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.
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, recently told the New York Times that economic opportunities for poor people in the United States may have been better in the 1960s than they are today. Could this be true?
Walker, an African-American, was born in 1959 in Lafayette, Louisiana, to a single mother and grew up in small towns in Texas, including Ames, an all-black town. His prospects might not have seemed bright but in fact he attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a law degree; he joined a prominent law firm, then the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), and subsequently entered the nonprofit world.
In the Times interview, Walker gave credit for his success to his mother, who was a nurse’s assistant, and to the federal childhood program Head Start. “I’m grateful to America, because I was a boy at a time when America believed in little poor black boys and girls living on dirt roads in shotgun houses in small towns across this country.”
He explains: “In 1965, I was sitting on the porch with my mother and a lady approached and told my mother about a new program called Head Start. And I was fortunate enough to be in the first class of Head Start, in the summer of 1965.”
1965? That was the year of the Watts (Los Angeles) riots, two years after Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, three years before King’s assassination, and a year after three young men were killed in Mississippi for trying to bring voting rights to blacks.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
As a professional commenter on higher education, one of the phrases I encounter ad nauseam is “shared governance.” That is the concept in which the faculty, the trustees, and the administration are roughly coequal partners in higher education decision-making, each having dominance in its own sphere of activities. What makes this so annoying is that one of the common justifications used for it is that it is our “traditional” form of governing universities, and therefore any attempt to question it is out of bounds.
But is it really our tradition? Or is it something that was grafted onto another tradition of governance during the Progressive Era?
One of the bases for this traditional shared governance narrative is the claim that American colleges descend from the scholar-centered University of Paris, and therefore the origins of American colleges are as “communities of scholars.” Higher education historian Edwin Duryea, in his 2000 book The Academic Corporation: A History of College and University Governing Boards, claims that, “The Parisian model appeared in Oxford and Cambridge that, in turn, carried over to America.”1
