A Companion to World History

Douglas Northrop

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118977514, 9781444334180
• eBook ISBN: 9781118305478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A COMPANION TOWORLD HISTORY

"This new volume offers insightful reflections by both leading and emerging world historians on approaches, methodologies, arguments, and pedagogies of a sub-discipline that has continued to be in flux as well as in need of defining itself as a relevant alternative to the traditional national, regional, or chronological fields of inquiry"
Choice

"The focus...on the practicalities of how to do world history probably gives it its edge. Its thirty-three chapters are grouped into sections that address how to set up research projects in world history, how to teach it, how to get jobs in it, how to frame it, and how it is done in various parts of the globe. It is an actual handbook, in other words, as opposed to a sample of exemplary work."
English Historical Review

A Companion to World History offers a comprehensive overview of the variety of approaches and practices utilized in the field of world and global history. This state-of-the-art collection of more than 30 insightful essays – including contributions from an international cast of leading world historians and emerging scholars in the field – identifies continuing areas of contention, disagreement, and divergence, while pointing out fruitful directions for further discussion and research. Themes and topics explored include the lineages and trajectories of world history, key ideas and methods employed by world historians, the teaching of world history and how it draws upon and challenges "traditional" approaches, and global approaches to writing world history. By considering these interwoven issues of scholarship and pedagogy from a transnational, interregional, and world/global scale, fresh insights are gained and new challenges posed. With its rich compendium of diverse viewpoints, A Companion to World History is an essential resource for the study of the world's past.

PART I

Trajectories and Practices

CHAPTER ONE

World History

Departures and Variations

KENNETH POMERANZ AND DANIEL A. SEGAL

“World history” exists today as both an established undergraduate-level teaching field in US higher education and a recognizable – though arguably still fledgling – research field that operates transnationally. In both manifestations, world history has gained a significant foothold only since the early 1980s. That earlier efforts failed to establish world history as either a teaching or research field, and that world history faces continued skepticism from many academic historians, indicates significant tensions between history as an institutionalized discipline and the project of world history. The ongoing work of producing both world history courses and scholarship has thus required that historians depart from some of the received practices of their discipline, even while building on others.

The need for two such departures has been particularly visible to the pioneers of world history. The first and most obvious of these involves acquiring knowledge about areas of the world and their inhabitants that had previously been little studied by historians. The second involves studying phenomena on a scale larger than the national and state units that have been the usual units of historical inquiry and legitimate expertise. During the early emergence of world history this shift upward in geographic scale most often took the form of treating supranational “civilizations” as distinct wholes, in close parallel with the established treatment of nations and states; increasingly, however, the shift upward in scale has involved recognizing and thinking in terms of connections and the ways connections shape the places they connect.

In addition, as historians have pursued comprehensive world history projects – world history survey courses, for example – they have also pursued a third departure, involving working on much larger time-scales than is common for historians. Put simply, just as the inclusive ideal of world history has motivated a concern with neglected spatial regions, it has also motivated increased attention to the large segment of early human time that had previously been left to archaeology and paleoanthropology.

Without question, these departures – particularly the first two – have produced important new knowledge. They have, for instance, led to a much fuller recognition of the extra-European dimensions of historical phenomena that had been understood – prior to recent world history scholarship – as purely European stories. Yet these achievements have not resolved the considerable challenges of extending the spatial and temporal coverage of history to be inclusive of all of humanity.

From Disciplinary Exclusion to Limited Acceptance, circa Late 1800s to 1990

As history was institutionalized as an academic discipline in Europe and the United States in the 1800s, its leading figures produced historical scholarship that served nationalist movements and/or states to which they had allegiance, whether by fostering collective memory and patriotic pride, offering lessons from “past politics” for statesmen, or both.¹ Yet, the mutual recognition of these works as “history” – while other scholarship also on the human past, specifically social evolutionary studies of non-European peoples, was not so recognized – meant that “history” as a discipline was identified with the aggregate of the states and nations these “historians” wrote about. This aggregate was, in turn, a distinct subset of the globe and humanity: it is what we have come to know as “the West.” Thus, even though most works of “history” were written about a single state or nation, and even though these texts were written in a voice that identified with their respective national or state subject, the discipline as a whole interpolated an overarching civilizational identity. At its onset, then, disciplinary history at once conjoined, and was shaped by, two projects: the making of nation-states and the making of the Western Self.

Moreover, this double identification of the discipline – with individual states and nations on the one hand and the West on the other – was further supported by the denigration of works of “general history” (as works with some attempt at global coverage were called) as amateurish and popular. The effect, not surprisingly, was that in the wake of the discipline’s institutionalization, works of this genre came to be produced only by persons outside of or at the margins of the profession.²

Within the discipline, the earliest significant production of supranational and suprastate history appeared in the context of US undergraduate teaching following World War I, when the Western Civ survey course was introduced. This shift upward in geographic scale to the discipline’s civilizational Self reflected concerns about the discontents of nationalism, as evidenced by the war and the upsurge of both nativism and isolationism in the United States after the war. Though the Western Civ course is now rightly remembered as “Eurocentric,” this label – if no more is said – risks obscuring important aspects of the course’s relationship to world history. First, along with its supranational and suprastate geographic scope, the Western Civ survey recognized and narrativized the full span of human time, starting with the emergence of hominids. Indeed, in the years surrounding the Scopes Trial, Western Civ was a significant vector in the United States of the secular chronology of human existence. Second, in a nontrivial sense, Western Civ provided a story about humanity in toto. It did this by inscribing a “first-the-West-then-the-rest” grand narrative. Within this schema, the West’s trajectory foretold the shared – or if not the shared, then the defining – experiences of all humanity; the West’s history was thus humanity’s history (Segal 2000).

With the continued success of the Western Civ survey and emergence of area studies programs after World War II, survey courses about other “world areas” entered the undergraduate curriculum in US higher education. These courses were typically organized chronologically, even when they were housed in area studies programs. (See Kramer, this volume.) The most common of these new surveys were devoted to East Asia or East-plus-Southeast Asia.³ That it was East Asia or a larger Asian area that was the primary addition is a pattern we will see repeated many times in tracing efforts to redress history’s institutionalized tie to “the West” – with this being an indication that non-Western areas other than Asia, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania, were seen as even further behind in (or even more thoroughly lacking) history. Yet even though the broadening of the curriculum was circumscribed by this gradient sense of the historicalness of different peoples and places, by representing the histories of other areas as complex and distinctive, the new area survey courses troubled the social evolutionary notion that the Rest merely followed the West. These courses thus disturbed the conflation of the West’s history with human history and thereby suggested that the task of representing human history required a significant broadening of the discipline’s geographic scope.

This disturbance was, however, far from sufficient to support the emergence of world history in the 1950s. True, some “world history” surveys did appear, but these were located primarily at institutions of lower prestige (state colleges with teacher training programs, for instance), and the textbooks that served these courses were minimally adapted Western Civ texts, with Asia – and usually East Asia – getting the bulk of the additional coverage. At Northwestern University, Leften Stavrianos made a rare attempt to establish a more robust world history survey at this time – and at an institution of some prestige, no less. Yet, Stavrianos was firmly rebuffed by his own department.⁴

In the postwar period, many journals, conferences, and American Historical Association (AHA) book prizes also came to be organized on areal rather than national or state lines. Here, again, the region that was most prominent was East Asia. Furthermore, most research in this and other new areal fields was conducted on national or state units within the delimited area, and what research there was that focused on a larger region almost always deployed notions of a distinct areal essence or character. Connections were not what this work foregrounded.

A small number of important books of the middle decades of the century escaped or at least pushed at these constraints. Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century had significant global coverage and gave considerable attention to connections.⁵ The same author’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II – though narrower in geographic scope – was also an important forerunner of world history, particularly because it demonstrated that, despite what area studies boundaries suggested, North Africa and Southern Europe belonged together as a historical unit of analysis.⁶ Indeed, one of Braudel’s most profound legacies for world history is the injunction in this text to “imagine a hundred frontiers, not one, some political, some economic, and some cultural”: historians should, in short, resist treating any unit of analysis as a discrete, functional whole (1972: 170).

William McNeill’s Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) and Plagues and Peoples (1976) also operated on a global scale and were nonetheless widely respected by professional historians. But while Braudel’s and McNeill’s books were admired in the profession, their works were seen neither as models for younger historians to imitate nor as harbingers of an emerging field of world history. Indeed, McNeill tried and failed to persuade his own department (at the University of Chicago) to create a world history program at the graduate level.

Only from the end of the 1970s did world history begin to attract more attention in many departments – in the first instance, as an undergraduate survey course. Departments that had added colleagues who worked on areas outside of the West often sought ways to integrate those colleagues into lower-division teaching. One attempted solution was to have those colleagues participate in Western Civ surveys, on the grounds that this was material every historian had to know. This was never very satisfactory, in no small part because it limited how much the non-Western specialists could teach in their own areas of expertise. A second response was the introduction of various lower-division surveys on other geographic areas: Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and so on. This second response was supported by critiques of Eurocentrism in both the curriculum and scholarship, which had also played a part in creating faculty lines in these areas.⁷ So too, this second response was supported by both a decline in the number of schools that required students to take Western Civ and new competition for enrollments from other programs that aimed to bring “diversity” into the curriculum, notably women’s studies and ethnic studies. Yet there were important institutional – and intellectual – limits to this second response. Multiplying survey courses had diminishing returns in enrollments, since most students only took one of them, and yet these courses had to be offered regularly in order for students to be able to use them to meet requirements. Consequently, additional survey courses consumed a big chunk of the total courses that could be offered in the new areal fields, which often had just one or two faculty members. This outcome was good neither for these colleagues nor for a department that wanted varied upper-division tracks for its majors and grad students. Offering a world history survey, by contrast, addressed these several problems at once.

Changes in secondary education in the 1980s provided a further incentive for departments to offer a world history survey. A number of US states, also in response to critiques of the curriculum, were shifting from the teaching of the history of Europe or the West to the teaching of world history. (See Bain, this volume.) For many public universities and less elite private ones, aspiring high school teachers comprised a significant fraction of history majors; it thus made sense for those departments to offer students undergraduate training more closely aligned with the curriculum they would be expected to teach.

As world history as a teaching field grew in this context, an important moment of its institutionalization occurred in 1982, when the American Historical Association co-sponsored a conference with an academic institution that many historians, in the post-Vietnam era, would otherwise have avoided: the US Air Force Academy. Yet the Academy was one of the few institutions of higher education with an established world history survey course. This was so, we suspect, because the Academy’s mission – like the US military’s mission more generally – was inescapably global, while the number of technical and military courses required of students meant that there was no opportunity for them to take a sequence of area surveys. And whether coincidentally or not, the AHA’s president-elect in 1982 was Philip Curtin, an early advocate of world history. Whatever the exact reasons for this unusual collaborative venture, the conference drew more people than expected and was judged a major success by its organizers and many participants. Following a post-conference planning meeting, the World History Association (WHA) was founded in 1983, as an affiliated society of the AHA.

Yet while world history surveys were introduced on more and more US campuses in the 1980s, the most prestigious universities and elite colleges remained resistant. Prestigious research departments could afford to have many colleagues who never taught lower-division courses, and historians in these departments, as well as those at elite liberal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Maps, Figures, and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: The Challenge of World History
• PART I: Trajectories and Practices
• PART II: Categories and Concepts
• PART III: Many Globes
• Bibliography
• Index