World history

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World history is the study and teaching of all or most of recorded history from the beginnings to the present. The World History Association publishes the quarterly Journal of World History.

Teaching

In college curricula, it became a popular replacement for courses on Western Civilization, beginning in the 1970s.

Theoretical and scholarly studies

Herodotus (5th century BC) was a world historian as well as founder of Greek historiography.[1] His History presents insightful and lively discussions of the customs, geography, and history of Mediterranean peoples, particularly the Egyptians. However, Thucydides promptly discarded Herodotus's all-embracing approach to history, offering instead a more precise, sharply focused monograph, dealing not with vast empires over the centuries but with 27 years of war between Athens and Sparta. In Rome, the vast, patriotic history of Rome by Livy (59 BC-17 AD) approximated Herodotean inclusiveness[2]; Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) aspired to combine the logical rigor of Thucydides with the scope of Herodotus.[3]

Divine intervention

Chinese, Muslim, Indian and Christian traditions of learning emphasize that God determined history and humans played only supporting roles. Thus Saint Augustine City of God (413-26 AD) distinguished sharply between divine purpose and disjointed human history. In Christian Europe narrative writing was replaced by annals and chronicles that often stressed the trivial and the miraculous.

In China Ssu-ma Cheng-chen in 87 BC presented a model of Chinese history that assumed Heaven choses virtuous hereditary rulers, then arranges events so that they were overthrown when a ruling dynasty became corrupt. Each new dynasty begins virtuous and strong, but then decays, provoking the transfer of Heaven's mandate to a new ruler. The test of virtue in a new dynasty is success in being obeyed by China and neighboring barbarians. After 2000 years Ssu-ma Chen's model still dominates scholarship, even among westerners who do not hold the Taoist belief that the ruler's personal virtue assures divine support.[4]

One Arab scholar, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) broke with traditionalism and offered a strikingly modern model of historical change in Muqaddimah, a brilliant exposition of the methodology of scientific history. Ibn Khaldun focused on the reasons for the rise and fall of civilization, arguing that the causes of change are to be sought in the economic and social structure of society. His work was largely ignored in the Muslim world. Otherwise the Muslim, Chinese and Indian intellectuals held fast to a religious traditionalism, leaving them unprepared to advise national leaders on how to confront European imperialism as it reached into Asia after 1500.

Europe

While the Chinese, Muslim, and Indian traditions continued their theocentric historiography, there was a radical challenge to it in Christian Europe during the Renaissance. Historians such as Machiavelli ignored divine intervention and stressed that men made their own history, and that rulers should study history in order to shape the future. European scholars began a more systematic study of history. Voltaire (1694-1778), the leading figure of the French Enlightenment used comparative history, as in Essay on Manners (1753), to ridicule Christian folly and promote the rule of reason. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) introduced the perspective of the Scottish Enlightenment in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767).

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in Italy broke new ground with his Scienza nuova seconda (The New Science) in 1725. Vico saw history as the expression of human will and deeds. He argued that men are historical entities and that human nature changes over time. Each epoch should be seen as a whole in which all aspects of culture--art, religion, philosophy, politics, and economics--are interrelated (a point developed later by Oswald Spengler. Vico showed that myth, poetry, and art are entry points to discovering the true spirit of a culture. Vico outlined a conception of historical development in which great cultures, like Rome, undergo cycles of growth and decline. His ideas were out of fashion during the Enlightenment, but influenced the Romantic historians after 1800.

20th century writers

Influential writers who have reached wide audiences including H. G. Wells, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee[5], Pitirim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson[6], and Lewis Mumford. Scholars working the field include Eric Voegelin[7], William H. McNeill and Michael Mann.[8].

McNeill's well-known approach is broad, its organizing concept being the interactions of peoples across the globe. Such interactions have become both more numerous and more continual and substantial in recent times. Before about 1500, the network of communication between cultures was that of Eurasia. The term used to describe these areas of interaction differ from one world historian to another and include "world-system" and "ecumene." But whatever it is called, the importance of these intercultural contacts has begun to be recognized by many scholars.[9]

Academic historians, who increasingly specialize and demand the use of primary sources, tend to disparage scholarship in world history as attempting the impossible.

Bibliography

  • Bentley, Jerry H. Shapes of World History in Twentieth Century Scholarship. Essays on Global and Comparative History Series. (1996)
  • Costello, Paul. World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism (1993).
  • Frye, Northrop. "Spengler Revisited" in Northrop Frye on modern culture (2003), pp 297-382, first published 1974; online
  • Hughes, H. Stuart. Oswald Spengler (1952).
  • McInnes, Neil. "The Great Doomsayer: Oswald Spengler Reconsidered." National Interest 1997 (48): 65-76. Issn: 0884-9382 Fulltext: Ebsco
  • McNeill, William H. "The Changing Shape of World History." History and Theory 1995 34(2): 8-26. Issn: 0018-2656 in JSTOR
  • McNeill, William H., Jerry H. Bentley, and David Christian, eds. Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History (5 vol 2005)
  • Mazlish, Bruce. "Comparing Global History to World History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Winter, 1998), pp. 385-395 in JSTOR


Primary sources

notes

  1. ↑ K.H. Waters, Herodotus the Historian (1985)
  2. ↑ Patrick G. Walsh, Livy: His Historical Aims and Methods (1961)
  3. ↑ Frank W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, (3 vols. 1957-82)
  4. ↑ S. Y. Teng, "Chinese Historiography in the Last Fifty Years," The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Feb., 1949), pp. 131-156 in JSTOR
  5. ↑ William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee a Life (1989)
  6. ↑ Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007)
  7. ↑ Michael P. Federici, Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order (2002)
  8. ↑ Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (1986) excerpt and text search
  9. ↑ William H. McNeill, "The Changing Shape of World History." History and Theory 1995 34(2): 8-26.
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