Why world history

Human beings, unlike other species, have the gift of language, that is, symbolic thinking and communication. That means that humans also have what World History for Us All calls collective learning Glossary-No Javascript , the ability to learn from one another and to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. Communicating intelligently in any language, whether English, Spanish, or Vietnamese, requires that we share a common fund of knowledge, information, vocabulary, and conceptual tools.

We need shared knowledge and understandings partly because we live in a world where people in specialized occupations and professions tend to use special words, terms, and concepts that "outsiders" do not understand. Making world history a core subject in schools broadens the fund of knowledge that we all share. It helps us speak and write to one another in clearer and more intricate ways. This does not mean that world history courses should be exactly the same in every school district.

But societies should aim for general agreement regarding the common stock of both world-scale knowledge and historical thinking skills that children ought to possess when they graduate from high school. All past societies that we know of have had an endowment of collective knowledge. World history facilitates the recognition and construction of larger contexts in several ways: it brings focus to connections that help to explain historical developments, it encourages the framing of comparisons that help clarify the relationships between and among historical developments, and it prompts historians to recognize and analyze large-scale systems that condition historical development.

During the past generation or so, world historians have generated a sizable body of scholarship exploring the connections, comparisons, and systems that help to situate historical development in larger appropriate contexts. Take the case of the American Civil War, a conflict that historians have conventionally considered exclusively in the context of U. It is of course both possible and necessary to understand the Civil War as an episode in U.

Within the context of U. While it is essential to analyze the American Civil War within the framework of U. The United States certainly had a national history in the nineteenth century, but this U. Strong British demand for raw cotton, the institution of slavery, the early development of industrial production, and American expansion to the west were all features of the global historical landscape that profoundly influenced the American Civil War.

In the absence of this web of ties linking the United States to other lands and peoples, the American Civil War is almost inconceivable. And just as conditions in other lands influenced the nature and the course of the conflict in the United States, the American Civil War in its turn had global implications of its own. It opened a space for France to seek opportunities for influence in Mexico, and it encouraged the expansion of cotton production in Egypt, Anatolia, and central Asian lands.

High prices for raw cotton brought prosperity to all these lands and India as well during the Civil War, but the return of American cotton to the global market contributed to the collapse of prices and a severe global depression in the s and s.

Alongside the various connections linking the United States to a larger world, comparisons between American and other societies also help to locate the Civil War in global context. This was, after all, not the only conflict of global significance in the mid-nineteenth century. Conflicts also rocked Europe and Asia, where various parties embarked on efforts at social reorganization under conditions of early industrialization.

These efforts had quite different results in different places. In Italy and Germany, like the United States, violent campaigns brought about the consolidation of powerful national states. Elsewhere in Europe, the revolutions of did not bring about the new political order that their leaders sought, but they launched an era of class-based political action, as newly emerging groups of workers sensed common interests. In China, the Taiping rebellion also ultimately failed, enabling a weakened Qing dynasty, hobbled further by unequal treaties, to hold onto power for another half-century.

Yet it also prompted some Chinese leaders to undertake a Self-Strengthening Movement that laid the foundations of an industrial infrastructure in The Middle Kingdom. In Japan, events played out differently yet again: the visit of Commodore Perry sparked government crisis and a brief civil war, and the ensuing Meiji Restoration facilitated an industrialization process that made Japan both a powerful national state and a budding imperial power, albeit at the cost of tremendous domestic coercion and numerous small-scale conflicts.

Like wars of unification in Italy and Germany and the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the American Civil War addressed some of the fundamental tensions in American society, established a political and legal foundation for the emerging national state, and launched a process of rapid industrialization. It was a unique development, as were the other experiences mentioned here, but it deepens the understanding of them all to recognize that they each, to some extent, represented different responses to larger general challenges.

In this case, the principal general challenge was to organize a viable society under conditions of early industrialization. Economic and political logic of the early industrial era pushed societies to consolidate political power, tighten the organizational bonds that held them together, mobilize national work forces, and build industrial plants.

The national state was an institutional form that proved to be capable of accomplishing these organizational tasks. In this light it is perhaps not so surprising that during the later nineteenth century, many societies adopted the nation-state model for their own purposes or strengthened the institutions they had already put in place.

They did so in different ways, through processes that were sometimes more and sometimes less violent, always reflecting the influence of local conditions, so all the processes were unique developments. It is helpful for historians to recognize, however, that the different experiences of nineteenth-century societies represented their different ways of responding to common challenges that were new to them all.

So my first claim holds that world history is essential as a mode of study because it deepens the understanding of individual societies' experiences by clarifying their relationships with other societies and by placing them in comparative perspective.

This claim has to do with the generation of precise historical knowledge and the quest for deep historical understanding in appropriate contexts. The study of history can hardly have much value or benefit unless it stands on a solid foundation of accurate and reliable knowledge.

So it is crucial for purposes of justifying the study of world history to recognize that for many purposes, world history yields better knowledge than alternative approaches to the past because of its capacity to situate historical development in appropriate larger contexts.

My second claim moves beyond the issue of historical knowledge as representation of past experience in general and into the realm of historical knowledge that is particularly appropriate in the educational curriculum because it has some larger social or public benefit in preparing students for responsible citizenship in the contemporary world.

Over the years, educators and policy makers have suggested or assumed various reasons for studying world history. Most of their arguments have to do with practical considerations of national interests, including business, economic, diplomatic, geo-strategic, and security interests, to name the most prominent.

There is some cogency to these arguments, and I concede that they have some force, even if they sometimes take a rather narcissistic approach by reducing the larger world to a set of American national interests. Yet another argument for studying world history is moral, in that it has to do with the kinds of personal conduct and public policy that are appropriate for the contemporary world, and that is the one I would like to develop here.

The concern that prompts it is the need for navigational aids in a world of difference. Both within and beyond our borders we cross paths with different peoples, encounter different values, and seek ways to deal with different forms of social organization. How might we best conduct ourselves in a world of difference? Scholars, teachers, and students have developed innovative approaches and materials and regularly engage in debates about theory, methodology, and content on Web sites, blogs, and in print.

People have actually been doing world history for a long time. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus set his story of the war between the Persians and the Greeks within the context of the world as he knew it, and the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian told history through an encyclopedic presentation of events, activities, and biographies of emperors, officials, and other important people.

In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, however, the focus of most professional history—that is, history written by men trained at universities—became the nation-state, which fit with the rising importance of nations as political units and with growing nationalism.

But after World War II, scholars and teachers began to challenge nationally-organized histories. Navigating World History pp Cite as. T o put it simply, world history is the story of connections within the global human community.

The source material ranges in scale from individual family tales to migrations of peoples to narratives encompassing all humanity. World history is far less than the sum total of all history. Nevertheless, it adds to our accumulated knowledge of the past through its focus on connections among historical localities, time periods, and themes of study. Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Skip to main content. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Advertisement Hide. Authors Authors and affiliations Patrick Manning. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. The Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Russian empires all expanded dramatically within less than a century. Google Scholar. On silver trade, see Dennis O. CrossRef Google Scholar. The impact of new scientific work on interpretations of world history has already been substantial.

The work of new cultural studies with more variables to account for and less financial support for research is moving more slowly, yet its implications for world history are sure to be profound. Although scientific and cultural studies differ sharply from each other, they share the experience of finding that their results have substantial historical implications, but that they are outside the areas of principal historical emphasis.