World History, Macrohistory

20 Jul 2008 10:45

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Where "macrohistory" begins and ordinary history leaves off, I shan't attempt to say. Nor shall I attempt to draw a very precise border with sociology.

Mitch Porter, in correspondence, quotes the following definition of "world history" from S. A. M. Adshead's Central Asia in World History:

What was to end the ages of isolation [i.e. of "tangential and irregular contact" between "the four primary civilizations of Western Eurasia, East Asia, Black Africa, and Meso-America"] was the development of a global overlay, an interlocking set of institutions, which made the world less many and more one. It is these institutions, or world networks as they may be called, which form the subject matter of world history, as it will be understood in this study. World history, in this sense, is not super-history. Indeed, especially in its earlier stages, it is somewhat marginal history. It is simply the history of rather pervasive institutions or networks which operate, if not in all four primary civilizations, at least in more than one of them.

Now, clearly the history of those pervasive institutions and networks is very interesting and important, and equally clearly "world history" is a natural name for that subject. (I'm skeptical of the idea of discrete civilizations, but another time.) If we were engaged in the rectification of names, that might well be the end of it, but as it happens "world history" is already used for a somewhat ill-defined subject, of which networks and institutions of global reach is but a part. World history, in the ordinary sense, is roughly supposed to be the history of events of global importance. This is, naturally, a superset of Adshead's "world history", and perhaps even a natural one, since one wants to say that (e.g.) the French Revolution was an event of global importance, though it was not part of those world institutions.

Cf. Archaeology; Historical Materialism; History and Historiography; Plagues

Recommended:
• Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250--1350
• S. A. M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History
• Guillermo Algaze, "The Sumerian Takeoff", Structure and Dynamics 1:1 (2005): 2 [From the abstract: "Economic geographers correctly note that regional variations in economic activity and population agglomeration are always the result of self-reinforcing processes of resource production, accumulation, exchange, and innovation. This article proposes that essentially similar forces account for the emergence of the world's earliest cities in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Souther Mesopotamia), sometime during the second half of the fourth millennium BC."]
• Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel [The only genuinely scientific approach to history I've ever seen. Brilliant and utterly convincing. The big picture of all human societies over the last 13,000 years or so.]
• Mark Elvin
  • The Pattern of the Chinese Past
  • "Why China Failed to Create an Endogenous Industrial Capitalism: A Critique of Max Weber's Explanation", Theory and Society 13 (1984): 370--391 ["[A]n economic and ecological explanation of China's failure to create her own industrial capitalism is possible, and that it is simpler in its assumptions, more internally consistent, and more amenable to empirical verification than the cultural and ideological analysis offered by Weber. Where political or cultural factors are important, they are not linked to characteristic Weberian themes, such as inner-worldly asceticism. Examples are China's lack of a modern science, her failure to persist in long-distance overseas exploration and trade, and her substitution of commercial-type relationships for direct management in much industrial organization. Furthermore, [this] approach [explains] the differential response in modern times of different parts of the Chinese culture-area to the challenge of imitative modern economic growth, while the Weberian approach [does] not... [L]ate-traditional Chinese values and ideas were in most respects already suitable for modern economic growth, and ... the key inhibiting constraints were not cultural."]
• Ernest Gellner, Plow, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History
• Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe [I'm serious; the information is accurate, the coverage is global, the jokes are funny, and the drawing is good.]
• Eric Hobsbawm [The first three are his trilogy on the "long nineteenth century"; the last, the "short twentieth century"]
  • The Age of Revolution
  • The Age of Capital
  • The Age of Imperialism
  • The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1917--1991
• Marshall Hodgson
  • The Venture of Islam [Essentially a fragment of his never-finished world history]
  • Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History [Ed. Edmund Burke III]
• Jay Levenson (ed.), Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration [Visually lovely and highly scholarly survey of world art, and so the world's high cultures, circa 1492, i.e., around the climax of the agrarian age.]
• Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography
• J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History [The reticular interpretation of history]
• William H. McNeill
  • The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes and Community
  • Plagues and Peoples
  • The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000
  • The Rise of the West [Not Eurocentric, despite the title]
• Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
• Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt [The novel of global history. So what if it's not the history of our globe?]
• Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny [The last third, about the meaning of life, must be massively discounted; the first two-thirds are very good.]

To read:
• S. A. M. Adshead, China in World History
• Thomas T. Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History [blurb]
• Braudel, The Mediterranean
• K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750
• David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History [From the Big Bang to the present in 664 pages. Blurb]]
• Randall Collins, Macrosociology: Essays on the Sociology of the Long Run
• Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeaseable Appetite for Energy
• Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
• Philip De Souza, Seafaring and Civilization: Maritime Perspectives on World History
• Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age
• Jack Goody
  • Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate
  • The East in the West
  • Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain [Blurb]
• Johan Goudsblom, Eric Jones and Stephen Mennell, The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilization
• Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past [blurb]
• John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation [Blurb]
• Eric Jones
  • The European Miracle
  • Growth Recurring
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• John Keay, The Spice Route: A History [Blurb]
• Philiip L. Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia [blurb]
• Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power
• Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past
• Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
• Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC [Review in American Scientist]
• Daivd Northrup, Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450--1850
• Colin Renfrew and J. F. Cherry (eds.), Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-political Change
• John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World [Blurb]
• Nathan Rosenberg, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World
• Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain [blurb]
• Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities [Blurb]
• J. K. J. Thomson, Decline in History: The European Experience
• Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study [Bookseller's description: "The first detailed comparative study of the seven most fully documented early civilizations: ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Shang China, the Aztecs and their neighbors, the Classic Maya, the Inka, and the Yoruba. Unlike previous studies, equal attention is paid to similarities and differences in their sociopolitical organization, their economic systems, and their religious beliefs, knowledge, art, and values."]
• David Wilkinson, "Civilizations as Networks: Trade, War, Diplomacy, and Command-Control", Complexity 8 (2002): 82--86
• John E. Wills, 1688: A Global History