DOUGLAS NORTHROP
What do historians see – and what do they miss? It depends, of course, on how any particular historian chooses to look. She or he must first decide on a time and place to investigate, identify sources to serve as evidence, and pose questions to ask about them. Each choice is shaped by a scholar’s training – the way they learned the craft of “history.” Usually this happens at an academic institution, through formal education in one or more clearly defined “fields”: French history, African history, early modern history, the history of science, and so on. Experienced scholars convey their expertise to students, carefully preparing the next generation of historians, honing linguistic skills and imparting deep knowledge of particular archives, libraries, and publications. New historians thus emerge well versed in their area’s theoretical, methodological, and historiographical debates – at least as these are understood at their academic institution, located in its own geographic and cultural context, and at a certain point in time. But what happens if these institutional and intellectual pathways are disrupted – if historical questions are asked in new ways, stretching across the boundaries of the existing fields? Can time and space be stretched, as in Map I.1, and historians take a new, broader, perspective?
This is precisely what practitioners of world and global history aim to do. They represent a young “field,” at least by the standards of professional history, one that by most measures has only come into its own over the past quarter-century. World history is still in some ways embattled, harshly criticized by self-styled disciplinary gatekeepers, including some specialists in nationally defined fields – Japanese history, Russian history, American history, etc. World history may represent a practical threat (as a new claimant to limited institutional resources) but is more likely to be attacked in intellectual terms, as a marginal, even doomed approach, too general, impossibly broad, obviously too superficial to permit serious scholarship. Yet world history – as a professional arena – is populated by a diverse and rapidly growing group of scholars and teachers who have worked hard to show the contrary. They have developed all the trappings and infrastructure of a legitimate institutional domain: professional organizations (especially the World History Association, thewha.org), journals (notably the Anglophone Journal of World History and Journal of Global History), book prizes, teaching prizes, PhD programs, undergraduate courses, elementary- and secondary-school curricula, textbooks at all levels, handbooks for teachers, scholarly monographs, popular publications, Advanced Placement tests, museum exhibits, television shows – the list goes on.1 World historians thus stand on much stronger ground now to argue with skeptics than they did a generation ago. The field is sufficiently rooted and broad-based to have moved beyond self-justification; it includes a panoply of internal conversations and arguments about what world-historical work can and should do. World historians take deeply divergent approaches, sometimes evincing little consensus about the field’s wider parameters or its common standards. World history is a professional arena visibly in flux, still taking shape, open for dispute. This volume sketches the resulting arguments, and traces the field’s principal trajectories. But world historians as a group share the impulse to see the human past differently – more expansively – by reaching beyond the boxes in which history is conventionally taught.
Map I.1 On a typical world map, such as the classic Mercator projection, Greenland appears misleadingly enormous – yet few observers pause to note the inaccuracies. Mapmakers rarely question other basic assumptions, such as drawing north at the top. But if the Earth resembles a ball spinning through space, are “up” and “down” so self-evident? Better maps can provide fresh perspective, and make viewers aware of unspoken assumptions. The Hobo-Dyer projection shows accurately the relative size of different land areas, while preserving north/south and east/west lines of bearing. It also gives the Southern Hemisphere visual prominence, imagining a globe that has been recentered Down Under.
Source: Hobo-Dyer Equal Area Projection. © 2007, ODTmaps. Adapted with permission from www.ODTmaps.com.
William McNeill, perhaps the best-known world historian of the last century, once memorably defended the field through metaphor. What might a world historian see, he asked, that a national, regional, or period-specific historian would miss? “A tree is a tree,” he pointed out. It is also a collection of millions of cells, or trillions of atoms; at the same time, it is also a vanishingly tiny piece of the forest ecosystems that stretch far beyond its trunk. Biologists may analyze how the tree’s cells work, parse the chemical processing of chlorophyll, and zoom down to the molecular level of DNA – all valuable endeavors – but that does not make it inaccurate to talk about “the tree.” No one needs to understand every individual cell to know what a tree is. Ecologists, likewise, need not start at the atomic level – nor the level of an individual tree – to discuss the “forest”: to analyze its seasonal variations, its diseases, or its interactions with other species (such as humans). Put simply, different entities, issues, and patterns emerge at each level of perspective (atom-cell-tree-forest). None are right or wrong in an absolute sense, merely more or less appropriate to the questions being asked. Every phenomenon is best seen at its own scale; each is also inescapably comprised of smaller units, while interlocking with others to shape larger levels. “Precision and truthfulness,” McNeill concluded, “do not necessarily increase as the scale becomes smaller.”2
McNeill expanded the point – and the concomitant value of adopting a bird’s-eye perspective – by describing a walk he had taken long before, when he was a graduate student in New York City. One day in Morningside Park he looked out and saw a major highway, the Hudson Parkway, stretched out beneath him. From his elevated point of view, he suddenly realized, “the stop-and-go traffic on the Parkway constituted a longitudinal wave, with nodes and anti-nodes spaced at regular intervals, moving along the Parkway at a pace considerably faster than any single vehicle could make its way along the crowded roadway.” Each individual car was part of this wave, although it far exceeded any one vehicle in both size and speed. The wave, McNeill declared, was “most certainly there – clear and unambiguous,” notwithstanding the fact that few if any drivers on the road – in fact, probably no one but McNeill himself, watching from the overlook – could be aware of its existence. Recognizing it required three things: a perceptive observer (McNeill), a proper spot from which to look (Morningside Park), and a concept through which to “see” and understand what was happening (the idea of a longitudinal wave).
This Companion to World History provides readers with dozens of such spots from which to look, and key concepts with which to make sense of what they see. World history’s defenders often use such conceits, frequently invoking ideas of a “lens” or viewpoint to make the case for adopting a world/global-level perspective. Metaphors of visibility and perspective abound, and contributors to this book are no exception – they use many different lenses (zoom, wide-angle, moving back and forth, and so on). The volume aims to orient readers to world history by showing the globe from as many of these points of view as possible. It sketches the development of world history as a professional field, especially over the past generation of scholarship; identifies principal areas of continuing contention, disagreement and divergence; and suggests fruitful directions for further discussion and research. It also considers issues of scholarship (research) and pedagogy (teaching) – each of which yields fresh insights but also poses particular challenges when approached at transnational, interregional, or world/global scales.
“World history,” or various approaches grouped under that label, has exploded recently into prominence in the United States – in university, college, and high-school, middle-school, and elementary-school (K-12) classrooms – and to varying degrees in other countries as well, but it is nevertheless still criticized as disjointed in practice and sometimes dismissed by academic historians as mere “popular” history, lacking scholarly respectability and disciplinary solidity. Such critiques are belied by the steady flow of excellent world-historical research in journals, books, and graduate programs, but “national” or regional historians do not commonly read this work. How has serious scholarship developed in an arena without a readily visible fieldsite or manageable body of languages, and with a proclivity to incorporate methods and sources from disciplines as varied as literature and astrophysics? How can teachers and students educated along national, regional, or chronological lines make sense of a vastly broader sweep of the human past to highlight worldwide patterns, global developments and comparisons, and cross-regional or world-systemic interactions?
More than 30 chapters follow to address these questions. Each chapter provides not so much a neatly packaged description of a canonical topic as a sketch of starting points for further exploration. Each offers an overview of the practices operating within a particular subfield or approach. The chapters collectively suggest that world history is best seen as a field in action, not one clearly defined or even easily summarized. The book adopts a “warts and all” approach that equally celebrates the achievements and breadth of a field that has come of age, explores its fundamental problems, and highlights challenges for the future. Contributors ask forthright questions about core problems: how can practitioners establish distinctive and defensible research methods for world and global history; how should readers think about connections (or the lack thereof) between world-scaled scholarship and teaching; and how does world history appear to the non-Anglophone world?
This final question may seem obvious, but is too often overlooked in practice: how would the world’s past change if it were written by all its people? This issue runs throughout the book, but is addressed directly in the concluding group of essays in Part III, “Many Globes: Who Writes the World?” These chapters extend recent efforts to broaden the geographic, linguistic, institutional, and epistemological bases of world history by considering how the field could change were it not so dominated by modern Western (especially American) scholars and their concerns. These scholars are of course situated culturally and historically, with predispositions and theoretical frameworks shaped by positions in a modern, especially Anglophone and capitalist, West. Radical critics, especially those adopting perspectives from postcolonial studies, argue that the character of actually-existing world history – its practitioners’ predominant physical locations, shared languages, and core problematics – amounts only to the latest version of the West’s assertion of intellectual hegemony. From this point of view, world history studies a “globe” that has been conceived through Euro-American categories and approached with Euro-American historicist epistemologies (for example, assuming professional practices of empirical documentation). It is therefore neither objective nor value-neutral – and far from truly global.3 Some world historians, speaking with the zeal of partisans and converts, have disagreed forcefully with this characterization, calling it unfair, political/ideological, and a failure of imagination (Bentley 2005; O’Brien 2006). Yet their and others’ actions have also conceded that “worlding” the field is indeed a crucially important task, one that has only just begun.4
When histories begin at different starting points, as the chapters in Part III show, other questions inevitably arise. Historical subjects will shift, and new frameworks emerge. What, then, are the limits of Anglophone world-historical scholarship? How will categories, emphases, and chronologies shift if the world’s past is considered from other points of view? What other possible centers and peripheries come into focus – or does the center/periphery model even apply? Are concepts like “nation,” “empire,” or “bureaucracy” (to take just a few examples) still as important, and do they mean the same thing? How do the “turning points” of global or interregional history change? What evidence – and what methods – do scholars working in different institutional, linguistic, and disciplinary terrains find most productive? How do their theories, narratives, and epistemologies of a “world” differ? How, most basically, do they think about the past? A concluding chapter leaves history altogether, considering global approaches in other disciplinary terrains – nonhistorical fields in the humanities and social sciences, from art to economics, that are likewise wrestling with theories and practices of world-scaled study.
The bulk of the book before this point is divided into two broad headings. The chapters in Part I discuss the making of world history as a field, on the one hand, and of world historians to populate it, on the other. These chapters sketch the techniques and methodsthrough which historians are currently trained to think about the globe – from practicalities of program and course design, to research methods and fieldwork, to the intellectual questions of how to define basic categories and conceive an audience for teaching and scholarship. This section orients readers new to the field by providing a historical backdrop – the emergence of world and global history as a professional domain, the politics and institutional stakes of undertaking world-historic study, and even a personal story of the odyssey of becoming a world historian. As many have found, it is not an easy field to enter, so the professional trajectories that unfold are complicated. Several pieces deal thoughtfully with the critical voices of historians who have questioned the intellectual value, methodological practicalities, and epistemological implications of world history. These critics, like those already mentioned, make important points; it is unfair to brush them off as misinformed or narrow-minded pedants. Rather than taking a straightforwardly evangelical approach or simply lauding the value of global perspectives (as important as such perspectives may be), these chapters reflect on the trade-offs that come with any choice of method, concept, approach, or theory – world history included. One topic regrettably almost absent, with only an occasional glancing discussion, relates to the field’s own economics, especially with regard to textbooks – the pressures of markets on authors and publishing houses, editorial perceptions of books that will “sell” and are thus worth publishing, shifting practices of remuneration for authors, and how such factors shape (and constrain) the architectures of “the world” that will reach wide audiences.
Part II then delves in detail into the chief concepts, categories, and approaches that are employed today by world and global historians. What makes an essay (or book, or course syllabus, or museum exhibit) “world-historical” or “globally minded”? What are the benefits (and costs) of taking such a perspective? How has world and global history drawn upon – and questioned, challenged, destabilized – the categories of “traditional” history? Several chapters consider various frameworks in space and time – ranging from the universe as a whole down to localities and microhistory. World history, perhaps counterintuitively, does not only mean looking at “the globe,” as a whole, all at once; any number of other scales are also approachable in ways that are consonant with the field’s guiding concerns. Other chapters then consider comparative approaches, in which particular themes are taken up and seen afresh in global context. Finally, several chapters cover key aspects of connective world history – tracing how historians follow objects, people, and ideas around the globe, and what they can learn by doing so. Each of these general approaches – framing, comparing, connecting – suggests principal modes that world historians have adopted, and how they might answer critics who say the field lacks firm sources, clear methods, recognizable fieldsites, defined historiographies, and/or coherent theoretical frameworks.
Of course, many other topics could have been included: sports and leisure, technology, etc. Yet just as world historians do not purport to offer encyclopedic coverage of everything that ever happened, this Companion does not set out to survey the field exhaustively – merely to sketch its major approaches. A planned chapter on “identity” did not materialize, to take one example, so readers do not hear separately about identity categories such as race, gender, and class. The existing chapters nevertheless provide tools to reflect on these, and many other, themes. Race, class, and gender are key concepts historians use to think about the past, and they have been used productively in many time periods and cultural contexts; but strikingly, they have not yet played a prominent role in the writing of world and global history. This may be changing: some scholars have proposed rewriting world history through a lens of gender, for example, such as Strasser and Tinsman (2010) or Wiesner-Hanks (2007). The potential promise is clear. Identity categories have both an abstract analytic power – offering a powerful way for scholars to interpret the world – and their own independent historical presence – as important ideas that appeared at particular times and places in the actually existing world, and served to organize social groups and movements. They grew, migrated, and had manifold effects; therefore they can be treated as historical subjects in their own right, producing their own discrete, globally dispersed, world histories. One could, for example, write a world history of apartheid and racial ideologies that interlocked South Africa, India, and Haiti; or of women’s suffrage, both globally and in specific places such as Japan, Turkey, and Brazil.
Clearly there are many kinds of world and global history, and the details will emerge as the chapters unfold. Just a few more words at the outset suffice to set the stage, and to point out a few additional questions readers may wish to keep in mind. What holds this enterprise together? How do world historians define what they do (apart from McNeill’s metaphors of lenses and traffic and trees)? Definitions obviously vary, but most efforts to synthesize the field include at least two key ideas. First is the importance of scale, especially the interconnecting of different scales. World historians, plainly, are best known for thinking big. They emphasize the bird’s-eye perspective, and are renowned for looking at (comparatively) vast distances and grand issues. They therefore ask questions, use methods, and seek sources that stretch across particular places or individual countries to encompass wider regions, and sometimes the whole globe. (Occasionally, as one chapter below shows, they even move beyond the Earth!) In temporal terms world historians likewise look across larger-than-customary stretches of time to find longer-term developments, comparisons, patterns, and connections. But this stretching – the overall expansion of time and space – is by itself not enough to define world or global history: the big picture is a necessary, but not sufficient, component. Most world historians would agree that it also requires a second key idea:mobility. The past is seen less as a collection of discrete stories (of particular places or peoples) than one fundamentally shaped by, and concerned with, the movements, relationships, and connections among them. Individual stories – whether of a single person, a town, a region, a country, even a continent – are therefore not seen in standalone terms. World history instead brings multiple stories together, comparing and/or connecting individuals and communities that are separated in space or time. From this point of view, any particular group can be seen in both relative (relational, comparative) and interactive (mutually constitutive, connective) terms. Any single story emerges and makes sense most fully only in wider contexts, both seen through ongoing processes of exchange, encounter, and relationship with people far away, and as part of systems much larger than any locality.
Institutionally and intellectually, therefore, world history at its heart denies the presumptively foundational character of the nation-state. This modern social form has frequently been assumed to be – or at least it has been unwittingly treated as – a self-evident, naturally fundamental framework for conceptualizing the human past. (Recall those disciplinary fields for historians, generally structured along national lines: American history, French history, Chinese history, and so on.) Area studies scholarship, based on the notion of coherent, separable world “regions,” has also, for the last half-century or so, played a related role in this “boxing” of historical knowledge. To be fair, scholarship focused on area and nation has created critical underpinnings for world history today, generating detailed knowledge of peoples and cultures all around the globe, including many not previously well studied by the powerful institutions of Euro-American academia. Yet both the area-studies enterprise and national historiographies start by reifying a unit for study, generally treating it as a more or less self-contained, sometimes almost hermetic box. World history, at its core, posits instead the need to put areal – or national – literatures into connection with one another, to resist institutionally instantiated assertions of specialized “turf” and “expertise” that are built into professional academic discourse. World historians start by adopting very different scalar approaches in space and time. National and regional stories are present, certainly, but are not always presumed to drive the whole.5
For this reason, world historians do not see the simple expansion of scale – including to the globe as a whole – as the only story worth telling. Instead, cross-regional, cross-temporal, and global points of view are essential, often overlooked, perspectives; but they are only one (or two) of the levels of analysis to be included. Grand perspectives give new meaning to national (and local) developments, and cross-regional or global developments shape local-to-national stories; but wider narratives also arise from smaller-scaled histories. The basic idea is that none of these histories, at whatever level, exists in isolation. All have been shaped by different scalar layers and by distant places, actors, ideas, and histories. Many world historians are interested in how these scales interact – how trajectories, patterns, actors, and contingencies are inescapably part of a vast interlocking interscalar system of space and time. All the levels work together, and each lends structure and composition to others. The relative weight of any particular spatial or temporal scale will shift depending on the questions being asked, but world history requires constant mobility: regularly shifting the lens to move viewers ever upward and ever downward. A world-historical approach thus means always asking what is happening on different levels, and how these levels are shaping one another – tracing interscalar loops of connection and causation. Some world historians, more controversially, then go beyond these scalar interactions to compare layers of scale. This happens most visibly in the subfield of Big History, which identifies commensurable patterns across vastly disparate spatial scales, ranging from subatomic particles to intergalactic space. Such a view – drawing its evidence from physics, biology, and other nonhistorical fields via concepts of complexity and energy utilization – is not universally held by world historians, but it suggests the breadth of new perspectives that can be brought out by expanding notions of scale.
World history thus holds that the customary, basic units of disciplinary history are too rigid. As a field it aims to overcome the mutually reinforcing, too often invisible, institutional and intellectual boundaries that constrain historical work. Many of these boundaries are likewise effects of modern states and their politico-cultural projections; they include complicated feedback loops of educational systems (in which national “fields” define the reading lists history students must master, and impel the creation of yet more nationally framed dissertations and books), professional training and advancement (job searches, tenure evaluations, and monographic publication are similarly aligned to certify standing in these fields), institutional locations and financial resources (research is often pursued in national archives, published in nationally or regionally framed journals, and taught in curricula that specialize along national/regional lines). Even language skills – scholars’ foundational tool, crucial for access to history’s raw materials – are framed by modern national states and their definitions of vernacular/political culture. (Consider the relative paucity of work on, say, modern Kurdish or Uyghur history.) Historians can be as blind as anyone else to the unspoken, mutually reinforcing elements that predefine a professional world. Taken as a whole, though, these elements make it harder to pursue, even to see, cross-cutting issues and boundary-transgressing questions, much less to investigate histories of, say, humanity as a whole. World history is therefore more radical, in an institutional-intellectual sense, than it may first appear. It asks: What would change if students started not by mastering a national field (or two), but by looking across borders – to topics being investigated in other archives and parts of the world, and asking how they compare, how they could be connected, how they may be similar or divergent responses to shared conditions? If Homo sapiens sapiens is a discrete subspecies – if modern humans are an identifiable entity in Earth’s biosphere – must not humanity also have a meaningfully collective history?
How could one study such a history? What role could individual women or men possibly play in it – would it not wind up vast and faceless, reduced to statistics and abstract structures, full of general “trends” such as demographics, urbanization, or technology? How can one identify meaningful turning points at global scale, divide time into “periods,” or preserve a role for human culture or individual agency? When historians reach into different disciplines (if, for example, they use evolutionary biology to place humans alongside primates as part of a deeper history of life, as in Morris 2010), is it possible to avoid biological determinism and retain a sense of historical contingency? Or is world history hopelessly presentist, impelled by issues such as global warming and the internet, inclined to see all prior eras in the light of – as inexorably leading up to – present-day “globalization”? Is it anachronistic to rethink ancient pasts through modern paradigms such as globalization and “connectivity,” as some archaeologists (LaBianca and Scham 2006) have started to do? And in practical terms, how could one possibly know enough about developments everywhere in the world – during any period – to speak broadly about a “globe”? Can primary documents ever really underpin such work, or must it always be a synthesis of others’ scholarship – and thus is it inevitably to be deemed less serious, or superficial, by self-respecting professional historians? Or, on the other hand, do world historians need to work collaboratively, writing in teams? If so, how can such practices fit into scholarly arenas predicated on single-author, monographic scholarship as the chief currency for promotion and status? Or into pedagogical realms where team teaching may not fit, if every faculty member must teach a certain number of courses, or meet with students for a fixed number of “contact hours”?
On a theoretical level, at least some of these questions are answerable. Scholars of subaltern studies have long since shown that historians can read state-produced, nationally framed records in ways that go “against the grain” of what they seem to discuss. Years ago, too, the Annales school treated history in vast time depths and stretched far across national borders. And how, after all, could any historian of seventeenth-century Russia, or Meiji Japan, or modern South Asia – after long years of training, even a lifetime of scholarship – possibly know every province, each individual village, much less every family or person living in his or her area of specialty? Is such encyclopedic preparation really necessary before a historian hazards to speak about “Russian” (or “Japanese,” or “South Asian”) social history? Professional norms do not – cannot – require such exhaustion. Historians are expected to abstract general, defensible conclusions from particular shreds of evidence, and to speak judiciously and knowledgeably about them. These practices customarily happen at scales ranging up to the national/regional; such conclusions are seen, by professional consensus, as perfectly plausible. It makes sense to talk about “Brazilian” history, notwithstanding the vast differences between Rio’s urban favelasand the “uncontacted tribes” of the Amazon’s far-western Vale do Javari. In temporal terms, too, a historian of France is unlikely to know equally well the diplomatic story of the Maastricht Treaty of 1993 and the details of Charlemagne’s eighth-century interactions with Rome. Given the limits of any individual’s knowledge, interest, and training, she or he would read and rely on secondary scholarship – without going back to check every primary document – if called upon to write a class lecture, compose a textbook, or speak with a local reporter who calls asking for a historical perspective.
Research or teaching at a global scale involves processes that are, in principle, the same. Yet practically speaking, especially given the way most historians are trained, this particular scalar expansion – to a global level – produces qualitatively new challenges. Where does one go to investigate “humanity,” or to ask world-level historical questions? What archives should a scholar use, what questions would she or he ask? Must world history dissertations require PhD students to use texts in many different languages, held in different archival repositories, and must they be treated independently of existing historiographical questions? If so, how can students possibly be trained? How many cases must they include in a world-historical study – and whatever the number, why not more? In the face of practical limits on any one person’s time and mental capacity, is it permissible to rely at least sometimes on secondary literature for evidence, rather than insisting that all scholarship be based on a personally generated foundation of primary documents? How can one design survey classes, or thematic seminars, that will teach students (whether at an elementary, secondary, university, or graduate level) about a “world”? What about the inevitable counterexamples, which multiply endlessly in the face of any general global assertion? (As if one could not find counterexamples to generalizations about Meiji Japan, or Muscovite Russia.)
Moreover, if world history concentrates on particular themes and approaches – as the following chapters show, world historians emphasize ideas such as nodes, systems, interconnections and “thick” networks – what about people or areas not visible or present in these framings? Who gains, and who disappears, when history is reconceived globally? What about groups living far from demographic, political, economic, or cultural “centers” – such as people scattered across millions of square miles of Pacific Oceania, or nomads who appear in written sources only when they invade settled areas? Do they not matter? Or those with poorly known histories – consider the lack of written sources in precolonial North America, or the few non-epigraphical texts that survived the tropics of Southeast Asia before ca. 1400 CE. Such places are already relegated to the margins of existing historical fields. Panama is ignored by most Latin Americanists; Uzbekistan was long judged obscure by Moscow-focused Soviet historians. Such places tend to generate only small, specialized historiographies. But without much secondary scholarship, are they consigned again to be forgotten by world historians, left out of globally scaled metanarratives? Will tomorrow’s world historians even be aware of the holes produced by uneven preexisting historiographical developments? Is it up to specialized scholars to show that global metanarratives are inevitably flawed through such exclusions? Is it intellectually defensible to leave such problems to the fullness of time, hoping that the vagaries of field coverage will somehow, someday, self-correct?
These are just some of the daunting questions asked by skeptics and objections lodged by critics. Readers should keep all the hurdles in mind while reading the essays that follow. They chronicle various methods, concepts, and theories world historians have used; they navigate contending schools of thought, point to different bodies of sources, and sketch some of the answers given to critics. Inevitably, some approaches will appeal more than others; every reader will reach his or her individual conclusions.
Throughout the journey, too, consider one last issue: falsifiability. This concern is less often vocalized, but it nonetheless needs attention. How, in short, do we know good world history when we see it – and concomitantly, what does bad world history look like? Specialists, after all, must be able to tell the difference, and in broad terms to agree which is which; and students must learn to do so. For good reasons, few chapters in this book frontally address this question. Each essay sets out to show the methods, reach, and potential of a particular approach, not to show how it itself can be called into question; and given strict word limits, there was little space to offer examples of bad work. Few authors wished to do so, in any case, and such an endeavor can quickly prove tiresome. But falsifiability is nevertheless a key question readers need to ask. Ask it of any book these chapters cite, or any article in, say, the Journal of World History. Perhaps especially in large-scalar approaches – given the vast distance between individuals (who feature in many historical documents) and interregional analysis – how would one query or contradict the results? National and regional historians debate this question too: arguing about when particular evidence that runs contrary can be discounted as “noise,” isolated flotsam not undercutting an interpretation, or when it is a substantive counterexample that necessitates more sweeping reconsideration. At global scale, is it possible to imagine generalizable norms of evidence that have sufficient power to serve as disconfirmation, or that cast serious doubts on an interpretation? Without it, world histories will simply proliferate, with few visible means of demonstrating quality, rigor, or depth.
The challenges of world history, then, run inward as well as outward. As the field comes into its own, enjoying unprecedented scholarly visibility and increased public interest, with new resources and rapid growth fueled by the contexts of twenty-first century globalization, it nevertheless faces old pitfalls and continuing conundrums. Some problems are methodological or theoretical, others institutional and practical. Taken together, the problems explain why some world historians express pessimism about the field’s chances of achieving full disciplinary standing (Manning 2003; 2008). Yet given the same rapid expansion, alongside the sweeping intellectual claims that connect with many powerful constituencies, other voices express more optimism about world history’s future (Bentley 2007). Indeed the field’s coming of age and surge into prominence is enabled by its posing of such challenges – theoretical and practical – to the existing frameworks of disciplinary history. The possible payoffs, as well as the deep pitfalls, are clear.
By pursuing more flexible and wider perspectives – stressing cross-regional and cross-border approaches, big-picture views, and global-to-local analysis of systems, structures, and interactions – world history sets out to map a globe, many globes, both past and present. It avoids relying on static units, whether “nations” or “civilizations,” as a foundational way to approach the human past – not ignoring them, but incorporating them with an eye to their historicity. Beyond that, in globalizing itself as a field, and incorporating a newly expanded range of views about what history can be, world history promises no less than to offer fresh insights into the human condition. World history thus stakes a very grand claim of its own: to illumine humanity’s history. That is what its converts proclaim. Its critics are not convinced this is possible. The stakes are high, the field yet in formation, and the challenges clear and daunting. How to address them, and where world history goes from here, is what readers will see in the pages that follow.
Notes
1 Overviews include Manning (2003); Bentley (1996; 2006); Dunn (2000); Stearns (2011).
2 Quotations in these two paragraphs are from McNeill (1982: 82–84). Scholars in other disciplines use similar metaphors to defend big-picture, macro perspectives. David Damrosch (2003: 4) justifies the study of world literature, for instance, by noting that no one denies entomologists a category of “insects,” even though millions of species exist: so many that it would be impossible to be bitten by even a tiny fraction of them.
3 The principal voices are Lal (2003; 2005), Nandy (1998), and Dirlik (2002; 2003); others who have intervened include Feierman (1993) and Prazniak (2000). For a fuller discussion of these critiques and debates, see Sutherland (2007).
4 See Manning (2008), or the Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO), at www.uni-leipzig.de/~gwhisto (accessed Mar. 2012). Antoinette Burton has noted the dominance of North American-based theory, but also the limits of this critique. Many prominent scholarly voices, she points out, such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, or Homi Bhabha, have “at best an angular relationship to American politics and culture” (2003: 12–13).
5 Environmental historians – who also define subjects that spill beyond, or are irrelevant to, human political units – have much in common, as do some kinds of transnational and comparative history. Comparative approaches, though, may still presuppose national units as the basis for comparison; and international history – as in diplomatic histories – can easily slip into a framework of state-level actors and their interactions. Even some “transnational” approaches ironically place national states at a foundational level, as discussed by Bayly et al. (2006). Hence there have been calls for a different approach, such as Dirlik’s (2005) pursuit of “translocal” (rather than transnational) history.
References
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