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The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers
The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers
The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers
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The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers

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The New World History is a comprehensive volume of essays selected to enrich world history teaching and scholarship in this rapidly expanding field. The forty-four articles in this book take stock of the history, evolving literature, and current trajectories of new world history. These essays, together with the editors’ introductions to thematic chapters, encourage educators and students to reflect critically on the development of the field and to explore concepts, approaches, and insights valuable to their own work. The selections are organized in ten chapters that survey the history of the movement, the seminal ideas of founding thinkers and today’s practitioners, changing concepts of world historical space and time, comparative methods, environmental history, the “big history” movement, globalization, debates over the meaning of Western power, and ongoing questions about the intellectual premises and assumptions that have shaped the field.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 23, 2016
ISBN9780520964297
The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers

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    The New World History - Ross E. Dunn

    THE NEW WORLD HISTORY

    THE CALIFORNIA WORLD HISTORY LIBRARY

    Edited by Edmund Burke III and Laura J. Mitchell

    1. The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F. Richards

    2. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian

    3. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho

    4. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf

    5. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker

    6. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, by Jeremy Prestholdt

    7. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall

    8. Island World: A History of Hawai‘i and the United States, by Gary Y. Okihiro

    9. The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz

    10. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones, by Gary Y. Okihiro

    11. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, by Robert Finlay

    12. The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, by Sebastian Conrad; translated by Alan Nothnagle

    13. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914, by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi

    14. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, by Marcello Carmagnani

    15. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 , by Julia A. Clancy-Smith

    16. History and the Testimony of Language, by Christopher Ehret

    17. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, by Sebouh David Aslanian

    18. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route, by Steven E. Sidebotham

    19. The Haj to Utopia: The Ghadar Movement and Its Transnational Connections, 1905–1930, by Maia Ramnath

    20. Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History, by Arash Khazeni

    21. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World, by Kevin P. McDonald

    22. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, by Marc Matera

    23. The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers , edited by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward

    THE NEW WORLD HISTORY

    A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers

    EDITED BY

    Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward

    UC Logo

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Oakland, California

    © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Dunn, Ross E., editor. | Mitchell, Laura Jane, 1963– editor. | Ward, Kerry, editor.

    Title: The new world history : a field guide for teachers and researchers / edited by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward.

    Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Series: The California World History Library ; 23 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2016021166 (print) | LCCN 2016020076 (ebook) |

    ISBN 9780520964297 (e-edition) | ISBN 9780520293274 (cloth : alk. paper) |

    ISBN 9780520289895 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    Subjects: LCSH: World history—Historiography.

    Classification: LCC D13 (print) | LCC D13 .N454 2016 (ebook) | DDC 907.2—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021166

    Manufactured in the United States of America

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    CONTENTS

    Preface

    INTRODUCTION

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 1 WORLD HISTORY OVER TIME: THE EVOLUTION OF AN INTELLECTUAL AND PEDAGOGICAL MOVEMENT

    Introduction

    The Rise of World History Scholarship

    Craig A. Lockard

    World History

    Marnie Hughes-Warrington

    Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course

    Gilbert Allardyce

    Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Hemispheric Interregional Approach to World History

    Edmund Burke III

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 2 DEFINING WORLD HISTORY: SOME KEY STATEMENTS

    Introduction

    Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to World History

    Marshall G. S. Hodgson

    The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years

    William H. McNeill

    Depth, Span, and Relevance

    Philip D. Curtin

    A Plea for World System History

    Andre Gunder Frank

    Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History

    Jerry H. Bentley

    World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

    Merry Wiesner-Hanks

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 3 REGIONS IN WORLD-HISTORICAL CONTEXT

    Introduction

    The Middle East and North Africa in World History

    Julia A. Clancy-Smith

    No Longer Odd Region Out: Repositioning Latin America in World History

    Lauren Benton

    Southeast Asia in World History

    Craig A. Lockard

    American History as if the World Mattered (and Vice Versa)

    Carl Guarneri

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 4 RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL SPACE

    Introduction

    The Architecture of Continents: The Development of the Continental Scheme

    Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen

    Southernization

    Lynda Shaffer

    Oceans of World History: Delineating Aquacentric Notions in the Global Past

    Rainer F. Buschmann

    Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities

    Alison Games

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 5 RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL TIME

    Introduction

    Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History

    Jerry H. Bentley

    When Does World History Begin? (And Why Should We Care?)

    David Northrup

    History and Science after the Chronometric Revolution

    David Christian

    Worlding History

    Daniel A. Segal

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 6 WORLD HISTORY AS COMPARISON

    Introduction

    Global and Comparative History

    Michael Adas

    Frameworks for Global Historical Analysis

    Patrick Manning

    How to Write the History of the World

    Lauren Benton

    What Is World History Good For?

    Kenneth Pomeranz

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 7 DEBATING THE QUESTION OF WESTERN POWER

    Introduction

    Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture

    Kenneth Pomeranz

    The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity

    Joseph M. Bryant

    Capitalist Origins, the Advent of Modernity, and Coherent Explanation: A Response to Joseph M. Bryant

    Jack A. Goldstone

    Comparison in Global History

    Prasannan Parthasarathi

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 8 WORLD HISTORY, BIG HISTORY, AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

    Introduction

    The Columbian Exchange

    Alfred W. Crosby

    Matter Matters: Towards a More Substantial Global History

    Frank Uekötter

    The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?

    Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill

    Big History: The Emergence of a Novel Interdisciplinary Approach

    Fred Spier

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 9 GLOBAL HISTORY AND GLOBALIZATION

    Introduction

    Global History: Approaches and New Directions

    Maxine Berg

    Comparing Global History to World History

    Bruce Mazlish

    Cycles of Silver: Globalization as Historical Process

    Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez

    What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective

    Frederick Cooper

    Further Reading

    CHAPTER 10 CRITIQUES AND QUESTIONS

    Introduction

    Global History and Critiques of Western Perspectives

    Dominic Sachsenmaier

    Much Ado about Something: The New Malaise of World History

    Vinay Lal

    Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History

    Jerry H. Bentley

    Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multicentric World History Needs Africa

    Joseph C. Miller

    Women’s and Men’s World History? Not Yet

    Judith P. Zinsser

    Histories for a Less National Age

    Kenneth Pomeranz

    Further Reading

    Teaching World History, Further Reading

    Credits

    Index

    PREFACE

    In 1997 Ross Dunn contracted with Bedford/St. Martin’s to edit a collection of essays on the development of world history as an educational and research field and on the problems of conceptualizing, constructing, and teaching the subject in colleges and universities. A twenty-five-year veteran of the world history program at San Diego State University, he agreed with his Bedford/St. Martin’s editors that the field had matured to a point where publication of a selection of outstanding scholarly essays and book excerpts was worthwhile. In the preface to The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, which appeared in 2000, Dunn wrote that the book aimed to signify how rich and inventive the world history field has become and to explore several different dimensions of its development, mainly in the United States, in the twentieth century and especially since the 1960s.

    The New World History had been out for only a few years when colleagues starting asking Dunn to produce an updated edition, owing to the accelerating growth of world history education and scholarship. He was not in a position to take on the job for a number of years, and he decided that when he did, he wanted a partner or two. Thus, in due course he invited Laura Mitchell, who teaches African and world history at the University of California, Irvine, to collaborate with him as coeditor. More recently, Laura and he recruited Kerry Ward, an Africanist, Southeast Asianist, and world history teacher at Rice University, to join the team.

    As work on the project progressed, the three of us found ourselves amazed by the expansion of the field since 2000, not only in the volume of writing but also in the appearance of new subdisciplines, new theoretical statements, new periodicals, and many new programs and institutions, not only in the United States but also in several other countries. We also noted that some of the issues that had provoked much debate in the 1990s or earlier—introductory world history versus Western Civ, the problems of starting a new course on a campus, alternative syllabus designs, the pros and cons of world systems theory—no longer commanded as much attention in the new century. Consequently, we concluded that new essays should replace many, though not all, of the ones in the 2000 volume. This meant that we also had to rethink the chapter categories into which readings were to be grouped and to write a new general introduction, as well as new introductions to all the chapters. In short, we transformed the 2000 book into a new and very different publication.

    This transformation has been shaped by our conversations—both sustained and fleeting, in formal panels and in social contexts—at meetings of the World History Association (WHA). We are grateful for the institutional structure of a scholarly society that facilitates wide-ranging inquiry and detailed attention to pedagogy. Without the WHA, the intellectual engagements necessary for this kind of book would not have been possible.

    Laura Mitchell brought the project to the attention of Niels Hooper, executive editor at the University of California Press. The press has an outstanding and growing world history list, including books of interest to student readers. Hooper responded enthusiastically. In collaboration with Bradley Depew, David Peattie, and other UC Press editors, and with the advice of anonymous reviewers, he guided this project to completion. As the submission date grew near, the three of us faced the painful task of deleting some of the excellent essays from our working list. This is to be a one-volume publication, our editors reminded us, not two! We are nonetheless able to provide a robust selection of existing scholarship thanks to a generous subvention from Alida Metcalf, history department chair at Rice University, to support payment for reprint permissions. We are grateful for the university’s material assistance and vote of confidence in this project. We believe that the forty-four selections offered here represent a cogent sampling of literature that addresses the history, methodology, criticism, and pedagogy of a vibrant research and teaching field.

    INTRODUCTION

    Colleges and universities in the United States have taught world history, defined one way or another, since the nineteenth century. Out of the curriculum of the early Republic, which was centered on holy scripture and the classics, emerged general history, a course of study designed for the multitude of both native-born and immigrant Americans entering post-primary education after the Civil War. The one-year general history course, taught in either high school or college, was the story of humankind defined unabashedly as the progressive evolution of peoples of Caucasian race and Christian faith to world dominion. As an approach to teaching, it encouraged students to exercise interpretive judgment, but it also demanded a good deal of fact drilling. In the 1890s two scholarly commissions disparaged the course for stifling the historical imaginations of young Americans.¹ Endorsing the recommendations of the commissions, the secondary schools largely abandoned general history after 1900, replacing it with a solid four-year block of courses in classical, medieval/modern, English, and American history.

    History’s reign over the humanities curriculum was glorious but brief. After World War I, the world history survey course reappeared in secondary schools in response to new educational ideologies promoting acculturation, vocational training, and civic responsibility. At the same time, the burgeoning social science disciplines demanded places in the curriculum. In public schools, social studies, a phrase added to the American lexicon in the 1920s, largely replaced the four-year history block. The new pedagogy assigned world history to the tenth grade, where it served as a vehicle for delivering geography, government, sociology, citizenship, and a kind of resurrected general history in one efficient package.

    Paralleling this development, colleges began in the 1920s to offer undergraduate surveys of Western civilization from ancient to modern times. James Harvey Robinson, who taught at Columbia College from 1895 to 1919, trained a number of graduate students who introduced the first Western Civ courses and wrote textbooks for them. Robinson offered a graduate course that explored his ideas about the progress of rational thought in human society, a process that he located exclusively in Europe and North America. According to anthropologist and historian Daniel Segal, the authors of the first generation of Western Civ textbooks contended that college students must acquire a knowledge of Western political, cultural, and intellectual achievements, not so much to fortify their American patriotism as to prepare them to help defend human civilization against the irrationality and barbarism that had afflicted society in World War I and that in the 1930s threatened to do so again.²

    Both tenth-grade world history and college Western Civ paid attention to the big international issues of the day. This practice reflected the public interest in Europe and world affairs that had been growing since before World War I. Nevertheless, the prewar intellectual principle, endorsed by Robinson and other scholars of Western civilization, that one part of humankind had a history to be studied and preserved but that other parts did not, endured throughout the interwar period. This was the era when European colonial empires sprawled across Africa and Asia and when Western science, medicine, and engineering appeared to be transforming the material world. Most educators took it for granted therefore that non-American history studies reasonably excluded all but the very contemporary or very ancient experience of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.

    As the American Century reached its zenith in the two decades after World War II, the Western Civ course remained preeminent as a framework for explaining what should matter most to young Americans. Many citizens recognized, however, that the second global war and its aftermath made the world simultaneously smaller as an interacting social sphere and much larger as a cultural construct in the collective consciousness, not only of Americans and Europeans but of peoples almost everywhere. A bigger world required a bigger world history.

    The critical challenge to the Western perspective of discerning causation and meaning in the human past through what James Blaut called the European tunnel of time came slowly and from several directions.³ One was the insistent nationalism that emerged in most European colonial dependencies after World War II, including the rise of armed liberation movements in some places. Another was the Cold War as an apocalyptic global rivalry for influence over the futures of nonaligned states. Those twin developments prompted the movement to train more American college students in the history, culture, and politics of foreign areas, as well as more insistent calls for the internationalizing of both secondary and college curricula. In the universities, the rapid expansion of historical and social scientific knowledge, the social broadening of faculties, and, in the late 1970s, the rise of multiculturalist ideology all contributed to serious questioning of the assumption that world history was largely equivalent to the experience of people inhabiting Europe.

    By the 1970s a movement was under way among a significant minority of college and secondary teachers to enlarge the cultural scope of syllabi and textbooks to include the historical and cultural traditions of Africans, Asians, and indigenous Americans. Few educators, however, seemed to know how to make non-American history more culturally inclusive without creating courses that were more incoherent and unwieldy than Western Civ. Fortunately, a few thinkers, notably William H. McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson at the University of Chicago and Leften Stavrianos at Northwestern University, had been working since the 1950s to formulate large historical questions that could seriously be addressed only by breaching, at least in some measure, the borders of civilizations and nation-states. These scholars drew ideas from the increasingly nuanced disciplines of historical sociology and cultural anthropology. They also read the works of twentieth-century metahistorians like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, whose universal histories contemplated the underlying moral and spiritual structures that might govern change in the human condition, past and future. They did not, however, engage in the philosophical conjectures that characterized this earlier tradition of world history writing. Rather, they applied the methodological rules of the modern historical discipline, founding their interpretations of the past on the collection and analysis of material evidence.

    By the later 1970s, introductory world history, drawing broadly on the conceptions of these and a few other thinkers, was beginning to gain acceptance in collegiate education as a distinct curricular alternative to Western Civ. Some traditionalists argued that world history educators wanted to drop the West. Clearly, few instructors had that in mind, and in fact most of the detractors who complained about Western exclusion probably feared that a course might devote less than 80 or 90 percent of its syllabus to European history. Indeed, the new field owed a significant debt to Western Civ. That course was the first of any non-American history survey to make a place for itself in colleges. Because it was not just a compilation of histories of European states or nations, it advanced the concept of border-crossing history. And, though not in its earliest manifestations, it eventually put forward the idea that the human venture began in the Paleolithic era, not in fifth-century BCE Athens.

    World history practitioners, however, sought more-sweeping innovations than these. In the 1980s and 1990s, more young scholars, possessed of internationalist sensibilities and area studies training, and influenced by the social science disciplines, turned enthusiastically to economic, social, popular cultural, and other spheres of inquiry that invited cross-cultural or interregional frameworks of analysis. In our view world history became new as both a teaching and research endeavor when nations, civilizations, and conventionally defined areas (Africa, the Middle East) no longer rigidly predetermined the borders of investigation. Moreover, just in the past two decades, the astonishing acceleration in the production and flow of information, the proliferation of exchange networks, the advent of social media, and the continuous restructuring of the world economy have obliged teachers and scholars, whether they like it or not, to reflect on the past, from Paleolithic times onward, in more holistic and spatially flexible terms. The traditional argument that the global past is much too tangled and perplexing to explore profitably—or that Andre Gunder Frank’s proposal for humanocentric history is too much trouble to construct when nations and cultures are natural units of study—has lost much of its persuasive power.

    Several writers have observed that the world history teaching project nourished research more richly than the other way round. By reverse analogy, we know for example that the social history of the United States grew steadily as a scholarly enterprise from the early part of the century, when scholars like James Harvey Robinson advocated a broadening of inquiry beyond political, diplomatic, and military subjects, until the 1960s and 1970s, when social history exploded in all directions. With only a few exceptions, however, college and high school textbooks lagged well behind advances in social history scholarship, and in the 1980s they were still catching up. By contrast, the pressure on curriculum makers and textbook publishers to broaden the scope of world history beyond the Western metanarrative has until recently exceeded scholarly energy devoted to new studies in comparative, interregional, and global subjects. Much of the exciting new work in world history has come from the pens of scholars who either were teaching the subject already or were intellectually affiliated with a network of teachers who did. Philip Curtin, for example, made several key contributions to the literature of comparative world history, but these began to appear only after he started teaching The Expansion of Europe, later called The World and the West, at the University of Wisconsin.

    DIMENSIONS OF WORLD HISTORY TEACHING AND LEARNING

    The world history research and educational project today encompasses a potentially immense range of topics to investigate. The richness and diversity of the field is evident in the essays that follow in this book. It is also manifested in journals (the Journal of World History, the Journal of Global History, and World History Connected) and in scholarly meetings of the World History Association, its American affiliates, and the organizations that have emerged in other parts of the world. In short, the aim of the world history project is not only, or even mainly, to construct histories of the world.

    Nevertheless, educators have faced continuing challenges in devising conceptual frameworks for introductory world history that match the narrative coherence of Western Civ. Since the 1980s undergraduate courses have proliferated in both two- and four-year colleges across the United States, as if college faculties actually agree on a clear definition of their subject and on the epistemological objectives of their course, when so far they do not. Indeed, designing a globally inclusive course invites controversy. This is not because world historians argue over finding the best way to cover everything, an ambition that some critics apparently imagine the field is trying to achieve. (Not even a two-semester history of a small town in Missouri could hope to attain such a goal.) Rather, educators have agonized over how to build and then properly position conceptual platforms from which to explicate the human past in all its variety and confusion. World history, as opposed to European, Moroccan, or Iroquoian history, lacks an assumed, coherent cultural frame, however mythical such cultural uniformity may be.

    In the early days of the world history teaching project, most instructors took the view that the study must first of all be multiculturally inclusive, not Eurocentric—as the Western Civ course was by definition. If a course could not be built on any imagined global culture existing since ancient times, it should certainly not leave out any major geographical region. Both Stavrianos and McNeill worked from the premise that Western civilization, meaning essentially Europe, was a natural unit of investigation but that it must not stand for the whole of humankind as the only tradition of historical significance. The narrative must also include chapters about other civilizations. This idea that regions, defined by either their perceived cultural commonalities or their geographical coherence, may serve reasonably as the fundamental categories of inquiry has remained a credible conceptual framework for many teachers and textbook writers. Regional approaches accept a single chronology of human development at a broad level, dividing the past into ancient, medieval (middle period), and modern segments. However, within those large chunks of time, and perhaps within a few additional subdivisions, students explore continuities and changes in particular parts of the world one after another. They cover the same chronological ground several times from different regional standpoints. Instructors may note similarities and differences between developments in two or more regions, though a broad, globally inclusive narrative does not allow for deep, systematic comparative analysis of particular topics. The main advantage of a regional approach is its attention to relatively long-term continuities within particular civilizations or regions, a structure that permits students to place often complex historical subject matter within intellectually manageable geographical or cultural compartments.

    World historians, however, have increasingly questioned the validity of world history surveys that aim simply to cover several civilizations or regions, none of them analytically connected to the others, a strategy that may largely ignore the large-scale patterning that puts the world in world history. Indeed, educators have recently adopted more flexible and expansive views of region-centered world history by, for example, reconceiving the meaning of regions to include arenas of human commercial and cultural interaction such the Indian Ocean basin or Inner Eurasia. Today, most regionally organized textbooks, especially for college readers, give some attention to geographical spaces defined by human interconnectivity and to big pictures of change at hemispheric and global scales.

    Some teachers and writers have departed from region-based world history by adopting thematic narrative structures. This means organizing study of the human past in terms of different categories of change—political, economic, intellectual, environmental, and so on—within defined time periods. Typically, the themes chosen address particular phenomena of large historical significance, such as empire formation, belief systems, trade, wars, women and gender, or the social consequences of epidemic disease.⁷ Thematic organization allows students to explore particular types of historical change in detail. It also encourages comparison of cases in different parts of the world within the frame of the selected theme. A too-rigid thematic approach, however, may mean separating a particular phenomenon from the more general social context of the period under study and thus discounting the complexities of historical causation. Structuring a world history survey thematically may also mean repeating chronological sequences multiple times, not to move from one region to another but to address different subject matter.

    In the past decade or two, more educators have questioned both region-centered and thematic world history, persuaded that the field must continue to push toward more integrative accounts in which the human story from Paleolithic times to the present unfolds as a single, unilinear chronological narrative. The whole earth and its physical and natural environment become the predominant and ever-present spatial context of this narrative. Humans are identified, first, as members of a particular (and special) animal species and, only second, as affiliates of particular societies, empires, migrating populations, or other groups. This approach pushes to the foreground the study of large-scale patterns of change and requires that some of the knowledge about civilizations, events, and peoples traditionally regarded as essential recede from view. In the past fifteen years, the best-known interpretive works that unify the human story have been William H. and J. R. McNeill’s The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History and David Christian’s Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History.

    Christian’s book, however, is something more than world history. It has provided the principal textual foundation for an ambitious intellectual endeavor that undertakes to narrate the whole of the past from its cosmic beginnings. This movement for what Christian named big history has generated a corpus of literature and introduced courses in both high schools and universities in several countries.⁹ Big history connects the human past to the much older story of the universe, starting with the Big Bang. It aims to link the humanities and social sciences with the historical sciences, including cosmology, geology, climatology, and evolutionary biology. Advocates of big history, as well as proponents of unified but chronologically less aspiring narratives, argue that the study of change on extremely large scales does not blur our vision of the past. Rather, it directs our view to phenomena that we would not otherwise notice at all. According to David Christian, World history is as doable as any other type of history; we just have to develop the methods and conventions needed to do history at large scales. And despite the many difficulties, it is worth doing because what can be seen at large scales are objects and problems . . . that cannot be seen at smaller scales.¹⁰

    No matter the scale of history being addressed or the narrative approach taken, educators face the task of encouraging habits of mind that lead learners to formulate good historical questions. This is basic to advancing world history beyond the coverage of different cultures and places. Since the 1990s, pedagogical research increasingly shows the importance of developing the critical thinking skills of students, whether at K–12 or college levels.¹¹ History classrooms, reformers have argued, should be places where students pose questions rather than simply memorize information that has no connection to concrete historical problems, especially problems that have relevance to contemporary society. In world history education, the examination of interregional or global patterns, as opposed to the factual coverage of a selection of regions, requires critical thought to identify what those patterns might be and how their significance might be evaluated. In other words the starting point of any world historical investigation, whether undertaken by research scholars or middle school students, should be to ask good questions and then test these hypotheses by gathering and analyzing evidence.

    When students think about the past in terms of questions that probe for explanations of historical cause, effect, and change, they may find that the appropriate scope of their inquiry fits neatly within the limits of a particular nation, civilization, or region. They may also find, however, that their investigation must encompass what Philip Curtin called a relevant aggregate of data and of human interrelationships that cuts across political or cultural frontiers. In other words, the inquiry should embrace whatever geographical, social, or cultural field is appropriate for seeking answers to the questions posed. Border posts between countries or geographical markers between continents should not predetermine the scope of the investigation. Over the millennia humans have formed all sorts of aggregates—migrating bands, marching armies, commercial caravans, religious missionaries, big corporations—that act in time and space without regard to the geographical conventions—nations, culture areas, continents—that scholars decided, in some cases a century or two ago, should be the proper and even exclusive vessels for historical inquiry. The movement for a new world history has given researchers leave to break out of national and regional shells, and as they have done this, they have discovered a wealth of new historical questions to explore. As Patrick Manning notes, The problem is not with studies of nations but that the national framework constrained twentieth-century historians to limit their research and writing.¹²

    INSTITUTIONS TO ADVANCE THE FIELD

    Most of the development of world history as a professional field has taken place since 1970. Hundreds of courses have sprung up in two- and four-year institutions, usually as part of undergraduate core (general education) programs. These courses have typically either replaced or supplemented Western Civ or other broad area studies. Robust data on the number and distribution of world history offerings in the United States are lacking. But in the 1980s and 1990s, courses probably expanded fastest in public universities and community colleges, where demand for large-enrollment core courses was greater than in either liberal arts colleges or major research universities. In institutions that do not grant doctorates in history, instructors have faced somewhat less pressure than they have in PhD-granting universities to focus their careers almost exclusively on specialized research. Moreover, state universities have historically trained large numbers of K–12 teachers who, especially from the late 1980s, might find themselves assigned to middle school or high school world history classrooms whatever their initial career preferences might have been. To cite one example of growth, a group of five instructors introduced world history at San Diego State University in 1974 as a two-semester sequence of courses. Team-taught the first three or four years, the course drew heavily on the conceptual thinking of McNeill, Hodgson, and Curtin. Today, lower-division world history is a pillar of the general education program, enrolling several hundred students every semester.

    One useful gauge of the expansion of world history in recent years in both K–12 and postsecondary education is the striking success of the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program. Every year more than two million high school students enroll in AP courses and examinations. Many of these students strive for scores that will earn them credit in courses offered at the college or university they plan to attend. A trend of growth in the number of students taking the exam in a particular subject indicates concomitant growth in the availability of that subject in collegiate institutions. The AP world history program, designed by a committee of scholars and teachers vested in world historical modes of inquiry rather than simply area specialties, offered its first exam in 2002. Since then, the number of test takers has grown at a remarkable rate. The table below indicates the world history exam’s growth between 2002 and 2015 compared with the long-established programs in European and US history.

    As world history core courses have proliferated, the logic of creating both upper-division and graduate options for studying comparative, interregional, or global historiographical topics has become apparent. Some instructors who developed first-year courses also wanted to try out new world history concepts and approaches at more-advanced teaching levels, offering classes on such topics as the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean world, comparative nationalist movements, or the modern world economy. In some institutions that trained K–12 teachers, both historians and education faculties recognized that even though states and school districts increasingly mandated world history, prospective teachers had little opportunity to address the subject except by taking an introductory course plus a selection of area studies classes. Ironically, teachers who had little exposure to world history as a set of innovative ways of thinking about the past were nonetheless expected to offer middle school or high school courses that embraced the whole inhabited earth over many centuries or even millennia. It is clear that students seeking careers in social studies teaching need much richer training in world history as a distinct discipline. In 2012 a group of K–12 and university educators initiated a project to address this issue, forming the Alliance for Learning in World History. This association aims to advance, potentially on an international scale, both the professional development of K–12 world history teachers and scholarly research on student learning as it applies specifically to world history classrooms.¹³

    TABLE 1

    The number of graduate programs in world history began to grow in the mid-1980s, but we have to go back to 1959 to identify the first formal one. That year Philip Curtin led the founding of the Comparative Tropical History (later Comparative World History) PhD program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The curriculum emphasized area studies, but students received training in two world regions, selected from among sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. Some courses in the program required comparative case studies of phenomena such as slavery, religious movements, or nationalism. Most students chose dissertation topics involving only one region, and they looked for academic jobs in that area. Nevertheless, a number of Wisconsin graduates, inspired by Curtin’s comparative globalism, went on to inaugurate world history courses that in some institutions eventually included graduate studies. Several new programs burgeoned after 1985, the year that Jerry Bentley and colleagues introduced world history as a secondary PhD research field at the University of Hawaii. In 1994 Northeastern University inaugurated a PhD program in which world history was the primary field of study. In other institutions, faculty have created programs that include world, interregional, or comparative history as secondary fields. In 2014 the World History Association listed 116 institutions in the United States having world history components in MA or PhD programs.¹⁴ Most of these initiatives have had the combined aims of preparing young scholars to contribute to world history as a research field, to teach the subject in K–12 or collegiate classrooms, and to advance the integration of historical research methods with those of other disciplines, not only with the standard social sciences and humanities but also with such fields as archaeology, linguistics, genetics, and climatology.

    As soon as world history took root as an educational and scholarly project in the United States, its advocates also set to work to organize and professionalize the movement outside the classroom. This endeavor got seriously under way in 1982, when a small band of educators launched the World History Association (WHA). From the start, the WHA strove to build sturdy bridges between K–12 and collegiate educators. This was an unusual strategy for an organization whose founding members were mostly, though not exclusively, professors. The WHA has held fast to this founding philosophy, bringing together university professors, college and community college instructors, school teachers, graduate students, and independent scholars in a collegial camaraderie rarely found in more narrowly focused academic and professional societies.¹⁵ The founding of the WHA was just the first of many initiatives to build new institutions, expand knowledge, and advance teaching. Here are some of the key events:

    • 1984. History educators organized the Rocky Mountain Regional World History Association, the first of several regional affiliates of the WHA to be founded in the United States.

    • 1987. The California State Board of Education endorsed a new public school curriculum that called for three full years of world history in middle and high schools. This strong commitment to the subject helped activate reform of world history curricula in several other states.

    • 1990. The University of Hawaii Press published the inaugural issue of the Journal of World History under the editorship of Jerry H. Bentley.

    • 1992–94. A large partnership of educational and civic organizations, funded by federal grants, developed voluntary national competency standards for both United States and world history in K–12 schools. Even before they appeared publicly, these standards attracted harsh criticism from conservative politicians and opinion makers for undervaluing patriotic ideals and Western achievements in favor of multicultural inclusiveness, critical inquiry, and politically correct attention to African, Asian, and Native American history. Ironically, the controversy drew more public attention to the project’s pedagogical sophistication and intellectual substance than would otherwise have been likely, and it stimulated constructive national discussion among history educators. The standards had an important influence on the subsequent design of history guidelines in several states.¹⁶

    • 1994. H-World, a free electronic list for discussion of world history scholarship and education went online. H-World became one of dozens of lists affiliated with the H-Net family of interactive newsletters hosted by Michigan State University to facilitate communication among professionals in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

    • 1994. The Center for History and New Media was founded at George Mason University to make available digital media and technology to preserve and present history online, transform scholarship across the humanities, and advance historical education and understanding.¹⁷ Now named in honor of its late founder, Roy Rosenzweig, the center administers a number of sites offering primary document resources and up-to-date news on world history.

    • 2001. Under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a group of educators launched World History for Us All (WHFUA), an online model curriculum for world history in middle and high schools. Initiated at San Diego State University, WHFUA has continued under development as a project of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    • 2001–2. The College Board introduced the Advanced Placement course in world history.

    • 2003. The free electronic journal World History Connected came online. Based at the University of Illinois and edited at Hawaii Pacific University, the journal aims to bridge the long-standing divide between teachers in secondary and postsecondary education, . . . introduce teaching methods that have proven particularly effective in world history classrooms, and provide readers with the latest news in world history research and debates.¹⁸

    • 2006. The London School of Economics and Political Science initiated publication of the Journal of Global History. The journal’s tables of contents show that its mission is not distinctively different from that of the Journal of World History. The two periodicals together offer a wider conduit for publication in the field.

    • 2008. The Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO) was founded in Dresden, Germany, to promote and facilitate communication among world and global historians.

    • 2010. The International Big History Association was founded at a conference in Coldigioco, Italy, to foster integrated and interdisciplinary investigation of the history of the universe, the earth, organic life, and humankind.

    • 2011. The World History Association was admitted to membership in the American Council of Learned Societies.

    • 2012–13. World history scholars and educators inaugurated the Alliance for Learning in World History.

    As discussion and debate over world history education continues, the scholarly research and analytical reflection that must inform it continue to accumulate. Indeed, world history has firmly established itself within the discipline mainly because research and writing on explicitly comparative, interregional, or world-scale historical problems have given it credibility as both a research and classroom subject. This book aims to encourage history professionals to consider the directions the discipline has taken and to contemplate where it might go from here. We would like the book to encourage prospective, novice, and veteran educators and researchers to think afresh about world history’s intellectual premises, conceptual structures, and historiographical genealogy and to become more self-conscious about the ideas and precommitments that have influenced their teaching and research choices. Since the turn of the new century, the work of world historians to reimagine and enrich the field has been striking. Before 2000 teachers and scholars who exchanged ideas had much less to say than they do now about such subjects as environmental history, applications of genetic research, the roots of globalization, change in the Paleolithic era, the cosmic context of the human past, the great divergence between Europe and Asia, postcolonial critiques of world-scale narratives, the prioritization of research agendas, and the world history project in countries besides the United States.

    As editors of this volume, we recognize that our angle of vision on world history is conspicuously American, that is, reflective of our experience as educators and scholars in the United States. We have all taught, and two of us continue to teach, world history in American universities, and we intend this book to be of use primarily, though not exclusively, to American educators and students.

    In the past few decades, research and teaching in world history, or as some prefer, global history, has gained traction in many countries besides the United States. World historians have engaged in lively discussions about how perspectives on both teaching and research may differ from one country or region to another. For the most part, these historians dismiss the notion of homogenous national perspectives on world history, whether a reified Chinese, German, Mexican, or Australian perspective, in contradistinction to an American one. Rather, world history research and education projects have invariably been shaped by a combination of local, national, and transnational influences.

    Modern states have their own distinctive traditions of knowing world history, from creation stories of the distant past to contemporary writing that investigates historical encounters between the scholar’s country or region and the rest of the world. Nevertheless, within many countries, differing institutional environments, intellectual preferences, funding sources, social attitudes, and public policies have produced a diversity of local viewpoints on world history. This is eminently the case in the United States. Moreover, in the past decade or two the intellectual and institutional connections among world history scholars in different countries have expanded greatly. The founding of the Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO) in 2008 attests to this phenomenon. International exchanges have influenced world history outlooks in all countries where a significant commitment to the field exists. And if Western, and especially American, scholarship and teaching models have to date stimulated the field in Asia, Africa, and Latin America more than the other way around, that state of affairs will certainly change in the coming decades. In his comparative study of world history scholarship and institutional development in the United States, Germany, and China, Dominic Sachsenmaier writes: If one takes the claim for local contingency seriously, it is impossible to solely focus on alleged worldwide commonalities that may characterize a growing trend in historiography. At the same time, it would be impracticable to discuss only local theaters of global historical research since this would inevitably overlook the multifarious forms of transnational interconnections and exchanges in the field.¹⁹ A collection of essays on world history method or teaching published in Germany or China would no doubt look very different from this one. We hope, nevertheless, that the ideas in this book will feed into the transnational network and stimulate discussion in many countries.

    This volume addresses collegiate educators and scholars primarily, but K–12 world history teachers also struggle with conceptual and organizational problems. Like university instructors, many K–12 educators claim creative responsibility for the conceptual shape of their world history courses even when they might conveniently fall back on textbooks and state or district guidelines that, with a few exceptions, have been slow to entertain ideas and strategies of the new world history. This book also intends to serve the ever-growing ranks of Advanced Placement world history teachers, who must assign their students college-level work but who also have wide latitude to structure their courses in innovative ways. Finally, we encourage social studies specialists in school districts and university education departments to consult this volume to familiarize themselves with the transformations that have taken place in world history scholarship and pedagogy since the days not so long ago when historians regarded the European and global past as largely synonymous or defined the subject as simply the study of the achievements and peculiarities of foreign cultures.

    The essays in this book are organized in ten chapters, beginning with writings that describe and interpret the emergence of academic world history and concluding with a selection of critiques, hard questions, and dissenting viewpoints. Some of the choices we made in assigning selections to one chapter of the book or another might be contestable because some essays reasonably fit in two or more of our chosen categories. Because the focus here is on issues that confront the modern history professional, the volume touches only lightly on the long philosophical and moral traditions of universal history writing exemplified in the modern centuries by such exponents as Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, and Toynbee. Nor does the book include course outlines or day-to-day classroom strategies, resources that a number of publications and websites amply supply.²⁰ We have made selections with an eye to their length, sometimes choosing one essay over another because it is more concise. All but two of the articles are reprints from earlier publications, in some cases excerpts from longer essays. Many of the selections have been edited for length, if only slightly. The annotated Further Reading list at the end of each chapter offers a selection of additional works. As the title of this book suggests, we offer our perspectives on world history as an academic subject in the expectation that it will encourage other teachers and scholars to stretch and deepen their understanding of the field.

    NOTES

    1. National Education Association, Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies, Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies ([US Government] Printing Office, 1893); and American Historical Association, Committee of Seven, The Study of History in Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1903).

    2. Daniel A. Segal, ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education, American Historical Review 105, 3 (June 2000): 770–805.

    3. J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guildford Press, 1995), 5.

    4. See Kenneth Pomeranz and Daniel A. Segal, World History: Departures and Variations, in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 16–17.

    5. Andre Gunder Frank, A Plea for World System History, Journal of World History 2, 1 (Spring 1991): 3. See Chapter 2.

    6. Philip D. Curtin, Graduate Teaching in World History, Journal of World History 2 (Spring 1991): 772. Curtin acknowledged that I have already raided my lectures for [The World and the West] to publish two books, one on cross-cultural trade and one on plantations.

    7. For a description of a thematically organized course, see Steve Gosch, Cross-Cultural Trade as a Framework for Teaching World History: Concepts and Applications, The History Teacher 27 (August 1994): 425–31.

    8. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); and David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

    9. See the Big History Project, https://www.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive. See also David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014). The authors have written this textbook both for college and university students and for advanced high school pupils.

    10. David Christian, Scales, in Palgrave Advances in World Histories, ed. Marnie Hughes-Warrington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 78.

    11. Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

    12. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 273.

    13. Alliance for Learning in World History website, http://www.alliance.pitt.edu.

    14. Graduate Programs, World History Association, www.thewha.org.

    15. History, Mission and Vision of the WHA, World History Association, http://www.thewha.org. The constitution of the WHA, written in 1983–84, stipulated that at least two members of the nine-member Executive Council must be precollegiate history educators. Key documents on the early days of the World History Association may be found in volumes of the World History Bulletin, first published in fall 1983. Issues of the Bulletin are archived on the WHA website (www.thewha.org).

    16. National Standards for History, Basic Edition (Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996). See also Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).

    17. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, chnm.gmu.edu.

    18. Heather Streets, Tom Laichas, and Tim Weston, World History Is Here, World History Connected 1, 1 (November 2003), http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/1.1/index.html.

    19. Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7.

    20. See World History Connected, the e-journal for learning and teaching world history, http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/index.html; AP Central, AP World History Course Home Page, College Board, http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/4484.html; and Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, chnm.gmu.edu.

    FURTHER READING

    Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

    Bentley, Jerry H., ed. The Oxford Handbook of World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

    The Cambridge World History. 10 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

    Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

    Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

    Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper, 2015.

    Headrick, Daniel R. Technology: A World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

    Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, ed. Palgrave Advances in World Histories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

    Iriye, Akira, ed. Global Interdependence: The World after 1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

    Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power. 4 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

    Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

    ———, ed. Global Practice in World History: Advances Worldwide. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2008.

    McNeill, J. R., and William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

    Morris, Ian. Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

    Northrop, Douglas, ed. A Companion to World History. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

    Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

    Pomper, Philip, Richard H. Elphick, and Richard T. Vann, eds. World Histories: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998.

    Ponting, Clive. A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

    Reinhard, Wolfgang and Akira Iriye, eds. Empires and Encounters, 1350–1750. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015.

    1

    WORLD HISTORY OVER TIME

    The Evolution of an Intellectual and Pedagogical Movement

    INTRODUCTION

    The earliest world histories were stories ancient people told of how the earth was formed and human beings came to inhabit it. Many of these creation stories have endured. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions share the main lines of the world history told in the book of Genesis. In that account, God first made the earth and furnished it with the seas, land, and all manner of plants and animals. Then he fashioned man and woman and gave them dominion over the earth and all its creatures. But because Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, God condemned them to mortality and drove them from the garden to bear children in sorrow. Thus, the populating of the world got under way. According to the Yoruba creation story told in West Africa, the supreme deity, Olodumare, dispatched his vice regent to form the earth with help from a pigeon and a five-toed hen. Then God sent Oduduwa, another of his agents, to shape human beings from clay. The first human community arose in Yorubaland, and from there people went out to settle other parts of the world.¹

    These creation stories have a universal character. They recount the origins of the world, not just a particular place in the world, and the human species, not just a particular ethnic group. The first humans do not remain confined to the place of their creation but go forth to populate the globe. Traditional creation stories express the urge that Homo sapiens has to explain itself to itself—where did we come from, how long have we been here, how did the world get to be the way it is, what is our destiny?

    In the agrarian age, when societies grew larger and interactions among them more complex, chroniclers who had the benefit of writing systems recorded much more detailed universal histories. Their accounts typically started with the creation of the world at the hands of a divine power but then described the course of what they regarded as important events up to their own era. A number of historians of premodern centuries chronicled not only their own societies but also neighboring ones, universalizing their accounts in both time and space to the extent that available knowledge of foreign lands allowed them to do it. In those centuries, networks of interregional communication carried increasing quantities of cultural and historical information from one society to another. But the knowledge flow still remained erratic and piecemeal. No scholar in any region of the world could richly incorporate knowledge of the culture and history of all other regions. Historians defined the world as the places they could in some measure comprehend, passing over the rest as unknowable. In the case of Eurasian, American, and Australasian societies, they had no awareness of one another at all before 1500 or later. Universal history could only be the history of the writer’s known world.

    Inevitably, historians also filtered their knowledge through cultural lenses, which further constrained their global vision. Just as the Yoruba origin story placed God’s creation of human beings and the starting point of human history in Yorubaland, so Christian and Muslim writers conceived of events in their own parts of the world as rich with purpose and meaning, as manifestations of God’s plan for the world. From these ethnocentric perspectives, exotic peoples inhabiting remote climes could justifiably be ignored because their ways were presumed to be both unfathomable and heathenish. From the earliest encounters between Europeans and American peoples, Spanish theologians wrote admiringly about Indian societies. But they filtered their admiration through a lens that discerned traces of divine intervention and potential conversion to Christianity. In the eighteenth century, European thinkers began to disengage their historical studies from Christian doctrine. Some scholars, writing from a secular perspective, expressed their approval of what travelers reported about distant regions, notably China. Nevertheless, universal historians of the Enlightenment era located the development of human rationality and creative spirit, for them the historical narrative that most mattered, squarely in Europe, starting with the blossoming of reason, individualism, and liberty in ancient Rome and Greece.

    From the nineteenth century, European scholars who tried their hand at world history faced a growing chorus of intellectual disapproval. Historical writing, like so many other occupations in the era of the Industrial Revolution, became professionalized and specialized. Scholars, notably in Germany, proclaimed the advent of a new history. They admonished all historians to eschew philosophizing or speculating and instead to study the past scientifically by gathering evidence, mainly from written documents, and to analyze it rigorously to determine objectively what actually happened. Most inquiries founded on this method had inevitably to limit their subject matter in time and space. Indeed, scholars took eagerly to the study of particular nations and to local developments within nations, including mastery of the languages in which those peoples recorded historical information. Leaders of sovereign states—and in the twentieth century nationalist organizations in colonial dependencies—recruited intellectuals to recover the historical origins and development of the presumed national community, even though such projects often served the mission of creating a national identity where none had existed previously. Moreover, because the richest places in which to unearth documentary evidence of the national past were among the papers stacked in government or church archives, nationalism and historical professionalism neatly reinforced each other. As that synergy developed, most academic specialists came to regard writers of universal history as intellectual speculators oblivious to rules of evidence. As Gilbert Allardyce writes in this chapter, historians reared on specialized research, learned to hold world history in suspicion as something outmoded, overblown, and metahistorical. Whoever said world history, said amateurism.

    If professional scholars thought that universal history was unsound, the great majority of them also insisted that peoples other than Europeans, and their cultural offspring in the Americas and a few other regions, either had no history at all or had reached a state of historical stasis some time in the ancient past. Even though Europeans and Americans accumulated vastly more knowledge of Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the nineteenth century than ever before, the power that European states increasingly wielded in the world tended to intensify rather than soften attitudes of cultural superiority and exclusiveness. To be sure, Europeans had no corner on cultural arrogance: most peoples who shared language, culture, and historical experience regarded themselves as smarter and morally loftier than foreigners in general. In Europe, however, the methods and vocabulary of science were invoked to legitimize claims that Europeans were biologically superior to all peoples outside of the West. Nineteenth-century race ideology postulated that Africans, Asians, and American Indians had always been to one degree or another intellectually and culturally incapacitated. In consequence, they could never have been agents of progressive change. Rather, they either existed permanently in a prehistoric state, or their early efforts at building civilizations floundered for lack of sufficient mental and moral aptitude. In the later nineteenth century, racial teachings that excluded a large part of humankind from history pervaded all levels

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