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ISBN 978-1-4443-3418-0

Douglas Northrop

Douglas Northrop is Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. His first book, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (2004), won the W. bruce Lincoln Prize and the Heldt Prize.

A Companion to World HistoryEdited by Douglas Northrop

A Companion to World History offers a comprehensive overview of the variety of approaches and practices utilized in the field of world and global history. this state-of-the-art collection of more than 30 insightful essays – including contributions from an international cast of leading world historians and emerging scholars in the field – identifies continuing areas of contention, disagreement, and divergence, while pointing out fruitful directions for further discussion and research. themes and topics explored include the lineages and trajectories of world history, key ideas and methods employed by world historians, the teaching of world history and how it draws upon and challenges “traditional” approaches, and global approaches to writing world history. by considering these interwoven issues of scholarship and pedagogy from a transnational, interregional, and world/global scale, fresh insights are gained and new challenges posed. With its rich compendium of diverse viewpoints, A Companion to World History is an essential resource for the study of the world’s past.

A C o m p a n i o n t o

WORLD HISTORY

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A Companion to World History

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORYThis series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our current understanding of the past. Defined by theme, period and/or region, each volume comprises between twenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The aim of each contribution is to synthesize the current state of schol-arship from a variety of historical perspectives and to provide a statement on where the field is heading. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO EUROPEAN HISTORYA Companion to Europe 1900–1945Edited by Gordon MartelA Companion to Eighteenth-Century EuropeEdited by Peter H. WilsonA Companion to Nineteenth-Century EuropeEdited by Stefan BergerA Companion to the Worlds of the RenaissanceEdited by Guido RuggieroA Companion to the Reformation WorldEdited by R. Po-chia HsiaA Companion to Europe Since 1945Edited by Klaus LarresA Companion to the Medieval WorldEdited by Carol Lansing and Edward D. English

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORYA Companion to the American RevolutionEdited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. PoleA Companion to 19th-Century AmericaEdited by William L. BarneyA Companion to the American SouthEdited by John B. BolesA Companion to American Indian HistoryEdited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal SalisburyA Companion to American Women’s HistoryEdited by Nancy A. HewittA Companion to Post-1945 AmericaEdited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy RosenzweigA Companion to the Vietnam WarEdited by Marilyn B. Young and Robert BuzzancoA Companion to Colonial AmericaEdited by Daniel VickersA Companion to American Foreign RelationsEdited by Robert D. SchulzingerA Companion to 20th-Century AmericaEdited by Stephen J. WhitfieldA Companion to the American WestEdited by William DeverellA Companion to the Civil War and ReconstructionEdited by Lacy K. FordA Companion to American TechnologyEdited by Carroll Pursell

A Companion to African-American HistoryEdited by Alton Hornsby, JrA Companion to American ImmigrationEdited by Reed UedaA Companion to American Cultural HistoryEdited by Karen HalttunenA Companion to California HistoryEdited by William Deverell and David IglerA Companion to American Military HistoryEdited by James BradfordA Companion to Los AngelesEdited by William Deverell and Greg HiseA Companion to American Environmental HistoryEdited by Douglas Cazaux SackmanA Companion to Benjamin FranklinEdited by David Waldstreicher

WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO WORLD HISTORYA Companion to Western Historical ThoughtEdited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah MazaA Companion to Gender HistoryEdited by Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-HanksA Companion to International History 1900–2001Edited by Gordon MartelA Companion to the History of the Middle EastEdited by Youssef M. ChoueiriA Companion to Japanese HistoryEdited by William M. TsutsuiA Companion to Latin American HistoryEdited by Thomas HollowayA Companion to Russian HistoryEdited by Abbott GleasonA Companion to World War IEdited by John HorneA Companion to Mexican History and CultureEdited by William H. BeezleyA Companion to Global Environmental HistoryEdited by J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart MauldinA Companion to World HistoryEdited by Douglas Northrop

For further information on these and other titles in the series please visit our website at

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A COMPANION TO WORLD HISTORY

Edited by

Douglas Northrop

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except chapter 20 © 2012 Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and Mr Benjamin Sacks

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataA companion to world history / edited by Douglas Northrop. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4443-3418-0 (hardback)1. History–Methodology. 2. History–Study and teaching. 3. Historiography. I. Northrop, Douglas Taylor. D13.C628 2012 907.2–dc23

2012009799A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Painting of the Battle of Adwa, 2 March 1896, by unknown Ethiopian artist, c. 1940–1949. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

Set in 10/12pt Galliard by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2012

For Sawyer and Jeremy, every day a new world

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables x Notes on Contributors xi Editor’s Acknowledgments xviii

Introduction: The Challenge of World History 1 Douglas Northrop

Part I trajectorIes and PractIces 13

1 World History: Departures and Variations 15Kenneth Pomeranz and Daniel A. Segal

2 Why and How I Became a World Historian 32Dominic Sachsenmaier

Researching the world: techniques and methods 43

3 Becoming a World Historian: The State of Graduate Training in World History and Placement in the Academic World 45Heather Streets-Salter

4 The World Is Your Archive? The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research 63Barbara Weinstein

5 What Are the Units of World History? 79Adam McKeown

Teaching the world: publics and pedagogies 95

6 Meetings of World History and Public History 97Leslie Witz

7 Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History 111Robert B. Bain

Contents

viii contents

8 Teaching World History at the College Level 128Trevor Getz

Part II categorIes and concePts 141

Framing 142

9 Environments, Ecologies, and Cultures across Space and Time 143I.G. Simmons

10 Deep Pasts: Interconnections and Comparative History in the Ancient World 156Norman Yoffee

11 Big History 171Fred Spier

12 Global Scale Analysis in Human History 185Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall

13 Region in Global History 201Paul A. Kramer

14 Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World 213Anne Gerritsen

Comparing 227

15 Comparative History and the Challenge of the Grand Narrative 229Michael Adas

16 The Science of Difference: Race, Indo-European Linguistics, and Eurasian Nomads 244Xinru Liu

17 Projecting Power: Empires, Colonies, and World History 258Mrinalini Sinha

18 The Body in/as World History 272Antoinette Burton

19 Benchmarks of Globalization: The Global Condition, 1850–2010 285Charles Bright and Michael Geyer

Connecting 301

20 Networks, Interactions, and Connective History 303Felipe Fernández-Armesto with Benjamin Sacks

21 Objects in Motion 321Scott C. Levi

22 People in Motion 339Kerry Ward

contents ix

23 Religious Ideas in Motion 352Karin Vélez, Sebastian R. Prange, and Luke Clossey

24 Diseases in Motion 365Martin S. Pernick

25 Bullets in Motion 375Stephen Morillo

Part III Many globes: Who WrItes the World? 389

26 The World from Oceania 391Damon Ieremia Salesa

27 The World from China 405Weiwei Zhang

28 Historicizing the World in Northeast Asia 418Jie-Hyun Lim

29 Writing Global History in Africa 433David Simo

30 Islamicate World Histories? 447Huri Islamoğlu

31 The World from Latin America and the Peripheries 464Eduardo Devés-Valdés

32 (Re)Writing World Histories in Europe 478Katja Naumann

33 Other Globes: Shifting Optics on the World 497Douglas Northrop

Bibliography 527 Index 576

Maps

I.1 Imagining a recentered globe: the Hobo-Dyer projection 210.1 Major sites in the Old Assyrian trading system 16114.1 Jiangxi province in late imperial China 21816.1 Central Asia and early Indo-European peoples 25220.1 The Indian Ocean: wind and weather patterns, with trade routes 31420.2 The Pacific: wind patterns and population movements 31420.3 The Atlantic: wind patterns and trade routes 31521.1 The silk roads, from ca. 200 bce 32421.2 Going global: European trade contacts in Africa and Asia, ca. 1700 33321.3 Europeans in the Americas, ca. 1700 33426.1 Oceania, with island groups and voyaging zones 393

Figures

7.1 An expert teacher’s concept map 115 7.2 A novice teacher’s concept map 11612.1 Basic iteration model of world-system evolution 19512.2 Temporary institutional shortcuts in the iteration model 19633.1 Our world’s visual greeting: picturing humanity for the universe 517

Table

9.1 Gross energy consumed by humans 145

Maps, Figures, and Tables

Notes on Contributors

Michael Adas is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor and Board of Governors’ Chair at Rutgers University. His teaching and research have centered on the comparative study of the impact of Western science and technology on European and American colonialism in Asia and Africa. His recent books include Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance and Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission. Adas has also co-authored six editions of World Civilizations: The Global Experience. He is currently working on a comparison of the combat experience in World War I and Vietnam.

Robert B. Bain is Associate Professor of Education and History, and chair of the secondary teacher education program, at the University of Michigan. Bain earned his PhD in American social history at Case Western Reserve University. After working for years as a high-school social-studies teacher, he joined the faculty at Michigan, where his research and clinical work focuses on the translation of historical “habits of mind” into K-12 classrooms: how teachers and students can acquire the methods, approaches, and assumptions of disciplinary historians in teaching and learning. A former World History Association council member, most recently he is a co-designer and researcher in the Big History Project.

Charles Bright is Arthur J. Thurnau Professor and Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Residential College. In addition to his collaborative work with Michael Geyer over two decades on global history, he has worked on prison history, publishing The Powers That Punish: Prisons and Politics in the Era of the “Big House,” 1920–1955, and on the history of Detroit, doing oral histories and creative projects with theater groups in the city. The current essay is part of a book project (with Geyer), The Global Condition in the Long-Twentieth Century.

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is also Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies. A historian of Victorian Britain, modern empire, Indian women, feminism and postcoloniality, she is the author most recently of A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles (2012).

xii notes on contributors

Christopher Chase-Dunn is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems (with Thomas D. Hall), The Wintu and Their Neighbors (with Kelly Mann), and The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism (with Terry Boswell). He is founder and former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research. Chase-Dunn is currently doing research on global party formation and anti-systemic social movements. He also studies the rise and fall of settlements and polities since the Stone Age and global state formation.

Luke Clossey is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Simon Fraser University. His dissertation research won prizes from the World History Association and the Canadian Historical Association, and was published as Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (2008). Now that he has finished fighting over punctuation with the co-authors of the essay included here, he can return to fieldwork preparatory to writing a history of the early modern global cult of Yeshua ben Miriam, a first-century Jewish messiah.

Eduardo Devés-Valdés (PhD, University of Leuven (Lovain), and a second PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Paris III), a specialist in Latin American thought and thought in peripheral regions, is Professor of American Studies and coordinator of the Postdoctoral Studies Program at the University of Santiago, Chile. He  has published more than 150 works, including El pensamiento africano sud- sahariano en sus conexiones y paralelos con el latinoamericano y el asiático, and has taught and researched at various locations across Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto teaches at the University of Notre Dame. His books on global history include The World (2010), 1492 (2010), Pathfinders (2007), Civilizations (2000), and Millennium (1999).

Anne Gerritsen (PhD, Harvard) is Associate Professor of Chinese History at the University of Warwick. She works on topics that are local in scope, such as the history of the Jiangxi prefecture of Ji’an and ceramics manufacture in the Jiangxi town of Jingdezhen, as well as topics that are global, such as the worldwide trade in porcelain, and global perceptions and knowledge of Chinese material culture and technology. She is currently the director of the Global History and Culture Centre, based in the Department of History at the University of Warwick.

Trevor Getz is a Professor of African History at San Francisco State University. He is the author or co-author of seven books, the latest of which is the graphic history Abina and the Important Men. He is currently working on a digital world history textbook with Jonathan Brooke and is editing the Oxford University Press series African World Histories.

Michael Geyer is Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History at the University of Chicago and faculty director of the Human Rights Program. His main academic interests are war and violence, the history and theory of Human Rights, and global history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among his recent publications is Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, edited with Sheila Fitzpatrick (2009). The current essay is part of a book project (with Charles Bright), The Global Condition in the Long-Twentieth Century.

notes on contributors xiii

Thomas D. Hall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana. He holds an MA in Anthropology, University of Michigan, and a PhD in Sociology, University of Washington. His interests include indigenous peoples, ethnicity, and comparative frontiers. Recent publications include “World-systems analysis and archaeology: Continuing the dialogue,” with P. Nick Kardulias and Christopher Chase-Dunn, Journal of Archaeological Research 19 (3) (2011): 233–279; “Resilience and community in the age of world-system collapse,” with Glen D. Kuecker, Nature and Culture 6 (1) (2011): 18–40; Indigenous Peoples and Globalization: Resistance and Revitalization, with James V. Fenelon (2009).

Huri Islamoğlu is Professor of Economic History, Boğazici University, Istanbul; and since 2008, Visiting Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley. Her publi-cations include (with Peter Perdue) Shared Histories of Modernity in China, India and the Ottoman Empire (2009); Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West (2004); Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (1987); and State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire (1994). She has written and lectured in the fields of comparative economic history and political economy, legal history, agricultural history and agricul-ture and current globalization trends, and global governance.

Paul A. Kramer is an Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, with research and teaching interests in US imperial, transnational and global histories since the mid-nineteenth century. He is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (2006). He co-edits the Cornell University Press series The United States in the World, and is currently at work on a book-length project on the nexus between empire and US immigration policy across the twentieth century.

Scott C. Levi (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000) is Associate Professor of Central Asian history at Ohio State University. In addition to his articles and book chap-ters, Levi has authored The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900 (2002), edited India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500–1800 (2007), and co-edited (with Ron Sela) Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Sources (2010).

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Comparative History and the director of the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University in Seoul. He has held visiting appointments in Krakow, Cardiff, Kyoto, Berlin and Cambridge, Mass. He has written numerous books and articles on the comparative histories of nationalist movements, colonialism, issues of memory, and the sociocultural history of Marxism in East Asia and Eastern Europe. He now edits a Palgrave series on mass dictatorship in the twentieth century. His most recent project is a transnational history of “victimhood nationalism,” covering post–World War II Korea, Japan, Poland, Israel, and Germany.

Xinru Liu (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) teaches world history and the history of South Asia and Central Asia at the College of New Jersey in Ewing and is associated with the Institute of History and the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Among her many publications are Ancient India and Ancient China (1988); Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People in AD 600–1200 (1996); Connections across Eurasia: Transportation, Communications, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads, with Lynda Norene Shaffer (2007); and The Silk Road in World History (2010).

xiv notes on contributors

Adam McKeown is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, where he offers courses on the histories of globalization, world migration and drugs, and is the  co-coordinator of the PhD track in International and Global History. He wrote Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (2008), and Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (2001). He is now working on the history of globalization since 1760.

Stephen Morillo, DPhil Oxford, Professor of History and Chair of Division III (Social Sciences) at Wabash College, specializes in premodern comparative world and military history. He is President of De Re Militari, the Society for Medieval Military History. He has written Structures and Systems: Conceptual Frameworks of World History, a forthcom-ing world history textbook, and is working on a cultural history of warrior elites in world history. His numerous other books, articles, and chapters include What Is Military History? and War in World History: Society, Technology and War from Ancient Times to the Present, a military world history textbook.

Katja Naumann is a researcher at the Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe at the University of Leipzig, where she coordinates a handbook on the transna-tional history of the region. She lectures at the Global and European Studies Institute in Leipzig and coordinates the headquarters of the European Network in Universal and Global History. Further, she works on the editorial boards of the geschichte.transna-tional forum and Comparativ: A Journal for Global History and Comparative Studies. In her dissertation she analyzed the development of world history teaching in the United States (1918–1968).

Douglas Northrop is Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, where he teaches modern Central Asian studies and helped create a program in world and global history. His books include Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia and An Imperial World: Empires and Colonies Since 1750 (forthcoming). His current research brings together environmental, colonial, cultural, and urban history in telling the story of Central Asia through natural disaster – specifically, a series of major earthquakes that struck the region during the last two centuries.

Martin S. Pernick, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, received a PhD in history from Columbia University, and has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Pennsylvania State University Hershey Medical Center. He authored A Calculus of Suffering (1985), on professional and cultural attitudes towards pain treat-ment in nineteenth-century America, and The Black Stork (1996), on eugenics and euthanasia in American medicine and film; plus numerous articles on epidemics, defining death, disability, eugenics, public health films, medical professionalism, informed con-sent, and the relation between history and bioethics, in US and comparative history.

Kenneth Pomeranz is University Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He previously taught at the University of California, Irvine, and was Founding Director of the University of California’s Multi-Campus Research Program in World History. His publications include The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy and The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Philosophical Society, ACLS, Institute for Advanced Studies, and NEH, among others.

notes on contributors xv

Sebastian R. Prange is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. His research centers on the organization of Muslim trade networks in the medieval and early modern Indian Ocean, with a regional focus on South India.

Dominic Sachsenmaier taught transcultural and Chinese history at Duke University before his recent move to become a Professor of Modern Asian History at Jacobs University in Germany. His main current research interests are Chinese and Western approaches to global history as well as the impact of World War I on political and intellectual cultures in China and other parts of the world. He has also published in fields such as seventeenth-century Sino-Western cultural relations, overseas Chinese commu-nities in Southeast Asia, and multiple modernities. His most recent book is Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (2011).

Damon Ieremia Salesa is Associate Professor of Pacific Studies at the Centre of Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Victorian British Empire (2011), one of the contributing authors to The New Oxford History of New Zealand (2009), editor (with Kolokesa Māhina and Sean Mallon) of Tangata o le Moana Nui: The Peoples of the Pacific and New Zealand (2012), and author of many other articles on race, Pacific, indigenous and imperial history. He is currently completing a book project, Empire Trouble and Troublesome Half-Castes: Samoans and the Greatest Powers in the World.

Daniel A. Segal is the Director of the Munroe Center of Social Inquiry and Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and History at Pitzer College. He is a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a recipient of the American Historical Association’s William Gilbert Award. He has published on race and nationalism in Trinidad, incest in Jane Austen, and on the history of undergraduate history textbooks. He contributes to the Slow Blog movement at http://daniel-segal.blogspot.com/.

Ian Simmons ended his book-writing days with a triad of books on environmental history, each written at a specific spatial scale but all covering the last 10,000 years. The last, Global Environmental History (2008), tried to encompass both the scientific outlook in which he was schooled and the broader contributions of the social sciences and humanities. He lives in Durham, UK, and is preparing a website on medieval environ-mental change in east Lincolnshire, a little-known area to which he was a wartime evacuee. His happy memories also include being a post-doc at Berkeley in the 1960s.

David Simo is Professor of German Literature, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies at the University of Yaoundé 1 in Cameroon, and a visiting professor at various German, French, and American universities. Born in Baham, Cameroon, in 1951, he studied German language and literature, comparative literature, and political science in Abidjan, Saarbrücken and Metz, earning a PhD in comparative literature in Metz (France), 1979, and a postdoctoral qualification (Habilitation) in Hanover, 1991, on intercultural experiences. He has published articles on German and African literature, postcolonial theory and criticism, and cultural studies. He received the Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar Lüst Prize, and serves as Director of the Center for German African Scientific Research Cooperation in Yaoundé.

Mrinalini Sinha is the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman”

xvi notes on contributors

and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995) and of Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (2006). She is currently working on the implications of the 1929 nationalist resolution for the complete political independence of India from the British Empire.

Fred Spier is Senior Lecturer in Big History at the University of Amsterdam. Spier has a MSc in biochemistry and both an MA and a PhD in cultural anthropology and social history. He executed a 10-year research project on religion, politics and ecology in Andean Peru. In his book Big History and the Future of Humanity (2010), Spier presents an explanatory model for all of history. Translations exist or are forthcoming in Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. Spier currently serves as the first Vice President of the International Big History Association (IBHA).

Heather Streets-Salter received her PhD at Duke University in 1998. She is Associate Professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the graduate program in World History. Previously she directed the graduate program in World History at Washington State University from 2003 to 2011. Recent works include Martial Races: The Military, Martial Races, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (2004), Traditions and Encounters: A Brief Global History (2006) with Jerry Bentley and Herb Ziegler, and Modern Imperialism and Colonialism: A Global Perspective (2010) with Trevor Getz. Her current monograph is called Empire Crossings: Connections across Imperial Borders in Southeast Asia.

Karin Vélez is Assistant Professor of History at Macalester College. A doctoral graduate of Princeton University, she has also worked at Northeastern University, Duke University as a Thompson Writing Program Fellow (2008), and Williams College as a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow (2005). She has recently published on the transatlantic gifts of the Huron of Lorette (French Colonial History Journal 12 (2011)) and on early modern missions to the Americas (in Mary Laven et al., eds, Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (2012)). She is currently finalizing a book manuscript, “Catholic landings in the early modern world: Jesuits, converts and the collective miracle of Loreto.”

Kerry Ward is Associate Professor of World History and Director of African Studies at Rice University. She is the author of Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (2009). Ward has published in the fields of slavery and forced migration, Indian Ocean history, South African and Indonesian colonial history, and historical memory and public history. She is currently Secretary of the World History Association.

Barbara Weinstein is the Silver Professor of History at New York University. Her research has focused primarily on postcolonial Brazil, and includes two monographs, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (1983) and For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964 (1996). She is co-editor of The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History (2012), and is cur-rently completing The Color of Modernity, a study of race, regional inequalities, and national identities in Brazil.

Leslie Witz is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa. His major research centers around how different histories are created and represented in the public domain through memorials, museums, festivals, and tourism. His book Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National

notes on contributors xvii

Pasts was published in 2003. He has also written two books for popular audiences: Write Your Own History (1988) and How to Write Essays (1990). Witz is the chair of the board of Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum.

Norman Yoffee’s research oscillates between the fields of Assyriology (Mesopotamian studies) and Anthropology. These fields come together in Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations (2005). After retiring from the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, he is now Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and University of New Mexico, and is Senior Fellow, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. His home page is sitemaker.umich.edu/nyoffee.

Weiwei Zhang is Associate Professor of History at Nankai University, China. He has taught at Nankai since 1975, offering courses in modern global history and world- systems study and working to develop a noncentric and holistic approach which emphasizes global disequilibrium and social physics. A member of the executive board of the Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO), and of the board of directors of the Asian Association of World Historians, Zhang earned his PhD in 1998 at Nankai, served as visiting scholar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (1987–1988, 1999–2000), at Seoul National University, Korea (1997), and the University of Louisville (2002), and received a Teaching Model Award of Higher Education, Tianjin (1996).

Editor’s Acknowledgments

No book is an island – and no author stands alone. Every writer’s voice appears, and takes on full meaning, in conversation with others: with those who wrote earlier, and those located around the globe. This idea should be particularly obvious to anyone inter-ested in world history, given the field’s focus on core themes like interaction, encounter, and mutual influence. It should be just as plain in a large-scale collective book like this one – with its almost three dozen chapters, each of which sets out to map a terrain of scholarship produced by scores of authors. The scale of such an undertaking produces obvious logistical challenges (and the requisite jokes about cat-herding), but the effort also shows at every step the interlocking, iterative character of historical work. As this book now heads out to its own world of readers, I am humbled and grateful for the unstinting contributions of the many who brought it into existence.

This list starts with Tessa Harvey, publisher for History at Wiley-Blackwell, who first proposed the idea of such a book, and framed it as part of the Companions series. Tessa encouraged me to take the plunge as editor, helped sharpen my initial ideas as they grew into the volume’s overall architecture, and brainstormed details and assisted with the recruitment of an extraordinary slate of authors – who now fill its pages. Gillian Kane likewise helped as the volume took shape, and provided steady encouragement as the months passed. Later in the production process I had the good fortune to work with Isobel Bainton and Sue Leigh, the very best of project editors and managers, who kept track of myriad balls in the air and without whom the book could never have appeared, and with Ann Bone, Glynis Baguley, and Zeb Korycinska, the most vigilant (and patient) of copyeditors, proofreaders, and indexers.

In plotting the table of contents I consulted with, and twisted the arms of, dozens of colleagues. Many, happily, agreed to participate by writing a chapter. Some went above and beyond in thinking about the volume as a whole, and helped me make connections among its various components – here I am particularly grateful to Michael Adas. Among those whose names do not appear in the chapter listing, but who nevertheless played an important role in shaping my ideas about what this book could and should do, I thank Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis.

The essays that follow engage questions of scholarship alongside pedagogy, and confront issues of institution as much as intellect. These practicalities that enable (and

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channel) intellectual work can be invisible to readers and students, yet are nonetheless critical. Given world history’s oft-marginal status in the disciplinary arenas of History, I am astonishingly fortunate to have worked at three institutions that not only allowed, but even encouraged, such exploration. I first taught world history at Pitzer College, where Daniel Segal brought me into his fascinating pedagogical projects and showed me what was at stake in the effort; later I helped design world-oriented graduate and under-graduate programs at the University of Georgia, and then, since 2004, at the University of Michigan. My thinking has been shaped by hundreds of students along the way, first-year undergraduates through PhDs in global history, and by colleagues at every step.

I am particularly mindful of the remarkable support provided by the University of Michigan, an unusually encouraging place for serious efforts to build world/global history. Gratitude is due especially to Geoff Eley, the extraordinary department chair of History, and Kathleen Canning, the dedicated former director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies (EIHS). In spring 2009 more than two dozen Michigan faculty and PhD students signed up for an EIHS boot camp, which I co-taught with Robert Bain, on “Thinking and Teaching in Global Dimensions.” Since then curricula, faculty hires, visiting speakers, and student admissions have all changed – interweaving “the global” (in all its flavors and meanings) throughout institutional life. Unlike most academics, with at most a handful of people working on the margins of a department, I am now privileged to have no fewer than 31 (!!) History faculty self-declared as members of a “globalist” faculty group. (In Michigan’s language of acronyms, this status formally means belonging to the “GWITECC” faculty caucus – dedicated to “global, world, international, trans-regional, edges, connective, and comparative history.”) A few current members are represented in the pages that follow (Bain, Bright, Pernick, Sinha); others who contribute to the vibrant presence of world history at Michigan, and who have shaped my thinking about it, include Howard Brick, Gabrielle Hecht, Nancy Hunt, Valerie Kivelson, Ian Moyer, Hitomi Tonomura, and Penny Von Eschen.

By authorial convention I save for last the most fundamental and heartfelt of debts. My family has heard much about the challenges of this book, and has seen firsthand the logistical complications of shepherding 33 chapters to completion. My wife, Michelle McClellan, dealt as much as I did with the sharp end of those challenges, and she deserves as much credit for finding their solutions. My sons, Jeremy and Sawyer, saw me working on this book for a long time – but as perhaps the only preadolescents in Michigan simul-taneously learning Uyghur alphabets, studying aeronautical engineering, and reading voraciously about world politics, they also served as inspiration for its completion. To me they are emblematic of what it means to let minds range freely, all around the globe, crossing borders wherever and whenever one’s interests may go.

A Companion to World History, First Edition. Edited by Douglas Northrop. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

What do historians see – and what do they miss? It depends, of course, on how any particular historian chooses to look. She or he must first decide on a time and place to investigate, identify sources to serve as evidence, and pose questions to ask about them. Each choice is shaped by a scholar’s training – the way they learned the craft of “history.” Usually this happens at an academic institution, through formal education in one or more clearly defined “fields”: French history, African history, early modern history, the history of science, and so on. Experienced scholars convey their expertise to students, carefully preparing the next generation of historians, honing linguistic skills and imparting deep knowledge of particular archives, libraries, and publications. New historians thus emerge well versed in their area’s theoretical, methodological, and historiographical debates – at least as these are understood at their academic institution, located in its own geographic and cultural context, and at a certain point in time. But what happens if these institutional and intellectual pathways are disrupted – if historical questions are asked in new ways, stretching across the boundaries of the existing fields? Can time and space be stretched, as in Map I.1, and historians take a new, broader, perspective?

This is precisely what practitioners of world and global history aim to do. They represent a young “field,” at least by the standards of professional history, one that by  most measures has only come into its own over the past quarter-century. World history is still in some ways embattled, harshly criticized by self-styled disciplinary gatekeepers, including some specialists in nationally defined fields – Japanese history, Russian history, American history, etc. World history may represent a practical threat (as a new claimant to limited institutional resources) but is more likely to be attacked in intellectual terms, as a marginal, even doomed approach, too general, impossibly broad, obviously too superficial to permit serious scholarship. Yet world history – as a professional arena – is populated by a diverse and rapidly growing group of scholars and teachers who have worked hard to show the contrary. They have developed all the trappings and infrastructure of a legitimate institutional domain: professional organizations (especially the World History Association, thewha.org), journals (notably the Anglophone Journal

The Challenge of World History

Douglas Northrop

IntroductIon

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Map I.1 On a typical world map, such as the classic Mercator projection, Greenland appears misleadingly enormous – yet few observers pause to note the inaccuracies. Mapmakers rarely question other basic assumptions, such as drawing north at the top. But if the Earth resembles a ball spinning through space, are “up” and “down” so self-evident? Better maps can provide fresh perspective, and make viewers aware of unspoken assumptions. The Hobo-Dyer projection shows accurately the relative size of different land areas, while preserving north/south and east/west lines of bearing. It also gives the Southern Hemisphere visual prominence, imagining a globe that has been recentered Down Under. Source: Hobo-Dyer Equal Area Projection. © 2007, ODTmaps. Adapted with permission from www.ODTmaps.com.

IntroductIon: the challenge of world hIstory 3

of World History and Journal of Global History), book prizes, teaching prizes, PhD programs, undergraduate courses, elementary- and secondary-school curricula, textbooks at all levels, handbooks for teachers, scholarly monographs, popular publications, Advanced Placement tests, museum exhibits, television shows – the list goes on.1 World historians thus stand on much stronger ground now to argue with skeptics than they did a generation ago. The field is sufficiently rooted and broad-based to have moved beyond self-justification; it includes a panoply of internal conversations and arguments about what world-historical work can and should do. World historians take deeply divergent approaches, sometimes evincing little consensus about the field’s wider parameters or its common standards. World history is a professional arena visibly in flux, still taking shape, open for dispute. This volume sketches the resulting arguments, and traces the field’s principal trajectories. But world historians as a group share the impulse to see the human past differently – more expansively – by reaching beyond the boxes in which history is conventionally taught.

William McNeill, perhaps the best-known world historian of the last century, once memorably defended the field through metaphor. What might a world historian see, he asked, that a national, regional, or period-specific historian would miss? “A tree is a tree,” he pointed out. It is also a collection of millions of cells, or trillions of atoms; at the same time, it is also a vanishingly tiny piece of the forest ecosystems that stretch far beyond its trunk. Biologists may analyze how the tree’s cells work, parse the chemical processing of chlorophyll, and zoom down to the molecular level of DNA – all valuable endeavors – but that does not make it inaccurate to talk about “the tree.” No one needs to understand every individual cell to know what a tree is. Ecologists, likewise, need not start at the atomic level – nor the level of an individual tree – to discuss the “forest”: to analyze its seasonal variations, its diseases, or its interactions with other species (such as humans). Put simply, different entities, issues, and patterns emerge at each level of perspective (atom-cell-tree-forest). None are right or wrong in an absolute sense, merely more or less appropriate to the questions being asked. Every phenomenon is best seen at its own scale; each is also inescapably comprised of smaller units, while interlocking with others to shape larger levels. “Precision and truthfulness,” McNeill concluded, “do not necessarily increase as the scale becomes smaller.”2

McNeill expanded the point – and the concomitant value of adopting a bird’s-eye perspective – by describing a walk he had taken long before, when he was a graduate student in New York City. One day in Morningside Park he looked out and saw a major highway, the Hudson Parkway, stretched out beneath him. From his elevated point of view, he suddenly realized, “the stop-and-go traffic on the Parkway constituted a longitudinal wave, with nodes and anti-nodes spaced at regular intervals, moving along the Parkway at a pace considerably faster than any single vehicle could make its way along the crowded roadway.” Each individual car was part of this wave, although it far exceeded any one vehicle in both size and speed. The wave, McNeill declared, was “most certainly there – clear and unambiguous,” notwithstanding the fact that few if any drivers on the road – in fact, probably no one but McNeill himself, watching from the overlook – could be aware of its existence. Recognizing it required three things: a perceptive observer (McNeill), a proper spot from which to look (Morningside Park), and a concept through which to “see” and understand what was happening (the idea of a longitudinal wave).

This Companion to World History provides readers with dozens of such spots from which to look, and key concepts with which to make sense of what they see. World history’s defenders often use such conceits, frequently invoking ideas of a “lens” or viewpoint to

4 IntroductIon: the challenge of world hIstory

make the case for adopting a world/global-level perspective. Metaphors of visibility and perspective abound, and contributors to this book are no exception – they use many different lenses (zoom, wide-angle, moving back and forth, and so on). The volume aims to orient readers to world history by showing the globe from as many of these points of view as possible. It sketches the development of world history as a professional field, especially over the past generation of scholarship; identifies principal areas of continuing contention, disagreement and divergence; and suggests fruitful directions for further discussion and research. It also considers issues of scholarship (research) and pedagogy (teaching) – each of which yields fresh insights but also poses particular challenges when approached at transnational, interregional, or world/global scales.

“World history,” or various approaches grouped under that label, has exploded recently into prominence in the United States – in university, college, and high-school, middle-school, and elementary-school (K-12) classrooms – and to varying degrees in other countries as well, but it is nevertheless still criticized as disjointed in practice and sometimes dismissed by academic historians as mere “popular” history, lacking scholarly respectability and disciplinary solidity. Such critiques are belied by the steady flow of excellent world-historical research in journals, books, and graduate programs, but “national” or regional historians do not commonly read this work. How has serious scholarship developed in an arena without a readily visible fieldsite or manageable body of languages, and with a proclivity to incorporate methods and sources from disciplines as varied as literature and astrophysics? How can teachers and students educated along national, regional, or chronological lines make sense of a vastly broader sweep of the human past to highlight worldwide patterns, global developments and comparisons, and cross-regional or world-systemic interactions?

More than 30 chapters follow to address these questions. Each chapter provides not so much a neatly packaged description of a canonical topic as a sketch of starting points for further exploration. Each offers an overview of the practices operating within a particular subfield or approach. The chapters collectively suggest that world history is best seen as a field in action, not one clearly defined or even easily summarized. The book adopts a “warts and all” approach that equally celebrates the achievements and breadth of a field that has come of age, explores its fundamental problems, and highlights challenges for the future. Contributors ask forthright questions about core problems: how can practitioners establish distinctive and defensible research methods for world and global history; how should readers think about connections (or the lack thereof) between world-scaled scholarship and teaching; and how does world history appear to the non-Anglophone world?

This final question may seem obvious, but is too often overlooked in practice: how would the world’s past change if it were written by all its people? This issue runs throughout the book, but is addressed directly in the concluding group of essays in Part III, “Many Globes: Who Writes the World?” These chapters extend recent efforts to broaden the geographic, linguistic, institutional, and epistemological bases of world history by considering how the field could change were it not so dominated by modern Western (especially American) scholars and their concerns. These scholars are of course situated culturally and historically, with predispositions and theoretical frameworks shaped by positions in a modern, especially Anglophone and capitalist, West. Radical critics, especially those adopting perspectives from postcolonial studies, argue that the character of actually-existing world history – its practitioners’ predominant physical locations, shared languages, and core problematics – amounts only to the latest version

IntroductIon: the challenge of world hIstory 5

of the West’s assertion of intellectual hegemony. From this point of view, world history studies a “globe” that has been conceived through Euro-American categories and approached with Euro-American historicist epistemologies (for example, assuming professional practices of empirical documentation). It is therefore neither objective nor value-neutral – and far from truly global.3 Some world historians, speaking with the zeal of partisans and converts, have disagreed forcefully with this characterization, calling it unfair, political/ideological, and a failure of imagination (Bentley 2005; O’Brien 2006). Yet their and others’ actions have also conceded that “worlding” the field is indeed a crucially important task, one that has only just begun.4

When histories begin at different starting points, as the chapters in Part III show, other questions inevitably arise. Historical subjects will shift, and new frameworks emerge. What, then, are the limits of Anglophone world-historical scholarship? How will categories, emphases, and chronologies shift if the world’s past is considered from other points of view? What other possible centers and peripheries come into focus – or does the center/periphery model even apply? Are concepts like “nation,” “empire,” or “ bureaucracy” (to take just a few examples) still as important, and do they mean the same thing? How do the “turning points” of global or interregional history change? What evidence – and what methods – do scholars working in different institutional, linguistic, and disciplinary terrains find most productive? How do their theories, narratives, and epistemologies of a “world” differ? How, most basically, do they think about the past? A concluding chapter leaves history altogether, considering global approaches in other disciplinary terrains – nonhistorical fields in the humanities and social sciences, from art to economics, that are likewise wrestling with theories and practices of world-scaled study.

The bulk of the book before this point is divided into two broad headings. The chapters in Part I discuss the making of world history as a field, on the one hand, and of world historians to populate it, on the other. These chapters sketch the techniques and methods through which historians are currently trained to think about the globe – from practicalities of program and course design, to research methods and fieldwork, to the intellectual questions of how to define basic categories and conceive an audience for teaching and scholarship. This section orients readers new to the field by providing a historical backdrop  – the emergence of world and global history as a professional domain, the politics and institutional stakes of undertaking world-historic study, and even a personal story of the odyssey of becoming a world historian. As many have found, it is not an easy field to enter, so the professional trajectories that unfold are complicated. Several pieces deal thoughtfully with the critical voices of historians who have questioned the intellectual value, methodological practicalities, and epistemological implications of world history. These critics, like those already mentioned, make important points; it is unfair to brush them off as misinformed or narrow-minded pedants. Rather than taking a straightforwardly evangelical approach or simply lauding the value of global perspectives (as important as such perspectives may be), these chapters reflect on the trade-offs that come with any choice of method, concept, approach, or theory – world history included. One topic regrettably almost absent, with only an occasional glancing discussion, relates to the field’s own economics, especially with regard to textbooks – the pressures of markets on authors and publishing houses, editorial perceptions of books that will “sell” and are thus worth publishing, shifting practices of remuneration for authors, and how such factors shape (and constrain) the architectures of “the world” that will reach wide audiences.

Part II then delves in detail into the chief concepts, categories, and approaches that are employed today by world and global historians. What makes an essay (or book, or

6 IntroductIon: the challenge of world hIstory

course syllabus, or museum exhibit) “world-historical” or “globally minded”? What are the benefits (and costs) of taking such a perspective? How has world and global history drawn upon – and questioned, challenged, destabilized – the categories of “traditional” history? Several chapters consider various frameworks in space and time – ranging from the universe as a whole down to localities and microhistory. World history, perhaps counterintuitively, does not only mean looking at “the globe,” as a whole, all at once; any number of other scales are also approachable in ways that are consonant with the field’s guiding concerns. Other chapters then consider comparative approaches, in which particular themes are taken up and seen afresh in global context. Finally, several chapters cover key aspects of connective world history – tracing how historians follow objects, people, and ideas around the globe, and what they can learn by doing so. Each of these general approaches – framing, comparing, connecting – suggests principal modes that world historians have adopted, and how they might answer critics who say the field lacks firm sources, clear methods, recognizable fieldsites, defined historiographies, and/or coherent theoretical frameworks.

Of course, many other topics could have been included: sports and leisure, technology, etc. Yet just as world historians do not purport to offer encyclopedic coverage of everything that ever happened, this Companion does not set out to survey the field exhaustively – merely to sketch its major approaches. A planned chapter on “identity” did not material-ize, to take one example, so readers do not hear separately about identity categories such as race, gender, and class. The existing chapters nevertheless provide tools to reflect on these, and many other, themes. Race, class, and gender are key concepts historians use to think about the past, and they have been used productively in many time periods and cultural contexts; but strikingly, they have not yet played a prominent role in the writing of world and global history. This may be changing: some scholars have proposed rewriting world history through a lens of gender, for example, such as Strasser and Tinsman (2010) or Wiesner-Hanks (2007). The potential promise is clear. Identity categories have both an abstract analytic power – offering a powerful way for scholars to interpret the world – and their own independent historical presence – as important ideas that appeared at particular times and places in the actually existing world, and served to organize social groups and movements. They grew, migrated, and had manifold effects; therefore they can be treated as historical subjects in their own right, producing their own discrete, globally dispersed, world histories. One could, for example, write a world history of apartheid and racial ideologies that interlocked South Africa, India, and Haiti; or of women’s suffrage, both globally and in specific places such as Japan, Turkey, and Brazil.

Clearly there are many kinds of world and global history, and the details will emerge as the chapters unfold. Just a few more words at the outset suffice to set the stage, and to point out a few additional questions readers may wish to keep in mind. What holds this enterprise together? How do world historians define what they do (apart from McNeill’s metaphors of lenses and traffic and trees)? Definitions obviously vary, but most efforts to synthesize the field include at least two key ideas. First is the importance of scale, especially the interconnecting of different scales. World historians, plainly, are best known for thinking big. They emphasize the bird’s-eye perspective, and are renowned for looking at (comparatively) vast distances and grand issues. They therefore ask questions, use methods, and seek sources that stretch across particular places or individual countries to encompass wider regions, and sometimes the whole globe. (Occasionally, as one chapter below shows, they even move beyond the Earth!) In  temporal terms world historians likewise look across larger-than-customary stretches

IntroductIon: the challenge of world hIstory 7

of time to find longer-term developments, comparisons, patterns, and connections. But this stretching – the overall expansion of time and space – is by itself not enough to define world or global history: the big picture is a necessary, but not sufficient, component. Most world historians would agree that it also requires a second key idea: mobility. The past is seen less as a collection of discrete stories (of particular places or peoples) than one fundamentally shaped by, and concerned with, the movements, relationships, and connections among them. Individual stories – whether of a single person, a town, a region, a country, even a continent – are therefore not seen in standalone terms. World history instead brings multiple stories together, comparing and/or connecting individuals and communities that are separated in space or time. From this point of view, any particular group can be seen in both relative (relational, comparative) and interactive (mutually constitutive, connective) terms. Any single story emerges and makes sense most fully only in wider contexts, both seen through ongoing processes of exchange, encounter, and relationship with people far away, and as part of systems much larger than any locality.

Institutionally and intellectually, therefore, world history at its heart denies the presumptively foundational character of the nation-state. This modern social form has frequently been assumed to be – or at least it has been unwittingly treated as – a self-evident, naturally fundamental framework for conceptualizing the human past. (Recall those disciplinary fields for historians, generally structured along national lines: American history, French history, Chinese history, and so on.) Area studies scholarship, based on the notion of coherent, separable world “regions,” has also, for the last half-century or so, played a related role in this “boxing” of historical knowledge. To be fair, scholarship focused on area and nation has created critical underpinnings for world history today, generating detailed knowledge of peoples and cultures all around the globe, including many not previously well studied by the powerful institutions of Euro-American academia. Yet both the area-studies enterprise and national historiographies start by reifying a unit for study, generally treating it as a more or less self-contained, sometimes almost hermetic box. World history, at its core, posits instead the need to put areal – or national – literatures into connection with one another, to resist institutionally instantiated assertions of specialized “turf” and “expertise” that are built into professional academic discourse. World historians start by adopting very different scalar approaches in space and time. National and regional stories are present, certainly, but are not always presumed to drive the whole.5

For this reason, world historians do not see the simple expansion of scale – including to the globe as a whole – as the only story worth telling. Instead, cross-regional, cross-temporal, and global points of view are essential, often overlooked, perspectives; but they are only one (or two) of the levels of analysis to be included. Grand perspectives give new meaning to national (and local) developments, and cross-regional or global developments shape local-to-national stories; but wider narratives also arise from smaller-scaled histories. The basic idea is that none of these histories, at whatever level, exists in isolation. All have been shaped by different scalar layers and by distant places, actors, ideas, and histories. Many world historians are interested in how these scales interact – how trajectories, patterns, actors, and contingencies are inescapably part of a vast interlocking interscalar system of space and time. All the levels work together, and each lends structure and composition to others. The relative weight of any particular spatial or temporal scale will shift depending on the questions being asked, but world history requires constant mobility: regularly shifting the lens to move viewers ever

8 IntroductIon: the challenge of world hIstory

upward and ever downward. A world-historical approach thus means always asking what is happening on different levels, and how these levels are shaping one another – tracing interscalar loops of connection and causation. Some world historians, more controversially, then go beyond these scalar interactions to compare layers of scale. This happens most visibly in the subfield of Big History, which identifies commensurable patterns across vastly disparate spatial scales, ranging from subatomic particles to intergalactic space. Such a view – drawing its evidence from physics, biology, and other nonhistorical fields via concepts of complexity and energy utilization – is not universally held by world historians, but it suggests the breadth of new perspectives that can be brought out by expanding notions of scale.

World history thus holds that the customary, basic units of disciplinary history are too rigid. As a field it aims to overcome the mutually reinforcing, too often invisible, institutional and intellectual boundaries that constrain historical work. Many of these boundaries are likewise effects of modern states and their politico-cultural projections; they include complicated feedback loops of educational systems (in which national “fields” define the reading lists history students must master, and impel the creation of yet more nationally framed dissertations and books), professional training and advancement (job searches, tenure evaluations, and monographic publication are similarly aligned to certify standing in these fields), institutional locations and financial resources (research is often pursued in national archives, published in nationally or regionally framed journals, and taught in curricula that specialize along national/regional lines). Even language skills – scholars’ foundational tool, crucial for access to history’s raw materials – are framed by modern national states and their definitions of vernacular/political culture. (Consider the relative paucity of work on, say, modern Kurdish or Uyghur history.) Historians can be as blind as anyone else to the unspoken, mutually reinforcing elements that predefine a professional world. Taken as a whole, though, these elements make it harder to pursue, even to see, cross-cutting issues and boundary-transgressing questions, much less to investigate histories of, say, humanity as a whole. World history is therefore more radical, in an institutional-intellectual sense, than it may first appear. It asks: What would change if students started not by mastering a national field (or two), but by looking across borders – to topics being investigated in other archives and parts of the world, and asking how they compare, how they could be connected, how they may be similar or divergent responses to shared conditions? If Homo sapiens sapiens is a discrete subspecies – if modern humans are an identifiable entity in Earth’s biosphere – must not humanity also have a meaningfully collective history?

How could one study such a history? What role could individual women or men possibly play in it – would it not wind up vast and faceless, reduced to statistics and abstract structures, full of general “trends” such as demographics, urbanization, or technology? How can one identify meaningful turning points at global scale, divide time into “periods,” or preserve a role for human culture or individual agency? When historians reach into different disciplines (if, for example, they use evolutionary biology to place humans alongside primates as part of a deeper history of life, as in Morris 2010), is it possible to avoid biological determinism and retain a sense of historical contingency? Or is world history hopelessly presentist, impelled by issues such as global warming and the internet, inclined to see all prior eras in the light of – as inexorably leading up to – present-day “globalization”? Is it anachronistic to rethink ancient pasts through modern paradigms such as globalization and “connectivity,” as some archaeologists (LaBianca and Scham 2006) have started to do? And in practical terms, how could one possibly