The New Global History

In the spring of 1979, in my second semester of college teaching (as a visiting assistant professor of history at Oberlin), an absolutely brilliant undergraduate wrote a scathing critique of dependency theory. That theory, associated with the German American economic historian Andre Gunder Frank, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney and the Argentine and Brazilian economists Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado, among others, emphasized the historical role of colonialism and imperialism in creating unequal economic relations between countries.

My student argued that dependency theory overemphasized external factors and global structures, downplaying the internal factors of governance, policy, class structure, environment and culture that impeded development while treating local actors as passive victims of global forces and diverse societies as homogeneous groups.

From few undergraduates have I learned so much. Few have so influenced my thinking.

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Much as The New York Times’ “1619 Project” recovers earlier arguments (associated most closely with historian and publisher Lerone Bennett Jr.) about slavery’s centrality in U.S. cultural, economic and political history, so, too, does postcolonial theory represent, in many respects, the revival of ideas associated with dependency theory and with Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist and political philosopher from Martinique, which stressed the psychological impact of colonialism and the internalization of the perspectives and values of colonizers, criticized national bourgeoisies as successors to European elites and viewed violence as cathartic and a way for colonized people to reclaim their humanity, agency and cultural identity that had been suppressed or denigrated under colonial rule.

Each generation writes the history that it needs. It’s therefore not a surprise that the early and mid-19th century, the age of state building, produced national histories that focused on the development of governmental institutions and bodies of law or that the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a proliferation of histories that examined the development of industry, the growth of regional, partisan and class divisions and the incorporation and colonization of “frontier” regions as an example of “progress.”

Nor is shocking that the 1960s saw the rise of histories from below that centered on previously neglected groups, activists and reformers, though almost always in the context of specific polities.

Our age of globalization needs a very different kind of history, a big-picture history that places the biggest issues of our time—colonialism and its legacies, the environment and climate, gender and sexuality, infectious diseases, migrations and diasporas, race and caste, revolutions and civil wars, and slavery and other forms of unfree labor—into fresh perspective.

That history has begun to appear. It builds on criticisms leveled in the 1950s and 1960s of modernization theory as Eurocentric, linear, deterministic and reductionist and neglectful of historical context and the global inequalities and power structures that can impede development in previously colonized societies.

These jumbo histories, which bridge the divide between history, anthropology and sociology, build on but also challenge the national and regional histories that have long dominated the discipline and represent the most significant effort to rethink and reconfigure the field since the rise of the new social history and the cultural turn during the 1970s.

These works counter the scholarly specialization that “produced such fragmentation of knowledge that it discouraged efforts to seek larger meaning in the past,” in the words of the late world historian Jerry H. Bentley. They also challenge the Eurocentric notion that certain distinctive cultural characteristics, such as rationality and inquisitiveness or forms of social and governmental organization that encouraged innovation and a strong work ethic, explain the West’s economic development or rise to global power.

In stark contrast to earlier works of world history by such authors as H. G. Wells and Arnold Toynbee or by scholars like Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein, these studies do not seek to create a grand historical narrative. Instead, they have a tighter thematic focus and disavow or complicate those earlier works’ reliance on modernization or Marxist schemas or dependency theory.

The new global history instead builds on examples laid by such pioneering scholars as Robin Blackburn, Alfred W. Crosby, Philip D. Curtin, David Brion Davis, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Eric Foner, George Fredrickson, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Peter Kolchin, Gerda Lerner, William McNeill, Peter Linebaugh, Kenneth Pomeranz, Marcus Rediker, Theda Skocpol, Peter Stearns, L. S. Stavrianos and Charles Tilly.

Among the foremost examples of the new global history are Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton; Jeroen Duidam’s Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800; Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed; Kyle Harper’s Plagues Upon the Earth; Joachim Radkau‘s Nature and Power; Giorgio Riello’s Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World; and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Culture of Defeat.

I’d distinguish these books from two historical genres that have attracted a broad popular audience: the fascinating if somewhat reductionist histories by Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari, on the one hand and the entertaining if a bit superficial global histories of foods and commodities, like Mark Kurlansky’s Big Oyster, Cod, The Core of an Onion, Milk!, Paper, Salmon and Salt. Unlike those works, the prime examples of the new global history are characterized by an extraordinary depth and breadth of historical research, a truly comparative perspective and close attention to issues of power and inequality.

I’d also differentiate these books from certain other forms of world history spelled out in an essay by Bentley:

• Sweeping surveys of the world’s past.
• Studies of large-scale historical processes that don’t respect cultural, geographical, national or political boundaries, such as globalization or the expansion of religious faiths and cultures.
• Transregional and cross-cultural contacts, exchanges, trade and cultural interactions and continental and hemispheric and transoceanic integration.
• Campaigns of imperial expansion.

Several themes run through the new global history:

• That slavery, colonial displacement and imperialism are not just a Western evil but global and even contemporary evils.
• That contingency—as well as geography, climate, ecology and environment—have played a crucial role in world history, such as “windfall gains from overseas colonies” or wind and ocean currents that facilitated sea travel from Europe to the New World or “the fortuitous proximity of coal resources to manufacturing centers.”
• That transformative ideas and technologies are products of an ongoing process of cross-cultural diffusion, fertilization, borrowing, adaptation and elaboration.

Among the most important recent examples of the new global history is James Poskett’s Horizons, an shockingly ambitious global history of science that argues that the great achievements of European science—including Copernican heliocentrism, Newtonian physics, Lavoisier’s chemistry, Linnaean classification, Darwinian natural selection, Mendelian genetics and Maxwellian electromagnetism—were, in the words of my great UT colleague Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “the result of global efforts and that science is intimately attached to colonialism, capitalism, slavery, industrialization and geopolitical conflict.”

The history of science, in short, has long been “one of constant cultural exchange” and “linked to slavery, war, colonialism and empire.”

Poskett, a leading authority on the Silk Road, the trading network that connected China to the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, seeks to:

• Recover the stories of the non-European “scientists who have been written out of history,” like the Turco-Mongol astronomer Ulugh Beg and his Muslim counterpart, Taqi al-Din; the indigenous Peruvians whose astronomical observations contributed to the findings of the French astronomer Charles-Marie de la Condamine; Graman Kwasi, from what is now Ghana, who played a critical role in the investigation of the medicinal properties of various plants; and the Bengali physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, whose work on quantum mechanics had a powerful influence on Albert Einstein.
• Reveal the role of cultural exchange and the slave trade; New World colonization; European exploration of sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific; the Industrial Revolution; and the scientific revolution.
• Refute the idea that modern science was a 16th- and 17th-century European invention, while demonstrating that the international nature of science is not a recent phenomenon (for example, Copernicus “relied upon mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts, many of which had only recently been imported into Europe”).
• Remind readers of science’s role in war making, empire building and rationalizing class and racial inequalities, even as it has also contributed to our health and our understanding of the natural world.

Poskett makes many important observations. That the idea of an Islamic golden age of science “relies on the false notion that Islamic science—along with Islamic civilization in general—went into a period of decline immediately after the medieval period.” That within the Ottoman, Songhay, Ming and Mughal Empires, as in Renaissance Europe, astronomers and mathematicians were reforming ancient science and offering alternatives. That Newton’s ideas that the force of gravity varied across the Earth’s surface, that the earth wasn’t a perfect sphere and that planets wobble as they orbit were influenced by the finding of the French astronomer Jean Richer, who discovered that his carefully calibrated pendulum clock operated more slowly in South America and West Africa than in Europe.

Readers will learn about fossil hunting in 19th-century Argentina, evolutionary ideas in Tsarist Russia, the study of atomic structure, Darwinism and earthquakes, and seismic waves in Meiji Japan, physics in Qing and early 20th-century China, Ottoman engineering, genetics in Mexico and Israel, AI in Ghana and electromagnetic radiation in late-19th-century India. As Poskett makes clear, the founders of BioNTech, the Turkish-born Ugur Sahin and the German- born daughter of Turkish immigrants Özlem Türeci, are just among the most recent evidence that “science is not and has never been, a uniquely European endeavour”:“From Aztec naturalists and Ottoman astronomers to African botanists and Japanese chemists, the history of modern science needs to be told as a global story.”

Just 449 pages long, the book has its omissions and gaps, including “economics, most of the earth sciences, experimental science before 1800, Africa after 1800”—or about epistemology or empiricism. Even as Michael Bycroft, a historian of science and technology, praises Poskett for demonstrating that “world history and global exchange are an excellent framework for understanding past science,” he also worries that Horizons is constructing a contemporary myth.

At a time when the humanities are under attack as jargon-ridden, excessively theoretical and highly politicized, global histories like Poskett’s make a point that we deny at our peril: that a more multicultural perspective attentive to issues of power and influence is essential if we are to understand the world as it truly is.

In a fascinating blog posting, the economist Noah Smith argues, “Nations don’t get rich by plundering other nations.” The true sources of national wealth, he insists, come not from plunder—from slavery or other systems of unfree labor or land seizures and displacement or resource exploitation—but from science, medicine, technology, industry, education and economic and social policy. Nor, he asserts, can contemporary differences in national income and wealth be attributed to colonialism or imperialism that have trapped poorer nations into cycles of dependency.

His essay notes that the fastest-growing economies—for example, Guyana’s, but also China’s, India’s, Indonesia’s, Uganda’s and Vietnam’s—succeeded in overcoming various forms of dependency and Western domination. In a captivating earlier piece, he attributed the economic divergence between Haiti and its Hispaniola neighbor, the Dominican Republic, not to the debt imposed by France as reparation for expropriated French property or the 19-year U.S. occupation, but to land mismanagement, deforestation, political instability and corruption, flawed macroeconomic policy, and a lack of spending on education and infrastructure.

I agree wholeheartedly with those who believe we need to reconfigure our humanities Ph.D. programs to produce graduates who aren’t narrowly disciplinary. I am convinced that among the reasons that too many undergraduates regard the humanities as irrelevant is not just because of job market pressures or costs that push students into financially remunerative majors or the humanities’ perceived lack of practical skills, but an inability to see a direct connection between the humanities and broader social, political and cultural issues or the humanities’ relevance in understanding complex global and existential issues and ethical dilemmas.

If humanities faculty hope to truly engage today’s students, we need to ensure that our classes focus on the big questions and debates—involving colonial legacies; cross-cultural interactions and borrowings (or appropriations); identity, inequality, migrations and diasporas; and the diverse forms that power takes (economic, linguistic, political, psychological and more) as well as on the timeless and enduring issues of beauty, divinity, epistemology, evil, justice, morality and the nature of a meaningful life—that cut across disciplinary boundaries and speak to our time.

The humanities, as Cicero understood, are not merely a loose collection of disparate disciplines, but the means through which students acquire the essential skills of analysis, interpretation and evaluation, learn the importance of rhetoric and oratory, attain cultural and historical awareness gain an understanding of ethics and morality and develop a capacity to take pleasure from intellectual and cultural pursuits.

In the end, the purpose of the humanities is nothing less than to produce thoughtful, knowledgeable, articulate and morally responsible adults. Anything less is a betrayal of our professional responsibilities.