The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research
BARBARA WEINSTEIN
All historians are world historians now.
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World
The field of world history is unusual among areas of specialization in the historical profession for having its origins primarily, if not exclusively, in pedagogical concerns. More specifically, the rapid rise of world history as a field is intimately tied to the decline of the canonical Western Civilization course (Levine 2000; Allardyce 2000).1 Spurred by critiques of Eurocentrism within the academy and demands by various ethnic groups not descended from Europeans for representation within the university curriculum, history departments found it increasingly untenable to treat “Western Civ” as an appropriate gateway course for understanding human experience. The result has been a shift away from Western Civ and toward World History, an approach to the classroom that carries a mandate to be more representative of the range of human experiences.
Thus, for better or for worse, world history as a field is wedded to the demand for more culturally diverse and inclusive courses that every year introduce masses of newly arrived mostly North American college students to the history of “the world.” This has periodically provoked a backlash against world history in university departments, where the standard complaint (and by no means exclusively from defenders of its predecessor, Western Civ) is precisely that world history is principally a pedagogical field. Not being a “research field” – I have even heard colleagues claim that it not only isn’t but can’t be a research field – it therefore should not be a subject offered at the college level. The implication is that teaching a course in a field outside or beyond our research-related expertise debases the historical profession and reduces us to the condition of (gasp!) mere high school teachers.2 (See Bain, this volume.)
This critique of World History is unpersuasive in any number of ways, starting with its faulty assumption that most courses taught by university professors relate to their research. A few privileged clusters of academics aside, most historians routinely offer courses that involve large amounts of material and many historical issues only remotely connected to their own research agenda. More worthy of serious consideration is the claim that world history is an “impossible subject” since nobody actually studies “the world.” But here again, one could respond that it is a question of degree, not a qualitatively different endeavor, since it is also true that nobody studies – to take my field of specialization as an example – “Latin America.” Typically, Latin American historians focus on a particular country or set of countries, and within those countries only specific periods and topics.
At the same time, it is useless to deny that there is a kernel of truth in this complaint about world history. Despite the multiplication of world history courses, and in the last two decades, the founding of MA and even PhD programs in World History,3 only very recently have we begun to see job openings that specify that applicants should have training in world history as a research field (Townsend 2007). (See Streets-Salter, this volume.) Job ads (for other fields) do frequently say: “The ability to teach world history would be a plus.” Typically, what is meant by “ability” is that the candidate, while a graduate student, served as a teaching assistant in a course on World History, whose principal instructor was likely someone who also had no prior expertise in World History. This “learning by doing” process may be adequate for preparing instructors to engage undergraduates’ attention, and to teach them enough world history to, say, pass an exam that would license them as secondary school teachers, but it promises little for a research field in world history. One can imagine a proliferation of world history instructors without any intensification of the intellectual conversation around world history.
Fortunately, just as new research agendas produce curricular innovations, new course offerings generate new research interests. The field of world history – while still more pedagogically inclined than most – has also ramified into cohorts and publications (the World History Association, theJournal of World History) that are oriented toward exploring questions related to research as well as teaching. Moreover, journals such as the American Historical Review, which have no particular geographic focus, have increasingly taken up world-historical issues. While a modal “world history” publication might still be a multi-authored textbook intended for classroom use, there is a growing community of scholars who would define their research field as world history, and who envision a synergy between their classroom teaching and scholarly work.
Of course, this in and of itself does not mean that scholars of world history have silenced their critics. First of all, world historians have to define in a persuasive way what it would mean to do research in world history. Despite my earlier claim about it being more a quantitative than a qualitative distinction, according to the conventions of the historical profession, it is quite acceptable for me to say that I am a Latin Americanist who specializes in twentieth-century São Paulo, Brazil – no informed person would bat an eyelash. But if I said I was a world historian who specialized in twentieth-century São Paulo, Brazil, that would certainly raise eyebrows and prompt colleagues to ask what exactly I might mean when I called myself a world historian. In other words, world history is not a field where the part can easily stand in for the whole. Hence, scholars in the field have had to be far more thoughtful than most historians about how they would define the field and what it means to do research in it.
Developments in the field of history since the 1980s have tended to make matters even more complicated for scholars of world history, both as instructors and researchers. The historical concerns that prompted the shift from Western Civ to World History have also challenged those historical approaches that offered the most convenient pedagogical frameworks and methodological underpinnings for the field. World History, in its current paradigmatic form, is not conceived as a mere amplification of the “Western Civ” course; rather one of its principal purposes is to rethink the place of the West in the macrohistorical narrative. At the same time, the very notion of a master narrative has been challenged from a number of different theoretical directions – most vigorously, from those associated with postmodern and postcolonial interventions (Bentley 2003; Weinstein 2005). Historical researchers in a variety of subfields have turned away from the grand explanatory narrative as incurably teleological and Eurocentric, and in many instances, it has given way to a preference for “micronarrative” of brief duration, concentrated on a particular event that offers us a goldmine of cultural meanings (Darnton 2004). This anecdote-based approach to history (most famously exemplified by Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), has been quite fruitful in a number of scholarly contexts. But its fragmentation of historical narrative/interpretation presents special problems for those who teach World History, and for those who seek to promote research in that field. While the absence of a narrative framework would be challenging for any course curriculum, it seems particularly difficult to imagine constructing an effective syllabus for a world history course based on a series of unconnected incidents. Clearly, some explanatory narrative would be needed to link them in some way, to provide some connective tissue so that students gain some sense of why these events or stories are significant. But most of the anecdotal/historical literature will be of little help in that regard. Furthermore, I have argued elsewhere that the micronarrative approach does not so much challenge grand narratives, or even deny them, as it ignores and obscures them, and the influence they continue to exert in how both scholars and the public view the past and present (Weinstein 2005). Ultimately, the micronarrative will be of limited utility for the project of “provincializing Europe,” to cite Dipesh Chakrabarty’s pithy formulation of the problem (2000).
To clarify the dilemma facing a scholar of world history who wishes to eschew Eurocentrism, it is useful to consider both the criticisms and proposals that Chakrabarty makes in his highly influential book. Early on in Provincializing Europe, he critically revisits the canonical essay by E.P. Thompson on “Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism” (1967). In this essay Thompson not only describes the process by which the English worker is obliged to internalize the discipline associated with industrial work rhythms, but also contends that the same is happening, or will happen, to the Third World worker, with the only difference between the English and, say, Indian worker being the passage of secular/historical time. Thus, Thompson’s essay, though focused on the English worker, is replete with world-historical implications or claims made intelligible by a certain Marxist grand narrative. But for Chakrabarty, these claims exemplify the way in which “the modern” continues to be understood “as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be [merely] reproduced … with a local content” (2000: 48). In other words, if we followed Thompson’s reasoning, the narrative of Indian industrialization and work-discipline would be nothing more than an echo of what had happened long before in England. From this perspective, to understand history, one must know the history of England; knowing the history of India is optional and, in some ways, superfluous.
What, then, does Chakrabarty propose as a way to undo the Eurocentric bias that can be found in even some of the very best historical writing? In four chapters he elaborates on aspects of Indian cultural and political life that he argues cannot be easily assimilated into the West’s historicizing narrative. He begins his analysis by citing Paul Veyne’s distinction between “singularity” and “specificity” (Veyne 1984: 56–57). The latter is an example of a general tendency, and thus can be easily articulated to a larger narrative. Chakrabarty, however, seeks out forms of sociability or social practice that are, in his view, singularities – that is, ones that resist assimilation into a historicist narrative (2000: 56). But it is precisely this feature of his historical (as opposed to metahistorical) chapters that makes them of limited use for the aspiring teacher and/or scholar of world history.
Chakrabarty’s text, given his critique of historicism in general, may be a particularly sweeping example of the rejection of grand narratives, but I would cite his work as symptomatic of a larger turn toward singularities or meaning-laden anecdotes, and toward research questions that are synchronic, rather than diachronic. Whereas the world history course, and the research questions it produces, needs to have a capacious geographic and chronological span, many historians are busy slicing and dicing the past in ways that threaten to reduce us, once again, to teaching “one damn thing after another,” though now it is more likely to be a discontinuous assortment of discursive representations or cultural constructions. The latter provide poor ammunition for attacking the stubbornly Eurocentric vision of history that undergraduates – at least North American ones – often bring to the classroom. Bold, coherent stories have great heuristic appeal, and it is difficult to convince students to be more skeptical toward a particular story line if we are not offering anything in its place.
One response to this dilemma has been the rise of “big history” – most readily associated with the work of Jared Diamond (1997) and David Christian (2005). (See Spier, this volume.) Inspired by scientific disciplines’ search for a unified field of knowledge, these historians seek to construct the grandest of grand narratives, which can isolate a handful of factors (germs, the vote, a technological innovation) that broadly, even universally, explain historical trends. It is beyond the subject of this chapter to discuss the many big problems presented by “big history” – including a spectacular overreaching that serves to remind us why so many historians eschewed grand narratives in the first place. But for our purposes here, it is relevant to note two especially troubling aspects of “big history.” One is that its treatment of the “modern world” is (irremediably) Eurocentric since it tends to be constructed around measures of success and failure, gauged on the basis of Western notions of economic growth and development. The other is the virtual impossibility of rooting “big history” in primary source research. No doubt a “big history” text could feature some documents that are relevant and illustrative of its arguments, but the very need to eliminate distracting countervailing evidence makes archival sources more of an impediment than an inducement to “big history.”
In short, there is an ongoing tension between the pedagogical need for some sort of narrative coherence and the tendency of grand narratives to reproduce Eurocentric versions of world history. Keeping this dilemma in mind, in the remainder of this chapter I will discuss both well-established and recently initiated ways of organizing and conceptualizing research in world history. In evaluating the merits, drawbacks, limitations, and promises of different approaches, I consider their potential to contribute, on the one hand, to rethinking (not just shrinking) narratives, and on the other hand, to constructing a field that does not lapse into Eurocentrism – that does not ultimately define world history as “The West and the Rest.” In addition, I will consider the practical aspects of any particular approach – that is, can research be done in this vein given the usual constraints that historians operate under in terms of time and resources? As a point of clarification, I should say that almost any historical research could make a contribution to the field of world history – as the epigraph from C.A. Bayly claims, we are now all, in a sense, doing world history. But such an expansive definition would render this discussion unmanageable. So at the risk of drawing a somewhat artificial line, I will be classifying as “world-historical research” work that deliberately attempts to transcend conventional geographic field borders.
Perhaps the first school of world history that went beyond “The West and the Rest” narrative was the civilizations approach, and despite a steady stream of criticism and revision, it is likely that the average world history instructor still organizes his or her syllabus and adopts a textbook based on this perspective. (See the chapters by Pomeranz and Segal, by Getz, and by McKeown, this volume.) The appeal of this approach is its placement of different societies – defined as civilizations – on a similar plane, and while it implies cultural and material hierarchies at particular moments in time, a focus on the rise and fall of civilizations means that the civilizations approach can serve to undermine the linear/progressive narrative of the Rise of the West. One of the foundational concepts of this school – the idea of an “axial age” in the ancient world – both contributes to the linear/progressive narrative and suggests some ways in which to undermine its Eurocentrism. An idea first articulated by Karl Jaspers and then endorsed by Shmuel Eisenstadt, the phrase “axial age” refers to a pivotal era in history when several different civilizations independently developed certain concepts deemed crucial to human progress (Eisenstadt 1986). In other words, these significant developments do not have a single originating point from which they radiate out, but rather multiple points of origin.
For our purposes here, there are two drawbacks of the civilizations school that are worthy of note. One is the intrinsic and probably unavoidable tendency of this approach to operate with normative and anomalous categories – to focus on “successful” societies/empires and to marginalize groups both within and beyond the successful society that are judged to have failed in constructing a “world civilization.” A sort of “greatest hits of human history,” it all but inevitably implies failure, even degeneration, for a culture or society once its hour of greatness has passed, thus potentially reproducing a principal pillar of nineteenth-century imperial ideologies.4
As for advancing a research agenda in world history, one can readily perceive the problems that a civilizational approach poses. If the object of discussion or analysis is an entire “civilization,” how could one do original research, based on primary sources? The scale of the questions and the resulting holistic approach seems to preclude significant primary research. The world historian, in this situation, has no choice but to rely on a synthesis of the research done by others. A scholar might contribute to the historical knowledge available about a particular civilization, but that would not necessarily translate into a contribution to world history as a field that is not merely additive – that is, a sum of many parts, equaling less than the whole.
There has been, however, at least one serious proposal for conceptualizing the civilizations approach in a way that would both allow for a research agenda and advance a deliberately “world-historical” conception of the research. The emphasis would be on the way in which trends or innovations – religious, technological, linguistic – in a particular social formation interact with or circulate within other societies. According to Marshall Hodgson, perhaps the most ambitious and innovative of “civilizations” historians, “it is precisely in terms of the effect of changes in one place and time upon changes elsewhere that historical questions became so fatefully interrelated” (1993: 254–255).5 In his 1993 introduction to Hodgson’s Rethinking World History, Edmund Burke III observed that Hodgson, while remaining committed to a civilizational approach, presaged both Edward Said and J.M. Blaut in his effort to de-essentialize the notion of civilization and critique diffusionism (Burke 1993). And Ross Dunn, in his review of this volume, lamented that historians were so “captivated by the civilization as a thing of conceptual beauty and fixedness” that they could not conceptualize the fluidity and indeterminateness implied by intense connections and exchanges, and therefore could not fully embrace the implications of Hodgson’s work (1996: 133). Some recent studies, such as C.A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2004), have taken up Hodgson’s call to emphasize connectedness, while not entirely eschewing European exceptionalism (Hall 2004); Hodgson’s insights also fueled the critique of received geography offered by Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen in The Myth of Continents (1997).
Several leading world historians have identified the comparative method “as a promising window onto the larger project of writing world history.” According to Richard Eaton (1997), “comparative historians are especially well positioned to help free the profession from the sort of nationalist or civilizational straitjackets that have bedeviled so much history writing in the past. To the comparativist, the topic, the problem, or the process is the focus of attention, not the place.” He then contends that comparing patterns of religious conversion from one society to another can illuminate the “mechanics of a worldwide process.” There is, of course, a substantial comparative historical literature – on slave systems, revolutions, feminist movements, etc. – by scholars who were not necessarily thinking of their work as a contribution to the field of world history, and typically were only considering two or three societies. Even in this more limited context, the comparative method posed problems that have been widely debated in the historical discipline over the last decade. As a deliberate contribution to world history – which might require comparisons among multiple cases – the problems of the comparative method are likely to multiply.6
As a heuristic device – an aid to analytical thinking – comparison is not only useful but inevitable. What historical reasoning doesn’t involve some sense of a process or event happening in one place, but not (or less so) in another? But it is when scholars structure a research agenda around explicit, systematic comparison that certain problems are likely to emerge. Perhaps the most serious challenge is to avoid the designation of one case as normative and the other(s) as deviant or anomalous. A related problem is the tendency, even the need, to (overly) homogenize each case being compared so as to heighten the contrast, thereby losing a sense of the heterogeneity within cases which may be more meaningful than the differences revealed by the comparison. Yet another problem that has been identified in studies that favor the comparative method is the inclination to treat the entities being compared (empires, nations, cities) as bounded and distinct, rather than involved in webs of communication, trade, and cultural exchange. As Micol Seigel points out in her trenchant critique of the comparative method, “comparison requires the observer to name two or more units whose similarities and differences she or he will then describe. This setup discourages attention to exchange between the two, the very exchange postcolonial insight understands as the stuff of subject-formation.” Seigel then extends her critique, noting that “above all, setting up parallel objects for study obscures the exchange fostered by comparisons themselves” (2005: 65). The resulting comparative “insight” can become a constitutive element in the construction of national, gender or racial identities, so that an attempt to neatly compare two cases becomes fraught with difficulties.
One could argue, however, that these are perils and pitfalls that can be avoided or negotiated; they may be reasons to modify the comparative method, not to eschew it altogether. Eaton’s nuanced and sophisticated approach to the phenomenon of religious conversion – focused on three different Naga communities in northern India – is a case where the scale of the study and the depth of the historian’s knowledge make the comparative conclusion compelling.7 It is when Eaton wants to shift the frame of reference from a particular region of India to a world-historical perspective that I find his claims less persuasive. First of all, extending the discussion of religious conversion beyond this region would require archival and ethnographic research in multiple locations that would be daunting for most historians, and would probably only be feasible for a team of researchers. But more important, a comparative project, to maintain coherence, has to identify certain variables that will be considered in diverse locations, yet it is precisely the particularities of the Naga’s cosmological traditions that seem most noteworthy in this context, and searching for the presence or absence of similar beliefs elsewhere already promises to skew the historian’s research mission.
Yet, even with all of these caveats about the comparative method, we need to acknowledge that Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) – a work of comparative history – has been among the most influential books in the years since its publication for world historians, and for historians seeking to undermine a certain teleological narrative of the “Triumph of the West” (see also Wong 2000). This study of the economic trajectories of China and Britain argues that even as late as the eighteenth century, the two empires were more similar in economic terms than they were different, and that it is only due to a particularly favorable conjunction of circumstances for Britain in the second half of that century that it was able to experience such massive economic growth and technological development in the subsequent century, while China languished. As with any controversial and important book, Pomeranz’s study has been criticized on a number of counts. Perhaps the most common criticism from world historians is that he merely switches from a unipolar Western-dominated world to a bipolar world reduced to Western Europe and China. And the book undoubtedly displays some of the flaws that have bedeviled other comparative histories – overhomogenization of the units of comparison, unequal degrees of expertise on the part of the author, reliance on syntheses of other historians’ research, inattention to interactions and exchanges, and to the role of other units/actors, and the need to focus on elements that are more easily comparable phenomena than what Veyne calls singularities. Yet none of these complaints has dulled the appeal of Pomeranz’s study, which provides a powerful antidote to works that trumpet European exceptionalism. The book’s success does not mean that it has avoided all the pitfalls of comparative research, but rather that it forcefully addresses a major question that a significant portion of the historical profession still sees as being answerable through this sort of large-scale comparison driven by secondary sources.
Both the civilizational and comparative approaches rely on a notion of fixed, bounded places to which a historian brings a world perspective, but increasingly scholars of world history are choosing something or someone mobile as their object of study. By “mapping” the trajectory and ramifications of a moving subject or object, historians can identify and study persons, processes, and commodities whose history cannot be confined to a single society. The study of bodies in movement across imperial or national boundaries is not particularly new – immigration has been a subject of historical research since the mid-twentieth century. (See Ward, this volume.) But in the past, most scholars of migration focused on the “receiving” society and folded the immigrant story into a national narrative, whereas world historians would be expected to pay equivalent attention to the entire route (including the ocean passage), and to view such human movements in terms of their transnational implications. Furthermore, certain groups – for example, anarchists or abolitionists – are particularly interesting to world historians because their routes of circulation often go beyond a point of departure and arrival, increasingly an outmoded way of conceptualizing human movements (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Appadurai 1996).
For obvious reasons, such studies have been especially prevalent among historians who define their “area” as at least partly oceanic – those who study the Atlantic world, the Pacific Rim, and the Indian Ocean, as well as those who focus on diasporic populations. Rebecca Scott has traced a particular mixed-race family, originally from Saint-Domingue (Haiti), whose members dispersed to Cuba, Louisiana, France, and Belgium (see Scott 2007). Aside from revealing an intriguing family saga, her study (and a similar one by Martha Hodes, 2003) allows us to follow the ways in which the identities of the various family members and generations change according to the moment and place in which we encounter them, how their legal prerogatives and restraints are determined and defined, and what it tells us about an emerging Atlantic world of rights and racism. Natalie Zemon Davis’s Trickster’s Travels (2006) explores the remarkable and peripatetic life of a Muslim born in Granada in the fateful year of 1492, who became one of the leading geographers of his era (known in the West as Leo Africanus). The historical anthropologist J. Lorand Matory (1999) follows the cultural circuits and exchanges of former slaves and their descendants from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, whose “return” to West Africa allows them to acquire fluency in English (and hence become “The English Professors of Brazil”), but also spearhead a revival of “authentic” Yorùbá religious practices then flourishing in Bahia but nearly obliterated by decades of civil war and British colonialism in West Africa.
Aside from being intrinsically fascinating stories to any reader, these sorts of studies have a special appeal for the world historian. To be sure, the research requirements can be daunting. Historians often struggle to get funding to visit a single research site, never mind multiple sites in far-flung locations requiring an array of language skills (though such efforts can make a scholar doubly appreciative of what his or her subject endured in moving from one place to the next). But this approach does allow the world historian to rebut one of the standard criticisms of the field: the research in this vein is thoroughly rooted in primary sources. The sort of historical detective work that such studies involve relies fundamentally on archival material or memoirs and oral accounts, not secondary research by scholars in a particular subfield.
The subjects of such studies, if carefully selected or critically presented, can also contribute to undermining the Eurocentric narrative that typically locates the origins of (modern) ideas and practices in what Chakrabarty calls a “hyper-real” Europe, and then describes them as radiating out to the less dynamic precincts of the globe. The circuitous routes followed by the individuals or groups whose movements have been mapped by historians illustrate how problematic it is to regard “influence” as flowing in a single direction, as well as how much such assumptions rest on an essentialized view of the identity of bearers of ideas and practices. In addition, there is an often unacknowledged advantage to studying the movement of a body or bodies rather than, say, the circulation or peregrinations of an idea (for example, religious conversion). Although an individual or group’s identity and subject position may change in moving from one place to another, we still assume a degree of continuity or continuous subjectivity that makes the project of following in their footsteps an intellectually compelling one. In contrast, when tracing the itinerary of an idea, given the appropriations and adaptations any concept will undergo in its travels, it becomes difficult to know whether the thing being studied bears any relation to the version of it with which the project started.8 (See the chapters by Burton and by Vélez, Prange, and Clossey, this volume.)
For all their virtues, these studies of particular bodies moving over time and space present one substantial drawback with regard to the field of world history: they do not offer an adequate framework for a world history curriculum. One can imagine using such studies as stimulating supplements to more macrohistorical works, but a course entirely composed of such stories, no matter how well interpreted, is likely to leave the average classroom of North American undergraduates scratching their heads and wondering what they were supposed to derive from the course. These are, after all, microhistories – Scott actually entitled one version of her article “Microhistory set in motion” (2009) – and while they may contribute to a rethinking of macrohistorical questions, they can rarely support the entire weight of a wide-ranging historical narrative.
A potentially sturdier alternative is to map the application and expansion of particular institutions or forms of regulation. An especially notable example is Lauren Benton’s Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (2002). In this work, which she herself terms “institutional world history,” Benton examines a variety of locations and moments that witnessed innovations, conflicts, and negotiations over legal definitions, jurisdictions, and authority as colonizing powers sought to institute or invoke their hegemony in their colonies. Working with the concept of legal pluralism, Benton demonstrates that expanding authority did not entail a uniform application of legal codes originating from the hegemonic power – indeed, often the primary intention was to place subject peoples beyond the boundaries of legal rights and obligations. Conversely, colonized peoples might in one instance seek to be exempt from the legal exactions of the colonizer, and at another, demand to be included within the juridical penumbra of the empire. And since colonial legal regimes involved multiple jurisdictions and cultural contexts, they were also fertile points of exchange. According to Benton, “the law worked both to tie disparate parts of empires and to lay the basis for exchanges of all sorts between politically and culturally separate imperial or colonial powers” (2002: 3).
The advantages of this approach to world history, from both a scholarly and pedagogical vantage point, are many. Colonial legal regimes provide us with a coherent and capacious framework for thinking about diverse societies and their interactions, as well as enabling us to consider change over time as certain legal patterns – for example, evolving definitions of property rights – enact relations constitutive of intensifying capitalist economic arrangements. At the same time, the highly focused research method, with its emphasis on specific court cases or legal struggles, makes it possible for Benton to rely at least partly, and often heavily, on primary sources.9 Moreover, Benton describes her approach as suggesting “an important reorientation of world historical narratives” and insists that its “perspective clearly challenges Eurocentric world histories that emphasize the unique, progressive character of European institutions or that view global change as emanating exclusively from the dynamics of Western development” (2002: 6). In sum, Benton’s study fulfills all three of the “missions” outlined at the outset of this essay: (1) it draws on archival research and primary sources; (2) it maintains a concern with constructing a broad interpretive narrative, and (3) it challenges the established Eurocentric narrative of world history.
Benton’s Law and Colonial Cultures may well come as close as I can imagine to providing us with a full-fledged model for world-historical studies. However, lest this section close with what seems like a completely unreserved endorsement, I do want to express one small but significant reservation – or cite the reservation expressed by Steven Feierman (1999) in a different but analogous context. After a largely positive appraisal of historical studies focused on the hybridity of African culture in the colonial and postcolonial eras, Feierman indicates some qualms about the defining role of colonialism in the recent African historiography:
These innovative contributions are fascinating when taken individually, but they present a profound problem of historical representation when aggregated into a regional historical narrative. The studies of commodities (or of Christian sin) in one place, and then another, and then another can be aggregated only on the basis of their shared relationship to the relevant European category: they cannot be placed within a larger or more general African narrative. What is African inevitably appears in a form which is local and fragmented, and which has no greater depth than the time of colonial conquest, or the moment just before it. (1999: 185)
In her study Benton deliberately (and in my view, successfully) disputes a representation of European legal regimes as rational, uniform, and originating solely in the West, and refuses any invidious (and largely fictitious) contrast between customary law at the local level and philosophically informed legal precepts at the imperial level. But whenever European imperial expansion is the structuring historical process, we need to be especially alert to the dangers that Feierman identifies above.
There are currently two other areas of research that, while not avowedly operating in the realm of world history (indeed some of their practitioners overtly disavow any connection), are nonetheless producing work with obvious ramifications for world historians. One is the field of transnational history, and the other is the field of global history (or a particular version of it). Of the two, transnational history is by far the more influential and visible. A quick search for the term transnational in the 2010 program of the American Historical Association meetings produced 120 hits, and the 2011 program produced 135 hits. (A related but not identical trend is “trans-regional history,” but it is interesting to note that a search of the 2011 program produced only four papers or panels that used the term trans-regional.)
As with any approach that has attracted so many practitioners, there is no single, agreed-upon definition of what we mean by “transnational,” but I find particularly useful Micol Seigel’s distinction between international history (with its emphasis on interaction between nation-states) and transnational history, which “examines units that spill over and seep through national borders.” Indeed, Seigel contends that the core of the transnational approach “is the challenge it poses to the hermeneutic preeminence of nations” (2005: 63). Or to borrow Prasenjit Duara’s engaging phrase, it promises to “rescue history from the nation” (1997) – not by ignoring the nation as a category, but by refusing it the primacy and unity it enjoys in the more traditional historiography.
The virtues of the transnational approach for the world historian seeking to contest Eurocentrism are particularly evident if we follow Seigel’s reasoning and contrast it to international history. Virtually all current practitioners of world history would agree on the need to emphasize interaction and exchange, but if we are conceptualizing such interactions as taking place between fully formed and reified nations or societies, we are likely to end up focusing yet again on those nations that have traditionally dominated the historical landscape. One of the merits of the transnational approach is its inclination to go against this grain by demonstrating the way in which ideas, commodities, cultural forms, or political practices often associated with one (hegemonic) nation or set of nations actually reflect the innovations and adaptations worked by myriad groups in multiple locations. Whether we are discussing a cultural form such as jazz, or a controversial text such as Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, or an identity such as “middle class,” transnational history disposes us to cast our net widely, and to avoid automatically assigning greater historical significance to a particular actor or group of actors on the basis of their national location (Seigel 2009; Sinha 2006; López and Weinstein 2012).
At the same time, transnational history – to live up to its promise – requires a research plan that involves comparable degrees of engagement with primary sources in the different locales under discussion. To consult archival documents and print sources in one location and rely on syntheses of secondary sources elsewhere will surely produce a study that has a narrative/interpretive “core” and supplementary “peripheries.” This, in turn, implies that transnational historians – unless collaborating with a team of colleagues – cannot cast their nets too widely without compromising their commitment to transcending the national/historical framework. It is not, on its own, a substitute for (modern) world history since it does not offer a narrative framework for either a world history course or a world-historical research agenda, nor is that the intention. But one can imagine a thematic world history course that could be constructed out of carefully selected examples of transnational historical studies (Seigel 2004).
Although many scholars casually treat global history as a synonym for world history, a vocal group of academics, including Bruce Mazlish and Wolf Schäfer, have insistently defined global history as a very different field of study. According to Mazlish, unlike world history (which he tendentiously defines as “the whole history of the whole world”), global history should be understood as the history of globalization. (See Bright and Geyer, this volume.) The latter field can then be broken down into two camps – a “weak” definition that studies globalization in its longue duréeform, and a “strong” definition (Mazlish’s position) that sees the history of globalization as dating from the second half of the twentieth century. Although Mazlish acknowledges globalization’s longer roots, he argues that it is only since the 1970s that the degree of “synergy and synchronicity” has been sufficient “to justify the launch of a new periodization” (1998: 391).
The “weak” definition of global history could easily be folded into the larger enterprise of world history, but Mazlish and Schäfer contend that their definition of global history distinguishes it sharply from world history in two key respects.10 First, they cite novel developments in telecommunications, transportation, and, most recently, cyberspace that have shrunk time and distance and allowed certain events and processes to be experienced, for the first time, on a genuinely global scale. Thus, instead of what he sees as world historians’ interminably additive and undertheorized approach to the history of the world, Schäfer (1993) claims that the new global historians can construct a category of analysis that is “truly global” and engage with theoretical frameworks for understanding planetary phenomena. Second, according to Mazlish, global historians “know that each of the factors of globalization requires rigorous empirical study” and therefore “are trying to establish a more deliberate research agenda” (1998: 392).
These challenges and critiques are useful for world historians to ponder, but it strikes me that the global historians are both demanding too much theoretical and methodological coherence from the field of world history and claiming too much of it for themselves. Their argument about periodization has by no means been universally persuasive to their fellow historians, some of whom argue that there were equally intense processes of globalization in earlier periods (Bayly 2004), or counter that the world is actually becoming less “globalized” in the sense of increasingly fragmented cultures and deeply divergent standards of living (Cooper 2005). The very argument about synchronicity seems, itself, undertheorized: when Mazlish notes that over 3 billion human beings simultaneously watched the same Coca-Cola commercials during a recent Olympics, I immediately recall theories of reception and wonder to what extent we can say that they saw the same commercial, any more than we can claim that villagers undergoing conversion in different locations at different times embraced the same Christian god. And while I can easily envision doing empirical research on how Coca-Cola tailored its commercials to a vast global audience, and contributed to shaping the image of the global consumer, not even the most deliberate research agenda could adequately address the other side of the question on a global scale.
Perhaps more troubling is a certain tendency to treat contemporary globalization as a process that, by its very nature, reduces Eurocentrism. Aside from minimizing the significance of populations that are still stubbornly or unwillingly “off the grid,” this view overstates the democratic character of recent technological and organizational innovations, and understates the extent to which globalization might reinforce processes of normalization. Among the factors of globalization that Mazlish mentions (1998: 393) as requiring rigorous empirical study are nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and the United Nations, none of which would seem to challenge a Eurocentric vision of the world. He also notes that “with globalization has come the adoption of a uniform calendar,” but treats this as a neutral development with no implications for reproducing hierarchies of power and authority. Scholars of world history may not have figured out how to dismantle the master narrative of the West civilizing the World, but at least they widely recognize the need to grapple with it.
The point of this chapter has been to consider some of the ways in which historians laboring in the field of world history have attempted to make it a research-based as well as pedagogical enterprise, and have sought to construct narratives that can allow both scholars and students to have a sense of broader historical processes without reproducing the Eurocentrism that World History, as a field, was intended to undo. As I suspect is immediately obvious, it is easier to sketch out the problems and pitfalls of various approaches than it is to suggest solutions to the intellectual quandaries facing the field. For one thing, many of the impediments to the fuller realization of world history as a research field stem from institutional structures and disciplinary traditions that are deeply entrenched and difficult to challenge. Topics that would prove impractical for an individual historian to pursue, whether in terms of linguistic requirements or travel to archives, might be feasible if historians could collaborate in research teams the way scientists typically do. In the humanistic disciplines, such efforts are extremely rare; even the multi-authored world history text commonly consists of discrete contributions with a similar “slant,” rather than representing a genuinely collective undertaking that addresses a focused set of questions or phenomena. However appealing on the face of it, movement in the direction of more collective or collaborative research would require rethinking the historian’s craft as well as professional practices ranging from research funding to evaluations for tenure and promotion.
Though it would surely be presumptuous to prescribe any single research method or interpretive framework for addressing such a wide and complex range of scholarly issues, I do have a sense that some research agendas are more likely to be fruitful than others. Once again I would cite Benton’s Law and Colonial Cultures as indicating promising avenues for future research. Her argument about legal pluralism, on the one hand, and about an increasing state presence on the other, demonstrates how we can decenter a historical process without obscuring hierarchies of power and authority. Much the same approach is suggested in an essay that appeared in an issue of the Radical History Review devoted to rethinking world history: In “Pluralizing capital, challenging Eurocentrism” (2005) John Chalcraft argues for a de-essentialized and capacious definition of capitalism that can accommodate the variety of productive forms that have shaped the contours of capitalist economies, thereby moving away from a normative/linear model of capitalist development associated with the West. Once we shift to this more “generous” notion of productive relations, it becomes “too simple to say that Europe imposed the market and the commodity form on the rest of the world.” Furthermore, he argues that “the market was one of the things that the rest of the world both made by itself and appropriated from Europe” (2005: 27).
Although Chalcraft’s suggestive and somewhat polemical article cannot be compared to Benton’s deeply researched and fully realized monograph, my point here is simply to highlight their common concern with pluralizing forms and with the implications of that “pluralism” for the historical processes in which they are embedded. Neither author is arguing simply for paying attention to “local variation” – an approach that typically leaves the “core” of the process largely untouched. Rather, both are insisting that these plural forms become dynamic elements in the process of historical change. Finally, they both indicate ways to focus our scholarly inquiries so that they can lead to a feasible research agenda, and allow us, at the end of the day, to imagine a narrative, or set of narratives, that can counter the Eurocentric story line that so many of our students still carry in their heads (Seigel 2004).
Notes
1 As Levine (2000) reminds us, the Western Civ course is itself a relatively recent curricular innovation, not something that could be defended as a venerable tradition.
2 Vinay Lal (2005), in a very different vein, denounces world history as just the latest in a series of epistemological efforts by the West to impose its knowledge/power on the rest of the world. Since this critique could be extended to virtually any intellectual trend associated with the Western academy, I will simply note it and move on.
3 The University of Hawai’i has a doctoral program in world history that emphasizes the study of transregional phenomena. It also specifically does not offer a master’s in world history, a degree typically associated with classroom teaching rather than archival research. The University of Pittsburgh is also in the process of initiating a doctoral program in world history.
4 It seems obvious that there is a problematic ranking of societies involved in an approach that, for example, could easily incorporate material on the Aztec and Inca empires, but would be hard-pressed to include material on postindependence Latin America.
5 Given that Hodgson died in 1968 at the age of 46, the breadth and prescience of his work is simply astonishing.
6 For a much more extensive discussion of the comparative method and world history, see the chapter by Michael Adas, this volume.
7 It is worth noting, however, that Eric Van Young (1990; 2001), in his study, on a similar scale, of villages that did or did not join in the independence-era insurrections in Mexico, refuses any interpretive framework that could explain political behavior at the level of the individual community.
8 Another version of objects in motion is the commodity chain (Topik et al. 2006). In this case, the very point is to follow transformations and to use these to construct a narrative about the global economy. This makes the study of commodity chains an excellent pedagogical tool for world history courses, but this literature has not led to a significant rethinking of the Europe-centered “world-system.”
9 The same applies to Seed (1995), although her analysis of rituals, legal and symbolic, through which European powers enacted their authority over conquered territories in the New World is narrower and more static than Benton’s study.
10 It should be noted that Schäfer, in a subsequent article (2003), adopted a more conciliatory and collaborative stance toward the field of world history.
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