MICHAEL ADAS
Roughly two generations of comparative research and scholarship ago, in his preface to a collection of essays on The Comparative Approach to American History, C. Vann Woodward pronounced “historical comparison … notoriously dangerous and misleading” (1968: x). Clearly at cross-purposes with the efforts of the distinguished colleagues who had contributed to the edited volume and the apparent intent of the essays he was introducing, Woodward concluded that “historians as a rule are reluctant to make them.” He did go on to concede, with a sense of resignation, that since comparisons – for reasons that were unclear given their problematical nature – were inevitably going to be made, “it would seem best that they be handled by expert historians.” In effect dismissing decades of important theoretical and historical contributions by comparativists in other social science disciplines, he pronounced historians the “best qualified to point out the fallacies of comparisons, to distinguish between comparisons that are misleading and those that are illuminating, to warn against strained and unsophisticated experiments of the sort, and to call attention to new opportunities for fruitful comparative studies” (1968: x).
In his introduction and his concluding remarks, Woodward does not even attempt to define what comparative history might be or delineate the distinctive research and writing strategies the comparative approach entails. Nor does he have anything to say about the comparative methods deployed by the authors of the essays he seeks to frame. But that collective included some of the most distinguished historians of the time, among them Peter Gay, David Brion Davis, John Hope Franklin, and Arno Mayer. And they provided highly suggestive forays into subfields as diverse as slavery and revolution, urbanization and the Cold War, that presaged the emergence of the comparative approach as a major force in the historical profession in the 1970s and 1980s. This trend was clearly discerned by Raymond Grew (1980) just over a decade after the publication of Woodward’s edited volume. Drawing on his remarkably wide-ranging mastery of contemporary historical scholarship and his stewardship of Comparative Studies in Society and History, Grew suggested a number of the ways in which comparative analysis had reshaped historical inquiry in both the United States and Europe in fields as disparate as demography and literary expression.1 Though he argued that no explicit or agreed upon method for doing comparative history had as yet emerged, he observed that many approaches had developed in ways that significantly enhanced the level of analysis and sophistication of theorizing in the discipline and cognate fields.
It is noteworthy that these and other early exchanges on the uses of comparison in historical enquiry rarely linked it to world or global history, which paralleled the comparative approach as a growing force in the discipline in these same decades. William McNeill’s widely read Rise of the West, which was first published in 1963, began a sustained effort to recover the level of respectability that world history had not enjoyed within the transnational scholarly community since the time of Voltaire and Montesquieu. (See Pomeranz and Segal, this volume.) The enthusiastic reception of McNeill’s path-breaking work and his Plagues and Peoples (1976), which followed just over a decade later, also served to reinstate the grand narrative as the predominant mode of doing world history. Although McNeill and other early advocates of the macronarrative were not purposeful, systematic practitioners of the comparative approach, their sweeping surveys of different aspects of the human experience shared an emphasis on patterns of interaction among civilizations and empires, nomadic and sedentary societies, and across culture zones and continents. But then, as now, world historians of the grand narrative persuasion diverged from those who identified themselves as comparativists in significant ways. The former were committed to tracing key themes and processes in a broad global perspective; the latter were intent on the rigorous application of a method of historical analysis that had long been nurtured mainly by fellow travelers in other social science disciplines. Although the two approaches have converged frequently over the past two or three decades – usually in works that have come to be labeled world history – practitioners in neither camp have given explicit attention to the differences between them. Consequently, there has been a dearth of dialogue devoted to explicating the ways in which the conscious cultivation and thorough incorporation of aspects of each of these options might enhance the work of scholars, teachers, and public intellectuals striving to improve our understandings of the cross-cultural interactions and transregional exchanges that are defining dimensions of both.
In this chapter, I explore key similarities and differences (with emphasis on the latter) between the two approaches and address the ways in which I believe comparative analysis can (and often does) add depth, focus and analytical rigor to our thinking about and writing world history in its various guises. Some of my arguments, and indeed many of the issues that I foreground, were first articulated nearly a century ago by Marc Bloch in a brilliant, seminal paper called “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” presented in 1928 at the Sixth Annual Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo (see Bloch 1969: 44–81). Reprinted in a number of languages, sometimes cited but seldom extensively invoked in rare discussions of methodology among world historians or in individual works on global themes, Bloch’s exposition of the uses of comparison for historical scholarship tackles many of the challenges and obstacles that its practitioners have invariably had to grapple with. Often implicitly, he also provides credible rejoinders to the critiques or outright dismissals, such as those epitomized by C. Vann Woodward’s introduction, that have been leveled for decades against both comparative and world history by more specialized, area studies-oriented researchers and scholars. Although the issues that I raise here go beyond and are at times at odds with aspects of the case for comparison made by Bloch, most of his interventions have stood the test of time remarkably well and remain in my view the obligatory starting point for anyone embarking on the serious study of history in either its comparative or global modes, or ideally any combination of the two.
In arguing his case for the advantages of in-depth comparative analysis, Bloch returns again and again to issues related to selection, perhaps the most fundamental dimension of the generic methodology that all professional historians are expected to master. From the cases that the comparativist seeks to probe in depth and decisions pertaining to evidence that will make this possible to the categories of analysis and different levels of variables deployed, the historian must make choices that will determine the extent to which her or his efforts at cross-cultural explanation will be credible and relevant for both world historians and theoretically minded scholars in a variety of social science disciplines. Once the comparativist has decided which cross-cultural themes, recurring patterns, global processes or theoretical propositions merit extended study, she or he must determine which case study examples are best suited to answer the questions likely to be posed. As Bloch insisted, several criteria need to be brought into play in determining which case histories will best test the causal arguments and overall hypotheses that he viewed as essential outcomes of fruitful comparison. To begin with, he assumed that extensive reliance on archival sources was obligatory, and consequently stressed the importance of at least a reading proficiency in languages appropriate for the societies, periods, and issues to be explored. Bloch advocated a mastery of both the published primary and archival sources for each of the case examples that approached monographic thoroughness. For comparison at this level to be feasible, Bloch concluded that the societies selected for case study examples ought to share significant historical connections, ranging from linguistic, institutional, epistemological and other cultural commonalities to ongoing interaction and exchanges over extended periods of time.
For some comparative and most world historians Bloch’s prescriptions regarding case selection have proved problematic. In fact the demands they entail may explain why his pronouncements have been neglected. A book-length study with even two or three cases based on the depth of monographic mastery that Bloch had in mind could occupy the better part of a productive scholar’s career. It is also likely that the case studies would not only come to make up the better part of the comparative study that resulted but possibly constrict the attention given to developing the themes, arguments and theoretical insights that transcend them. In actual practice even the best of comparative and world historians have tended to rely on a mix of archival, published primary and secondary sources in developing their case studies (for recent examples, see Lieberman 2003; 2009; Ward 2009; Hecht 2012). This approach has been especially fruitful for researchers working in the subfields of colonial expansionism, commercial diasporas, and slavery in which there are accessible, often abundant and well-cared-for archival repositories that make it possible to explore the convergence of multiple colonizers, diasporas and indigenous peoples (White 1983; 1991; Curtin 1984; Benton 2002; Schwartz 2008). Those who begin as area specialists producing closely argued monographic works have also productively and provocatively tackled major issues and controversies in cross-cultural and world historiography through a comparison of a core case example – based heavily on archival and published primary sources in their primary area(s) of expertise – and mainly secondary sources on one or more cases focused on other regions (Pomeranz 2000; Fredrickson 2002). At an even more ambitious level of argument, a number of the most widely read books in world history have resulted from cross-disciplinary combinations of decades of anthropological fieldwork in specific locales supplemented by secondary works ranging across diverse geographical and temporal settings (Wolf 1982; Diamond 1997).
Perhaps intentionally, Bloch had little to say about secondary sources beyond setting up a number of specialist monographs on French medieval history as foils for his demonstration of the ways in which comparison could expose false analogies, most notably the development of enclosures in France that resembled those in England. But secondary works have been central, hence critical, to almost all comparative and world history. For those undertaking either approach to cross-cultural analysis, broad surveys of relevant published works are essential for the task of determining which cases will provide the fullest and most appropriate evidence for exploring recurring or diverging patterns and causal connections. Coverage of the relevant secondary source literature can also uncover supplemental case examples for testing specific aspects of a comparativist’s broader arguments, as well as counter examples that often complicate his or her interpretations in revealing ways. Extensive coverage of monographic studies and the theoretical literature available on the phenomena to be compared make it possible for the historian to formulate working arguments or hypotheses and an overall conceptual framework that can be tested and reworked in line with the evidence provided by archival and published primary documents. Bloch’s confidence that the archives themselves would reveal the questions that needed to be posed is clearly at odds with the way that most historians work. As William Sewell has insisted (1967: 218), primary sources cannot “supply us with the explanations to be subjected to test: this is the task for the historical imagination.” Perhaps more than monographic or narrative historians, comparativists need to enter the archives with at the very least tentative assumptions, questions to be asked, problems to be resolved and preliminary interpretations in order to select and make sense of the evidence to be examined.
With regard to both the questions they pose and the interpretations they advance, John Goldthorpe (1991) has argued that for historical sociologists, particularly those who undertake comparative analysis, a heavy reliance on secondary sources has been highly problematic. Without using primary documents, he contends, sociologists attempting to study historical phenomena are capable of only what he terms a “second order of interpretation.” This means that their analysis and conclusions have been limited or skewed by the fact that they have not made use of written materials and other “relics” produced by actors and observers contemporaneous with the ideas and events they sought to analyze. Most crucially, in Goldthorpe’s view, comparativists (as well as world historians of the grand narrative persuasion, whom he does not explicitly address) have been forced to “pick and choose” from the arguments and findings of other historians and rely on their interpretations of the extant primary sources, or at least the ones they have actually examined. Because broadly applicable causal explanations and theorizing have been central preoccupations of those who pursue comparative analysis, they have also been likely to privilege interpretations drawn from secondary works that buttress their own theoretical predilections and line of argument.
Barrington Moore Jr’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) provides one of the more striking illustrations (though not one discussed by Goldthorpe) of this dubious outcome. In one of the most read and debated early comparative works, which was based on case examples focused on such extensively studied social upheavals as the English and French revolutions, Moore relied heavily on historians who stressed class divisions and material conditions that had long been seen by writers of the Marxist persuasion as critical causal factors behind social conflict. This reliance skewed Moore’s handling of his case examples, and in turn his larger comparative framework and conclusions, in important ways. But, as Joseph Bryant pointed out in his nuanced rejoinder to Goldthorpe’s very contentious essay (Bryant 1994), ample alternative interpretations were readily available in the published works of non-Marxist historians. Thus, a comparativist or grand narrativist, such as Moore, can evaluate the evidence, arguments, and overall interpretations advanced in secondary works by advocates of differing theoretical persuasions and political proclivities, and fashion on that basis a less reductive, ideologically driven and narrowly conceived interpretation of comparative or global events and processes. Choices among well-researched and argued alternative interpretations are, of course, sometimes not available to historians drawing on case examples from areas, such as central Africa or Oceania, that have not received as much attention as France or China and do not have comparable historiographical traditions. In these cases greater reliance on primary source materials – often including oral testimony – becomes all the more imperative.2 Thus, although levels of immersion may vary, the informed sampling of key primary sources (usually identified through extensive reading of the secondary literature) also enables comparativists not only to analyze more perceptively the periods and peoples under consideration, it allows them to choose among the relevant secondary works that usually – and necessarily – constitute the main evidence used in developing the case examples that undergird their thematic and theoretical arguments.
In addition to questions arising from Bloch’s stress on the necessity of grounding comparative history in primary sources, his arguments for the importance of selecting case studies drawn from societies that share common origins and mutual interaction over extensive spans of time have proved contentious and perhaps daunting for those considering comparative options. In responding to the constraints Bloch’s case study prescriptions would impose in this regard, William Sewell takes an extreme opposite view. He argues that the most productive comparisons are more likely to result from case examples drawn from societies which are geographically and historically distant from each other; for example tracing the rise of industrialization or right-wing political movements in Germany and Japan. But even a cursory survey of the more influential works published in recent decades in which the comparative method has been systematically applied to world history in a sustained manner suggests that insistence on either polar option is problematic in a number of ways. Comparisons of case examples that are linked in time and space, such as slave plantation societies in different Caribbean islands and mainland South America (Klein 1986; Blackburn 1997), women’s work (Tilly and Scott 1989), labor in Latin America (Collier and Collier 1991), and nationalism in France and Germany (Brubaker 1992) have been very revealing. Equally transformative of the issues and approaches emerging in key historical subfields have been comparisons of institutions, including slavery and serfdom (Kolchin 1987), empires and colonization (Lang 1975; Doyle 1986; Abernathy 2000; Burbank and Cooper 2010), and settler societies (Solberg 1987; Weaver 2003), that develop in very different locales, largely independent of each other, and decades (and in some cases centuries) apart.
Although in terms of languages required and the accessibility of archival sources, research involving related cases may prove less time-consuming and arduous, the corpus of comparative historical works over the past half-century provides plenty of evidence indicating that the criteria for effective case selection have less to do with distance in time and space than with the questions the comparativist seeks to answer; the comparability of the kinds of social systems, institutions, movements, ideas or processes she or he seeks to analyze; and the availability of comparable evidence across cases. Depending, for example, on whether the historian is attempting to compare or contrast whole social systems or key elements within them, the broader phase or stage of development that potential case examples exemplify becomes a crucial factor in selection. Thus, Eugene Genovese’s (1969) caution that in evaluating different slave-plantation systems it is essential to select case examples that exhibit comparable institutions, technologies, and commercial linkages, rather than the chronology of their rise and decline, is well taken if one seeks to explore the key commonalities of one type or phase. But comparisons stressing the differences between plantation societies in different phases of the South Atlantic System have been equally effective and more revealing of the forces behind shifts in this (regrettably) defining mode of early modern production for export over time.
The number and ordering of core case studies in works focusing on cross-cultural comparisons or global themes have also varied considerably. Though four or five fully developed cases have tended to be the upper limit, Victor Lieberman’s magisterial, two-volume Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context (2003; 2009) spans at least eight distinct culture areas (depending on how one counts), and Theda Skocpol’s highly influential States and Social Revolutions (1979) compares and contrasts six. The predominant ordering of core cases has been to treat each of them in distinct chapters or sections, and then draw together broader patterns from each in conclusions that trace similarities and differences among them. Some comparativists and world historians have also endeavored to identify and set out what Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers (1980) have aptly designated “middle level generalizations” (Wolf 1969; Goldstone 1991; Scott 1998). More challenging, but equally engaging and innovative in conveying patterns of cross-cultural interaction, have been comparative works that get at larger themes and processes by exploring converging cultures (White 1991) or mixing case study discussions within chapters defined by broader themes and key aspects of the general phenomena being explored (Degler 1971; Skocpol 1979; Adas 1979; Kolchin 1987; Fredrickson 1981; 1995).
However many cases are deployed and whatever ordering is adopted, all comparative historians are compelled, either implicitly or explicitly, to deal with the problem of “the nth case” that has bedeviled generations of practitioners in the other social sciences. Because there are clear limits to the number of case studies that can be compared in depth in a given study, the author and his or her audience are left to ponder whether and why possible alternative case examples have been missed or excluded. The sometimes highly contested answers to these questions often center on objections that core case studies have been deliberately chosen because they buttress an author’s general hypotheses or line of argument, or, conversely, have been left out because much of what they reveal would run counter to the causal explanations and broader patterns he or she is attempting to introduce into scholarly discourse. At times, the more scrupulous of comparativists have published follow-up essays that set out categories of analysis and causal explanations that diverge significantly from their earlier work. Among the boldest and more revealing of these was Theda Skocpol’s article (1982) on the Iranian revolution of 1978–1979, which stresses factors, such as human agency, ideology, and contingency, that have little place in her meticulously detailed States and Social Revolutions, which had done so much to shape scholarly discussion on the causes and course of revolutions for over a decade. There is no compelling remedy for this potential downside of the comparative approach, but careful and open-minded case selection based on a mastery of the relevant literature across disciplines and the deliberate selection of contrary or problematic core examples can at least mitigate the objections that evidence drawn from nth cases may summon.
As with any approach to analysis, the comparative method has yielded distinct advantages for its skilled practitioners while limiting possibilities that might have been better facilitated if they had pursued alternative options. In the realms of cross-cultural and world history, the grand narrative has proved to be the main contender in that regard. Among the more apparent pluses of the macronarrative is the fact that it allows the historian to tackle far greater swaths of time and space than comparativists – or at least those who build their studies on deeply contextualized case examples. Some of the more successful of the grand narratives encompass whole social systems and diverse aspects of the human experience across millennia (Pacey 1990; Bentley 1993; Allsen 2001), while others confine their temporal coverage of comparably diverse human endeavors while ranging across even more variable geographic locales and social systems (Bayly 2004; Darwin 2007). In both approaches, the case examples deployed and issues considered tend to shift in kaleidoscopic fashion, but in the best of the works of this genre this means that general patterns (both similar and contrasting), “big” questions and credible answers, and often underlying principles of historical development are foregrounded. The relative paucity of explicit methodological interventions and strictures with regard to coverage means that the possibilities that the grand narrative approach offers for fast-paced, compelling overviews of historical processes, replete with dramatic flourishes, usually far exceed those available to the fully committed comparativist. The broader scope and bolder claims of the macronarrativist also contribute to the likelihood that their works will reach a larger audience, and very often one that extends beyond the historical profession and academe more generally. (See Witz, this volume.)
These and other, very considerable, merits of the grand narrative approach to world history need to be weighed against those garnered by the rigorous and deeply contextualized application of the comparative method to cross-cultural analysis and (necessarily) more narrowly construed swaths of global history. The emphasis placed by the comparativist on systematic and sustained exploration of a more modest number of case examples sacrifices the broader scope of the macronarrativist for more detailed attention to the complexities, contradictions and vagaries that arise from a more thorough mastery of the secondary and monographic literature in relevant specialist subfields and inevitably more extensive, but variable, reliance on primary and archival sources. The firmer command of a much broader source base for fewer case studies not only makes, as we have seen, for a surer handling of pivotal interpretive choices and ongoing debates within specialized fields, it forces the comparativist to grapple with the extent to which causal connections and conclusions based on a more superficial level of case study exploration need to be tested and perhaps modified in major ways. As Bloch found nearly a century ago with regard to attempts to lump agrarian enclosures in England and France (Bloch 1969: 49–51), in-depth comparisons may well reveal that rather different processes and outcomes are at work despite seeming similarities and historical connections across the societies and cultures being compared. They have the added advantage of deterring cross-cultural or world historians from building comparisons on the basis of categories of analysis and theoretical assumptions prompted by their field(s) of expertise, which is very likely to skew the reading of evidence drawn from other culture areas and sociopolitical contexts. Deep immersion in diverse and multiple cases is also perhaps the best antidote to Eurocentrism and other modes of privileging that have proved highly contentious for world historians.
Sustained comparisons among well-developed core cases also enhance the historian’s capacity to recognize and avoid the pitfalls that very often punctuate the sweeping surveys and bold forays into generalized speculation that typify grand narratives. At the most basic level, they make it very unlikely that historians committed to cross-cultural analysis will opt for what Skocpol and Somers (1980) have labeled the Parallel Demonstration approach. Driven by the determination to support an a priori hypothesis or model, those who adopt this approach seek to identify and deploy as many case examples as possible. Hence, selection of case examples and sources is subordinated to the theoretical arguments or thematic patterns the author wishes to advance, and these in turn are often determined by the area expertise or extended fieldwork drawn upon for their core – and most detailed – comparisons. At its worst this approach can result in a proliferation of shallowly researched case examples that show little awareness of debates and differing interpretations in the secondary literature. It may also diminish an author’s inclination to grapple with evidence that complicates or contradicts the main line of argument, and thus reduce the possibility of refinements or major revisions. Closer examination of works based on parallel demonstration also reveals that in many – if not a majority – of studies in this mode rather different categories of analysis would be more appropriate than those stressed by the author in question. It also becomes clear that seemingly similar causal connections work very differently – or in fact apply less well or not at all to some or even a majority of cases – than the author assumes. Consequently, the outcomes identified are disarmingly far more variable and contrary than the model or patterns that the comparison is intended to demonstrate would lead one to conclude (Worsley 1968; Paige 1975; Diamond 1997).
In-depth contextualization can also obviate problematic interpretive moves that are common not only to grand narrativists and comparativists but to historians more generally. If taken seriously, it could rid the discipline of what Carl Degler identified decades ago as “one-shot brief analogies” (1968) that crop up even in the most narrowly conceived monographic studies. Though often made with laudable intent of suggesting the broader applicability of single case findings, these asides are invariably simplistic and misleading. At the other end of the interpretive spectrum, well-developed case studies can serve to caution against explicating general patterns or causes in ways that suggest an underlying teleology that drives history. Though Jerry Bentley is right, for example, to argue for the need for world historians to analyze “big” processes, such as demographic fluctuations and the impact of technological innovation, that have been central to the human experience from its inception (2003), his approach suggests a progressive, evolutionary vision of history that has very often been called into question by the devastating reverses or destructive potential that, for example, technological innovation or rapid population growth has engendered.
This caution would also apply to the reductionism that is often found in works with world history perspectives as well as those based on conscious and serious comparative inquiry. Though reductionism and reification facilitate advancing broad and provocative conclusions, and especially developing general hypotheses, they can make short work of the contradictions and messy complexities that complicate the work of all serious historians and often undo those with cross-cultural ambitions. As Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000), demonstrates, even the most rigorous and revealing of comparative works can raise major questions that arise from privileging selected events, kinds of causes and processes, or limiting the timespan that is brought into the account. His core assertion, that resources from the colonies and the accessibility of coal in Great Britain were the critical factors that explain (much of) Europe’s capacity after ca. 1800 to break the high-level equilibrium bind that he and others (Elvin 2008) have argued led to Europe’s surge and China’s stagnation, is only somewhat persuasive, even if one focuses narrowly on economic indices of growth and social well-being. But confining the question to just that constricted range of causal variables, as Joseph Bryant (2006) has argued the most cogently, raises a multitude of problems regarding the nature and fit of the statistical data available on both (but particularly the Chinese) sides of the comparison. Perhaps more critical, Pomeranz’s causal and temporal reductionism means that three centuries of European scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations before ca. 1800 that produced unprecedented transformations in areas of endeavor as diverse as weaponry and understandings of the natural world are not seriously taken into consideration. These advances, of course, contributed in major ways to the capacity for Western Europeans to acquire and exploit effectively the resources, including coal, of both the colonies and Europe itself, and they gave rise to societies in which growth was sustained and technological and scientific breakthroughs were systemic and proliferating. Hence, when contrasting cross-cultural social change of the pervasiveness and magnitude Pomeranz is trying to explain, it is imperative to take into account both diverse sectors and dimensions of the societies in question and the cumulative effects of change over a far longer durée than he envisions.
In-depth contextualization of a manageable number of core case studies allows the comparativist to make considerable use of the historicist techniques that Steven Greenblatt has so skillfully applied in his exploration of cross-cultural contacts and exchanges (1976; 1991). From recovering the meanings contemporaneous with earlier times of what appear to be familiar terms and expressions to understanding the significance of rituals, customs and everyday gestures, historicism depends to a significant degree on immersion in the languages, primary source materials and the sociocultural milieus in which cross-cultural history is enacted. Whether the comparativist or world historian is exploring interactions and exchanges associated with first or early contacts across cultures, or patterns of development within societies separated in time and space, it is also essential that serious attention is given to indigenous epistemologies, material artifacts, and the nuances of social differentiation, markers of status and conventions of command and deference. And without a strong grasp of the broader context in which these are formulated and deployed, they are very likely to be misinterpreted or passed over altogether.
Two rather different, but revealing, examples of missed signals in major comparative studies where case evidence is not fully contextualized, hence insufficiently historicized, underscore the importance of both. In analyzing the causes of the French Revolution, which serves as one of the core cases in States and Social Revolutions, Theda Skocpol makes quite extensive use of the ample published primary sources available. In surveying the agrarian disorders that contributed to the upheavals, she relies heavily on the cahiers de doléances, which are treated as first-hand compilations of peasant grievances (1979: 123–126). Further inquiry into the actual authorship of the information gathered in the cahiers, however, would have revealed that they were written by local notables and especially lawyers, and thus were as (or more) likely to reflect the views of landholders and professionals as those of the peasantry, which itself was divided into often quite distinct social strata. In a provocative essay on a very different form of social divisions, in this instance among European and Amerindian cultures in collision, Patricia Seed (1992) argues that European colonizers in the New World drew on distinctive ceremonies and different sorts of claims of possession in attempts to establish their authority over the indigenous peoples. Drawing on a command of European discourses, written in a number of languages, she seeks to establish the ideological underpinnings of these rituals and claims. But differing European perceptions and approaches to domination were also shaped by what they encountered in different areas of the Americas themselves. Whether land or people were paramount, for example, in the Europeans’ efforts to provide legitimacy for their various colonizing schemes was surely determined in part by the numbers and sociopolitical organization of the indigenous peoples encountered and the environment and natural resources of the areas the colonizers sought to rule and exploit.
The pronounced tendency for world history written (and taught) in the grand narrative manner to privilege aggregates – whether population and migration trends, trading indices and levels of economic productivity, or wartime casualties and occurrences of social protest – can be offset in comparative studies that are to varying degrees grounded in fully developed case studies that allow for inclusion of human agency, ideology and contingency. Each of these not only provides ways of linking the specific to the general, the local to the global, but by interjecting individual and group experiences, ideas and pivotal events they offer the possibility of combinations of narratives infused with analyses that prove as compelling in terms of style as, and potentially more cogent and memorable in argument than, macronarratives. They also greatly enhance the cross-cultural or world historians’ opportunities to recover the neglected or “lost” voices and agency of subaltern groups, especially those without written sources, which often become pawns to be manipulated, subjugated, and exploited, particularly in global history reified and abstracted by the structuralist, world-systems approach. Inga Clendinnen’s work, particularly her superb article on “Fierce and unnatural cruelty” (1991), which compares Spanish and Aztec approaches to warfare, religion, conquest, and empire building, provides a superb example of the ways in which a thorough grounding in often difficult sources and sensitivity to both sides of cross-cultural encounters can yield detailed, gripping and highly revelatory accounts of pivotal events and processes in world history (on similar approaches to these same encounters, see the recent works cited in Townsend 2003). Clendinnen’s essay is a remarkable tour de force that intersperses narrative of the maneuvers and combat from both sides’ perspectives with reflections on topics of relevance to world and comparative historians as diverse as the rationales undergirding human social hierarchies, the problems of the extant documents dealing with the siege, and the contrast between each side’s conceptions of warfare and its purposes.
Of all the many techniques the comparative method offers to advance our thinking, writing and teaching about world history, none are more critical than the analytical tools that it provides for causal analysis. The procedures involved in determining what Marc Bloch characterized as “real causes” (1969: 54) can infuse all approaches to cross-cultural history, including the grand narrative, with finely honed questions and clearly defined focus issues, as well as more coherently and rigorously developed explanatory hypotheses and conclusions. At the most basic level, comparison compels those who take it seriously to move well beyond mere description, which is the prevalent mode of most of the world history intended for popular consumption (Craton 1982; Watts 1997). Even more scholarly and indeed influential works, such as Janet Abu-Lughod’s overview of what she argues was the first world system (1989; 1993), would have been more cogent and compelling if the forces that gave rise to and shaped the nature of the different trading nodes and network segments, whose structures she meticulously details, had been compared and analyzed. In this case, an exploration of causal dynamics is of particular importance because it might well have bridged the disconnect between her descriptionof the trading networks, which occupies the greater part of her book and essays, and her concluding speculations about the decline of the first world system, which have little to do with what has gone before and are highly problematical.
Despite its positivistic assumptions and tone, Skocpol and Somers’ essay on the “The uses of comparative history in macrosociological inquiry” (1980) remains the best summary available of the ways in which comparison can discipline, refine and underscore causal explanation in cross-cultural history. Though Marc Bloch is mentioned, and his certitude that facts and scientific inquiry are central to historical investigation are mirrored in Skocpol and Somers’s critique of major approaches to comparative analysis, they build mainly on John Stuart Mill’s logics of comparison. Broad categories of analysis (for example, economic inequities or types of social movements) and specific causal factors are not distinguished, but both are key aspects of thorough comparative analysis. Either or both can also serve as constants or grounds that insure the comparability of the case studies selected and the quality and depth of the sources available for each of them. Thus, significant similarities are critical not only for establishing comparability of cases (that, in popular parlance, oranges are being compared with oranges, not oranges with apples), but they are in addition very often the main focus of cross-cultural histories that seek to set out or reformulate recurring patterns of, for example, first contacts, systems of slavery, or peasant protest movements; to define types of political or social systems; or (more ambitiously) to argue for what Skocpol and Somers refer to as “middle level generalizations” that apply to institutions, ideologies and social systems, or historical processes.
In each case, Eugene Genovese’s caution that the historian must be clear that the same outcome is being compared needs to be taken into account. Reflecting on decades of debate regarding the conditions endured by slaves in different New World plantation systems that had been initiated by Frank Tannenbaum’s Slaves and Citizens (1947), Genovese (1969) observed that most of those engaged in these at times acrimonious controversies paid little attention to critical terminological questions, such as what did treatment or exploitation mean. He argued (contentiously in the view of many later scholars) that the daily conditions of slaves in the United States may have been better than those of their counterparts in Brazil, but due to higher manumission rates the possibility of being released from enslavement during one’s lifetime in the latter system were higher.3 In his view this meant that key, but neglected, causal factors – including timing, positioning in the global arena, and whether the system in question was still importing or no longer importing large numbers of slaves – needed to be taken fully into account. In each instance, the importance of deeply contextualized case analysis is underscored.
Although similarities and parallel developments have been stressed in perhaps a majority of the works on cross-cultural and world history, contrasting case examples have also proved a very effective way to identify and analyze causal factors. If diverging causes and outcomes are the focus of comparison, then commonalities in broader sociocultural contexts or analytical categories become critical to the viability of the comparison. Whichever approach is stressed, and most comparative studies exhibit a mix of parallels and contrasts, the weight or importance of different causal variables ought to inform both writing strategies and overall arguments and conclusions. Here again in-depth contextualization provides checks against construing causal variables too narrowly or selecting them with an a priori theoretical agenda in mind.
The methodological refinements of the last few decades on the comparative procedures that Marc Bloch advocated so eloquently nearly a century ago make it possible to test dominant paradigms, general hypotheses, persisting patterns, causal arguments, and even what has become received wisdom for those writing monographs in specialized fields. All of these tasks, which Bloch insisted comparison could best facilitate, can now be tackled with a good deal more consistency and analytical cogency than he could have imagined. In varying combinations these phenomena have been central to global grand narratives and cross-cultural history, and thus it is fair to assume that both approaches to world history can be advanced in significant ways through the rigorous application of the amended approaches to comparative analysis that build on Bloch’s original formulations. This may well entail, particularly for the grand narrative, setting more modest parameters in terms of temporal and geographic scope. But it offers the possibility of significantly reducing the tendencies to excessive generalization, oversimplification, essentialism, and reification that area and subfield specialists often find so objectionable in macronarrative. In-depth case study comparisons could obviate the urge to clutter the historical narrative with clunky disquisitions on the proper comparative method and overly explicit and rigid frameworks of analysis. The conscious and sustained melding of the comparative method and the grand narrative ought to produce hybrids that enjoy short-term spikes in sales as well as a long shelf life, and become obligatory reading for historians across subfields and a broader, nonacademic audience. Because they are more likely to draw evidence and techniques from other social science and humanities disciplines, they are also more likely to shape scholarship in fields beyond history in pivotal ways that range from testing paradigms to challenging assumptions about the preconditions that gave rise to contemporary global processes. Even though perhaps most historians, and even many colleagues in these cognate disciplines, no longer share Bloch’s confidence regarding the “scientific” nature of the comparative method (1969: 75), it remains the most productive approach devised thus far for writing and teaching enduring global or cross-cultural history.
Notes
1 Grew’s disproportionate attention to studies of these two regions reflected the state of both world and comparative history at the time. These trends were exemplified by Barrington Moore Jr’s ambitious Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World(1966), which uses the United States, Britain and France as its core cases, and Theda Skocpol’s just-published States and Social Revolutions (1979) in which four of six main cases are European, and fit best within her conceptual framework.
2 For perhaps the most cogent reflections extant on these issues of central importance for the historical method, see Collingwood (1946).
3 As many authors of works on slavery have pointed out, manumission did not necessarily mean a better or longer life for the individual released from bondage.
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