Conference held at the GHI, London, March 30-April 1, 2000. Conveners: Eckhardt Fuchs (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) and Benedikt Stuchtey (GHI London). Participants: Michael Adas (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick), Jerry H. Bentley (University of Honolulu), Michael J. Bentley (University of St. Andrews), Thomas Bohn (University of Jena), Sebastian Conrad (Free University of Berlin), Arif Dirlik (Duke University), Vinay Lal (University of California at Los Angeles), Ricardo K.S. Mak (Hong Kong Baptist University), Jochen Meissner (University of Hamburg), Mauro Moretti (University of Pisa), Patrick O'Brien (University of London), Jürgen Osterhammel (University of Konstanz), Roxann Prazniack (Hampden-Sydney College), Lutz Raphael (University of Trier), Hagen Schulze (Free University of Berlin), Julia A. Thomas (University of Wisconsin at Madison), Eduardo Tortarolo (University of Turin), Peter Wende (GHI London).
The German Historical Institutes in London and Washington invited practitioners and theoreticians of world historiography to a three-day conference in order to discuss, in international comparison, the discipline's past traditions as well as present and future direction. The conference followed a meeting in Washington in October 1997, where we investigated the professionalization of the historical sciences as well as the possibilities and limits of intellectual scholarly exchange and transfer. (See the conference report in the Bulletin, issue no. 21, Fall 1997, pp. 27-30.) As was the case in Washington, the London meeting aimed to trace the development of academic history in international perspective, whereby emphasis was placed especially on non-European examples. Of course, the conference could not claim to have covered each and every tradition, and for that reason only a small yet representative selection of European and non-European historiographies were chosen: Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States. The conference ended with papers on contemporary debates and research emphases in world history writing, followed by a discussion of the central question of whether and how world history can be written at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
After words of welcome by Peter Wende, the director of the GHI London, Benedikt Stuchtey presented his concept of the meeting and several general tendencies in the writing of world history, past and present. In his introduction Stuchtey pointed out the differences between the terms world history, global history, total history, and universal history. He also addressed the question of the connection between world history, on the one hand, and local, regional, and national histories, on the other. Is the historical discipline in danger of fragmenting further, or will world history help prevent this? Already in the 1980s the renowned historian William McNeill argued that world history writing - in its goals and methods - should not differentiate itself from other types of history writing. When the French Annales school recognized the arbitrariness of chronological and regional borders of traditional historiography, it unintentionally created the important fundamentals of modern world history writing. Naturally, the problem of the unevenness of what we know remains: Is it even possible to write a comprehensive world history as long as the Western world is substantially better researched than the non-Western world? What are the possibilities, and the limits, of a comparison?
The conference was divided into two chronological units, 1800 to 1945 and 1945 to the present, and two geographic units, a comparison of Europe with non-European countries. In the nineteenth centuy, universal history was understood as the history of the development of European civilization, economic primacy, and imperial expansion. Taking the example of Italy, Mauro Moretti presented the works and debates of leading Italian historians, concentrating in particular on Cesare Cant (1804-95) and his "Storia Universale" in thirty-five volumes (published between 1838 and 1846). Despite great interest in the national question and the rise of the Italian nation-state, the writing of world history, especially influenced by German works, played a not unimportant role in nineteenth-century Italy. However, Cant's concept of "history" remained conventional because he limited himself to describing the European and Christian West, and understood universal history exclusively as the history of Christendom.
In his investigation of world history writing in Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, Thomas Bohn came to the conclusion that in his example the political function of historiography could be discerned: Russia's place in Europe, the tense relations between backward-looking and modernizing forces, society and the states, between academic works and popular syntheses, traditional and modern, interdisciplinary methods, and finally between Eurocentric models, on the one hand, and the construction of a patriotic Russian Sonderweg (special path), on the other. Russian and Soviet concepts of world history depended to a great extent on how the country defined its position between its colonial periphery and Europe, and the emancipation from the influence of German historicism and Hegelianism. Nevertheless, the official Marxist-Leninist history of the world in ten volumes (1955-65) was grounded in the classic European viewpoint, even if its motifs, such as the class struggle, were used as scaffolding.
Eckhardt Fuchs shed light on the three traditions of world history writing in Germany since the end of the eighteenth century: the universal and cosmopolitan perspective; world history starting with Europe; and history with the idea of the nation at its center. In the second half of his talk Fuchs spoke about the problems of writing a transcultural and transnational history of historiography. Beginning with recent debates on Eurocentrism and postcolonialism he enumerated the theoretical and methodological problems confronting the writing of universal history. From an epistemological point of view he appealed for a "soft" Eurocentrism as a possibility, in self-critical reflection and via transcultural comparison and transfer, for embarking on new ways of writing the history of history.
In her contribution on Japan, Julia A. Thomas tendered the thesis that world history writing in Japan above all served the purpose not of understanding the Other, that is the non-Japanese world, but rather the self-understanding and self-definition of Japan itself. From the Tokugawa Period (after 1600) to the post-World War II era Japanese world history writing was marked by anxiety and insecurity in dealing with the country's national identity; the critical engagement with the world outside Japan primarily served the function of a critical engagement of Japanese with themselves.
Ricardo K. S. Mak remarked that Chinese ideas about the world outside of China experienced a watershed during the time of the Opium Wars. The wall separating China from the outside world that existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, in spite of trade with Southeast Asia and the influence of Western science, slowly gave way after 1842 to Chinese intellectuals opening up to the West and attempting to redefine China's place in the world. Whereas the first generation of these intellectuals still believed in the possibility of a Chinese exceptionalism that was independent of the outside world, the second generation recognized the shortcomings of Chinese civilization and strove for a partial integration into world society. Furthermore, in the age of imperialism social Darwinism played a decisive role in the perception of the country and its relations to other nations.
As Vinay Lal reported in his paper, India found itself in an area of conflict between Western colonialism and the beginnings of political emancipation. This situation produced its concept of world history, such as that of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet, according to Lal, despite the multicultural and transnational collaboration within the scholarly community, there can be no talk of having overcome the Eurocentrism - that is, the western European and American perspective - that dominates world history writing. Few studies of world history use a genuinely comparative approach, and the current discourse on globalization still has a unified concept of the world, which does not take seriously the manifold possibilities for interpretation.
In the same session Jochen Meissner called into question the Eurocentric focus of universal history using the example of the Brazilian historian Gilberto Freyre. Meissner discussed Freyre's book Casa grande e senzala (1933), which does not attribute Brazil's miserable conditions and putative powerlessness to reach the level of development of other countries to the usual racism but rather to societal ills. When the book was published, it was widely cited by Fernand Braudel and Thomas Mann, which led to twenty-five printings. Freyre had studied with Franz Boas, among others, and had taken an interest in anthropological and transcultural issues.
Tracing the development of Japanese world history after 1945, Sebastian Conrad articulated how much Japan tried to define its position between Asia and Europe, that is, between Asian and Western history. World history was popular and was firmly anchored in school curricula. It had the function of connecting Japan's past to a universal history. Whereas in the immediate postwar period Japan tended to understand itself as part of the West within the concept of modernization, then in the 1960s to see itself again closer to the Asian world order, in the 1990s the country rediscovered and valued positively the period of national isolation (1603-1853), which is associated with pride in the nation and a vision of a peaceful, nonexpansionist society. Thus, support for isolationist politics can be viewed as a consequence of Japan's position in world history.
Lutz Raphael elucidated the theory and practice of world historiography by the Annales school. He began by discussing Henri Berr's famous "L'evolution de l'humanité" project and then by talking about Lucien Febvre's and Marc Bloch's concepts of world history. Of special importance is the role played by Fernand Braudel, whose book La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II has become an undisputed class of historiography. Braudel's program, which breaks down into an immutable geographic period, the "long durée" of social and demographic period, and then the short duration of events, however, was never adopted by the Annales. The Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Annales school's institutional base, was of extraordinary importance.
The two great figures of German world historiography are without doubt Karl Marx and Max Weber. They functioned as key figures in Patrick O'Brien's reflections on "The Global History of Material Progress." O'Brien proposed a few parameters for the study of the universal history of economic growth and systematically investigated by means of a chronological outline the economic conditions from Adam Smith, Marx, and Weber to the World System School and Brenner. The second half of his talk compared European with Asian developments with regard to technologies, techniques, processes, and management of the means of production from 1368 to 1815.
The last panel of the conference dealt with the tasks and problems of present and future world history writing. In his paper Jerry H. Bentley focused on the connection between "World History and Grand Narrative." Bentley appealed for the drafting of a world history that divorces itself from the Eurocentric model based on the Enlightenment and strives for the integration of individual societies into a global dynamic. As support for this proposal he sketched three historical "realities" that were common to all human societies and that would create world history through their contextualization, in contrast to the existing teleologies based on supremacy and domination: population growth, constantly improving technical possibilities, and increasing transcultural relations are of decisive importance for the development of the world as a whole.
In his paper Michael Adas emphasized that from a global perspective, however, it would be very difficult to write a "grand narrative" without the exceptionalism of the American past. The experience of the former settler society, to have achieved global hegemony, is essential for a better understanding of world historical problems and especially those of the twentieth century. Important preconditions herein again would be historical comparison as well as the ascertaining of common experiences, for example, the frontier and the influence of scientific and technological change. Adas also indicated that world history has only relatively recently found acceptance, following the gradual relaxation of the domination of the specialized disciplines.
In the last contribution to the conference Arif Dirlik raised the problem of current world history writing, seeking its justification and meaning in light of the fact that world history essentially reflects "world making" and still cannot free itself from the ruling Eurocentrism. Dirlik warned against the tendency to privilege world history vis-à-vis other types of history writing, to proceed positivistically in practice, and to do nothing but gloss over the triumph of Western-imprinted globalization.
This tension between arguments for and against writing world history continued in the final discussion. To begin with, Jürgen Osterhammel summarized the five central problems: the development of criteria for problems related to world history; the question of "good" or "bad" world history; its intellectual as well as institutional premises; the questions of whether comparative history is the same as world history, and whether space and time are the units of world history. These criteria were taken up once again during the discussion of individual papers. Thus, participants debated the example of British historiography's astounding lack of world history. The importance of the history of philosophy, as well as the difference between a profession focusing on national histories and amateur historians, who also study world history, have been as thematized as the problem of Eurocentrism in current world history writing. The societal and economic relevance of world history was then underscored, which makes clear conceptual definitions necessary, for example, the differences between "culture" and "cultural." The study of the history of "civilization" also has encountered criticism ever since Edward Said's critique of "orientalism" in Western scholarship. In fact, an academic subfield has been created to deal with this issue. As Michael Geyer and Charles Bright already wrote in their essay in the American Historical Review (1995), modern world history writing has not yet freed itself from Western stereotypes. Reorienting the field would create numerous theoretical and practical questions and affirm its potential. The conveners plan to publish the results of the conference.
Eckhardt Fuchs
Benedikt Stuchtey