While studying European guilds last year, I came across a debate over the “Golden Age” of the Netherlands (1580 to 1680). The issue was whether Dutch guilds were weak or strong. I wanted to delve into this subject, but doing so would have been futile. I don’t know the Dutch language. The best writing about Dutch guilds in the seventeenth century would be in Dutch.
I suspect that many historians, including economic historians, have experienced this same problem and not given the Dutch the study they deserve. Historians tend to praise the early muscularity of the Netherlands economy but then dismiss the country as being unimportant in the long run because it missed out on the Industrial Revolution.
This, despite the facts that the country increased its farmland by one-third (from 1300 to 1800) through reclamation from the sea, it had a prosperous economy before any other country, and it had a sturdy middle class in the age of Rembrandt. But it didn’t have factories until late in the nineteenth century, so it was “backward.” It fell off the charts of history—its high point being 1688, when its stadtholder, William of Orange, became the king of England.
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.
For years I’ve heard about the academic pressure to publish. Now, as a graduate student, I’ve come across some results of that pressure. These are books that make an interesting subject dull.[1] I’ll consider one of them, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, in this post.
To be sure, my professors have taken pains to assign only books they consider important and relevant, the “cream of the crop.” (One professor advised his class that if we didn’t like these, we would hate the ones he had rejected.) Nevertheless, a few clunkers come through. Well, I consider them clunkers. As an editor (current and past), I am frustrated when I see tremendous talent combined with disappointing execution.
The book I’m commenting on was praised on its cover as “superior and fascinating.” It reflects enormous research (12 years’ worth), including meticulous gathering of visual artifacts across two continents and several centuries. And it exhibits heroic efforts to come up with new interpretations. But, in my view, its impact is restricted by having to meet the academic goals that lead to tenure and full professorship.
Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World[2]is the story of how tobacco and chocolate, substances that were part of pre-Columbian social and religious rituals in Mexico and Central America, became popular products in Europe during the 1600s.
