GLOBAL HISTORY

Historiographical Feasibility and Environmental Reality

Wolf Schäfer

The history I should like to see written is one which probably cannot be written adequately yet: that of the world since the Second World War, and more particularly, during the third quarter of the twentieth century.

— Eric Hobsbawm, "The Missing History"

Introduction

Global history is the unwritten history of the twentieth century, and we have to find out how it can be written. Yet this term global history is not only intriguing but also quite arrogant. It is intriguing because it captures an important part of what is going on in the world around us, and it is arrogant because it sounds so bombastic and seems to violate the guideline that small is beautiful and that first-rate historical work should be narrowly focused and based on original research.[1] The source of this ambivalent response to global history is not the emergence of global realities as produced by countless historical actors but rather an inflated concept of global history as produced by some historians and social scientists. Everybody recognizes the turn toward globalization in contemporary history, and we are ready to assume that global history works on the level of reality. However, on the level of historiography, we are not so sure and are inclined to be skeptical, if not worried. Neither the successful institutional implementation nor the "correct" conceptual construction of global history are matters that one can take for granted.

This chapter builds upon a research-oriented construction of global history. It identifies the set of global realities that could and should become the focus for vigorous research, and it takes a first cut at what is currently the most prominent global reality, the global environment. Of course, that is much too limited an approach for a full treatment of global history, but comprehensiveness is not my aim here. I want to explore the professional feasibility of writing global history, and I will be satisfied if I can make that point.

The first section distinguishes between World and Global History. I shall be arguing that Global History should not be identified with traditional World History. However, the terminology is in flux, and a clear-cut understanding of the conceptual differences between the approaches of World and Global History is warranted. Global History is not a twentieth-century supplement to World History but rather a new and distinctly different approach to the study of global processes in contemporary history. This does not mean that all work cataloged under the heading of World History is of little value. In fact, newer studies in World History are often valuable contributions to the prehistory of global studies (especially the work of Philip Curtin, Alfred Crosby, and Michael Adas). The growing literature about global issues in fields such as sociology, economics, and international relations is already playing a significant part in enhancing our understanding of current history.

[Oct. 2001: The preceding paragraph has been revised to conform to the way I have come to distinguish between World and Global History. By using lowercase and uppercase letters I try to call attention to the difference between raw and refined history (history and historiography): lowercase letters (global history/world history) point to the raw historical material; capital letters (Global History/World History) indicate what global and world historians do when they process that material. I have revised the reminder of the document accordingly.]

To begin with, Global History does not attempt to give a total account of us, our world, or times past, present, and future. Traditional World History, particularly in its totalizing form, tried to cover the whole world, the whole human past, and the whole of humanity. But these are no longer plausible conceptions due to the growth in knowledge and an increasing complexity. I object to grand syntheses of world history and endorse the writing of comparatively humble pieces of work. Studies in Global History are likely to deal with "big structures, large processes and huge comparisons,"[2] but acceptable contributions must be of limited — that is, less than total — scope, and they have to be research oriented.

My own experience tells me that global history is a great teaching field; yet I hold that Global History must prove its viability by becoming a productive research field first and foremost. World History tried to launch itself via teaching[3] and a few outstanding contributions like William McNeill's Rise of the West (1963), but it never managed to overcome the doubts of the research historian who thought: If one does not read all the languages of the world — and who does? — and if one has not searched all the archives of the world — and who has? — how can one tell the story of world history professionally? Of course, total knowledge is an impossible standard, and even the most local historian would not want to subscribe to it.

There is nothing wrong with bold generalizations and high levels of abstraction. But it defeats the purpose of advancing historical knowledge if the specialists appreciate the stories in the globalist's account that they do not know much about and fault his or her scholarship in the fields of their particular expertise. Concerning devastating qualifications of this kind, my prescription emphasizes researchability and a drastic reduction in holistic weight. To overcome the skeptical attitude in the historical profession, which I happen to share, I propose to construct Global History as a cross-cultural, multinational, interdisciplinary, but nevertheless completely ordinary research tool for historians and social scientists.

The second section of this chapter lists the realities of our new global history world and claims that Global History investigates the emergence and present character of self-conscious, multiple local activities with immediate worldwide range, consequence and/or significance. Global historians study subjects interacting on a global plane — that is, human actors who are aware of and responsible for the evolution, interplay, and cross-fertilization of a global civilization with a global technoscience in a global environment. After these preliminary theoretical clarifications, I finally proceed to sketch the paradigmatic ecological reality of global history, namely, our continuous unveiling, changing, monitoring, and interpreting of the face of the earth.

Notes

[1] For an eloquent celebration of academic narrowness, see Eric Monkkonen (1986).

[2] For a spirited and inspiring pleading for "historically grounded huge comparisons of big structures and large processes," see Charles Tilly (1984).

[3] Gilbert Allardyce (1990: 26). Allardyce quoted McNeill — "Try to teach world history and you will find that it can be done" — and reported that it is the policy of the World History Association (WHA), formed in 1982, to prove the possibility of World History by teaching it.