This is lecture 2, I call it – What is World History – I’m going to start here with
a quote from Henri Cordier, a French teacher, he says in this quote – and kind of sets
up the problems with world history, at least for those in the West – he says, quote “Westerners
have narrowed the history of the world into grouping what little they know about the expansion
of the human race around the peoples of Israel, Greece, and Rome.
They have thus ignored all those travelers and explorers who in their ships plowed the
China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode across the immensities of Central Asia to the Persian
Gulf.
In truth, the larger part of the globe containing cultures different from those of the ancient
Greeks and Romans, but no less civilized.
These have remained unknown to those who write the history of their little world under the
impression that they’re writing world history.”
What this is is a critique, essentially, of what we call Eurocentrism.
Eurocentrism is simply telling history from a distinctly Western or European point of
view.
There’s nothing wrong with this.
We’re raised in this culture and we do it without even thinking about it.
What I want you to do is think about it.
If you were raised in China you’d tell history from a Sinocentric point of view.
But we are raised in the West and we have a Eurocentric point of view.
I’ll give you an example of how this, how this works.
For instance, if you tell the story of Columbus – in the West we tell the story as one of
great triumph, one of the decisive turning point in world history launching what today
we call globalization – the Columbian Exchange, the exchange of domesticated plants and animals
and technologies and religions and cultures and diseases.
Columbus sort of launches us into this modern era and it’s depicted as a great success,
a great triumph.
Now, that’s the Eurocentric point of view.
Look at Columbus from the point of view of the Caribbean Indians in 1492 and you get
something quite different.
You get literally the end of the world.
Within a couple of generations these people are wiped out by the diseases, the pathogens
brought over by the Europeans.
The Indians, of course, have no immunity to these diseases and they are quickly decimated.
So the Eurocentric point of view gives us the story of great triumph.
If you take the point of view of the natives, you literally have the apocalypse.
It’s the end of the world.
So what I want you to do is simply keep this in mind as you listen to these lectures and
go through the other course materials.
Always be aware that everything has a point of view.
Now, I’m going to mention some major sources that I’ve used to put these lectures together.
World history was one of my major fields in graduate school, so I’ve spent a lot of
time sitting around seminar tables with professors and other students talking about these books
and these arguments.
I’ve also used the McNeil’s book called The Human Web, a bird’s-eye view of world
history.
This is a very accessible text on world history.
It’s very readable.
It gives you the broad strokes that we like to use in world history, but it has enough
detail to keep you interested.
I’ve also used Professor Peter Stern’s, his lectures through the Great Courses series.
His lectures on world history have been very helpful in chronology and some other key terms
and concepts.
You’re probably aware that we teach a number of different history surveys.
The most common, of course, for you guys, is the U.S. history survey.
And then of course, we teach western civilization, which is focused on Europe, the Eurocentric
point of view, and now world history.
Now I want to emphasize that world history is a fairly recent development in the profession.
It’s now offered at many colleges and universities.
The World History Journal was started in the early 1990’s – Jerry Bentley, the editor.
World history is a major field in various PhD programs like mine.
It’s increasingly a pertinent topic in popular culture.
I’m thinking now of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond – a very popular
book and turned into a PBS documentary, which was also quite interesting.
Where did world history come from?
In the 1960’s, the historical profession became increasingly fragmented or specialized.
We began to tell stories that had previously been ignored.
Previously political history and military history had dominated the profession.
But now we have the rise of what was called social history, this is sort of history from
the bottom up.
We begin looking at the laboring class, the working class.
A key text here is E.P. Thompson’s Making of The English Working Class; this came out
in 1964.
So, social history sort of ignores the elites, which had always been the focus of history,
and began looking at the common people.
We have the emergence of an African-American history, where we re-examine slavery from
the slaves’ point of view.
We re-examine reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement from the point of view of
those involved in the movement.
And then of course, in the 80s and 90s there’s an emerging sort of cultural turn – as they
call it – and we have gender history.
Quite often this is confused with women’s history and it shouldn’t be.
Gender history refers to masculinity and femininity, and how these concepts are used in history,
and this is sort of the emergence of, or the continuation of social history, getting away
from a focus on the elite.
Cultural history emerges here in the 1990s, investigating the meaning of things.
Cultural history tends to reject what we call ‘metanarratives’, these sort of all-explanatory
systems – like Christianity or Marxism.
There’s a focus on language.
Where does power lie in the society?
So world history is sort of borne of these increasing, this increasing fragmentation
in the profession.
Historians looking for larger units of analysis, for instance, from a national history to regional
history to a bigger unit of analysis – world history.
There are objections to world history.
I’ll mention a few of them here.
This is a controversial topic at times.
The main objection is probably that world history encroaches, or takes away from, Western
civilization.
World history is accused of being too diverse, too multicultural, especially here in the
United States; we view ourselves as part of the Western tradition, and to do world history
tends to diminish the role of the United States and shift the focus to other places, and a
lot of people have trouble with that.
Some people think of history as a tool for nationalism, that is the historian’s job
is to exalt the nation’s past so that we can justify our present and perhaps our future.
Most historians would disagree and say no, they are not a tool of the state and they’re
not here to simply praise the history of the state as they are to examine it critically.
I’m going to mention a couple of approaches to world history.
How do we get at such a big topic?
There is a civilizational approach, where you look at civilizations side by side and
compare them in similar time periods.
A key term here that’s useful is cross-cultural encounters.
We find – in the past – missionaries and merchants, conquerors, travelers – who venture
into strange lands and they take information with them and they pick up new information,
technologies are exchanged, domesticated plants and animals and diseases, religions.
Cross-cultural encounters, this is a key way of linking human society together.
World history also has in it non-human factors.
I’ll mention a few examples of this – disease; disease obviously plays a huge role in human
history, think of the great pandemics of the past.
Of course, we have the Black Death or the Bubonic plague in the 14th century, which
ravaged Eurasia with a huge loss of population.
We’ve already mentioned the decimation of the indigenous people of the New World after
Columbus arrives in 1492.
Of course, we have the great Spanish flu at the end of the Great War in 1917 and ’18.
So disease is a theme, or a factor, in world history.
Trade is another.
Again, we’ve all heard of the Silk Roads that link China to the Roman Empire.
Of course, the great Mongol circuit of trade in the 14th century that tends to tie Eurasia
together.
You could track the expansion of the market, or capitalism, the world system that draws
more and more nations into it.
Immigration is another factor in world history.
People seeking opportunities and moving to better places.
People forced, forced immigration like slavery for instance.
There were over 11 million Africans that are forced to the New World to labor in slavery.
Of course, people fleeing danger as well.
You see a lot of mass population movements, say at the end of the Second World War.
So immigration is a theme that will re-emerge.
Technology is another theme.
You can go all the way back to the sort of clichéd Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age
as weapons and tools become increasingly more sophisticated.
You can track it all the way to the present with the invention of paper, the printing
press, the computer.
Technology has a way of shrinking the world making globalization possible, and making
the earth a much smaller place.
Climate is another factor.
Of course, we had a little Ice Age in the what, the 14th century, which caused famine,
which caused a massive population loss.
We have sea-changing levels in history.
We have – even today, we talk about climate change.
This is a very politicized issue.
I don’t want to get into it here, but climate is something that world historians take note
of.
So when we talk about approaches to world history, we’re looking for patterns, broad
patterns, connections, and linkages.
Some key terms and concepts that would be useful for you – diffusion is the first,
this is simply the spread or the dissemination of information and its adoption as one civilization
encounters another, or agents from these civilizations encounter each other.
Traditions and Encounters, this of course, is the title of Jerry Bentley’s very popular
world history textbook, and Traditions and Encounters points to those things that historians
like to track – continuity and then sudden change –
continuity, change.
Key terms here to keep in mind, determinism or human agency.
Human agency refers to the impact of a particular person on history.
You can think of someone like Muhammed, for instance, or Jesus, or Napoleon, or Hitler.
Determinism refers to broader, bigger, structural factors in human life, whether it’s trade
or technology or disease.
Determinism tends to negate the individual human and stress the larger, broader patterns.
The world system – this is going to come up again, in fact, we’ll have a little lecture
on it.
I’m just going to introduce it here.
This is Immanuel Wallerstein’s analysis, whereby he points out that there’s a core
of the world’s system, those highly-developed capitalized countries.
There’s a semi-periphery and then a periphery – as you move out from the core towards
the periphery you have lesser developed nations, nations with cheap labor and raw materials
that are exploited by the core, and again, we’ll talk about this in more detail later.
I want to say just a word here about the fact that world history is an interdisciplinary
study.
By interdisciplinary I mean the historian is going to have to venture outside of his
profession and use other specialists to make sense of world history.
For instance, biology with the study of disease, we’ve already talked about pandemics and
the Black Death, smallpox, and malaria.
We use botany.
Think of dendrochronology, whereby we can date trees through the tree-ring growth.
As you cut through a tree you can see this.
You’ve undoubtedly seen it yourself.
This is useful because we can actually look back in the past with these tree rings and
we can determine something about the climate in this time period, whether there are forest
fires or insect infestation or extreme cold or drought.
You can measure, or get some idea about the past climate through tree rings.
Of course, geology – we can look at plate tectonics, we can look at climate, the formation
of the earth when we talk about the origins of man.
We bring in linguistics to look at the spread of human languages to see commonalities in
languages.
We’ll talk about this in another lecture.
We use archaeology, obviously, to give us clues to prehistory and to antiquity.
Literary criticism is now a tool used by historians to sort of pick apart, or deconstruct, texts.
You see this used in a lot of classic texts, even the Bible under scrutiny by literary
critics.
And of course, we use demography, whereby we bring statistical analysis.
You see this used in immigration, for instance.
So, some conclusions here.
World history takes a long view.
World history looks for patterns, links, connections among peoples.
World history uses comparative method.
World history is interdisciplinary.
World history allows us a broader view of the human species, and world history – like
I just mentioned – takes note of non-human agents.
So, that wraps up this first lecture as an introduction to this topic.
Thank you.