teaches us to aggregate together various monetary substances (including silver coins, gold coins, copper coins, and cowries), has inadvertently precluded understanding of global monetary events during this period. Thus, we are forced to conceptually disaggregate individual monies and treat each separately, including silver. Doing so at a global level reveals immediately that it is a mistake to couch things in “East–West” terms. There was no imbalance of trade— East–West, North–South, Europe–Asia, or otherwise—for which monetary substances had to compensate. There was just trade. The one market most responsible for the birth of globalization was the silver trade. The most dynamic end-markets for silver in the world were in China. Europeans were important middlemen, as were innumerable non-Europeans who also devoted considerable energies to the pursuit of profit emanating from the global trade in silver and related products.

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C YC L E S O F S I LV E R

There were two silver cycles prior to the Industrial Revolution. We label one the Potosí/ Japan Silver Cycle, spanning a “silver century” from the 1540s to 1640s, and during which a preponderance of the world’s silver production was concentrated at mines in Potosí (modern-day Bolivia) and Japan. Thousands of tons of silver were transshipped throughout the world toward China; the price of silver in China had been pushed down to the world price by 1640. The world price of silver had itself fallen, to the cost of production, signaling the end of a century of super-profits. Later on came the Mexican Silver Cycle of 1700–1750, marked by an unprecedented explosion in Mexican silver production, also destined for Chinese markets. From the 1540s onward it became common knowledge among merchants, government officials, clerics, scholars, and others that China was the end market for American and Japanese silver. Indeed, there was no question about this later during an early stage of the Industrial Revolution. Adam Smith doubted neither the importance of silver in stimulating world trade, nor the central role of China. This is unsurprising because the relentless flow of American silver to China continued throughout Smith’s lifetime: The silver of the new continent seems in this manner to be one of the principal commodities by which the commerce between the two extremities of the old one [Europe and China] is carried on, and it is by means of it, in great measure, that those distant parts of the world are connected with one another.7

If it is permissible to designate any region of the earth as a dynamic center, then China is the prime candidate for centrality at the time globalization was born. China contained a larger proportion of world population in the 16th century than it does today (roughly 20% today versus 25%-plus then). China also contained cities of a million inhabitants and more by the year 1600, when the largest cities in Western Europe (London and Paris) contained perhaps 200,000 inhabitants each. With huge urban centers, vast rice lands, and per capita living standards among the highest in the world, no economy on earth dominated to the extent that the Chinese economy did at that time. European economies paled by comparison. No one would consider writing a 20th-century world history of the oil business without emphasizing the role of the world’s most prominent oil consumers. Yet trade histories routinely ignore the fact that China was for centuries the world’s dominant end-market for silver. Failure to look at trade relations from a truly global perspective has caused 20th-century historians and social scientists to lose sight of the fact that access to Asian markets guided merchant behavior worldwide. Among those merchants, however, the consolidation of Muslim trading networks since the 15th century and the arrival of Europeans in Asian waters in the 16th century had a lasting impact on world history:8

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East Asia had been in contact with the West for more than a millennium, largely through overland migrations and trade routes, but occasionally, indirectly by sea. Nothing in the previous experience of the peoples of the region prepared them, however, for the infinitely more intensive interaction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.9

It is important to understand that the European presence in Asia prior to the Industrial Revolution was confined to the archipelagoes and fringes of mainland Asia. Confrontations with mainland powers were out of the question. Manila was the headquarters of Spain’s Asian operation, while the Portuguese were located in Goa (in India) and Macao. The Dutch and English arrived early in the 17th century; the former centered in Batavia (Jakarta), while the latter gained a foothold with trading posts in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta on the Indian coast. Europeans could not begin to threaten Japan or the powers on Asia’s mainland. After expelling the Portuguese in the 1630s, for example, the Japanese used Dutch merchants as replacements. The Dutch were confined to a tiny artificial island called Deshima in Nagasaki Bay and the Shogun strictly controlled the terms of trade. But why were Europeans anxious to reach the fringes of Asia? The answer is that they wanted to plug into the world’s most lucrative markets. Nobody could compete with Asian producers of spices, silks, and ceramics— and in the 18th century, tea— all highly-prized commodities the world over. But what could Europeans offer to exchange for such valuables? The answer is one dominant product: silver. As mentioned already, silver gravitated overwhelmingly to end-market China. The reason is simply that the price of silver in China was double its price in the rest of the world. A paper money system had existed in China since at least the 11th century, but fiscal problems led to over-issues and the collapse of the Ming monetary system in the middle of the 15th century. Merchants, especially in maritime regions of China, converted to the use of silver as a monetary base.10 As this trend toward conversion to silver money expanded, local and regional governments increasingly converted tax payments to silver as well. Although the Ming Dynasty long opposed the silverization movement, which had moved “from the bottom up,” acquiescence to this irresistible trend was eventually institutionalized in the form of the “Single-Whip Tax Reform” of the 1570s; a number of taxes were consolidated into a single empire-wide tax, payable exclusively in silver (even by peasants). As already noted, China contained at least a quarter of the world’s population and huge cities (e.g. 1 million in Nanjing and 660,000 in Beijing), so the conversion of China’s monetary and fiscal systems to a silver base had a momentous impact. Moreover, because of China’s extensive tributary system, domestic silverization created a ripple effect reaching far beyond Chinese borders: The entire tribute and interregional trade zone had its own structural rules that exercised a systematic control through silver circulation and with the Chinese tribute trade at the center. This system, encompassing East and South-East Asia was articulated with neighboring trade zones such as India, the Islamic region and Europe.11

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The Chinese conversion to silver caused the market value of the white metal to soar far higher in China than in America, Japan, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. Regionally-divergent bimetallic ratios provide a clear indicator of the inflated value of silver in China vis-à-vis the rest of the world. In the early 16th century, the gold/silver ratio in China stood at 1:6, while in “contrast the gold/silver ratio hovered around 1:12 in Europe, 1:10 in Persia, and 1:8 in India.”12 No wonder it was specifically silver that flooded into China for centuries; the Chinese simply offered the best price for this product. Rather than depicting this flow as a passive effect of disequilibrium in non-monetary trade, therefore, it is better to recognize that disequilibrium within the silver market itself was an active cause of global trade. After a half-century interlude, a “Mexican Silver Cycle” (1700–1750) followed the formula established by its 1540s–1640s predecessor, but it also involved seismic environmental shifts.13 China’s population increased dramatically during the 18th century at a time when its cultivated acreage expanded by perhaps half. According to a prominent sinologist, much of China’s “population growth in the 18th century was speeded up by a massive ecological change: the introduction of new crops into China from the New World [sweet potatoes, peanuts, and maize].”14 These population dynamics were related to increased commercialization and further ecological changes within China.15 In simple terms, China’s 18th century population and market growth implied yet another immense increase in China’s demand for silver. It was this resultant demandside pressure that caused the value of silver within China to spike some 50% above silver’s price in the rest of the world (i.e., bimetallic ratios diverged again). Along with supply-side dynamics within Mexico’s mining industry, China’s demographic revolution was responsible for the world’s second silver boom during the first half of the 18th century. More Spanish American silver was produced in the 18th century (mostly from Mexican mines) than in the 16th and 17th centuries combined. High-quality pieces of eight16 coined in Mexico became by far the most dominant monetary substance in history. Trade circuits worldwide were inundated with silver headed for Chinese markets, and by 1750 the Chinese price of silver had once again (like in 1640) descended to its price in the rest of the world. Super-profits again disappeared. The trends outlined above help to clarify a sea change in foreign commerce in the middle of the 18th century in Asia. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 led to British control of Bengal. Profits from trade with China buttressed Britain’s position “in the East during the three decades of the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s . . . decades of rising British power and of French and Dutch decline.”17 The British managed to gain control of a new, rapidly growing market involving the sale of Bengali opium to China in exchange, in part, for Chinese exports of tea. The point is not that silver flows to China stopped during the second half of the 18th century—they did not—but rather that opium and tea became the high-profit markets, with silver playing a complementary role in terms of profitability. London tea imports reached a weight of 2.5 million pounds by 1760, 9 million pounds by 1769– 70, 14 million pounds in 1785– 86, and 23 million pounds by the end of the

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century,18 and this opium traffic “grew more than twentyfold between 1729 and 1800, which helped to staunch the flow of bullion from Britain to China.”19 But the Chinese history of opium consumption was itself linked to American tobacco introduced via the Philippines in the sixteenth century: “The habit of opium smoking in China was an offshoot and development of tobacco smoking.”20 Once again, an important biological exchange involved an American crop. This time, tobacco was tied to the consumption of opium, a more lucrative (for the British) Chinese import than was the (complementary) American silver during the second half of the 18th century. So lucrative was the British opium monopoly that the East India Company earned clear profit of at least 100% even on sales in Calcutta to the Dutch.21 The British tea-and-opium connection itself was part and parcel of complex trade connections at the global level. English people consumed sugar with tea, for example, which required importation of prodigious quantities of slave-produced sugar from the Americas. No one questions European and US superiority in military and economic terms after the Industrial Revolution, including their ability to dominate land-based Asian powers as the nineteenth century progressed. It is important to recognize, however, that economic dominance by Europe, the United States (and later by Japan) is a post–Industrial Revolution phenomenon: Just 200 years ago, two other countries—India and China— accounted for two thirds of the world’s economic output . . . How did industry and European-style countries called nation-states—rather than highly developed agrarian empires like China and India— come to define our world?22

Lest the reader be tempted to dismiss statements concerning Asian economic prowess as current fashionable opinions, consider the words of prominent 18th-century analysts writing about their own times. David Hume stated that “a Chinese works for threehalfpence a day, and is very industrious. Were he as near us as France and Spain, every thing we use would be Chinese . . . ”23 Adam Smith asserted matter-of-factly: “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe, and the difference between the price of subsistence in China and in Europe is very great. Rice in China is much cheaper than wheat anywhere in Europe.”24 Kenneth Pomeranz’s award-winning book The Great Divergence contains a systematic comparison of standards of living in Europe vis-à-vis China.25 He concludes that Europe’s most advanced regions had achieved a per capita standard of living roughly equal to those of advanced regions in China by the time of the Industrial Revolution: In sum, core regions in China and Japan circa 1750 seem to resemble the most advanced parts of western Europe, combining sophisticated agriculture, commerce, and nonmechanized industry in similar, arguably even more fully realized, ways. (p. 17) . . . [And] eighteenth-century China (and perhaps Japan as well) actually came closer to resembling the neoclassical ideal of a market economy than did western Europe. (p. 70)

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Pomeranz contends that all advanced regions within the Eurasian landmass were facing serious problems in terms of exhaustion of natural and man-made resources prior to the Industrial Revolution. It appeared unlikely that any such region could have sustained existing standards of living, never mind vaulting into a new industrial era. One of the crucial advantages enjoyed by certain European powers (especially England), according to Pomeranz, was access to the vast natural resources of the Americas. His book is filled with quantitative estimates of the significance of this European advantage. No Asian power enjoyed access to a parallel environmental bonus. It remains to be seen whether Pomeranz’s hypothesis will withstand waves of criticism that will no doubt be launched. His impressive scholarship and bold stance, however, assure that future debates on the Industrial Revolution must necessarily be cast in global terms. Henceforth, all competing hypotheses must respond at a global level of analysis.

CONCLUSION

Absence of consensus concerning a workable definition of the term “globalization” has produced debates that lack intellectual rigor. Our contention is that globalization is an historical process with characteristics that can be identified and systematically studied. The birth of globalization occurred in 1571, the year that Manila was founded as a Spanish entrepôt connecting Asia and the Americas via the Manila Galleons route. After more than 10,000 years of isolation, the “Columbian Exchange” (Atlantic) and the “Magellan Exchange”26 (Pacific) permanently linked all populated continents in terms of trade, diseases, ecologies, and cultures. For the 16th through the 18th centuries, silver was an essential commodity that linked the world and China was its dominant endmarket. A new historiography has emerged that also places the Industrial Revolution and so-called Western predominance in a global context. We recognize that specific eras involve unique circumstances and transformations that alter the rhythms of the world economy. For example, new Asian exports in the 18th century like tea and opium were added to traditional exports of preceding centuries such as silks, porcelain and spices. Technological innovations continue to increase the speed of production and exchange, but our world economy today is a consequence of historical forces that continue to evolve since 16th-century beginnings.

NOTES

1. Raymond Grew, “Food and Global History,” in Raymond Grew (ed.), Food in Global History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999, p. 5. 2. See www.thewha.org for further information. 3. A.W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972; A.W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900– 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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4. See D.O. Flynn and A. Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origins of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 201–221. 5. For recent exceptions to the European preeminence hypothesis, see J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York: Guilford Press, 1993; M. Lewis and K. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; and Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. For a recent restatement of traditional views, see David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, New York: Norton, 1998. 6. K.N. Chaudhuri has long recognized the need to conceptually separate intercontinental movements of gold from intercontinental movements of silver. Chaudhuri urged a return to the reasoning of Classical economists like David Ricardo. See, for example, K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the East India Company 1660– 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 156. 7. Smith, 1965 (1776), p. 207. 8. Zheng He, famous commander of Ming China’s fleets of the early 15th century, was himself a Muslim. 9. Warren I. Cohen, East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 215. 10. For a long-term monetary history of China, see the landmark treatise: Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000– 1700. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 11. Tekeshi Hamashita, “The Tribute System of Modern Asia,” in A.J.H. Latham and H. Kawakatsu, eds., Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 97. 12. Richard von Glahn, 1996, p. 127. 13. See D.O. Flynn and A. Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-18th Century,” Journal of World History (forthcoming, Fall 2002). 14. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990, p. 95. 15. See Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 16. Pieces of eight were also called “piastres” or “Spanish dollars” or “pesos” and were coins of eight “reals”; a “real” of silver weighed 3.44 grams until 1686. 17. Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient 1600– 1800. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976, p. 176. 18. Furber, 1976, p. 175. 19. K. Pomeranz and S. Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. Armonk, N.Y. and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1999, p. 103. 20. Jonathan D. Spence, Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1992, p. 231.

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21. Carl A. Troki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750– 1950, Asia’s Transformations. London: New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 54. 22. Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, p. 2. 23. “Hume to Oswald, 1 November 1750,” in Eugene Rotwein (ed.), David Hume Writings on Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970, p. 198. 24. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House, 1965 [1776], p. 189. 25. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 26. See John R. McNeill (ed.), Environmental History in the Pacific World. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, pp. xix–xx.

W H AT I S T H E C O N C E P T O F G LO B A L I Z AT I O N G O O D FO R ? AN AFRICAN HIS TORIAN’S PERSPEC TIVE Frederick Cooper

There are two problems with the concept of globalization, first the “global,” and second the “-ization.” The implication of the first is that a single system of connection—notably through capital and commodities markets, information flows, and imagined landscapes—has penetrated the entire globe; and the implication of the second is that it is doing so now, that this is the global age. There are certainly those, not least of them the advocates of unrestricted capital markets, who claim that the world should be open to them, but this does not mean that they have got their way. Nevertheless, many critics of market tyranny, social democrats who lament the alleged decline of the nation-state, and people who see the eruption of particularism as a counterreaction to market homogenization, give the boasts of the globalizers too much credibility. Crucial questions do not get asked: about the limits of interconnection, about the areas where capital cannot go, and about the specificity of the structures necessary to make connections work. Behind the globalization fad is an important quest for understanding the interconnectedness of different parts of the world, for explaining new mechanisms shaping the movement of capital, people, and culture, and for exploring institutions capable of regulating such transnational movement. What is missing in discussions of globalization today is the historical depth of interconnections and a focus on just what the structures and limits of the connecting mechanisms are. It is salutary to get away from whatever tendencies there may have been to analyze social, economic, political, and cultural processes as if they took place in national or continental containers; but to adopt a language

This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Frederick Cooper’s “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective” was originally published in African Affairs 100, 399 (April 2001): 189–213. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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that implies that there is no container at all, except the planetary one, risks defining problems in misleading ways. The world has long been— and still is— a space where economic and political relations are very uneven; it is filled with lumps, places where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not, where social relations become dense amidst others that are diffuse. Structures and networks penetrate certain places and do certain things with great intensity, but their effects tail off elsewhere. The present article is written by a historian whose research has focused on the study of colonial empires, particularly in Africa. Specialists on Africa, among others, have been drawn into the globalization paradigm, positing “globalization” as a challenge which Africa must meet, or else as a construct through which to understand Africa’s place in a world whose boundaries are apparently becoming more problematic.1 My concern here is with seeking alternative perspectives to a concept that emphasizes change over time but remains ahistorical, and which seems to be about space, but which ends up glossing over the mechanisms and limitations of spatial relationships. Africanists, I shall argue, should be particularly sensitive to the time-depth of cross-territorial processes, for the very notion of “Africa” has itself been shaped for centuries by linkages within the continent and across oceans and deserts—by the Atlantic slave trade, by the movement of pilgrims, religious networks, and ideas associated with Islam, by cultural and economic connections across the Indian Ocean. The concept cannot, I will also argue, be salvaged by pushing it backwards in time, for the histories of the slave trade, colonizing, and decolonization, as well as the travails of the era of structural adjustment fit poorly any narrative of globalization—unless one so dilutes the term that it becomes meaningless. To study Africa is to appreciate the long-term importance of the exercise of power across space, but also the limitations of such power.2 The relevance of this history today does not lie in assimilation of old (colonial) and new (global) forms of linkages but in the lessons it provides about both the importance and the boundedness of long-distance connections. Historical analysis does not present a contrast of a past of territorial boundedness with a present of interconnection and fragmentation, but a more back-and-forth, varied combination of territorializing and deterritorializing tendencies. Today, friends and foes of globalization debate “its” effects. Both assume the reality of such a process, which can either be praised or lamented, encouraged or combated.3 Are we asking the best questions about issues of contemporary importance when we debate globalization? Instead of assuming the centrality of a powerful juggernaut, might we do better to define more precisely what it is we are debating, to assess the resources which institutions in different locations within patterns of interaction possess, to look towards traditions of transcontinental mobilization with considerable time depth? Globalization is clearly a significant “native’s category” for anyone studying contemporary politics. Anyone wishing to know why particular ideological and discursive patterns appear in today’s conjuncture needs to examine how it is used. But is it also a useful analytical category? My argument here is that it is not. Scholars who use it analytically risk being trapped in the very discursive structures they wish to analyze.

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Most important in the term’s current popularity in academic circles is how much it reveals about the poverty of contemporary social science faced with processes that are large-scale, but not universal, and with the fact of crucial linkages that cut across state borders and lines of cultural difference but which nonetheless are based on specific mechanisms within certain boundaries. That global should be contrasted with local, even if the point is to analyze their mutual constitution, only underscores the inadequacy of current analytical tools to analyze anything in between. Can we do better? I would answer with a qualified yes, but mainly if we seek concepts that are less sweeping, more precise, which emphasize both the nature of spatial linkages and their limits, which seek to analyze change with historical specificity rather than in terms of a vaguely defined and unattainable end-point.

V I E W S O F G L O B A L I Z AT I O N

The first way in which globalization is frequently talked about can be termed the Banker’s Boast. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the market orientation of Communist China, investments supposedly can go anywhere. Pressure from the United States, the IMF, and transnational corporations brings down national barriers to the movement of capital. This is in part an argument for a new regulatory regime, one which lowers barriers to capital as well as trade flow, and which operates on a global level. It is also an argument about discipline: the world market, conceived of as a web of transactions, now forces governments to conform to its dictates. “Globalization” is invoked time and time again to tell rich countries to roll back the welfare state and poor ones to reduce social expenditures—all in the name of the necessities of competition in a globalized economy.4 Next comes the Social Democrat’s Lament. This accepts the reality of globalization as the bankers see it, but instead of claiming that it is beneficial for humankind, it argues the reverse. The social democratic left has devoted much of its energy to using citizenship to blunt the brutality of capitalism. Social movements thus aim for the nation-state, the institutional basis for enforcing social and civic rights. Whereas the enhanced role of the nation-state reflected organized labour’s growing place within the polity, “globalization” has allegedly undermined the social project by marginalizing the political one. In some renderings, globalization must therefore be fought, while, in others, it has already triumphed and there is little to do except lament the passing of the nation-state, of national trade union movements, of empowered citizenries.5 Finally comes the Dance of the Flows and the Fragments. This argument accepts much of the other two—the reality of globalization in the present and its destabilizing effect on national societies— but makes another move. Rather than homogenize the world, globalization reconfigures the local. But not in a spatially confined way. People’s exposures to media—to dress, to music, to fantasies of the good life— are highly fragmented; bits of imagery are detached from their context, all the more attractive because of the distant associations they evoke. Hollywood imagery influences people in the

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African bush; tropical exoticism sells on rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. This detachment of cultural symbolism from spatial locatedness paradoxically makes people realize the value of their cultural particularity. Hence a sentimental attachment to “home” by migrants who do not live there but who contribute money and energy to identity politics. As flows of capital, people, ideas, and symbols move separately from one another, the dance of fragments takes place within a globalized, unbounded space.6 There is something in each of these conceptions. What is wrong with them is their totalizing pretensions and their presentist periodization. The relationship of territory and connectivity has been reconfigured many times; each deserves particular attention.7 Changes in capital markets, transnational corporations, and communications in recent decades deserve careful attention, but one should not forget the vast scale on which investment and production decisions were made by the Dutch East India Company— linking the Netherlands, Indonesia, and South Africa and connecting to ongoing trading networks throughout south-east Asia—in the sixteenth century. Some scholars argue that the “really big leap to more globally integrated commodity and factor markets” was in the second half of the nineteenth century, that “world capital markets were almost certainly as well integrated in the 1890s as they were in the 1990s.” Such arguments work better for OECD countries than elsewhere and do not adequately express qualitative change, but economic historians still stress that the great period of expansion of international trade and investment— and their importance to shaping economic interdependence—was the decades before 1913, followed by a dramatic loss of economic integration after that date. For all the growth in international trade in recent decades, as a percentage of world GDP it has only barely regained levels found before the First World War. Paul Bairoch emphasizes “fast internationalization alternating with drawback” rather than evidence of “globalization as an irreversible movement.” The extensive work now being done on specific patterns of production, trade, and consumption, on national and international institutions, and on existing and possible forms of regulation is salutary; fitting it all into an “-ization” framework puts the emphasis where it does not belong.8 The movement of people, as well as capital, reveals the lumpiness of cross-border connections, not a pattern of steadily increasing integration. The highpoint of intercontinental labour migration was the century after 1815. Now, far from seeing a world of falling barriers, labour migrants have to take seriously what states can do. France, for example, raised its barriers very high in 1974, whereas in the supposedly less globalized 1950s Africans from French colonies, as citizens, could enter France and were much in demand in the labour market. Aside from family reconstitution, labour migrations to France have become “residual.”9 Clandestine migration is rampant, but the clandestine migrant cannot afford the illusion that states and institutions matter less than “flows.” Illegal (and legal) migration depends on networks that take people to some places but not others. Other sorts of movements of people follow equally specific paths. Movements of diasporic Chinese, within and beyond southeast Asia, are based on social and cultural strategies that enable mobile businessmen and migrating workers to adjust to

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different sovereignties while maintaining linkages among themselves. As Aihwa Ong argues, such movements do not reflect the diminishing power of the states whose frontiers they cross, or undermine those states; rather, such states have found new ways of exercising power over people and commodities.10 We need to understand these institutional mechanisms, and the metaphor of “global” is a bad way to start. The deaths of the nation-state and the welfare state are greatly exaggerated. The resources controlled by governments have never been higher. In OECD countries in 1965, governments collected and spent a little over 25 percent of GDP; this has increased steadily, reaching close to 37 percent in the supposedly global mid-1990s.11 Welfare expenditures remain at all-time highs in France and Germany, where even marginal reductions are hotly contested by labour unions and social democratic parties and where even conservatives treat the basic edifice as a given. The reason for this is contrary to both the Banker’s Boast and the Social Democrat’s Lament: politics. This point has been emphasized in regard to Latin America: both France and Brazil face tough international competition, but in France the welfare state can be defended within the political system, whereas in Brazil “globalization” becomes the rationale for dismantling state services and refraining from the obvious alternative—taxing the wealthy. In the more developed Latin American countries, taxes as a percentage of GNP are less than half the levels of western Europe.12 There are alternatives to acting in the name of globalization, which the Brazilian state has chosen not to pursue. But one should not make the opposite mistake and assume that in the past the nationstate enjoyed a period of unchallenged salience and unquestioned reference for political mobilization. Going back to the anti-slavery movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political movements have been transnational, sometimes focused on the “empire,” as a unit, sometimes on “civilization,” sometimes on a universalized humanity. Diasporic imaginations go well back too; the importance of deterritorialized conceptions of “Africa” to African Americans from the 1830s is a case in point. What stands against globalization arguments should not be an attempt to stuff history back into national or continental containers. It will not fit. The question is whether the changing meaning over time of spatial linkages can be understood in a better way than globalization. Globalization is itself a term whose meaning is not clear and over which substantial disagreements exist among those who use it. It can be used so broadly that it embraces everything and therefore means nothing. But for most writers, it carries a powerful set of images, if not a precise definition. Globalization talk takes its inspiration from the fall of the Berlin Wall, which offered the possibility or maybe the illusion that barriers to cross-national economic relations were falling. For friend and foe alike, the ideological framework of globalization is liberalism— arguments for free trade and free movement of capital. The imagery of globalization derives from the World Wide Web, the idea that the web-like connectivity of every site to every other site represents a model for all forms of global communication. Political actors and scholars differ on “its” effects: diffusion

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of the benefits of growth versus increasing concentration of wealth, homogenization of culture versus diversification. But if the word means anything, it means expanding integration, and integration on a planetary scale. Even differentiation, the globalizers argue, must be seen in a new light, for the new emphasis on cultural specificity and ethnic identification differs from the old in that its basis now is juxtaposition, not isolation. For all its emphasis on the newness of the last quarter-century, the current interest in the concept of globalization recalls a similar infatuation in the 1950s and 1960s: modernization.13 Both are “-ization” words, emphasizing a process, not necessarily fully realized yet but ongoing and probably inevitable. Both name the process by its supposed endpoint. Both were inspired by a clearly valid and compelling observation—that change is rapid and pervasive and both depend for their evocative power on a sense that change is not a series of disparate elements but the movement of them in a common direction. Modernization theory failed to do the job that theory is supposed to do, and its failure should be an illuminating one for scholars working in the globalization framework. Modernization theory’s central argument was that key elements of society varied together and this clustering produced the movement from traditional to modern societies: from subsistence to industrial economies, from predominantly rural to predominantly urban societies, from extended to nuclear families, from ascriptive to achieved status, from sacred to secular ideologies, from the politics of the subject to the politics of the participant, from diffuse and multi faceted to contractual relationships. The flaws of modernization theory parallel those of globalization. The key variables of transition did not vary together, as much research has shown. Most important modernization, like globalization, appears in this theory as a process that just happens, something self-propelled. Modernization talk masked crucial questions of the day: were its criteria Eurocentric, or even more so, based on an idealized vision of what American society was supposed to be like? Was change along such lines just happening or was it being driven—by American military might or the economic power of capitalist corporations? The contents of the two approaches are obviously different and I do not wish to push the parallel beyond the observation that modernization and globalization represent similar stances in relation to broad processes. Both define themselves by naming a future as an apparent projection of a present, which is sharply distinguished from the past. For the social scientist, the issue is whether such theories encourage the posing of better, more precise questions or slide over the most interesting and problematic issues about our time.

D O I N G H I S T O R Y B A C K WA R D S : C O L O N I Z AT I O N A N D T H E “A N T E C E D E N T S ” O F G L O B A L I Z AT I O N

Scholars working within globalization paradigms differ over whether the present should be considered the latest of a series of globalizations, each more inclusive than the last, or a global age distinct from a past in which economic and social relations were contained

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within nation-states or empires and in which interaction took place among such internally coherent units. Both conceptions share the same problem: writing history backwards, taking an idealized version of the “globalized present” and working backwards to show either how everything led up to it (“proto-globalization”) or how everything, up to the arrival of the global age itself, deviated from it. In neither version does one watch history unfold over time, producing dead ends as well as pathways leading somewhere, creating conditions and contingencies in which actors made decisions, mobilized other people, and took actions which both opened up and constrained future possibilities.14 Let us take an example from where I left off in the last section: the colonizations by European powers in Africa in the late nineteenth century. At first glance, this fits a metahistory of integration—however ugly some of its forms may have been— of apparently isolated regions into what was becoming a singular, European-dominated “globality.” Colonial ideologists themselves claimed that they were “opening up” the African continent. But colonization does not fit the interactive imagery associated with globalization. Colonial conquests imposed territorial borders on long-distance trading networks within Africa and monopolies on what was then a growing external trade, damaging or destroying more articulated trading systems crossing the Indian Ocean and the Sahara desert and along the West African coast. Africans were forced into imperial economic systems focused on a single European metropole. More profoundly, colonial territories were highly disarticulated politically, socially, and economically: colonizers made their money by focusing investment and infrastructure on extremely narrow, largely extractive, forms of production and exchange.15 They taught some indigenous peoples some of what they needed to interact with Europeans, and then tried to isolate them from others whose division into allegedly distinct cultural and political units (“tribes”) was emphasized and institutionalized. There might be a better case for calling colonization “deglobalization” than globalization, except that the prior systems were constituted out of specific networks, with their own mechanisms and limits, and that colonial economies were in reality cross-cut by numerous networks of exchange and sociocultural interaction (also dependent on specific mechanisms and bounded in particular ways). To study colonization is to study the reorganization of space, the forging and unforging of linkages; to call it globalization, distorted globalization, or deglobalization is to measure colonization against an abstract standard with little relation to historical processes. Was decolonization a step towards globalization? It was literally a step toward internationalization, that is, a new relationship of nation-states, which is what globalizers, with reason, try to distinguish from globalization. Newly independent states were at pains to emphasize their national quality, and economic policy often relied on importsubstitution industrialization and other distinctly national strategies to shape such an economic unit. Does the era of Structural Adjustment Plans, imposed on now hapless African states by international financial institutions such as the IMF, at last represent the triumph of globalization on a resistant continent? That certainly was the goal: IMF policy is consis-

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tent with the Banker’s Boast, an imposed lowering of barriers to capital flows, reduction of tariff barriers, and aligning of currency on world markets. But was that the effect? It takes a big leap to go from the Banker’s Boast to a picture of actual integration. In fact, Africa’s contribution to world trade and its intake of investment funds were larger in the days of national economic policy than in the days of economic openness.16 Shall we call this the age of globalizing deglobalization in Africa, or of distorted globalization? Is Africa the exception that proves the rule, the unglobalized continent, and is it paying a heavy price for its obstinacy in the face of the all-powerful world trend? The problem with making integration the standard— and measuring everything else as lack, failure, or distortion—is that one fails to ask what is actually happening in Africa. The downsizing of governments and the loosening of investment and trade regulations are important trends, but they reflect the force of proglobalization arguments within institutions like the IMF rather than an ongoing process. Rule-making is not production, exchange, or consumption. All of those depend on specific structures, and these need to be analyzed in all their complexity and particularity. Africa is filled with areas where international investors do not go, even where there are minerals that would repay investors’ efforts. To get to such places requires not deregulation, but institutions and networks capable of getting there. One could make related arguments about China, where the state’s economic role and importance in mediating relations with the outside world are far too strong for the globalization paradigm, or Russia, where oligarchies and mafias imply a model focused on networks more than integrative world markets. Africa now appears to be part of the half of the globe that is not globalized. Better, however, to emphasize not a “globalizing” (or “deglobalizing”) Africa (or China, or Russia), but rather the changing relationships of externally based firms and financial organizations, of indigenous regional networks, or transcontinental networks, of states, and of international organizations.17 Some linkages, such as the relationships of transnational oil companies to the state in Nigeria or Angola, are narrowly extractive in one direction and provide rewards to gatekeeping elites in the other. There is nothing web-like about this. At another extreme are the illicit networks that send out diamonds from the rebelcontrolled areas of Sierra Leone and Angola and bring in arms and luxury goods for warlords and their followers. Such networks are built out of young people detached (or kidnapped) from their villages of origin, and flourish in contexts where young men have few routes to a future other than joining the forces assembled by a regional warlord. These systems are linked to diamond buyers and arms sellers in Europe (sometimes via South African, Russian, or Serbian pilots), but they depend on quite specific mechanisms of connections. Rather than integrating the regions in which they operate, they reinforce fragmentation and reduce the range of activities in which most people in a violence-torn region can engage.18 . . . The modern version provides a product to be enjoyed by people in distant lands, who do not necessarily ask where the diamonds come

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from any more than the consumers of sugar in nineteenth-century England wanted to know about the blood in which their sugar was soaked. And now there are “international issue networks” developing to tell the diamond users in Europe and North America about this blood, using a similar universalistic language to that of the anti-slavery movement of the early nineteenth century.

MORE THAN LOC AL AND LESS THAN GLOBAL: N E T W O R K S ,  S O C I A L F I E L D S , D I A S P O R A S

How does one think about African history in ways that emphasize spatial connection but do not assume the “global”? The vision of the colonial official or the 1930s anthropologist of Africa divided neatly into culturally distinct, self-conscious units did not work, despite the tendency of official myths to create their own reality. By the 1950s and 1960s, anthropologists were using other concepts: the “social situation,” the “social field,” and the “network.” The first two emphasized that in different circumstances Africans constructed distinct patterns of affinity and moral sanction and moved back and forth between them; class affiliation might be operative in a mining town, deference to elders in a village. Conquest itself created a “colonial situation,” as Georges Balandier described it in a pathbreaking article in 1951, defined by external coercion and racialized ideology within a space marked by conquest boundaries; Africans, far from living within their bounded tribes, had to manoeuvre within— or try to transform—the colonial situation. The network concept stressed the webs of connection which people developed as they crossed space, countering the somewhat artificial notion of “situations” as being spatially distinct.19 These terms did not provide a template for analyzing a structure, but they directed the researcher towards empirical analysis of how connections were formed, towards defining units of analysis by observation of the boundaries of interaction. They encouraged studying the channels through which power was exercised. These concepts thus had their limits. . . . Nevertheless, one can use such a framework to study the merchant diasporas of West Africa—in which Islamic brotherhoods as well as kinship and ethnic ties maintained trust and information flows across long distances and during transactions with culturally distinct populations— or the long-distance migrant labour networks of southern Africa.20 The network concept puts as much emphasis on nodes and blockages as on movement, and thus calls attention to institutions, including police controls over migration, licensing, and welfare systems. It thus avoids the amorphous quality of an anthropology of flows and fragments. These concepts open the door to examination of the wide variety of units of affinity and mobilization, the kinds of subjective attachments people form and the collectivities that are capable of action. One is not limited by supposedly primordial identifications, to the “tribe” or “race” for instance, or to a specific space. One can start with identification with “Africa” itself and study the diasporic imagination, for “Africa” as a space to

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which people attached meaning was defined less by processes within the continental boundaries than by its diaspora. If slave traders defined Africa as a place where they could legitimately enslave people, their victims discovered in their ordeal a commonality which defined them as people with a past, with a place, with a collective imagination. When African-American activists in the early nineteenth century began to evoke images of “Africa” or “Ethiopia,” they were making a point within a Christian conception of universal history rather than a reference to particular cultural affinities. The meanings of Africa-consciousness have been varied, and their relationship to the particulars of Africa even more so. J. Lorand Matory argues that certain African “ethnic groups” defined themselves in the course of an African-American dialogue under the influence of former slaves who returned to the region of their fathers and advocated forms of collective identification that transcended regional divisions and which were based as much on an imagined future as a claimed past.21 The spatial imagination of intellectuals, missionaries, and political activists, from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, was thus varied. It was neither global nor local, but was built out of specific lines of connection and posited regional, continental and transcontinental affinities. These spatial affinities could narrow, expand, and narrow again. Pan-Africanism was more salient in the 1930s and early 1940s than in the 1950s, when territorial units became more accessible foci of claims and when political imagination became (for a time at least) more national. French officials in the post-war decade tried to get Africans to imagine themselves in a different way, as citizens of a Union Française, and African politicians tried to use this imperial version of citizenship to make claims on the metropole. But imperial citizenship was ridden by too many contradictions and hypocrisies to constitute a plausible case to most Africans for supranational identification. French officials, realizing the cost of making imperial citizenship meaningful, backed away from it, using the word “territorialization” in the mid-1950s to emphasize that in conceding power to Africans the government was devolving on them the responsibility of meeting the demands of citizens with the resources of individual territories.22 Among the various possibilities—pan-African visions, large-scale federations, and imperial citizenship— the territorially bounded citizenship that Africans received was the product of a specific history of claims and counterclaims. One needs to look at other circuits: religious pilgrimages to Mecca and networks of training which Muslim clerics followed all over the Sahara desert, from the eighth century and intensely from the eighteenth; regional systems of shrines in central Africa; religious connections between Africans and African-American missionaries. The linkage between intra-African and extra-African networks is an old one: the Brazil-AngolaPortugal slave trading nexus; trans-Saharan commercial, religious, and scholarly networks connecting with Hausa and Mandingo systems within West Africa; a trading system extending from Mozambique Island through the Red Sea, southern Arabia, and the Persian Gulf to Gujarat; a Dutch-pioneered system that connected Indonesia, South Africa, and Europe, with tentacles reaching into the interior of southern Africa; the

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network of merchants and professionals across coastal West Africa, with links to Brazil, Europe, the Caribbean, and the West African interior, shaping racially and culturally mixed coastal communities; and, more recently, the horrifically effective networks of diamond and arms smugglers connecting Sierra Leone and Angola to Europe. One cannot argue that networks are soft and cosy and structures are hard and domineering.23 And one can look at border-crossing “issue networks,” of which the anti-slavery movement of the early nineteenth century was the great pioneer.24 Anti-colonial movements from the 1930s onwards were able to make the once ordinary category of “colony” into something unacceptable in international discourse largely because they linked activists in African towns and cities with principled groups in metropoles who in turn tied those issues to the self-conception of democracies. In South Africa in the early twentieth century, scholars have found in a single rural district linkages to church groups emphasizing Christian brotherhood, to liberal constitutionalist reforms in cities, to African-American movements, and to regional organizations of labour tenants.25 The shifting articulations of local, regional, and international movements shaped a political repertoire which kept a variety of possibilities alive and suggested ways of finding help in the African diaspora and in Euro-American issue networks. In the end, South African whites, who prided themselves on their own connections to the “Christian” and “civilized” West, lost the battle of linkages. Perhaps social democrats have better things to do than lament. The current efforts of trade unions and NGOs to challenge “global” capitalism via “global” social movements— such as those against sweat shops and child labour in the international clothing and shoe industries or the movement to ban “conflict diamonds”—have precedents going back to the late eighteenth century, and they have won a few victories along the way. Arguments based on the “rights of man” have as good a claim to “global” relevance as arguments based on the market. And in both cases, discourse has been far more global than practice.

RETHINKING THE PRESENT

The point of these short narratives is not to say that nothing changes under the sun. Obviously, the commodity exchange system, forms of production, the modalities of state interventions into societies, capital exchange systems, let alone technologies of communication, have changed enormously. The slave-sugar–manufactured goods commodity circuits of the eighteenth century had a vastly different significance for capitalist development in that era from that of the diamond-arms circuit today. My argument is for precision in specifying how such commodity circuits are constituted, how connections across space are extended and bounded, and how large-scale, long-term processes, such as capitalist development, can be analyzed with due attention to their power, their limitations, and the mechanisms which shape them. One can, of course, call all of this globalization, but that is to say little more than that history happens within the boundar-

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ies of the planet and therefore all history is global history. However, if one wants to use globalization as the progressive integration of different parts of the world into a singular whole, then the argument falls victim to linearity and teleology. The globalizers are right to tell us to look at long-distance connections. The difficulty is to come up with concepts that are discerning enough to say something significant about them. Like modernization theory, globalization draws its power from uniting diverse phenomena into a singular conceptual framework and a singular notion of change. And that is where both approaches occlude rather than clarify historical processes. But what about reversing the argument? Or admitting that there is little point in refining globalization by adding a historical dimension, and turning instead to the other position which some globalizers take: that the global age is now and it is clearly distinguished from the past. Here, my argument has been not against the specificity of the present, but whether characterizing it as global distinguishes it from the past. Communications revolutions, capital movements, and regulatory apparatuses all need to be studied and their relationships, mutually reinforcing or contradictory, explored. But we need a more refined theoretical apparatus and a less misleading rhetoric than globalization—Banker’s Boast, Social Democrat’s Lament, or the Dance of the Flows and Fragments—provides. I have argued this by looking both at the variety and specificity of cross-territorial connecting mechanisms in past and present and at the misleading connotations of the “global” and the “-ization.” The point goes beyond the academic’s quest for refinement: a lot is at stake in the kinds of questions which a conceptual apparatus brings to the fore. International financial institutions that tell African leaders that development will follow if they open up their economies will not get to the bottom of the continent’s problems unless they address how specific structures within African societies, within or across borders, provide opportunities and constraints for production and exchange, and how specific mechanisms in external commodity markets provide opportunities and blockages for African products. State institutions, oligarchies, warlords, regional mafias, commercial diasporas, oligopolistic foreign corporations, and varied networks shape the nature of capitalism and its highly uneven effects. Capitalism remains lumpy.26 It is no surprise that journalists and academics alike react with a sense of wonder to the multiplicity of forms of communication that have opened up (but are available only to some) and to the border-crossing strategies of many firms (but not others). The globalization fad is an understandable response to this sense of connectivity and opportunity, just as modernization theory was to the collapsing rigidities of European societies in the 1950s and the escape from the constraints of colonial empires. Globalization can be invoked to make a variety of claims, but it can also constrict the political imagination, occlude the power and importance of the long history of transnational mobilizations, and discourage focus on institutions and networks that can offer opportunities as well as constraints. Of course, all the changing forms of trans-continental connections, all the forms

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of integration and differentiation, of flows and blockages, of the past and present can be seen as aspects of a singular but complex process which we can label globalization. But that is to defend the concept by emphasizing how little it signifies. Words matter. The incessant talk about globalization— the word, the images associated with it, and arguments for and against “it”—both reflects and reinforces fascination in boundless connectivity. Yet scholars do not need to choose between a rhetoric of containers and a rhetoric of flows. They do not need to decide whether Africa is part of a necessary and universal trend or a peculiar and frustrating exception, but they can instead analyze how it and other regions are linked and bounded and how those links and boundaries shift over time. Activists are not faced with a singular force to oppose or promote, but they . . . need to understand with precision the patterns of interconnection, the choices and constraints which they imply, and the consequences of different sorts of actions along different sorts of interfaces. Not least of the questions which we should be asking concern the present: What is actually new? What are the mechanisms of ongoing change? And above all, can we develop a differentiated vocabulary that encourages thinking about connections and their limits?

NOTES

1. Both dimensions were evident in a conference on “Social Sciences and the Challenges of Globalization in Africa,” held in Johannesburg in September 1998 by the influential African research consortium, CODESRIA. The 2001 Congress of the Association of African Historians to be held in Bamako will devote itself to the theme “African Historians and Globalization.” The conference announcement (from a posting on H-Africa) begins, “Globalization is an omnipresent and inescapable fact.” For quite different examples of globalization in Africanist literature, see Caroline Thomas and Peter Wilkin, Globalization, Human Security, and the African Experience (Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 1999) and Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer (eds), Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Blackwell, Oxford, 1999). 2. Colonial studies now offer not only an argument about the ways in which European societies, and other empires as well, were constituted across space, but also an argument about the limitations and incoherences of colonial systems. See Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between metropole and colony: Rethinking a research agenda,” in F. Cooper and A. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp. 1–56. 3. Early on, globalization was a particularly American fad, but it has become more “global.” In France, for example, “mondialisation” is much debated in politics and increasingly in academic circles. If the “pros” dominate the American debate, the “antis” are prominent in France, and they even have their public hero, José Bové, arrested for wrecking a McDonalds. The Socialist Government argues that globalization can and should be regulated and controlled, but it does not question “its” reality. See “Proces Bové: La fête de l’antimondialisation,” Le Monde, 30 June 2000; “Gouverner les forces qui sont à l’oeuvre dans la mondialisation,” Le Monde, 27 June 2000. For different uses of the globalization con-

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cept by French academics, see GEMDEV (Groupement Economic Mondiale, Tiers-Monde, Developpement), Mondialisation: Les mots et les choses (Karthala, Paris, 1999); Serge Cordellier (ed.), La mondialisation au delà des mythes (La Decouverte, Paris, 2000, orig. 1997); Jean-Pierre Faugere, Guy Caire, et Bertrand Bellon (eds), Convergence et diversité a l’heure de la mondialisation (Economica, Paris, 1997); Philippe Chantpie et al., La nouvelle politique économique: L’etat face à la mondialisation (PUF, Paris, 1997). 4. This is the version of globalization one sees in the newspapers every day, and it can be found in vivid form in the book by New York Times’ correspondent Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1999). However, the probusiness The Economist has long held a more sceptical view, for it thinks the economy is not globalized enough. Among academic economists, advocates of globalization include Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996) and Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and and Strategy in the Interlinked World Economy (Harper, New York, 1990). See also Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Toward a New Global Age: Challenges and Opportunities (Policy Report) (OECD, Paris, 1997). 5. Susan Strange exaggerates the decline of the state but provides a valuable analysis of “nonstate authorities.” She finds the word “globalization” hopelessly vague. Saskia Sassen embraces “globalization” and treats it as a causative agent (“Globalization has transformed the meaning of . . . ”), But much of her work consists of useful and insightful discussion of  the intersection in cities of transnational migration and financial movements, as well as of the problems of regulation of interstate economic activities. She too emphasizes the declining relevance of states. See Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996); Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New Press, New York, 1998). For other versions of the decline of states see David Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995); Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (SAGE, London, 1994); Bertrand Badie, Un monde sans souveraineté: Les états entre ruse et responsabilité (Fayard, Paris, 1999). For one of many examples of the denunciatory mode of globalization literature, see Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999). 6. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996). What is striking to an historian about this book is Appadurai’s assertion of newness without the slightest effort to examine the past and his preference for inventing a new vocabulary (ethnoscapes, etc.) to characterize phenomena at a global level rather than making a sustained effort to describe the mechanisms by which connections occur. A related approach is used by two Africanists in Geschiere and Meyer, Globalization and Identity. 7. Some observers describe the present age as one of the “annihilation of space by time,” That, of course, is a nineteenth-century idea—from Marx— and space-time compression has had many moments. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989). 8. Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 2, 4; Paul Bairoch, “Globalization Myths and Realities: One Century of External Trade and Foreign Investment,” in Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache (eds), States against Markets: The

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Limits of Globalization (Routledge, London, 1996), p. 190. See also Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996) and Kevin R. Cox, Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (Guilford Press, New York, 1997). 9. Le Monde, 20 June 2000. 10. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1999). 11. “A survey of Globalisation and Tax,” The Economist, 29 January 2000, p. 6. 12. Atilio Boron, “Globalization: A Latin American Perspective.” Unpublished paper for CODESRIA conference, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1998. 13. Dean Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973), pp. 199–226. 14. An example of ascending globalizations can be found in the GEMDEV volume (Mondialisation), where Michel Beaud writes of “several globalizations,” and about “archeoglobalizations” and “proto-globalizations” (p. 11). In the same book, Gerard Kebabdjian makes the opposite argument, distinguishing between today’s “globalized” structure and colonial economies, which entailed exchange within bounded regimes (pp. 54–55). A variant between the two, in the same book, comes from Jean-Louis Margolin, who looks for “preceding phases of globalization” and then writes of “the distortion into colonial imperialism of the strong globalizing wave coming from the industrial and political revolutions” (p. 127), of “the aborted globalization surrounding Europe, 1850–1914” (p. 130), then of the “quasiretreat of the global economy by a third of Humanity” (under Communism, pp. 127, 130, 131). He ends up with a dazzling non-sequitur: “All this prepared the globalization, ‘properly speaking,’ of today” (p. 132). All three variants reduce history to teleology with little understanding of how human beings act in their own times and their own contexts. 15. On agriculture in colonial and postcolonial Africa—notably the importance of “exploitation without dispossession”— see Sara Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1993). 16. Africa’s share of world trade fell from over 3 percent in the 1950s to less than 2 percent in the 1990s, and to 1.2 percent if one excludes South Africa. Africans have the use of one telephone line per 100 people (1 per 200 outside of South Africa), compared with 50 in the world as a whole. Electricity is unavailable in many rural areas and does not always work in urban ones; mail services have deteriorated, and radio is often unusable because batteries are too expensive; millions of people get their information in an older way—by word of mouth. World Bank, Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000). 17. Beatrice Hibou, “De la privatisation des économies à la privatisation des états,” in B. Hibou (ed.), La privatisation des états (Karthala, Paris, 1999). 18. Rather than constitute alternatives to the state, such mechanisms more likely interact with state institutions and agents. See Janet Roitman, “The garrison-entrepôt,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 150–152 (1998), pp. 297–329; Karine Bennafla, “La fin des territoires nationaux?” Politique Africaine 73 (1999), pp. 24–49; Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou, La criminalisation de l’état en Afrique (Ed. Complexe, Paris, 1997). 19. Georges Balandier, “La situation coloniale: Approche théorique,” Cahiers Imemation-

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aux de Sociologie 11 (1951), pp. 44–79; Max Gluckman, “Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolution,” in Aidan Southall (ed.), Social Change in Modern Africa (Oxford University Press, London, 1961), pp. 67–82; J. Clyde Mitchell, Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analysis of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1969). 20. Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Migrants in Yoruba Towns (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1969). 21. James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Oxford University Press, New York, 1995); J. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999), pp. 72–103. 22. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996). 23. The variety and time-depth of diasporic phenomena, as well as the specificity of the mechanisms by which they were organized, are emphasized in Emmanuel Akyeampong, “Africans in the Diaspora; the Diaspora in Africa,” African Affairs 99 (2000), pp. 183–215. For a detailed study of transcontinental interconnection, see Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1820 (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1988). 24. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1975); Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1988). 25. William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1987). 26. As Hibou (“De la privatization”) shows, the privatization of nationalized companies in Africa produced something quite different from a “private sector” of competing firms connected to world markets: officials may privatize state-owned firms to themselves, leading to private accumulation through government, and narrow channels of interaction. Similarly, the Commonwealth of Independent States remains vastly different from post-1989 fantasies of market integration. Markku Lonkila, “Post-Soviet Russia? A Society of Networks?” in Markku Kangaspuro (ed.), Russia: More Different Than Most? (Kikimora, Helsinki, 1999), pp. 98–112.

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 9 Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. This book is an important contribution to the growing corpus of works that address broadly the development, contemporary significance, and methodological challenges of global history as a research field. Conrad brings fresh insights to the problem of defining global history relative to world history, big history, and globalization studies. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. China and the Birth of Globalization in the Sixteenth Century. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 2010. This collection of essays focuses on the central role of China in the global silver trade and the relationship of this trade to the

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evolution of global commodity markets. The authors posit that epidemiology, ecology, demographics, and culture shaped economic forces. They trace the evolution of interconnections between China, Japan, the Spanish empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Goucher, Candice. Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food. Armonk, NY: Routledge, 2013. Foodways provide an arena for cultural exchange, technology transfer, and commodities markets. Goucher considers the Caribbean as a crucible of creolization, beginning with the Columbian voyages. African cultural and culinary practices came to the region through the Atlantic slave trade. Plantation sugar production influenced food and beverages in the region. Indentured Asian plantation laborers also brought new cultural practices of food preparation and consumption. Goucher’s study shows that foodways can be a fascinating approach to understanding creolization. Hopkins, A. G. ed. Globalization in World History. London: Pimlico, 2002. Essays by Chris Bayly, Amira Bennison, John Lonsdale, and others emphasize the interrelations of empire and globalization. In his introductory chapter, Hopkins offers a lucid synthesis of the historiography of globalization, from its inception to the beginning of the twentyfirst century. He discusses two main questions: “What can historians contribute to the debate on globalization, and what can the debate on globalization contribute to the study of history?” Historians, he believes, can usefully weigh in on the question of whether or not globalization has produced a world fundamentally different from any earlier era. They may also explore new perspectives on a subject that has been too much constrained by Western angles of vision. Hunt, Lynn. Writing History in the Global Era. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Social history, ethnic history, feminist studies, and cultural studies have all challenged the dominant narrative of history from the mid-twentieth century onward. These approaches, with their attention to individual lives and new perspectives on the self taken from science and environmentalism, can challenge metanarratives of globalization. Mazlish, Bruce. The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Mazlish argues that a detailed historical analysis of the changing meanings of the concepts of humankind and humanity is critical not only to understanding the past and present but also to confronting future challenges. He explores the emergence of human rights as a legal concept, the United Nations as representative of humanity, and the meaning of the humanities and humanitarianism in the modern world. Osterhammel, Jürgen, and Niels P. Petersson. Globalization: A Short History. Translated by Dona Geyer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. The concept of globalization gained popularity in the 1990s as a way to explain the contemporary world. This book explores the different meanings and applications of that concept. It argues that globalization is not a twentieth-century phenomenon. It is a process whose origins date to the early modern long-distance trading networks. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pilcher explores the origins of indigenous Mexican cuisine. He argues that as Mexican cuisine was popularized in the United States as fast food, it sparked a debate about the authenticity of local cuisines in Mexico. He finds that “the struggle between industrialized Tex-Mex foods and Mexican peasant cuisines is one front in the much larger battle between globalization and national sovereignty.”

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HISTORY AND GLOBALIZATION

Prestholdt, Jeremy. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Locating global interconnectivity in the nineteenth century from the perspective of East African consumerism, Prestholdt challenges the assumption that globalization is a recent phenomenon driven by the West. He also demonstrates that African consumers, rather than accepting market forces imposed from outside, shaped networks of trade and consumption. Rosenberg, Emily, ed. A World Connecting: 1870– 1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012. Five interpretive essays explore the period of intensified globalization that was facilitated by technological advances in communication and transportation. The essays examine the tensions and contradictions of globalization through the lenses of modern state building, imperial expansion and contraction, shifting free and forced migration patterns, globalized commodity chains, and transnational cultural networks. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Nobel Prize–winning economist Stiglitz contributes to the contemporary globalization debate by critically analyzing the role of the International Monetary Fund and other global financial institutions in precipitating global economic crises. He argues that imposing financial policies on developing countries in the process of globalization has done more harm than good and that this approach “needs to be radically rethought.” Wright, Donald R. The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, the Gambia. 3rd ed. Armonk, NY: Routledge, 2015. This book exemplifies the writing of the history of globalization from the perspective of the local. It demonstrates how global events and processes shaped people’s lives in Niumi, a small and seemingly isolated subregion on the Gambia River in West Africa. Wright demonstrates how global forces shaped the environment and society in this locality from the earliest human settlements to the present.

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10 CRITIQUES AND QUESTIONS

IN T R O D U C T I O N

This final chapter of The New World History brings us full circle, from exploring the evolution of the field in Chapter 1 to considering critiques and questions that scholars have formulated about the field in recent years. Historians across the ideological spectrum have criticized the field as an intellectual project. The debate over Western civilization versus world history has faded as world history approaches have come to dominate the field in research, publication, and teaching. The tremendous growth of world history at the K–12 level in the United States, particularly in the high school Advanced Placement program, has generated the need for world history surveys at state universities and community colleges where the majority of teachers are trained. During the mid-1990s, conservative critics launched the “history wars” over the content of the new National History Standards, attacking what they believed was an anti-Western bias in the content of world history curricula.1 Other conservative critics of world history have continued to argue that survey courses based on a broad treatment of world civilizations or regions, even with the emphasis on connections and encounters, are too shallow to provide students with a meaningful historical understanding of their own world. They still lament the dilution of the Western triumphalist narrative, arguing that the present capitalist world order is dominated by Western values and scientific knowledge and should therefore be at the center of world history narratives. Despite the overwhelming success of multicultural approaches to teaching world history, these criti-

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cisms have not entirely abated. Critics on the left, on the contrary, argue that world history has not been able to overcome its essentially Eurocentric bias and has not escaped an inexorable rise-of-the-West narrative, despite the elaboration of connective, comparative, cross-cultural, and big history frameworks that aspire to be increasingly inclusive. Yet the multiculturalist approach now dominant in the field has arguably failed to solve the problem of how to represent a diverse spectrum of voices in world history surveys. For example, a sophisticated, comprehensive world history survey centered on gender has yet to be written. This is not to overlook the contributions of scholarship that investigates gendered identities and the construction of gender roles, but this work has been methodological, episodic, or tightly focused rather than centered on gender as a way to reshape world history narratives.2 Some critics point out that world history conversations in the United States continue to be dominated by American and European perspectives, with insufficient attention paid to alternative viewpoints that scholars in other countries, that is, outside America’s hegemonic institutional setting, have been generating. Finally, the proliferation of multiauthored world history textbooks for high school students or introductory undergraduate courses has resulted in a large number of “variations on a theme” rather than a reevaluation and reworking of the paradigm of world history itself. In other words, the argument runs, world history is becoming repetitive and self-referential. It remains therefore a fertile battlefield for culture wars in the United States when considered through its range of critics. On the one hand, challenges to world history have proliferated as the field has grown in the past decades. On the other hand, some critics wonder whether the new world history project began with an intellectual bang in its early days but is now fizzling as it becomes a new orthodoxy, at least in English-language publications. The essays in this chapter focus on a range of critiques from these latter perspectives. While conservative critiques still circulate, the range of challenges to the world history project coming from the intellectual left gives more insight into current debates in the field. Dominic Sachsenmaier suggests that critiques of the Eurocentric basis and Englishlanguage bias of world history are currently being heard in different parts of the world. This process is not new. Dependency theory emerged in Latin America during the 1950s and spread rapidly throughout the “third world” as the most influential early critique of modernization paradigms, but it still relied on the narratives of Western-centric globalization. Likewise, Immanuel Wallerstein’s model of world-systems theory, which developed as a historical analysis of the emergence of globalized capitalism from the early modern period, posited the West as the center and the rest of the world as “peripheries.” Historians such as Janet Abu-Lughod and Andre Gunder Frank challenged these narratives of Western dominance, arguing that the first “world system” emerged in Asia prior to the development of Wallerstein’s European-centered world-system (see Frank’s essay in Chapter 2) and that previous narratives have overstated European economic superiority, particularly over East and South Asia, before the Industrial Revolution (see Pomeranz’s essay in Chapter 7).

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Sachsenmaier’s critique is based on several trends in historical analysis. The emergence of subaltern studies as a “history from below” challenged the dominant perspective of colonizers in the writing of colonial history.3 Postmodern and postcolonial critiques of historical writing prompted a reevaluation of the concepts intrinsic to largescale analysis by provoking historians to examine their presumptions about the nature of facts and evidence, along with their own subjectivity in writing history. Examining the power structures embedded in colonial archives (and archives in general) became a subject for research by historians who had previously taken the ordering of categories and the preservation of documents in archival collections for granted rather than asking questions about why some documents were preserved and catalogued and others were not.4 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “provincializing” of Europe exposes the ideological basis of historicism, which posits that modernity originated in Europe and then spread globally over time.5 Kenneth Pomeranz’s comparison of England and the Yangtze River delta in The Great Divergence prompts the question of whether it makes analytical sense to include industrializing England and rural Greece in the same region during the nineteenth century.6 These interventions influenced historical analyses of the interplay between the local and the global. But Sachsenmaier goes one step further by suggesting that this “glocalization” could (and should) result in collaborative research and writing on globalization that takes account of multiple perspectives produced in disparate institutional locations. How can this “kaleidoscopic pattern” of “glocalized” world history be written? In his recent book Global Perspectives on Global History, Sachsenmaier traces in separate chapters the local historiographies of global history in the United States, Germany, and China. He suggests that the most powerful role of the “global historical trend” is to provide locally sensitive relevant historical understandings of contemporary global processes.7 The basis of these global histories must still be rooted in the nation for two main reasons. First, he argues, states provide the institutional framework in which academic historians produce knowledge about the past. Second, nations are still the dominant structure for public discourse, and it is imperative that historians participate in shaping public understandings of the “glocalized” past. But has “glocalization” gone far enough? Many scholars argue that it has not. Arif Dirlik, for example, returns to the persistent question “What is world history for?” to assert that many world historians have sought explicitly to overcome the biases of preceding generations by rejecting the nation as the natural unit of analysis (and of Europe as the cradle of the modern nation). For Dirlik, however, these historians have made uneven gains because alternative narratives of globalization and global history have not displaced Eurocentric concepts of spatiality and temporality. Local history production must still contend with globalizing impulses rooted in European experience.8 Vinay Lal, contributor of the second article in this chapter, sees Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History as an early challenge to Eurocentric thinking because Nehru framed world history from a local perspective. Lal pointedly asks why world historians

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have ignored Nehru’s vision. In a withering critique of the field, Lal argues that Nehru appears on the stage as a “world historical figure,” not as an intellectual writing world history. This sleight of hand, he contends, reinforces the implicit Eurocentrism of the world history project that still centers on the contribution of European intellectuals, whose ideas then spread to the rest of the world, instead of being formed through intellectual encounters taking place simultaneously in different contexts during this period. Criticizing world history as still embedded in the nation-state and containing a positivist and progressive intellectual agenda— even when the narrative focus is on cross-cultural encounters—Lal argues that this approach obscures earlier cosmopolitan perspectives. Lal also suggests that European colonization probably narrowed the worldview of subsequent generations of colonized peoples rather than bringing them into globalized modernity. World history emanating largely from the American academy is “thus one of the twenty-first century’s preeminent forms of colonizing knowledge— all the more insidious in that it appears to be as benign and ecumenical an enterprise as one can imagine.” The same year that Lal’s critique of academic world history appeared in the Radical History Review, Jerry Bentley published his overview of the evolution of world history scholarship in the Journal of World History. Bentley’s article, which is excerpted in this chapter (see another excerpt from this essay in Chapter 2), addresses both right- and leftwing critics of world history. On the left, he argues, Marxist critics such as Arif Dirlik have overstated their case that world history naturalizes the spread of global capitalism and Eurocentric knowledge. Bentley instead sees the potential for historians to overcome these earlier biases by centering alternative worldviews as foundational to human history. Postcolonial critics such as Lal and Chakrabarty, Bentley contends, have underestimated the extent to which many historians committed to the world history project are themselves involved in reevaluating Eurocentric biases of earlier metanarratives. He rejects the claim that professional historians are not openly engaged with critiques of their own analytical frameworks and argues that discarding historical scholarship as an intellectual enterprise, especially world history, is counterproductive to the aims of education in general. Bentley makes the argument for “ecumenical” world history based on “large-scale empirical narratives” that accommodate multiple perspectives and experiences rather than presenting a single totalizing metanarrative. The main elements of Bentley’s ecumenical narrative “are rising human population, expanding technological capacity, and increasing prominence of cross-cultural interaction over time . . . that have profoundly influenced the world and its development through time.” Bentley has consistently endorsed the project of world history as having moral value in promoting understanding of human differences, commonalities, and connections.9 Joseph Miller, a historian of Africa, takes up the challenge that an expanded vision of area studies perspectives poses to writing world history. The University of South Carolina Press published Miller’s “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multicentric World History Needs Africa” in a collection of essays by several Africanists; these essays first appeared in the journal Historically Speaking in a 2004 forum on

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Africa and world history. The globalization of regional fields, and specifically African history, Miller argues, is a crucial component of world history and must include the acknowledgment that historical perspectives and ideas originating in Africa have influenced those of peoples with whom Africans have come in contact. Miller argues that world history has “reached the limits of gains achievable within the framework of an essentially nationalist, particularistic, exclusive, and progressive epistemology.” Simply compiling the achievements of African civilizations in the past and the contributions of African slaves to the making of the Atlantic world as part of responses to the racial discourses on “blackness” is not enough. Miller emphasizes that African philosophical thought is based on a communal ethos in which individual identity is rooted in affiliations to others—“belongings” through fluid structures of hierarchy and ranking. Such communal understandings provide a way to incorporate Africans into the writing of world history as participants in a multicentric perception of the past. Doing so means reconceptualizing the meaning of witchcraft, slaving, and consumption from African moral perspectives about wealth and corruption. He opens his essay with a quotation from Lauren Benton written earlier in 2004: “World history has not produced a significant volume of methodologically thoughtful discussions or theoretically influential studies.”10 The challenge remains how to do it. Even while arguing for a multicentric world history sensitive to the multiplicity of African experiences, Miller ignores the gendered nature of lived experience. “In Africa one succeeded in the highly competitive personal and communal environments that I’ve described by aggregating followings of people—by taking wives and enlisting clients, siring children, and acquiring vulnerable strangers as dependents.” Miller’s male subject position as the default for being human is one that makes women’s and gender historians call for more gender-sensitive world history. Judith Zinsser’s critical assessment of the absence of gender-aware world history scholarship is especially trenchant. She notes that although more women’s experiences are being included in world history textbooks, they are usually added as a separate category rather than through the incorporation of gender as a category of analysis in conceptualizing human experience.11 The tremendous growth of women’s history as a distinctive field since the 1960s has transformed our understandings of historical experience, and this has undoubtedly influenced some writing of world history. But despite Joan Scott’s seminal statement, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” published thirty years ago,12 Zinsser argues that “the majority of male world historians in their writings seem almost totally oblivious to the theoretical arguments that have occupied their feminist compatriots for the last two decades.” She then turns to the obstacles for world history high school teachers, including the necessity of using assigned textbooks and the pressure of external examinations, which place constraints on innovation in teaching women’s world history. Many college or university professors have created courses that offer models for incorporating women’s experiences and gendered analysis

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into world history teaching.13 The innovative thematic curricula of “separate” women’s world history “ultimately form[s] the missing half of the universal history that has so far eluded our best efforts.”14 But women’s world history is not synonymous with a gendered world history. Moreover, accounting for the historical forms of gendered identity raises questions about gender itself, whether the categories of “woman” and “man” are themselves Eurocentric categories that exclude more expansive and fluid notions of gender in other societies in the past. This attention to an expanded notion of gender and sexuality in a gendered world history is even more relevant in our current milieu, where challenging these categories and the rights attached to them has become an important cultural issue both locally and globally. This is the “not yet” that remains to be seen in gendering world history. Gender history challenges “methodological nationalism” from below by gendering nationalism itself as well as positing that men and women experience nationalism differently. In the final selection in this chapter, Kenneth Pomeranz points out that challenges from above to the nation-state as the natural unit of analysis for world history have most often been in the form of reframing geographies and comparisons. The proliferation of research monographs that transcend the nation by mapping networks, tracing connections, and formulating comparisons provided a foundation for new syntheses of geographical regions that move beyond the nation and, for that matter, traditional area studies. The expansion of Indian Ocean history is a particularly prolific example of this new trend in scholarship. Pomeranz argues that the insights gained from using revised geographies as a basis for understanding history are not finding the same traction in teaching as they are in research. “But why, when we look beyond the nation, does our teaching— as opposed to our research—jump straight to the level of the whole world?” he asks. The answer partly lies in the pressures felt across the United States to teach world history to prescribed state standards and the need to train instructors at colleges and universities who can teach these classes. The nationwide shift to require world history in elementary and high schools has far-reaching consequences. Middle school and high school teachers, often in collaboration with their colleagues in higher education, have been at the forefront of a movement to make world history more important in college teaching. The tremendous growth of world history courses in high schools created a trickle-up effect, prompting most college campuses to teach large-scale history in some form. This proliferation of lower-division world history surveys has not, however, produced a similar effect on higher-level courses and graduate training, where world history programs are still few in number. Nevertheless, newly minted PhDs are often confronted in job interviews with the question “Can you teach world history?” This is creating more demand for graduate courses and engagement with the field. Pomeranz does not shy away from asking “what could be more appropriate for a world with so many pressing and inherently global challenges and such enormous

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inequalities and barriers to solidarity than to provide histories of all humanity?” Jerry Bentley was always clear about his commitment to an expanded notion of humanism. Perhaps we have come full circle. Andrew Dickson White, the first president of the American Historical Association in 1884, identified world history as the highest stage of historical knowledge. Although his gendered language and his terms of reference to the nation and civilization are now archaic, his humanistic ambitions for world history were not so different from those of many of the authors in this chapter. “This study of history, either as a whole or in large parts, is of vast value both as supplying the method and test of special studies on the one hand, and of meeting the highest necessities of man on the other. . . . We may indeed consider it as the trunk of which special histories and biographies are the living branches, giving to them and receiving from them growth and symmetry, drawing life from them, sending life into them.”15 This sounds not a little like a call for “glocalization.” Unlike world history as it was written in the nineteenth century, today’s scholarship is, as Pomeranz and others have advocated, at its best explicit and self-conscious about its scales of analysis. Thus, world historical thinking does not naturalize its scales or terms of analysis as universal truths but as open, contingent, contested, and historically constructed. World historians can make these older units of the past both strange and familiar, local and global, and perhaps thereby stimulate learners to critically examine those categories we take for granted today. As William McNeill puts it: “Pattern recognition of the sort historians engage in is the chef d’oeuvre of human intelligence. . . . Here is the great secret of human power over nature and over ourselves as well. Pattern recognition is what natural scientists are up to; it is what historians have always done, whether they knew it or not.”16 World history—including its critiques— can reconnect us with one of the common denominators of what it means to be human.

NOTES

1. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 2. Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman, “It’s a Man’s World? World History Meets the History of Masculinity, in Latin American Studies, for Instance,” Journal of World History 21, 1 (March 2010): 75– 96; Merry Wiesner-Hanks, The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 3. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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6. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 7. Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 8. Arif Dirlik, “Confounding Metaphors, Inventions of the World: What Is World History For?” in Writing World History, 1800– 2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 91–133. 9. Jerry H. Bentley and Karen Louise Jolly, “In Search of a Global Cultural History,” in Architects of World History: Researching the Global Past, ed. Kenneth R. Curtis and Jerry H. Bentley (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 215–35. 10. Lauren Benton, “How to Write the History of the World,” Historically Speaking 5 (March 2004): 4, quoted in Joseph C. Miller, “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multicentric World History Needs Africa,” in Recent Themes in the History of Africa and the Atlantic World: Historians in Conversation, ed. Donald A. Yerxa (Columbia: University South Carolina Press, 2008), 7. 11. Some textbooks published after Zinsser’s essay have done much to overcome the shortcomings of gender analysis. See, for example, Bonnie G. Smith et al., Crossroads and Cultures: A History of the World’s Peoples (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012); and Ross E. Dunn and Laura J. Mitchell, Panorama: A World History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2015). 12. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, 5 (December 1986): 1053– 75. 13. Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner, The Family: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 14. Judith P. Zinsser, “Women’s and Men’s World History? Not Yet,” Journal of Women’s History 25, 4 (Winter 2013): 313. 15. Andrew Dickson White, “On Studies in General History and the History of Civilization,” Papers of the American Historical Association 1 (1886): 49– 72. 16. William H. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2.

G LO B A L H I S T O R Y A N D C R I T I Q U E S O F W E S T E R N P E R S P E C T I V E S Dominic Sachsenmaier

The article discusses the parameters of the expanding field of global history and its wider methodological implications.  [.  .  .] [T]he author reflects upon the possibilities and challenges for global history in an age in which universalism and Eurocentrism have long come under attack from many different directions. The article discusses dependency theory and subaltern studies as two very different precursors to the current

This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Dominic Sachsenmaier’s “Global History and Critiques of Western Perspectives” was originally published in Comparative Education 42, 3 (August 2006): 451– 70. Reprinted with permission of the publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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critiques of Eurocentrism. The impact and legacy of such schools, the author argues, cannot be ignored by global historians, even though they do not need to get directly involved in these academic discourses. The piece ends with scenarios for multipolar and pluralistic perspectives on the past.

CRITIQUES OF EUROCENTRISM— GLOBAL DIMENSIONS

Steering historiography into the quite unknown ocean surrounding the isles of solidly explored nation-states and regions cannot aim at all-encompassing visions reaching across time and space. Quite the contrary, the real potential of global history lies in culturally “ecumenical” approaches that apply multiple perspectives. Any kind of research with a decidedly global perspective will also have to find ways to balance the universal and the particular. It has to be sensitive to both the inner diversity of global structures and the global dimension of many local forces. For that matter it will be important for historians to reach out to different fields and open new theoretical debates. So far many debates on global history have moved within the parameters of concepts developed by the community of academic historians. In order to formulate a vision of global history that remains sensitive to the tectonics of our time, however, a wide variety of intellectual currents must be taken absolutely seriously. Since new forms of transcultural history do not want to continue the Eurocentric paradigms that characterized most of universal history and much of “classic” world history, prominent alternative movements, such as postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, need to be considered as reference points in the debates on global history’s future trajectories. The critique of the aura of the modern west as a teaching civilization has certainly been as old as the colonial discourses from which this aura emerged. But doubts about the Weberian hypothesis, which treated the west as the only universalizable civilization, certainly took a new direction after the twentieth century had started to unfold into a century of world wars and genocide. In the midst of the Cold War setting, which was characterized by two competing visions of the Enlightenment, an increasing number of non-western intellectuals sought to break away from a framework that seemed to offer only choices between two western visions of world order. Such efforts involved not only creating alternative development programmes but also viewing world history in ways that were profoundly different from modernization theory and Soviet ideology. Couched in a more contemporary terminology, such movements could be characterized as attempts to formulate alternative visions of global history. Some theories, contesting the primacy of western knowledge, turned into transcultural movements that came to encompass a wide array of intellectual traditions. This has most notably been the case with dependency theory, which in its early forms was formulated in Latin America, as well as with postcolonial studies, which were initially conceptualized by Indian intellectuals. The role of international academic transaction hubs, most notably Anglo-American universities where a large number of foreign born

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intellectuals were teaching and studying, was certainly important for the rising prominence of these ideas. Yet it was arguably the first time that an internationally prominent academic school had emerged from non-western environments. Schools of thought such as dependency theory and postcolonialism are not only relevant for conceptualizing global history but also suggest new patterns in the international sociology of academic knowledge—patterns that may prove to be highly relevant for the modalities of global historical research. The understanding of “the west” as the epicentre of most intellectual shockwaves no longer expresses reality; rather the generation and adaptation of ideas have turned more into a multi-directional network of exchanges (Gibbons et al., 1994). Scholars are only now beginning to understand the implications of this more polycentric pattern of knowledge production for the study of globalization in general and global history in particular. One of the earliest internationally influential critiques of the dominance of western paradigms, which had its origins outside the west, was dependency theory. The pathways of dependency theory are a particularly good example for the global evolution and spread of a new academic paradigm. Precursors to or early versions of dependency theory emerged in Latin America, where it was rooted in long intellectual traditions of reflecting upon the dependence of Latin American countries on foreign political and economic powers (Lindstrom, 1991). During the 1950s and 1960s public intellectuals in Latin America challenged development programmes under the leadership of the United States, and part of their challenge was the effort to withdraw from the alleged dominance of western thinking. Like any major intellectual movement dependency theory quickly branched out in different directions, some of which were more radical, while others were more moderate in terms of their overall political outlook. However, no matter in which local or political environment they may have been situated, dependency theorists commonly argue that the presence of a liberal market economy and not its absence was the root cause for the economic misery and social crises in most countries south of the Rio Grande del Norte border (Kay, 1989; Bernecker & Fischer, 1998). The mere presence of the west, it was argued, made it impossible for other societies to follow their own historical trajectories. The main objective, then, was to gain local control over the concepts and mechanisms of development— an effort that in many national theatres became an important part of identity politics (Menzel, 1994; Bernecker & Fischer, 1998). The dependency theory movement quickly spread to other parts of the world, where it was adapted to new sociopolitical contexts. In Africa, for example, critical intellectuals referred to dependency theory when questioning the prospects of national liberation and its western frameworks (Cooper, 1994). Also in the United States dependency theory started to enjoy a great prominence in the late 1960s (Cardoso, 1997). Here scholars such as André Gunder Frank (1967) moved dependency theory closer to the conceptual world of Marxism, albeit in modified forms (Packenham, 1992). During the 1980s, world-systems theory, which was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and a group of likeminded scholars, shifted the main research focus to the formation of

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the global hierarchy during the early modern period. Departing from the main postulates of dependency theory, the Wallerstein school held that the global hierarchy could not be resolved by efforts to break away from the international system. Predicting the imminent collapse of the global economic system, Wallerstein (1998) advocated global solutions and the concerted efforts of the underprivileged. The failure of alternative development programmes and the quite unexpected success of many East Asian economies have weakened the position of dependency theory and its derivatives. Today many scholars argue that the intellectual parameters of dependency theory are too narrow and one-dimensional. At the time, studies that criticized dependency theory saw underdevelopment as the result of a bewildering array of factors that include the structures of the global economy, but also encompass ideologies and mentalities as well as more local factors such as corruption and the compliance of many social groups to colonial rule (Laclau, 1971). At an early stage Marxist criticisms of dependency theory pointed to the fact that development studies did not sufficiently consider pre-capitalist factors as impediments to development. In this context it was pointed out that tracing the origins of modern capitalism and global trade in Europe was an unduly Eurocentric perspective (Blaut, 1993). For example, some economic historians have countered world system analysis by arguing that in the past trade systems had existed in the Indian Ocean and other macro-regions that were not centred on the west (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Bentley, 1996a). Others have argued that in terms of economic output and standards of living, Europe was still peripheral to East Asia, most notably China, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution (Wong, 1997; Frank, 1998; Pomeranz, 2000). A profoundly different critique of western dominance was offered by the subaltern studies and postcolonial schools, which also strove to make the understanding of European history more parochial. While the earlier traditions of dependency theory tended to exclude cultural factors as well as the question of ethnicity, these newer theories tended to neglect economic and other material perspectives (Darby, 1987). Needless to say, on both sides a number of scholars have tried to bridge the gaps between structuralist and deconstructivist, cultural and material approaches (Wolfe, 1997). Certainly the terms postcolonialism and subaltern studies cover a wide spectrum of different intellectual traditions, political ambitions and scholarly efforts. The complexity of these schools can only be sketched out in a caricaturing fashion by roughly outlining the main agendas and issues of contention that characterize these approaches (Gandhi, 1998; Loomba, 1998). Inspired by postmodern philosophy, many postcolonial thinkers challenged concepts such as modernity, asserting that they are mainly discursive instruments to further western imperial interests. Postcolonial movements rapidly started to influence scholars in a wide range of world regions such as North America, Latin America and East Asia (Seed, 1991; Mallon, 1994; Chakrabarty, 2000b). In some cases the reception of subaltern studies and elements of postcolonialism was blended into more local schools. This is, for example, the case with the Chinese Houxue [Post-studies], which enjoyed a sudden rise to prominence during the early 1990s (Zhao, 1995).

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Subaltern studies were originally formed in the context of the political, social and cultural crises in India during the 1970s. During that time the capitalist modernization programmes under the government of Indira Gandhi had significantly widened the social, regional and political gaps within the country, which led to a wide variety of counter-movements that challenged the government’s claim to represent the people. In response to the deteriorating situation, India’s political leadership turned partly to repressive measures and partly to populist campaigns in order to gather support from the masses. The government’s success in restoring its own authority was limited: the nation-state survived, but this critical situation had eroded the legitimacy of national institutions in India, such as the parliaments, the state administration and the legal system (Prakash, 1994). The ensuing struggle over who would claim to represent India quickly became also a struggle over who would speak for the Indian past. Many intellectuals argued that only if India could find her own ways of representing herself, could she hope to find a dignified future (Inden, 1986). A fair number of historians challenged the bulk of South Asian historiography as a conspiracy of colonial elites to tailor history to their own interests and experiences. They argued that both the nationalist and Marxist approaches to history forced the Indian past into the straight jacket of western concepts. A very similar pattern of thinking can also be observed in the debates on the concept of “orientalism,” which proved highly influential not only among many intellectuals in the west, but also in the Islamic World as well as in many other world regions (Freitag, 2002). According to Edward Said, arguably the founder of this school of thought, the west constructed a highly stereotyped “orient” in a way that previously more independent societies could fit into the framework of colonial rule and exploitation. These intellectual challenges crystallized into the postcolonial, orientalism and subaltern studies schools. Scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Spivak and Partha Chatterjee quickly gained influence which reached far beyond the field of South Asian history and historiography in general. These and other proponents of subaltern studies set out to retrieve the voices of the “subaltern” and to explore them through the lenses of their own value systems, agendas and perspectives (Spivak, 1998). Most of the scholars in this movement have shifted their attention to studying the mechanisms of persuasion and coercion through which colonial and later national elites secured their own interests and power. For example, some studies seek to show how certain forms of mass action were marginalized and how others were utilized by the elites in the Indian independence movement, which was part of a quest to erect a modern nation-state (Amin, 1984; Chatterjee, 1993). In this context, subaltern studies moved very close to postcolonial criticism. Many postcolonial thinkers argue that such categories as nation, class, and statehood, which were central to the Indian independence movement, remained entrapped in a western conceptual world. Applying these categories blatantly from a European to a colonial context, they reckon, buries India’s past under a mountain of exogenous concepts, and doing so at least tacitly implies asking how India “performed” in categories such as prog-

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ress, modernization and rationalization. According to many followers of the postcolonial movement, applying these categories to India would mean perpetuating the intellectual patterns that had supported European supremacy in the geopolitical arena. From this notion postcolonial thinkers derive their quest to regain authority over the logics with which India’s past and the histories of other former colonies are being understood. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000a), for instance, postulates an intellectual “provincialization” of Europe, which would follow the geopolitical marginalization of a continent that once had claimed to represent the only civilization that had the potential or even the duty of becoming a universal civilization. This would mean that European concepts would no longer be applied to non-western contexts in unreflective ways. These and other challenges being raised by postcolonial thinkers can no longer and should no longer be ignored by new research agendas such as global and transcultural history. Postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and dependency theory all have relatively long traditions about understanding, developing and changing historical thinking from global and local perspectives. Also, it may well be the case, as Charles Maier (2000) pointed out, that the heritage of colonialism and western dominance will eventually become subject to major social, intellectual and political debates. In this context, it may be the case that the concepts and approaches of postcolonialism will be applied to many additional fields of inquiry. So far they have been almost exclusively applied to India and other core colonies of the European empires. They are just beginning to be used for the historical study of white settler colonies such as Australia or the United States (Wolfe, 1997).

C O M P L E X TA S K S F O R T H E F U T U R E

For most adherents of postcolonialism there is no solace in trying to overcome a historically rooted condition, in which the west has had a profound impact on the entire world. Rather, the aim is to become critically aware of the heritage of western thinking in former colonies and in that manner to open up new ways of understanding the Indian past. Fresh lenses to view Indian history would thus have to move in a space between western concepts on the one hand and some kind of cultural essentialism or fundamentalism on the other hand. Exactly in the spaces between allegedly separate cultures and regions, and in the hybridized forms of thinking and creating social realities, may be the key for promising political and intellectual models in the future (Bhabha, 1988). Here could lie an opportunity for developing new visions for liberating the “people” and achieving a bonum commune [common good] that could provide an alternative to nationalism as well as to the Cold War options of liberal capitalism and Marxism (Guha, 1998; O’Hanlon, 1998). Pluralistic theories will lose the clear vision and interpretation of the world; yet at the same time they will move academic thinking closer to a multifaceted, increasingly entangled world. They may indeed be the only ways to establish a community of discourse that reflects the social realities of the past and present, while at the same time

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providing viable visions for the future. For these and other reasons, the debates on a potential global ethic have centred on finding a balanced perspective between universalism and particularism, between awareness of the global and sensitivity for the local (Habermas, 1996; Küng, 1997). The global ethics literature, as well as the postcolonialism, subaltern studies and orientalism movements, have produced a number of detailed studies, but by and large they were rather theoretical in nature (Zarogin, 1999). This may explain why much of the literature published under the aegis of these movements tended to be rather abstract and in many cases resorted to cultural stereotypes.1 For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000a) call to provincialize Europe does not shy away from explicitly reducing the European experience to a quite uniform condition of Enlightenment values and its derivatives. Chakrabarty achieves this fairly one-dimensional image of Europe by excluding the “real Europe” from the picture and focusing on certain images and concepts of Europe that circulated across cultural boundaries and were being co-produced in societies outside the west. Any serious effort to provincialize Europe, however, would have to explore the cultural struggles between religion and secularism, between discourses of liberty and those of social control, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, between re-enchantment and disenchantment that have characterized European history for the past few centuries. The internal contradictions and tensions, the hidden potentials, the abysses and missed opportunities of European history, would need to be considered in order to be able to embed Europe in a new global vision of history. After the decline of Eurocentric theories, the need for global perspectives has not diminished—quite to the contrary. So far, postcolonialism has not produced an answer as to how to place the “other” into a larger framework, within which it could be communicated and accepted (Pieterse, 1994). The theories developed by postcolonial thinkers, which are characterized by ever more entangled, multilayered and intertwined patterns of thinking, need to be supported by building a strong base of detailed knowledge and case studies. At a time when Eurocentrist thinking about the global has significantly weakened in academic circles and beyond, new ways of thinking have to be developed in detail—ways of conducting research that allow for cultural diversity, hybridity and mutual exchanges (Mirchandani, 2005). To find new avenues of academic research that include a diversity of experience, yet at the same time remain intellectually and politically committed to the world as an interactive system, may be among the most challenging intellectual tasks of the future. It will be impossible to condense this complex and varied way of thinking into the neat categorical systems that have characterized many social and economic theories ever since the late eighteenth century. Now that scholars have begun to pursue global agendas while remaining sensitive to the full complexity of the local, the devil will be in the detail. Or, seen from another perspective, the treasure trove will be in the detail. In lieu of a detached macro-theoretical synthesis, the relationship between the global and the local will need to be explored through a myriad of detailed studies. Here, in the

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necessity to gain some solid ground between remote and abstract global theories and detailed analysis of the local, lies a great contribution of historiography to the social sciences in general. Global and transcultural history can be at the very forefront of such an endeavour. In its endeavour to explore this interplay between global and local, history can draw on many research traditions. For example, the traditions of diaspora, minority and migration studies have long operated with alternative conceptions of social space that cut across conventional regional boundaries. Contrary to its original meaning as involuntary exile, today the term “diaspora” is applied more generally for communities that refer to some kind of geographically remote cultural and historical origin. This semantic change has its origins in the 1960s when Afro-American history in the United States was increasingly studied under the aegis of the term “diaspora.” Subsequently the term was quickly applied to other communities such as the Overseas Chinese or Indians (Schnapper, 1999). Today diaspora studies usually explore transnational communities, which are characterized by distinct identities, public spheres and other features that are constitutive of social groups. Yet, analogous to certain developments in the studies of national cultures and societies, diasporas are studied less as seemingly autochthonous social spaces, and more as sociocultural formations that are tightly intertwined with and connected to other groups—not only their home and host countries but also, for example, other transnational communities. In other words, in the study of diasporas scholars are also becoming increasingly sensitive to the reality of hybrids and complex entanglements that has been traditionally overlooked by historical scholarship in favour of national and other narratives (Ong, 1999). For this purpose historians need to apply concepts such as “globalization” and “culture” in ways that do not take either side as absolutes or fixed points (Cooper, 2001).2 The range of detailed topics that would need to be explored to enhance our understanding of the creative tension between the global and the local is enormous. For example, scholars have just begun to become sensitive to the question of how European societies were impacted, influenced and altered through the colonial experience and its intermediate consequences such as migration or worldwide economic integration (Gilroy, 1993). There is very little detailed knowledge about the close entanglement between knowledge and power in the colonial age (MacLeod, 2000). Furthermore, we are just beginning to understand the impact of colonial segregation on national identities in Europe, as well as on ethnic exclusionism in western societies (Pollock, 2000). For example, Homi Bhabha argues that stereotypes of Englishness eroded and changed through the mimicry of the Indian upper classes that started to act “white” without being so (Bhabha, 1994). New, culturally pluralistic ways of looking at global history also lead to new conceptions of social, economic and cultural space. For example, a growing number of economic historians seek to globalize economic history and keep the field closely enmeshed with cultural and social questions. Global histories of commodities in particular have

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grown in number and offer a fascinating change of perspectives and viewpoints from which history is being investigated and narrated. By following the production and trade lines of single commodities historians can offer insight into the social and cultural consequences triggered by the globalization of trade. For example, in a study on the global dynamics and implications of sugar trade, Sidney Mintz (1985) discusses topics ranging from the forced migration of Africans to the New World and its sociocultural consequences, to the growth of proto-industrial production in some Caribbean colonies and its repercussions on Europe. Furthermore he discusses the consequences of the availability of sugar in parts of Europe since the eighteenth century, which affected the living conditions and identity patterns, particularly of the lower classes. Subsequent studies have added the effects of globalizing sugar trade on regional markets as well as local communities (Mazumdar, 1998). Additional global commodities such as salt, cod, spices, and cotton have been explored with an interest to investigate how different regional social, economic, and cultural histories were in fact connected with each other (Kurlansky, 1997, 2002; Dalby, 2002; Beckert, 2005). In each case the story of single commodities reveals how geographically distant communities came to be involved in a nexus of exchanges that affected each of the participating locales, albeit in very different ways. In the words of Eric Wolf (1982), “through the expanding commitment to the production of commodities, changes on the level of the world market had consequences at the level of household, kin group, community, region and class” (p. 143). These are just examples of the myriad of fascinating topics that need to be explored in due detail and with due sensitivity to various levels of local contexts. For historiography the enormous tasks related to a global turn bring the necessity to experiment with new modes of research. Given the blunt fact that every vision of the universal is and always has been historically contingent and socially constructed, i.e., it is largely dependent on an individual’s perspective and his or her community, scholarship has to find new ways to bridge the gap between the universal and the particular. It is rather simple to make the claim that scholarship needs to become more multiconceptual, multi-lingual and multi-angled, but this means a significant challenge to build a thriving tradition of scholarship on these new premises. The author’s voice needs to become increasingly dialogical in nature and actively to include other interpretations of the past within one and the same narrative. The question, then, is the extent to which the field and all its institutional support structures are sufficiently prepared to master such a task.

T H E I N S T I T U T I O N A L PA R A M E T E R S O F G L O B A L H I S T O R Y

In order to find ways of writing new forms of global and transcultural history it is necessary to assess critically the disciplinary structures and cultures of the field— a field that needs to be understood from a global perspective. As already pointed out in the introduction, there are certainly profound differences between various national historio-

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graphic traditions. Yet at the same time historians can be seen as members of a professional community, which is a result of a global transformation in the categorization and institutionalization of knowledge. The fact that all modern academic historiographies have been born in the same cradle has profound implications for the ways historians can and should tackle transcultural approaches. From the very beginnings of modern historiography academic trends have crossed national boundaries, where they interacted with local identities, research traditions, and political and societal factors. For example, during the decades after the Second World War social historical approaches, which often relied upon intensive data collection, were dominant in many academic circles.3 Also, the counteractions to these universalizing models during the late 1980s, which came to be known as the so-called “cultural turn,” were equally a transregional movement. In recent decades cultural history has often—in conjunction with postmodern thinking— experienced a sharp rise in many countries, and it had a great effect on the field of historiography, no matter whether in China, the United States, Japan, or in other countries (Miyoshi & Harootunian, 1989; Lu, 2001; Jenkins & Thompson, 2004). Given such long-term methodological innovations as the “cultural turn,” the field has become diversified to a historically unprecedented extent (Iggers, 1996). However, the growing international connections among historians are still far from producing a tightly integrated community of scholars, a community characterized by a relative balance of opportunities between the margins and the centres of the global academic network. In China, for example, only a small number of historians have the necessary foreign language skills and access to financial resources to participate actively in international dialogues and cross-cultural projects. Here, just as in many countries, one can observe a basic dichotomy between a globally connected elite of scholars and a larger group of academics whose active work experience does not cross national boundaries (Leutner, 2003). Furthermore, particularly in the field of history the majority of research is being published in national languages, which is important for the role of historians in their respective public spheres but certainly also an obstacle for the international accessibility and communicability of historiographic research. National or linguistic boundaries still matter not only in the directions of research but also in the academic labour market. Networks among historians tend to be knit most tightly within national or cultural boundaries. Nevertheless the levels of interaction between historians have reached historic highs. In many countries the internationally mobile, renowned representatives of the profession who frequent international conferences may only be a small segment of the entire profession. Yet it is equally true that many historians have an increasing access to international debates through conferences and, most importantly, through translations of academic texts. New perspectives and methodological trends are quickly spreading into different local contexts, where they are being integrated into ongoing academic debates. In other words, globally circulating ideas are constantly being translated, adapted and integrated into more locally confined debates.

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The flows and exchanges of academic concepts have become faster and more intensive and no longer necessarily follow the logics of political boundaries. During the past ten years, the global connections among many academic historians have increased sharply due to revolutions in the sector of communications technology. The impact of the Internet and email on historiographical research in particular has thus far been insufficiently explored (Trinkle, 1998). However, it is safe to assume that the computer revolution has already begun to leave a distinct mark on the modes and circumstances of historical research. A rapidly growing corpus of primary and secondary sources is now available online, which greatly facilitates the work of scholars whose mobility may be limited for financial, political or personal reasons. This balances some of the hierarchies within the profession and contributes to decentralizing the field’s research opportunities on an international level. Furthermore, the levels of professional exchanges among historians have reached historic highs now that documents can be transmitted electronically and Web sites focusing on academic discussion draw an increasing number of subscribers and participants.4 The simultaneously growing international interest in new transcultural or even global historical research is an indication of the fact that international scholarly debates are becoming increasingly attuned to each other (Sachsenmaier, 2005). The growing international connectedness of academic historians should not be taken as an indication that the conceptual worlds of academic historiography are in the process of worldwide convergence and assimilation. New kinds and modalities of locally specific historiographies are beginning to emerge, and they need to be understood in the context of the growing importance of cultural identities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it was through global integration that historiography started to become less Eurocentric. The worldwide appeal of theories such as dependency theory and postcolonialism was only possible because of structural changes within international academia. After the end of the colonial age, a number of countries, mostly in South Asia, Latin America and East Asia, were in the position to build comparatively strong academic systems (Ajayi & Festus, 1994; Eckert, 1999), which were heavily oriented towards western models but largely independent from them institutionally (Raphael, 2003). This situation fostered attempts to break away from western tutelage and in some cases to formulate alternative models of international and cultural history. Furthermore, a social revolution in Anglo-American universities diversified the ethnic, gendered and social backgrounds of faculty to a historically unprecedented degree (Appleby et al., 1994). In many cases knowledge was exchanged or even generated in diasporic networks. Western universities dominated by white men started to lose their monopoly on the production of academic knowledge. In retrospect, it may be no great surprise that this powerful group had projected its own life-world onto the globe and that today, in a more diversified academic world, many alternative visions and rivalling claims to social scientific theory have emerged. They may be an aspect of the gradual decline of what has been deemed as the “Hellenistic period of Anglo-American civiliza-

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tion,” a term that the Chilean historian Claudio Veliz coined to underline his hypothesis that the international appeal of western culture had not necessarily been related to imperialist expansion (Veliz, 1994). Building on this changing academic landscape historians are in the position to formulate new kinds of history that explore the middle ground between the erroneous (and often politically motivated) assumptions of secluded civilizations on the one hand and universalizing master narratives on the other. In sociological theory, the concept of “glocalization” has started to become frequently used to express the global dimensions of the local and the local manifestations of the global (Robertson, 1996). In some ways the shift to such methodologies would have great implications for a field, which in and of itself could be characterized as a “glocal” set of institutions with the task of generating, debating and transmitting knowledge of the past. One way of establishing modes of research dedicated to global topics yet remain locally rooted would be to experiment with team work— a practice that is well-established in other social sciences but hardly common in the field of historiography (Wallerstein et al., 1996). Global historical research, which would be largely confined to certain national arenas, would be rather unconvincing in a methodological and theoretical sense. If historiography utilizes its own international dimensions it can contribute significantly to the study of globalization and to the struggles to establish global paradigms of thinking. For example, it can explore sociological and economic theories of globalization in more local depth and within wider historical dimensions. Furthermore, historiography may be able to inject a narrative tradition into the study of globalization— a subject that is so far being explored mainly with large theoretical apparatuses and their own academic jargons. This is certainly true for the bulk of macro-sociological literature but certainly also the postcolonial critiques of Eurocentrism. Historiography will be able to add the stories of hybridizations, of global transformations and cross-cultural entanglements to the study of globalization. In that manner the role of historiography has the potential to go far beyond testing theories of globalization formulated by the other social sciences and the humanities. Historiography may eventually be able to build its own methodological frameworks and dynamically interact with other fields in the study of globalization.

NOTES

1. Another branch of criticism, which is primarily directed against postmodernism but also against postcolonial theories comes from a Marxist perspective (Dirlik, 2000). 2. For this reason Frederick Cooper remains critical of using the concept of globalization in social scientific and historical analyses (Cooper, 2001). 3. It is ironic that under the great influence of modernization theory, Soviet Marxism, Eurocentric, Hegelian and teleological understandings of history respectively were highly influential in academic circles on both sides of the Cold War divide. For the international prominence of social history during the 1960s and 1970s, see Kocka (1989).

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4. For the field of World History see for example H-World (www.h-net.org/~world) as well as the German site “Geschichte transnational,” available online at: http://geschichte -transnational.clioonline.net

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Menzel, U. (1994) Geschichte der Entwicklungstheorie. Einführung und systematische Bibliographie [History of development theory: introduction and systematic bibliography] (2nd edn) (Hamburg, Deutsches Übersee-Institut). Mintz, S. W. (1985) Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history (New York, Viking Penguin). Mirchandani, R. (2005) Postmodernism and sociology: from the epistemological to the empirical, Sociological Theory, 23(1), 86–115. Miyoshi, M. & Harootunian, H. (Eds) (1989) Postmodernism in Japan (Durham & London, Duke University Press). O’Hanlon, R. (1998) Recovering the subject: subaltern studies and the histories of resistance in colonial South Asia, Modern Asian Studies, 22, 189–224. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality (Durham & London, Duke University Press). Packenham, R. A. (1992) The dependency movement: scholarship and politics in development studies (Boston, Harvard University Press). Pieterse, J. N. (1994) Unpacking the west: how European is Europe?, in: A. Rattansi & S. Westwood (Eds) Racism, modernity and identity: on the western front (Cambridge, Polity Press), 129–149. Pollock, S. (2000) Ex Oriente Nox. Indologie im nationalsozialistischen Staat [Ex oriente nox. indology in the national socialist state], in: S. Conrad & S. Randeria (Eds) Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts-und Kulturwissenschaften [Beyond Eurocentrism. Post colonial perspectives within the historical and cultural sciences] (Frankfurt, Campus), 335–371. Pomeranz, K. (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton, Princeton University Press). Prakash, G. (1994) Subaltern studies as postcolonial criticism, American Historical Review, 99, 1474–1490. Raphael, L. (2003) Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme [Historiography in the age of extremes] (Munich, Beck). Robertson, R. (1996) Social theory, cultural relativity and the problem of globality, in: A. King (Ed.) Culture, globalization, and the world-system: contemporary conditions for the representation of identity (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press). Sachsenmaier, D. (2005) Global history. Global debates, H-Soz-Kult, 1(1). Schnapper, D. (1999) From the nation-state to the transnational world: on the meaning and usefulness of diaspora as a concept, Diaspora, 8(3), 225–254. Seed, P. (1991) Colonial and postcolonial discourse, Latin American Research Review, 26(3), 181–200. Spivak, G. C. (1998) Can the subaltern speak?, in: C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds) Marxism and Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, University of Illinois Press), 271–313. Trinkle, D. A. (Ed.) (1998) Writing, teaching, and researching history in the electronic age (New York & London, ME Sharpe). Veliz, C. (1994) The New World and the gothic fox: culture and economy in Spanish and English America (Berkeley, University of California Press).

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Wallerstein, I. (1998) Utopistics: or, historical choices of the twenty-first century (New York, The New Press). Wallerstein, I. et al. (1996) Open the social sciences. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the restructuring of the social sciences (Stanford, Stanford University Press). Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the people without history (Berkeley, University of California Press). Wolfe, P. (1997) History and imperialism: a century of theory, American Historical Review, 102(2), 388–420. Wong, B. (1997) China transformed: historical change and the limits of the European experience (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press). Zarogin, P. (1999) History, the referent, and narrative: reflections on postmodernism now, History and Theory, 38(1), 1–24. Zhao, Y. (1995) Houxue yu Zhongguo [Post-studies and China], Ershiyi shiji, 27, 4–11.

M U C H A D O A B O U T S O ME T H IN G : T H E NE W M A L A I S E O F WO R L D H I S T O R Y Vinay Lal

World history has lately come into vogue. The conference circuit in world history has witnessed rapid growth since the mid-1990s, job openings in this area have multiplied, and ambitious works in world history, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) and David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1998),1 have garnered numerous accolades, as well as an unusually wide readership. At the University of California, a multicampus initiative in world history was launched several years ago, and among its first products is a series, published by the university’s press, called “The California World History Library.” The second volume in this series, Maps of Time (2004), describes itself as a work in “big history,” and its author, David Christian, characterizes his enterprise as having originated from his feeling that scholarship has been enervated by the fragmented accounts of reality that have come into fashion over the last two decades, and his sense that historians can learn from scientists.2 If scientists no longer find the idea of a “grand unified theory” absurd or preposterously vain, why should historians shun grand narratives? Christian argues that “large stories” can provide a “sense of meaning” and that intellectuals who disavow “grand narratives” do so at the risk of rendering themselves insignificant.3 California is a big state in an equally big nation-state, and it is perfectly apposite that “big history” should be grounded in a place that often imagines itself as the center of the world. One of the numerous, unthinking clichés that proliferates about Los AngeVinay Lal’s “Much Ado about Something: The New Malaise of World History” was originally published in Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 124–30. Copyright, 2005, MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc.. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press.

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les, that very big metropolis of California, is that a hundred or more languages can be heard in its schools, though what is never mentioned in the same breath is that speakers of English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Hindi, Tagalog, Korean, Japanese, and Swahili alike shop at Wal-Mart and munch down burgers at McDonalds. Multiculturalism has a ravenous appetite; it has been America’s way, from the late twentieth century onward, of eating up the world. But to return to the schools: if the world has come to Los Angeles, why at all bother with the world? That Californians cannot much be bothered with the world is nowhere better indicated than in the fact that they are self-obsessed by their own earthquakes, fires, mudslides— and highway chases. Indeed, one suspects that for all the difficulties that occasionally intrude on the lives of Californians, these are also welcomed as signs of the biblical scale of life in God’s own land. Lest one should forget just how big California is, it is useful to recall that it is often spoken of as the world’s seventh- or eighth-largest economy. Doubtless, purchasing parity power has not been factored into such calculations about the size of the economy, but one can nonetheless understand why California is accustomed to thinking of itself in lofty terms, both drawing the world to itself and having the world radiate outward from the Golden State. Big history and world history thus have, in myriad ways, their own political economy. In big places one’s pretensions are likely to be big as well, and it is inconceivable that world history would emanate from Khartoum, Tripoli, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur, or Lima. From Oswald Spengler onward, world history has been a conversation in which colonized and now-underdeveloped subjects have had no place, except, of course, as the objects of the wise discourse of knowing subjects. Indians may have taken charge of their history, as have (to howsoever lesser an extent) Africans of African history, but “world history,” generally represented as the playing field of more ecumenical minds, remains firmly within the provenance of the Western scholar. The paraphernalia of almost any kind of modern scholarship is vast, but much vaster still is the array of texts, in diverse languages, that a world historian might require and that seldom are available to those outside the Western academy. Though Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently argued that the subject of history is always Europe, even when the histories in question are transparently those of Latin America, Africa, or India,4 we might say that world history has not merely restored Europe as the hegemon of history— a restoration occurring in the midst of much anxiety about the loss of faith in grand narratives, the nefarious influence of those French diseases of the mind that go under the name of poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the demotion of scientific history, and the infusion of interpretive frameworks that steadfastly probe the nexus of knowledge and power— but rather returned history to its “proper” home. Let us think, then, of a world history emanating from some place other than a metropolitan center in the West. Between 1930 and 1933, Jawaharlal Nehru penned nearly two hundred letters to his daughter Indira that offered, to invoke the title of the subsequent collection, Glimpses of World History.5 It is apposite that those chained within prison walls should indulge in large canvases, and everywhere the sumptuous history of prison

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literature offers striking reminders of the often inverse relationship of the narrowness of one’s lodgings to the catholicity of thought. Yet rarely has someone confined to a prison cell by the colonial regime been able to command as expansive a conception of the world as Nehru did in Glimpses of World History. Nehru worried that he might have lavished too much attention on India, China, Russia, and Europe: thus in one letter he reminds his teenage daughter that he last treated the history of Cambodia when it was under Hindu kings, but that is no reason to suppose that “exciting things” didn’t take place there in the meantime. As a relentless advocate of India’s cause, both before and subsequent to independence, Nehru was hardly a critic of the nation-state system; yet, as letters 129–34 unequivocally show—letters in which Nehru allowed himself extended discussions of revolutions, literature, science, democracy, socialism, Marxism, and the growth of workers’ organizations—he had foreseen the shortcomings of a world history centered on nation-states. Like other colonized subjects, Nehru had been stirred by accounts of the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905; but, unusually for a nationalist of his time, he was determined that Japan’s triumph should not be construed as a model for India to emulate. “Japan not only followed Europe in industrial methods,” he commented, “but also in imperialist aggression. She was more than a faithful pupil of the European powers: she often improved on them.”6 There are moments, to be sure, when Nehru is writing as an Indian, or as an advocate of Fabian socialism; and yet he advises Indira, apropos of all the “isms” in circulation—“feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism”—that “behind them all stalks opportunism.”7 This is in 1933: Germany was arming itself to the teeth, pogroms against Jews had intensified, but Europe was still far from being on the verge of war. Nehru nonetheless wrote, as he put it, in “The Shadow of the War.” Glimpses of World History is sweeping, literary, nuanced, playful, philologically minded—the word Fabian, Indira is informed, derives from the Roman general Fabius, who was not keen on engaging Hannibal in open conflict and sought to wear him down through attrition— and ecumenical both in its conception of the world and history. This is the world history on which, growing up as children in India, we were nurtured. It filled me, when I was in my early teens, with a vague desire that I should, sometime during the stage of fatherhood, do for my children what Nehru had done so admirably for Indira. Many years later, I was heartened to discover that my adolescent affection for this book was shared by more mature readers. The British writer, journalist, and founder of the Left Review, Tom Wintringham (1898–1949), gave it as his opinion that one could learn better English and better history by turning to the Glimpses rather than to Thomas Macaulay.8 But I have since also discovered that practitioners of world history in the academic establishment have received Nehru’s work with studied indifference. These same practitioners, while aware of the myriad ways in which Nehru calls attention as a world historical figure— an inspirational figure of anticolonialism, the first prime minister of an independent India, a principled advocate of nonalignment— appear entirely oblivious to his writings, especially Glimpses of World History, and even critiques of the

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Eurocentrism of world history seem unaware of Nehru’s unique foray into world history at a time when it was far from being institutionalized as a subject of disciplined study.9 World history only has place for the likes of Nehru as men of action, not as originators of ideas. Even Mohandas Gandhi, in many respects the most arresting and original figure of the twentieth century, has suffered the same fate: the world histories have room for a sanitized Gandhi, the “apostle” of nonviolence and liberator of India, but none for his brilliant and withering critique of modernity, or his prescient understanding that oppression will increasingly be exercised through categories of knowledge.10 One wonders, indeed, whether world history even at its best does not, particularly with reference to history in the five hundred years subsequent to the beginning of European expansion, implicitly endorse the crass supposition, which frequently receives succor from scholars and writers who purport to study the big ideas of our times, that the faculties of reason and reflection have been most developed in the West. What conception of the world, then, does world history have? And, not less significant, who is world history for, and what is the cultural and political work of world history? In raising these questions, I only marginally mean to evoke certain predictable criticisms of world history that, for all their worth, leave the political and epistemological project of world history unscathed. Large narratives are always susceptible to charges of generalization, and most historians are barely equipped to write histories of the nation, much less of the world. One can certainly quibble with many world histories on the grounds that these largely constitute histories of the West, or of European expansion, or that they disproportionately focus on the modern world and the supposed scientific ingenuity of the moderns. More subtle critiques of the enterprise of world history point to the fact that world history still remains tethered to the nation-state, often centering on the nation-state of the historian, and that world history has no more been able to do without nation-states than the United Nations can be conceived outside the nation-state system. But even this objection has less force than commonly imagined, and at least a few practitioners of world history have structured their histories around global exchanges. One historian, Jerry Bentley, has proposed a world history around “three realities of global experience and the relationships among them”: “rising human population, expanding technological capacity, and increasing interaction between peoples of different societies.”11 That such a history—for instance, the account of cross-cultural encounters—may still be excessively predicated on nations and certain nation-states is a criticism to which Bentley pays little attention. If world histories take the holocaust perpetrated on Jews as paradigmatic of genocide, if that holocaust is the Holocaust standing forth in singular and sinister isolation, then why should we not think that European encounters with the world will become the template for cross-cultural encounters around the world? We must suppose, following the immense pleasure taken by many in cross-cultural encounters, that since colonialism led the Europeans to “increasing interaction” with the world, it must have been a good thing— good at least for the Europeans, which is all that matters. When Bentley remarks that, “generally speaking, the intensity and range

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of cross-cultural interactions have increased throughout history, albeit at irregular and inconsistent rates,”12 the inescapable conclusion is that these interactions have led the way to progress and a better and more integrated world. From the vantage point of a historian of India, the history of what Bentley and many others describe as cross-cultural interactions looks very different to me. Recent studies have restored the Indian Ocean world to its rightful place as the site of great civilizations and fruitful economic, cultural, and social exchanges,13 but even then, no world history that I am aware of has accorded any substantive recognition to the Gujarati thalassocracy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.14 Gujarati merchants roamed the Indian Ocean for centuries, as early as the middle portion of the first Christian millennium, and were by the thirteenth century a permanent fixture in Malacca, Timor, Java, Sumatra, Kedah, Borneo, and the Moluccas, besides traveling to the east coast of Africa, Aden and the Gulf, and China. Though north India came under the rule of Afghan kings in the eleventh century, India’s interactions with Afghanistan, central Asia, and Iran were much older. One effect of European colonialism in India, the history of which has hitherto largely been written as European cosmopolitanism running over native provincialism and medievalism, was to excise the memory of India’s long history of encounters, generally more productive and less exploitative, with central and west Asia, Southeast Asia, East Africa, southern China, and the civilizations around the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf. In nineteenth-century Bengal, the world began to revolve around the twin poles of London and the middle-class society of Calcutta. To this day, the world to most educated Indians means little more than India (and perhaps Pakistan) and the “West” (increasingly the United States). The conception of the world, to put it bluntly, has narrowed very considerably for Indians. One suspects that this is nearly true of all formerly colonized peoples. Such a conception of the world and history has also informed what is called comparative history: thus when comparative history is evoked, it generally means that one studies India and the West, Africa and the West, the Middle East and the West, and so on. Rare is that historian who would do a comparative study of India and Africa, or Gujarat and the Indonesian archipelago, or Dubai and Malacca; in comparative history, one axis of the comparison is taken for granted, while the other is generally determined by the national origins of the historian, or by the historian’s specialization in one kind of national history or another. Articulate and well-meaning advocates of world history, such as Michael Adas,15 have deplored the narrative of American exceptionalism, and he argues that this narrative cannot be reconciled with the “visions of America,” which Adas evidently shares, “as a model for the rest of humankind.”16 That the United States—founded on slave labor, perpetrator of multiple genocides, and the best friend to countless despots— should rightfully serve as a model for anyone is itself a species of, rather than a contradiction to, American exceptionalism; but let such trivia pass. Other people at other times have thought of themselves as divinely ordained to free the world from oppression, but Adas concedes that Americans have unfortunately been more inclined than other people to

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view themselves as a people whose thoughts and deeds are guided by God. (But what if God intended mischief?) Considering that American provincialism is proverbial around the world, who would want to disagree with Adas’s plea that world history can perhaps serve as the most useful antidote to the American inclination to be “out of step with time”? What place can there be for American exceptionalism in the era of globalization? The irony of calling for diversity, multiplicity of voices, and polyphonic histories in the United States, even while that country leads the world in stripping the world of diversity under the aegis of globalization, is only lost on those who issue calls for world history. It is another form of American exceptionalism to believe that what is good for America is perforce good for every other nation. The United States doubtless requires many antidotes to its ferocious exceptionalism, but that can be no reason for involving everyone else in its distinct problems. World history will now be foisted on the rest of the world, and the world will most likely not be able to resist this development. Such is the imperialism of modern knowledge. Advocates of world history might be puzzled that smaller or relatively insignificant nations—relative to the United States, even India becomes insignificant, though the new forms of coolitude championed by Thomas Friedman and others are calculated to put India within the orbit of the United States and turn it into a visible member of what the United States likes to call the international community— are not grateful for entering into the horizon of world history, but one has only to remember the misfortunes of various nations when they fell under the gaze of colonizing powers.17 World history is also the apposite form of knowledge for our times, taking its place beside multiculturalism, globalization, multilateralism, and the new world order. It is thus one of the twenty-first century’s preeminent forms of colonizing knowledge— and all the more insidious in that it appears to be as benign and ecumenical an enterprise as one can imagine. An integrated history of one world, our world, sounds appealing, but we need to have a conception of many worlds, not one. There are many modes of comprehending the world outside history, and it is not sufficient to speak merely of diverse histories. But those are other stories, for other times.

NOTES

1. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 2. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 3. 3. Ibid., 9–10. 4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27–46. 5. Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (1934; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).

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6. Ibid., 457. 7. Ibid., 947 8. Tom Wintringham, “Better History and Better English,” in Nehru Abhinandan Granth: A Birthday Book (New Delhi: Nehru Abhinandan Granth Committee, 1949). 9. See, for example, J. M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians, vol. 2 of The Colonizer’s Model of the World (London: Guilford, 2000). I am aware of only one academic study of Glimpses in relatively recent years: David Kopf, “A Look at Nehru’s World History from the Dark Side of Modernity,” Journal of World History 2 (1991): 47– 63. For an earlier assessment of Glimpses, see Vinay Lal, “Nehru as a Writer,” Indian Literature, no. 135 (1990): 20–46. 10. For a more detailed exposition of this view, see Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto, 2002). 11. Jerry Bentley, “World History and Grand Narrative,” in Writing World History 1800– 2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 51. 12. Ibid., 59. 13. K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Janet L. AbuLughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250– 1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 14. See V. K. Jain, Trade and Traders in Western India, AD 100– 1300 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1990). One world history that is somewhat attentive to Indian maritime traditions is Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature (New York: Free Press, 2001), 337–42. 15. Michael Adas, “Out of Step with Time: United States Exceptionalism in an Age of Globalization,” in Stuchtey and Fuchs, Writing World History, 137– 54. 16. Ibid., 139. 17. Thomas L. Friedman, “The Great Indian Dream,” New York Times, March 11, 2004; Friedman “Small and Smaller,” New York Times, March 4, 2004.

M Y T H S , WAG E R S , A N D S O ME M O R A L IMP L I C AT I O N S O F WO R L D   H I S T O R Y Jerry H. Bentley

While commentators on the right have lobbied for a patriotic world history to undergird conservative political programs, scholars on the left have offered formulations of the global past and critiques of efforts to construct a global past with very different political implications. World history as envisioned on the left, or as criticized from the left, does not possess the thematic unity of the patriotic world history emphasizing democratic values and institutions that have emerged from the right. Rather there are two preemiThis selection is an edited version of the original publication. Jerry H. Bentley’s “Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History” was originally published in Journal of World History 16, 1 (March 2005): 51– 82. Permission to reprint from Journal of World History.

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nent and sometimes conflicting strains of thought: the Marxist, as represented here principally by the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and Arif Dirlik, and the postcolonial, as represented here principally by the works of Ashis Nandy and Vinay Lal. The Marxist approach calls for a world history that historicizes capitalism, foregrounds the oppression and injustice that have arisen from globalizing capital, and uses world history as a tool of education in the interests of building a more just and equitable world. The postcolonial approach, on the other hand, doubts the usefulness of history as a tool for criticism and social reform. Indeed, some postcolonial scholars have gone so far as to reject history in general as a form of knowledge and world history in particular as a project that can contribute constructively to global justice on the grounds that professional historical scholarship is incapable of shedding the baggage of capital, the nation, empire, and European modernity that it acquired at its birth. Immanuel Wallerstein has worked for many years, both individually and together with collaborators, to develop a neo-Marxist vision of a modern, capitalist, Europeandominated world system. His vision has been controversial, and parts of it have begun to look weak in light of recent studies. It has become clear, for example, that Wallerstein focused so intently on the internal workings of his postulated European-dominated world system that he did not recognize the emergence of a genuinely global economy in the early modern world. Nevertheless, Wallerstein’s vision remains powerful, and it has left its mark on historical scholarship.1 His emphasis on the systematic dimension of modern world history has transformed understanding of capitalism and economic development. His analysis of the political and economic relationships between the regions that he called core, periphery, and semi-periphery has been especially valuable for purposes of understanding the dynamics of a world moving toward integration. Even with its problems, Wallerstein’s understanding of modern world history remains coherent and often compelling. Yet Wallerstein has gone well beyond analysis of the past to consider contemporary and even future political implications of his scholarship. By historicizing the capitalist world system, Wallerstein has not only situated capitalism in time but also predicted its demise: he has argued explicitly that the contradictions of capitalism will eventually bring the capitalist world system to an end—and will do so sooner rather than later. Though not an activist, or at least not recently, he has clearly regarded his scholarly writings as cultural contributions to movements seeking to introduce some variety of socialist world government. Alongside the power of his historical analysis, there is a wistful and even utopian air about Wallerstein’s sketchy discussions of a future world order. Animated by a deepseated sense of outrage at the injustice and inequality of the capitalist world system, Wallerstein has yearned as Marx did for an alternative to underwrite a more just and fair world order. So far as I am aware, he has not sought to design a new order or imagine its structure in any detail. No less than the conservative commentators, however, Wallerstein believes he knows the end of history, and the end he sees involves the demise and

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disappearance rather than the triumph of capitalism. As in the case of the conservatives, Wallerstein’s perspective on the end of history entails a leap of faith, and his conviction that the kingdom of socialism is at hand is no more susceptible to historical demonstration than the conservatives’ beliefs that democracy and free markets stand at the end of history. He has drawn attention insistently to the fact that capitalism has experienced serious crises over time, and he has argued powerfully that the logic of capitalism is fraught with difficulties in that it depends upon unlimited growth in a finite world.2 Yet the historical record suggests that humans have a remarkable capacity for maintaining their societies while muddling through difficulties. Indeed, the historical record shows further that humans have sometimes been capable of adjusting their social organization, fixing its problems, and improving its efficiency so as to deter the onset and diminish the effects of difficulties. Granting that capitalism is a human creation that has emerged within history and that it inevitably will eventually collapse or (perhaps more likely) gradually mutate into a different kind of human creation within history, it is by no means certain that a general collapse or thorough transformation is imminent. Like the conservative commentators and Wallerstein, Arif Dirlik has harnessed his scholarship to a political agenda, and he has focused attention even more directly on the conception and practice of world history as a scholarly project. Dirlik has recently leveled a challenging critique at actually existing world history, charging both that it naturalizes capitalist globalization by turning it into human fate and that it perpetuates Eurocentric knowledge even as it seeks alternatives to Eurocentric explanations of the global past.3 Through its emphasis on connections, exchanges, and transregional integration, Dirlik holds, world history has the effect of legitimizing global capitalism while ignoring the fragmentation that globalizing processes have caused and also suppressing notice of alternative possibilities for social organization. As for Eurocentrism, Dirlik argues along with Samir Amin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others that Eurocentrism is not just an uncomplicated preference or predilection that is possible to eliminate at will or remedy by simply including the experiences of peoples beyond Europe in historical accounts. Rather, a species of Eurocentrism resides at the heart of historical scholarship and the notion of modernity itself, insofar as capital, nation, empire, and historical scholarship all collaborated and played prominent roles in the construction of modernity.4 In this view, Eurocentrism resides not only in the substance of historical scholarship but also, more significantly, in the structures of power that have enabled European peoples and their descendants to produce knowledge that conceived the world, explained it, defined its political and cultural geography, evaluated it in European terms, and exploited its resources. Even the analytical units of world history, such as “nation,” “cultural region,” and “civilization,” Dirlik holds, tie world history to the Eurocentric modernity that produced them. Dirlik has identified some genuine problems, but my sense is that he has both overstated the problems and overgeneralized his critique. As for his concern about the naturalization of globalization, it certainly would be possible to use world history in an effort

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to legitimize contemporary globalization, just as it would be possible to employ history in a campaign to legitimize democracy or socialism or nationalism or fascism or any other ideological preference. On the other hand, it should be clear enough that historical analysis of globalizing processes does not necessarily valorize them. Dirlik, however, regards any reference to interaction, exchange, or integration either as an endorsement of contemporary globalization or as a sign that the historian serves as a dupe of global capital. This is a rather unnuanced approach that would make it difficult if not impossible for scholars to discuss historical interaction and exchange at all without subscribing to contemporary globalization and all its effects. On the issue of Eurocentrism, Dirlik falls into the trap of an originary fallacy: he confuses origin with fate in assuming that historical scholarship must inevitably follow lines established at its foundation. By this reasoning, professional historical scholarship incurred the taint of original sin because it emerged in collusion with the national state and modern imperialism, and, as a result, its heirs cannot escape the Eurocentrism that became part and parcel of professional historical scholarship in its earliest days. Yet the historical record is full of cultural projects that started along some particular set of lines, then underwent deep and sometimes radical transformation as later practitioners devised different ways to carry on their work: the histories of Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism offer only a few examples of this point on the large scale, while the histories of academic disciplines such as economics and anthropology offer examples more analogous to the situation of historical scholarship. Dirlik has not entertained carefully enough the possibility that through self reflection and selfcorrection, scholars can deal more or less adequately with the problem of Eurocentrism: there are more possibilities in heaven and earth, and more wonders in the historical record, than are dreamt of in Dirlik’s philosophy. In any case, just as the conservatives use history to reinforce patriotic American identity and Wallerstein takes it as the sign that a new global order is approaching, Dirlik also has political uses for history. Dirlik’s agenda is social transformation through what he calls “place based politics” seeking to overcome oppression and inequality by building democratic and egalitarian orders in particular spaces. Dirlik argues passionately for place-based politics, albeit in general terms, without specifying details of any particular project or program. Nor is it entirely clear what role history might play in place-based politics, apart from the task of clearing intellectual brush by exposing the problems that national states, colonial empires, and especially global capital have visited upon the world. Unlike the history of Wallerstein and Marx, Dirlik’s history is not a machine that generates social orders through its own dynamic logic; rather it appears to serve as a kind of prophetic rebuke seeking to galvanize a moral consciousness that will push social transformation through to completion.5 Going beyond Dirlik, several postcolonial scholars have taken the critique of Eurocentrism further and questioned the value of history as an enterprise. An early gesture in this direction came in an influential 1992 essay in which Dipesh Chakrabarty offered

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the pessimistic view that Eurocentrism thoroughly pervaded professional historical scholarship by determining its subject, methods, and the protocols of knowledge that gave it meaning. As a result, effective reform of professional historical scholarship was inconceivable, since that project would entail the dismantling of modern knowledge systems and the dissolution of history as we know it— an unlikely prospect for the foreseeable future.6 In the meantime, Chakrabarty implied, the value of professional historical scholarship was dubious at best and possibly nil. Perhaps the most general formulation of this postcolonial critique of history as a form of knowledge has come from Ashis Nandy, an Indian psychoanalyst and director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. In a provocative essay titled “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” Nandy sought to relativize history and situate historical scholarship alongside other ways of accessing the past. Most if not all the world’s peoples have had their ways of dealing with the past, after all, and only recently has professional historical scholarship established global intellectual hegemony over study of the past. The alternative to history explored by Nandy was epic or myth, as in the cases of the ancient Indian epics, but he might well have added legend, memory, genealogy, imagination, song, and dance as further alternatives to history as a mode of dealing with the past. In any event, Nandy notes that in spite of its claims to superiority as a form of knowledge about the past, history in India has been subject to hijacking both by professional scholars seeking to use a scientifically (re)constructed past to support a secular state and by Hindu nationalists seeking to mobilize popular support for the political program of Hindutva. In both cases history has betrayed the powerful influence of contemporary political interests, and particularly in the case of Hindu nationalists, it has proven all too capable of inspiring violence. For Nandy, then, history as a form of knowledge may well be too dangerous for contemporary mortals to handle: the world might be a better and safer place if it renounced history as a way of dealing with the past.7 Vinay Lal has made a similar point in an essay with a more explicit political twist. After a lengthy review of prominent Indian participation in transregional, hemispheric, and global processes from ancient times through the colonial era, Lal concluded rather precipitately that “at least in the present circumstances, the enterprise of world history, from whatever angle it is attempted, must be disowned and repudiated.” As Lal saw things, “‘world history’ informs the greater part of the people in the world that the only history they have is to catch up to someone else’s history, or else they themselves will become history. Such a history has every potential to be a form of ‘cultural genocide,’ politically disempowering, and destructive of the ecological plurality of knowledges and lifestyles.”8 Two principal fulcrums in the critique of history by Nandy and Lal are the destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya (on 6 December 1992, when a Hindu mob tore down a mosque built on the supposed birth site of the Hindu god Rama) and more generally the perils of developmentalism and modernization of the Enlightenment and capitalist varieties. The destruction of the mosque figures in Lal’s analysis, but it plays a more prominent role in Nandy’s critique, where it functions as a cautionary tale that

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points up the dangers of history and its potential to fuel violence. The issues of development, modernization, and their dangers are by no means absent from Nandy, and indeed they loom large in much of his writing, but Lal invokes them more directly for the immediate purpose of subjecting history to critique. The points that Nandy and Lal make about Ayodhya, developmentalism, and modernization are plain enough, and I concede that there is some cogency in their positions on these issues.9 Yet it should also be clear that the renunciation of historical scholarship would not likely contribute to a resolution of these problems. Leaving history aside, myth, legend, collective memory, and other modes of dealing with the past also are readily available for use by those seeking ideological justifications for their political preferences and actions. Indeed, it is arguable that the ostensibly historiographical problems cited by Nandy and Lal owe more to the influence of myth and memory than to any feature of professional historical scholarship proper. Was it historical scholarship per se that incited violence at Ayodhya, or was it rather the myths that inspired the mythistory of Hindutva? It is worth noting that archaeological work has also figured prominently in the debates over Ayodhya. In 2003 the Hindu nationalist BJP government recruited politicized archaeologists who conveniently indicated that the remains of a temple honoring Rama lay below the Babri mosque. This view arose from a hasty and highly selective examination of the remains: it represented not honest archaeological analysis so much as a brazen distortion of the evidence.10 Yet it would not necessarily be wise to renounce all archaeology as a useless or dangerous or fatally flawed enterprise just because the practitioners of mytharchaeology have abused scholarly techniques. The postcolonial critics have overlooked the point that like modern science, professional historical scholarship opens itself to examination and criticism from all angles, while myth, legend, memory, and other alternative approaches to the past make little or no space for critique. Without denying that power relations play a role in the matter, I think it is clear that openness to critique, which has potential to point the way toward corrections and improved analyses, goes some way toward explaining the credibility of professional historical scholarship. It does not strike me that the renunciation of professional historical scholarship in general or world history in particular would represent a step toward the constructive resolution of contemporary problems. Rather, it would mean effective disengagement from the world and forfeiture of opportunities to bring a powerful analytical tool to bear on contemporary problems. Indeed, it is worth entertaining the possibility that a reflexive historiography that takes its own historical location into account and foregoes special pleading for Hindu nationalists or rampant development or narrowly conceived versions of modernity might actually serve broader interests reasonably well. Like Dirlik, however, Nandy and Lal fall into the trap of an originary fallacy in that they dismiss the possibility that historical scholarship can transcend its original limitations. Yet there are many cases of conceptual transformation in historical scholarship. To cite only a single example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, who in 1992 despaired of developing alternatives to Eurocentric historiography, later allowed on further reflection that alternatives were indeed conceiv-

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able. Thus he undertook a project to “provincialize Europe” by exposing historicism as the principal ideology underwriting European domination of the world and by outlining an alternative Bengali modernity that stood alongside European modernity.11 His project suggests the possibility of provincializing Europe further, thus diluting if not entirely liquidating Eurocentric influences in professional historical scholarship, through the elaboration of additional alternative modernities. This consideration of leftist views on world history suggests both reinforcement and refinement of the moral imperative formulated earlier for education in world history. It reaffirms the need for a world history that rejects special pleading for ideological interests, no matter whether they arise from the patriotic right or the critical left. At the same time, it pushes the moral imperative further by bringing clearer focus to the need for alternatives to Eurocentric history. Commentators on the left have charged with some merit that within the house of professional historical scholarship, it is still possible to find vestiges of a Hegelian conception that construes Europe as the dynamic site of genuine historical development and progress, while dismissing other lands as sinks of lethargy and stagnation untouched by conscious or meaningful historical development. Half a century of historical and area studies scholarship has thoroughly undermined crude versions of this vision, but postcolonial critics have argued that traces of Hegel lurk in the unexamined assumptions and everyday practices of professional historical scholarship. If a principal purpose of historical scholarship is to understand as best we can the world and its development through time, then scholarly practices that make some specific society the reference point of world history are out of order. Rather than contributing to an understanding of the world and its development through time, this approach turns scholarship into a rather silly and mechanical game of praise and blame instead of a more sophisticated analytical effort to understand the world in its complexity. There is room for debate about the extent to which viable alternatives to Eurocentric history emerge from any specific project, such as Chakrabarty’s effort to provincialize Europe, but the quest for understanding the world requires forbearance from the urge to make a preferred social order the standard, the reference point, or the end of history.

NOTES

1. To mention only two important works of many that could be cited, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000). 2. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. to date (New York, 1974– 1989); Historical Capitalism (London, 1983). For a collection that conveniently brings together the most important of Wallerstein’s numerous essays, see The Essential Wallerstein (New York, 2000). For his most recent views on the world system and its future, see WorldSystems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, N.C., 2004). 3. See particularly Arif Dirlik, “History without a Center? Reflections on Eurocentrism,” in Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (Lanham, Md., 2002), pp. 247–284; and “Confounding Metaphors, Inven-

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tions of the World: What Is World History For?” in Writing World History, 1800–2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford, 2003), pp. 91–133. There is a great deal of overlap and even extensive repetition between these two essays, and indeed also between these two and a series of essays in which Dirlik offers critiques of postcolonial scholarship. See especially the essays collected in two volumes: The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo., 1997) and Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Lanham, Md., 2000). 4. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. R. Moore (New York, 1989); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000). 5. See especially “The Global in the Local” in The Postcolonial Aura, pp. 84–104, and “Places and Transcommunality: A Comment on John Brown Childs’s Idea of the Transcommunal,” in Postmodernity’s Histories, pp. 229–236, as well as other essays collected in these two volumes. 6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26. 7. Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” in World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, ed. Philip Pomper, Richard H. Elphick, and Richard T. Vann (Malden, Mass., 1998), pp. 159–178. 8. Vinay Lal, “Provincializing the West: World History from the Perspective of Indian History,” in Writing World History, 1800– 2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford, 2003), pp. 271–289, quoting from pp. 287–288 and pp. 288–289, respectively. 9. There is less cogency, however, in Lal’s peroration, which reflects positions urged by Nandy’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, exhorting India to drop out of history altogether by disengaging from the contemporary globalizing world. See Lal, “Provincializing the West,” p. 289. Though attempted on several notable occasions in the past, there does not appear to be a truly promising model for such a policy. Meanwhile, the remarkable extent, wealth, prominence, and influence of the contemporary Indian diaspora would seem to complicate if not thoroughly undermine any project to seal India off from the rest of the world. 10. Kristin M. Romey, “Flashpoint Ayodhya,” Archaeology 57 (July/August 2004): 48–55. 11. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. See also Ranajit Guha’s complementary thoughts about moving beyond Eurocentric historiography: History at the Limits of WorldHistory (New York, 2002).

B E YO N D B L AC K S , B O N DAG E , A N D B L A ME : W H Y A M U LT I C E N T R I C WO R L D H I S T O R Y NE E D S A F R I C A Joseph C. Miller

As Lauren Benton put it recently, “World history has not produced a significant volume of methodologically thoughtful discussions or theoretically influential studies.”1 As a historian, I have to agree. As an Africanist, I have long thought that the particular This selection is an edited version of the original publication. Joseph C. Miller’s “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multicentric World History Needs Africa” was originally published in Historically Speaking 6:2 (2004): 7–11. © 2004 The Historical Society. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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“peoples without history” whom I contemplate offer the extreme examples of the exclusion that conventional untheorized standards of world history impose—less and more implicitly on most of the world. Most world historians—with respect but not apologies to my many friends who thus style themselves— seem also to mute, if not negate, central principles of history’s distinctive methodology. Those who adhere to a “civilizational” approach isolate the exceptional by relying on “continuity” and “origins” in ways that neglect history’s core emphasis on change arising from contingency and complexity. Those who isolate single “causes”— or even several “causes”— of change violate history’s distinctive reasoning from contexts, the particulars of time and place. It is not that world historians have not made gains: only that they have reached the limits of gains achievable within the framework of an essentially nationalist, particularist, exclusive, and progressive epistemology. In fact, Africans (like the vast majority of the world’s people) have had, and have, distinctive ways of thinking about themselves and their world(s), as well as about the greater world they share with us. These are worth knowing, not just for their abstract value as human creations but also for the very practical and revealing highlights that their alternatives cast on the modern Western imaginings that make up our reality. The first generation of trained historians interested in Africa—Edward Blyden and others in Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Leo Hansberry, and colleagues of African descent in the United States, trained before the First World War—played by European rules. They concentrated on the earliest, largest, most powerful, monument—building “states” in Africa that they could identify. Their identification of pharaonic Egypt (third to first millennium B.C.E.), or at least Nubia, as “African,” their delineation of “empires” in the sub-Saharan western Sudan (tenth to sixteenth centuries C.E.), and their admiration for the mysterious monumental stone ruins in southeastern Africa at Great Zimbabwe (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries C.E.) survive today as the touchstones of most world history references to Africa before the fateful era of the Atlantic slave trade. King Tut preceded Alexander and Augustus, and Mansa Musa of Mali (ca. 1320s) reigned before Elizabeth I or Phillip II. For most, this progressive vision of Africa’s past presents gripping achievements, farseeing paradigms for modernity, and all the more poignantly because these “black” achievers constructed them in defiance of hostile modern racial stereotypes. The story is tragic because later Africans, unlike Europeans, seemingly lost the opportunity to build on such promising foundations. Of course, all of this evidence of ancient African accomplishment appeals to modern liberals concerned to move beyond the racial divisions under which we still labor. It is a narrative ready-made for introducing Africa respectably into a global history for youthful beginners barely aware of the world beyond their personal, very contemporary, and only hazily (even) national experiences. But it thereby also trades on (by playing off) precisely the modern, often implicitly racial, distortions that exclude Africa from a history of the world that might include Africans’ own visions of struggle and accomplishment.

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Within the mainstream academy, scholars first sought these distinctively African perspectives not through history but rather through anthropology, a discipline distinguished from the several academic disciplines on which it drew only by its focus on “Others.” Anthropology appealed to liberals because it substituted nonbiological (and hence value neutral in an age that believed in biology as destiny) distinctions in learned, hence alterable, social and cultural practice (in a progressive age that also believed in social engineering) for the prejudicial biological ranking of human differentiation that underlay the racism of colonial times. But the difference on which anthropology thrived still rested on the premise that Others were exotic; the anthropologist assumed the heroic role of penetrating the superficial unintelligibility of what Others did to reveal the (implicitly surprising) “rationality of natives”2 —reason construed variously as “culture,” “structure,” “function,” and so on. The trouble was that the “rationality of natives” turned out to lie, once again, largely in the mind of the ethnographic observer. Early to mid-twentieth-century anthropology was thus no less a child of European modernity than was history, and it similarly selected what made sense to Westerners from whatever else that might have been discerned “out there” among the Rest. For outsiders to African history, the reigning anthropological derivative has been the “tribe.” Today people in Africa may use the term to claim “tribal” political affiliations, but applied to the past the word retains the quasi-racist connotations of “primitive” that it acquired in colonial times. As a result, today’s historians of Africa have banished the word tribe from their vocabulary. But even polite (if not politically correct) Africanist speech retains a tendency to recognize Africans principally by the company they keep, under elaborately respectful euphemisms—“ethnic” or “linguistic” or “ethno-linguistic.” The laudable quest to render Africans respectable by comfortable, familiar standards—whether as builders of states and monuments or as members of ethnicized cultures—thus inevitably excludes nearly all the ideas and strategies important to people in Africa, precisely because the forms in which Africans’ ideas became familiar to outsiders were the ones that Europeans constructed to render Africans incompetent, if not also contrastingly repugnant. They are the specific components of the “blackness” and “bondage” under which (undifferentiated) “Africans” still labor in much world history. As the title of these remarks implies, I think that historians of Africa are now prepared to offer a superior alternative that makes such union of Africa and history not only possible but also necessary for the integrity of both. But to do so they must step beyond modern preoccupations—mostly derived from values like individual freedom and the political tensions of race—that continue to exclude Africa from a viable role in a balanced, multicentric world history of complexity. Given the racial politics of history in Africa, there is an urgency about doing it right, not only doing right by people in Africa (and by their descendants in the diaspora who claim its heritage as their own) but also moving historical epistemology beyond its preoccupation with triumphal progress and toward the more ironic, even tragic, story of all humanity.

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Philosophers of African thought have long insisted on Africa’s communal ethos: individuals “existed” not because they could think, alone, for themselves (a notion predicated on a sense of a stable self, generated internally, independently of context—pace Descartes, who marked the threshold of European modernity in precisely these terms) but rather because they affiliated themselves with consummate flexibility with others around them: “I am, because I belong”; or, “I am because we are.”3 On that philosophical basis, identity is relative, a fluid social and contextual sensibility, and Africans worked out multiple identities to seek success through flexible strategies of accumulating connections, of constructing social contexts rather than taking them as given. People in Africa, rather than emphasizing technologies of appropriating nonhuman sources of energy, sought productivity (and power) by controlling the efforts of the people around them, through multiple distinctions of age, gender, rank, among other means of differentiation—increasingly, after 1700 or so, including slavery. The multiplicity of identities multiplied the systems of ranking, in a kind of inflationary process that gave more people more means of claiming superiority over others in one defined context or another, however they might simultaneously be outranked on other spectra they did not control. So much for the validity of reducing Africans’ identities to single-dimensional “ethnicities” and particularly inherited or determining ones. Following this African logic, one ends up conceptualizing power as an abstract externality that individuals accessed or asserted rather than something inherent in individuals themselves. One also senses the naïve simplicity of the single-dimensional notion of rank and power that emerges from modern individualism, which cannot encompass the fundamentally competitive strategies of “belonging” that motivated action, and hence history, in Africa. To extend this kind of contrast to those familiar “ancient African kingdoms” and “empires” that conventionally enter less multicentric versions of world history, I turn to pharaonic Egypt, Nubia, the “empires” in the sub-Saharan western Sudan, and the mysterious but monumental stone ruins at Great Zimbabwe in southeastern Africa. The flexibility and multiplicity of identity in Africa rendered irrelevant most of such progressivist history (or the equivalent Weberian political sociology) that structures modern (nation-) state-centered global histories in terms of modern political and military power. But Africans in fact thought of political community not as institutionalized collectivities of this sort but rather in terms of ongoing, direct, face-to-face negotiations. Politics was a dynamic process of personal interaction rather than relationships stabilized by “hegemony” or “legitimacy” or any of the other modern fictions necessary to explain “structures” that work by abstraction rather than through continuous, real-time confrontation and collaboration. Historians of medieval Europe now rightly distinguish chivalric politics there from early modern “absolute” monarchies (never mind modern state systems) and construct their political histories around the long series of circumstantial, incremental steps through which Europeans struggled with one another to construct the latter out of the

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former. Political history in Mali or Songhai was no less conflict-ridden and dynamic and merits similar respect. It is not the essentially static imaginings of modern Europeans of these as “states” that historians ought to incorporate into their global narratives but instead the human dilemmas of power, the many different strategies that people invented to work their ways out of specific contradictions. The process of how closed domestic communities engage the openness of commercial economies leads directly to the sensitive issue of African involvement in Atlantic slaving. If one starts from the evident premise that in Africa one succeeded in the highly competitive personal and communal environments that I’ve described by aggregating followings of people— by taking wives and enlisting clients, siring children, and acquiring vulnerable strangers as dependents—then we shift our focus from who sold whom to Europeans to how buyers in Africa deployed the textiles, currencies, alcohol, and guns that they acquired from the Atlantic to assemble the large personal followings on the most dependent terms they could impose: that is, especially (but not only) including the uprooted, isolated, and hence vulnerable strangers whom we would describe as “slaves.” Powerful Africans accordingly distinguished dependents they acquired for sale from others whom they meant to keep. The competitiveness of this process, as in the modern international arms race, meant that some survived only by escalating the struggle to the level of violence. The result in Africa paralleled what political economists have characterized in Europe as a violent phase of “primitive accumulation” at the threshold of the individuation of property and identity on which modern capitalism later rose. African warlords assembled vulnerable refugees and structured them in coherent groups for self-defense. Military leaders gained unprecedented political power over these refugees initially in return for protecting them from other warlords. Some warlords captured still others to keep and employ as agents of their personal power or to sell for still more imports with which they could buy the loyalties of subjects growing reluctant or resentful at the costs of defense. They thus created the (mostly) eighteenthcentury “states” of the Atlantic coastal regions (though the processes I am describing are meant to accent these as highly dynamic entities, anything but static “states”). Further recruitment through slaving eventually allowed other entrepreneurs to convert commercial opportunity into increased human investment in production and greater (human) productivity in an economic process of “development” that sustained Africa’s growing exchanges with the growing Atlantic economy. On the scale of world history, these dispersed, continentally specific strategies of seizing local resources were realizations of a single pan-Atlantic (and ultimately global) integrative economic process. Phrased in this differentially inclusive way, it becomes clear that people in Africa participated no less than anyone else but in the distinctive ways— conceptually, economically, environmentally— accessible to them under the pressures of the accelerating pace of change that capitalist strategies enabled. In Africa

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these engagements— first Asian, then Muslim, and only belatedly Christian—went back at least to the eighth century. By the eighteenth century Europeans were culpable in the sense of being “enablers” who provided the commercial credit (more important than the guns). But the issues for Africans, and the only bases for understanding their active engagement in the exchange, were their own. World historical processes are generated through— and because of—the specific and differing ways in which people experience them. That’s the European version of the story, told in political and economic terms that you may regard as familiar, even trivial, however much they may convey some sense of novelty when applied to Africa. Working my way a bit farther out on my limb, I’ll propose that “witchcraft” (NB: our designation of the experience) provided the terms in which most people in Africa experienced the human exploitation of this era. But we must suspend our modern prejudice against our own distorted notion of “witchcraft” only as “superstition” to sense it as historical human experience. Keep in mind that for Africans witchcraft was an evil within, an antisocial quality, which they often visualized as a corrupt visceral substance. In the African communal ethos of personalized politics, this image represents with particular clarity— or I should say, with characteristic directness— a sense of corruption in the body politic. People accustomed to the face-to-face intimacy of Africa’s domestic economies and societies found the anonymity of strangers anomalous and risky—in a deeply personal way as well as in a material (“business”) sense. With merchants from afar, one effected conclusive exchanges by a payoff in cash or trade goods intended to sever any ongoing personal obligation between giver and taker (thereby rendered “buyer” and “seller”) rather than consolidate the connection of patron to client, or supplicant to sponsor, fundamental to the ethos of connections. Further, the material gains that individuals made from such transactions violated the fundamental sharing premise of Africa’s communal ethos. Material— as distinct from human— accumulation thus embodied (sic!) the fundamental evil of (suspected) betrayal and traffic with aliens, whether “red” Europeans, visiting Muslims, or African strangers. Wealth in things, secretly hoarded for selfaggrandizement, carried overtones of perversion, a bargain with the devil. The relevant distinction was not between “Africans” and Others but between balanced reciprocities among known associates and imbalanced gains from associating with outsiders. Political authorities who built their power on commercialized exchanges with Europeans were accordingly (and their modern counterparts still are) suspected of being witches as well as respected (feared?) as kings. In an alternative metaphor for the same idea of an inner disruption of an outwardly healthy (moral) order, in central Africa local people who achieved eminence by mercantile success joined healing cults to purge themselves of the moral failure implicit in material accumulation achieved by consuming one’s relatives and associates.

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Most people in Africa accordingly understood the Atlantic commerce as an extreme form of illicit consumption— directly of humans, not commodities: they saw the Europeans as “cannibals.” The cowrie shells that constituted the currency of trade in parts of the Gulf of Guinea, they knew, grew on the sunken bodies of captives who drowned or who were thrown into the seaside lagoons on their way out to the import-bearing ships anchored just offshore. And the consummate evil of enslavement itself, being kidnapped and stripped of all the human associations that defined identity, could itself be interpreted as a consequence of witchcraft, of betrayal from within the community of trust. Once the disappearance of intimates stimulated suspicions of this sort within communities, they could heal the wounds and restore social integrity only by condemning others of their own as the witches responsible, thus taking the first step in the process of social ostracism that ended in disposal of outcasts to passing merchants. Some of them ultimately—though often only many transactions later— ended up sold to Europeans at the coast as slaves. Consider the tragedy of thus seeking the sources of the very local, personal suffering that accompanied (or constituted) Africa’s growing engagement with the currents of Atlantic commerce in the confines of the small communities within which most Africans experienced this very broad process: a self-defeating attempt to restore the integrity of a body politic dissolving in dissension and suspicion by purging it of its own human vitality. Describing the process in these African terms immediately suggests (to me, at least) the analogy of contemporary European medicine attempting to cure afflictions recognized as physical by purging bodies with emetics, enemas, and bleedings. And, of course European and American historians are now rewriting the history of their parts of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in material analogs to the way the Africans characterized the process from the beginning, as a revolution in the “consumption” of things—not of people. Contemplating the Atlantic era in Africa’s history in terms of witchcraft begins to suggest the intensity of the moral crisis that clearly gripped most people there by the late eighteenth century, after more than one hundred years of violent disruptions of community and invisible betrayals of personal trust perpetuated by supposed patrons who in fact sought private advantage at the expense of those dependent on them. One could trust the least those on whom one depended most. Africans would not have thought in terms of such abstractions as “European demand for Africans as slave labor.” To my mind, trauma was pervasive and formed the historical context out of which arose not only the internal destructiveness of slaving itself but also many of the often convulsive popular responses of the nineteenth century that presently enter world history textbooks (if at all) only under exoticizing ethnographic or orientalist labels—Muslim jihads, “millennial uprisings,” and “witchcraft eradication movements.” If the era was a plague of witches for Africans, an eruption of the evil within, and they fought it with witch-hunts and other ultimately self-destructive attempts at social reconciliation, early modern Europe also had its wars of religion, as old Catholic certain-

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ties dissolved into the risks and vulnerabilities of Protestant individualism and modern capitalism. Was the well-known flaring of witch-hunts in Europe during the agonized transition from a similarly communal ethic to the individualistic strivings of early capitalism purely coincidental? I would not presume to defend the parallel in detail, but if what we are learning about African history enables one to raise that question about Europe, I think we are poised to develop a validly multicentric world history by bringing Africa in, on Africans’ terms, to illuminate what we otherwise haven’t seen clearly within our own discourse. “Others,” when we see them as who they were rather than as what we need them to have been, become mirrors reflecting truths that we don’t otherwise see in ourselves. On a pan-Atlantic scale, Africans, as the discourse of witchcraft and the recourse to slaving affirmed, had primarily their own human wealth to pay for their investments in developing commercial modernity. Europeans, on the other hand, had the unprecedented specie resources of the Americas, entire continents of productive land in the New World at its disposal, as well as a long lead in individualist accumulation and in literacybased material technologies, all of which contributed to the decisive capitalist and technological turns taken there. But that’s a story that deserves to be told in terms of both historical contingency and the global processes that accommodated these complementing alternative strategies and experiences in Africa (and Asia) of the same long-term historical dynamics. Balanced formulations of conflicts within both the conventionally racialized sides, as well as between them, develop a narrative far more interesting than “blacks” once again in “bondage,” a narrative that illuminates both familiar processes in Europe and processes in Africa familiar only to Africanists by setting both in their full, global historical contexts, each including the other (and I’ve artificially limited my phrasing of the point to take account of only two sides, while in fact there were more, in the Americas and in Asia), each serving as context to explain the other. As a world historian, I offer this historical vision of early Africa as a contributing center in a balanced array of engaged participants in a multicentered, multilayered, multiply-initiated, and multiply-experienced history— one that goes beyond comparisons of isolated cases of singular abstractions, which mostly reflect the experience of the modern West. This vision also goes beyond the movements of people, crops, animals, germs, and ideas among geographical regions treated as entities otherwise autonomous to include peoples’ substantive experiences of processes broader than they could apprehend from within the local or regional (or national) historical contexts in which they lived. Conventional history fails to address fully the fact that people throughout history have reacted to long-term, broad processes of which they were only dimly aware. World historical patterns like these are indeed processes, aspects of the universal human ephemerality of living in time, rather than static institutions; they are significant as history primarily in their dynamic aspects. It is these broad processes, always and only as experienced in specific historical contexts, that world history distinctively considers, in all the multiplicity of their manifestations. From careful consideration of these

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individual historical experiences— the local in the global (rather than the other way around)— emerge transtemporal and transcultural recurrences not evident from within any of them alone. It is this particular strength of world history that allows Europeanists to learn more about Europe by understanding places like Africa, Asia, the Americas, or the Pacific on their own terms. How much more fully do we understand England or France in the eighteenth century, for instance, if we take account of the full global context, including Africa? Even Americanists are now discovering that they can’t understand the troubled assemblage of the modern United States without appreciating fully the respective backgrounds of the diverse people who confronted one another in North America. It is the responsibility of historians, and the distinctive strength of world historians, to identify the significant aspects of their subjects’ lives of which they were unaware. Doing so highlights the contingencies, the shortsightedness, the unintended consequences of what they did, and the ironies and tragedies that make their stories realistic and appealing. World history has no place for the triumphal narrative of the unfolding of inherent superiority— of one race over others, of technological mastery over nature, or of national character—to which regional histories are all but inevitably vulnerable. Our disciplinary logic particularly depends on contrasting what is unique or momentary with what recurs more generally. So, too, with world history as a distinctive epistemology. History is always about ourselves or about some protagonist with whom the historian and her or his audience identify against Others. But for this confrontation to generate historical energy, a genuine dynamic of change, the Others must be given autonomous agency, must be shown to act beyond reaction, acting not only for themselves but also by standards of their own making. I have offered examples of Africans’ motivations to suggest how we now can see people of many different sorts interacting there, independently of outsiders, engaged with Muslims as well as Europeans, and with others as well but autonomously so, perhaps “losing” collectively in Europeans’ terms, or in the long run, but in the accessible— and hence motivating— short term gaining privately on other terms of their own. Historically Africans centered their concerns on one another, among the people they knew, on the distinctions of rank and social relationships by which they made themselves and not exclusively (and for most of the past, not even particularly) on their contacts (not “relationships” in their sense) with outsiders, Others whom they displaced to nonhuman spaces. Thus a world history that evaluates Africans only in terms of their relations with others’ worlds catches only the most fleeting glimpses of what they were in fact about. World history, despite its patronizingly inclusive impulses to draw selectively on the intermittent evidence of “states,” monuments, militarism, and resistance to the eventual European triumph, leaves Africans without motivations— and hence without history— of their own. That is bad enough for Africans. But the rest of the world is no less impoverished by the absence of their vital counterpoint to the teleology of European triumph. It is of

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course a truism, or ought to be, that globalization is a dialectical process that stimulates diversity in measures at least equal to the conformity that it threatens. One breathes life back into the gasping body of a world history of triumphal Western modernity— or steadily creeping globalization— only by focusing on the domestic, regional, local histories, and personal biographies of the people who made and continue to make history happen in Africa (or anywhere else). Then we can build a multiplistic history— or multiple histories— around the ways in which their many and diverse strategies drew on the broader contexts or proceeded innocently of these contexts while nonetheless being part of them. My final reflections ascend to the level of conviction that Jörn Riisen has characterized as “moral.”4 We are living with intensifying globalization. Our predecessors have dealt with earlier phases of this fulfillment of the inherently human propensity— I would actually say need—to network in intriguingly complex ways. This characteristically incremental process first invented “non-Western” histories by inverting “Western civilization” to study other civilizations in the 1950s and 1960s. Then in the 1970s and 1980s scholars focused on what they saw as non-Western deficiencies (“underdevelopment” and the like), which they tended to blame on the West. The West was inverted from noble and civilizing (later Westernizing and modernizing) to domineering and exploitive. Now, after sensing the autonomous and enormously diverse creativities of human beings all around the globe, extreme constructivists cannot imagine a “there” out there if it is not ours; if our realities are not real, then nothing can really be. But let’s be real: the truth is, there are multiple historical realities, the perceptions by which people act and generate change. Historians attempt to sense and to contemplate the relationships among these multiple realities—their own, their readers’, their subjects’, and the many others among whom their subjects lived. My world history amalgamates these meaningful worlds in a multicentric integration of balanced, engaged, autonomous strivings and misunderstandings. Its tone cherishes failure as much as success and considers thoroughly the standards applied to determine the difference between the two. It is ironic at best and often tragic. It teaches readers to recognize and accept their own all-too-human limitations; it is a badly needed antidote to the hubris of individualism that drives the contemporary world.

NOTES

1. Lauren Benton, “How to Write the History of the World,” Historically Speaking 5 (March 2004): 5. 2. Wyatt MacGaffey, “African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives,” History in Africa 5 (1978): 10, 1–20. 3. As phrased artfully by Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan Scott Lee, eds., I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

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4. Jörn Riisen, “Morality and Cognition in Historical Thought: A Western Perspective,” Historically Speaking 5 (March 2004): 40–42.

WO ME N ’ S A N D ME N ’ S WO R L D H I S T O R Y ? N O T Y E T Judith P. Zinsser

This article explores why women have been excluded from the narratives and analyses of world historians. It explains, for example, that the usual patriarchal narratives speak in abstractions like: “societies,” “human groups,” and “populations.” These hide the maleness of the protagonists despite women’s presence in all aspects of all histories. The creation of a separate women’s history for every region of the world over the last four decades means inclusion is possible. Obstacles remain. In the interim, the article teaches a gender inclusive world history while continuing to research and write a separate women’s world history by analyzing women’s experiences in cross-cultural comparative, thematic, or global contemporaneous frameworks. In its premier issue, the editor of The Journal of World History offered three ways to write “World History”: comparisons across regions and cultures, say of the Han and Roman Empires; analysis of a global phenomenon across time and place but in a particular era, the years 1492 and 1917–1919 are common choices; and, thematic studies across geographical and temporal boundaries such as a history of disease and its effects—William McNeill’s popular Plagues and Peoples is an obvious example. So-called “Big History,” which chronicles the earth from the beginnings of the cosmos to the present, with its focus on the impact of environment on the planet and its life forms, emerged as the most extreme version of this third approach. These ways of seeing the world’s history offered a rich array of opportunities; a marrying of breadth and depth that constituted new perspectives (often on traditional subjects) supported by recognizable, rigorous scholarship. Thus this new field was validated. The unacknowledged default in world history, however, remains “man” as it once was in all our less ambitious histories. The unspoken “false universals” of Hilda L. Smith’s analyses of early modern London prevail on a global scale. Terms such as: “people,” “human beings,” “peasants,” “workers,” suggest that all history was experienced identically by both sexes.1 The patriarchally directed narratives we once decried in our specialties have survived here. In fact, the maleness of the protagonists is so thickly embedded as to be almost unnoticeable in the “clashes and conflicts,” “encounters,” “societies converging and diverging,” “the plurality of webs of communication,” and “human groups” affecting each other and their environments in patterns of “diversity and dominance.”

Judith P. Zinsser’s “Women’s and Men’s World History? Not Yet” was originally published in Journal of Women’s History 25, 4 (2013): 309–18. © 2013 Journal of Women’s History. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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World historians defend this partial view with standard explanations. As in the first decades of women’s history advocacy, the burden of proof lies with those who wish to include, not with those who continue to exclude. Men governed, men invented, men fought, and men rebelled. The exceptional woman might play a man’s role in these global constructions of the past and therefore find her way into the world history lexicon, but as Antoinette Burton has argued: rather than justify inclusion of all women, her presence heightens the value of men’s activities and leaves every other woman’s activities just as insignificant and as invisible as ever.2 We know, however, as Bonnie G. Smith writes in the introduction to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, “there is virtually no historical, social, or demographic change in which women have not been involved and by which their lives have not been affected.”3 Some world historians have sought to remedy this obvious lack of half of humanity’s experiences. Most often, however, the effect has been the creation of a separate women’s history within articles or monographs that otherwise are about men. World history textbooks give the most obvious examples of this practice, but it also happens in national, chronological, and thematic or topical studies. Women are the separately named category, identified by their sex in ways unnecessary for men. Female authors, women union leaders and rebels, queens, and women philosophers have their own paragraphs or pages. To understand the phenomenon, imagine the following phrases in global narratives: “the male religious leader, Mohammed” in a cross-cultural history of early Islam; “the male artist Michelangelo” as mentioned in a comparative text on the Italian Renaissance and Ottoman calligraphy; “Thomas Edison, a male inventor,” and “Mao Zedong, the male leader of the Chinese Communists” in a history of the contemporary world. Also, imagine these men’s stories as ancillary to the main text, set apart in sections on “men’s contributions to religion” or “men outside the family.” Thus, by their designations and organizational choices, world historians have unintentionally reified across the globe and the millennia the now defunct concept of “separate spheres.” There is another effect of this ancillary status accorded to women in the history of “humanity.” As Merry Wiesner-Hanks pointed out in Gender in History, in this configuration, women carry all the sex and all the gender, leaving a neutered, apparently ungendered history of mankind.4 Women’s historians are to be congratulated, however, for their creation of full-fledged separate histories of women that match in quality the work previously done on males. Their monographs, their edited collections, and review essays, on comparative and thematic topics exploring particular aspects of women’s experience, fill bibliographies of books like the four-volume series, Restoring Women to History edited by Margaret Strobel and Cheryl Odim-Johnson. Although these also have the effect of creating a separate women’s history, not the truly universal history that in theory should be our goal, they do provide the scholarship necessary for the larger project. So, what happened? Resistance to such an undertaking remains the principal reason for failure in this endeavor. Some aspects of this resistance are easily named, others appear more difficult to identify.

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Some can be ascribed to willful negligence, others to reluctant, even well-intentioned accommodation within the dominant historiography, especially when faced with apparently impossible theoretical and actual contradiction or outright opposition. It is easy to see that the problems first encountered by world historians decades ago are compounded when one turns to doing even a separate history of women in a global, transcultural context.5 Research in more than one language and in widely separate archives is almost a given. The choice of topic, to say nothing of the multiplicity of choices that have to be made once facts accumulate, seems more daunting when the very significance of the project seems so important to prove. Whose “significance” will be honored? That of traditional men’s history, using men’s history categorizations of decisions about relevance? Men’s historians argue over “periodization,” but the more or less traditional chronological designations actually obscure women’s activities. What, then, will be the alternative method of categorization? Most women’s historians turn to some kind of thematic organization, but that presents yet other hazards. Whose perspective governs these choices, and even more importantly, the overall analytical focus? Then there is the question of perspective. How can one speak for multiple voices from different times, places, and contexts? This is a humbling task even if emboldened by Donna Haraway’s solution, the concept of “situated knowledge” that shifts unselfconsciously and transparently from one site to another.6 Given the theoretical minefield I have just begun to dismantle, it is perhaps no accident that the majority of male world historians in their writings seem almost totally oblivious to the theoretical arguments that have occupied their feminist compatriots for the last two decades. Women’s historians have not allowed themselves that luxury. In thinking across the whole of history, however, all of our sensitivity to theory only complicates the task of placing women’s past in a world-wide context. One has to add to the usual world history conundrums, those particularly associated with women’s history. There is the need for different kinds of sources and the problems of establishing individual and group agency. And perhaps the most challenging of all: the need to avoid essentialism, inadvertently to insist in the search for a coherent narrative that women have been all alike, that the concept of “woman” itself is not in need of analysis as one crosses from one cultural milieu to another. Presupposing and hypothesizing continuity and similarities where the differences are so glaring as to time, place, and context, then, is an obvious and seductive abyss. The most exciting challenge to us as historians is to present multiple voices simultaneously.7 To accomplish this needed integration of women’s and men’s scholarship, I suggest two approaches. Most women’s historians first encountered “world history” as a teaching field. Although already trained as scholars of regions that require comparison or thematic study across cultural or national boundaries— such as Latin American or African history—they still find the history of all regions in all time a potentially impossible task, even if they follow the traditional male-centered narratives. Teachers in public high schools find themselves required to do the mandated classes in world history without

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any justification at all. It was in that latter context that decades ago I first began playing with “world history.” Let us then experiment with a universal history in our classes, and, in our research, continue to build a separate women’s world history. This in turn will provide the examples and analytical insights for that elusive goal, the masterfully crafted narrative like Catherine Hall and Lenore Davidoff’s study, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780– 1850, giving equal significance to women’s and men’s history. As teachers we face two obvious constraints: the textbook and, for secondary school educators, external examination. The authors of texts in their explanatory prefaces now usually affirm their commitment to meet the demands of women and gender historians; the text falls short of their best intentions. Even noted feminist historians with a clear, demonstrated commitment to the inclusion of women and discussion of gender in different eras and cultures, and a willingness to break publishers’ traditions and formulate topical and thematic organization, have not been able to alter the overall male tenor of the books that introduce so many students to thinking about themselves and their past in a global context.8 National and state standards that govern external testing in the United States, though exemplary in their interdisciplinarity and their efforts to include everyone, are so content heavy that no one could possibly teach everything. And “everything” includes very little outside the world of the universal male default. In the guide for the very popular Advanced Placement World History exam, the only female references are indirect, in the fine print, and very general with none of the explanation and example given for such traditionally male topics as state building, trade, revolutions, global conflicts, and economic change. The examiners designate only one exclusively female historical event: “demands for women’s suffrage” and “emergent feminism” and bunch them together as only one item in an extensive list of “Key Concepts” to be covered for the twentieth century. In contrast, for a college or university course, sometimes an instructor may feel free to use the kind of topical organization that frees up women’s and men’s actions, responses, and gendered roles and idealizations that would make world history truly universal. Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman experimented with the period from 1400–1870, part of a three-quarters introductory course in world history. They built on each of their specialties to create four women and gendered units on: sexuality, state formation, and empire building; the enclosure and seclusion of women and the religious/ ideological dimensions of political rule; gender divisions of labor, slavery, and capitalist development; sexual rights, inequalities, and dominations including nineteenthcentury nationalism and imperialism and the responses of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian women to these nineteenth-century occidental cultural, economic, and political encroachments.9 They assigned culture-specific chapters in monographs, journals and collections, and primary sources, and created comparisons and thematic continuities in lectures and discussion. Alternatively, an instructor could look for inspiration in the numerous pamphlet series in world history. These now always include at least one

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title offering a global perspective on some aspect of women’s and what they identify as “gender history” (usually just a synonym for women’s history), theoretically from a global perspective.10 Such Web sites as “World History Matters” also provide a few “case studies” with selected primary and secondary readings about women’s participation in such well-known events as the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. As for our own research, we can turn our attention to the challenging and exciting opportunities of a separate women’s world history: the needed geographically and chronologically diverse comparative and thematic studies and the analytical syntheses which ultimately form the missing half of the universal history that has so far eluded our best efforts. What follows is a very subjective list of some six broad thematic-topical approaches already explored that await an even more global, transcultural context.11 • Women in their families: begin with their roles in the collective survival of the world’s populations in a comparative perspective. The history of “food” must consider women’s roles in the cultivation, domestication, and uses of all kinds of agricultural products and livestock. Mary Hartmann’s hypothesis that there are modern parallels to an early modern European phenomenon awaits further explorations: that late marriage increases a wife’s authority and power.12 What is so dangerous about women’s challenges to enforced heterosexuality? Marilyn Morris first suggested the need for research and analysis of women’s alternatives to heterosexual unions, different choices they have made about their sexuality, and their rejections of traditional patriarchal, male dominated relationships.13 • Women’s labor, paid and unpaid, has already produced rich comparative studies, for example, on enslavement, and on waged work since the nineteenth century. These comparisons await the application of such thematic insights developed in contemporary studies to those of earlier eras as the continuous significance of household work to an economy overall, women’s relation to technology, and gendered divisions of labor, to name only a few of the possibilities.14 • Women living and acting together offers all kinds of possibilities. For example, little has been done on women’s religious communities across time and place since JoAnn McNamara’s work on Catholic nuns.15 In contrast, studies of and resources for women’s international connections in the contemporary era are rich. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin have created an extensive Web-based resource of primary sources from around the world, Women’s Social Movements International (WASI), which will facilitate every kind of comparison, including between feminisms. Even suffrage advocacy, however, awaits transcultural synthetic analysis. Why those women in that era and place? Why those issues at that time?16 • Women’s varied roles and identities in the vast range of political entities across time and place suggest many questions in need of comparative and broad analytical answers.17 Latin Americanists and South Asianists first analyzed gendered

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images of the “motherland,” but so much more waits to be examined: Why have women been the designated repositories of cultural identity? Why for those cultures at that time? Why women’s complicity in, or resistance to, such associations?18 Wars are a common place of world history. What were the effects of local conflicts, of larger wars on women’s lives? What were women’s roles in fostering conflict and sustaining it both practically and ideologically? The role of their religious beliefs?19 Then, another obvious political topic: advocacy for rights has not always had a feminist component. What prompts negative and positive connotations for “feminism”? Why have women’s rights not been “human” rights?20 • Religious, social, and political control of women’s bodies is a given of human history, particularly control through sexual taboos and restrictions on women’s reproductive rights. What causes changes in this oppressive use of women? In their acceptance or rejection of this control?21 What about wars and other instances of the extreme abuse of women?22 How do women exploit men’s concern with their bodies, use it for themselves, for their children? Finally, what of the women’s own manipulation of their bodies: for example, women’s acceptance or rejection of bound feet, of stiletto heels, loose or form-fitting clothing, short or long hair, make-up or the veil, to name only a few?23 • World historians call it: diasporas, migrations, or the more general phrase, movement of peoples. They ignore, however, the gendered and sexual aspects of these global events. There are monographs and articles on groups of women’s experiences leaving their village, town, and country for every kind of reason. The forced migration of the enslaved has offered particularly rich sources of information and analysis. Now women’s historians could begin to study patterns of causation, of risk, of outcomes. For example, in the nineteenth century, urbanization was a more significant factor in European women’s lives than industrialization. Domestic service, not manufacturing, drew women to cities and across oceans. How has this changed? Remained the same? In other cultures, in earlier periods, in the twentieth century? When do women become refugees or political exiles? What kind of society can they create in that circumstance? What of the women, usually from privileged circumstances, who sought education, adventure, or purpose elsewhere and became travelers or explorers, or from the earliest eras to the present, missionaries for their faith?24 Such investigations of similarities and continuities, of differences and discontinuities would begin to give us an idea of what world history would be like as seen from women’s perspectives, as illustrated by their experiences. We already know that it would enrich our analyses of processes and events usually associated exclusively with men. Such broad studies are not popular, however. A 2011 statistical study of history abstracts in English still shows the preference in the United States for North American subjects.25 I assume this would characterize articles on women in other parts of the world who

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also choose to do research on women in their own culture over that of others, or in a comparative or thematic context. I know that we can point to harumphing gray-haired male pundits, to cautious female mentors, to short-sighted publishers holding court at conference book displays to explain these figures. But we must not encourage the gatekeepers. We now decide tenure, review manuscripts, and write books. We head examining boards and participate in setting standards. We teach, we encourage new scholarship, we create our own. We are writing what can become women’s world history, and we will probably have to be the ones to write that elusive universal history of the world.

NOTES

1. Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England 1640– 1832 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 2. Antoinette Burton, A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 3. See Bonnie G. Smith, “Introduction,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, ed. Bonnie G. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Note that Smith has also collaborated on world history texts and contributed to pamphlet series with a global focus. 4. See Burton, A Primer for Teaching World History; and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in History (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Note that Wiesner-Hanks has collaborated on world history texts and edited collections on gender and women in a transcultural context. 5. In developing this section, I am particularly indebted to Sue Morgan, “Theorizing Feminist History: A Thirty-Year Retrospective,” Women’s History Review 18, no. 3 (2009): 381–407. 6. See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 7. See, in particular, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Jane Duran, Worlds of Knowing: Global Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 2001). 8. For two of the more successful, see Robert W. Strayer, Ways of the World: A Global History 2012 edition (New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012), and Linda Walton and Candice Goucher, World History: Journeys from Past to Present (New York: Routledge, 2012). See also, Kevin Reilly’s source collection, Worlds of History 2007 edition (New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007). 9. Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman, “Engendering History,” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 151– 64. Note that the Journal of Women’s History has also published ways of rethinking world histories. See Karen Hagemann and María Teresa Fernández-Aceves, eds., “History Practice: Gendering Trans/National Historiographies: Similarities and Differences in Comparison,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 1 (2007): 151– 52. 10. Note that “gender” and “family” are often synonymous with “women” in these series. Bonnie G. Smith edited a group of world history pamphlets exclusively devoted to women

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with volumes taking a regional or thematic perspective, published collectively as Women’s History in Global Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). See also the article collection, Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner Hanks, eds., A Companion to Gender History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006). 11. Note that the titles that follow are equally subjective in nature. 12. Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Rosemary A. Joyce, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender and Archeology (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008); and Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994). 13. Marilyn Morris, “Sexing the Survey: The Issue of Sexuality in World History since 1500,” World History Bulletin 14, no. 2 (1988): 11, 13, 17, 19–20. See more recently, Leila J. Rupp, Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 14. There is a rich monographic literature, on, for example, textile workers from even early centuries, but little comparison or synthesis across cultures. See some efforts: Judith P. Zinsser, “Technology and History: The Women’s Perspective, A Case Study in Gendered Definitions,” World History Bulletin 12 (Spring 1996): 2, 6– 9; Hilary Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994); Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). See the early idealism of Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn B. Young, Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989); and the realities of Marianne H. Marchand and Jane L. Parpart, eds., Feminism, Postmodernism, Development (New York: Routledge 1995); Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan, Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances (New York: Routledge, 2000). The United Nations publication, World’s Women 1970– 1990 contains a wealth of information on most aspects of women’s lives (United Nations, NY: United Nations Publishing, 1991). 15. JoAnn McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). See the series on “Women in World Religions” edited by Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987); also such monographs as Megan McLaughlin, Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000– 1122 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Elizabeth E. Prevost, The Communion of Women: Missions, Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 16. See for example, Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement 1830– 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of the International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Karen Offen, Globalizing Feminisms, 1789– 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2009). See the extensive research awaiting synthesis, Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Dashhkalova and Anna Loufti, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Femi-

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nisms: Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Central European University Press, 2006). 17. Anne Walthall, ed., Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Fatema Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (New York: Washington Square Press, 2000). 18. Ida Blom, Karen Haagemann and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Berg Publishers, 2000); Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (New York: Routledge, 2000). 19. See, for example, Miriam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, eds., Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994). 20. Much exists to be synthesized for the contemporary era, see, for example, Temma Kaplan, Women and Grassroots Movements (New York: Routledge, 1999); J. Bystydzienski and Joti Sekhon, eds., Democratization and Women’s Grassroots Movements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Valentine M. Moghadam, ed., From Patriarchy to Empowerment: Women’s Participation, Movements, and Rights in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007). In addition to the collections referenced in note 15, see also, Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp, eds., Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and on international organizations, for example, Mary K. Meyer and Elisabeth Prügl, eds., Gender Politics in Global Governance (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); and Judith P. Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women 1975–1985,” Journal of World History 13 (Spring 2002): 139– 68. 21. See, for example, Lara M. Knudsen, Reproductive Rights in a Global Context: South Africa, Uganda, Peru, Denmark, the United States, Vietnam, Jordan (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006); and the still useful collection, Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 22. Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts, 1989 edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), is still a useful synthesis on this European phenomenon; on contemporary abuse, see Diane E.H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven, eds., The Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women (East Palo Alto, CA: Frog in the Well, 1984). 23. For example, many monographs on women’s commodification of their bodies exist, but few comparisons or syntheses. See Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, The Courtesan’s Art: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Joyce Outshoorn, The Politics of Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States and the Globalization of Sex Commerce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also, Alys Eve Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girl in the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 24. See notes 13, 15, 16, and 20 for collections on many of these questions. Much exists on European imperialism, but the topic awaits extended comparison and synthesis; for exceptions, see Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University of Vir-

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ginia Press 1998); and Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden (New York: Routledge, 1995). 25. Sharon Block and David Newman, “What, Where, When, and Sometimes Why: Data Mining Two Decades of Historical Abstracts,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 1 (2011): 81–109.

H I S T O R I E S FO R A L E S S N AT I O N A L AG E Kenneth Pomeranz

A year as AHA president has offered good opportunities for reflecting on a topic that has long concerned me: how our discipline is responding and might respond to the changing geography of our own era. There are at least two distinct phenomena involved, though they are interrelated, and often get lumped together under headings like “globalization.” Moreover, we are responding to these changes very differently in our research and in our teaching. Later, I will offer suggestions for narrowing that gap. The first development involves the increasing importance of flows between what has loosely been referred to as “the West” and parts of what is even more loosely called “the rest”: movements of people, goods, pollutants, ideas, and so on in both directions. One result has been a greater awareness of past flows across these same spaces, and of the degree to which Westerners have often ignored dynamism— and thus the existence of “real history”— elsewhere in the world. This has led to calls for devoting more of our research and teaching to what Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt called “wider world history” in an article for the May 2013 issue of Perspectives, which was followed by an online forum.1 Clossey and Guyatt argued that “the West” is still hugely overrepresented in most U.S. history departments—though less so than it used to be, and less so than in Canadian and UK history departments. Other participants in the forum suggested that the rebalancing of attention that Clossey and Guyatt seek had already gone a bit further than they indicated, but the contributors generally agreed that this process was far from complete, and they pointed to possible opportunities for speeding it along—including some that might avoid a zero-sum game with European and U.S. histories. (This allowed everyone to politely avoid discussing whether there was an ideal balance, and if so, what might need to be reduced in order to achieve it.) The second development involves an increased questioning of the units most often emphasized in historical analysis, whether of the West or of other places. Chief among these is the challenge to “methodological nationalism”—the still-powerful nineteenthcentury assumption that nations were the logical containers of meaningful history, serving as the most important point of reference even for research and teaching conducted on different scales, so that studies of, say, Pittsburgh, Omaha, and Atlanta ultimately Kenneth Pomeranz’s “Histories for a Less National Age” was originally published in American Historical Review 119, 1 (February 2014): 1–22. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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mattered as they helped us build a better story of “the United States,” or as they might be juxtaposed to Stuttgart and Essen for the purpose of comparing the U.S. and Germany. Of course, methodological nationalism never had quite the hegemony that we sometimes imagine, particularly for studies of earlier periods. And it has faced many challenges in recent decades, especially from histories which assert that class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on were often more meaningful historical units than nations. As many of those new histories pointed out, nations often proclaimed a certain homogeneity that really applied only to small parts of their population, and actively suppressed (sometimes with the aid of historians) the narratives and identities of other groups. What has happened more recently, though, is that these challenges from below to methodological nationalism are now accompanied by challenges from history on larger scales. There are now more credentialed historians who say they teach and/or write “world history” than at any point since the nineteenth-century professionalization of our discipline. The new histories from “above” the nation seem harder to reabsorb inside a national frame than most challenges from below— a gendered history of Britain’s World War I mobilization is, after all, still about British history even as it disaggregates that unit. And while teaching units larger than the nation are not new, previous examples were rarely used to challenge methodological nationalism, and indeed often reinforced it. Both Western Civ and civilizational area studies units—mostly utilized in introductory teaching— fit comfortably within a system where serious research and advanced teaching were generally reserved for national units, and they raised some of the same intellectual issues (e.g., of false claims of internal homogeneity or of a shared cultural essence). Consequently, they face many of the same criticisms leveled against methodological nationalism, plus others, and do not have the self-evident claim on our attention that nations get by having armies. Thus their status is considerably shakier still than that of national history. They do not currently seem likely beneficiaries of moves to deprivilege the nation, except perhaps in some radically altered form. As I hope to show later, world history can potentially do something very different for us from what these other supranational units have done. At any rate, the new challenge from “above” represented by world or global history has been accompanied by other challenges that question both national and civilizational frameworks by devising units that cross borders without claiming to encompass the polities and cultural areas they slice through. This includes research and occasionally teaching that focuses on diasporic groups, transnational professional or intellectual networks, and other spatially dispersed groups that might nonetheless share some sense of identity; studies of commodity chains; and studies of interactive spaces such as the Atlantic littoral or the Silk Road, which are interesting in part because their dense networks of interaction neither relied on nor produced much movement toward cultural homogeneity or shared identity. The push for broader inclusion and the push for different units can reinforce each other. Those interested in large-level syntheses clearly need monographic research on many still-neglected areas; and studies of, say, Indian Ocean networks are likely

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to stimulate writers of East African national histories in many of the same ways that studies of Atlantic networks, southwestern borderlands, and the Great Lakes “middle ground” have energized U.S. national history. But the people emphasizing more inclusion and those emphasizing new frameworks often talk past each other or work at crosspurposes—partly because we have thus far reacted to these challenges rather differently in our teaching and in our research. While reframing represents a response to both new research findings and our changing experience of the present— the preferred stimuli for historiographic change—it also represents responses to potentially far less welcome trends. These include powerful political pressures to focus education more narrowly on what will supposedly yield immediate economic returns, rather than on nurturing knowledge and habits of thought relevant to the reflective citizen or individual (or even to the later phases of a person’s career). And there may also be cultural reasons to worry about a general privatization of concerns that can easily marginalize history. Even twenty years ago, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s big survey of Americans’ uses of the past pointed to a probable decline in the number of people who felt that major public events had influenced them, and a strong tendency, even among those who did feel that public events mattered, to put their importance in very personal terms— that a war had created pressures to grow up quickly, for instance—rather than in terms of a stake in the outcome of public contention.2 De-emphasizing national units need not mean abandoning history with direct political relevance, but it runs that risk—though the state is not, in fact, going to wither away any time soon. In such an environment, moreover, making “wider world” history seem relevant can be particularly difficult, despite rising awareness of the economic importance of the world beyond U.S. borders. On the one hand, one could imagine Rosenzweig and Thelen’s most basic finding— that people find the past interesting and meaningful when they can place themselves or their loved ones in relationship to it—reinforcing various other arguments for doing “world” courses, since everyone can locate themselves within that unit, rather than multiplying national or area-focused courses on parts of the wider world. Moreover, many advocates of world history, myself included, have argued at times that the world is precisely the unit with which we should encourage people to identify: if national history helped strengthen the sense of national citizenship, the argument goes, what could be more appropriate for a world with so many pressing and inherently global challenges and such enormous inequalities and barriers to solidarity than to provide histories of all humanity? But dangers lurk here, too, even beyond the obvious ones of superficiality, and of financially pressed deans deciding that a department with some members who can teach “world history” does not need an army of Africanists, South Asianists, East Asianists, Europeanists, Latin Americanists, and so on.3 In contrast to area studies (which for our purposes here includes American studies) and national history, which both emphasize cultural particularity, and to transnational

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but non-global units like the Silk Road or the Mediterranean, most global history narratives thus far have been strongly materialistic, and focused on general processes. They thus have the potential to unwittingly reinforce a popular view of “globalization,” which acknowledges the growing economic importance of the wider world, but claims that the world is becoming a sufficiently seamless marketplace that one need not understand particular histories or cultures to function in it. As just one indicator of how common this view has become outside the academy, consider the terms used for “wider world” societies. Texts from 1989 later scanned into Google Books used the phrase “developing countries” roughly forty-three times as often as they used “emerging markets”; by 2008 (the last year for which data is available), that difference had dropped to a bit over 2:1. In the daily press, the reversal has gone further: the New York Times used “developing country” more than twice as often as “emerging market” from 1990 through 2000; for 2000–2013, it has been more than 2:1 the other way, and for the last twelve months more than 3:1.4 Some other, still larger-scale, world history narratives—those of Ian Morris and David Christian, for instance—build a coherent story around the interrelated growth across millennia of human population, technology, knowledge-sharing networks, energy consumption, and environmental impact, leading to a present that could usher in either sustainable universal prosperity or ecological catastrophe.5 This is a truly global story, bringing in places and epochs that historians have usually avoided; it builds potential bridges to other disciplines, argues for the necessity of a common human citizenshipcum-stewardship of the planet, tempers the triumphalism of many “globalization” narratives, and provides a historical context for some of today’s greatest issues. And it develops precisely the mutually reinforcing “triple helix” of themes—population growth, increased technical capacity, and increasingly dense long-distance connections—that Jerry Bentley (author of Traditions and Encounters, the best-selling world history textbook, and founding editor of the Journal of World History, which was for years the only scholarly journal explicitly devoted to world history) picked out as most suitable for analysis on a global scale.6 But it has its own problems, some of which I have discussed at greater length elsewhere.7 Among others, it tends to reduce history to the history of technology, and contemporary issues to the search for a technological fix for our fossil fuel addiction; meanwhile, questions of politics, of who exactly has created and benefited from economic growth, environmental damage, and increased cross-cultural contact, all tend to be elided by a narrative in which “humanity” becomes the actor that we follow through time.8 Narratives on very large spatial scales also tend to use large temporal scales, in part because they highlight themes and processes that touch many places but may do so decades or even centuries apart. They can thereby become disconnected from the time scales of human lives— and thus from both the humanistic project of recovering people’s experiences and the social science project of reconstructing decision mecha-

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nisms and causation.9 Since working on such scales requires more frequent explanatory recourse to motives and forces that do not change much, it can also thwart our efforts to show that certain things which contemporary society and/or disciplines that take their behavioral assumptions from it tend to ascribe to timeless human nature—including the privileged status of “growth” itself— are in fact historical products. In short, it is much better at making the strange familiar than at making the familiar strange, or at least contingent; and history needs to do both. My point here is not, however, that we should therefore avoid such very large scales, but rather that we need to clarify their relationship to other scales. Different historical scales do not nest neatly within each other, like Russian dolls; they are focusing devices that always obscure some patterns to make others stand out, with consequences that can be moral as well as intellectual. This problem exists whether the scales in question are small, medium, or large— and we are hardly the first generation to notice the issue. Fifty years ago, amidst a wave of decolonization that seemed to represent the near-universal triumph of the nation as an organizing principle for human societies, David Potter sounded two cautionary notes for historians. First, he emphasized that the apparent primacy of national identities could only be a relative and historical matter: the sense of belonging to a nation had no necessary priority over religious, class, or other solidarities, and much of its apparent ascendancy at the moment reflected a widespread but non-obvious belief that nations, unlike, for example, classes and sects, had the right (within some unspecified limits) to wield force. Second, because identifying some group as a nation licensed it, at least in some eyes, to do things that would be unconscionable if other groups did them, the stories historians told about the emergence and further histories of nations carried large implications, whether they liked it or not. Thus, as historians “made use of nationalism” (as a concept)— and quite legitimately focused much of their attention on it, since it was one of the most important phenomena of modern times—they also needed to remain wary of how nationalism made use of historians.10 In a similar spirit, we need to think today both about how we use the global and about how various versions of the global may use us. Consequently, despite my own commitment to the emerging field of world history, what I offer here is not intended as an example of what Gordon Wright, categorizing the presidential addresses before his, called the “manifestoes.”11 Instead, I see it as a set of questions about how we are coping with the changing geography of our world, containing as much uneasiness as celebration or exhortation. It thus follows more in the spirit of Joseph Miller’s 1999 address. Miller asked what the processes that eventually created an “African history” cognizable by the rest of the discipline revealed about the discipline; he simultaneously asked how the discipline as a whole might profit from observing what had been necessary to meet professional standards of history while studying places nobody had in mind when those canons were created.12 While world history is not as firmly established in the discipline as is African history, it seems to me sufficiently accepted to ask similar questions about what has been adopted, changed,

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and jettisoned along its path to inclusion. Its greatest value, I will argue, is not that it is necessarily the best scale on which to do history, but that it helps force into the open the necessity of being self-conscious about all scales. Let us look, then, at the rather different ways we have been responding in research and in teaching, and at where the opportunities and pitfalls may be. If we consider trends in historical research, two things become evident very quickly. First, research on transnational topics is booming, particularly for the early modern and modern periods. (Research on earlier periods was never as fully “nationalized” to begin with.) It takes many forms, but is generally concerned with mapping networks of one sort or another that cross national, and often area studies, lines. This work is getting plenty of recognition from the discipline at large; indeed, it seems to be riding a wave of enthusiasm. Fewer than 40 percent of the books we honored with prizes last year framed their subjects within a single polity, even though many prizes were originally endowed in national terms (e.g., the best book on English history).13 The books that have been selected for “featured reviews” in the AHR since that section was reinstituted in 2007 have a roughly similar profile: only 36 percent of the 135 books in question were on topics clearly contained within a single modern nation. Another 12 percent were explicitly framed with reference to an area studies region such as Latin America or South Asia, making such books exactly as numerous in the featured reviews section as those that were either explicitly global or framed by non-traditional regions such as the Indian Ocean. Fully 36 percent crossed national lines in one way or another— by following networks of trade, migration, scientific collaboration, and the like, or by comparisons of some sort—but without specifying some larger geographically defined object: their subject matter might all come from various parts of Europe, for instance, but without any attempt to make claims about Europe as a bounded whole. These numbers are strikingly different from those for our recent research as a whole: more than 70 percent of all the books reviewed in the February, April, and June 2013 issues of the AHR, for instance, would have fallen firmly within the “single nation” category, or roughly twice the percentage as in these two groups of books singled out for notice. (Data for five prestigious presses was in between, but much closer to the distribution for all books reviewed than to that for books receiving featured reviews.)14 They also represent a striking shift away from national units (and “the West”) when compared to the books selected for featured reviews when the AHR previously had that section, in 1993–1996.15 Very little of this research, however, is actually at the global level. Indeed, except for environmental history and histories of very recent times, there is not much research that takes the whole world as its focus. This is not particularly surprising. Aside from the very general trends already mentioned, probably only a few aspects of history are best approached on a truly worldwide scale. Most world history instead focuses on mapping specific, limited sets of connections— of trade, disease transmission, intellectual influence, violence, or whatever—which usually stop well short of spanning the whole world,

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or else makes comparisons that interrogate claims about the universality or regional specificity of particular processes by looking at a few specific, bounded sites. And while exploring these specific connections or comparisons can be considered to be doing “world history,” there is no reason that it has to be, any more than it must be called doing the history of “the Atlantic,” “Eurasia,” “Africa,” or any other old or new space that might be drawn by enclosing the dots that such work connects. Meanwhile, though this kind of spatial reframing apparently meets our approval as research, it is hard to find in our curricula. This spring and summer, I organized a survey of the courses offered by a representative sample of 218 AHA member departments at colleges and universities.16 At the introductory level, 46 percent of all classes last year were on national histories or histories firmly contained within national borders; U.S. history alone made up 35 percent of introductory classes. Another 20 percent were either in Western Civ or, more often, “area studies” culture areas, such as European or East Asian history surveys. Of the 34 percent in all other categories put together, fully half were world history surveys. Histories of non-traditional regions (e.g., the Atlantic world, the Indian Ocean, the Silk Road), courses that were based on comparisons or connections that crossed national boundaries but did not cover the whole world (e.g., the history of Buddhism, the age of revolutions, Christian missions, Gandhi and Mao, the Irish diaspora), and international relations all put together—in other words, the sorts of big but sub-global units that are much in vogue in our research— came to only 10 percent altogether. At the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, we find far more courses that have no geographic referent at all, because they focus on meta-topics: courses on theory and/or method, courses on historiographical classics, research or honors seminars that mix students from many fields, and so on jump to 19 percent of all offerings. But if you put those aside and consider only courses that have a time/place topic, the share of national histories and of traditional regions at the graduate level is almost the same as for introductory undergrad courses. There is some shift within the set of transregional/ transnational courses offered at the upper-division level away from “world” and toward the other categories I described—indeed, world classes drop to a mere 4 percent at the advanced undergraduate level, though they make a partial comeback at the graduate level. Most importantly, though, the preponderance of traditional units overall remains almost unchanged. Thus it appears that the kinds of stories we find it interesting to explore and to tell each other are much less “national” and “conventionally regional” than those that we tell our students, especially our beginning students. The contrast becomes particularly striking when we put it side by side with practices in disciplines relatively close to ours. In a parallel survey, only 6.6 percent of all courses in anthropology were billed as courses about a particular nation; 11.5 percent specified an area studies region; 10.8 percent at least implied that their unit of analysis was the whole world. More than 70 percent either focused on theory and method (at least in the course title) or saw no need

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to specify any geographic/cultural container. When it comes to research, anthropology is as committed as we are to contextualized “thick description”—it is an anthropologist’s term, after all— and probably not coincidentally, it belongs to the dwindling group of disciplines that emphasize book-length scholarship almost as strongly as history does.17 But its members are much less likely to identify with “areas”: the AHA has about 20 percent more members than the AAA, but there are 160 percent more historians who belong to the Association for Asian Studies, and more than five times as many historians in the Middle East Studies Association.18 Sociologists are even less likely than anthropologists to define themselves or their courses using the units that we generally use.19 In political science, where state institutions naturally loom large, the number of courses focused on national and traditional area studies units was much larger than in sociology and anthropology, but still much less than in history— and even further away from the figures for history if one focused on the most prestigious programs.20 Such surveys are imperfect, but the contrast is stark. We are clearly much more committed than our colleagues to bounded, conventional units— or at least to taking them as a point of departure— and this shows up especially strongly in our teaching.21 In part, the differences reflect different theoretical concerns, which inform both research agendas and teaching. For a historian, it is fascinating to read the debates anthropologists have been having over the last two decades about the desirability of doing “multi-sited ethnography”—work that follows migrants, products, ideas, or other flows across space— as opposed to more traditional work anchored in one community, and to note similarities to and differences from our discussions about transnational/ world history. In some ways, the concerns are very familiar— the time commitment involved in gaining a deep understanding of even one social setting, questions about the possibility of teamwork in research that aims at a qualitative, personal understanding, and so on.22 But it is also striking how centrally concerned the anthropological debate has been with how to avoid framing either the single or the multi-part field site, or any larger entity for which they might stand, as a “bounded whole,” and with calling attention to the objects of analysis as analytical constructions rather than real “communities” or “cultures.”23 Historians, by contrast, have generally been happy to acknowledge that no social unit is completely self-sufficient, while only occasionally calling each other’s attention to that fact, and to frame what we offer to students with the most recognizable of these units—which are also the units that students are most prone to mistakenly consider natural. Why, then, do we continue to rely on national (and other traditional) units more than anthropology, sociology, and even political science do? And why in teaching much more than in research? In part, maybe it is because we study the past, and no current trends can change the importance of state and nation-building over centuries gone by. Perhaps, too, the fact that we must bridge the gap between present and past (and often between “our

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society” and the past of “another” one) means that to add a further level of strangeness by framing our stories through unfamiliar spatial units seems likely to be a bridge too far for some undergraduates. But there are also larger theoretical issues, and some very practical ones. Historians have never gone nearly as far toward defining our discipline methodologically as other disciplines have. As Timothy Mitchell has pointed out—in an essay that, oddly, leaves out history—the high tide of area studies in the United States, from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, coincided with periods in which the social science disciplines invented as their objects of study supposedly coherent and distinct entities called “the economy,” “the political system,” “the social system,” and “culture.”24 (Remarkable as it may seem to us today, a Google Ngram confirms Mitchell’s claim that “the economy” was not a very common term before the 1950s, and did not really take off until the 1970s; “social system” also boomed in the 1950s, and “political system” in the 1960s, before both declined again in the 1970s.) These systems belonged to nations, or perhaps to area studies regions. National or area specialists, particularly historians, then looked at how these systems interacted within a national body, much as a doctor might consider the interaction of the circulatory, digestive, nervous, and endocrine systems. (And like general practitioners, we often relied on these specialists to provide models that let us fill in what probably happened in their areas of specialty when our sources could not tell us.) But faith in the usefulness of these constructions crumbled in the 1970s and 1980s, as confirmed by the decline in the use of these terms, and the increasing reluctance of many anthropologists and sociologists to even use the terms “culture” and “society.” In other words, the people who had previously seen themselves as mapping the subsystems that each nation supposedly had lost faith in the existence of those systems as integral units at roughly the same time that methodological nationalism came under attack in various fields. With the objects that had defined them no longer reliable, and having largely ceded the particular (naturalized as the national) to others, economics was restructured as the home of a distinctive type of reasoning—which it now seeks to apply everywhere, leading to what the rest of us often see as disciplinary imperialism—while anthropology was reconfigured as the home of a method (participant observation) and lots of reflexivity. Sociology and political science tried to make equivalent moves, but failed to reach agreement on what their shared method and assumptions were, and fragmented into very loosely related subfields.25 History, on the other hand, experienced these epistemological crises very differently, because we occupied two different positions in the system of knowledge that Mitchell describes. We were specialists in the interrelationship (at the level of a nation or a civilization) of the “systems” in which different disciplines were invested, but that meant we had no stake in the integrity or self-sufficiency of any one of them. On the contrary, our stock-in-trade was to insist that you could not understand a society’s intellectual life without exploring its social structure, or its economy without its politics, and so on. While many people were increasingly skeptical about specific ways of making these

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connections—notably Marxism and modernization theory— one could still assume that such links existed. Similarly, new histories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality emphasized the value of deconstructing national narratives, but not necessarily in order to leave that deconstruction permanent; most such studies worked within a single nation, and their authors often explicitly aimed at creating a more inclusive national history, rather than showing that there was no such thing as a coherent society with a coherent history. Historians did, of course, have an investment in the coherence of history itself—the idea that various sets of changes over time, whether serial or parallel, formed intelligible patterns; but that did not require a commitment to finding that coherence on any particular spatial level on any particular occasion. Though we most often found coherence on the level of the nation, it might also be on the level of an ethnic group (as in African American history), a civilization, or elsewhere. The coherent history we relied on might even be of an entity that was not our explicit topic, as when some national histories— especially non-Western ones, but even some European national histories, such as Germany’s—were described in terms of their nonconformity with a stylized Western path that was “offstage” and thus unexamined. All of these objects have indeed now come in for strong questioning, but mostly in relative, not absolute, terms: Who, after all, would say that neither nations nor classes nor ethnic groups have any reality? Thus, our object has not been as badly shaken as in other disciplines; we have therefore felt less need to define ourselves by a method—which we almost certainly could not do without the discipline fragmenting very badly. Being less methodologically defined, we have found it easier to continue treating our topics as more or less bounded fields of which we illuminate certain illustrative parts (even if we are more inclined than we used to be to question the representativeness of those parts), rather than as a set of dots connected by the very visible, somewhat arbitrary, hand of the scholar/teacher. And those boundaries often make practical sense even when they are theoretically shaky: we can all agree that the U.S.-Mexico border is much less of a firm line in reality than it is on a map or in Westphalian theories of the state, but it nonetheless matters powerfully to people’s lives. So the good news is that we have been shaken up less than many other disciplines, and we can frame our teaching in terms of units that are quite legible and still make intuitive sense as at least heuristic wholes: no matter how much we or our colleagues may question whether there are “societies,” or worry about the ideological implications of imagining things called “nations” moving like monads through time, these units have an intuitive appeal. So does trying to figure out how the different kinds of human endeavor located within a particular set of those boundaries related to each other over a certain bounded time period— assuming that there must be something that ties together the philosophes, eighteenth-century French agrarian problems, rivalry with England, and so on, and that it is a reasonable project to get students to the point where they can discuss all these things (or explain why they don’t have to) in explaining the revolution of 1789.

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Moreover, these categories give us some valuable turf, which becomes all the more valuable to the extent that other disciplines are retreating from it, at least for pedagogy. There are merits—both for public service and for enrollments—in being the principal remaining department, other than perhaps literature, to which a student who just did a semester in Italy, or who is about to intern with a company that is heavily involved in Mexico, or who is starting to think that his/her future in-laws might be Vietnamese, can turn for nationally based courses. And at the risk of repeating myself— and the obvious—nations remain very important; they also become all the more historically interesting as they become less of a self-evident telos, and we instead need to explain how they became such important, often dangerous, foci of power and identification. But why, when we look beyond the nation, does our teaching— as opposed to our research— jump straight to the level of the whole world? The answer is probably overdetermined. On the one hand, there are pressures to fit our curriculum to those of our majors who are thinking of becoming history teachers— a hefty percentage on many campuses. Seventy-five percent of U.S. high school graduates now take a course labeled “world history,” but the expected content varies greatly from state to state; an offering that tries to give some introduction to everything thus has a certain logic to it, and can help assuage the fears of future teachers who are handed a set of standards including many topics they would never otherwise study.26 (By contrast, relatively few teachers have the chance to choose the overall structure of their classes, even if they wish they could; thus a world history field driven by “trickleup” from high school standards will tend toward a more fact-based set of goals than most of us would probably like.) The same holds true when we think of world history as part of general education and preparedness for citizenship. If we seek to encourage global awareness, then a course that addresses the whole world seems logical. Even if what we seek is to interest students in some part or parts of the wider world, there is still some logic to remaining very general at the introductory level, and letting them choose which of the various places they’ve been introduced to they follow up on; that would produce something like our current curricula, where “world history” has become the second most common introductory survey, but upper-division courses overwhelmingly focus on nations or area studies regions. Moreover, the disjunction between the way we do introductory teaching and the way we frame our research fields is hardly new. As far as I can tell, even at its peak of popularity, Western Civ remained solely an introductory course, without any upper-division or graduate courses framed around it or faculty who considered it to be their specialty. Since world history has at least some upper-division classes, graduate programs, and self-proclaimed specialists to its name, we have perhaps slightly narrowed the gap between how we introduce our field and how we practice it. But the current moment gives us an opportunity to go further in rethinking the relationship between general education and the specialized production of new knowledge in our field— one that it would be a shame to miss, or to leave entirely to those who teach introductory courses.

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There are several reasons to do this. If globalization has an implication for us as civic educators, it is not simply that “once upon a time, history made national citizens; now it must make world citizens.” Identities are multiple, and often mutually reinforcing rather than competitive; so, too, are the contexts for public action. As David Hollinger put it, in a slightly different context, we also have obligations to “a public smaller than the species.”27 Moreover, we might sometimes serve the whole species best by addressing that smaller public as Americans— or as “Americans in the world,” rather than demanding a choice between global and national attachments. Meanwhile, the problems we face as a species also cry out for people to get as much practice as they can in selecting appropriate time scales for framing historical processes, and in detecting what might be missed if we focus exclusively on any one particular time scale. Environmental issues are the obvious example here— as many aspects of the climate change debate make especially clear— but any situation in which the short- and long-term effects of some important development are different will do, and history is, to a significant degree, about both tracing such interrelated processes and reconstructing how people experienced and responded to these different dynamics.28 And here, at least, mundane considerations may align nicely with theoretical ones. General education is changing in ways that provide opportunities for history departments that respond creatively to today’s new geographies. It is worth noting here that we cannot assume that general education requirements and our place within them are secure: pressures to provide undergraduate degrees more cheaply frequently translate into pressures to decrease general education requirements, and perhaps to focus them more narrowly on writing and basic numeracy. But on the other hand, a majority of college administrators told a survey conducted after the 2008 crash that general education was an increasingly important priority for them. Moreover, “global/world cultures” ranked near the top of the areas of knowledge they said that their requirements targeted; it was cited by almost twice as many of them as U.S. history, and by more than twice as many as languages.29 My point is not, of course, that we should simply provide the curriculum that others think we should provide, either for general education or otherwise, but these desires may represent opportunities for us to bolster our place in public culture (and the employment possibilities for our students) through offering appealing forms of “wider world history.” At the same time, there also seems to be a (perfectly reasonable) desire to rethink general education requirements so that they are less a matter of meeting a checklist of knowledge goals, as in a model defined by seeking “cultural literacy”; instead the focus is shifting toward using general ed to make sure that the students have certain skills that their majors may not emphasize, and that they can effectively move back and forth between the kinds of questions, evidence, and methods that their majors highlight and those highlighted by other fields.30 In short, we have important strengths to play to, and need not pander; but we are not putting our best foot forward if we present ourselves as simply providing an introduction to the history of one or more societies “out there,” or even to the history of all of us,

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without also advertising the ways in which we teach people to problematize and switch among spatial and temporal units of analysis. Bob Bain has reached a similar conclusion with respect to teacher training in particular: observing differences between teachers asked to design a U.S. history course and a world history course, he notes that problems in the latter case are caused much less by a lack of factual knowledge about certain areas than by confusion about what would be useful themes and a workable organizing framework.31 And as we consider this, the last major redesign of introductory history teaching—the creation of the Western Civilization course— should serve us as a cautionary tale. As Daniel Segal has pointed out, James Harvey Robinson and his students, who largely created Western Civ and the early textbooks for it, were very much committed to extending the period covered by “history” back as far as possible, at the same time that Robinson wanted history written and taught so as to explain “this morning’s newspaper.” Equally convinced that all history was a seamless whole, and that from its beginnings the history (here opposed to “pre-history”) that mattered was essentially that of people attempting to solve fundamental intellectual, scientific, and cultural problems, Robinson et al. presented the story of “the West”— already detached from any real geography, as the course moved from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean to northern Europe and across the Atlantic, with strong unifying themes compensating for the geographic incoherence— as a historical stream that any other place could join. Western Civ was thus presented as a world history in embryo, even if it had not so far included most humans—implicitly devaluing other histories.32 Something that calls itself “world history” and takes “humanity” as its subject, even as it must be highly selective in its examples, runs similar risks, even if some of our examples now come from the Indus or Yellow River valleys. And in this case, too, those risks can be amplified, rather than diminished, by a strong thematic unity— especially a thematic unity that treats some past people as having successfully faced problems of “sustainability” analogous to ones that seem to be reaching a decisive moment today. Not that we can or should write large-scale history without big themes. Indeed, I would argue that we need more of them, and more in which—unlike population growth, greater energy use, and so on—historians are the obvious people to do the teaching. Very few other historical trends have as clear a directionality or can be as readily found in the very deep past as Bentley’s “triple helix,” but many others are nonetheless relevant across vast spaces and time scales: the rise and decline of human retinues as status symbols, changing relationships between humans and territory (as property, as space to be ruled, and as places that define identity), monetization and commodification in their many forms, changing ideas of the sacred, and so on. The raggedness of these other large themes—the fact that they do not fit everywhere, or at all times—is a feature, not a bug. It helps call attention to the artificiality of our spatial and temporal units, what they reveal and conceal, and the need to use them provisionally. I propose these other themes

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not as replacements for the grand ecological and technological themes so central to current world history courses, but as supplements without which such courses can obscure, rather than teach, some of the central virtues of historical thinking in particular. This explicit playing with scales and units is something we do all the time in our research, and many of us do it in the classroom as well; but it would probably help to do more of it, and to advertise it as one of the important operations we teach. Moreover, it would help not to have the structure of our curricula working against us, which it seems to me they do at the moment. To have introductory courses almost all take either a single nation, a “civilizational” region, or the whole world as a frame is to highlight the units that are most likely to seem “natural” to beginning students, and to faculty advisers from other disciplines, trying to help them figure out what can be learned from twelve different courses that fill an “international studies” or “humanities” requirement; we thus fail to signal that we teach the skills involved in choosing and maneuvering among different scales of inquiry. To have the “world” unit be a common one for surveys but then disappear at the advanced undergraduate level suggests that when we get really serious, we invariably look at nations or civilizations, much as we did decades ago. (It also suggests that it’s OK to use a “world” unit for general education that we don’t use in teaching more committed and sophisticated students.) To have very few courses at any level organized around nontraditional regions like the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, which are producing some of the research we ourselves are most excited about, seems a huge missed opportunity; so does a curriculum structure in which once students advance from very broad introductory courses to narrower ones, they never return to larger spatial and temporal scales, even though many of them would find this stimulating, and more and more of us do exactly that at some point in our research careers. (Our current practice more closely resembles the progression through increasing specialization of some natural science curricula; but if what we are teaching is different, why should it be similarly structured?) Self-consciously highlighting questions of scale and of boundaries has much to offer us. Again, we know this from many trends within our research: the strong interest in internationalizing U.S. history, the scholars who have made “territoriality” an explicit subject of research, the aforementioned work on non-traditional regions, on various sorts of networks, on commodities, and so on.33 When we also highlight the importance of temporal scale, we help clarify why historical narratives sometimes complement, but also sometimes contradict, the macro-narratives of other disciplines, and thus form an important part of the intellectual equipment that people need. Certain economic narratives, which assume an eventual return to “equilibrium” without specifying how long that will take, are particularly obvious cases requiring a historical narrative as complement— or as correction, if what might happen in the interim makes pressures toward the original equilibrium moot.34 But there are many others, including many that historians create when we frame large processes as the response of a single reified actor

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(nation, religion, civilization, or other) to a clearly defined “challenge”; and it is hard for even the best historians to avoid doing that when we create our large narratives.35 The point is not that we therefore give up on big pictures, but that we emphasize, as part of our place in the academic division of labor, that we provide ways to think about the interrelationship of different scales: temporal scales, spatial scales, and also levels of abstraction. We all know the perils of formulations such as “Germany wanted” or “middle-class voters feared,” as well as process-centered analogues like “urbanization required,” but we also know that we cannot do completely without them. It would seem to follow that we should have explicit discussions with our students about when such simplifications are acceptable and when they are not— conversations that we have with each other every time somebody says that his or her goal is to add “nuance” or “complexity,” and somebody else insists that this additional nuance meet the “So what?” test. Negotiating all these kinds of scales is an essential part of our research lives, which are thus centrally concerned with the organization of new and old knowledge, not just “the production of new knowledge”: an increasingly common description of what research should achieve, but a highly misleading one, and not just for history. Emphasizing reorganization of knowledge as central to our research can help us frame what we do (beyond digging individual facts out of archives) in ways that should be familiar to people all across the campus. Scientists, after all, understand that one can study a forest, a tree, or cells in a tree without any one of those levels making the others superfluous, and the whole field of complexity theory focuses on patterns that emerge on one scale and resist reduction to the dynamics of any more fundamental scale.36 Likewise, placing the movement among various scales that is essential to that effort front and center as a skill that we teach could help clarify what we offer to students beyond historical facts and the “communication” and “critical thinking” skills that many disciplines can claim.37 World history courses tend to place these issues in particularly sharp relief, as they require particularly rapid zooming in and out—if, that is, we treat that zooming as an opportunity to show our students how historians work, rather than as an embarrassing necessity that we hope the beginners in those classes won’t notice. (Unfortunately, textbooks generally seem to take the latter approach, very rarely calling attention to shifts of scale.) To cite a personal example, when I used to teach a nineteenth- and twentiethcentury world history survey at the University of California, Irvine (mostly to science majors), the first three-week unit featured a kaleidoscope of different kinds of analytic units: a lecture on rapid urbanization that went from London to Chicago to Buenos Aires to Shanghai; one on agrarian crisis in which growers of staples such as rice and wheat were juxtaposed to those who went through the boom and bust of industrial crops like rubber and palm oil, and temperate zones to tropics; and one on fossil fuels and energy use that went to huge time scales. This set the late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury scene, and was followed by a unit on world wars, revolution, and political polarization— a unit with much shorter time scales, more sustained stories about particular places, and shorter, more observable chains of influence linking one event to another.

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Only after teaching the course a few times did I realize what could be gained by making these shifts of approach part of the subject matter— but when I did, at least some students seemed to find the whole course considerably more meaningful. Scattering courses at various scales throughout our curricula, and teaching more courses based on non-civilizational regions, seem like other important ways to bring our teaching more in line with our research, inviting our students over the course of their undergraduate careers to think about issues that we often reserve for each other. It can also make it more evident how a set of history courses on different times and places can nonetheless be cumulative, even if not as obviously cumulative as a math major might be. Last but not least, this kind of self-consciousness—in part a matter of being open with students about the quandary that challenges to both methodological nationalism and “civilizational” essentialism have left us with—frees us to continue teaching courses about the readily cognizable units that many allied disciplines have largely abandoned without falsely naturalizing them. It helps us bring into the classroom a number of the questions that we ourselves have found particularly exciting in recent years, about the making, unmaking, and contradiction of territorial institutions and identities at various levels. It links those theoretical concerns to the practical questions of the student who is not headed for an academic career: “What things will be different if I go work in India, and why? Is it worth understanding those differences, or are they bound to become ever less important over time, as some of my other courses suggest?” And it gives us ways to help our audiences, both inside and outside the academy, frame better questions about what it means—in terms of specific everyday practices and the extent and limits of specific people’s networks—to say that we live in an increasingly global world. None of us, I suspect, really doubts either that nations are historical artifacts or that they remain important. But there may be less unanimity about area studies “civilizations”— which never had the institutional power of nation-states (except, to a very limited extent, in today’s EU) or attracted us all that much as research (as opposed to pedagogical) units. So let me close by suggesting that at this level, too, an effective response to socalled “globalization” is not to simply drop units once we see that they are not bounded wholes, but to highlight how they are made and remade, and what they are and are not good for—both as analytical units for us and as often-naturalized units used to mobilize resources for “real world” projects. For this purpose, let me turn to East Asia, since it is the region I know best— although I suspect that a similar argument could be made about some others, too. Let me also emphasize that everything I am about to say could be presented to even beginning undergraduates as part of a survey that takes apart commonsense notions of why East Asia is a unit and builds in their place a historically based understanding of how regional particularities can emerge, disappear, reappear, and matter to daily life (albeit unevenly) across the region at specific moments, including ours. Comparing 1980, when I started graduate school, to today, it is striking how much

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we overlooked in treating East Asia as a single region back then. It is even more striking that, despite thirty years of globalization that supposedly transcends regions (and critiques of Orientalism, which some believe showed that area studies had always been a bad idea), East Asia probably makes more sense as a teaching and research unit today.38 To an extent unimaginable during the Cold War, the region is now crisscrossed by dense networks connecting all its constituent countries: not only in trade and investment, where the flows are now significantly larger than those between these countries and either the U.S. or Europe, but in exchanges of popular culture, movement of students (where they also now eclipse movements between East Asia and the West, at least by some measures), and so on.39 It is not just that the region has become more densely interconnected than it could be when politics made the Taiwan Straits, the Sea of Japan, and the Bohai Gulf (separating South Korea from China) impenetrable barriers. It is also that it is a different kind of region from the kind we were once encouraged to imagine— one that is clearly a historical product, rather than a more or less transhistorical fact. The old story was that of a region characterized by a shared high culture radiating from two centers: a Chinese one, later supplemented or even replaced by a Japanese one; and by a socioeconomic basis, irrigated rice. But it was never clear how far down the social scale or across the region “Confucianism” stretched in practice, though it clearly stretched a long way as a vague talisman of cultural sophistication; and it is completely clear that even most of China was not growing irrigated rice through most of history. There were, to be sure, many significant shared references, but they never integrated the region the way that the current webs of transnational ties do. East Asia may be somewhat atypical in the degree to which it is becoming more of a region in an era that is supposedly making regions irrelevant, but it is certainly not completely unique. And when we look at the making of today’s East Asia, we do not find one uninterrupted story, either of ongoing integration or the maintenance of a shared ancient heritage. Instead we find multiple, layered, region-making processes, with the crucial links often emanating from various margins rather than the supposed centers of power and high culture. Most recently, we see the effects of several decades in which there were particularly strong buildups of technological and financial resources in some of the region’s smaller and less fully sovereign polities (Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea), which were thereby well positioned to play important roles in the post-Mao remaking of China. Beneath those networks we find deeper layers of regionally circulating religious, philosophical, medical, and other texts, and strong diasporic networks (e.g., of Chinese merchants); the latter, ironically, were kept largely regional partly by migration restrictions and racialized nation-building projects that impinged on East Asia from outside. We also find the spread, both across space and across the social scale, of the old cultural traditions we once took to be the deepest, bedrock layer of regional formation; but when we look closely, we often see those traditions as at least partly retrospective cre-

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ations inflected by political choices. Consider, for instance, Buddhism. When the Ming fell in 1644, what we now call “Tibetan Buddhism” was not recognized within China proper as one branch of a religion that also included “Chinese Buddhism”: Chinese practices were “the teachings of Buddha,” and Tibetan/Mongol ones were “the teachings of lamas,” unfit for civilized people. Later, the Qing imperial household (invaders from Manchuria) began patronizing Tibetan clerics and temples for political reasons (and perhaps for personal enlightenment) and in the process brought many Inner Asian monks to Beijing. Thus, in the long view, they prepared the ground for the integration of these “Buddhisms,” which would in turn help the Chinese/Inner Asian empire they created survive as a national state once they were gone— though that was obviously not their intention. Nor was it a task they completed: it was twentieth-century clergy, supposedly secular governments, and lay activists (many of them influenced by the Christian model of what a world religion should look like, and seeking alternatives to Japanese versions of a shared “Asian” identity) who produced what now appears as the longstanding “background condition” of a “Buddhism” shared across vast spaces and big differences in daily practice.40 So this cultural region is not a found object, but rather something always being re-created through interactions— and so, perhaps, not categorically different from non-civilizational regions like the Indian Ocean or Atlantic World after all. One would hope that a student who had been through an assortment of courses that were self-conscious about spatial units in this way would have—in addition to a lot of content knowledge, and general skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking— some sense of the tools with which to approach questions about how social space changes over time, how that can matter to the people within a region, and how the spatial units that we use to frame questions matter with respect to what processes we do and don’t see. These are important tools for students to hone; they provide leverage on vital intellectual questions about structure, agency, and culture, and about the possibilities for empathetic understanding of experiences remote from our own. But they are also highly practical skills that give students leverage on questions they might well confront in nonacademic careers: How do we decide whether the “Pacific Rim” is a meaningful unit (and for what purposes) or just a name for some shipping lanes and the fond hopes of certain chambers of commerce? Does it matter whether one launches a given project from New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, or Shanghai? Are the particular networks or commonalities on which one bases such decisions robust enough to bounce back quickly from a crisis on the Korean Peninsula or over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands? Skills for thinking about such issues historically should matter to planners for everything from corporate supply chains to NGOs to government agencies, universities, and even K–12 systems guessing about future demand for particular languages. This is not, of course, the only way history can matter, but it is one that should find ready takers, while actually moving our pedagogy closer to what we often, all too revealingly, call “our own work.” I said that this would not be a manifesto, and I will not end by saying “Let us go

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do X.” But I hope that I have given you food for thought. Our discipline has a rather unusual relationship to time, space, and place, and we live in a moment when many people wonder which pasts, if any, one must engage with in order to navigate something called “today’s world.” The older units with which we are identified can seem to have perfectly obvious meanings; this is both an asset and a problem for us. We are already rethinking those units, in many interesting ways, but this rethinking is not as evident as it might be in the face we present to the wider world, either in our course listings or in the explanations we give of what we as a field do. Learning to choose and maneuver among a huge range of spatial and temporal scales, and explain what is revealed and obscured as one does so, has long been a central part of our craft, and one that people who must locate themselves and their options in both time and space will always have need of—maybe more than ever in a world that tells them that they cannot be insulated from the wider world while offering up increasingly decontextualized “information” and some questionable universals as dominant kinds of knowledge. So while challenges to methodological nationalism threaten formerly secure franchises from which we have gained a great deal, they also highlight the need for things that we are good at, and have gone quite far in discussing amongst ourselves. We can, I think, help both ourselves and others by doing our reframing for a less national age more self-consciously, and more openly.

NOTES

A draft version of this address was presented as a paper at the East Asia Transregional Histories Workshop at the University of Chicago. I thank the organizers, the participants, and the two discussants—Dipesh Chakrabarty and Paul Cheney—for their comments on that occasion. Earlier drafts benefited from comments by Maureen Graves, Robert Moeller, Daniel Segal, and Julia Thomas. 1. Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt, “It’s a Small World after All: The Wider World in Historians’ Peripheral Vision,” Perspectives on History 51, no. 5 (May 2013), http://www .historians.org/perspectives/issues/2013/1305/Its-a-Small-World-After-All-The-WiderWorld-in-Historians-Peripheral-Vision.cfm; “AHA Roundtable: ‘It’s a Small World after All,’ ” Perspectives on History Online, Summer 2013, http://www.historians.org/perspectives/ issues/2013/1306/Small-World-Forum_Index.cfm, with contributions by Mary Elizabeth Berry, Anne Gerritsen, Teofilo Ruiz, Kenneth Mills, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt. 2. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998), 38, 50, 55– 56, 116–118, 128, 133–134. 3. Those of us who work in big departments should remember in this connection that more than half of college history courses are taught in departments with fewer than twenty full-time faculty or the equivalent thereof (e.g., eighteen full-timers and four half-timers). Data compiled by Robert Townsend from the AHA’s 2012 Directory of History Departments and Organizations; e-mail message from Liz Townsend, July 5, 2013.

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4. Google Ngram, http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/; New York Times online archive search. 5. Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future (New York, 2010); David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, Calif., 2004). 6. Jerry H. Bentley, “World History and Grand Narrative,” in Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, eds., Writing World History, 1800– 2000 (London, 2003), 47– 65, here 63– 65. There is also considerable resemblance to the strategy employed in J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York, 2003). Interestingly, Bentley’s own research contributions to world history placed more emphasis on a narrative treatment of cross-cultural encounters than on demography, technology, the environment, or a structural view of the growth of enduring long-distance networks. See Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993). 7. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Teleology, Discontinuity and World History: Periodization and Some Creation Myths of Modernity,” Asian Review of World Histories 1, no. 2 (July 2013): 189–226, especially 197–201, 206–209, 213–223. I develop some of these themes in greater detail in “Environmental History and World History: Parallels, Intersections, and Tensions,” in Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori, eds., A Companion to Global Historical Thought (Chichester, UK, forthcoming, 2014), 351–368; and in “How Big Should Historians Think? A Review Essay on Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future by Ian Morris,” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 2, no. 2 (2011): 304–329. 8. For other problems with treating humanity as a whole as the subject of history, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. 9. See, for instance, the discussion of the relationship between temporal scale and agency in Sebouh David Aslanian, Joyce E. Chaplin, Ann McGrath, and Kristin Mann, “AHR Conversation: How Size Matters—The Question of Scale in History,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (December 2013): 1431–1472, especially 1444–1449, 1453–1455; and Pomeranz, “Teleology, Discontinuity and World History,” 191–195, 215–220. 10. David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” American Historical Review 67, no. 4 (July 1962): 924–950. 11. Gordon Wright, “History as a Moral Science,” American Historical Review 81, no. 1 (February 1976): 1–11, here 2. 12. Joseph C. Miller, “History and Africa/Africa and History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (February 1999): 1–32. 13. Those that did included books on the Roman and Japanese Empires— single polities but hardly single nations. Without them, the number drops below 30 percent. 14. At the University of California, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale—picked partly for the ease with which such data could be obtained from their websites— 60 percent of history titles deal with national or subnational topics. 15. In that period, the topics of at least 57 percent of the books selected were contained within a single modern nation, while another 16 percent were about Europe or Europe and

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North America. By contrast, only 24 percent could be said, even by a generous definition, to cross national lines without claiming to represent a larger “civilizational” unit, and none constructed regions that crossed area studies lines, such as the Atlantic world. Moreover, only 4 percent of these books dealt with any part of Asia, and none focused on sub-Saharan Africa. 16. By representative, I mean that they were distributed among schools granting associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in the same proportion as our 733 member departments. This does, unfortunately, mean that community colleges, whose departments rarely join the AHA, are grossly underweighted, but I suspect that including more of them would only reinforce my findings. 17. See Leigh Estabrook with Bijan Warner, “The Book as the Gold Standard for Tenure and Promotion in the Humanistic Disciplines,” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Report (Champaign, Ill., 2003), based on a 2003 study of Committee on Institutional Cooperation universities (not counting the University of Chicago) funded by the Mellon Foundation, http://msc.mellon.org/research-reports/Book%20as%20the%20Gold%20Standard .pdf/view. Anthropology is also the only discipline that gets more International Dissertation Research Fellowships (from the Social Science Research Council) and Fulbright-Hays funding—the largest sources of funds for dissertation research abroad—than history does. Rina Agarwala and Emmanuel Teitelbaum, “Trends in Funding for Dissertation Field Research: Why Do Political Science and Sociology Students Win So Few Awards?,” PS: Political Science & Politics 43, no. 2 (April 2010): 283–293, here 284–285. 18. Membership data from AAA and ASA websites; AAS data by field provided courtesy of Irene Dolozor, e-mail of August 19, 2013. MESA membership data courtesy of Sara L. Palmer, e-mail of September 26, 2013. The Latin American Studies Association also provided membership data (e-mail of Milagros Pereyra-Rojas, September 26, 2013), but it is harder to interpret. In part this is because the association has a very large share of members based outside the U.S.; in part it is because its membership categories have changed dramatically. In 1974 (the first year for which data is available), members were recorded in only six disciplines, but by 2012 it was thirty, leading to large declines in almost all of the originally listed categories. 19. In sociology, 11.8 percent of classes were focused on a single nation, 1.8 percent on an area studies unit, and 8.5 percent on the world, with almost 80 percent not geographically defined. (The ASA is the same size as we are, while one-seventh as many sociologists are AAS members, and barely one-tenth as many belong to MESA.) There was a small number of schools with a combined sociology/anthropology department; results for those schools were not materially different. 20. The overall figures were as follows: national units, 30.0 percent; traditional regions, 9.4 percent; unconventional regions, 2.8 percent; world, 14.2 percent; theory/method, 26.4 percent; non-geographic, 16.3 percent; other/unclassifiable, 0.6 percent. For the ten most prestigious research universities in the sample (Cornell, Emory, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan–Ann Arbor, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Rutgers–New Brunswick), the numbers were as follows: national, 24.0 percent; traditional regions, 12.9 percent; unconventional regions, 2.9 percent; world, 15.6 percent; theory/method, 27.8 percent; non-geographic, 16.9 percent; other/unclassifiable, 0.2

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percent. At my home institution (not included in the sample), only 12.4 percent of political science courses explicitly targeted a nation, 9.4 percent a region, and 6.5 percent the world. 21. As one further example, consider the “sections” within professional organizations. The AAA has forty, of which at most seven are associated with a “place” of any sort. The APSA has forty-four sections, of which only three (Canada, Europe, and Africa) are based on any kind of geographic or cultural unit. The ASA has fifty-two, of which two might be said to refer to a place, but only very loosely: Latino/a (which presumably covers people of that heritage wherever they are) and “Asia and Asian America.” The AHA has no sections, but a large number of our affiliated societies have a national or regional basis, while many others have a temporal one (absent in these other fields). 22. See, for instance, George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117; Mark-Anthony Falzon, “Introduction,” in Falzon, ed., Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis, and Locality in Contemporary Research (Burlington, Vt., 2009), 1–23; Matei Candea, “Arbitrary Locations: In Defense of the Bounded Field-Site,” ibid., 25–45; Joanna Cook, James Laidlaw, and Jonathan Mair, “What If There Is No Elephant? Towards a Conception of an Un-Sited Field,” ibid., 47– 72; Cindy Horst, “Expanding Sites: The Question of ‘Depth’ Explored,” ibid., 119–133; Karen Isaksen Leonard, “Changing Places: The Advantages of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” ibid., 165–180; and George E. Marcus, “Multi-Sited Ethnography: Notes and Queries,” ibid., 181–196. 23. There does, however, seem to be less concern among anthropologists about the specifically linguistic aspects of these challenges. Perhaps this is because a few languages are so widespread in today’s world (especially among those who cross borders frequently), and perhaps also because living informants who move do not lose the capacity to talk to ethnographers in their old languages, while historians, who must often track migrants through what those around them record, need to read the languages of each place those people move through. 24. Timothy Mitchell, “Deterritorialization and the Crisis of Social Science,” in Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver, eds., Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate (Syracuse, N.Y., 2003), 148–170, here 154–163. 25. In the case of economics, one can tell two rather different stories, which lead to the same conclusion. Mitchell’s story, focusing on the 1970s, points to declining faith in Keynesian models that claimed to explain whole economies as more or less predictable systems: a tale in which the recognition of failure is tied to a loss of unifying faith and fragmentation of the field into people pursuing many different topics and united only by the faith in maximization under constraints and models rendered in mathematical form. Alternatively, one could focus on some of the new models (such as real business cycle theory) that treat old topics of economic debate as solved problems no longer needing discussion, thus freeing economists to go use their (vindicated) tools elsewhere. While these stories are fundamentally different, and may describe different parts of the profession, the effect is the same. 26. Robert B. Bain, “Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History,” in Douglas Northrop, ed., A Companion to World History (Malden, Mass., 2012), 111–127, here 111. In fact, as Bain notes, many “world history” courses are a series of strung-together area studies

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units, while others are essentially a Western Civ narrative, with brief excursions into other areas (usually in the distant past) added on without having much effect on the main story. 27. David A. Hollinger, “The Historian’s Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 381–395, here 384. 28. I discuss several examples, concerning both spatial and temporal scales, in “Teleology, Discontinuity and World History”; see especially 193–195, 206–209, 215–223. An example I have found particularly effective for teaching purposes and general audiences is the effects of mechanized transportation on the use of horses. Most people take for granted the long-term outcome, namely that horse-drawn transport has nearly disappeared from most of the world. When people learn that the initial effect was quite the opposite—because building railways caused a huge increase in the quantity of people and goods being transported, and they all had to get to and from the station, the number of horses in major urban centers increased much faster than the human population during the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth—they are often surprised, but still note that “in the long run” the eclipse of horse-drawn transit was inevitable. That may even be true, but nobody saw it coming until quite late: even in 1900, almost fifty years after the invention of the internal combustion engine, experts were still nervously projecting the sanitary and other problems that would result from several decades more of growth in the urban equine population, rather than foreseeing that the automobile would render these worries moot. For a brief account, see Eric Morris, “From Horse Power to Horsepower,” Access 30 (Spring 2007): 1– 9, http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access%2030%20-%2002%20-%20Horse%20 Power.pdf. 29. Hart Research Associates, “Trends and Emerging Practices in General Education: Based on a Survey among Members of the Association of American Colleges and Universities” (May 2009), http: //www.aacu.org/membership/documents/2009MemberSurvey_ Part2.pdf, 4– 5. Interestingly, a Hart survey of business executives also ranked “global issues” among the top five areas needing more emphasis in higher education. There is something odd about the very limited support for language requirements in this context, but it presumably reflects a feeling that English has become enough of a lingua franca that one can function in today’s world without other languages. The argument against this seems to me part of the general argument about the continued relevance of cultural particularities that recurs throughout this address. 30. American Association of Colleges and Universities conference overview, “General Education and Assessment: A Sea Change in Learning,” February 28–March 2, 2013, http:// www.aacu.org/meetings/generaleducation/gened2013/materials.cfm; see also the Lumina Foundation’s description of the Degree Qualifications Profile at http://www.luminafounda tion.org/publications/The_Degree_Qualifications_Profile.pdf. 31. Bain, “Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History,” 113–117, 123. 32. Daniel A. Segal, “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 770– 805, here 776, 778– 780, 785; see also Adam McKeown, “What Are the Units of World History?,” in Northrop, A Companion to World History, 79– 93, here 81. 33. See, for instance, Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age; Thomas

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Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006); Carl Guarneri, America in the World: United States History in Global Context (New York, 2007). On “territoriality,” see, e.g., Charles Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 807– 831. 34. Donald N. McCloskey, “The Economics of Choice: Neoclassical Supply and Demand,” in Thomas G. Rawski et al., Economics and the Historian (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 122–158, here 128 fn. 1, points to the fact that positing an equilibrium-seeking process does not tell us how quickly or slowly that dynamic will work, but without noting that it can make economic analysis alone misleading. 35. I give some examples from a work I greatly admire—Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism—in “Teleology, Discontinuity and World History,” 206–208, 217–219. 36. I found the forest/tree/cell analogy, used for slightly different purposes, in William H. McNeill, “A Defense of World History: The Prothero Lecture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 32 (1982): 75– 89. For an introduction to complexity theory, see Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford, 2009). 37. There is a small but interesting psychological literature suggesting that beginning students have a strong tendency to explain everything in terms of individual agency: e.g., explaining Columbus’s voyages in terms of his personal ambition or that of Ferdinand and Isabella, rather than exploring the position of Castile in existing political and commercial competition. When they are urged away from that, their first recourse is often to treat political units as individual agents (e.g., “Britain felt . . . ”). It would not be a bad first description of what we teach, methodologically speaking, to say that we try to make students able to consider the play of structure, culture, and agency in more sophisticated ways than that—which involves, among other things, getting them to think about what units are “real,” in the sense that they have either agency or an inherent logic that limits the possibilities available at a given time. (It also probably involves making them less eager to resort to mono-causal explanations of any sort.) For a discussion of the psychology of history learning that emphasizes this movement from individual causation to analysis of structures, see Ola Halldén, “Conceptual Change and the Learning of History,” International Journal of Educational Research 27, no. 3 (1997): 201–210. 38. It is convenient for these purposes that Edward Said’s much-cited Orientalism was published in 1979—though Said himself was by no means calling for a total abandonment of area studies. 39. For comparisons of economic flows within East Asia and between East Asia and the West, see, e.g., figure 6, “Intra-regional Trade of Major Regions (1988–2007),” in Douglas H. Brooks and Changchun Hua, “Asian Trade and Global Linkages,” ADB Institute Working Paper no. 122 (December 2008), http://www.adbi.org/files/2008.12.04.wp122.asian.trade .global.linkages.pdf, 10; United States Census Bureau, “Trade in Goods with Korea, South,” http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5800.html; European Commission, Directorate-General for Trade, “European Union, Trade in Goods with South Korea,” http://trade .ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_113448.pdf, 2; Scott Snyder and SeeWon Byun, “China-ROK Trade Disputes and Implications for Managing Security Relations,” Korean Economic Institute Academic Paper Series 5, no. 8 (September 2010), http://www.keia

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.org/Publications/AcademicPaperSeries/2010/APS-Snyder-2010.pdf. See also “S.  Korea, China, to Hold New Round of FTA Talks Next Week,” Xinhua, January 2, 2014, www.china .org.cn/2014 –01–02/content _31074129.htm; and Aaron Back, Toko Sekiguchi, and Yuka Hayashi, “China, Japan, South Korea Agree to Trade Talks,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230437150457740277307642 8202. The former gives a figure for China–South Korea trade which is more than double the figure for the U.S. and South Korea, and more than triple that for the EU and South Korea; the latter specifically notes ways in which the proposed China/South Korea free trade area deal would serve as an alternative to the U.S.-proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. For figures relevant to movements of students see, e.g., China State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, “Away from Home but Never Alone,” April 12, 2007, http://www.safea.gov .cn/english/content.php?id=12742823; Eunkyung Seo and Heesu Lee, “China Beats U.S. for Korean Students Seeing Career Ticket,” Bloomberg News, September 4, 2013, http://www .bloomberg.com/news/2013–09–04/china-beats-u-s-for-korean-students-seeing-career -ticket.html. See also Hélène Le Bail, “The New Chinese Immigration to Japan: Between Mobility and Integration,” China Perspectives 61 (September– October 2005): 2–15. 40. Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New York, 2005).

F U R T H E R R E A D IN G FO R C H A P T E R 10 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chakrabarty argues that the concept of Europe as the cradle of capitalist modernity is intrinsic to the social science disciplines, including history. This mythical thinking about Europe distorts perceptions about the rest of the world, casting other regions as being comparatively deficient. Dirlik, Arif. “Confounding Metaphors, Inventions of the World: What Is World History For?” In Writing World History, 1800– 2000, edited by Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, 91–133. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Dirlik critiques Eurocentric assumptions inherent in world historical scholarship, even in work that attempts to break free of them. Alternative narratives of global history have not displaced the elision of Western civilization as world history. The contradictions of globalization are simultaneously a process of Euro-American homogenization and of the heterogeneity and localization of the human condition. Dirlik doubts that historical narratives are capable of achieving the multiplicity of visions that allow for the incorporation of other conceptualizations of history itself. Feierman, Steven. “African Histories and the Dissolution of World History.” In Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities, edited by Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, 167–212. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Feierman’s essay is one in a collection that argues for the importance of knowledge from Africa and knowledge created by Africanists for the practice of humanities and social science in Euro-American universities. Feierman argues that Africanist historians’ emphasis on local agency has yet to fundamentally alter the Western progress narratives that undergird world historical scholarship. Guha, Ranajit. History at the Limit of World-History. New York: Columbia University Press,

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2002. Guha contends that the Western philosophy of history that is characterized by the Hegelian concept of world history has colonized historical thinking in ways that eradicate alternatives emanating from outside Europe. Using examples from the Indian past, he argues for alternative narrative forms that allow ordinary people’s everyday lives and perspectives to be part of the human past. Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. The History Manifesto. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. In a controversial polemic, the authors call for a return to large scales and long chronologies, and for historical research based on big data. The authors describe a contemporary moment characterized by the myopia of short-term thinking brought on by information overload; they claim that only by employing big data can historians understand “deep contexts” and create a “history for the present.” Moyn, Samuel. “Bonfire of the Humanities.” The Nation 300, 6 (February 9, 2015): 27–32. Moyn explores the perception that the study of history is in a state of crisis, losing relevance for the public and for students. He examines the critiques and new approaches of prominent historians, including Lynn Hunt, David Armitage, and Jo Guldi. Nehru, Jawaharlal. Glimpses of World History. 1934. Reprint, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004. Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, wrote this world history from memory as a series of letters to his daughter. First published in 1934, this massive tome presents an alternative world history that highlights the contributions of Asia. Sutherland, Heather. “The Problematic Authority of (World) History.” Journal of World History 18, 4 (December 2007): 491– 522. Sutherland argues that in this current era of globalization, we need a new “usable past” that transcends earlier historical metanarratives and national histories. Achieving this transcendence through conventional practices of historical research and writing requires that historians destabilize progress narratives of modernization and the nation.

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TEACHING WORLD HISTORY, FURTHER READING

American Historical Association. Perspectives on Teaching Innovations: World and Global History. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1999. Bain, Robert B. “Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History.” A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrup, 111–27. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Big History Project. https://bighistoryproject.com/home. Burke, Edmund, III, David Christian, and Ross E. Dunn. World History: The Big Eras: A Compact History of Humankind for Teachers and Students. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012. Burton, Antoinette. A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Dunn, Ross E. “The Two World Histories.” Social Education 72 (September 2008): 257– 63. Dunn, Ross E., and David Vigilante, eds. Bring History Alive: A Sourcebook for Teaching World History. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996. Getz, Trevor. “Teaching World History at the College Level.” In A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrup, 128–39. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. National Center for History in the Schools. World History for Us All. National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles. http://worldhistoryforusall .sdsu.edu. Naumann, Katja. “Teaching the World: Globalization, Geopolitics, and History Education at U.S. Universities.” German Historical Society Bulletin Supplement 5 (2008): 123–44.

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“The New World History: How Can We Bring Our Students’ World into the Classroom?” Special issue, Social Studies Review 49, 1 (Spring/Summer 2010). Roupp, Heidi, ed. Teaching World History in the Twenty-First Century: A Resource Book. New York: Routledge, 2010. Stearns, Peter N., Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds. Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 2000. “Teaching World History.” The Source: A Quarterly Publication of The California HistorySocial Science Project, Fall 2014. Women in World History. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/. World History Sources. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/index.html.

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CREDITS

Michael Adas, “Global and Comparative History,” from Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), ix–xi. Gilbert Allardyce, “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course.” Jerry H. Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” American Historical Review 101 (June 1996): 749– 56. Jerry H. Bentley, “Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History.” Originally printed in Journal of World History 16, 1 (March 2005): 51– 82. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press. Lauren Benton, “How to Write the History of the World.” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 5, 4 (March 2004), 5– 7. ©2004 The Historical Society. Reprinted with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press. Lauren A. Benton, “No Longer Odd Region Out: Repositioning Latin America in World History.” Originally published in Hispanic American Historical Review 84, 3 (August 2004): 423–30. Reprinted with permission from Duke University Press. Maxine Berg, “Global History: Approaches and New Directions.” Originally published in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–18. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.

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Joseph M. Bryant, “The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity.” Originally published in Canadian Journal of Sociology 31, 4 (Autumn 2006): 403–44. Reprinted with permission from the Canadian Journal of Sociology. Edmund Burke III, “Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History.” Originally published in Journal of World History 6, 2 (Fall 1995): 237– 50. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press. Rainer F. Buschmann, “Oceans of World History: Delineating Aquacentric Notions in the Global Past.” Originally published in History Compass 2 (2004): 1–10. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons. David Christian, “History and Science after the Chronometric Revolution,” from Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context, ed. Steven J. Dirk and Mark L. Lupisella (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2009), 441– 62. Julia A. Clancy-Smith, “The Middle East and North Africa in World History” (not previously published). Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective.” Originally published in African Affairs 100, 399 (April 2001): 189–213. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press. Alfred W. Crosby, “The Columbian Exchange,” from Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 45– 57. Philip D. Curtin, “Depth, Span, and Relevance.” American Historical Review 89 (February 1984): 1– 9. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Globalization as Historical Process.” Originally published in World Economics 3, 2 (April–June 2002): 1–16. Reprinted with permission from World Economics. Andre Gunder Frank, “A Plea for World System History.” Originally printed in Journal of World History 2, 1 (Spring 1991): 1–28. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press. Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” Originally published in American Historical Review 111, 3 (June 2006): 741– 57. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press. Jack A. Goldstone, “Capitalist Origins, the Advent of Modernity, and Coherent Explanation: A Response to Joseph M. Bryant.” Originally published in Canadian Journal of Sociology 33, 1 (January 2008): 119–33. Reprinted with permission form the Canadian Journal of Sociology. Carl Guarneri, “American History as if the World Mattered (and Vice Versa),” from America in the World: United States History in Global Context (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 1–22. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History.” Journal of World History/Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale (UNESCO) 1, 3 (1954): 715–23.

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Marnie Hughes-Warrington, “World History.” Originally published in Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, ed. Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys, and Barbara Caine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 611–17. Reprinted with permission from Palgrave. Originally published in Journal of World History 1, 1 (Spring 1990): 23–26, 40– 76. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press. Vinay Lal, “Much Ado about Something: The New Malaise of World History.” Originally published in Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 124–30. Copyright, 2005, MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc.. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of Duke University Press. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, “The Architecture of Continents: The Development of the Continental Scheme.” Originally published in The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 21–33. Reprinted with permission from University of California Press. Craig A. Lockard, “The Rise of World History Scholarship.” Originally published in the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 130–35. Reprinted with permission from Taylor & Francis Group LLC Books. Craig A. Lockard, “Southeast Asia in World History.” Originally published in World History Connected 5, 1 (October 2007), http://world historyconnected.press.illinois.edu/5.1/lockard.html. From World Heritage Review. Copyright 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. Patrick Manning, “Frameworks for Global Historical Analysis.” Originally published in Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 276– 80. Reprinted with permission from Palgrave Macmillan. Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global History to World History.” Originally published in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, 3 (Winter 1998): 385– 95. Reprinted with the permission of the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. © 1998 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. William H. McNeill. “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years.” Journal of World History 1, 1 (1998): 1–21. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press. Joseph C. Miller, “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multicentric World History Needs Africa.” Miller, Joseph C. “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multi-centric World History Needs Africa.” Historically Speaking 6, 2 (2004): 7–11. © 2004 The Historical Society. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. David Northrup, “When Does World History Begin? (And Why Should We Care?)” Originally published in History Compass 1 (2003): WO 032, 001–008. Reprinted with permission from John Wiley & Sons.

CREDITS

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Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Comparison in Global History.” Originally published in Writing the History of the Global, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69– 82. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Histories for a Less National Age.” Originally published in American Historical Review 119, 1 (February 2014): 1–22. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture.” Originally published in American Historical Review 107, 2 (April 2002): 425–46. Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press. Kenneth Pomeranz, “What Is World History Good For?” Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, Nov. 19, 2004 (previously unpublished essay) Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Global History and Critiques of Western Perspectives.” Originally published in Comparative Education 42, 3 (August 2006): 451– 70. Reprinted with permission from Taylor & Francis Ltd. Daniel A. Segal, “Worlding History,” from Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Perspectives on Social Science History, ed. Harvey J. Graff et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 81– 98. Lynda Shaffer, “Southernization.” Originally published in Journal of World History 5, 1 (Spring 1994): 1–21. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press. Fred Spier, “Big History: The Emergence of a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach.” Originally published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33, 2 (June 2008): 141– 52. Reprinted with permission from Maney Publishing. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Originally published in Ambio 36, 8 (December 2007): 614–21. Reprinted with permission of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Frank Uekötter, “Matter Matters: Towards a More ‘Substantial’ Global History.” Originally published in World History Bulletin 29, 2 (Fall 2013): 6– 8. Reprinted with permission of the World History Association. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.” Originally published in Journal of World History 18, 1 (March 2007): 53– 67. Reprinted with permission from University of Hawaii Press. Judith P. Zinsser, “Women’s and Men’s World History? Not Yet.” Journal of Women’s History 25, 4 (2013): 309–18. © 2013 Journal of Women’s History. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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INDEX

Page numbers followed by f indicate figures; page numbers followed by t indicate tables Abd al-Rahman, 251 Abernethy, David B., 31 abolitionism, 518, 522, 524 Abu-Lughod, Janet L., 28, 133, 138, 139, 359, 388, 497, 534 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 322, 323f, 324 Acosta, José de, 267 Acton, Lord, 49 Adams, Robert McC., 80 Adas, Michael, 332–33, 344, 497, 559–60 Advanced Placement (AP) program, 8, 9t, 533 Advanced Placement (AP) World History course, 8, 11, 13 Advanced Placement (AP) World History exam, 581 Aegean Sea, 223 Africa, 133, 307, 515; beyond blacks, bondage, and blame, 568–77; East Africa, 243–44; geographical boundaries (see continental scheme); Portuguese in, 253–54, 345; West Africa, 251, 253, 254, 345, 522–24; why a multicentric view of the world needs, 568–77. See also Middle East and North Africa; specific topics

African diaspora, 261, 269, 275, 278, 522–24, 570 African diseases, 126, 171 African history, 591–92. See also Africa; specific topics Afroeurasia, 92, 94, 218, 219, 359, 360; flow of living organisms between the Americas and, 171, 214; Marshall Hodgson and, 92, 94, 189, 215, 217–18; as a spatial single field of human interactivity, 22, 218 Afro-Eurasian Historical Complex, 26, 84, 189, 191, 215 agency, individual, 610n37 agrarian age, 18 agrarian history, 30 agrarian revolution, 468–69 agriculture, 371, 372; “invention” of, 427–28. See also Columbian Exchange; specific crops Aikin, Lucy, 42 Al-Battani, 250 alcoholic beverages, 281 Alder, Douglas D., 63 Allardyce, Gilbert, 19, 78, 79, 132

619

Allen, Robert C., 362 Alliance for Learning in World History, 8–9 Al-Mansur, 250 Alpers, Edward A., 260–61, 265n13 Alvares, Claude, 32 American Age of Nation-building, 203–4 American Council of Learned Societies, 11 “American empire,” 202–3 American exceptionalism, debate over, 207–8; assessment, 210–12; the case against exceptionalism, 210–11; the case for exceptionalism, 209–10; Europeans invent, 208; weighing successes and shortcomings, 210 American frontier, 209 American Historical Association (AHA), 48, 55, 56, 58, 271; Committee of Seven, 55–58; General History course and, 55–57; meetings, 123, 177, 282n13; Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and, 177; Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and, 170, 177, 594; Organization of American Historians (OAH) and, 62, 282n13; specialization and, 123; World History Association (WHA) and, 65. See also American Historical Review American Historical Review (AHR), 129n1, 177, 216, 592, 593 “Americanization,” 202–3 Americans as chosen people, 207–8 Amin, Samir, 32, 563 ‘Amr ibn Bahr al Jahiz, 246–47 Anderson, Benedict, 31 Anderson, Bonnie, 46 animal domestication, 30, 190, 428, 429, 442, 582. See also domesticated animals; livestock animals: spread of, 120. See also fur trade Annales School, 27, 70, 262, 421 Anthropocene, 439–40, 443; defined, 424; preanthropocene events and the, 441–44; stage 1: industrial era (ca. 1800–1945), 444–46; stage 2: Great Acceleration (1945–ca. 2015), 448, 449f, 450–56; stage 3: stewards of the Earth System? (ca. 2015–?), 451–56 anthropology, 156, 570, 593–94 Appadurai, Arjun, 260, 343, 527n6 Appelbaum, Nancy, 159 aquacentric notions in the global past, delineating, 259–64 Arabistic bias, 82

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Arabs, 249–52. See also Islamic world; Middle East archaic globalization, 343 area studies, 7–9, 52–53, 123, 153, 168, 217, 595; connecting across former, 492; criticism of, 603; dissatisfaction with, 485, 486; era of, 66; global history and, 484; vs. global history narratives, 589–90; mainstreaming of, 307; moving beyond, 538; in universities, 66 area studies agenda, 486 area studies courses, 8, 9; courses replacing broad, 7 area studies perspectives, expanded vision of, 536 area studies programs, 123, 291, 349 area studies regions, 592, 593, 595, 597, 602 area studies scholarship, 567 area studies specialists, 492 area studies training, 3 area studies units, courses focusing on, 588, 594 area-studies approach to world cultures, 63 Aristotle, 223, 233n7 Armitage, David, 221, 262–63, 270–72, 344 Arrighi, Giovanni, 28 Asia: geographical boundaries (see continental scheme); Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Parthasarathi), 414–17. See also East Asia; Southeast Asia; specific topics “Asia,” uses and meanings of the term, 103–4, 106–7, 224, 233n3, 407 astronomers, 246, 460, 461, 463, 464, 472n16 astronomy, 246, 290, 464. See also cosmology asymmetries, paradigm of, 490 Atlantic creole, 277 Atlantic demographic history, 126–28 Atlantic history: definitions, challenges, and opportunities, 267–81; types of, 272. See also specific topics “Atlantic” panels or papers at conferences, 282n13 Atlantic Studies, 270 Atlantic system of trade and migration, 206 Austin, Gareth, 489 Babur, 175 Bacon, Francis, 252–53 Bailyn, Bernard, 279, 490

Bain, Bob, 599 balanced comparisons, 334, 350–52 Balazs, Stefan, 111 Balfour, Clara Lucas, 43 Banker’s Boast, 521 Baquaqua, Mahommah Gardo, 280 barbarian invasions, 58, 114, 116, 141 “barbarian” nomads, 133, 140 “barbarians,” 40, 111, 191, 501. See also primitivism Barkey, Karen, 343 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 24, 51 Bayly, Christopher A., 29, 343, 485 Beard, Mary Ritter, 46 Becker, Carl, 69 behavioral modernity. See creative explosion Belgium, 372, 406 Bellow, Saul, 80 Ben Suleiman, Ayuba, 280 Bengal, 510 Bentley, Jerry H., 94–95, 216, 221, 222n16, 261–62, 536, 606n6; on cross-cultural integration, 293; on cross-cultural interactions, 558–59; and historicizing globalization, 477; humanism and, 539; Journal of World History and, 94, 307, 496; overview, 94–95; “triple helix” of themes, 558, 590, 599; on world history, 496 Benton, Lauren, 170–71, 333–34, 568; Law and Colonial Cultures, 344–45 Berg, Maxine, 159, 477, 479 Bible. See Genesis Big Bang, 295; big history and, 6, 29, 295, 305, 310, 425; David Christian on, 305, 425 big bang paradigm, 460, 461 big history, 29, 46, 305, 310, 344, 425–26; astronomy, Eric Chaisson, and, 464, 465; California and, 555; complexity in, 467–70; conferences on, 11, 472n16; courses on, 459–63, 465, 470; David Christian and, 6, 29, 305, 425, 460, 462, 463, 465 (see also Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History); deficiencies, 308; defining, 423; emergence of, 29, 305, 423, 425, 459–70; emergence of a general theory of, 464–65; environmental history and, 423; Goldilocks principle and, 465–67, 471n14; history of, 462–63; movement for, 6; from a multidisciplinary to an

interdisciplinary approach, 460–62; overview and nature of, 6, 29, 423, 459, 460, 464, 578; political economy of, 556; proponents/advocates of, 29, 305; regimes and, 462, 464; The Self-Organizing Universe (Jantsch) and, 461; The Structure of Big History (Spier), 461, 462; support for, 308; uniting scientific paradigms with a narrative of human history, 425, 460 Black, Cyril E., 68; modernization theory and, 27, 68 Black, Jeremy, 31 Black Death. See bubonic plague Black Sea, 127, 223, 252, 253 Blaut, J. M., 83 Blaut, James, 388 Bloch, Marc, 413 Blom, Ida, 46 Blumi, Isa, 180n17 Blyden, Edward, 569 border-crossing “issue networks,” 524 Borges, Jorge Luis, 342 Boserup, Ester, 45 Bossuet, Bishop, 49 Bowen, Emanuel, 229 Boxer, Charles, 186 Braddick, Michael J., 270 Braudel, Fernand, 185, 215–16, 262, 267–68, 276, 278, 281, 490, 497 Brazil, 518 Brenner, Robert, 413 Brewer, John, 491 Bright, Charles, 477, 497–99 Britain, 405; coal and, 350, 361–64, 372, 375, 376, 388, 390, 398, 406, 415–17, 444, 488; compared with Ottoman Empire, 415–16; India and, 408–9; industrialization, 362, 363, 400, 401, 488; sugar and, 273, 376, 511, 522; trade with China, 510–11; Yangzi River Delta compared with, 350, 360–62, 367, 369, 375, 377, 413, 416–17. See also England; specific topics Britanocentrism, 231 British Atlantic, historians of the, 270 Broadberry, Stephen, 403t Brown, Cynthia Stokes, 29 Brown, Henry Phelps, 369 Bryant, Joseph M., 400–401, 404–7, 410 bubonic plague, 253

INDEX

   •   6 21

Buddhism, 300; China and, 101, 117, 191, 247, 248, 300, 604; India and, 191, 248; Mahayana, 101, 191, 192; Theravada, 193; Tibetan, 604; trade and, 117, 300, 301 Bunbury, E. H., 230 Burbank, Jane, 487 Burke, Edmund, III, 78n, 92 Burkert, Walter, 84 Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth, 43 Burton, Antoinette, 579 Buschmann, Rainer F., 220–21 Bushnell, Albert, 55 Butel, Paul, 279 cacao, 280–81 California, 555–56 California School, 344, 360–61, 363, 364, 365n11, 400, 406, 411n1; Bin Wong and, 360, 361, 363, 411n1 California State Board of Education, 10 California World History Library, 555 Campbell, Cameron, 392 Cannadine, David, 346 Cape of Good Hope, passage around Africa via the, 205 Capella, Martianus, 224 capital, 343–45, 377, 488–90; drive to produce, accumulate, distribute, and consume, 138; global, 564; globalizing, 562; human, 138; for sustained investments, 389, 409 (see also capital investments) capital accumulation, 138, 139, 196, 358; long economic cycles of, 140 capital exchange systems, 524 capital flows and movement, 448, 451, 514, 516–18, 521, 525 capital goods, 374–76 capital investments, 391, 409. See also capital: for sustained investments capital markets, 514, 517; European, 369, 490 capital suppliers, 409 capital-intensive methods of production in Europe, rise of, 362 capitalism, 141; modern world-capitalist system, 140, 141 (see also modern world system); rise of global, 183; slavery and, 203. See also world system

6 2 2    •   I N D E X

Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (Goody), 363, 387 capitalist origins: and the advent of modernity, 383–411; debating, 383–98 capitalist world system, 347, 562 carbon dating, 314–15 carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration, atmospheric, 443, 446, 447t, 451, 454, 455 Carolingian period, 225 case study, 338–40; historical, 358–59 Catholic countries, slavery in, 340 Catholic world, cultural unity of, 225 Catholicism, 574–75 Caucasian race, 19–20 Cell, John, 340 Center for History and New Media, 10–11 Central Asia. See Inner Eurasia Chaisson, Eric, 463–65 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 347, 544, 564–65; critique of Eurocentrism, 563–67; on intellectual “provincializing” of Europe, 535, 545, 546, 567; Jerry Bentley on, 536 Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age, The (Hunt et al.), 321–26 Chambers, Robert, 462 Champa rice, 247 Chandavarkar,Rajnarayan, 413 charcoal, 441, 444 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 139 Chatterjee, Partha, 544 Chaudhuri, K. N., 262, 490 Chaudhuri, Nupur, 45 Chaunu, Pierre, 185, 343 “Chicago School,” 26, 78 Child, Lydia Maria, 43 Childe, V. Gordon, 112, 136 China, 244, 245, 407, 410; ancient, 115–16; Bin Wong and, 334, 335, 351, 360–62, 365, 389– 90; Buddhism and, 101, 117, 191, 247, 248, 300, 604; coal and, 365, 372–73, 394, 406, 416–17, 444; divergence between Europe and, 367 (see also global conjuncture); grains in, 371, 374, 381n41, 417; Han dynasty, 101, 116, 141, 393, 578; and the Industrial Revolution, 249, 351, 377, 508, 511, 543; Kenneth Pomeranz on, 31, 360–61, 388–91, 535; in

Middle Ages, 110–12; Ming dynasty, 118, 385, 389, 391–92, 410, 432, 509, 604; pre-modern, 300, 390; Qing/Manchu dynasty, 375, 385, 389, 391–93, 408, 410, 417, 604; Song dynasty, 111, 138, 139, 247–49, 444; sugar and, 247, 368–70; Sui dynasty, 247, 248; Tang dynasty, 111, 138, 247–49. See also East Asia; Great Divergence; Southeast Asia; Yangzi River Delta China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience (Wong), 362, 389 Chinese diaspora, 186, 339, 517 chocolate, 280–81 Christian, David G., 218, 310; on Big Bang, 305, 425; big history and, 6, 29, 305, 425, 460, 462, 463, 465; on Goldilocks principle, 471n14; Maps of Time, 6, 348, 425, 465, 555; on prehistory, 294–95; on world history, 6 Christian civilization and Western civilization, 318–19 Christian Europe, 51 Christian Mediterranean, 243, 251–53 Christianity, 18, 54; civilization and, 54, 318–19; Europe and, 49, 51, 54, 225–26; in Latin America, 184; medieval and Renaissance constructions, 51, 224–26; in South Africa, 524; in Southeast Asia, 194, 196; time and, 290 chroniclers, 18, 289 chronicles, 312 chronology, 5, 127, 289–91, 338; defined, 289– 90. See also periodization chronometric revolution(s), 312–15; history and science after the, 311–16, 317n10 chronometry, 312, 313; defined, 312 Cicero, 135 Cipolla, Carlo, 27 circulationist approach/circulationist strategy, 333, 343–46 circum-Atlantic history, 272, 273 civilization, 112, 125, 325; “before,” 322, 324–26; Christianity and, 54; concept of, 326, 327; definitions and meanings of the term, 112, 115, 326; vs. primitivism, 51; role of men and women in the history of, 41; as universal history, 41; use of the term, 325–26; who really belongs to a, 112 civilizational approach, 67

civilizational envelope, 358 civilizational units, 318, 319 civilizationism, 92 civilizations, 112, 602; autonomous, 26; as autonomous social entities whose interactions defined history, 112; “first,” 322–25; as prime actors on the historical stage, 125; tracing connections among great, 102. See also Hodgson, Marshall; McNeill, William; Toynbee, Arnold Clancy-Smith, Julia, 169–70 Clark, Gregory, 403t Clark, Liz, 156 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 43, 44 Clifford, James, 260 climate change, 424, 453, 454 climate intervention. See geo-engineering options Clossey, Luke, 587 cloth, 369, 370, 373–75, 408, 409, 415, 416 Cloud, Preston, 463 coal, 377, 394, 397–98, 417, 444, 446f, 450f, 488; Belgium and, 372, 406; Britain and, 350, 361–64, 372, 375, 376, 388, 390, 398, 406, 415–17, 444, 488; China and, 365, 372–73, 394, 406, 416–17, 444; colonies and, 390, 394, 406; Europe and, 367, 368; Kenneth Pomeranz on, 390, 394, 406, 416, 488; “resource shocks” of, 376; wood shortage and, 372; in Yangzi River Delta, 350, 360, 375, 416–17 coal boom, 372 Coclanis, Peter A., 274, 278, 489 Cohen, Robin, 30 Cold War, 3, 168, 204, 211, 317, 545, 551n3, 603; end of, 204, 287, 337. See also Sputnik crisis collective learning, 312, 348 College Board. See Advanced Placement (AP) World History Colley, Linda, 485, 491 Collingwood, R. G., 312 Colonial Era (1607–1783), 203 colonial projects, 186 colonial societies in the Americas, historians of, 269–70 colonialism, 184; European (see under modernity). See also specific empires colonization and the “antecedents” of globalization, 519–22

INDEX

   •   6 23

Columbian Exchange, 205, 272, 273, 427–33, 512 Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequence of 1492, The (Crosby), 183, 422, 423 Columbus, Christopher, 175, 427, 429 commerce. See trade commercial world system, 117 commodity history, 280, 424, 435–36, 547–48. See also specific commodities comparative history, 332–34, 344, 485–91, 559; vs. circulationist approach, 333–34, 346; comparison and connection, 490; divergence and comparison, 487–90; global history and, 335–37, 486, 487–90, 497 comparative studies, 340 comparative world history, 344–46, 383, 394 Comparative World History Program (Comparative Tropical History), 9, 27, 333, 340 comparison, 128–30, 340; definition and nature of, 332; meanings of the term, 340–41; microcomparisons vs. macrocomparisons, 341; reciprocal, 413; world history as, 331–35 complexity: in big history, 467–70; types/levels of, 464–65. See also Goldilocks principle Conant, James Bryant, 59 Conference on History, Civil Government, and Political Economy, 55 Confucius, 23 connected histories, 479 continental Americanism, 237n76 continental scheme, development of, 222–23; into the 20th century, 231–33; classical precedents, 223–24; continuing career of the continental scheme, 229–31; medieval and Renaissance constructions, 224–26; new divisions, 227–29; old worlds, new continents, 226–27 continents, 229, 236n59; architecture of (see continental scheme); The Myth of Continents (Lewis and Wigen), 218, 274, 275, 349; terminology, 229 contrast-of-contexts approach, 336 Cooper, Frederick, 481, 487 copper, 507 core-periphery structure (of modern world system), 138, 139 core-periphery theories of world history, 69

6 2 4    •   I N D E X

corn. See maize cosmology, 315–16 cosmopolitan cultures, 102 cosmopolitan democracy, 148, 149 cosmopolitan world system, 113–16 cosmopolitanism, 101, 109, 119, 277, 278, 319, 486, 490; cultural, 193; ecumenical, 70 cotton, 243, 247, 249–52, 254, 370, 373; Britain and, 365, 373, 376, 415–17; China and, 247, 370, 371, 373–75, 410; economics and, 416, 417; France and, 415, 416; India and, 243, 365, 415, 416 cotton cloth, 408, 409, 416 cotton exports, 416 cotton textiles, 243, 415, 417 creation stories, 17–18, 305, 306 creative explosion, 310 Crosby, Alfred W., 216, 264n1, 342, 423; The Columbian Exchange, 183, 422, 423 cross-cultural integration, processes of, 293 cross-cultural interaction, 147–48, 176, 296– 302, 558–59 Crossley, Pamela, 479 Crutzen, Paul, 424–25 cultural broker, 277 cultural cosmopolitanism, 193 “cultural imperialism,” 202–3 cultural pluralism, 116–17, 119, 541, 545–47. See also pluralism Cultural Studies Reader, The (During), 156, 157 cultural superiority/cultural arrogance, 9–10. See also ethnocentrism cultural turn, 549 culture: concept of, 595; definition of, 156, 176 cultures, 51; cosmopolitan, 102 Curie, Marie, 314 Curie, Pierre, 314 curriculum. See world history curriculum Curtin, Philip D., 27, 93, 94, 216, 269, 332–33, 340, 342, 422 Dance of the Flows and the Fragments, 516 dark ages, 116 Darwin, Charles, 306, 462 Darwin, John, 31, 485, 487 Davidoff, Lenore, 581 Davis, Mike, 348

Davis, Natalie Zemon, 491 Dawson, Christopher, 24 Dawson, Edgar, 58 de Beauvoir, Simone, 44 de Groot, Joanna, 45 de Pizan, Christine, 41 de Vries, Jan, 367–68, 489, 490 deforestation, 176, 371–73, 393, 416, 436, 442, 443, 445 Degler, Carl H., 72, 340 demographic history, Atlantic, 126–28 dependency theory, 45, 534, 540–43, 545 Diamond, Jared, 29, 309, 555 diaspora, 183, 261, 265n13, 529n23, 547, 550, 583, 588; African, 261, 269, 275, 278, 522–24, 570; Chinese, 186, 339, 517; scope of the term, 547; trade, 184, 341n8, 344, 345 diasporic imaginations, 518, 522–23 diffusion, 136, 137 diffusion theories, 71, 77n53 Dirlik, Arif: critique of Eurocentrism, 563–64; Marxism and, 536, 551n1, 562; on the purpose of world history, 535 disciplinification, 463 Discovery, Age of, 175 discovery method, 60 disease epidemics, 126, 171, 301; bubonic plague, 253; indigenous populations decimated from Old World disease, 119–20, 268, 274, 375, 504–5. See also Plagues and Peoples diseases, 30, 281; African, 126, 171 domesticated animals, 427–29; spread of, 120. See also animal domestication domesticated plants, 427–29, 431; movement of, 171. See also plant domestication domestication: of camels, 116; of cotton, 243; of rice, 190, 428; of sugar, 246 Downey, Matthew T., 64 Du Bois, W. E. B., 569 Dublin, Thomas, 582 Dunn, Ross E., xiii, 71 During, Simon, 156, 157 Dutch East India Company, 517 Early, Gerald, 207 early modern period. See Colonial Era Earth System, 442–44, 451–56; defined, 442;

global change and the, 424, 442–46, 448, 451–54. See also Anthropocene East Africa, 243–44 East Asia, 602–4. See also Southeast Asia East Asian development path, 489–90 East India companies, 486, 487, 511, 517 Eastern Europe, 253, 374, 375 Eastern Hemisphere, 98, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 243, 252, 254, 255. See also cross-cultural interaction ecological circumstances and changes, adaptations to, 136 ecological redemption stories, 176 ecology, 488; political economy and, on the eve of industrialization, 366–77. See also Earth System; great divergence: geographical contingencies and economic history, 30, 485 economic integration, 481, 482n7 economies, industrial vs. organic, 406, 410, 411n2 economy: approaches to the history of the modern world, 360–61; concept of the, 595 ecumenical cosmopolitanism, 70 ecumenical process, 93 ecumenical world history, 95, 146–51, 536 ecumenical world system, 93, 113, 116, 132 education, liberal, 122 Ehrenberg, Margaret, 45 Einstein, Albert, 290 Ekholm, Kajsa, 139 Eliade, Mircea, 80 Elias ibn Hanna al-Mawsili. See Ilyas bin Hanna al-Mawsuli Elliot, John, 262, 492 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 43 Elvin, Mark, 111, 392 Emmer, Pieter C., 276 Empire, Age of, 204 empires, 174, 492; study of global, 186 encompassing comparisons, 351 energy systems, fossil fuel–based, 446–46, 446f, 447t, 450f engines: invention of, 445. See also steam engine England, 335, 350. See also Britain; Great Divergence; specific topics English laborers, real farm wages of, 402, 403t

INDEX

   •   6 25

Enlightenment, 51, 157 Enlightenment thinkers, 23 environment: earliest impacts of humans on the, 441–42; philosophical approaches for dealing with the changing global, 452; business-as-usual, 452–53; geo-engineering options, 454–56; mitigation, 453–54. See also Anthropocene environmental history, 30, 119–20, 178, 421–24, 435, 436, 439. See also disease epidemics environmental imprint of industrial era, 445– 46, 446f, 447t equilibrium trap, high-level, 392 ethics, global, 546 ethnocentrism, 23–26 ethnoracial categories, construction of gendered, 159 Eurasian efflorescences and equilibrium traps, 389–95 Eurasian similarity thesis, 394 Eurocentrism, 25–26, 51, 54, 56, 68, 134, 275, 291, 292, 383–84; accusations of, 387; Africa, the Atlantic, and, 279; beginning of the reaction against, 56; diminishing, 546, 550; Eurasian centrism and, 487; gender and, 538; global approach/global perspective and, 60–63; global integration and, 550; globalization and, 506, 535; of Immanuel Wallerstein, 359; and its alternatives, 130–32, 535, 566–67; Leften Stavrianos and, 51, 53, 60–62; modernization and, 519; “New World” and, 277; originary fallacy and, 564; postmodernists and, 350; and the value of history as an enterprise, 564–65; William McNeill and, 65, 66, 68–70, 358; World History Association (WHA) and, 65, 70. See also ethnocentrism; Western civilization course; westward distortion of history Eurocentrism, critiques of, 32, 60–61, 534, 551; Arif Dirlik’s, 563–64; Dipesh Chakrabarty’s, 564–67; Frederick Teggart’s, 131; Glimpses of World History (Nehru) and, 535–36, 556–58; global dimensions, 540–45; Marshall Hodgson’s, 81, 82 Europe: Christianity and, 49, 51, 54, 225–26; Eastern, 253, 374, 375; geographical boundaries (see continental scheme); intellectual “provincializing” of, 535, 545, 546, 567; living standards, 402, 403t; uses and meanings of

6 26   •   I N D E X

the term, 223–25, 407; Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Parthasarathi), 414–17. See also specific topics “European” and “Asian” societies, distinction between, 401–5 European colonialism. See under modernity European dynamism, 505–7 European Exploration, Age of, 505 “European miracle,” 377 European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, The (Jones), 413, 485 “European tunnel,” 2 European-centered world system, 534 European-dominated world system, 562 “Europeans,” use of the term, 226 European-trade-deficit hypothesis, 506, 507 europeenses, 224 Europe’s north, the rise of, 254–55 evolution, 306, 425, 460, 462 exceptionalism: adopted by Americans, 208. See also American exceptionalism exceptionalist theories, 209–10 expertise of the margins, 160 Exploration and Contact, Age of, 203 Fagan, Brian, 30, 308 Fage, Mary, 42 Fairbank, John King, 135 Fallers, Lloyd, 80 Feierman, Stephen, 326 feminist archaeologists and historians, 136–37 Fibonacci, Leonardo, 252 Field, George, 463, 464 fire, 441 flax, 373 Flynn, Dennis, 360, 477, 480–81 Fonte, Moderata, 41 “foreigners” and “foreign,” 103 forests, 371–72, 450f. See also deforestation Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI), 282n13 fossil fuel–based energy systems, 446–46, 446f, 447t, 450f. See also carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration France, 177, 349, 416; cotton and, 415, 416 Frank, Andre Gunder, 133, 134, 137–39, 359, 388, 394; California School and, 360, 411n1;

on China, 406; contrasted with Jerry Bentley, 95; on humanocentric history, 4; Marshall Hodgson and, 80, 94, 133, 134; on modernization theory, 45, 93–94; on rise of the West, 361–62; on world system, 113, 118, 133, 139, 140; on world-system theory, 80, 94 Fraser, Nancy, 147 Frederickson, George, 340 Freyre, Gilberto, 25 Friedman, John, 139 Friedman, Thomas, 436 frontier, 209; and divergence of America’s history from Europe’s, 209; United States on Europe’s, 210–11 fur trade, 128 Gagnon, Paul, 200 Gambrill, J. Montgomery, 57–58 Games, Alison, 220–21, 343–44 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma), 558 Garden of Eden, 17 Garner, Karen, 159 Geary, P., 328n9 Geertz, Clifford, 80, 327 gender: nationalism and, 96, 158–59, 538; and world history, 44–46, 95–96. See also women gender blindness, 39 gender history, 537–38; vs. women’s history, 155– 56, 537–38. See also women; women’s history gender periodizations, 39 “general history,” 1, 58 General History course, 1, 54–58 Genesis, book of, 17, 305, 306 Genghis Khan, 111 Genovese, Eugene, 339 geo-engineering options, 454–56 geology, 315–16, 398, 443 geosequestration, 454 Gerhard, Dietrich, 296 Gernet, Jacques, 111 Geyer, Michael, 477, 497–99 Gibbon, Edward, 338 Gills, Barry, 133, 134, 137–40, 359 Gilroy, Paul, 261 Gimbutas, Marija, 45 Giráldez, Arturo, 360, 477, 480–81

Glimpses of World History (Nehru), 535–36, 556–58 Glissant, Edouard, 317 “global” and “world,” meanings and connotations of, 478, 498 global change: Earth System and, 442–43; meanings of the term, 442 global conjuncture: Europe, China, and the, 366–77 global historical analysis, frameworks for, 337– 41; objects of study and procedures for study, 337–38. See also units of analysis global history, 26, 475–81, 497–502; approaches and new directions, 484–92; comparative history and, 335–37; comparing world history to, 495–502, 502n7; comparison and connection, 490; comparison in, 412–18; and critiques of western perspectives, 540–51; definitions, 484n26, 498–99, 502n7; divergence and comparison, 487–90; early manifestations, 486; globalization and, 478; institutional parameters of, 548–51; methods, 491–92; microhistories and, 490–91; nature of, 484; scope of the term, 52–53; towards a more “substantial,” 434–39; types of adherents of, 499; use of the term, 478, 483n14; where it comes from, 485 “global history,” 26 Global History Reader, The (Mazlish and Iriye), 476, 478 global perspective, 29, 508, 541, 546, 548, 582; American history in, 199–200; toward, 50–64. See also specific topics global studies movements, 60, 61 globalism, 9, 52, 60–62, 478 globality, condition of, 477 globalization, 475–81, 498, 515, 590; Africa and, 514–18, 520–26, 526n1; approaches to, 343–44 (see also circulationist approach/circulationist strategy); ascending globalizations, 528n14; colonization and the “antecedents” of, 519–22; defining, 477, 504, 512, 518; factors of, 498; as historical process, 477, 503–12; meanings of the term, 476, 518, 527n5; nation-states and, 500–501, 516, 519–20; nature of, 499, 500; networks, social fields, diasporas, and, 522– 24; origin of the term, 482n2; problems with the concept of, 514; rethinking the present,

INDEX

   •   6 27

globalization (continued) 524–26; scope of the term, 504; views of, 515– 19; what the concept is good for, 514–26 glocalization, 535, 539, 551 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 208 gold, 192, 243, 251, 254; silver and, 250, 506, 510, 513n6 gold trade, 243–44, 250, 251, 253, 254, 506–7 Goldilocks circumstances, 466–69 Goldilocks principle, 465–67, 471n14 Goldstone, Jack A., 360, 363–64, 370, 388, 394, 485 Goodrich, Samuel G., 54 Goody, Jack, 363, 387–88 Goswami, Manu, 158 Gottschalk, Louis, 25, 50, 69, 72–73, 78, 79 Goudsblom, Johan, 460 grain trade, 373, 381n41, 430 grain wages, 378n5, 403t grains, 428, 432, 433; in China, 371, 374, 381n41, 417; economics of, 368–69, 376, 417; in Egypt, 322; in Middle East, 322, 323f, 428. See also specific grains grand narratives, 26, 332, 348, 384, 486, 491, 555, 556; master narratives and, 349, 350 Great Acceleration (1945–ca. 2015), 448, 449f, 450–56 great divergence, 351, 365, 412–13; causes/ sources of, 205, 406, 409, 411, 488; debate over, 31, 484; geographical contingencies and, 389–95; “late,” 390, 395; overview and nature of, 31, 351 Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of Modern World Economy, The (Pomeranz), 334–35, 350, 412, 485, 511, 535; “Assessing Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: A Forum,” 488–89; China and, 350, 362, 389; scholarship following, 362, 363; Yangzi Delta, England, and, 335, 350 “great society,” 115 Greco-Roman civilization, 191, 260, 357 Greeks, 223–25, 259 Grew, Raymond, 332 Grousset, René, 24 Grunebaum, Gustave E. von, 80 Guarneri, Carl, 172–73 Guha, Ranajit, 32

6 2 8    •   I N D E X

Gupta, Bishnupriya, 403t Gupta dynasty, 246 Gupta kings, 242, 243, 246 Guyatt, Nicholas, 587 Guyot, Arnold, 230 Haber, Fritz, 445 Haggart, Richard, 156 Hakluyt, Richard, 229 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 43 Hall, Catherine, 581 Hall, Tom, 139 Han dynasty, 101, 116, 141, 393, 578 Hancock, David, 281 Hansberry, Leo, 569 Haraway, Donna, 580 Hartwell, Robert, 111 Hatfield, April Lee, 272, 274 Hawking, Stephen, 290 Hay, Mary, 42 Headrick, Daniel, 30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13, 357, 567 hegemony-rivalry, 139 Hellenism, 101 hemispheric connections, north-south, 255, 269, 271, 275 hemispheric history, 107 hemispheric interregional approach to world history, Marshall Hodgson and, 78–88; “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History” (Hodgson), 97–107 hemispheric misconception, 128 hemispheric reorganization, 251–53 hemispheric solidarity, 127 hemispherism, political, 128 Herodotus, 22, 40, 223–24, 230–31 Herrad of Hohenbourg, 41 Hertzberg, Hazel W., 56, 58 Hesford, Wendy, 159 Hewitt, Mary Elizabeth, 42 hierarchy and British imperialism, 346 high-level equilibrium trap, 369 Hildegard of Bingen, 41 Hindu nationalists, 565, 566 Hinduism, 191, 193, 565–66 Hindutva, 565, 566

historians, 501, 594–96; levels of interaction between, 549–50; Organization of American Historians (OAH), 61, 62, 172, 282n13; world, 504. See also specific topics historical analysis. See global historical analysis; units of analysis historical competence: depth, span, and relevance (of knowledge) needed for, 121–29 historical complexes, 86. See also Afro-Eurasian Historical Complex historical continuity of development, 134 historical material, problem of organizing, 98–99 historical research, trends in, 592 historical sciences, 6 historical study, choice of formats of, 124 historiographers, 21 historiographies, various, 277, 278 historiography, 39–41, 547–51, 566; and the Atlantic, 276–78; changes and trends in, 12, 41, 108, 479, 541, 549–51; China and, 111, 112; European, 487–89; globalization and, 551; Latin America and, 183; of MENA, 174; parochial, 146, 147, 150–51; South Asian, 544; women and, 39–41 history: as stories, 405; types of, 123–25 History Curricula Inquiry, 58 History of Mankind: Scientific and Cultural Development (UNESCO), 21, 25 History Workshop Journal, 155 Ho, Ping-ti, 433 Hobhouse, Henry, 30 Hobsbawm, Eric, 27 Hobson, John, 388 Hodes, Martha, 159 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., 26, 132–34, 348, 358, 388; Afro-Eurasia and, 92, 94, 189, 215, 217–18; an intellectual and his times, 79–81; Andre Gunder Frank and, 80, 94, 133, 134; Arnold Toynbee and, 83, 87; “California School” and, 360, 361; contrasted with Philip Curtin, 93; critique of Eurocentrism, 81, 82; and the discipline of world history, 85–88; and the interregional approach to world history, 78–88; Islam and, 80–81, 92; on modernization theory, 81, 92; precocious vision of world history, 92; rethinking world history,

81–82; William McNeill and, 26, 78, 83, 93, 132–33 Hoffman, Philip, 489 Hollinger, David, 598 Holmes, Arthur, 314 Holocene, 440, 442–43, 446, 447t, 451 Homo erectus, 149, 310, 441 Homo sapiens, 294, 310, 427–28, 475 Hooper, Niels, xiv Hopkins, Sheila, 369 Horden, Peregrine, 270, 271 Huang, Philip, 369–70 Hughes, Brady, 46 Hughes, J. Donald, 422 Hughes, Sarah, 46 Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History, The (McNeill and McNeill), 6, 93, 348, 606n6 humanocentric history, 4 Humboldt, Alexander von, 229, 462–63 Hume, David, 511 Hunt, Lynn, 157, 321, 482n6 Huntington, Samuel, 359–60, 503n12 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 80 H-World, 10 Ibn Battuta, 194 Ibn Khaldun, 23 identity politics, 517, 542 identity(ies), 71, 318, 491, 501, 588; in Africa, 571, 572, 574. See also women Ilyas bin Hanna al-Mawsuli, 175 India: Britain and, 408–9; Buddhism and, 191, 248; cotton and, 243, 365, 415, 416; Ottoman Empire and, 415–16. See also Hinduism; southernization (Southeast Asia) Indian Ocean, 186, 193–95, 244, 260–63, 559; historical analyses of, 260 Indian Ocean basin, 219, 220; economic integration of, 300–301, 304n10 Indian Ocean history, 349; expansion of, 538 Indianization, 191 Indonesia, 127, 191, 196, 197, 243, 244, 408, 517, 523; spices of, 192, 194–95, 245–46, 248 (see also Spice Islands) Indonesian archipelago, 127, 192–94 industrial economies, 360, 410, 411n2

INDEX

   •   6 29

industrial era, 444–46, 512 Industrial Revolution, 30, 51, 98, 101, 255, 363, 367, 388, 394, 430, 433; in Britain, 127, 211, 243, 249; China and, 249, 351, 377, 508, 511, 543; discontinuity of, 377; European and U.S. dominance following, 511; and fossil fuel– based energy systems, 446f; in global context, 512; globalization and, 528n14; and professionalization specialization of occupations, 18; in United States, 204, 211; women and, 46 industrialization, 30, 388–89, 396, 409, 413, 417; Britain’s, 362, 363, 400, 401, 488; capitalism and, 400; China and, 360, 362, 367; coal and, 362, 488; and the Dutch, 196; importsubstitution, 520; Latin America and, 171, 183–85; modernity and, 400 (see also modernity); political economy and ecology on the eve of, 366–77; and proto-industrialization, 489–90; Southeast Asia and, 196, 360, 511; United States and, 204–6; women and, 45, 46 industrious revolution, 367–68, 490 Inner Eurasia, 5, 169, 170, 217 Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, 461 institutional world herbs, 185 Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE), 440 intellectual wagers, 146 interdisciplinarity, 422, 463, 471n7; definitions and meanings, 471n7, 492 interdisciplinary approach(es), 281, 307, 462, 463, 471n7, 492; from a multidisciplinary to an, 460–62. See also big history interdisciplinary orientation, 501 interdisciplinary studies, 463 interdisciplinary theory of history, 470 International Big History Association, 11 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 520–21 international turn in historiography, 479 internationalism, 25–26, 66, 79, 178, 478 internationalized American history, 200 interregional approach to world history, 132. See also westward distortion of history interregional historical constellation, 100–102 interregional historical developments, 99–100 interregional motifs, 86, 87 introductory world history (course): vs. Western Civ, xiv, 3, 4. See also world history course(s) involution, 369–70

63 0   •   I N D E X

Islam, 116, 117, 253, 262, 389; antagonism between other rulers and regions and, 115, 503n12; Marshall Hodgson and, 80–81, 92; spread of, 101, 116, 173–74, 184, 190, 193–94, 253, 263, 337; as transhemispheric cultural system, 92; The Venture of Islam (Hodgson), 22, 78–82, 86. See also Middle East and North Africa; Muslims Islamic and European Expansion (Adas), 332 Islamic conquests, 249, 301 Islamic history, Arabistic bias of, 82 Islamic world, 31–32, 80, 118, 301, 344, 385, 544. See also Middle East and North Africa Islamophobia, 178 Island Pacific, 168, 169, 171, 218. See also Oceania; Pacific Islands isolationism, American, 128, 201, 202, 212 issue networks, 524 Jameson, Anna, 42 Jantsch, Erich, 461–62 Japan, 408 Japan Silver Cycle, 508 Jaspers, Karl, 24, 305–7 Java, 192–94, 245–46, 248, 252 Java Sea, 245, 246 Jerome, Saint, 224 Johns Hopkins University, 27, 270 Jones, Eric L., 31, 413; The European Miracle, 413, 485 Journal of Global History (JGH), 11, 479, 480, 483n22 Journal of Women’s History, 154–58 Journal of World History (JWH), 11, 94, 154, 342, 479, 483n22, 590; Jerry Bentley and, 94, 307, 496 Junot, Laure, 42 Karras, Alan, 343 Katu, Michio, 160 Keay, John, 30 Kelekna, Pita, 30 Kellogg, Susan, 159 Kelly, Joan, 296 Kennedy, Paul, 139 Kerber, Linda, 159–60 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 159–60 Khayyam, Umar, 250

Kiple, Kenneth, 30 Kirkendall, Richard S., 61 Kish, Kathryn, 159–60 Kishlansky, M., 328n9 Klein, Herbert, 340 Klooster, Wim W., 276 Knox, John, 42 Kozol, Wendy, 159 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 306 Kroeber, Alfred L., 27, 83, 102 Kurlansky, Mark, 30 Kutter, Siegfried, 463 labor force, slavery and, 375, 574 Labor History, 155 Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas (Fink), 155 laborers, real farm wages of English, 402, 403t Lal, Vinay, 535–36, 562, 565–66 Lamprecht, Karl, 24 Landes, David, 31, 359, 363, 413, 485, 555 Langlois, Charles, 314 LaPietra Report, 172 Laslett, Peter, 278 late antiquity, 298 Latin America: as (no longer) “odd region out,” 171, 183, 185, 187; industrialization and, 171, 183–85; repositioned in world history, 183–87 Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Benton), 344–45 Lee, James, 392, 404t legal pluralism, 345 Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad alWazzan al-Fasi), 175, 491 Lerner, Gerda, 44, 156, 159, 160 Lewis, Martin W., 168, 218, 261, 274–75, 349 Liang Qichao, 23 Libby, Willard, 314–15 Lieberman, Victor, 29 life, complexity of, 464–65 life expectancy at birth in various countries, 402, 404t linguistic constraints and boundaries, 492, 549 linguistic turn, 85, 156, 161n11 Linton, Ralph, 496 livestock, 428–31. See also animal domestication Livi Bacci, Massimo, 27, 404t Lockard, Craig A., 171–72

Locke, John, 433 López de Legazpi, Miguel, 480 Lovelock, James, 468 MacGregor, Neil, 485 Mackinder, Halford, 229 macronarratives, 332–33. See also grand narratives Madelung, Wilfred, 80 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 262 Mahdi, Muhsin, 80 Maier, Charles S., 503n11, 545 maize, 431–33 Makin, Bathsua, 42 Malay peninsula, 191–94, 245 Malaya, 192, 193, 195, 196 Maldive Islands, 507 Malte-Brun, M., 228 Malthus, Thomas, 362 Manchu/Qing dynasty, 375, 385, 389, 391–93, 408, 410, 417, 604 Manning, Patrick, 7, 30, 92, 152–53, 155, 157, 333 mapping, 499–500 Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Christian), 6, 348, 425, 465, 555 Marinelli, Lucrezia, 41 Marks, Robert W., 360 Marsh, Elizabeth, 491 Marshall, Peter, 492 Marx, Karl, 13, 23, 357, 414, 434, 439 Marxism: Arif Dirlik and, 536, 551n1, 562; Immanuel Wallerstein and, 45, 562 Marxists, 106 Maskiell, Michelle, 159 master narratives, 185, 551; grand narratives and, 349, 350 materialism, 148, 573; “matter matters,” 435; new, 434–39, 439n1 mathematics, 246, 247 Matory, J. Lorand, 523 Matsuda, Matt, 271 Mauryan Empire, 243 Mayer, Martin, 59–60 Maynes, M. J., 159 Mazlish, Bruce, 477–78, 480 Mazrui, Ali, 25 McClure, Dorothy, 59 McCusker, John, 376

INDEX

   •   631

McKeown, Adam, 216–17, 339 McNamara, JoAnn, 582 McNeill, John R., 6, 30, 281, 348, 422, 424–25, 496–98; The Human Web, 6, 93, 348, 606n6 McNeill, William H., 50, 52, 79, 92–93, 133; Andre Gunder Frank and, 94; Arnold Toynbee and, 26, 69, 70, 83, 88n14, 496; “Chicago School” and, 26, 78; civilizational envelope and, 358; contrasted with Philip Curtin, 93; on ecumenes, 26; ecumenical world history and, 95, 146; Eurocentrism and, 65, 66, 68–70, 358; The Human Web, 6, 93, 348, 606n6; Immanuel Wallerstein and, 93, 358; Jerry Bentley and, 95; Leften Stavrianos and, 50, 52, 64, 65, 70, 71, 73, 79; Marshall Hodgson and, 26, 78, 83, 93, 132–33; Michael Adas on, 332–33; on myth, history, and mythistory, 145–47; overview, 26; on pattern recognition, 539; Plagues and Peoples, 92, 93, 183, 422, 496, 578; “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years,” 92–93, 107–21, 132, 358; World History Association (WHA) and, 26, 27, 50, 64–73, 94 McVay, Pamela, 30 Meade, Teresa, 159 meaning, capacity for seeking and finding, 312 Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Braudel), 262 Mediterranean Sea, 259–60; Braudel’s tripartite approach to, 262. See also specific topics Mediterraneanism, 174–75 Melaka, 192–95 Menard, Russell, 376 Merritt, Jane, 159 metageography, 218–19, 230, 261; The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Lewis and Wigen), 218, 274, 275, 349 metals, precious, 192, 506. See also gold; silver methodological nationalism, 588, 595; challenges to, 538, 587–88, 602, 605 Mexican Silver Cycle, 510 Middle East: grains in, 322, 323f, 428; rise of cosmopolitan civilization in ancient, 109–11, 113–15. See also Islamic world Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 169–70; in late antiquity and the “middle periods,” 174–75; in world history, 173–78

63 2   •   I N D E X

Middle East Studies Association (MESA), 170, 177, 594 Mignolo, Walter, 226 migration: slavery and, 175, 205, 206, 261, 265n15, 278, 374. See also specific topics migratory networks, 339 Miles, Rosalind, 45 Mill, Hugh Robert, 231 Miller, Joseph, 536–37, 591 Ming dynasty, 118, 385, 389, 391–92, 410, 432, 509, 604 Mintz, Sidney, 30, 434 Mitchell, Laura J., xiv Mitchell, Timothy, 595 mitigation, environmental, 453–54 modal and modish thinking, 141–42 Modelski, George, 139 modern world system, 114, 118, 339, 359, 562; characteristics and features, 137–38; coreperiphery structure, 69, 138, 139; hegemonyrivalry, 139. See also world system modern world-capitalist-system, 140 modernism, 51 modernity: debating capitalist origins, European colonialism, and the advent of, 383–411; multiple modernities, 347 modernization theory, 94, 358, 519, 596; Cyril Black and, 27, 68; flaws in and inadequacies of, 27, 45, 68, 519; globalization compared with and, 519, 525; Immanuel Wallerstein and, 28, 45, 358; Marshall Hodgson on, 81, 92 Modern-World System (Wallerstein), 358–59, 486, 497 Moluccas, 245–46 mondialisation, 526n3 Mongol empire, 139, 192–93 Mongolian conquest, 98, 101, 110, 251–54 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 230 moral implications of world history, 145–51, 561–67 Morgan, Jennifer L., 159 Morris, Marilyn, 46, 582 multicultural studies, 478 multiculturalism, 2, 5, 79, 82, 349, 533–34, 556 multinationals, 499, 500 multiplistic history/multiple histories, 577 Münster, Sebastian, 225

Muslim caliphates, 243, 247–49 Muslim Mediterranean, 177, 250, 251 Muslim merchants, 193, 194 Muslim scholars, 18, 32, 99–100 Muslim scientists, 251 Muslim trading networks, 193, 194, 508 Muslims: Mongols and, 252, 253; Westerners and, 24. See also Islam; Middle East and North Africa Myers, Philip V. N., 54 Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, The (Lewis and Wigen), 218, 274, 275, 349 mythistories, 69, 71, 145–47, 151 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 155–56 Nandy, Ashis, 562, 565–66 narrative approach, 5–7 National Center for History in the Schools, 11 National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), 57–59, 62 National Defense Education Act, 52, 168 National Education Association (NEA), 56, 168 National Endowment for the Humanities, 11, 65 national histories, dissatisfaction with, 485, 486 National History Standards, “history wars” over the content of the new, 533 national standards for history in schools, 292 nationalism, 3, 19, 177–78, 270, 544–46; anticolonial, 196; emerging in European colonial dependencies after World War II, 2; gender and, 96, 158–59, 538; Hindu, 565, 566; historians and, 591; linguistic, 129; origins of, 357; resources and, 437. See also methodological nationalism nationalist histories, 318, 319 nation-state(s), 174, 216, 270, 349, 516, 544; alleged decline of, 514, 516, 518; California as a, 555; globalization and, 500–501, 516, 519– 20; multinationals and, 500; Nehru on, 557; power of, 437, 511; world history, historians, and, 501, 504, 536, 538, 557, 558 Native Americans, 429–30 natural history, 308, 309, 425, 462; vs. human history, 308, 309, 313 Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Manning), 152, 333 Needham, Joseph, 111, 121n7 Nef, John U., 80

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 535–36, 557–58 neolithic agricultures, 309, 432, 433 neolithic era, 112, 137, 307; literature on, 29; livestock in, 430; prehistory and, 295, 307, 311n10 neolithic innovation, 427 Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO), 11, 12, 479 networks, 339, 343, 522–24 New Historians, 319 New History, 56 “new history,” 18 “new social studies,” 60 Newton, Isaac, 290 Nicholson, Linda, 147 Nieberg, Michael, 31 9/11 terrorist attacks, 178 nitrogen budget, global terrestrial, 448, 450f nomadism and nomadic peoples, 100, 101, 110, 134, 136, 300–302. See also “barbarian” nomads noösphere, 443 Northrup, David, 153, 160, 294–95, 477 Norton, Marcy, 280 nutrient budgeting. See nitrogen budget objectivity, 18, 125, 146, 290–92 O’Brien, P., 328n9 ocean basins, 219–20 Oceania, 232, 238n78, 260, 265n10, 291, 293, 333; historians and, 169; Marshall Hodgson on, 87; neglect of the history of, 2, 87; as separate section of the world, 231, 232, 236n64, 237n71, 297. See also Island Pacific; Pacific Islands oceans: influence of world history on the study of, 259. See also aquacentric notions in the global past, delineating Odim-Johnson, Cheryl, 579 Odyssey (Homer), 260 Ogawa, Manako, 159 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 226 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), 282n13 Orbis Alterius, 226–27 Organization of American Historians (OAH), 61, 62, 172, 282n13 “Orient,” 103

INDEX

   •   633

Orientalism, 103, 106, 170, 325, 351, 544, 546; as accusatory label, 387; critiques of, 603 Orientalism (Said), 45, 610n38 origin stories, 18 originary fallacy, 564, 566 Ortelius, Abrahamus, 227 Ortner, Sherry, 157 Orwell, George, 139 Osamu, Saito, 375 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 477, 481 “other,” 45, 159, 170, 202, 501, 546, 570, 575 “other” world systems, 138, 140 Ottoman Empire, 176–78, 179n3, 385, 400, 413, 488; Africa and, 253; Britain and, 415–16; India and, 415–16; Islam and, 253 Outlines of the World’s History (Swinton), 9–10, 54 Pacey, Arnold, 30 Pacific Islands, 25, 191, 238n81, 299, 307, 428. See also Island Pacific; Oceania Paige, Jeffrey, 344 paleolithic era, 3, 4, 6, 30, 137, 218, 293, 314; change in, 12; gender roles and, 136–37; literature on, 29; prehistory and, 295, 322; upper, 428, 429 “paleolithic period,” 322. See also paleolithic era paleolithic times, technological innovation in, 217 Panikkar, K. M., 25 Pantel, Pauline, 46 parallel developments, 86 Parthasarathi, Prasannan, 364–65 Pascal, Blaise, 150 patriarchy, 136, 137 pattern recognition, 539 Patterson, Clair, 315 Pearl River Delta, 366, 373 Penna, Anthony, 29 “people without history,” 28, 51, 306–7, 337 periodization, 187, 296; cross-cultural interaction and, 296–302 Peschel, Oskar, 229 Peter the Great, 228 philosophers, 23; of history, 23, 24 physics, 464–69; modern, 290–91. See also astronomy Piozzi, Hester (Hester Thrale), 42

63 4   •   I N D E X

Pirenne, Jacques, 102 place-based politics, 564 Plagues and Peoples (McNeill), 92, 93, 183, 422, 496, 578 plant domestication, 190, 243, 246, 423, 431, 442, 445, 582. See also domesticated plants Pliny, 135 pluralism, 67, 71, 360. See also cultural pluralism “political system,” 595 politics, 31 Polo, Marco, 194 Polybius, 23 polycentric analytics, a critique of, 395–98 polycentrism, 384, 388, 542 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 361–65, 389–91, 394, 412, 479, 512, 538–39; Bin Wong and, 360–65, 389–90, 394, 413, 488–89; California School and, 360, 361; central claims, 396; on China, 31, 360–61, 388–91, 535; on coal (and colonies), 390, 394, 406, 416, 488; on environmental history, 423; reciprocal comparison and, 413; on technology, 488; on world history today, 91, 539. See also Great Divergence Ponting, Clive, 27 Popper, Karl, 317n10 population growth, 448 Portugal, 487; agriculture and, 429, 432, 433 Portuguese, 194–95; in Africa, 253–54, 345; in Southeast Asia, 407, 509 postcolonial critiques of historical writing, 535 postcolonial studies and histories, 45–46 postcolonialism, 348, 541–46; gendered, 158 postmodern critiques of historical writing, 535 postmodern period, 499 postmodernism, 291, 345, 543, 549, 551n1 postmodernists, 350 potatoes, 431–33 Potter, David, 591 Prakash, Gyan, 544 prehistory, 294–95, 305–9, 311n10, 324, 325; meanings and connotations of the term, 306; neolithic era and, 295, 307, 311n10; paleolithic era and, 295, 322 pre-modern Asia, 300, 358, 390 pre-modern empires, 299 pre-modern period, 85, 347 pre-modern social history, 299

pre-modern societies, 18, 301, 357, 436 pre-modern times, 298–304nn7–8, 347–48; vs. modern times, 436–37 prices, 488 primitivism, 51, 306. See also “barbarians” Primrose, Diana, 42 privatization of nationalized companies, 529n26 process structures, 462 Purcell, Nicholas, 270, 271 Qing/Manchu dynasty, 375, 385, 389, 391–93, 408, 410, 417, 604 race, 125, 159, 160, 236n64, 522 race ideology, 19–20 racism, 31, 86, 125, 210, 309, 340, 570. See also slavery Radical History Review, 155 radiocarbon dating, 314–15 Raleigh, Walter, 175, 280 Ranke, Leopold von, 314, 338 Rashid al-Din Vatvat, Amin al-Din, 23 Reagan, Ronald, 122 reason, 23 reciprocal comparison, method of, 413, 489 Redfield, Robert, 27, 80, 496 regimes, 462; defined, 462 regional approach, 5, 6 regions, defined, 169 Reilly, Kevin, 64, 69 resource history, 424, 435–38 rice, 432; in China, 247–48, 368, 370–75, 432, 433, 511, 603; domestication of, 190, 428; irrigated, 191, 443, 603; in Southeast Asia, 190, 191 Richards, John, 30, 422 The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (McNeill), 305, 358; Arnold Toynbee and, 26; awards, 64; and the evolution of McNeil’s ideas, 92; influence, 26; interactions between civilizations and, 92, 215; Marshall Hodgson and, 83; organizing idea of, 70, 108; overview, 26, 107–8; thesis, 215; writing of, 69, 70 “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years” (McNeil), 92–93, 107–20, 132, 358 Rise of the West debate, 139–40 Ritter, Carl, 230

rivalry. See hegemony-rivalry Roberts, John, 27 Robin John, Ancona, 280 Robin John, Little Ephraim, 280 Robinson, James Harvey, 2, 56, 68, 599 Rocky Mountain Regional World History Association, 10 Rodney, Walter, 25 Roman Empire, 106; fall of, 106; stages of, 106 Rosenberg, Emily S., 29 Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, 362 Rosenzweig, Roy, 589 Rothschild, Emma, 491 Rumford, Count (Benjamin Thompson), 432 Rutherford, Ernest, 314 rye, 433 Sachsenmaier, Dominic, 12–13, 478, 534–35 Sahara Desert, 217, 250–51 Said, Edward, 45, 544 Samson, Jane, 31 San Diego State University, xiii, 8, 11 Sarkar, Tanika, 158 scale(s), 298, 348–49, 590–91, 599–602, 605; of analysis, 539; choosing among a range of, 605; global history and, 298 (see also global history); interrelationship of different, 601; large-scale comparative studies, 485–89; microhistories, global history, and, 490–91; social, 603. See also environmental history; time scales; units of analysis Schaub, Jean-Frederic, 490 science, 30; after the chronometric revolution, 311–16, 317n10; historical sciences, 6, 315–16. See also astronomy; physics Science and Civilization in China: The Gunpowder Epic (Needham), 111, 121n7 Scott, Joan, 155, 537 Seed, Patricia, 344 Segal, Daniel A., 91, 292, 294–95, 599 Seignobos, Charles, 314 September 11 attacks. See 9/11 terrorist attacks sexuality, history of. See under women Shaffer, Lynda, 219 Sheldon, Mary D., 55 Shiba, Yoshinobu, 111 Shils, Edward, 80 Shostak, Marjorie, 321f, 322, 324

INDEX

   •   63 5

Shu Wenying, 247 silk, 245, 249, 408–10, 509 Silk Road, 30, 115, 192, 217 silver, 250; gold and, 250, 506, 510, 513n6 silver cycles, 508–12 silver trade, 250, 506–7 Sima Qian, 22 Singer, Milton, 80 Single-Whip Tax Reform, 509 situated knowledge, 146, 580 skills, contact with strangers with new/unfamiliar, 108 Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 582 Skocpol, Theda, 336, 344 slave demography, American, 126–28 slave trade, Atlantic/transatlantic, 200, 205, 261, 263, 269, 272, 436, 505, 537; Africa and, 279, 487, 515, 523, 572, 574; cross-cultural interactions and, 298; demography, 216; France and, 416; and polygyny, 274 slave-produced sugar, 249, 281, 411, 430, 436, 511, 524 slavery, 159, 209, 210, 339, 340, 523; abolition of, 265n15, 273; agriculture and, 203, 206; American experiences and, 205, 206; Atlantic creole and, 277; books about, 339, 340; Britain and, 367; capitalism and, 203; Caribbean and, 261, 375; comparative studies of, 187, 202, 340; economics of, 375; and the Indian Ocean, 186, 261; labor force and, 375, 574; literature on Atlantic, 339; manufacturing and, 375–76; migration and, 175, 205, 206, 261, 265n15, 278, 374; witchcraft and, 574, 575. See also abolitionism slavery “stage” of Roman Empire, 106 slaves, 280; Arab importation of African, 249; Asian, 253 Smil, Vaclav, 29 Smith, Adam, 205, 431, 508, 511 Smith, Bonnie G., 46, 152, 158, 579 Smith, Hilda L., 578 Smith, Reuben, 80 social change, contact with strangers with new/ unfamiliar skills as motor of, 108 social Darwinism, 23 social democrats and the Social Democrat’s Lament, 514, 516, 518, 524 social fields, 522

63 6   •   I N D E X

social history, 159; mainstreaming of, 307; premodern, 299; vs. women’s history, 155–56 social scale, 603 social situation, 522 social studies, 1, 8, 13, 53, 56–59; “new,” 57, 60–63 “social system,” concept of, 595 societies, 51, 595, 596; how and why they change over time, 125; of replication, 389 Soluri, John, 437 Somers, Margaret, 336 Song dynasty, 111, 138, 139, 247–49, 444 Sorokin, Pitirim, 24 Southeast Asia, 189–90; borrowing and adaptation, 190–93; defined, 171, 237n71; expansion of Dar al-Islam and trans-regional trade network, 190, 193–94; industrialization and, 196, 360, 511; migration and mixing, 191; religion and maritime trade, 193; western expansion, the emerging global system, and, 194–95. See also East Asia; southernization (Southeast Asia) Southeast Asian resurgence: western colonialism, the global system, and, 195–97 southernization: of European Mediterranean, 251–54; and the Muslim caliphates, 249–51; westernization and, 219, 242, 243, 255 southernization (Southeast Asia), 242–43; of China, 247–49; defined, 242; developments after 1200, 251–54; the Indian beginning, 243–47 Soviet Union: demise of, 503n11. See also Cold War Sowernam, Ester, 42 Sparks, Colin, 156 specialization and overspecialization, academic, 122–23 Speght, Rachel, 42 Spengler, Oswald, 24, 49–50, 340, 357 Spice Islands, 194–95, 248–49 spice trade, 117, 244–46, 248 spices: fine, 251, 254; of Indonesia, 192, 194–95, 245–46, 248; search for, 194 Spier, Fred, 29, 425–26; The Structure of Big History, 461, 462 Spivak, Gayatri, 544 Sputnik crisis, 52, 53, 60, 66 Stark, Rodney, 31

Stavrianos, Leften, 64, 65, 69, 71, 73, 78, 79; “Chicago School” and, 26, 78; Eurocentrism and, 51, 53, 60–62; A Global History of Man, 63, 478; and the high school world history course, 50–64; overview, 26–27; use of the terms global history and world history, 478; William McNeill and, 50, 52, 64, 65, 70, 71, 73, 79; World History Association (WHA) and, 50, 64, 65; World History Project, 52, 53, 60 steam engine, 409–10, 445 Stearns, Peter N., 46 Steffen, Will, 424–25 Stone Age, 28 Strahlenberg, Philip Johann von, 228 Strange, Susan, 527n5 strangers, contact with, 108 Strasser, Ulrike, 581 Strayer, Robert W., 31 Strobel, Margaret, 45, 152, 579 Structural Adjustment Plan, 520 structural similarities, comparative history as the study of, 334 subaltern studies, 158, 535, 540–41, 543–46 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 485, 486 sugar, 196, 250–52, 254, 281, 428, 430; Arabs, Middle East, and, 249–52; Britain and, 273, 376, 511, 522; China and, 247, 368–70; crystallized, 246; India and, 246; slave-produced, 249, 281, 411, 430, 436, 511, 524 sugar trade, 548 Sugihara, Kaoru, 489–90, 492 Sui dynasty, 247, 248 Sullivan, Richard E., 72–73 Sumatra, 192, 194 Susman, Warren I., 50, 62 Sweet, James H., 279 Swinton, William, 19–20, 54; Outlines of the World’s History, 9–10, 54 systems, interrelationship of, 595–96 Tang dynasty, 111, 138, 247–49 Tannenbaum, Frank, 340 Tatishchev, Vasilii Nikitich, 228 Tattersall, Ian, 29 taxation, 509 technology, 30, 217, 409, 488; Bin Wong and, 361, 406, 489. See also industrialization Teggart, Frederick, 131, 135

temporal scale. See scale(s); time scales thalassocracy, 220, 259, 260, 262, 559 Thelen, David, 589 thematic approach, 5–7 themes, variations on world history, 205–6 Third World, 27, 69, 94, 337, 498, 534 Thomas, Hugh, 339 Thomas, Nicholas, 186, 346 Thompson, Benjamin (Count Rumford), 432 Thompson, William, 139 Thornton, John, 268 Thrale, Hester (Hester Piozzi), 42 Tilly, Charles, 344 Tilly, Louise, 45 timber, 371–74. See also wood time: notions of, 289–90; rethinking worldhistorical, 289–95. See also chronology; periodization time scales, 291, 295, 590, 598, 600, 605; mismatch in, 452–53; multiple, 292. See also scale(s) Tinsman, Heidi, 581 Toynbee, Arnold J., 13, 24, 69–70, 83, 106, 125, 223, 340; (popular) success and reception of the writings of, 49–50; on continental distinction, 223; on gender roles and gender inequality, 44; Marshall Hodgson and, 83, 87; method of tracing connections among great “civilizations,” 102; Oswald Spengler and, 24, 49–50; on Renaissance, 234n30; on the West, 51; William McNeill and, 26, 69, 70, 83, 88n14, 496 trade: global, 504–7; pre-modern, 299–301 trade deficit, 506, 507 trade/commerce: Atlantic, 202–3, 206, 574 (see also slave trade); diaspora, 184, 341n8, 344, 345; long-distance, 249, 250, 298–302, 373; spread of Islam and the expansion of, 194 (see also Islam: spread of); Yangzi River Delta’s, 373, 374. See also grain trade; silver cycles; specific topics trading networks, Muslim, 193, 194, 508 tradition, defined, 85 traditional society, 51 trans-Atlantic history, 176, 272 transatlantic passages, 480–81 transatlantic slave trade. See slave trade, Atlantic/transatlantic

INDEX

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transatlantic trends, 211 transcivilizational encounters, 496 transnational history, 479 transnational movements, 183 transnationalism, 159, 174 trans-regional history, 334 trans-regional trade network. See under Southeast Asia Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 23–24, 50, 107, 189 triumphalism, against, 212 Tryon, Rolla M., 55 Tucker, Judith, 45 Turkey/Turks, 253 Turkish conquests, 110, 225, 226, 251 Turkish historians and scholars, 177–78 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 209 Uekötter, Frank, 423–24 underdevelopment, 51, 358, 543, 556, 577; development of, 94 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization): History of Mankind: Scientific and Cultural Development, 21, 25 United States: Americans as chosen people, 207–8; as a distinctive civilization, 207; on Europe’s frontier, 210–11; foreign relations, 201; isolationism, 128, 201, 202, 212 United States history: American history in global perspective, 199–200; comparisons and connections, 201–2; decentering early America, 200–201; discovery of America, 205; refining national comparisons, 202–3; rethinking periodization, 203; shifts in global political and economic power, 206–7; stages of, 203–4; world history with America included, 205–7 units of analysis, 86, 269, 273, 274, 337, 358, 600, 607nn19–20. See also scale(s) universal histories: ancient and medieval, 40–41; women, civilization, and, 41–44 universal history, 40, 478–79 University of Chicago, 25, 26, 64, 71, 78–82 Ural Mountains, 228 Ussher, James, 306 van Loon, Hendrik Willem, 231–32 Veliz, Claudio, 551

63 8   •   I N D E X

Vespucci, Amerigo, 175 Vietnam, 191–97 Vietnam War, 196 Virginia, colonial, 272 Visweswaran, Kamala, 158 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 13, 23 von Glahn, Richard, 360 Von Laue, T. H., 45 wagers, 146, 147 wages and standard of living, 488 Waldseemüller, Martin, 226 Wallerstein, Immanuel: Andre Gunder Frank and, 94, 139; Arif Dirlik and, 562–64; capitalism and, 118, 138, 216, 358, 359, 534, 562–63; conservatism and, 562–64; Eurocentrism of, 359, 534; Fernand Braudel and, 497; Marxism and, 45, 562; modernization theory and, 28, 45, 358–59; Modern-World System, 358–59, 486, 497; socialism and, 563; William McNeill and, 93, 358; world-system theory and, 27, 28, 45, 93, 94, 113, 118, 133, 137–40, 216, 339, 358–59, 534, 542–43 Waltner, Anne, 159 Wang Feng, 360–61, 392, 404t Ward, Kerry, xiii Warne, Randi, 160 Weber, Max, 85, 334, 357, 413 webs of interaction, 93 welfare state, 202, 206, 516, 518 Wells, H. G., 24, 49, 56, 57, 313 West, the: belated and incidental rise of, 387–89; linkage of history with, 319; vs. “people without history,” 51; and “the rest,” 587 (see also “other”); use and meaning of the term, 131 West Africa, 251, 253, 254, 345, 522–24 Western Civ textbooks, 2, 320, 321, 324–26, 599 Western civilization course (Western Civ), 2, 124, 319–20, 324, 337, 541, 588, 593, 597, 609n26; civilization concept and, 326; courses that have replaced or supplemented, 7 (see also introductory world history); current international issues and, 2; diminishing portion of new Ph.D.’s who can easily teach, 2; Eurocentrism, 5; vs. introductory world history, xiv, 3, 4, 593; as neoconservative cause., 319; origins and emergence of, 172, 319, 320; students who introduced the first, 2,

599; Western-centrism of, 324; world history course and, 172, 292, 327 “Western problem” of history, 317 westernization: defined, 219, 242; southernization and, 219, 242, 243, 255 westward distortion of history, 104–5; pervasive results of, 106–7 westward shift in power toward United States, 206–7 Whigs, 68, 69 White, Andrew Dickson, 48–49, 539 White, Hayden, 312 White, Lynn, Jr., 253 Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Parthasarathi), 414–17 wider world, 61, 485, 605 wider world history, 587, 589, 598 wider world societies, 590 wider world system, 137 Wiesner-Hanks, Merry, 30, 46, 95–96, 579 Wigen, Kären E., 168, 218, 261, 274–75, 349 Wilkinson, David, 139 Willard, Emma, 43 Williams, James H., 271, 282n13 Williams, Raymond, 156 Willkie, Wendell, 79 Wills, John E., Jr., 29, .342, 360 Winthrop, John, 208, 212 Wintringham, Tom, 557 Wisconsin School, 27 “witchcraft,” 537, 573–75 witch-hunts, 574–75 Wolf, Eric R., 51, 306–7 “Woman’s Life in Other Ages, A” (Toynbee), 44 women: civilization, universal histories, and, 42–44; the defense of, 41–42; new world historical writing on, 46; world histories written by, 41–45. See also gender Women Intelligent and Courageous in Warfare, 40 women’s history: ancient and medieval “universal histories,” 40–41; U.S., 159–60; women’s and men’s world history, 578–84; world history and, 39–40; world history and the history of sexuality and gender and, 152–61, 537–38 women’s organizations, 160 women’s rights, 331, 583 Women’s Social Movements International (WASI), 582

Wong, Roy Bin, 351, 360–64, 388; balanced comparison and, 334, 350; California School and, 360, 361, 363, 411n1; China and, 334, 335, 351, 360–62, 365, 389–90; China Transformed, 362, 389; comparison, comparative analysis, and, 334–35, 360; divergence debate and, 488– 89; Kenneth Pomeranz and, 360–65, 389–90, 394, 413, 488–89; reciprocal comparison and, 413; technology and, 361, 406, 489 Wood, Peter, 339 wood resources and shortages, 371–72, 415, 416, 444. See also timber “world,” 40; defined, 496; meanings and connotations of “global” and, 478, 498 “World Cultures,” surveys of, 60 world historians. See historians world historical comparisons, connections, nexuses, and system(s), 132–35 world history, 131, 342, 496–97; beginning of, 304–10; books on, 6, 26–27, 29; definitions, 49, 97, 484n26, 496, 502n7; depth, span, and relevance, 121–29; the discipline of, 56, 85–88; as ephemeral causation and radical contingency, 395–98; institutions to advance the field of, 7–13; nature of, 39, 72, 73, 153; the new malaise of, 555–60; problems of, 102–7; purpose, 535; sub-fields, 39; uses of the term, 56, 86, 97, 478, 483n14; what it is and is not, 97–98; what it is good for, 347–52. See also specific topics World History Association (WHA), xiv, 9, 10, 50, 496, 504; Eurocentrism and, 65, 70; Leften Stavrianos and, 50, 64, 65; mission, 176; saving (world) history, 64; terminology and, 478; William McNeil and, 26, 27, 50, 64–73, 94. See also Journal of World History World History Connected, 4, 11 world history course(s), 3, 4, 54, 597–602; American historians and the coming of the, 48–73; Leften Stavrianos and high school, 50–64. See also Advanced Placement (AP) World History course; big history: courses on; Western civilization course world history curriculum, 1–4 World History for Us All (WHFUA), 11 World History Project, 52, 53, 60 world history scholarship: rise of, 22–32; trends in, 183–76

INDEX

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world history teaching and learning, 1–4; dimensions of, 4–7 world orientation, the problem of, 102–4 world regions, primary, 168 world system, 113–20, 273; civilization and, 496; cosmopolitan, 113–16; definitions, 94, 496; first, 113–18, 359, 497, 534; Roman Empire as, 497; synonyms, 93; William McNeil and, 93. See also modern world system world system analysis, 543 world system characteristics and transitions before and after 1500 A.D., 137–41 world system history, 479; cumulation of accumulation and ecology in, 136–37; “macro” vs. “micro,” 130; a plea for, 130–42 world system methods, 486; and global analysis, 68 world systems approach, 497; scholarly trend to revise, modify and enlarge upon the, 359 world-system theory, 27, 28, 45, 68–69, 80, 497, 542–43; Andre Gunder Frank on, 80, 94 (see also world system history); Immanuel

6 4 0    •   I N D E X

Wallerstein and, 27, 28, 45, 216, 339, 534, 542 Wright, Donald R., 279, 343 Wright, Gordon, 591 Wrigley, E. A., 372, 376 writing the history of the world, 342–47 Yangzi River Delta, 335, 350, 366–69, 374, 377n1; coal in, 350, 360, 375, 416–17; compared with Britain, 350, 360–62, 367, 369, 375, 377, 413, 416–17; lower, 371–74, 377, 381n41, 416–17; resource base, 361, 371–73, 381n41, 488; trade, 373, 374 Yergin, Daniel, 434 Yoruba creation story, 17 Zanj slaves, 249 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 226 Zhao Gang, 370 Zhenzong, Emperor, 247 Zimbabwe, 244 Zinsser, Judith, 46, 152, 153, 537