WEIWEI ZHANG
In China, “world history” as a notion or a concept was introduced from the West in the course of cultural exchange between China and the outside world in modern times. China has had a long tradition of Sinocentric historiography ever since Sima Qian (ca. 140–86BCE), in which the rest of the world near and far was treated either as barbarians or tribute-payers to the Middle Kingdom or the Central Empire. “World history,” in China, has thus usually meant “foreign history/ies”; “world history” in the sense of this volume – as a disciplinary subfield – has in China generally been seen as West/Eurocentric from the very beginning, simply because it was created in and introduced from the West/Europe. Furthermore, in modern times, Chinese “world historians” have been trained in the arguably Eurocentric literature and scholarship of world history while under the influence of such an inferiority complex that “world history” has been seen not as “ours/Chinese,” but as “theirs/foreign.” Therefore, the reasoning goes, “we/Chinese” do not have the firsthand resources to study “world history,” even though China has, of course, always been part of the world and world history – and has been at least as important as any other part, although this fact has sometimes been ignored or forgotten. That world history, as a category, has more often been treated within China as a synonym for “foreign history” also can be seen from the fact that there are two volumes of “Foreign history” and three volumes of “Chinese history” in the 32-volume Encyclopedia of China (Zhongguo da bai ke quan shu) (2009). In short, “Chinese history” and “world/foreign history” have been two separate disciplines in China from the very beginning, notwithstanding the presence of some brief Chinese history in published discussions of world history.
The first Chinese world historians were mostly those who studied abroad in the West (Europe and the United States) and Japan and returned to China to offer history courses under the heading of Xi Yang Shi, “a history of the West,” or Dong Yang Shi, “a history of the East” (history/ies of Japan and other countries to the east of China). They had been trained in the scholarship of Western and Japanese writers and then introduced these world/foreign history/ies into China. Their Chinese students took over what they had learnt abroad and followed these approaches to lay the foundation of world history in China, in which “world history” and Chinese history developed into two institutionally separate disciplines/fields, in terms of resources, traditions, methodologies, theories, and frameworks.
At first, world history served mostly as a brief introduction to the history/ies of the rest of the world beside China, defined by major regions such as Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas (northern America, especially the United States, and southern/Latin America), or particularly important countries such as Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan, India, Egypt (or others, according to individual teachers’ specialty and expertise). After the establishment in 1949 of the People’s Republic of China, more and more importance was laid on world history for both ideological and educational reasons. In the 1950s, notions of wider world history through a social evolutionary lens came to be introduced from the Soviet Union, both by Russian/Soviet scholars who came to China to teach short, intensive courses in world history framed by Marxism and Leninism, and by Chinese scholars who had gone to the Soviet Union to be trained in this revolutionary scholarship. This new generation of world historians criticized their predecessors’ ideology as “liberal” or “bourgeois/capitalist.” The new world history was taught and studied in the light of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, with an overriding emphasis on class struggle, international conflict and ideological confrontation. In the early 1960s, A General History of the World (Zhou and Wu 1962), written by Chinese world historians, was published in four volumes (ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary times). It was the first world history textbook written by Chinese world historians – trained as they had been in Soviet scholarship and based on Soviet interpretations of world history.
In the decade of the Great Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, world history textbooks (like much other prior scholarship) came under critique, and these first publications were reexamined in the light of new ideas about “antirevisionism” and “anti-imperialism.” The first generation of Chinese world historians was criticized and mistreated for its supposedly bourgeois ideology and revisionism. From an academic perspective, world history teaching and studying in China was again “revolutionized” and cut off totally from international academic exchange during the subsequent ideological phobia (on both sides) during the Cold War. In China, “world history” became a closed knowledge system about the rest of the globe, defined either regionally or nationally, in which every question was assigned a standardized answer – one that was deemed correct, politically and ideologically. The task of “academic research/study” was to find these answers, and to write them correctly according to the terms of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The task of “teaching/education,” unsurprisingly, was to transmit and instill these answers in students, who could be tested and judged entirely on the basis of how well they remembered the correct answers. This approach to education sent the message that there is only one correct answer to everything and the only thing people need to do is to memorize it through a rote kind of research/study. During the Cultural Revolution, all universities and colleges were closed to “do revolution,” and most professors/teachers found themselves sent to factories or the countryside, where they were reeducated and revolutionized for several years. The gap between world history in China and that in international academic circles widened greatly thanks to the diminution of academic exchanges and the near-total lack of interaction in different ideological contexts.
Thanks to changes in state policy since the 1970s, particularly the move to new forms of “reform” and specifically an “opening-up policy,” world history in China has changed dramatically again, this time under the pressure of modernization and globalization. It is safe to say that much academic writing in world history as well as contemporary social sciences in China has been developed in efforts to understand – out of a sort of inferiority complex – why it was the West, not China, that achieved modernization first, especially if “much of modern social science originated in efforts by late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europeans to understand what made the economic development path of western Europe unique” (Pomeranz 2000: 3), a comparison sometimes considered by Chinese writers in terms of superior psychology. Ever since the differences between China and the West in terms of socioeconomic development and science and technology were finally realized empirically, Chinese social scientists, including world historians and Chinese historians, have tried their utmost to find out “what went wrong” in China and Chinese history from a consciously self-critical approach. And scholars in world history focused on what made the West unique and different from China in socioeconomic development and modernization to identify their/West/European “advantages” in comparison with our/Chinese “disadvantages.” These efforts have resulted in the introduction of much famous Western scholarship to China, and in the rewriting of world history and foreign national histories according to or based on Western literature. For example, books written by L.S. Stavrianos, William H. McNeill, G. Barraclough, Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, J.H. Bentley, Kenneth Pomeranz, David Christian, and many others have been introduced into China and some of them have been published in Chinese translations. New textbooks of world history written and edited by famous Chinese world historians such as Wu Yujin, Qi Shirong, and others were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and a series on modernization edited by Luo Rongqu was published in the 1990s.
Comparative studies between China and the West in general, or “big powers” around the globe, have grown very popular in the context of this anxiety about modernization (or a “modernization complex”), as Chinese writers worked with the goal of finding out what China could learn from the West/Western countries in their experience of modernization, ideally so that shortcuts could avoid the mistakes made by or experienced in the developed countries. There was even a book (Tang Jin 2006) and a major 12-part TV series made by China Central Television on The Rise of the Great Powers in 2006 to explain why and how those “great powers,” Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan, came to be “modernized.” This kind of research is misleading; it is not helpful to offer a utilitarian comparison of this sort and compare incomparable parts of global history. (See Adas, this volume.) So, it has been easy for Chinese world historians to adopt West/Eurocentrism as the mainstream theory or dominant paradigm and to overemphasize Western advantages, even though they simultaneously bristle at the marginalization and underestimation of China and other non-European countries produced in such narratives of global/world history. Academic research has been much more utilitarian and pragmatic than theoretic and original under these conditions. Most writers followed the Western ideas of concept, theory and pattern to explore Western advantages that had already been identified by Western scholars and forgot a simple fact: China had functioned differently in the same global context, and hence some local advantages might have been disadvantages in global interaction, and vice versa. For instance, China was an advanced and modernized empire in European eyes during the Middle Ages and early modern times. But the disadvantages of some small European countries became advantages in modern global stories of interaction, while the advantages of some big Asian countries such as China, India and the Ottoman Empire turned out to be disadvantages when seen from a noncentric and holistic perspective (about which, more below).
Since there are more academic exchanges today in global/world history between China and the rest of the world, especially with the West, Chinese global/world historians are trying their best to narrow the academic gap developed during the Cold War. Many world history textbooks, monographs and articles on histories of particular countries, especially those in Western Europe and the United States, have been published recently, and research is proceeding on foreign areas alongside Chinese history – from many different perspectives in a more global context. Centers for world history, or for area and national studies, have been established in most universities and most of these centers work on national or provincial research projects or programs sponsored by central or provincial governments. For example, at my own institution, Nankai University, there are sites such as the Center for Modern Global History (where I am a fellow), the Center for Chinese Social History, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Institute of American History and Culture, and other smaller centers based in the College of History, and also an independent Institute of Japanese Studies. Similar centers and institutes for historical study are present in most top universities, including Peking (Beijing) University, Tsinghua (Qinghua) University, People’s University of China, Capital Normal University, Beijing Normal University, Guangzhou University, Wuhan University, Nanjing University, Fudan University, and Northeast Normal University, to name only a few.
National associations of world history and foreign national history, as well as those of specialized methodological/disciplinary areas such as economics, foreign relations, culture, religion, and so on, have been set up to encourage cooperative research and academic exchange. There are provincial and local associations for history, too. Most of these associations are supported or sponsored by the Chinese government, the Ministry of Education in particular. More and more scholars of world/foreign history are going abroad to study and do research, and more and more academic exchanges are underway, both individually and cooperatively. Scholars trained overseas, and with academic experience abroad, especially in the West, have been introducing the latest scholarship into China. At the same time, more foreign scholars in world history and other fields are coming to China to teach and give lectures. International academic conferences on world history in general, and various area or national studies in particular, have been held every year at different levels throughout China, with the participation of scholars from all over the world. More Chinese world historians, too, have gone abroad to attend international conferences and workshops. In short, the gap between Chinese world historians and foreign world historians has narrowed, even though there are still many differences in theory, methodology, structure, focus, interpretation and narrative. But global/world history in China is being Westernized in both resources and scholarship.
As a student of global/world history in China for more than 30 years, I have experienced and witnessed most of these changes in theory, methodology, structure and focus of both textbooks and scholarship. I have developed a suspicion about what I have been taught, and about what I am teaching about global/world history, because I too can become confused whenever I change my perspective from a national to a global one. The more I read and think, the more I find out that a “glober” perspective is badly needed – for a global history for all “globers,” my name for all people living on the globe. (I choose not to use “global citizens,” because “citizen” is a modern concept, intertwined with ideas of nationalism, and there are still many globers who do not have any “citizenship” of a particular nation on the globe.) I have always had the sense that something is wrong or missing in global/world history because of the preoccupations with, and prejudices of, nationalism, and also the fuzziness of what I call “centrism” in global/world history.
I started with the question “Is global history centered?” when I wrote to Andre Gunder Frank to criticize his simple replacing of Eurocentrism with Sinocentrism in ReORIENT (Frank 1998). Instead I have argued for “a noncentric and holistic approach to global history,” initially in a presentation at Northeastern University’s World History Center in December 2002, and later developed this idea into a chapter, “Teaching modern global history at Nankai: A noncentric and holistic approach” (in Manning 2007), with the assistance of Frank, and also of Patrick Manning, Alfred Andrea, Andrea McElderry, Jerry Bentley, and Peter Gran.
In my view, there has been no globally received single center for most of global history, but instead many “centers” of civilization are to be found, scattered or distributed here and there all over the globe (e.g., Christendom, the Islamic world, the Chinese/Confucian world, to name only a few). It is understandable that human beings are self-oriented and egocentric, a kind of cultural narcissism. So the view of “centrality” attached to a race/nation, a nation-state, or a culture/civilization is, in a sense, a form of cultural narcissism. This may be one of the reasons why global/world history has been understood, explained, taught or written in different “centric” perspectives. Egocentrism can be naturally developed into racial, national, and cultural/civilization-centric perspectives. This is seen fully in the cases of Sinocentrism, West/Eurocentrism or any other centrisms in global history. A person or people feels superior or inferior in comparing themselves with others, either consciously or unconsciously, from an egocentric or centric perspective. These psychological responses matter in global history because these feelings determine what the elite and the masses are seen to do in global history and everyday life in a kingdom/empire/nation-state, according to their perceived superiority or inferiority (based on their place and function in a given regional or global context).
In the modern period, centrism has been a product of newly born nationalisms in those “big countries” or “nation-states” competing for global hegemony. It is a difficult task for global historians to take a “glober” perspective because it means pursuing real de-centrism and de-nationalism from a noncentric and holistic perspective. Global historians’ own nationalist identities and standpoints have led to particular approaches and methods. When we were discussing “nationalism” and the “international,” Andre Gunder Frank made a similar point when he wrote to me:
And there are hardly any nation states. The job of historians – what they are paid for – is to create and implant a “nationalism” which is in fact a “statism.” The state pays them to do that and to invent nations/nationalities that don’t even exist. Of the nearly 200 United “Nations” – all are states, and not more than a handful, a dozen, have only one, or even a dominant, nation. (email, Dec. 13, 2002)
This so-called nationalism prevents global historians from developing a “glober” perspective on global history, because they have been tasked to demonstrate their “national” or regional superiorities and advantages – consider, for example, such instances as The Rise of the West (McNeill 1963),The European Miracle (Jones 1981), the “core–periphery” in The Modern World-System (Wallerstein 1974), The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Landes 1998), The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1996), The Great Divergence(Pomeranz 2000), and the recent “Rise of China” and “Chinese Miracle” in the ongoing global crisis and global disequilibrium. How can one understand global history objectively from a “nationalist” perspective?
It is senseless to talk about centrism whenever an organic system is taken as a whole – within which it matters that interdependence, interaction, contingency and conjuncture of parts functioned differently for the development of the whole in general and each part in particular. In the case of the field of global history, all the forces of social physics work together to create a global disequilibrium that changes global history contingently. What happens in global history, in what I call a “socialquake,” is a result of all social forces – far more than the “core/center” – just as an earthquake is caused by an interaction of physical forces from other places. Here I draw inspiration from Zhuangzi’s idea of You Dai Er Ran (interdependence/contingence),1 Engels’s concept of the “resultant” in 1890 (Engels 1958), Nash’s “game theory,” and Hawking’s “theory of the universe,” as well as “chaos theory,” “fuzziology,” “holism,” and “physics.” The noncentric and holistic approach argues that global history has been determined by an all-inclusive global disequilibrium caused by many, various social forces. Global disequilibrium is a disorder or a crisis caused by the combined result of all forces (ecological, economic, political, military, social, cultural, religious, psychological, etc.) in global history. In other words, the global disequilibrium is a global crisis.
The Chinese translation of “crisis” is two characters. One, Wei, means “chaos,” and the other, Ji, “chance,” indicating that chaos provides a chance for change. It is global disequilibrium that has forced development and shaped global history as well as national histories. For instance, the Pax Mongolica, the westward expansion of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Europe’s trade imbalance with the East, socioeconomic problems caused by natural and man-made disasters (the Black Death, wars, religious conflicts, etc.) in Europe, as well as the psychological temptation of the Orient occasioned by Marco Polo’s book in Europe, and many other changes combined to create a global result that led to global disequilibrium: a combination of mutual attraction and exclusion (racial, cultural, religious, economic, political, military, etc.) among various civilizations because of the struggle for survival. Several poor and small West European countries – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England in particular – had to go to sea in order to survive. The result was worldwide exploration, and thereafter the domino effect of modern history. Obviously, however, those small countries were not initially a global “core/center” in any meaningful sense. Pomeranz is correct in saying: “Our perception of an interacting system from which one part benefited more than others does not in itself justify calling that part the ‘center’ and assuming that it is the unshaped shaper of everything else. We will see, instead, vectors of influence moving in various directions” (2000: 10).
It is problematic to ask what made the west “the West,” or, to put it another way, what made the West “rise.” Recently, there has been a tendency to deconstruct this hermetic “West” in such scholarship such as The East in the West (Goody 1996) and The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization(Hobson 2004) – writings aiming to demonstrate the presence of Oriental or non-European elements interwoven into “the West.” Goody and Hobson highlighted this mixed nature of “Western civilization.” And neither are the East, the South, and the North isolated “civilizations” in cultural origin and composition. They are all hybrid mixes, and what makes them different is their unique composition and development in an ever-changing global context: “globers” have always moved around all over the globe to find better places to live since the very beginning of human history. Global migration and interchange between and among civilizations have made each modern “nation-state,” or culture/civilization/race/nation/people/state/country, a unique mix. None is pure, but each is unique. The diversity of any individual nation in race and culture is a special and specific result of historical contingency. Where did “the English” come from? Who are “the Chinese”? Is there a “typical” national citizen of the United States? Questions like these are difficult to deal with academically and practically. “The Oriental West” (Hobson 2004) thus has its counterparts in the East, the North and the South. Current manifestations of culture, or “civilizations,” are only a unique mix developed contingently in a regional/global context of diversity in unity. (See McKeown, this volume.)
During the half-century since its initial publication, McNeill’s The Rise of the West has been challenged from many different perspectives. Toynbee frankly pointed out in his later years:
The West’s ascendancy over the rest of the world during the last three centuries has been reflected in the recent Western way of looking at mankind’s history as all leading up to the modern West. I think this West-centered view of history is a palpable case of subjectivism; it seems to me to misrepresent the reality and, in so far as it distorts it, to make it unintelligible. (1974: 34–35)
Frank and Marks tried to recast this view of the West by approaching it from an oriental context, as in Frank’s subtitle, Global Economy in the Asian Age (Frank 1998; Marks 2007). And Peter Gran tried to go Beyond Eurocentrism (1996) and replace “the rise of the West” with The Rise of the Rich (2009) in a more global perspective. Yet ironically, even Chinese world historians today are still for the most part Eurocentric, because of their training and the geopolitical/cultural inferiority complex mentioned above. For example, some recent Chinese world historians have written: “In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the old China was racing ahead in the Middle Ages, the West somehow caught up and stood silently beside us on the same starting-line” (Mao Lei et al. 1991: 1). And then they have tried to find out why and how China was left behind, and how the West surpassed the East, in an analysis similar to that offered by Pomeranz in The Great Divergence (2000). In my view, by contrast, China and the West have never been “on the same starting-line,” and thus there is no comparability between China and the West because it is an interpretive dead end to compare two incomparable parts of global history. They functioned differently in the division of labor of global economy/history, just as different as the proverbial trunk, leg, ear, tusk or stomach of an elephant. How can we compare two incomparable parts of a whole?
In global history, several socialquake “bands” were formed from the internal interaction of parts within the globe. For instance, the changing balance of power between civilizations during the period 1500–1900 resulted from global disequilibrium, which shaped the histories of its parts (empire/kingdom/newly born nation-state) in particular, in the light of the social physics of convergence, contingency, conjuncture, interdependence, and interaction of various forces in various parts in the globe. This resulted in socialquakes contingently arising along the coasts of Western Europe, the Atlantic coast of the Americas, western and sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific basin (China, Japan, Southeast Asia, the western Americas, and Australia), and the Indian Ocean basin (India, southeast Asia and eastern Africa). In other words, what happened in Western Europe was not a European phenomenon or an internal development in Europe but a contingent result of interaction of all parts in the globe in a three-dimensional global history.
Having suggested a theory contrary to the received concept that the “‘Fall of the East’ preceded the ‘Rise of the West’” (Abu-Lughod 1989: 361), I further argue that the “general rise of socialquake bands” that caused global disequilibrium facilitated the “rise of the West” as only part of a general rise. From the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, there was a “general rise” along those bands, in which most “Oriental” countries/empires rose to their peaks either relatively or absolutely. For example, the Ottoman Empire, the closest “Oriental” country to the West, was expanding westwards, growing into a huge empire embracing parts of Asia, Europe and Africa around the Mediterranean. The Moghul Empire (1526–1707) in India had long been attractive to Westerners because of its wealth. China in the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (1644–1911) dynasties was enjoying one of the golden ages in Chinese history. Japan developed rapidly in the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867). In my view it is the “rise of Oriental empires” in general that pushed and facilitated the oft-discussed “rise of the West.” And the subsequent exploitations and colonization of African coasts and American hinterlands, along with the “rise of the United States” and the establishment of Latin American countries, also helped to further impel the “rise of the West.” Could you image a modern England or any “nation-states” in Western Europe without thinking of what happened in the rest of the globe? Hence I cannot agree with most Chinese world historians in their interpretations of nationalist modernization approached in a way defined by the “big countries.”
From this noncentric and holistic perspective, the structure of “center” and “core–periphery” is neither reasonable nor persuasive when the question becomes: what is the “center/core” and what is the “periphery” in “the rise of the West” and Eurocentrism? For instance, during the early stages of “the rise of the West” (circa 1400–1800), those “small” countries, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and England in particular, were all in a position of “periphery” in the wider Afro-Eurasian landmass, geographically, culturally, and economically (in terms of chain of demand–supply and consumer–producer). Actually, they functioned only as the middlemen between the producers in the East and the consumers of manufactured luxury goods (cotton cloth, silk, porcelain, tea and spices, to select only a few) in the West, recalling what the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company did and how they made their fortunes. When small Western European countries developed and “modernized” their economies as their functional position changed in global markets and interstate balances of power, they were still parts of a wider global interdependence in which they relied much more on the rest of the globe than the other way around in terms of global capital, markets, resources and labor.
From the perspective of global social history, then, it was Indian cotton weavers, Chinese silk-makers and porcelain producers, and many other manufacturers who forced some Europeans, some English people to be specific, to be creative and to devise import substitutes or knock-offs of oriental goods that had produced the long-existing trade imbalance between the West (especially England) and the East. Only colonial producers in the Americas and Africa could provide Europeans with the needed silver, gold and other products to buy or exchange luxury goods from the East. As a matter of fact, labor, that is, workers, farmers or slaves, built the base for daily life and hence should not be marginalized or peripheralized in global history.
In my view “the West” was, for most of this period, only a small part of the global picture. Its superiority to the Muslims, the Indians and the Chinese was problematic at best, and its “centric/core/dominant” position was no better than arguable. Just think of how many heavy pressures Western Europe faced from the East in terms of economy, trade, military, culture and politics, and how long it took for the Europeans to grasp opportunities to catch up or to be “modernized” during the processes dubbed by later historians Renaissance, Reformation, Exploration, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Democratic Revolution, and social improvement. This gives us a better understanding of global disequilibrium in global history in a full picture as well as in its 3-D image. In other words, crises of this global disequilibrium provided an opportunity for the “rise of the West” along the wider Atlantic socialquake band.
Although I do not wish to overstate the role that the West/Europe has played in global history, one could fairly say that it has had a positive and significant position, fully as important as those of the rest of the globe. When I expressed disagreement with Frank’s efforts to challenge Eurocentrism by overemphasizing Asia and thus underestimating Europeans’ activities and functions as “part and parcel of a single global world economy,” Frank replied, “Yes, but prior to my book all others claimed the opposite, which is much less true. I err a bit perhaps in overemphasizing what has previously been totally neglected” (email exchange, Dec. 13, 2002). Frank went on to argue that
Britain was NOT the workshop of the world – with an export deficit, growing every year from 1816 to 1913, and the “rise” of the Brits was due to its favored position in the multilateral trade system of interlinked trade triangles of which the China–India–Britain opium triangle was of course the most important if only because it was the drain from India that supported the whole system including European investment in the USA and the Brit Dominions and Argentina. (letter to author, early 2001)
The global disequilibrium I perceive between 1900 and 1950 could be portrayed as a military Armageddon under an ideological cover in the light of political, military and economical conflicts. The game began with a contest between “democracy” and “autocracy” among “capitalist” countries but ended “accidentally,” with a confrontation between “capitalism” and “socialism/communism.” Many “backward” countries, led by the USSR, made their own way in the chaos of war, and grasped the opportunities in the crisis to establish a bloc of socialist countries – and in exchange obtained rapid development and expansion. On the other hand, “capitalist” countries, neither winners nor losers, were badly hurt and faced the tough task of rebuilding in a shrinking bloc. In this global interaction, who was the “center” and who was the “periphery”?
As a crucially important element/force of “social physics,” psychology interacts with other elements contingently and interdependently. For example, people often overreact in an emergency or crisis when they are scared, as in a stock market crash or financial chaos that shakes markets and causes job losses nationally or globally. Those overreactions – selling shares and protectionism – can only make things worse and cause a vicious cycle. What is more terrible than real economic difficulties is that people lose their confidence during a depression. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” as Franklin Roosevelt put it. Those who live on credit and hope for future gains are suffering psychologically as well as physically in global crisis. It is not easy for them to get away from the shadow of depression.
Global history demonstrates that superiority or inferiority is but a temporary and passing psychology and phenomenon. As an actor, each part of the globe has its designated position in terms of superiority or inferiority at any given time. It is only a matter of time, but the timing matters. After the Cold War, global changes developed new balances of power both regionally and globally, and have brought about a new global disequilibrium as well as new attitudes of superiority or inferiority.
We are now amidst this process of global disequilibrium, which is shaping our common human future dramatically and significantly. The global economic crisis, which started from the United States, is changing people’s attitudes of superiority or inferiority and their prospects or predictions about the future, producing new invocations of optimism and pessimism. Perhaps, this time, people from all the world’s nations can realize that all people and peoples, just like those in Noah’s Ark, are but collaborators in a common venture and go on to establish a fully “glober” identity. We as globers should learn from a better understanding of those previous global disequilibriums which resulted in new balances of power or new global orders in the past, and seize the present opportunity. In any event, to cope with today’s global issues together, we globers must understand our common past first – to help each other tide over the crisis, to realize we are all on the same boat, and to work for our common future and gain a new confidence as globers rather than in terms of national superiority or inferiority.
One of the primary historical missions arising from the study of global history is to establish this glober identity or a wider vision associated with such a noncentric and holistic perspective. Global historians aim to do this by providing a better understanding and explanation of global history, from a glober perspective.
Recently, globers have been haunted by so many worldwide issues that they are very worried about the future of humanity. Where are we heading? What does our future hold? It is a truism to say that there are many possibilities and myriad uncertainties. As Wallerstein wrote in 1999:
The third premise is that the modern world-system, as a historical system, has entered into a terminal crisis and is unlikely to exist in fifty years. However, since its outcome is uncertain, we do not know whether the resulting system (or systems) will be better or worse than the one in which we are living, but we do know that the period of transition will be a terrible time of troubles, since the stakes of the transition are so high, the outcome so uncertain, and the ability of small inputs to affect the outcome so great. (1999: 1)
This prospect seems different from what he wrote 25 years earlier, when he predicted: “This would constitute a third possible form of world-system, a socialist world government” (1974: 348). He grew more despondent during the most recent global economic crisis when he repeatedly emphasized that at the end of the current world-system, 25 years hence, there would be nothing particularly good to follow; that one could only hope for the lesser of evils (see his speech at the international conference on Andre Gunder Frank’s Legacy of Critical Social Science, held at the University of Pittsburgh in April 2008).
The growing role of the G8 and the wider G20 groups of countries at the turn of the twenty-first century has meant further important developments in this global disequilibrium/crisis. It has been posited, and widely accepted, that the G8 is “the core/center” of the world that controls world affairs. In the middle of the 1990s, I asked a group of world-systems specialists whether they thought China would be among the core states in 50 years. (This was at a conference convened by a group of scholars from Wallerstein’s center who were paying a visit to Nankai University.) The answer was negative: these scholars did not think China or any other peripheral countries would become a core state, even over such a protracted timeframe, despite the already evident changes in China since the reform and opening-up policies. They instead emphasized that the core states had been Western countries (at least if Japan is included as a sort of Westernized oriental one) since the formation of the core–periphery structure – and thus they were likely to be Western countries for a long time. Actually, the global disequilibrium/crisis itself facilitates the development of G20 and a new approach to global affairs and issues, one in which the core–periphery perspective does not work very well in shedding light on global issues such as financial crises, global warming, terrorism, trade wars, and many others. Is the G20 “the core/center” of the globe? Does the G20 provide a new forum to discuss and solve global issues from an approach other than a core–periphery one?
The foregoing noncentric and holistic approach mainly analyzes the formation and structure of our current global disequilibrium. Global history is neither a sum of histories of separate nation-states nor a compilation of thematic histories (of economy, politics, society, diplomacy, the military, culture, science and technology, etc.). It is, instead, focused on the cause and effect of interdependence/contingency and interaction/conjuncture of various forces from a global perspective – to offer a proper understanding and description of the overall trajectory of global history as a whole, and as seen in three dimensions. So, the causes of global disequilibrium are explored in a global context rather than nationalist perspectives. It deals with a mix of various forces of diversity in unity, and concentrates on their interdependence and interaction: a mix of relations of production, a mix of social relations, a mix of political systems, a mix of cultures, a mix of religions, a mix of races, a mix of ideologies, etc. The internal contradictions of global history have been based on these mixes, which generate conflict and cooperation and form global equilibriums and disequilibriums. Coexistence and civilizational conflicts in the biosphere have also changed the ecological environment, with a strong impact on global history.
Global history is a contemporary understanding, explanation and description of what happened across the globe as a whole. Notably, most of the terminologies, notions, concepts and theories for global history were developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and thus originate from a Eurocentric perspective, thus inevitably expressing temporal, regional, racial, class and ideological limitations. For example, “the West,” “the East,” “Modern History,” “the Old World,” and “the New World” may all be problematic/debatable in the light of a global history. When I, for example, used the word “international” in a paper, Andre Gunder Frank wrote to me:
The very language is wrong. It refers to inter-nations that don’t exist. And it supposes that we start with pieces/parts A & B that then take up inter-relations between them. Of course this is totally counterfactual and anti-historic. But we don’t even have a vocabulary to express the globe from which we start and which breaks down into parts. (email, Dec. 13, 2002)
Frank is correct: we need to develop a new terminology and theory to enable a better understanding of global history.
In China, too, world/global history is at a similar crossroads, one that provides possibilities for new development and improvement. Mainstream structures and theories introduced from the West still have strong influences on textbooks and scholarship. Recent changes in the field of world/global history are still new to most Chinese world historians trained under Western (Eurocentric) notions, because the educational and knowledge system is relatively closed. Global history in China should include Chinese history, of course, and Chinese historians who can understand Chinese history in a global context instead of only through a nationalist perspective. Global history in China needs to be globalized, rather than Westernized, in a process of academic exchanges between Chinese global historians and their counterparts in the rest of the world – especially in overlooked issues and blind spots of global history as a whole. Meanwhile, global history itself also needs to be globalized – to share and express a global identity rather than many national ones.
Global history is a huge project that needs to include not only the wisdom of the West and the East, but also that of the South and the North. This is a task for all global historians, who need to find proper approaches and methods to cooperate with scholars of other fields in both social sciences and natural sciences. It seems that scholars in all relevant fields hold pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one that can form a three-dimensional big global history. Globalized global histories are what we need. History, both national and world/global, has often highlighted rulers, elites, the rich, the strong, winners, celebrities, the core/center, and the unique. It is time for global historians to more fully incorporate the ruled, the poor, the weak, the losers, the marginalized, and the masses; without these social forces, the picture of global history is not complete or perfect. The newly founded Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO, July 2008), which combines other bodies – the WHA (World History Association), ENIUGH (European Network in Universal and Global History), AAWH (Asian Association of World Historians) and ANGH (African Network in Global History) – is certainly a great step towards the creation of such a globalized global history.
Note
1 “Shade said to Shadow, ‘A little while ago, you were moving; and now you are standing still. A little while ago, you were sitting down; and now you are getting up. Why all this indecision?’ Shadow replied, ‘Don’t I have to depend on others to be what I am? Don’t others also have to depend on something else to be what they are? My dependence is like that of the snake on his skin or of the cicada on his wings. How can I tell why I do this, or why I do that?’” (Zhuangzi 1974: 48).
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