World
History and Its Relevance for the Teaching of History and Ethics
by
Patrick Kane
The teaching of world history offers a
valuable paradigm for the teaching of modern history (1550-Present) and other
periods of history. The old paradigm of
history based on the nation-state and the Rise of the West and Eurocentrism has
been critiqued and replaced by the newer model of World History as comparative
history.[1]
This has greater relevance for the teaching of history to students of the humanities
and social sciences.
One of the ironies of late twentieth
century American culture is the preservation of an elite role for Eurocentric
studies. In an era labeling itself as global, the reliance by Americans on a
Eurocentric model for explaining history remains as a vestige of the old
Hegelian model. This reliance occurred amid American entry into a post cold war
strategy in which the relations of global power have been maintained but for
which American intellectuals lacked a rational theory for explaining contradictions
it found in its own formation and those of other societies and nation-states. Of the modern democracies, Americans have
perhaps as much difficulty as any in accepting discrepancies in customs and
material conditions of living. Anthropology plays a more important role for
Americans than other social sciences, for instance history or sociology, as the
need to study and create markets for international products makes it more
useful.
A similar problem is found in English
historiography on Africa. The difficulties found in the British School of
Africanists, including John Fage and their reluctant acceptance of oral history
as a methodology, created a debate in African historical studies between
African historians, including Adu Boahen, Afigbo and Ajaye. Similarly, the
limited critique of colonialism within France led to its intellectual
deconstruction and political resistance by the intellectuals of the colonized:
Fanon, Albert Memmi, Ho Chi Minh, Aime Cesaire, and Camara Laye. The study of
North African culture allows one to bridge the notion of traditional and
postcolonial as a study of pop rai music and of the Algerian Jewish musician,
Maurice El-Medioni, and their relocation to Marseilles, France, allows students
and scholars an opportunity to ask questions about the production of culture as
an ongoing and changing response of considerable fluidity and movement.
The development of world history as a new
field of history has since the 1980s provided a better model for comparing
regions and cultures of the world.
Within the past decade, the project of the California School, encouraged
a reappraisal of world history as a method of comparison, and has shifted the
paradigms of world history away from the core-periphery dependency theories of
the Annales and World-Systems approaches. World history offers a possibility of
comparing interdisciplinary fields, particularly of Africa, or Southeast Asia,
Latin America, and the so-called subalterns.
Similarly the Eurocentric periodization of history with its privileging
of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as exclusive achievements of the
Europeans has been challenged. I teach
and encourage students to challenge this exclusivity by making use of the
studies by Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern
World, (1991), to show how the development of capitalism in England may be
compared with the development of capitalism in the Qing dynasty of China. By extension, I encourage students to compare
the development of arts in the Ottoman Empire or of China or Africa as
undergoing significant transformations and Enlightenments of their own. Here, Rifa’at About El-Haj in his Formation
of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire,
Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century, (2005) has shown the need for rigorous
methodology and work in primary sources and interpretation to avoid the habit
of Western historians, in their reliance upon secondary sources and the
singularity of the nation-state, to repeat their stereotyped assumptions about
Ottoman decline and autocracy in modern history.
For ancient history, this paradigm shift
has found useful advocates in the serial project of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, with its reappraisal of the relation and contribution of Egyptians
and Africans to Eastern Mediterranean society. Studies in archaeology and linguistics,
including the rise of iron working in Zimbabwe and Joseph Greenberg, The Languages of Africa, shed light on the comparative treatment of
ancient African history with Asian or European development. For medieval and early modern history, the
European focus on African slavery and the colonial phase has been reevaluated
through the comparative concept of Atlantic African Diaspora culture and
history. Similarly the work of African
historians has revised our understanding of pre-colonial African history and
societies.
For medieval history the comparison of
European and Islamic, Chinese and other Asian, African, and Central American
societies is a useful method for teaching world history, as in Charles Wickham’s
Framing the Early Middle Ages, 400-800 (2000). One cannot explain much of the development of
world history from the 7th century through 1550 without a
consideration of the various empires of the Islamic civilizations, and of the Mongol
empires of Central Asia and their influence.
For Europe, the accumulation of wealth is centered on a relation between
merchants, clergy and agriculture. For
this students may make use of architecture, and general works, such as George
Duby, The Age of Cathedrals, to begin to study the phenomenon of
monasteries and the formation of town centers, with their richly documented
sources. Similar approaches to other
civilizations and cultures allow students to compare the American mound
cultures, as at Cahokia, with monastic estates in Europe.
For early modern history, or the period
after 1550, the rise of rival world empires is key to explaining the rise of
European ascendance and colonization.
The wealth of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires during the 16th
and 17th centuries was afforded by their own development of the
commodities and by internal developments in the bureaucratic state that
supported extended public services and commerce. The take-off of English
industry and science after 1550 is a unique combination of an empire that
combined science, economy and ideology that allowed for the development of the
industrial revolution, but at an enormous social cost to its colonies in
Ireland or India. The study of the rise
of the empires after 1550 affords students with rich sources both in political
ideology and in artistic and cultural formation. Recent scholarship on the Qing dynasty as in Peter
Perdue, China Marches West (2007) or R. Bin Wong, China Transformed
(1997) allows us to conceptualize the rise of China as another route to
industrial formation. From the 19th
century, the rise of nationalism sets competition between empires as a struggle
between European states over the share of the continental system and the world
economy and headlong into the century of warfare that marks the 20th
century and its continuing struggles in the early 21st century.
In my teaching I encourage students to
make use of primary sources and to squarely confront the problems of power and
societies in the formation and writing of world history. Students with an interest in the humanities
and arts are encouraged to make use of original letters or documents, or works
of art as illustrative of the specific context of a historical formation or
problem of world history. A
multidimensional approach to the use of sources allows for students to develop
their own comparative skills in analyzing the comparative experiences of world
societies and the diversity of this experience.
I encourage and make use of the seminar
method of teaching, which after the introduction of the material and context,
allows for students to compare and present selected primary texts for critical
discussion. A student interested in
Italian Renaissance art may make use of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters,
Sculptors and Architects, to compare with an interpretative work by Bram
Kempers, Painting, Power and Patronage for a presentation on an aspect
of power and society in 15th century Italy. Picasso’s Guernica is an example of a
commentary on a twentieth century civil war which may be compared with the
reading of Arturo Barea’s The Forging of a Rebel., or Garcia Lorca.
On the other hand a student interested in
African art, may make use of material on the importance of oral history sources
for both Western African history and the arts as an avenue into interpreting
the development of early modern or contemporary African history. The writings of Adu Boahen on Western African
history may be compared with developments in African philosophies on art and
culture as a critique of the empirical model of Eurocentric approaches to
African history.
By encouraging students to develop
presentations in class, students develop their own critical skills of analysis
and exposition. Students may share
presentations and proceed to develop their own critical essays or reviews of
historiography or primary sources. In
this way the goal is to encourage the student to undertake a critical approach
to world history and its relevance to the contemporary world and the
development of social ethics.
[1] On the relevance of World History
as a new paradigm, I am indebted to advantages and differences found among the
works of Jack Goldstone, Peter Perdue, R. Bin Wong, and Rifa’at Abou El-Haj and
his Formation of the Modern State (2005), and specifically to Peter
Gran’s article, “Modern World History as the Rise of the Rich: A New Paradigm,”
History Compass 5/3 (2007): 1026–1049.
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