Western Civilization in World History

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134374748
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Western civilization and world history are often seen as different, or even mutually exclusive, routes into historical studies. This volume shows that they can be successfully linked, providing a tool to see each subject in the context of the other, identifying influences and connections.

Western Civilization in World History takes up the recent debates about the merits of the well-established 'Western civ' approach versus the newer field of world history. Peter N. Stearns outlines key aspects of Western civilization - often assumed rather than analyzed - and reviews them in a global context.

Part I
The Western civ tradition

Most studies of Western civilization begin with the history of the civilization, not the history of how the civilization has been taught. In this case, however, a brief exploration of how Western civ programs emerged, what problems they were intended to solve, is essential as a backdrop to the exploration of the subject itself. Too often a subject like Western civ (or American literature, or calculus) is taken as a given by students and teachers alike. In fact, it is always legitimate to identify and test basic assumptions, and the history of the teaching program offers a way to do so. Then we can turn to the analysis of how the assumptions play out in the subject matter itself.

Chapter 2
Why Western civ courses

The constraints of success

It may seem surprising that formal Western civ courses are both relatively recent (only introduced in the early 20th century) and American. Both points can be explained, in the process revealing some of the strengths and limitations of the Western civ approach.

It is also important to note, as a subset of the second point, how unusual it is for a nation to become so strongly committed to a history not directly its own. By the late 19th century, most countries were busily organizing historical training into national categories, in order to instill patriotism. This occurred in the United States, and in some instances the emphasis on American history preempted Western civ (largely the case in Texas, for example). But for many educators, and in their wake some segments of the public, American history by itself seemed too narrow, too purely recent, and so the commitment to Western civ, though technically foreign, developed as a complement. This point, too, can be explored, and, of course, it is vital to understand why American conservatives today, so strongly nationalist in most respects, place such weight on the Western civ tradition.

There are several precedents to the Western civ course. As Christianity developed, both in Western and Eastern Europe, various monks wrote chronicles of Christendom. These were usually descriptive, what happened one year after the next, and the selection of data was somewhat random. They did assume, however, that Christendom was a unifying concept to frame historical accounts. This picture was muddied, of course, by divisions between Catholic and orthodox Christianity. Russian chronicles talked of Russia, perhaps parts of the Balkans, and the Byzantine Empire, while French or German monks focused on the territory administered by the Roman church. But the idea of some coherence, transcending narrow and changing political boundaries, was nevertheless important.

The idea of history developed in the Italian Renaissance, from the 14th century onward, and then spread to the north, offered a much more direct precedent. A key development here was the sense that the Greek and Roman past constituted an immense treasure trove for modern intellectuals and educators. Not only philosophical ideas and artistic styles, but also historical examples could and should be directly borrowed. From this, the belief emerged that any member of the educated elite should be trained in Latin, possibly in Greek, and certainly in important segments of classical history. Knowing what Roman generals and politicians had done was directly relevant to policy issues and character development in the Renaissance world. Of course, most people in the Western world did not have access to this kind of education, so exposure to classical history and the ability to cite events and biographies from the Athenian or Roman republics became an important badge of elite social status as well.

The current Western civ teaching tradition altered both of these precedents to a degree. It certainly assumed that Western civilization could not be captured exclusively by attention to Christianity, though religion had to be considered. It also assumed that the Western past involved more than Greece and Rome, and that knowledge of its unfolding was essential to the education and citizenship of numbers of people, and not just a narrow elite. But the Western civ tradition was built on its precedents also: it did sometimes drift into a chronicling of events in the West, on the assumption that they would speak for themselves. It did sometimes pay particular deference to Greece and Rome, without much explicit analysis concerning why this was due. And it did continue to harbor some elitist impulses. It is not entirely accidental that, even today, many of the staunchest defenders of the Western civ course sit in some of the Ivy League colleges and in wannabe liberal arts institutions that sincerely believe they are training the best and the brightest and providing them, through Western civ, with a means of distinguishing themselves.

One other component contributed to the emergence of Western civ. Formal, professional historical teaching and research emerged in the second half of the 19th century. Obviously, as we have already suggested, history writing was not new at all. But the notion that there are professional standards for historical work, and that some people could and should be formally trained in its practice, for example through receiving doctoral degrees in the subject, arose in the later 19th century. The center for the development was in Europe, particularly Germany; some credit the German historian Leopold von Ranke, with his commitment to portraying history “as it actually happened”, as the first professional historical researcher. The European origins of this development meant that many of the early American professionals were trained in Europe or by Europeans, so they naturally assumed that European historical topics were appropriate fodder for research and teaching alike. This helps explain why, at a place like the Kansas State University (then called Kansas State Agricultural College) around 1900, along with some courses in American history, the standard curriculum included offerings in British history (seen as a particularly important backdrop to the United States), ancient, medieval, modern European, and also French history. As the 1909 catalogue indicated: “in order really to understand American history you must know European history. This is one of the chief reasons … for our study of ancient and modern history.” Indeed, in American universities generally in 1910, 45% of all history courses dealt with Western Europe, along with another 16% on England, compared to 37% on the United States, (and, obviously, 2% on the rest of the world).

Even with this pattern, however, the Western civ course had not quite yet emerged. Scientific historical researchers in Europe, and most of their American trainees, tended to focus on detailed research on relatively small periods of time. They were not comfortable with grand sweeps of a civilization; and so the European history courses tended to be subdivided into discrete time periods such as ancient or medieval. Putting together a larger picture, if done at all, would be mainly done by the student. Furthermore, the rise of professional history occurred at a time of growing nationalism. This meant that much research, and even more teaching, tended to be divided into national categories, often designed to bolster the claims of the nation state. Particularly for the modern period, history programs in Europe itself were thus typically focused on one’s own nation, not a larger civilization. And nationalist historians even quarreled about earlier times, before nations existed: Germans around 1900 tended to argue that the Middle Ages owed most to the proud traditions of Germanic tribes, and less to the achievements of the Roman empire, while the French, taking up the Latin mantle, argued the reverse. It was not easy, amid this kind of contention, to think of larger wholes; hence, at Kansas State, courses were on England or France rather than a whole civilization from beginning to present.

Two developments, coalescing in the first quarter of the 20th century in the United States, amended this context in ways that generated the tradition of the Western civ course in many American colleges and universities, from the 1920s onward. They help explain, also, why the Western civ impulse took hold in the United States more than in Western Europe itself. One of the developments was personal, in the contributions of a singularly imaginative and persistent history teacher. The other development, more complex, involved curricular reactions to some troubling changes in the world of the early 20th century.

The first force highlighted an individual, James Harvey Robinson, who taught both undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University and who tirelessly produced both textbooks and readings collections to serve as the basis for the teaching of Western civ. Robinson preached what he called the “new history,” which in turn involved an emphasis on relatively long spans of time. Advances in evolutionary biology and in archeology had placed new emphasis on extensive units of time and permitted a new division between human “prehistory” (which mainly meant, before writing) and “history.” Historical time was relatively recent – though far longer than smaller chunks like “medieval” – and through it, current developments could easily be connected to the historical past. With this kind of thinking it also seemed logical to distinguish between peoples with a history, such as those in the West, and peoples – such as many of those in Africa – whose long lack of writing seemed to deprive them of this quality. This distinction is now almost entirely discredited as we will see, but in the hands of people like Robinson it helped situate Western history in a special place. While the idea of prehistory had first emerged in 1871, as an English language term, it was Robinson, who was a professor at Columbia from 1895 to 1919, who most clearly translated the notion into a basis for a transnational history survey course.

It was probably inevitable, given the Christian, Renaissance and professional history precedents, that Robinson would see his historical story in European terms. There was a single survey, from the origins of historical time to the present, and it centered in Europe with recent extensions to North America. This was “our” history, and it united ancient Greece and thinkers like Aristotle with modern Europe and Newton and Darwin. Robinson talked easily of a “unity and continuity in history” in ways that had not seemed obvious to some of his predecessors. Indeed, it was both a measure of Robinson’s achievement, and a real fault, that many teachers stopped thinking about unity and continuity as problems, and converted them to assumptions.

Two other points: Robinson’s vision centered the essence of history on intellectual rather than political achievements. This was vital for the emergence of a Western civ course – for, whatever its merits, the Western past has not involved political unity, but it has arguably entailed some common intellectual contributions from various places within the West. And second, Robinson’s sense of Western unity involved an emphasis on the rational and scientific and on a relatively steady line of progress. The present was connected to the Western past, it built on it, but it also improved it. And implicitly – here was another powerful assumption that was not hauled out for careful analysis – this Western quality of rationalism and progress contrasted it with the traditions of other regions even if, technically, they too had “histories.” It was possible to distinguish Western history from the “other” without much explicit analysis, either because the other was mired in prehistorical conditions or because the other, though historical in the sense of having writing, was steeped in superstition and backwardness.

Between 1900 and 1915, Robinson constructed an extremely influential graduate course at Columbia that chronologically surveyed the rise of rational thought located in the West. By 1926, Western civ courses for undergraduates, patterned on this model, were becoming standard not only at Columbia, where the “Contemporary Civilization” course had been made a requirement in 1919, but more broadly, and a number of textbooks, quite similar to each other, emerged to service the field, unifying ancient, medieval and modern history into a single narrative that could be covered within a single academic year. Many of these texts were written by Robinson’s former students, who had fanned out to other institutions, such as the University of Michigan, where they carefully replicated their mentor’s approach. Harry Elmer Barnes, in his 1930s text, repeated the standard assumptions: “The history of Western civilization cannot be confined within the older historical chronology. It is now realized that man has been on earth for at least a million years…. From the standpoint of time and culture alike, the whole civilization of man in the West since ancient Egyptian days is ‘modern’ in character.” With this modern, Western unity so strongly stated, there was really no reason to go into any detail about the histories of other peoples, including those of what Barnes insisted on referring to as the “Orient,” who clearly lagged behind the West.

But the rapid adoption and dissemination of the Western civ course required a special context, beyond the labors of Robinson and his trainees. Here is the second part of explaining “Why Western civ?” The new course built clearly on Renaissance ideas of the link between Greece and Rome and then-modern times. It owed much to social Darwinism – the kind of thinking that had followed on the discovery of evolutionary theory. Social Darwinism contributed more than the sense of a big sweep of time followed by the emergence of humans followed by the very recent emergence of civilization. It also encouraged distinctions among different races of people with very different potentials for evolutionary success. In the classic age of imperialism, it was not surprisingly assumed that Western peoples topped the evolutionary hierarchy, which made it easy to concentrate on their history and ignore that of other, inferior types whether literally prehistorical or not.

But there was more specific context still. World War I – which in its European origins and concentration was really a battle within the West – had drawn the United States closer to Europe but had also raised huge concerns about Europe’s future. The greatest civilization in the world, which in the eyes of most American historians of Europe remained a vital compass for the United States itself, had split asunder. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic, though particularly in Europe itself, wondered if the West had passed its prime. The cruelties and losses in the War, the continuing postwar tensions and dislocations including a foreboding that more war might come, combined with stirrings in other parts of the world, such as China and Japan. American historians of Europe found a special mission in this situation, in providing a story of Western progress that rose above the nationalist limitations that bedeviled Europe itself. As Barnes put it, in writing his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World: “For the first time in human history, mankind is directly confronted with a compulsory and relatively expeditious choice between utopia and barbarism…. It is hoped that this book will contribute very directly to … [an] intelligent choice.” Writing and teaching about Western civ became, for these authors, a way “to keep civilization alive.”

The ironies here are obvious, and in some ways immensely appealing. Western civ courses sought to trace some durable features of a civilization, assumed to be the world’s best, precisely because that civilization might be crumbling. The hope – and it could be fairly vague – was that emphasis on the historical positive might help prevent the contemporary negative, or, at the least, the United States itself might become a superior repository of Western values, even if the Old World persisted in going astray. The question of how to fit the inescapable evil in the Western world – the evil that for example created Nazism in the same decades that the Western civ course was taking root – was a complex problem. Some Western civ texts tried to address it. Others, such as the University of Chicago course that for a time simply left out the 20th century because it had turned so horrible, ducked. Again, the Western civ course was born of a number of very powerful assumptions that, precisely because they seemed so essential, were not tested very thoroughly.

And there was another, more strictly American part of the context – one that particularly explains the rapid spread of Western civ programs, often as required components of college and university general education programs.

High school education was becoming increasingly widespread in the first decades of the 20th century in the United States, particularly for the growing middle class. And an ever-increasing minority of high school graduates sought entry to college. Some aspired to the “best schools,” headed by the Ivy League universities. It was difficult to turn all these students away – some were very able, some brought refreshing promise of representing expanding regions of the United States and present or future financial success. No longer did elite schools recruit simply from a handful of familiar private preparatory schools. But more diverse recruitment raised obvious problems of standards, for high schools varied greatly and their learning results might not be trustworthy. One response were College Board tests, introduced at this time to help identify aptitude regardless of school origin. Another response was a growing emphasis on general education requirements in college, that would help put students from different backgrounds on the s...

Table of contents

• Themes in World History
• Part I The Western civ tradition
• Part II Getting Western civilization started
• Part III The rise of the West, 1450–1850
• Part IV The West in the contemporary world