What is world history? Bruce Mazlish contends that "world" history, as opposed to "global" history, is the study of systemic processes of interaction among diverse peoples, best typified by the work of William H. McNeill. By contrast, "global" history is the history of globalization, a process that Mazlish argues did not begin to occur on a significant scale until at least the 1950s, and, more plausibly, the 1970s. Citing prominent economic historians, Nicholas Kristof asserts that globalization actually started in the second half of the 19th Century, when steamships, the telegraph, the railroad, and European, North American, and Japanese empire-builders brought humankind into a single densely interwoven community of trade, investment, culture, and political rivalry for the first time. One of the founders of world-system theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, traces the invention of capitalism and the beginnings of what he calls the "Modern World-System" to the late 15th and 16th Centuries. His co-founder and worthy competitor Andre Gunder Frank argues that capitalism originated some five thousand years ago and that at least the Afro-Eurasian ecumene has been in continuous interactive existence ever since. As that ancient forerunner of postmodernist relativism, the Roman playwright Terence, once said, Quot homines, tot sententiae: "as many men, so many opinions." [1]
All of these contentions make sense, given the definitions of terms and the frames of reference of each writer. They do not necessarily conflict, and they all make their contribution to our understanding of the dimensions of world and global history. But from my own perspective, there is no hard and fast distinction between world and global history. I accept the evidence o...
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...f Myself," in Collected Poetry and Collected Prose (New York:
The Library of America, 1982), p. 246.
[4] W. Warren Wagar, The Next Three Futures: Paradigms of Things To Come (New York:
Praeger, 1991), pp. 35-38.
[5] Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of
Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); and Neil Roberts, The Holocene:
An Environmental History, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA, and Oxford, Blackwell Publishers,
1998).
[6] Wagar, The Next Three Futures, pp. 40-44.
[7] Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998).
[8] William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 80-
85.
[9] Ibid., p. 6.
[10] Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995).
Ponting, Clive. Ch.11 from "A Green History of the World," St. Martins Press, NYC, 1991
In his short article “World History as a Way of Thinking” Eric Lane Martin, “…argue[s] that the most important things the field of world history has to offer the researcher, teacher, student, and general public are the conceptual tools required for understanding complex global processes and problems.” Anyone who follows the evening news or shops at Wal-mart, has encountered the processes and problems Martin speaks of. Our modern society puts pressure on a variety of citizens to grapple with and attempt to understand issues on a scale that moves beyond the local and national. History has long been a tool utilized by scholars, politicians and citizens to help them put current day happenings into context. That context has allowed for a deeper understanding of the present day. In an era when the issues cross national and regional boundaries the need for a different scale of history has become apparent. World history has emerged as a relatively new discipline within academia that is attempting to provide the context for large-scale processes and problems. As the field has grown a variety of authors, some historians, some from other fields, have attempted to write a history of the world. With such a daunting task how can we define success? How can we analyze the history that provides a true global perspective on processes and problems we face? By taking Martin’s two key characteristics of world history, one, it is defined by the kinds of questions it asks and two, it is defined by the problem-solving techniques it uses, we can analyze texts purporting to be world history and access their utility in providing context for the global processes and problems we face today.
Capitalism is the engine driving globalization. Therefore, the development of capitalism — from the age of mercantilism to today’s neoliberalism — is reflected in the way globalization has unfolded. Since the rise of mercantile capitalism in the 1500’s, the desire for profit has intensified the spread of people, commodities, ideas, images, culture, and capital across the globe. This process of global integration has brought (often by force) non-capitalist economies under the all powerful system of world capitalism that guides our lives today (Robbins 68).
In the document, "Indians: Textualism, Morality, and The Problem of History," Jane Tompkins examines the conflicts between the English settlers and the American Indians. After examining several primary sources, Tompkins found that different history books have different perspectives. It wasn’t that the history books took different angles that was troubling, but the viewpoints contradicted one another. People who experience the same event told it through their reality. This becomes a problem when a person who didn’t experience the effect wants to know what happened. Tompkins said, "The problem id that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer’s frame of reference, that one will never know, in any given case what really happened (202)."
The term "globalization" is commonly used to describe the increased mobility of goods, services, labor, and technology throughout the world. Globalization is a social change; it is really an increase in connections among societies and their elements. Globalization has become identified with a number of trends, most of which developed in the period after World War II. The developments of technology, organizations, legal systems, and infrastructures helped enable this movement to occur, thus leading cultures toward the idea of modernity. The ongoing "globalization debate" confronts the world of social sciences with a series of theoretical and empirical challenges.
2. Reilly, K. Worlds of History: A Comparative Reader. Third Edition. Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2007.
Ellis, Elizabeth Gaynor, and Anthony Esler. World History: The Modern Era. Boston: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, an entirely new form of history developed. The previously, largely Eurocentric and nationalistic approach, limited the field of history in many ways. The aim of ‘new world history’ is to eradicate the subjective, narrow-minded projection of history through introducing this new concept of interconnected, cross-cultural history. This approach is concentrated on looking at the overlapping and linking of various systems and networks across different societies’ boarders; an approach that focuses on collective experiences rather than an individual ones. In order for a form of history like this to ‘genuinely’
He argues that world history should not be viewed as separate, unconnected cultures of east and west, but rather that they were all connected in multitudes of ways and must be studied as such. Pointing out the inadequate ideal of separating the world into two sections which are not equal in geography, culture, population, or history itself, he instead poses a solution to the world history viewpoint: Studying the world through its interrelations between cultures and geographical locations. Hodgson’s proposed view of large scale history not only makes sense theoretically, but logically as it proves through the pages that the history or the world cannot simply be divided, but must be studied as a whole to be truly
World history is defined as the study of the relationships between people and different aspects of society such as culture, behavior, freedom and religion (Manning,2003,1). Two factors have had a significant impact on world history, are external and internal factors (World History Connected, n.d). The external factors are based on scientific principles in areas such as chemistry, archaeology and the environment , internal factors are traditional topics of history such as slavery, freedom, abolition and racial discrimination (World History Connected, n.d).
Flory, Harriette, and Samuel Jenike. A World History: The Modern World. Volume 2. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1992. 42.
William McNeill’s thesis includes many different regions, all in which hold their own development of world historical views. His understanding as to the best approach came from historiographical traditions documented in even the recent sources we have observed recently. As a student in a world history class, it is important to note that McNeill’s thesis would be very important in discussing the very understanding of what his title implies, “The Changing Shape of World History,” with an emphasis on the four old world civilizations of the middle east, India, China and Europe.
Globalization was derived from colonialism to control over previously colonized nations, and the way it did so was through the creation of the World Bank in 1945. Globalization is defined in Steger's book as, "the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space" (Steger 15). Globalization included numerous aspects but one that had heavily influence countries across the world was the World Bank, previously known as The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The World Bank was created during the Bretton Woods Conference, a t...
Globalisation goes back as far as the era before the First World War. During that time globalisation’s general tendencies produced a very uneven pattern of global economic development, exposing the limits of global economic integration. For example, the integration of the African economy into the capitalist economy is part of the globalising tendencies of capitalism.
Ponting, Clive. A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.