The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers
656
The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers
656eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520964297 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/23/2016 |
| Series: | California World History Library , #23 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 656 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Laura J. Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, author of Belongings: Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa, and coauthor of Panorama: A World History.
Kerry Ward is Associate Professor of History at Rice University and author of Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company.
Read an Excerpt
The New World History
A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers
By Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, Kerry Ward
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96429-7
CHAPTER 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.
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 of education in both Europe and the United States. Outlines of the World's History, a textbook published by William Swinton in 1874 for use in both high schools and colleges, opened with a staunchly racialist take on the global past.
Viewing history as confined to the series of leading civilized nations, we observe that it has to do with but one grand division of the human family, namely, with the Caucasian, or white race. ... Thus we see that history proper concerns itself with but one highly developed type of mankind; for though the great bulk of the population of the globe has, during the whole recorded period, belonged, and does still belong, to other types of mankind, yet the Caucasians form the only truly historical race. ... Of the peoples outside of the Caucasian race that have made some figure of civilization, the Chinese, Mexicans, and Peruvians stand alone. But though these races rose considerably above the savage state, their civilization was stationary, and they had no marked influence on the general current of the world's progress.
Most academic historians subscribed to these twin precepts — one, that national history could be grounded in "scientific" archival research but that world history could not, and, two, that African, Asian, and Native American history was either unknowable or long frozen in immobility — well into the twentieth century. After World War I, however, the overt racial triumphalism that pervaded nineteenth-century scholarship gradually lost its persuasive power as new social scientific theory began to influence Western views of human evolution and social development. Nevertheless, inquiry into the histories of peoples outside the "Western tradition" continued to receive little professional attention, or it was left to the new academic disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. In the interwar period, a number of writers tried their hand at universal history. A few of them, notably Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and H. G. Wells, achieved popular success. But university elites questioned their professional credentials or their indulgence in moral or religious conjectures.
The four essays in Chapter 1 demonstrate how world history, in a state of scholarly eclipse in the Western world since the mid-nineteenth century, gained academic respect and a secure place in college and school curricula in the decades after World War II. Craig Lockard opens his essay with a brief discussion of premodern and early modern world historiography, a survey that throws into relief the extraordinary density and diversity of the scholarship that has appeared since the 1950s. He contends that the research and teaching field "became feasible with the great increase of knowledge and the evolution of a more international orientation during the second half of the twentieth century" and that the extraordinary acceleration of global change persuaded many history professionals that viewing the past from "the widest possible angle of vision" was a legitimate if not imperative endeavor. He cites dozens of scholars who have produced comparative, interregional, and global-scale histories, exploring world systems, gender relations, empire building, commodity flows, migrations, climate change, and numerous other topics. He shows that the field has come to encompass much more intellectual variety than just histories of the world, even though the mission to make the whole human experience intelligible by one narrative formulation or another remains an important part of the research agenda.
In the second selection, Marnie Hughes-Warrington demonstrates this variety by succinctly surveying women's world history writing from ancient times to the near present. She argues for a broad-enough definition of the field to encompass many centuries of learned production. World historical scholarship, she contends, may embrace any work "that attempts to comprehend a meaningful 'world,' understood as an entire meaningful system of existence." Thus, Hughes-Warrington includes within her purview biographical compilations, florilegia (collections of literary extracts), mystical works, and moral debates over the natural differences between men and women, as well as universal histories, studies of gender relations over time, postcolonial histories, and, finally, analytical works informed by the world history movement of the past few decades.
Starting from this wide-ranging definition, Hughes-Warrington challenges two assumptions that have obscured many of the world historical works produced by women. The first is that the sex of the writer is basically irrelevant because, notwithstanding inclusion of rhetorical categories that describe women's particular roles and achievements in the global past, the main story world historians have to tell is "above gender." As Judith Zinsser puts it in her essay in Chapter 10, "In this configuration, women carry all the sex and all the gender, leaving a neutered, apparently ungendered history of mankind." This way of conceiving the past has offered little incentive to document female scholars who do not fit obviously into a conventional category of women's history but who have nonetheless insightfully interpreted the past on relatively large scales. The second assumption is that world history writing is a phenomenon mainly of the past century. Consequently, historiographers have often invoked Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, Bishop Bossuet, and a few other celebrated universal historians of earlier times — all of them men — but have failed to search systematically in the premodern past to discover other scholars, including notable women, who have written with world historical scope and sensibility.
The third and fourth essays in this chapter consider the achievements of William McNeill, Leften Stavrianos, and Marshall Hodgson, three of the founding intellectuals of the contemporary world history movement. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of World History in 1990, Gilbert Allardyce's essay "Toward World History" reviews the growth of the teaching field from early in the century to the 1980s. He traces the movement by examining the intersecting careers of McNeill, Stavrianos, and Louis Gottschalk. Allardyce demonstrates the great formative influence that both McNeill, who published The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), and Stavrianos, author of both high school and college world history textbooks, had on the subject as an "art of classroom teaching." He shows how these two men labored persistently to persuade the historical profession, dedicated as it was to high specialization, to take world history seriously as an academic subject.
The excerpt of Allardyce's essay printed here omits the account of Gottschalk's leadership in writing one of the six volumes of the UNESCO History of Mankind: Scientific and Cultural Development. Allardyce links this colossal project, which ran from 1951 to 1976, to postwar yearnings for international understanding and peace education. The History of Mankind stands as a learned and monumental reference work. Allardyce demonstrates, however, that precisely because of its commitment to "equal time" for numerous peoples, it failed to cohere as a unitary history of humankind. In the process of writing the fourth volume in the series, Gottschalk, a specialist on early modern Europe, became an eager convert to more integrated formulations of world history.
In the final essay in this chapter, Edmund Burke describes the career of Marshall Hodgson (1922-1968), a colleague of McNeill's at the University of Chicago and author of several visionary articles on interregional and comparative history. Burke explains that Hodgson thought McNeill's work, despite its global scope, privileged Europe and relied too much on cultural diffusionist theory. Burke also makes clear that Hodgson jumped ahead of both McNeill and Stavrianos in working out the idea of Eurasia, indeed of Afroeurasia, as a single field of human interactivity, rather than simply as a setting within which bounded civilizations knocked against one another. Hodgson conceived of Afroeurasia, which he spells "Afro-Eurasia," as a place where "unconsciously interregional developments" might converge "in their effects to alter the general disposition of the Hemisphere" (See Hodgson in Chapter 4). His three-volume project, The Venture of Islam, which appeared in 1974 (seven years after his death at the age of forty-six), restated his world history ideas. Indeed, this monumental work represents a seminal contribution to global as well as Islamic history. At his passing Hodgson was immersed in a major project titled "The Unity of World History." Admittedly, he had much less impact than McNeill or Stavrianos in launching world history as an academic field, but both men acknowledged a serious intellectual debt to him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The New World History by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, Kerry Ward. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, xiii,INTRODUCTION, 1,
Further Reading, 15,
CHAPTER 1 WORLD HISTORY OVER TIME: THE EVOLUTION OF AN INTELLECTUAL AND PEDAGOGICAL MOVEMENT,
CHAPTER 2 DEFINING WORLD HISTORY: SOME KEY STATEMENTS,
CHAPTER 3 REGIONS IN WORLD-HISTORICAL CONTEXT,
CHAPTER 4 RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL SPACE,
CHAPTER 5 RETHINKING WORLD-HISTORICAL TIME,
CHAPTER 6 WORLD HISTORY AS COMPARISON,
CHAPTER 7 DEBATING THE QUESTION OF WESTERN POWER,
CHAPTER 8 WORLD HISTORY, BIG HISTORY, AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT,
CHAPTER 9 GLOBAL HISTORY AND GLOBALIZATION,
CHAPTER 10 CRITIQUES AND QUESTIONS,
Teaching World History, Further Reading, 613,
Credits, 615,
Index, 619,