In the mid-1970s, while browsing in the Chicago Public Library, I came across The Rise of the Western World by Douglass North and Robert Thomas. [1] This short book tells a fascinating story of how property rights, trade, and limited government led to prosperity in the West (prosperity that eventually spread around the world).
Since then I’ve read many books about the success of the West and specifically about the Industrial Revolution, which started in England around 1760 and is generally viewed as continuing till 1830. I personally rate the Industrial Revolution as equal in importance to the discovery of agriculture.
So it will come as no surprise that, as a graduate student in history, I am studying the Industrial Revolution. In fact, I am studying labor conditions in the Industrial Revolution. Yes, the labor conditions that Charles Dickens wrote about in his novels Hard Times and Oliver Twist.
On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution was an exciting time. As a British schoolboy supposedly said, “About 1760 a wave of gadgets swept over England.”[2] New inventions, especially in the textile industry, appeared one after another, enormously improving productivity, reducing costs, and launching an age of material success.
On the other hand, labor conditions were tough. The new factories needed workers and brawn was not required. Women and children could work and monitor the machines—and they did.
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.
