If you are anywhere close to my age, you probably took a college course called “World History” even though it was primarily about Europe. Today some students take courses in “World History” that are actually designed to cover the world. This reflects a genuine effort by historians to “go global.” However, it is not as easy—nor perhaps as valuable—as it seems.
The field of world history got its start in the 1960s, perhaps with William McNeill’s book The Rise of the West (a powerful book I wrote about here). [1] In spite of the name, his book was an effort to get beyond thinking about Europe and offshoots like the United States. In fact, McNeill viewed world history as starting with the Middle East civilizations of the Sumerians and Egyptians and dramatically changed by the Mongols, who moved south and west of the Asian steppes in the 1200s. Only after 1500 did Europe begin to dominate.
Last semester I took a graduate seminar in “Thinking about World History in the Early Modern Era.” As the name implies, the class was a creative effort to determine how, on the college level, to study the whole world in a single period, the early modern period (usually described as between 1500 and 1800). Each student had to devise a syllabus for teaching such a course. (In a previous post I discussed the difficulties of breaking up history into meaningful periods, but this post is about trying to encompass the world in one of those periods. )
I don’t have a problem with teaching world history during the early modern period. I do have a problem with the entire concept of world history as it has been developed over the past few decades. Many barrels of ink (a metaphor, of course) have been spent on trying to define the discipline.
Is it about the connections between continents—how chocolate went from a ritualistic religious beverage in pre-Columbian Mexico to a tasty luxury in Europe? Or is it about comparisons—between, say, how “localized settings in widely separated regions coalesced into larger units—politically, culturally, commercially”? [2]
Connections are interesting—we learned about the trade connections made by Armenians and Sephardic Jews as well as the relationships between Christian missionaries and indigenous people in China and New France (Canada). Comparisons don’t seem to hold up as well as connections; while there may be consistent trends (such as governmental consolidation), they can happen at vastly different times.
Both connections and comparisons have their place, but trying to make a research field based on them seems unnecessarily troublesome to me. Trying to connect or even compare all parts of the world at every period strains history.
Do we have to “go global”?
Isn’t the history of every area, whether connected to other areas or isolated, of interest to someone? Connections and comparisons have their place, but do you have to be a world historian to find them? Without becoming globalists, students of American slavery are able to study the African slave trade, students of China can incorporate the Mongol warriors, and students of the Industrial Revolution can recognize the role of cotton in India and North America. To force connections where they aren’t important seems wrong and I worry that too much attention is being paid to that in today’s world history. I respect the effort but think it is overblown.
[1] William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ([1963] 1991).
[2] Victor Lieberman, “Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas,” in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c.1830, ed. Victor Lieberman (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1999), 24.
Joe: You may be right, but Wells did not spur an academic discipline, which is what McNeill did.
I thought H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” (1920) was generally regarded as the first “world history”?