World History: The Basics

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415582759
• eBook ISBN: 9781136888168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

World History has rapidly grown to become one of the most popular and talked about approaches to the study of history. World History: The Basics introduces this fast-growing field and addresses key questions such as:

• What is world history?
• How do we study a subject with such a broad geographic and chronological range?
• Why has world history been controversial?

Written by one of the founders of the field and addressing all of the major issues including time, place, civilizations, contact, themes and more, this book is both an ideal introduction to world history and an important statement about the past, present and future of the field.

1
INTRODUCTION

WHAT AND WHY IS WORLD HISTORY?

The most important point to know about any subject, when beginning to engage with it, is: what’s the purpose; why bother?

The basic reason to study world history involves access to the historical context for the globalized society we live in today (whether one likes a globalized society or not). Correspondingly, the reasons world history courses and programs have soared over the past quarter-century in the United States but also a number of other places, are that more and more educators, and students, have realized how complex and interconnected the world they live in has become, and have identified the resulting need for a new kind of historical scope. Purely national or regional histories no longer do the trick, though they may be exceptionally useful alongside a world history approach. We need a history that shows how world relationships have emerged and how different cultural and political traditions have formed and interacted. That’s what the world is about now, and that’s what world history can help explain.

This said, there are some supporting rationales, though they are much less important than the primary claim. A decisive factor in creating American interest in world history, from both high schools and colleges-universities, was the growing diversity of the student body. With more students arriving from backgrounds in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and often also with greater interest in their heritage, the need to offer a history that went beyond purely American or West European content became compelling. This was one reason world history initially spread more rapidly, as a teaching subject, at state colleges than at the elite private institutions whose enrollments were less mixed. But there were outright student protests at places like Stanford, pressing for more innovation in the history curriculum instead of a purely Western diet, and these currents unquestionably opened new doors for the world approach.

World history offers genuine new discoveries, a third reason to move it forward as a subject area. We will see that additions are particularly telling for the periods 600–1450 and 1450–1750, where escaping a narrow Western framework is particularly refreshing (even, it can be argued, for a proper understanding of the West itself). But world history adds new data and new points of view to virtually every period, even the great age of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. New stories are available, new reasons to become intrigued with the past. Above all, new vantage points emerge that clarify what the past was all about and how it relates to the present. Most world historians would argue that in the process a more accurate view of the past emerges, and accuracy is not to be scorned.

This returns us to the main points: world history fosters methods of analysis that prepare people at all levels to deal with the issues that contemporary global society poses, and will pose in the future.

All this assumes that world history can deliver on its promises. The goal of providing the mixture of facts, skills and analyses that meet the demanding criterion of using the past to explain the global present is undeniably challenging. Students in world history courses should be able to say, at the end of their labors, that they’ve at least made serious advances in that direction.

WORLD HISTORY AS CONTROVERSY

The reasons for world history seem so obvious to most world historians, and to many students as well, that it may seem odd that there have been serious battles about the subject and that many countries reject the whole approach even today. In the United States, world history played a significant role in what many people called the “culture wars” of the 1990s, and while the dust has settled a bit, too much emphasis on world history can still stir up storms in some quarters. In other countries, particularly where history teaching is more separate from history scholarship than is true in the United States, references to world history can also rouse major controversies.

In 1994, in fact, the United States Senate voted 99–1 against a world history plan for high schools that had been designed by a large committee of university historians and high school history teachers. The Senate was admittedly moved by a recent election which had returned a large conservative Republican majority. It was also reacting to a parallel plan for United States history that generated even more dismay, because it seemed to depart from established norms. But the concern about world history itself was genuine, for it is rare that an academic subject rouses that much disapproval from the senior legislative body in a whole nation.

The Senate was perturbed that world history seemed to downgrade any special qualities for Western civilization, which was in turn seen as the progenitor of key cultural and political themes in the United States. Its resolution intoned that any national history project “should have a decent respect for the traditions of Western civilization.” Without question, as we will see, world history does compete with earlier courses in European history or “western civ,” and without question world history does tend to regard the Western case as one among several rather than possessed of clearly special virtues. Western civilization courses, in contrast, had gained traction in the United States partly because they allowed emphasis on particular qualities Americans might hold dear (like real or imagined Renaissance individualism). While the Senate did not exactly say that world history was wrongheaded, its resolution clearly sought at the very least to single out a special place for Western values.

The Senate resolution did not cut off the world history movement in the United States, and indeed barely influenced it. Most states, in fact, as they developed history standards used a world history rubric from the mid-1990s onward. But closer examination revealed a host of problems unresolved. Most state standards and the kinds of textbooks used in high school world history courses, continued to give disproportionate attention to the West (to the tune of an average 67% of text coverage). This led world historians to complain that the resultant courses, often derisively labeled “the West and the rest,” seriously distorted what world history should really be about. Even as the world history label gained ground, the United States government promoted a massive “Teach American History” movement, with unprecedented federal funding, that while not explicitly hostile to world history implicitly made it clear that the national history was what was really important. Even the crisis following the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 generated signs of the ongoing division. While many educators and much of the general public saw the attacks as a sign that Americans should learn more about other parts of the world, including Islam, conservative spokespeople urged that this was the time to circle the wagons around the study of (and praise for) Western history.

The basic debate, which we will see repeated in virtually every region and resolved almost nowhere, really focused on the purpose of history, and the American hesitation about Western civ was merely a variant. Most countries, in the past two centuries, have looked to history education primarily to instill an agreed-upon national story and (usually) a set of implied national strengths. History was central, in other words, to identity formation and political orthodoxy. A sophisticated course might, to be sure, admit an occasional national mistake – like the United States treatment of Native Americans, or slavery – but this should be overridden by emphasis on the positive.

In the case of the United States, with a relatively short history, this national focus was supplemented by the Western civ backdrop. High schools and colleges from the 1920s onward frequently introduced a European course alongside an American history requirement, so that students might emerge with a strong sense of the national story bolstered by at least some understanding that national merits were further justified by their link to a longer and largely uplifting Western backdrop.

World history, quite simply, takes a different tack. It does not necessarily dispute the national or national-with-civilizational approach – world historians have not usually argued that we should abolish the teaching of American history, though some would like that history to be considerably revised – but it definitely touts a different set of goals at least for the world course. World history need not attack national identities, but it does not see support for these identities to be a key purpose at least of this part of a history program. The goal, again, is understanding global conditions through a historical lens. This in turn involves some serious attention to several major cultural traditions, and not just one’s own. Understanding global conditions also involves careful exploration of contacts among different societies and to larger forces – like trade patterns, or exchange of technologies – that help shape the experience of any particular region. World historians argue that these central concerns – comparative attention to several distinct cultural and political experiences and a focus on factors that transcend single societies – are the key components of any historical understanding of the world we live in. But they also strongly imply, if they do not say outright, that a purely national or regional lens cannot possibly capture this same world.

And this is the central dispute. Most societies in the world today, and not just the United States, continue to bring a deeply national commitment to history teaching – even when the same societies generate historical research that is less confined. For many, recent developments have heightened the national or regional focus. Russia, for example, had urgent needs to reexamine its school history programs after the fall of communism in 1991, and great attention has been paid to innovation – but almost entirely within a national context. The European Union has been attempting to promote history teaching that will emphasize Europe’s common bonds – and while this project is not anti-global, it does not place any premium on wider or non-European developments, and it can generate nervousness about too much global detraction.

Even besides specific new needs, the larger force of contemporary globalization inevitably produces a divided history response – which is precisely what the American culture wars are all about. World historians look at developments around us and argue that they clearly point to the need to take the widest possible view, to pay attention to a number of societies besides one’s own and to the evolution of patterns of trade or migration that have long affected any individual regional experience. But many people, including many educators and politicians, look at the same developments around us and argue that they point to an urgent need to shore up the national tradition. The very processes of globalization that intrigue world historians – though they may be very critical of certain features – cause grave concern for lots of publics. In fact, international opinion polls show that cultural globalization – the outside influences that impinge on regional beliefs and values – is the most feared aspect of the whole situation; 72% of those polled around the world profess to be against this aspect, whereas only 56% say they fear economic globalization. And if cultural globalization is an enemy, what more logical way to react than to try to reassert the storied qualities of the national history story?

The larger pressures of globalization surely also help explain tense debates in Australia. Here, the federal government launched a major program in 2000 to improve the teaching of history in the schools, and while much attention focused on local history the program also insisted on knowledge of global events and issues. The result prompted significant backlash, with new pride in Australia’s history at virtually all educational levels. A number of critics reported their shock that some students knew about World War II and Stalinism but not the name of Australia’s first prime minister. Arguments of this sort have unfolded virtually in any country where even timid gestures toward world history have surfaced. The same arguments explain why many countries, with sophisticated history enterprises in other respects, have not moved toward world history significantly at all.

In the current moment, in sum, world history is inevitably the subject of real controversy, even if most countries (unlike the United States in 1994) keep the subject out of the halls of parliament. World history is an innovation, a deliberate departure from the way history has usually been framed at least at the teaching level. Its justifications do not focus on instilling national identity or patriotic loyalty – though they do not inevitably contradict such purposes. Its goals assume that students should learn something about several identities and related cultures, and not just one, and also something about global interactions that go beyond regional identities of any sort. These are not subversive goals, but they do challenge established history routines and they make some people anxious.

HOW WORLD HISTORY EMERGED

World history is both very old and very new. Many historians, in many societies, tried to take a large view of the world when they wrote their histories. Herodotus, in fifth-century Athens, authored a mixture of history, travelogue and fantasy about a variety of places he visited around the eastern Mediterranean – this in contrast to a slightly later classical Greek historian, Thucydides, who focused rigorously on Greece and its city states, and nothing really beyond. The great Arab historian, the North African Ibn Khaldun, also tried to keep many parts of the world in mind. In eighteenth-century Europe, a variety of Enlightenment intellectuals, including Voltaire, wrote histories that were not narrowly confined to Western Europe. None of these historians was, by contemporary standards, a full world historian, simply because not enough was known about several different parts of the world for them to be really inclusive. But their goal was wide ranging, if not literally global, and it would have been logical to expect, with the rise of more formal historical study, to see a fuller world history emerge without too much difficulty.

The nineteenth century, and its fascination with nationalism, seriously disrupted what might otherwise have been a reasonably natural trend. Historical work expanded, and increasingly history began to be included in school curricula in Europe and the United States, but the focus rested heavily on the national experience. To be sure, in many cases, the purely national interest was leavened by some attention to the history of ancient Greece and Rome and, in the United States, in European history more generally – but as we have seen these latter engagements usually formed a backdrop to the national story.

The narrowing of the history mission was further enhanced by another nineteenth-century development, worthy in its own right: a growing interest in a heavily fact-based, elaborately researched scholarly presentation. Beginning in Germany with the great historian Leopold von Ranke, a new effort to make history more professional and precise involved insistence on portraying the past “as it actually was.” Translated into historical practice, this meant increasing attention to detailed archival research, producing often long, heavily footnoted books that provided a great deal of information about specific topics. At the hands of a master – like the nineteenth-century Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote a classic study of the Italian Renaissance – this new approach could produce a lasting characterization of a significant historical period or episode. On the whole, however, the new historical precision encouraged a choice of somewhat more limited topics, like a specific war, or treaty, or presidency. Most contemporary historians still appreciate the impulses behind this professional turn: we want our histories to be as accurate as possible and to rest on careful research. It is true, however, that translating this approach into world history is a real challenge, particularly for younger scholars, simply because it’s hard to generate that level of detail and that definite a research base when dealing with more than one major society or with such a vast topic as, say, patterns of global migration.

The net result of the nationalist impulse in history – plus the move toward greater precision – was, very simply, that there were few major advances in world history writing, much less teaching, during the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. There was real irony here, because in the actual world, contacts among societies were accelerating during precisely this period: but very little historical ...

Table of contents

• The Basics
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 A WORLD HISTORY SKELETON
• 3 HABITS OF MIND IN WORLD HISTORY
• 4 MANAGING TIME
• 5 MANAGING SPACE
• 6 CONTACTS AND THE STRUCTURE OF WORLD HISTORY
• 7 TOPICS IN WORLD HISTORY
• 8 DISPUTES IN WORLD HISTORY
• 9 WORLD HISTORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
• AFTERWORD
• GLOSSARY
• INDEX