AHR forum: The problem of interactions in world history

American Historical Review

Volumn 101, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 771-782

  Manning, Patrick ^a  

^a Northeastern University

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EID: 33645501867     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2169423     Document Type: Review

References (85)

1. Jerry Bentley, "Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History," AHR, 101 (June 1996): 752, 756. Bentley restricts his argument to contiguous regions of Afro-Eurasia. As I will note below, certain alternative perspectives would call for the inclusion of the Americas in interpretations of world history even before 1492.
2. Bentley defines his periods in large measure by the emergence of new technologies and by successive expansions in the scale of commerce, population, and administrative units. In addition, however, he portrays each period as having distinct character. Thus he emphasizes the spread of literacy in the period of early complex societies and the exchange of artistic traditions in the classical era. He also associates cyclical change with his periods, as with the spread of epidemic disease in the wake of population growth and migration.
3. In calling it his scheme, I mean that it represents his enunciation of an approach shared implicitly among contemporary world historians. William H. McNeill maybe considered to have laid groundwork for this scheme with his notion of periodic closure of a global ecumene. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963).
4. Visions of evolutionary stages in history include those elucidated by Karl Marx, the marquis de Condorcet, G. W. F. Hegel, and others. Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee contributed significantly to twentieth-century views of civilizational rise and fall. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; Oxford, 1992);
5. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caristat, Marquis de Condorcet, Tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1796; Paris, 1900);
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (London, 1968);
7. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Charles Francis Atkinson, trans., 2 vols. (London, 1926-28);
8. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London, 1934-61).
9. This is but a partial list of available interpretive frameworks in world history. Technologically determined interpretations of world history remain influential, especially for long-term change; histories of chosen peoples (Romans, Jews, Chinese, and others) have contributed to the interpretation of world history. Writers from Leopold von Ranke to Paul Kennedy have interpreted the world through the interaction of great powers. Anthropologists and some historians have utilized "culture areas" as an alternative to civilizations in exploring world history. The interpretation of world history in terms of the progress of one era over the preceding, while derisively labeled "Whig history," remains widely practiced. In a more specialized view of progress, Hegel in the nineteenth century and Francis Fukuyama in more recent times have emphasized the progress of human freedom in history. Leopold von Ranke, "The Great Powers" (1833);
10. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987);
11. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1951);
12. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History;
13. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992).
14. For a defense of an expanded world-system paradigm that conveniently reviews a wide range of historical frameworks, see Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London, 1993).
15. As he puts it, "Legions of scholars have examined the effects of cross-cultural interactions in modern times." Bentley, "Cross-Cultural Interaction," 751.
16. Rosenberg and Birdzell have assumed, in their widely cited interpretation of modern economic history, that there is no need to include interactions with areas beyond "the West" in their analysis. Paul Kennedy's study of great powers focuses on interactions among the powers, but he allows little role in his story for smaller or weaker polities. Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York, 1985);
17. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
18. Bentley, "Cross-Cultural Interaction," 753-56.
19. Gibbon's notion of decline and fall finds its reflection in the gloomy prognostications of Oswald Spengler and in the downswings at the end of Bentley's cycles; Condorcet's stages parallel the opening of new periods. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. (London, 1776-78);
20. Condorcet, Tableau historique;
21. Spengler, Decline of the West. Andrew M. Watson, in one of the fine recent studies to which Bentley refers, uses botannical and Arabic text data to trace a wave of agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world. His analysis of agricultural change, however, focuses dominantly on diffusion as the mechanism of change, and his conclusion contextualizes his results through a vision of civilizational rise and fall similar to that of Gibbon. Arnold Pacey's history of technology, in contrast, gives explicit consideration to varying mechanisms of transfer and innovation in technology.
22. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100 (Cambridge, 1983);
23. Pacey, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Oxford, 1990).
24. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto;
25. Herbert Spencer, The Evolution of Society (selections from Principles of Sociology [London, 1876]), Robert L. Carneiro, ed. (Chicago, 1967).
26. Spengler, Decline of the West. Probably Herbert Spencer was among those he targeted; Spencer's notion of evolution, however, was Lamarckian not Darwinian. It may be that Spengler drew on the thinking of Emile Durkheim in elaborating his organic metaphor. Durkheim, in his studies of suicide, developed organic metaphors for human society.
27. Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897; New York, 1966).
28. Toynbee, Study of History. Toynbee treated civilization as a "unit of analysis" rather than as an organism. His sections on "encounters" include "contacts between civilizations in space (encounters between contemporaries)" and "contacts between civilizations in time (Renaissances)," respectively Part IX (vol. 8, 88-629) and Part X (vol. 9, 1-166) of his study.
29. William H. McNeill, for instance, developed his broad interpretation of world history after having spent some years championing the teaching of Western Civilization. If McNeill's analysis is patterned somewhat after that of Toynbee, his title echoes that of Spengler. For a work similar to that of McNeill but that did not have such an echo among historians, see Jacques Pirenne, The Tides of History, Lavett Edwards, trans., 2 vols. (New York, 1962),
30. first published as Les grands courants de l'histoire universelle (Brussels, 1948).
31. Positivistic sociology includes the work of Weber, which became widely influential after World War II (following translation and publication of new works), and that of Talcott Parsons; a focus on bureaucratization and on modernization flowed from this framework. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., 3 vols. (New York, 1968),
32. trans. of Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Johannes Winckelmann, ed., expanded 4th edn. (Tübingen, 1956);
33. Talcott Parsons and Neil J. Smelser, Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory (Glencoe, Ill., 1956).
34. As the publication of Weber's full study on economy and society led to a burst of work drawing on his framework in the 1960s, so also did the publication of Karl Marx's notes on the method of political economy combine with the current political climate to bring a burst of new studies in political economy. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, David McLellan, ed. and trans. (New York, 1971).
35. John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven, Conn., 1959);
36. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World (New York, 1967). Quantitative work arose in social and economic history in the 1950s, leading to study of more variables in a positivistic and deterministic fashion.
37. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974).
38. Subsequent volumes were published as: The Modern World-System, II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York, 1980);
39. and The Modern World-System, III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s (New York, 1989).
40. Bentley's citations include echoes of Wallerstein's framework applied to earlier times: for instance, Philip L. Kohl, "The Use and Abuse of World Systems Theory: The Case of the 'Pristine' West Asian State," in C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ed., Archaeological Thought in America (Cambridge, 1989), 218-40.
41. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986);
42. see also William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976).
43. For a range of interpretive statements on postmodernism, see E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices (London, 1988);
44. Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher, The Postmodern Political Condition (New York, 1988);
45. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989);
46. and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991).
47. For initial work in this vein, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York, 1973);
48. for more recent work drawing on the same tradition, see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); both of these studies focus on France.
49. German compendia on world history began in the early nineteenth century, reached a peak late in that century, and continued into the twentieth century. See, for instance, Heinrich Leo, Lehrbuch der Universalgeschichte, 6 vols. (Halle, 1835-44);
50. Wilhelm Oncken, ed., Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen, 32 vols. in 4 series (Berlin, 1879-90).
51. Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte, 8 vols. (1879-87);
52. Spengler, Decline of the West;
53. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (London, 1920).
54. The term "diffusion" seems to have entered the humanistic lexicon in the wake of Enlightenmentera scientific discoveries, and it has been used within several frameworks since. (Alfred Crosby, among others, has emphasized the benefits of the term "connections" in describing interaction: the term invokes a range of types of interaction without being either explicit or limiting.) Organic metaphors and evolutionary schemes became popular from the time of Spencer to that of Spengler. Mechanical metaphors then came to the fore, in the wake of great advances in physics in the early twentieth century. A return to an interest in evolutionary models has become evident within recent social science, perhaps in a reflection of the great advances in microbiology. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988);
55. William H. Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity (Stanford, Calif., 1991).
56. Collective terms for humans vary with the collectivity and with the approach of the analyst. Thus the meanings of the terms "nation," "race," "society," "commonwealth," "empire," and "culture" change with time and circumstance.
57. Felix M. Keesing, Cultural Anthropology: The Science of Custom (New York, 1958);
58. A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn, "Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions," Peabody Museum Papers, 47, 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), as cited in Keesing, 18.
59. Clark Wissler, Man and Culture (New York, 1923).
60. Among the leading world historians, Philip D. Curtin has been most consistent in his references to "culture areas." See, for instance, Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984), x.
61. George Peter Murdock, Human Relations Area Files: Outline of Cultural Materials (New Haven, Conn., 1950).
62. Among the major studies that have relied heavily on these data are Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982);
63. and Frederic L. Pryor, The Origins of the Economy: A Comparative Study of Distribution in Primitive and Peasant Economies (New York, 1977).
64. The founding of journals such as Critical Anthropology and Dialectical Anthropology thus meant not only the establishment of Marxist factions among anthropologists but also the beginnings of a transformation of the discipline as a whole.
65. Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London, 1988).
66. For an analogous study linking anthropological theory to academic social history, see Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, 1991).
67. One well-known counter-example, in which historians joined with anthropologists to overturn a narrow and biased interpretation, is the rejection of C. G. Seligman's "Hamitic hypothesis," according to which all the history of eastern Africa could be interpreted through the percolation, over the millennia, of white racial influences from the north. Seligman, Races of Africa (London, 1936);
68. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, "General Introduction," in Ki-Zerbo, et al., eds., General History of Africa, Vol. 1: Methodology and African Prehistory (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), 21.
69. Clifford Geertz, "The Balinese Cockfight," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973).
70. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982).
71. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 (Cambridge, 1986).
72. On a somewhat analogous point, one may note that gender has yet to become a major conceptual issue in world history. A trend toward greater empirical inclusion of women in the world-historical narrative is evident, but the debates in feminist theory, linked to other developments in postmodernist thinking, have yet to address history at the global level.
73. To recapitulate, Bentley's periods are: 1. 3500-2000 B.C.E.: Early complex societies 2. 2000-500 B.C.E.: Ancient civilizations 3. 500 B.C.E.-500 C.E.: Classical civilizations 4. 500-1000 C.E.: Post-classical age 5. 1000-1500 C.E.: Transregional nomadic empires 6. 1500 C.E.-present: Modern age
74. Watson, Agricultural Innovation;
75. Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
76. Braudel is particularly skillful in his display of the influence of sixteenth-century Spanish fashion, but one could equally explore the periodization accompanying earlier interregional connections reinforced through the use of turbans as headgear or the adoption of Hellenistic garb. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century; Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, Sian Reynolds, trans. (New York, 1979), 311-25;
77. see also Frank L. Holt, Alexander the Great and Bactria: The Formation of a Greek Frontier in Central Asia (Leiden, 1989).
78. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, Wis., 1990).
79. See also Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky, eds., The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982).
80. Joseph Greenberg, in conducting field research in northern Nigeria that led him to a general classification of African languages, observed that the Hausa words for saddle and gun were borrowed ultimately from Arabic but that the Hausa had borrowed these terms (and presumably the items themselves) from their neighbors the Kanuri. An accumulation of such observations can contribute greatly to an understanding of world history. Greenberg went on in more recent work to classify the languages of Native Americans into three major groupings and to postulate the linkages of these groupings to major Eurasian language groups. Greenberg, "Linguistic Evidence for the Influence of the Kanuri on the Hausa," Journal of African History, 1, 2 (1964): 205-12;
81. Joseph H. Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, "Linguistic Origins of Native Americans," Scientific American (November 1992): 94-99.
82. Gills and Frank emphasize the contributions of artisans and miners, located far from the Mesopotamian heartland, to the wealth and coherence of Sumerian society; Bentley traces the spread of Buddhism through the agents of merchants but also notes the work of missionaries who accompanied merchants; while Liu Xinru emphasizes the breadth of the trade in silk as a religious artifact. Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank, "World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD," in Frank and Gills, World System, 152-57;
83. Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993);
84. Liu Xinru, "Silks and Religions in Eurasia, c. AD 600-1200," Journal of World History, 6, 1 (1995): 25-48.
85. One might go further and consider alternative ways of defining the continuities and changes across periods. The continuities within Bentley's periods appear as plateaus of active cross-cultural contact, separated by troughs of diminished contact; Bentley notes that episodes of epidemic disease and population decline mark the boundaries between these periods. But times of intensive cross-cultural interaction might also have been times of rapid change, and thus one could suggest treating the peak periods of interaction as the boundaries between periods, with the continuities being reflected in the periods of lesser interaction.