ADAM MCKEOWN
Imagine a textbook of United States history with the following table of contents:
America: From Continent to Nation
Part I: Early Societies in America
1. Alaska: The Bridge of Humanity
2. The Midwest and New England: Living with the Earth
3. New Mexico: Plateaus, River Canyons and the First Urbanization
Part II: Middle Grounds in the Middle Years, 1500–1776
4. New Mexico: A New Empire
5. The Midwest: Trappers and Confederacies
6. New England: Religion and Trade
7. Virginia: Home of Slavery and Liberty
Part III: A Nation Emerging, 1776–1914
8. New England: Immigrants and Elites
9. Virginia and Washington: Separate Traditions, Uncertain Unity
10. The Midwest: An Industrializing Heartland
11. California: The Western Shore
Part IV: Integration and Diversity, 1914–2010
12. Washington, DC: The Making of National Politics
13. New England: Tradition and Change
14. The Midwest: Rust and Race
15. California: The Flowering of New Cultures
Each chapter would cover important themes such as political institutions and ideologies, gender roles, economic development, technological achievements, and famous cultural benchmarks. Maps would situate the regions and states in national context, and sidebars would provide documents and pictures that illustrate the cultural and social specificities of each region. And thought-provoking study questions would ask students to compare and connect material from the different chapters.
We can also imagine some of the objections to this textbook. The most basic critique would be that it does not convey a sense of the history of the nation as a whole, but is merely a collection of state and regional histories loosely arranged around a narrative of the rise of the East coast and subsequent spread and transformations of its institutions and cultures. Other critiques might challenge the elite Northeastern-centric narrative as being too totalizing and overdetermined, and challenge our book to include a greater diversity of perspectives.
We could respond to these critiques in subsequent editions. The revisions could include short prefaces for each section that draw attention to major themes and outline the broader narrative about the integration of the nation. Additional maps could show flows of people and communication networks across the continent. New sidebars could describe processes that linked the nation and distinguished its parts: Currents and Climate, Native American Migrations, The Constitution, The Mississippi River, Presidential Elections, From Postal Service to Internet, Democrats and Republicans, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918, The Nation Goes to War, “Houston, We Can See the Nation.” Other sidebars could present primary materials that illustrate the perspectives of peoples such as the Navaho, Chinese-American laundrymen, French-Creole children, women’s suffrage workers, Yippies, Samoan football players, and illegal Mexican immigrants. We could also write new chapters that make the scope of the text more inclusive:
The South: A Slave Society
Indian Reservations: Making a Multijurisdictional Nation
The Great Plains: From Passageway to Heartland
From Puerto Rico to Guam: Defining Inclusion
We could even introduce entire chapters on thematic topics, especially for the twentieth century when technology made the process of national integration even stronger and more irreversible (albeit still dividing these chapters into subsections that show how different regions reacted):
The Civil War: Integration by Force
Strengthening an American State: Progressivism and the New Deal
An American Century? America in the World from World War I to Iraq
From Beatniks to Tea Partiers: Postwar Culture and Politics
Such changes would have to be made carefully. Reviewers and concerned parents will complain that crucial events and processes are being sacrificed for the sake of trendiness or a political agenda. Overworked teachers may find it hard to integrate the revisions into syllabi and teaching plans that they have built up over years. And armchair pundits will complain of an increasingly incoherent narrative. In the most general sense, the critics would be right. It would be an unwieldy and difficult textbook.
Fortunately, actual American history textbooks are much better structured (Brinkley 2008; Foner 2008). The chapters are not divided according to geographical spaces, but by themes and chronology. Typical chapters center on topics such as slavery; Western expansion; the growth of markets and industrialization; wars such as the Revolution, Civil War and World War II; political moments and movements such as Reconstruction, the New Deal, or Civil Rights; and even “eras” such as the Jacksonian era, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Depression or the Sixties. Regional variations are acknowledged, but rarely fundamental to the structure of the histories being related. The basic units of American history in these texts are periods, events and themes that coalesce around a single narrative of how the nation came to be what it is.
But our imagined textbook is not entirely a fantasy. This structure still shapes most world history textbooks. The basic units of these texts are territorial: world regions, empires or civilizations. Chapters are loosely grouped into chronological order, but rarely organized into a compelling narrative of how the world came to be as it is. This has been even more the case over the past generation, as the Rise of the West narrative has fallen out of favor. Attempts to move away from that narrative have certainly created more inclusive texts. Thematic sidebars, introductions that attempt to summarize developments across multiple areas and, especially for the earliest and most recent periods of history, thematic chapters have all been introduced to emphasize connections, comparisons and broad processes in world history. But other than a general sense of growing interconnectedness, no compelling narrative has emerged to replace the Rise of the West (See Bright and Geyer, this volume.) And even in books where those innovations are most thorough, geographic units still hold sway through subheadings and document choices (e.g., Fernández-Armesto 2009; Tignor et al. 2010).
There are many good reasons why it is easier to subject US history (or any national history) to a chronological approach than world history. These include the existence of a single national government with national policies, a dominant language and religion, a relatively unified media and civic sphere, and over two centuries of tireless work by amateur and professional historians to pull the scattered threads into a single narrative. A different mix of these factors – with more colonialist politics and an even greater exercise of the imagination thrown in – has also worked to produce coherent Western Civilization textbooks, and their close cousins, the area studies courses. The chronological and thematic units are so predominant in Western Civilization that the stability of geographical units becomes irrelevant as the narrative gradually sweeps from the eastern Mediterranean to North America. The power and deep institutionalization of these narratives and units can be seen in the fact that even the last generation of historians who have so tirelessly critiqued nationalist histories and the construction of area studies still for the most part identify themselves as national historians and area studies practitioners.
These very same factors have made it difficult to establish a world-historical narrative. They have divided the world into national and regional containers of history, all of which share common methodologies grounded in detail and particularism. These make it hard to construct any broader generalizations about global processes (although colonialism is a significant exception – one that has been incorporated as a common context for many national histories outside the West. (See Sinha, this volume.) Moreover, the early prestige of European models of national history and, by the early twentieth century, the Western Civilization narrative has compounded the problem by leaving the Rise of the West narrative as their greatest legacy to world history. Resistance against this narrative has generated productive new research and historical questions, in what has been called the “New World History” (Dunn 1999). Some critics have even responded to this legacy by rejecting world history narratives per se as inherently totalizing and Eurocentric master narratives (Dirlik 2003; Lal 2005; chapters by Weinstein and by Northrop, this volume. But see also Dirlik 2005 for an analysis more similar to mine). Most world historians, however, remain skeptical of a retreat into equally one-sided localism (Bentley 2005). But they have internalized this critique enough to remain wary of rashly constructing new narratives, and alternatives to the Rise of the West story have yet to cohere.
Is world history thus doomed to remain an array of geographical units without narrative or conceptual coherence other than a loose commitment to comparisons, connections, contacts and climate change? It may well be that world history works best by posing problems and critiques, rather than new narratives. Research by scholars grounded in various sorts of area studies training has, after all, been a fertile source of new challenges, ideas and perspectives in world history (Pomeranz 2007).
The logic of this new research, however, pushes us past the limits of the geographical units in which it is still largely grounded. Connective and critical world histories have shown the limitations of the traditional units of empires, civilizations, oceans and regions in understanding global processes (Dirlik 2005; Lewis and Wigen 1997). And if history is ultimately about the question of change over time and how we came to be where we are, world history cannot avoid narrative explanations. Historical explanations are grounded in complex specificities rather than laws, which makes narrative a key mode of exposition (Gaddis 2004; Manning 2003). The comparison and juxtaposition of local narratives does not necessarily add up to a world-historical explanation. It may well be that certain historical questions require global explanations, such as how and why Homo sapiens spread around the world, the different geographical diffusions of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, the effects of global population rise over the past 500 years, the origins and effects of the industrial revolution, or the spread of decolonization (Bentley 2003). But it is hard to imagine a genuinely global explanatory narrative emerging while our knowledge remains divided into familiar geographic units. The units that make up those narratives may instead have to be chronological, event-centered, network-centered, or rooted in geographical spaces other than those framed by area studies.
It is worth emphasizing that grand historical narratives – whether of a nation, a region or the world – are never meant to be a final explanation, or the sum of all knowledge. To be sure, the institutionalization of textbooks and history curricula sometimes makes it seem as if they are. But among practicing historians, narratives are most notable for their instability and incompleteness (see Getz, this volume). They are heuristic tools, under constant modification. They provide frameworks that help shape new questions and research problems. Few historians aim to merely reiterate a dominant narrative in their research. A successful work of history, at least as written by professional historians, generally aims to elaborate, modify, rethink, challenge and even undermine “dominant” narratives.
Here, we can take a lesson from work done under the rubric of national histories. Narratives of US history, for example, can create broad contexts and issues that invest local studies with greater significance. Those local studies, in return, earn much of their relevance by the extent to which they are able to modify our perception of these national narratives. A history of industrialization in Cleveland, the New York draft riots, Hmong immigrants in Wisconsin, or the spread of air conditioners may all be of interest to readers with a direct connection to those places or peoples, as well as to other readers with eclectic curiosities or theoretical concerns. But every one of these topics also gains greater relevance and reach by situating itself as a contribution to understanding better how the United States, as a whole, came to be what it is.
And this relevance need not come merely in the form of case studies that add detail and variation to our existing knowledge. Indeed, many of the best contributions aim to undermine or radically revise existing narratives. This has been the main achievement of the last four decades of social, ethnic and gender history – to incorporate slavery, women, Asians, popular culture and any other number of new dimensions into the grand narrative of American history. And it is precisely this concern with the grand narrative that has put these many specialized researches into conversation with one another as part of a larger project.
When engaging with a grand narrative, we must also remain aware of what can and cannot be known at different scales of analysis – both temporal and spatial – and what questions can best be answered at those scales. To some extent this is a matter of selectivity. Just as the historian of Potosí need not know the history of every mine, church and individual in the city in order to write a convincing narrative, so the historian of Bolivia need not know the history of every city in Bolivia, and a historian of the world need not know the histories of every nation, empire and trade diaspora. Similarly, nobody expects a generalization about industrialization in the United States to apply equally to Chicago, Georgia and the Hopi Indian reservation. Indeed, one may doubt that such a generalization could be applied to the Hopis at all. Nonetheless, it would be impossible to understand the Hopis without some awareness of the contexts of American (and global) industrialization (Pomeranz 2007).
This awareness also applies to temporal scales. Individual human decisions are of less relevance at longer and longer time scales, except as components of mass statistical aggregates. But many particularities, such as the divergence of national policies and individual wars, must ultimately be explained by human decisions – perhaps even those of single persons. These particularities all have had an effect over the subsequent course of history. But merely collecting examples of policy choices and decisions to go to war will not help us to understand the long-term processes of the creation of an international system or the buildup of conflicting interests that frames the possible choices and decisions. These have to be understood at a longer time frame, often beyond the life of a single, decision-making human.
This awareness of scale is about more than just different levels of generalization. Different scales of analysis also highlight different historical processes. The common criticism that grand narratives get the details of local histories wrong is often beside the point. A grand narrative looks at long-term trends and patterns. To claim the existence of a broad trend is not to claim that every place and everybody behaves the same. It is to claim that over time certain choices, actions, institutions and patterns become more and more likely, thus shaping the probable directions of subsequent change. Outliers, rebels and variations can coexist perfectly well with broad trends, and may even help instigate some of the most notable changes. Immanuel Kant commented on this in 1784, when he noted that actions such as marriage and birth may seem to be so dependent on human free will and contingency that they would be impossible to reckon in advance. And “Yet … they occur according to laws as stable as [those of] the unstable weather” (Kant 1963).
At the same time, the grand narratives must take care not to go to the opposite extreme and discount local particularities. In part this is because the large-scale view often cannot account for local particularities and processes that may be of great importance in daily human life. But it is also because one of the major sources of historical change may well be specific and local events that, for whatever contingent reasons, cascade into developments of regional, national and global significance. The very methods of large-scale, aggregate analysis tend to obscure these possibilities.
Let me give an example from my own research on migration from the 1840s to 1930s to show how different processes emerge at different scales of analysis (McKeown 2010). At the largest aggregate levels of over 20 million journeys over a period of 100 years, mass migrations out of Europe, China and India showed remarkably similar cycles of return and female migration, patterns that converged over time. If we break down any one of those mass flows into smaller flows defined by destination or region of origin, the correspondence is much weaker and very little convergence can be observed. This disparity grows stronger when we move down to the levels of villages and extended family. And we finally come to a point of absolute difference when we compare the lifetimes of the individual brother who did not migrate with the brother who did.
No one of these scales of analysis is the “true” scale. Instead, each scale illuminates different processes. The largest mass scale shows the effects of an increasingly integrated world economy on migration. Fluctuations in the smaller regional flows more strongly reflect historical events, national policies and economic contingencies that impacted those migrations. At the level of village, these contingencies are even more strongly shaped by the fates and fortunes of individual migrants who were able to establish a beachhead and new migrant networks. Finally, at the level of two brothers with their entirely opposite responses to similar structural conditions, we must resort to psychology or the specifics of family dynamics if we are to offer any explanation. We could also further expand the scale temporally, beyond the specifics of mass migration in the age of industry, to attempt larger generalizations of humans as a “migratory species” (Manning 2005).
The division of labor in science offers a good metaphor to understand the nature of knowledge at different scales. The principles of quantum mechanics underlie the structure of atoms and molecules, which then make up chemicals, substances and tissues come together to form organs and organisms, which then form populations, ecosystems and human societies. Any change in quantum mechanical principles would surely alter the nature of ecosystems and human societies. But nobody would ever propose to study ecosystems through the principles of quantum mechanics. An understanding of how ecosystems operate depends on setting limits to relevant information, devising appropriate methods and formulating appropriate questions. The relevant units for ecosystems are not electrons, neutrons and photons, but populations, environments, symbiotic relationships and moments of evolutionary change.
The need for different questions and relevant information is equally true for different scales of historical analysis. His family life and education would be an indispensable part of a biography of Mao Zedong. It is of less significance in a history of China or of the Chinese Communist Party, and of almost negligible interest in a history of the global communist movement. By the same token, a history of the global communist movement, or even a history of China, cannot really explain why millions of students beat their teachers and millions of city dwellers were sent to the countryside in China in the 1960s. To understand this, we would have to highlight Mao’s political tactics as part of the explanation, which might then bring us back to his personality and personal background. Although the questions, data, and assumptions (such as agency or structure as motive forces in history) at one scale of analysis do not always seem relevant, or even valid, at other scales, they are all linked through complex relationships.
Jared Diamond’s popular book Guns, Germs and Steel (1999) offers another example of the different kinds of knowledge that emerge at different scales of analysis (see chapters by Yoffee and Adas, this volume). Diamond provides a well-constructed and plausible argument for why economic development was more probable in the east–west Eurasian axis than in other parts of the world. Briefly put, the Eurasian axis was a space that facilitated greater levels of interaction and mutual learning, which made development more probable. He develops this argument with a mix of epidemiological, evolutionary, environmental, geographical and historical evidence. He goes wrong, however, in the final chapter where he extends his method to explain why Europe rather than other parts of Eurasia had an industrial revolution. His methods and arguments fail at this smaller scale. More standard historical methods that pay attention to social, political, institutional, cultural and economic specifics are necessary at this scale. An engagement with Diamond on the 10,000-year Eurasian scale, on the other hand, would require different tools such as evolutionary theory, an ability to challenge Diamond’s claims about the qualities of certain crops and animals, and an understanding of the long-term patterns and effects of cultural and technological interaction (Bulliet 2005).
For most historians, of course, a scale that encompasses the histories of different parts of Eurasia over a period of even 2,000 rather than 10,000 years is already well beyond their comfort zones. We are still a long way from any consensus on the narratives, questions and units that are appropriate for a world historical analysis. They will not necessarily be the same as those for national and regional histories. Topics like environment, climate, the global political order, the spread of religions and the movement of goods, peoples and ideas are sure to remain fundamental features of world-historical research. But we should not restrict ourselves to the most obviously global and connective topics and units.
The units we use to make sense of these processes are not necessarily the big units. We often tend to think in terms of a nested spatial hierarchy of units, from individuals to locales to nations to regions to the global, in which only the latter will be relevant to world history. But the specific units and topics of most relevance to world-historical research may often be quite small: a volcano eruption of a few days; a trading diaspora of a few hundred people; the construction and suppression of piracy; an international conference; a few maritime craftsmen, nomadic raiders or isolated missionaries; casual intimacies leading to the spread of syphilis; the history of passports; a multinational corporation; or the spread of the T-shirt. These may often seem to be, variously, of either negligible or enormous relevance to particular regional or national histories. But that should not be the metric by which we judge these topics. Rather, we should look at how they shape our understanding of the long-term processes that made the world as it is.
Periodization and chronology will also play a role in developing world-historical narratives, and temporal categories are no less crucial in writing world history. Debates over global periodization could revolve around questions such as the ebb and flow of nomadic power, the possibility of common cycles of state expansion and contraction, the relevance of the Black Death in producing new patterns of global interaction, the existence of a global seventeenth-century crisis, or the timing of the great divergence between Europe and the world. Such debates may often seem irrelevant to the questions formulated in the contexts of regional and local history. But again, that should not be the marker by which we judge their value. Rather it should be their potential to construct a better understanding of global history. Regardless of whether any particular periodization earns consensus, they are an excellent way to get scholars talking to each other across regional divides.
The geographic units of most relevance to world history may also be fundamentally different than those empires, civilizations and area studies units that still commonly divide world history textbooks. For example, the Kushan Empire, which existed in what is now Afghanistan and northern Pakistan from the second century BCE to the third century CE, had little political legacy and is rarely discussed in textbooks. But it was an important crucible for the mixing of Greek, Indic, Central Asian and Chinese cultures, and was a key space for facilitating the Silk Road trade and the formulation of Mahayana Buddhism as an expansive religion. Other geographical spaces, such as the highlands that cross Southeast Asia, China and India (especially for prehistoric periods), the network of early modern port cities that stretched from Amsterdam to Nagasaki, or the zone of Turkic-speaking peoples, are also examples of spaces that lie at the margins of most area studies but are of great importance to the processes and stories of world history.
Being historians who always build on the work of others, perhaps we should look to past and present practice in imagining appropriate units. What units and methods are now being used in world-historical research and teaching, and what are their potential and limitations? The following sections are not meant to be an exhaustive survey, but to give a sense of some of the broad possibilities in world-historical research.
Comparison and Connection
Comparison and connection are both deeply rooted in existing historical method and units. Both start with existing frames of historical knowledge and try to generate new understanding by juxtaposing and linking them. Diego Olstein (2009) calls comparative history the “pivot of historiography” because it brings together diachronic narratives of national history monographs with the more synchronic concerns of macrohistory and sociology (see also Tilly 1984). Connective histories, entangled histories and histoire croisée are the close siblings of comparative histories (Lepenies 2003; Manning 2003; Subrahmanyam 2005; Werner and Zimmermann 2004). They are a bit more daring in their greater willingness to transcend territorial boundaries and work from the bottom up. They sometimes present themselves as alternatives to comparative history. But the units to be connected are precisely those civilizational, national and regional units that make up comparative history.
Comparative and connective histories have been extremely fruitful in generating world-historical research and writing. William McNeill’s Rise of the West (1963), generally seen as a founding text of the New World History, used both of these techniques in the service of a narrative focused on civilizations and how they responded to diffusing ideas and techniques. More recently, early modern historians have put these methods to effective use in challenging the “rise of the West” narrative. Comparative works have shown that economic activity, trade, living standards, legal formations, frontier expansion and cycles of state consolidation were far more similar across Europe and parts of Asia than had previously been appreciated (Bayly 1989; Benton 2002; Lieberman 2009; Pomeranz 2000; Richards 2006). Connective histories have brought non-European actors into the mix as important agents of interaction, and made provocative cases for the significance of early modern economic and cultural exchange in shaping the order of the early modern world (Alexandrowicz 1967; Flynn and Giráldez 2002; Fletcher 1985; Frank 1998; Subrahmanyam 2005). Taken together, this work has invested new life into questions about the origins of the industrial revolution, reduced the significance of Europeans as the main agents of early modern global integration, demonstrated the emergence of increasingly similar legal and political structures, and made the question of the ultimate rise of the West all the more perplexing.
Most of the historians engaged in this research were trained professionally in areas of Asian history. The conceptual advances against the old rise of the West narratives have not come in the form of cutting-edge, anti-Orientalist theorizing, but in the application of traditional methods of documentary analysis and political and economic history. The mere act of not starting from an assumption about European difference, but of testing that assumption, has produced astonishing results. It has also meant that questions and narratives developed in the context of European history nevertheless continue to project a long shadow over comparative and connective history.
The grounding of these historians in area studies also means that they tend to be conservative in making generalizations that cross the familiar civilizational borders. The best of this work is very nuanced in the choice of units to be compared, moving between smaller regions such as the English Midlands or the Yangtze Delta, and the broader context such as the European state system or Chinese empire when relevant (Goldstone 2002). But even the connective historians (with the exception of those trained in economics) are very wary about suggesting generalizations that cross the usual area studies boundaries or that might suggest a global historical narrative. The aim of most of these historians does not appear to be the construction of a world-historical narrative so much as using their regional histories as a basis from which to critique Europe-centered world-historical narratives and rethink their own regional histories using the tools derived from European historical questions. Comparative and connective history does not yet seem equipped to provide innovative new units and approaches that are appropriate to a global historical scale.
Zones and Systems
Connections are central to various proposals for alternative geographic units such as zones of interaction, ecumenes, middle grounds, borderlands, systems and world systems (Braudel 1996; Chaudhuri 1985; Hodgson 1993). These units tend to center on large empty places such as oceans and deserts (although rarely jungles and arctic zones) across which different peoples and states frequently interact. The vast scholarship surrounding the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds (and the anxieties about the coherence of these units that accompany this scholarship) are the best-developed examples in recent years, although the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Central Asia, Sahara, maritime Southeast Asia and Dar-al-Islam are not far behind. The virtue of these units is that they simultaneously draw attention to integration through interaction, and to the social and cultural diversity that persists and is even generated in the context of this interaction. They show that world history is as much about the framing of difference as about integration. Difference is taken for granted not as the product of isolated histories, but as the product of an interactive history.
World-systems theory, pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s, is the most ambitious of these approaches, and still the most systematic attempt to establish a global historical narrative and scale of analysis (Flint and Taylor 2005; Wallerstein 2000). (See Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume.) It posits a world divided between tribute and tribal systems until the sixteenth century, when a capitalist world-system emerged in Europe. The modern capitalist system expanded to incorporate the entire world by the late nineteenth century (although see Frank 1991 and 1998 for an alternative narrative of a single system throughout history). The institutional and economic structures of all societies are fundamentally shaped by their position within this system. And those structures and relationships also change over time with the cycles of expansion and contraction within the system. In this way, world-systems approaches effectively transcend national and regional boundaries and places connections at the heart of world history.
World-systems theory has not, however, achieved an effective synergy with national and regional historical traditions. Regional historians resist what they see as the overly programmatic and structural account offered by world-systems theory, which often fails to produce good accounts of the complexities of local and mid-scale (under 50 years, or national units) histories. They also complain that it leaves little room for local agency and contingency. World-systems theorists have tended to respond by digging in their heels and further demonstrating the relevance of their models to understanding long-term trends. More recently, Wallerstein has also developed an extended critique of the forms of knowledge within the world-system. This includes an argument that the fragmentation of knowledge between the disciplines and area studies serves to obscure understanding of the system as a whole and uphold power relations (Wallerstein 2000). Compelling as these analyses may be, they only further close off the prospect of a working relationship between world-systems researchers and more mainstream historians and area scholars. Historians and world-systems theorists have reached a methodological impasse, each holding firm at opposite sides of the scalar divide.
More productive challenges have come from historians willing to work at a global level. For example, the early modern historians discussed above have seriously challenged the world-system narrative of a capitalist system that spread out from Europe to incorporate external areas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They have shown that the economies beyond Europe and connections between Europe and Asia were much more dynamic and complex than depicted in Wallerstein’s account. Indeed Wallerstein’s history of the modern world-system is deeply rooted in the same form of a rise of the West narrative that he otherwise so thoroughly critiques in its substance. I suspect that historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries willing to work at a broader, aggregate level can also find discrepancies with the patterns described by world-systems theory (McKeown 2008). The hope is that, rather than being used to discredit world-systems theory, these findings can be used to develop a better narrative – a narrative that appreciates the power of world-systems in formulating questions, drawing attention to connections as a systemic context for the production of difference, and interrogating the ways in which standard categories of knowledge exist in collaboration with a fragmented world.
Other kinds of systemic and zonal approaches tend to be looser in their claims than world-systems theory, providing space for a variety of possible outcomes and complexities. But this comes at the expense of imagining a global history narrative. As is the case with area studies research, work on one zone tends to happen in isolation from work on other zones and the borders around those zones can become calcified rather quickly. Then we once again fall into the same cycle of trying to find connections between the established zones of interaction, and to bring places at the margins of those zones more into the center. Zonal research draws our attention to the kinds of dynamics that are crucial to world history, but stops short of reaching for the narratives and questions that are most appropriate for large-scale research.
Globalization
The idea of globalization offers an alternative to approaches that are rooted in geographic units. A history of globalization would focus attention on the diverse causes and consequences of connectivity, and is an inherently time-based narrative. It would have to be grounded in units other than the primarily geographical ones discussed above. These could include chronological units based on periodization, and content-based units focused on types of flows, such as investment, trade, people, ideas, communication networks, etc. A history of globalization could also be easily mapped on to concepts such as convergence, diffusion and divergence that have long shaped the work of global historians (Crossley 2008).
The idea of globalization brings much baggage, however, and few historians seem willing to adopt it (see Bright and Geyer, this volume). It is a highly presentist buzzword, often deployed in a way that insists on the newness of the phenomenon. It also evokes strong emotional and political reactions, both from those who see it as an agenda of exploitation, and from those who see it as an essentially benign process that brings the benefits of technology, information and free markets to all. Both of these reactions are grounded in images of homogenizing forces that overwhelm local histories. Even in more thoughtful accounts, globalization is often depicted as an undifferentiated bundle, as if flows of people, money, ideas, communication and goods naturally moved in conjunction with each other in all times and places.
This baggage, however, also carries some basic tools and opportunities. If historians want to be relevant to the contemporary world, how better than to critically engage with a concept that fundamentally shapes our understanding of the world today? Historians are the ones who can show the effects of past globalizations, moderate the hyperbole, add complexity to the more simplistic claims, and clarify what is specific about the current moment. At the same time, historians can also learn from some of the more nuanced analyses of contemporary globalization that show how processes of regionalization, differentiation and new identity formation come hand in hand with contact and interaction (Appadurai 1996; Robertson 1992).
An example of the kind of nuance a historical perspective can bring is the effects of flows of information about legitimate political forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The mid-twentieth century is often seen as a period of deglobalization, when the massive flows of goods, money and people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had receded. But if we look at the diffusion of political structures, the mid-twentieth century is actually one of the most powerful moments of globalization ever. As late as the 1900s, the world was still covered by a plethora of political forms: nation-states, city-states, empires old and new, dominions, protectorates, territories, colonies, princedoms, tribal areas, etc. But throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, channels of information – as well as gunboats and colonizing armies – carried information about the institutions, symbols, practices and desirability of effective nation-states able to control their borders, engage in diplomatic relations, and otherwise engage in the same activities as similar states around the world. By the early 1960s, over 90 percent of the world was organized into nation-states of a kind that could be recognized by their peers and accepted into the United Nations. This was perhaps the most effective example of homogenizing globalization in human history. Yet it came hand in hand with the nationalist economic policies, border controls and restricted material flows that are often understood as the opposite of globalization (McKeown 2008; Thomas et al. 1987).
The idea of globalization has already generated productive debates about periodization. The early nineteenth century is seen as a crucial moment, often pointed to as the start of the great divergence and a new era of mass globalization characterized by expanding industrial markets, price convergence, rapidly increasing mass communications, the establishment of an international system of nation-states and an omnipresent conviction of living in a new era that the world had never experienced before (Hopkins 2002; McKeown 2007; O’Rourke and Williamson 2002). Such a periodization has significant effects on how we understand contemporary globalization. If the present can be understood as the continued unfolding of processes that have been in place for two centuries (which includes the consolidation of regional identities and borders, as well as the expansion of global flows), this should have serious consequences for our understanding of the effects and nature of current flows.
Acceptance of a nineteenth-century turning point will also have significant implications for how we interpret global connections in the earlier past. Were the global flows of silver, prestige items, weapons and soldiers, drugs, foods, new crops, trade diasporas, religious practices, ideas of kingship and common practices for treating foreigners actually not globalization? Or can they be understood as a different kind of globalization, one that grew hand in hand with a political landscape of universal empires and entrepôts rather than nation-states, one in which the cultural and social effects of interaction had dimensions other than the economic ones that dominate in the more recent era? And were the forms of exchange different in the Mongol era, during the age of classical empires, or earlier?
Such debates are crucial for the construction of a world history. Even if we ultimately jettison the idea of globalization (or, what is more likely, turn it into something that is entirely unrecognizable from its current form), consideration of that idea provides a context for productive discussions about processes that cross geographic boundaries. Out of these debates may come the rudiments of a narrative structure, some basic chronological and thematic units and, most importantly, further research questions at a scale different from those generated in area studies and European history.
Humanity
At first glance, humanity is both the most obvious and the most platitudinous unit of world history. Of course world history is about the history of human species, and how we came to be where we are. But this assertion gives us few guidelines about how to actually go about telling and analyzing that story.
This skeptical reaction perhaps says more about the limitations of historical method than about the category itself. Telling the history of humanity can actually be a most exciting challenge for world history, one that compels us to be interdisciplinary and search for new methods and modes of knowledge. This is the case when we understand the category of humanity not as defining the outer limits of our research, but as just a small part of a much larger living and physical environment.
The starting point for a compelling history of humanity is the question of what makes us human: when does “humanity” start, and how do we relate to other organisms and physical processes? These questions can never be definitively answered. But they are questions that can only be approached with knowledge of anthropology, evolution, linguistics, brain science, genetics, biology, environmental science and a host of other disciplines (Buchanan 2000; Bulliet 2005; Christian 2005; Smail 2008; Spier 2011; Wilson 2003). They are questions that transform the scale of humanity from an overwhelmingly large and substanceless platitude, to just a small portion of the diversity of life and the universe.
Once the scale of humanity is reduced like this, it become more possible to see the kinds of units and questions that can help us to understand humanity as a life form. When and how did humans come to cover and transform the Earth? What are the effects of language and writing? How have humans transformed the environment and their fellow life forms, and vice versa? What forms of social organization and relationships are distinctive to humanity? (For example, humans tend to distribute their reproductive burdens relatively evenly across multiple families rather than delegating them to one or two queens – as with bees – or to a single dominant male with his harem.) How has cultural evolution and learning shaped our physical distribution and evolution?
Many of these questions can be found in world history textbooks. But they are usually restricted to a small portion of the first chapter, because they threaten to overwhelm the kinds of questions that concern most historians. This need not be the case. Situating human history as part of world history (with the world understood as something that includes more than just humans), or even as part of a “big history” that stretches beyond the Earth, provides the rudiments for a narrative about how humans have interacted with the nonhuman world (see Spier, this volume). Rather than minimizing the importance of humans, it highlights their impact, situates that impact in time and space, and even draws attention to the last 200 years of massive, sometimes exponential growth in energy and resource consumption (Christian 2005). This, then, establishes a context from which we can return to and generate extra significance for more familiar questions about globalization, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, patterns and effects of global trade, and global inequality.
Note
Thanks to the participants in the Summer Dissertation Workshop in World History, University of Pittsburgh, June, 2010 for helping me to think through the ideas in this chapter. As far as I can tell, few if any of them would agree with all of my arguments here, especially my neglect of empire. But their engagement and challenges helped me to think more clearly.
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