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.
I’ve previously observed that few historians are military historians and so some basic questions about wars tend to go unanswered. However, I have found a book that fills in much of the gap.
Years ago, a critic challenged William McNeil’s magnum opus, The Rise of the West, [1] by saying that his book lacked military analysis—it “lost track of the interaction between military technology and political patterns.” So McNeill wrote a book about just that subject, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000. [2]
I’d like to share two items from his book. One is astounding, but perhaps true. The other addresses the frequently asked questions, “Why did Europe go to War in 1914 and why did the war last so long?”
Until a few months ago, I had never heard of William McNeill, a historian who died in 2016 at the age of 98. In my class in world history, I came across his book The Rise of the West, an 828-page volume published in 1963.[1] Not only did it receive the prestigious National Book Award in 1964, but it was extremely successful—even a popular Christmas gift. For historians, its significance is that it expanded thinking about world history away from a narrow view based on Europe and the United States.
That accomplishment is ironic because the book itself, a wonderful treasure trove of information about the entire world, looks somewhat old-fashioned and out of date now. But it’s still fascinating.
The title would never fly today. The Rise of the West sounds like just what McNeill was combating: Eurocentrism. His narrative starts with the origins of humans in the African savannahs and ends in the year 1917 with the Russian Revolution). It unabashedly celebrates the “era of Western dominance,” which began around 1500 and hadn’t ended by the book’s conclusion (or, for that matter, by the end of McNeill’s life).
