Abstract
To put it simply, world history is the story of connections within the global human community. The world historian’s work is to portray the crossing of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past. The source material ranges in scale from individual family tales to migrations of peoples to narratives encompassing all humanity. World history is far less than the sum total of all history. Nevertheless, it adds to our accumulated knowledge of the past through its focus on connections among historical localities, time periods, and themes of study.
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Notes
The Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Russian empires all expanded dramatically within less than a century. David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (New Haven, 2000).
On silver trade, see Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6 (1995), 201–21;
Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13 (2002), 391–429.
The impact of new scientific work on interpretations of world history has already been substantial. The work of new cultural studies (with more variables to account for and less financial support for research) is moving more slowly, yet its implications for world history are sure to be profound. Although scientific and cultural studies differ sharply from each other, they share the experience of finding that their results have substantial historical implications, but that they are outside the areas of principal historical emphasis. For a study that reveals details of these dynamics in the case of environmental history and that does not neglect cultural issues, see John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (New York, 2000).
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery; a problem in American institutional and intellectual life (Chicago, 1959);
Gilberto Freyre, The masters and the slaves: A study in the development of Brazilian civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam ([1933] New York, 1946);
Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and plantation life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969);
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, 1988).
Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The role of ideas in a tropical colony 1830–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955);
Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1992).
E. A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London, 1966);
Douglas L. Wheeler, “‘Angola is Whose House?’ Early stirrings of Angolan nationalism and protest, 1822–1910,” African Historical Studies 2 (1969), 1–22;
Elikia M’Bokolo, “Peste et société urbaine à Dakar: l’épidémie de 1914,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines No. 85–86 (1982), 13–46.
M. Flinn, The Origins of the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1966);
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1964);
Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York, 1978);
Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990);
Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South Asia,” Past and Present 158 (1988), 79–109.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York, 1997). Area-studies knowledge remains important for the world historian. Diamond brought to bear a particular strength on New Guinea and Australia, thus improving his argument overall as well as the details for that region. But his relative lack of knowledge on Africa caused him to underrate substantially the significance of agriculture and domestic animals in East, West, and North Africa, and thereby to add a racial tinge to his analysis.
Ibn Khaldun, An Introduction to History: The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood ([1377] London, 1967);
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Elborg Forster, ed. Orest Ranum ([1681] Chicago, 1976);
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History trans. H. B. Nisbet ([1830] Cambridge, 1975).
D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett ([1960] New York, 1965); Ibn Khaldun [1377].
For key analyses in the eighteenth century that did address global issues directly, see Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giamhattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch ([1725] Ithaca, 1984);
Voltaire, The General History [Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations] trans. William Fleming ([1754–1757] Akron, 1901–1904);
Voltaire, La Philosophie de l’histoire, ed. J. H. Brumfitt ([1753–1754] Toronto, 1969);
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. (London, 1776–1778);
Stephen K. Sanderson, ed., Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change (Walnut Creek, 1995).
In Renaissance studies, the founding text was Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. Middlemore ([1860] New York, 1958).
For two revealing (though conflicting) analyses of linguistics and archaeology in the development of Indo-European studies, see Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (New York, 1988);
and J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (London, 1989).
In one attempt to address this omission, William McNeill adopted an ancient terminology to include, in the course of the history of civilizations, not only periodic “closure of the ecumene” among civilizations, but also interactions among civilizations and “barbarians.” McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963).
John Locke, Two treatises of government, ed. Peter Laslett ([1690] Cambridge, 1988);
Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The spirit of the laws, trans. Thomas Nugent ([1748] New York, 1949);
Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, ed. Gonzague Truc ([1721] Paris, 1946);
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner ([1776] Oxford, 1976).
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., trans. Charles Francis Atkinson ([1918–1922] London, 1926–1928);
H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (London, 1920);
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1933–1961).
Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed. ([1803] Cambridge, 1992);
Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species by means of natural selection (London, 1856);
Henry Maine, Ancient Law: Its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern times (London, 1861);
Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, or, Researches in the lines of human progress from savagery, through barbarism to civilization (New York, 1877);
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 ([1867] Moscow, 1971);
Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State ([1884] London, 1968);
Alfred Wegener, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (Braunschweig, 1915).
I have placed area studies along the first rather than the second path to world history, though it is a borderline case. Latin American history became established in U.S. universities in the 1920s, and area-studies programs from the 1950s included the study of “history” for each region. Area studies ultimately overcame the skepticism of historians of Europe and the United States—they won in the argument that they were doing standard history in different regions, and they were rewarded with an allocation of area-studies positions in history departments. On the other hand, to the degree that they introduced anthropology, oral tradition, linguistics, and other disciplines into their work, area-studies historians were situated outside “history” and thus on the second path to world history. In any case the connections and comparisons among historians of Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the 1990s provided substantial momentum for world history. See, for instance, Frederick Cooper, Florencia E. Mallon, Steve J. Stern, Allen F. Isaacman, and William Roseberry, Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Madison, 1993).
Newton’s laws of motion posited that the distance moved by an object is its velocity multiplied by the elapsed time. Einstein added the condition that time is different for places moving at different velocities. At very high velocities, the differences between Newtonian and Einsteinian calculations of distance become significant, and Einstein’s calculations fit the experimental result. Einstein did not refute Newton, but he replaced an invariant time with an interactive term, which in certain circumstances becomes highly significant. I find this to provide a useful metaphor for the relations between old knowledge and new knowledge in history. See Walter C. Mih, The Fascinating Life and Theory of Albert Einstein (Commack, N.Y., 2000), 81–88.
On Madagascar, see Nick Garbutt, Mammals of Madagascar (New Haven, 1999), 17–18.
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England (New York, 1983).
For this work, Cronon was able to draw upon an earlier model, cast at a broader scale, in Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972).
Bruce Mazlish has argued for a distinction between “world history” and “global history,” using a somewhat similar argument. World history, in his view, is an extension of universal history, remains primarily concerned with comparisons and interactions of civilizations, and is somewhat backward looking. Global history, in his terms, has been provoked by the dramatic changes of globalization, focuses on dynamics at the planetary level, and is forward-looking. Mazlish has thus identified two paths to world history, one from inside and one from outside the established study of history. Where he has located the key change in the new perspectives arising out of recent events, I acknowledge that factor but subordinate it to the new information available in all the fields of knowledge. Bruce Mazlish, “An Introduction to Global History,” in Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, 1993), 1–24.
On these “culture wars,” see Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997).
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© 2003 Patrick Manning
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Manning, P. (2003). Defining World History. In: Navigating World History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973856_1
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