This is lecture 3; I call it arguments and historiography.
What we’re going to do here is track some of the key arguments, some of the key historiographic
moments in the development of world history as a distinct discipline.
Historiography is simply the body of writing about a particular topic.
For instance, you can imagine the historiography on the Second World War is immense.
The historiography on the Boer War is quite small by comparison.
So I want to look at some of these key moments, and again, this is a very brief survey.
But some of these arguments are key to the development of world history.
And I want to remind everyone that, you know, we’re not training historians here.
This is a history survey.
So instead of drowning you in a bunch of so-called historical facts, I’d rather provide you
with some of the big arguments, the big generalizations that you can actually use, that you can remember
and put to some use over the course of your life and your academic career.
Again, these themes, these arguments, are useful in world history; they’re sort of
central ideas.
So this is a good introduction to the field.
We’ll start with William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, published in 1963.
McNeill argued for a cumulative pattern of interaction in world history, while stressing
an increasingly unified modern world order.
Again, the world is getting smaller as we move forward in time; technology makes this
possible.
Influenced by anthropologists, McNeill assumed that borrowing was a normal human reaction
to an encounter with strangers possessing superior skills or technology.
Again – cross-cultural encounters – missionaries; merchants; armies; travelers – picking up,
learning, and adopting new technologies.
McNeill emphasized diffusion – that’s one of our key words – the adoption of societies
of technologies, skills, customs, social arrangements that they perceived to be better than their
own.
So diffusion and adoption have been sort of a critical dynamic in world historical change.
McNeill emphasized the web of communication between cultures as more critical than their
relative independence.
McNeill wrote another book in 1976 called Plagues and People – this first major work
looking at the reciprocal relationships between human beings and parasites in human history.
This is one of those nonhuman factors that we talked about in our last lecture.
The next book I want to mention briefly here is Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange.
This is published in 1972.
Crosby examined the impact of Columbus’s voyages on the global ecosystem.
This book gained a wide audience.
I think every teacher in the country has a lecture that they call ‘The Columbian Exchange’,
certainly I do.
Crosby stressed interdisciplinary studies.
He says, quote, “I am the first to appreciate that historians, geologists, anthropologists,
zoologists, botanists, and demographers will see me as an amateur in their particular fields.”
Crosby also published Ecological Imperialism, the biological expansion of Europe; it was
published in 1986.
Here Crosby argued that Europeans take their culture with them to the rest of the world
as they colonized the New World, Africa, portions of Asia and the Pacific.
Of course, this includes domesticated plants and animals, disease, weeds, other distinctly
European cultural artifacts – Christianity, for instance.
The next key text I’m going to mention is Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade
published in 1969.
Curtin linked Africa to the rest of the world, especially the sort of emerging Atlantic basin
connecting New World to Europe and Africa.
Curtin argued that the immunities in African populations, resulting from their exposure
to a difficult environment, gave African adults a demographic advantage over the indigenous
people of the Western Hemisphere and the Europeans in the New World.
Next is Immanuel Wallerstein’s The World System – I mentioned this in our earlier
lecture – published in 1974.
World system refers to the transnational division of labor, which divides the world into core
countries, semi-periphery countries, and those countries on the periphery.
Core countries focus on the higher skill, capital-intensive production, and the rest
of the world focuses more on a lower skill, labor-intensive production, and the extraction
of raw materials.
This constantly reinforces the dominance of the core countries.
Today the United States, Western Europe, Japan, China is emerging, as a core country.
The lesser developed countries – South America, parts of Africa and Asia, are on the periphery;
they supply labor and raw materials to the core.
Next I’m going to mention Jerry Bentley’s Old World Encounters, cross-cultural contacts
and exchanges in pre-modern times, published in 1993.
Bentley argued that well before modern times Africans, Asians, Europeans were regularly
interacting with each other and exchanging ideas, information, technologies.
Bentley argues these encounters rank among the most effective agents of change in world
history.
Next is Janet Abu-Lughod.
Her Before European Hegemony, the world system 1250-1350 – this is published in 1989.
Hegemony just means dominance.
What Abu-Lughod does here is she backs up Wallerstein’s world system a couple of centuries,
and she locates it in Central Asia, sort of during the time of the great Mongol trade
circuit that we’ll talk about in this course.
And then finally, Fernand Braudel, his classic The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World
in the Age of Philip II was published in 1966.
Braudel stressed interaction over a long duration across a wide region surrounding the Mediterranean
Sea.
Braudel took this maritime basin as a unit of analysis.
He ignored traditional boundaries of nations and cultures and civilizations and religions,
and looked at this region that surrounds the Mediterranean Sea.
One of the early texts looking at history from the bottom up, instead of the top down.
So in conclusion here, this is a very small sampling; I could go on like this for hours.
These are some of the earliest and most influential books in world history.
Keep these themes in mind.
Some of these arguments that I’ve just mentioned, for the non-historian it’s useful, more
useful, to learn sort of broad generalizations about world history than it is to try to cram
a bunch of useless facts into your heads – facts that you’ll promptly delete the minute this
course is over.
It’s better to have broad generalizations and sort of big, useful arguments when you
emerge from a history class.
Thank you for your attention.