Voyages, Migration, and the Maritime World

On China’s Global Historical Role

Clara Ho, Ricardo Mak, Yue-him Tam

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783110585070
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110585148
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

This is a multi-author volume resulted from an international conference focusing on topics related to our understanding of the role of China in the global history. Apart from introductory chapters exploring methodological issues and providing big pictures of framing China in the world in particular time zones, this volume also covers rich discussions on the following themes from the ancient period to the twentieth century: organized water transport, cultural interactions, navigators, port cities, smuggling activities, customs service, foreign relations, migration, and diasporas. Written by scholars of different generations who are based in diverse regions including Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK and the US, the chapters in this volume either address old questions from new perspectives, or table new topics that were largely ignored in previous scholarship. Some go further to brainstorm possible research directions in the future. This thought-provoking volume will be beneficial to readers who are interested in rethinking China's position in the global historical stage against the backdrop of Post-Orientalism.

Part I: Perspectives on the World

HANEDA Masashi

1 World/Global History and the Positionality of Historians

Note: The results reported in this paper are drawn from research conducted as part of the “Global History Collaborative” supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Core-to-Core Program

Starting a few years ago, I began to meet and exchange ideas related to the concept of “world/global history” with Ge Zhaoguang and other historians at the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies of Fudan University, as well as with Benjamin Elman and other researchers in the Princeton University Department of East Asian Studies. In 2014, a project was launched to create an international network focused on the study of global history known as the Global History Collaborative (GHC), which in part overlaps with this ongoing exchange, and brings together scholars from the Princeton University History Department, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in France, and the Frei Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany.17 My academic exchanges with these historians from around the world have led me to develop some thoughts about various issues related to world history studies that I had not previously seriously considered. World/global history studies seems to be approaching an extremely important crossroad, not only in Japan but globally as well. In this paper, I would like to raise two questions regarding current history studies, in particular world/global history studies, and discuss what I believe we, as historians, should do at this important juncture.

Various Versions of World History and My First Question

People around the world view world history in different ways. I would like to begin by examining how world history is studied and taught in various countries around the world.

(1) Japan

Since the early twentieth century, world history has been studied and taught at Japanese universities and other research institutions as three separate disciplines – Japanese history, Oriental history, and Western history. This scholarly division was consistent with the world view of Japanese intellectuals and politicians at the time. In their view, the world was divided into three parts: the nation of Japan, the Western world that Japan needed to imitate and overtake, and the Orient that Japan needed to lead. As such, it was only natural that they believed that each region should have its own history. It goes without saying that this is a modified version of the Western view of the world, which divides the world into West (Occident) and non-West (Orient). Geographically speaking, Japan is located in non-Western world, but, it is definitely not like other countries in the Orient.

This view of the world did not change after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. And even today, when such a tripartite division is clearly incongruous with the present world, major universities in Japan continue to study and teach world history within this framework. Meanwhile, at the high school level, Oriental and Western history have been combined and taught as a single subject known as sekaishi or “world history” since the early 1950s; accordingly, history is taught in two parts, Japanese history and world history. In Japan, high school textbooks are written according to governmental curriculum guidelines set by the Ministry of Education Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The MEXT checks if a textbook complies with the governmental curriculum guidelines and, if there is a problem, advises the publisher of any revisions that need to be made. The governmental curriculum guidelines are revised and officially published every ten years based on discussions by a panel of experts consisting primarily of university and high school teachers. Given that major universities in Japan do not have well-developed research programs for studying world history, it can be said that, it has been this governmental curriculum guideline committee that has de facto determined the framework for understanding world history in Japan.

The following figure represents the conventional understanding of world history in Japan today.

According to this model, different regions of the world and countries have independent histories following their own timelines; world history, then, is understood to be the aggregation of these separate threads. The model also shows the advancement of Europe into various parts of the world starting in the sixteenth century, leading to globalization under Western leadership. Here, I would like the reader to pay particular attention to East Asia. In Japanese textbooks, East

Figure 1: General view of world history in contemporary Japan.

Asia is described as a “civilization” or “region”18 unto itself and, thus, should have its own history as is the case for South Asia and Europe. However, the nature of this history is not clearly explained. This is because Japan itself is located in the region. Japan is believed to have a different history from that of other countries in the region; to describe the history of East Asia would complicate the understanding of Japan’s relationship to the rest of the region. Any description of East Asian history would necessarily include the history of China and the Korean Peninsula. It is considered problematic to, on the one hand, postulate that Japan has its own history and, on the other hand, posit that there is an East Asian history that includes other countries in the region.

(2) Germany, France, and the European Region

In this region, world history was conceived as a universal history of humankind by nineteenth century thinkers such as Hegel and Ranke. According to these intellectuals, Europe stood at the fore of humankind’s advancing front, and, as such, only Europe had a history. They believed that non-European regions of the world were not progressing and, therefore, did not have a history in the narrow sense of the word. Accordingly, the history of Europe was considered equivalent to “world history.” In European countries, which have inherited this tradition, the term “world history” is not commonly used; instead, the term used is simply “history.” For example, in French high schools (lycées), there is subject called “history (histoire),” which describes the pasts of France and neighboring countries. “History” does not uniformly cover the past of the world as a whole. The pasts of China, Japan, and other non-European regions are discussed only at the point when direct relationships are formed between such regions and France (and Europe) in the modern era.

Similarly, at universities and other research institutions, the primary purpose of history departments and history courses is to study the pasts of France and other European countries. In most cases, the pasts of Japan, China, and other non-European regions are dealt with within the framework of oriental studies or, more recently, area (or regional) studies (aire culturelle). While the situation is starting to change due to the rise of global history studies, in the past, a clear distinction was made between pasts of Europe and non-Europe, and few opportunities existed to comprehensively discuss the pasts of the world within the framework of “world history.”

(3) The United States of America

In the United States, the circumstances related to “world history” have been changing rapidly in recent years. Similar to the situation in Europe, as recently as 30 years ago, a clear distinction was made between the history of “Western civilization” and the history of other regions; “world history” as a distinct framework did not exist. However, since the establishment of the World History Association (WHA) in 1982, the nature of “world history” has been a subject of continuous discussion, and it appears that theory regarding world history studies has advanced substantially since entering the twenty-first century. Here, I would like to introduce the definition of “world history” presented on the World History Association’s website.

Put simply, world history is macrohistory. It is transregional, transnational, and transcultural.

Although it is important for students of world history to have a deep and nuanced understanding of each of the various cultures, states, and other entities that have been part of the vast mosaic of human history, the world historian stands back from these individual elements in that mosaic to take in the entire picture, or at least a large part of that picture. Consequently, the world historian studies phenomena that transcend single states, regions, and cultures, such as cultural contact and exchange and movements that have had a global or at least a transregional impact. The world historian also often engages in comparative history, and in that respect might be thought of as a historical anthropologist.

World history is not, therefore, the study of the histories of discrete cultures and states one after another and in isolation from one another. It is also not necessarily global history. That is, world history is not simply the study of globalization after 1492.

As long as one focuses on the big picture of cultural interchange and/or comparative history, one is a practicing world historian. Therefore, for example, a number of noted world historians focus on travel and cultural exchange within the vast premodern Islamic World. Others study the exchange of goods, ideas, flora, and fauna across the so-called Silk Road that criss-crossed Eurasia from roughly 200 BCE to about 1350 CE. Others concentrate on comparative holy wars both within and outside of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism Christianity, and Islam. Still others have chosen to study in depth the global or transregional impact of single items or classes of items, such as the development and use of firearms across the world from antiquity to the present or the significant roles that such apparently humble items as cotton and codfish have played across the vast span of human history. Given the current pandemic of AIDS and the ever-present fear of new pandemics, the role of disease in human history has also become an important and timely topic of study and teaching.19

I rate this view of world history highly for overcoming the deficiencies of the Eurocentric world history that originated in Continental Europe in the nineteenth century and suggest that it could even be called a “new world history.” In this definition, no distinction is made between the Western and non-Western worlds. World history is not viewed as the aggregation of histories of individual countries, as is the case in Japan. Any researcher interested in studying world history will, undoubtedly, have to refer to this definition in the future. That said, I am not completely satisfied with this view of “global history” and, as I will explain later, feel that there is further room for discussion. Interestingly, it does not comment on why and for whom world history studies is needed. I would also point out that this is the definition used by one academic society20 in the United States, that the majority of historians in the United States do not have a particularly strong interest in such world history studies, and that the framework for history education used in each state, in most cases, is the conventional framework centered around Western civilization.

(4) China and South Korea

Similar to the situation in Japan, history in China and South Korea is taught in two parts consisting of national history and world history. In China’s case, this means Chinese history and world history; in South Korea’s case, South Korean history and world history. Surveying countries around the world, this handling of world history is unique to Japan, China, and South Korea. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to examine a world history textbook used in Chinese high schools and remember being surprised at how little reference was made to China. This is because, in world history as it is taught in Japan, China plays a major role. A world history in which China does not appear would be unimaginable in Japan. In China, the country’s past is taught within the framework of national history. The same division is observed in academic studies; researchers at the Institute of World History Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, as a rule, specialize in the histories of foreign countries. In China, world history and Chinese history are considered a completely different disciplines.

As can be seen from the aforementioned discussion, world history is not necessarily studied or taught in the same way in different countries or different regions of the world. Why do such differences exist? The answer is simple. It is because the positionality of historians or those who relate history is different. The vast majority of historians, including those who study the histories of other countries, study history as citizens of the country to which they belong, using and publishing results in the language of their country. While there are numerous languages such as English and Spanish that are used in more than one country, a historian’s nationality and research language are strongly linked. I also publish much of my research in the Japanese language. In his book titled Tableau de la France, the renowned nineteenth century French historian Jules Michelet declared that “The history of France begins with the French language.”21 This situation has not changed substantially from then to now.

Naturally, history education, which based on this history studies, is conducted in the language of each country. Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, in most countries, history has been taught in schools as a means of cultivating a national identity. National histories have been constructed and narrated as something to be shared by a given country’s citizens, whereas foreign histories are described simply as a way to understand other countries and their pasts. At the root of this division is a binary view of the world in which a clear distinction is drawn between oneself and others. Insofar as historians discuss history in their own languages and countries use education to cultivate a national identity, it is only natural that the framework and description of world history should differ from country to country. So long as the countries based on the concept of a sovereign nation state developed in modern Europe continue to exist, it is highly unlikely that such understanding and description of history will disappear.

Is it okay, in today’s world, to continue studying and teaching the history in the same manner as 100 years ago – differently in each country and in each language, using countries as the primary framework? This is my first question.

I want to make it clear that I am not saying that the concept of “country” is unnecessary for understanding history. As emphasized by Ge Zhaoguang, I am well aware of the importance, especially in the case of contemporary China, to understand the past of a single country based on the framework of “China” and the significance of doing so.22 That said, my question is whether such history of individual countries is all that we need in this age of rapid globalization.

Various Versions of Global History and My Second Question

My second question is related to one of the reasons for this new rising tide of history studies that is different from world history or sekaishi [world history in Japanese], referred to as “global history” in English, guroobaru hisutorii (global history as it is understood in Japanese), and quan qiu shi (global history as it is understood in Chinese). At least, that is the case in Japan. Interestingly, this new history stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Perspectives on the World
• Part II: China’s Maritime World: From Ancient to Modern Times
• Part III: Migrations and the Travel of Ideas