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THE
COLORS OF WORLD HISTORY
By
W. Warren Wagar
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 of contemporary
anthropology that the career of Homo sapiens commenced in Africa more
than a hundred thousand years ago, that tribes of biologically human men
and women swiftly spread northward and eastward from their African homeland,
outbred their hominid rivals, and in due course populated the whole planet.
To me, this is globalization, the global diffusion of humankind and human
cultures. In only a few thousand generations, Homo sapiens was everywhere,
and everywhere essentially the same, despite superficial differences such
as skin color or width of nose or degree of hirsuteness. Globalization
outran evolution. The sheer mobility and versatility of Homo sapiens precluded
significant differentiation.
Accordingly, I would like to define world history as the history of all
the doings of the species Homo sapiens on (and off) the planet Earth,
the globe Earth, since its emergence in Africa more than 100,000 years
ago. In all these millennia, humankind has swarmed over the whole planet
and has exchanged ideas, institutions, technologies, and languages back
and forth and every which way, often making it difficult if not impossible
to ascertain which idea, institution, technology, or language first arose
where or when. In short, we have been globalizing from the beginning,
although I freely acknowledge that in certain periods, such as the middle
of the 4th Millennium B.C., the 16th Century A.D., and the second halves
of the 19th and 20th Centuries, we have seen significant upsurges in the
tempo and scale of globalization.
All this means that the subject matter of world--or global--history is
everything that every human being everywhere has ever done, said, thought,
felt, and dreamt. One cannot write off any doing, saying, thinking, feeling,
or dreaming of any human being as "irrelevant" or "unimportant."
Everything that ever happened bears witness to the human condition. Some
happenings may have had, surely did have, more influence than others,
although influence is fiendishly difficult to measure objectively, but
all of them bear witness.
The only problem with this point of view is that almost all human doings,
sayings, thinkings, feelings, and dreamings have left no trace: no written
records, no artifacts, no impact on the Earth's crust, nothing. Even the
lives of relatively well-documented figures in history, such as Martin
Luther or Mohandas Gandhi, are known to us only in bits and pieces. So
what can historians do? They can connect the dots, the pitifully few dots,
to make conjectural pictures of the past; they can assemble the surviving
evidence into narratives, or stories, about the past, with liberal resort
to their imaginations; but they will always do so in the light of certain
premises or theories or world-views that inform their labors, even if
they have no coherent awareness of these premises, theories, or world-views.
It would be advisable if historians could operate in an intellectual vacuum
free of all presuppositions and all ideologies, but in fact none of us
can. We are ineluctably the products of our times, our upbringing, our
culture, just as limited and time-bound as the people whose lives we study.
Reflecting on all this deeply enough, one may feel paralyzed. If the historian's
will is not completely or even mostly free, if the historian is the helpless
creature of his or her historical milieu, why not stop writing and teaching
history and just go fishing? Of course this is not an acceptable option,
not for historians born to the trade. We must live within our limitations
and get to work and write and teach history. In any event, people need
our pictures and our stories. People are not animals. They cannot shuffle
from day to day without at least some idea of where they came from. Nor
can we ourselves!
Which brings me to my main theme, the "colors" of world history.
Almost everything that ever happened has left no trace, but the evidence
that does remain is nevertheless immense, far more than any single human
being could ever hope to access and assimilate in any number of life-times.
We think we have managed to condense it into textbooks only five hundred
or a thousand pages long, but such books are little more than the tricks
of a skilled magician: they supply an illusion of global history, but
not the thing itself. Even if a single mind could take it all in, it would
still be only a fragment of the total. Worse yet, everything that ever
happened has, by definition, already happened--all the thoughts, all the
actions are gone. The historian cannot see, touch, or feel any of them.
The historian has only the surviving evidence, which is no more the real,
living past than a skeleton lying in its tomb is a real, living human
being. Such evidence does not speak to us. It is utterly silent. We have
to "make sense" of it. When the great 19th-Century French historian
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, addressing his students, said "Do
not applaud me. It is not I that speaks to you but history that speaks
by my mouth," he was full of prunes. [2]
So how do we make sense of this plethora of dead, inert, silent evidence?
We take out our palette full of colors and we paint. A palette full of
colors is simply my metaphor for the ideologically conditioned screens
or templates or paradigms that we consciously or unconsciously employ
to determine what kinds of evidence are most worth accessing and how we
go about converting them into explanations and narratives of the past.
I say "consciously or unconsciously" because I recognize that
many historians are not fully aware of their ideological underpinnings
and the sources of their preconceptions. A further complication is that
few of us in this chaotic postmodern world follow any single readily identifiable
party line: we are almost always the product of several rival world-views,
which can lead us into holding contradictory opinions. "Do I contradict
myself?" asked Walt Whitman, "Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes)." [3]
With this in mind, I like to think of historians as painters filling their
canvasses with strokes in various, sometimes clashing colors, although
many seem to prefer one color over the others, like Picasso during his
"Blue" period. For example, it is possible to write global history
that is predominantly Gray: the story of how, through science and technology
and skillfully managed accumulation of capital, human beings acquired
mastery of their environment, vastly increased their material wealth,
and produced the globalized economy and civilization of the 21st Century.
The chief ideological underpinnings of Gray global history are Enlightenment
faith in reason and science and liberal political economy. Elsewhere I
have dubbed this world-view "technoliberalism."[4]
As of the year 2001, this is the reigning ideology throughout the so-called
developed world, and its power in the so-called less developed world should
never be underestimated.
Of course there are many other colors on our palette. The late Arnold
J. Toynbee reached the conclusion that global history was essentially
the history of the emergence and proliferation of what he termed the Higher
Religions. We may call this Gold history, history as the evolution of
human spirituality; most often Gold history takes the form of the comparative
study of civilizations, viewed from the perspective of their allegedly
religious cradles. Its ideological underpinnings range from Platonism
to Christianity to Buddhism.
What else? The confluence of feminism and queer theory gives us Pink history,
the history of gender and sexual orientation. The confluence of Hegelianism
and Rankean "scientific" history gives us Blue history--Prussian
Blue, if you please--, global history as the story of the vicissitudes
of the state. My own specialty, the history of ideas, or intellectual
history, might be described as Silver history; it also originated in 19th-Century
German neo-idealism and should properly be known by its German name, Geistesgeschichte.
And of course it often happens that historians strongly inclined to one
color trespass on the turf of historians strongly inclined to another
color, as when, for example, a Blue historian seeks to explain Gray topics
by pointing to the central importance of state policy in facilitating
the rise of modern capitalism.
But the two colors I want to highlight in this essay are Green and Red.
Both of these colors focus on exploitation: the exploitation of the environment
and the exploitation of underclasses. Either of them offers an agenda
for global historiography: combined, they can supply an especially powerful
and ultimately subversive way of doing and teaching global history.
First, consider Green history. Clive Ponting's pioneering overview, A
Green History of the World, first published in 1991, has helped to establish
this vital sort of history in our purview. Another useful summation is
Neil Roberts, The Holocene: An Environmental History, first published
in 1989, with a second, enlarged edition in 1998. The Holocene is the
geological period in which we still live today, basically the time since
the end of the Pleistocene period (or last Ice Age) some 10 to 12 thousand
years ago. [5]
Does Green history have an ideological matrix? Typically it does: an ideology
that I label "counterculturalism,"[6]
a complex of ideas and values flatly opposed to "technoliberalism,"
the chief inspiration of Gray history. Whereas technoliberalism is all
in favor of science, technology, industry, commerce, and capitalism, in
favor of headlong growth, expansion, and development, the typical counterculturalist
believes in slowing down or otherwise limiting growth and creating societies
in collegial equilibrium with the natural environment. In this reckoning
development per se is not evil, but it must be sustainable development,
development that conserves resources, encourages biodiversity, and works
with nature, rather than against it. The roots of counterculturalism lie
partly in the romantic world-view of the early 19th Century, partly in
the utopian socialism of the same period, partly in various religious
traditions, especially both Eastern and Western mysticism and gnosticism,
and of course partly in the environmental activism of the last 40 or 50
years.
So Green history is not environmental history, pure and simple: it is
all about how human beings have been abusing the Earth for thousands of
years and paying heavy prices for their folly, the heaviest of which may
well have to be paid in the 21st Century. Be reminded that Ponting's A
Green History of the World has a minatory sub-title, namely, The Environment
and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. Green history tends to be apocalyptic
history.
But this is not to disparage Green history. In view of the looming ecological
crises of the 21st Century, and in view of humanity's age-old dependence
on the Earth, Green history should be an essential component of any attempt
to study, write, or teach history today. Technoliberals, the writers of
Gray history, offer an inspiring, heroic picture of how Homo sapiens has
been able to impose its will on the face of the Earth and rack up all
kinds of material progress: but their very anthropocentrism prevents them
from seeing that humanity is not the only value in the equation: the Earth
has always been and perhaps always will be the larger value. We human
beings are simply the fleas on her back.
And what a back she has! If one construes global history as the history
of human ecology, then the leading topics of a well-crafted text would
include climate; topography; habitats, from river valleys to tropical
islands to high plateaus; fresh water and mineral resources; all non-human
species of life both animal and vegetable, including the pathogens that
afflict us with infectious disease; the physical impact on the Earth of
all human activity, from deforestation of woodlands to toxic pollution
of groundwaters, lakes, rivers, and oceans; the size, density, and movements
of human population; and even the ideologies that inform human use and
abuse of the Earth. This is a full plate in and of itself; and although
I am not recommending that anyone teach global history purely in ecological
terms, you could do much worse.
One obvious thread worth exploring in global history is what Ponting calls
the collapse of great civilizations. Scholarly opinion nowadays tends
to attribute the initial rise and later collapse of many great civilizations
chiefly to ecological overshoot: too much deforestation, too much grazing,
too much erosion. Such practices may account for the fall of the Indus
Valley civilization of pre-Aryan India, the Mayan civilization of pre-Columbian
Central America and Mexico, and the civilizations of medieval Zimbabwe
in southeast Africa and medieval Cambodia in southeast Asia.
But environmental studies can also help explain the predominance of certain
cultures and states at one time and of other cultures and states at other
times. Consider China. From the 3rd Century B.C. on down to the present,
most of what we know as China has been--with occasional interregna--a
single unified state. A few other great ancient empires originated earlier,
but none still in existence can boast a more or less continuous existence
of almost 2300 years. During at least half of those years, and perhaps
more, China was also the richest and most populous country on the planet.
Andre Gunder Frank contends in his ReOrient that Chinese pre-eminence
did not wane until the early 19th Century; and we all know how rapidly
China has regained its status as a major economic power during the past
quarter-century, partly due to the fact that it remains the world's most
populous country.[7] A further ecological consideration,
emphasized by William H. McNeill, is that imperial China may have amassed
more wealth and enjoyed longer periods of political unity than imperial
India simply because the climate of the Indian subcontinent is somewhat
less healthful, with higher incidence of infectious disease, reducing
the productivity of labor, than the lands occupied by the Chinese.[8]
But China was not simply the product of the Chinese. It is singularly
favored by nature. The heartland of China consists of two fertile river
valleys, the valley of the Yang-Tze and the valley of the Huang-Ho. This
heartland is not divided into many isolated geographical regions by vast
mountain ranges or interior seas, as is the case with Europe. It was relatively
easy to unify once the necessary political ideas and military strategies
and technologies coalesced, as they did in the 3rd Century B.C. For the
next 2,000 years China was far and away the hegemonic power in East Asia:
the center of high culture, the center of commerce, industry, and craftsmanship.
China was self-sufficient and unsurpassable. Even the barbarian war-bands
who sometimes conquered China were soon fully assimilated into Chinese
civilization, becoming no less Chinese than the Chinese themselves.
Of course the very success of China undermined, at least temporarily,
its ability to compete with the rising rival powers of Western Europe
in the 19th Century. Look at Western Europe from the perspectives of Green
history. Mediterranean Europe, along with North Africa and Southwest Asia,
was relatively easy to unify, as the Romans discovered, thanks in part
to the Mediterranean Sea itself. But once--in ancient times--you reach
the Pyrenees and the Alps and the Carpathians and the Balkans, you enter
quite a different world: a world of dense hardwood forests, steep mountain
ranges, islands, rugged coasts, rough inland seas, glaciers, snow, and
ice.
The indefatigable Romans did manage to subdue part of this northern world,
for a few centuries, but at least half of it remained wild and barbaric.
When advances in metallurgy finally made possible the felling of the forests,
much of the land proved to be fertile. Populations increased. The temperate
climate of the lower-lying northern lands was relatively salubrious, especially
after economic progress made warm clothing and snug dwellings easier to
come by. But the geographical boundaries remained formidable. This transalpine
Europe, although not vast in extent, did not lend itself to conquest by
a single imperial power. From Charlemagne to Hitler, all the would-be
Caesars ultimately failed.
The outcome was a dishevelled world of many independent and semi-independent
kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and city-states, all in ruthless competition
with one another, unwilling to submit to the rule of any would-be Rome,
and dependent in varying degrees on the enterprise of their merchants
and bankers for their revenues, their arms, and their glory. Late medieval
Europe supplied the perfect launch-pad for the take-off of modern capitalism,
a tireless machine for the unrelenting accumulation of capital. At first
Venice, Genoa, Portugal, and Spain led the way; then the Netherlands;
then England. Every effort on the part of one great power to rebuild the
Roman Empire, from the Austro-Hispanic Habsburgs to Bourbon and Napoleonic
France to Nazi Germany, fell fatally short. Eventually, in the 18th and
19th Centuries, this divided but exuberant Western Europe conquered most
of the rest of the world. And make no mistake: today, as the 21st Century
gets under way, for better or worse, the whole world lies in the thrall
of Western European or European-descended technology, capital, culture,
and systems of belief.
So, to what can we credit the "success" of Western Europe? White
skin? Blue eyes? Christian piety? I think not! The best guess is that
late medieval Western Europe's relative poverty, compared to the great
powers of Asia, and its disunity--frustrating the emergence of an all-powerful,
all-controlling, innovation-discouraging imperial bureaucracy--gave Western
Europeans the hunger, the aggressiveness, the competitiveness, and the
economic machinery to reach out, grab, exploit, and dominate the world,
while at the same time, and by the same token, inventing the military
and industrial technology necessary to maximize their edge.
In the second half of the 19th Century, to complete the picture, three
peripheral countries located outside Western Europe moved rapidly to emulate
Western Europe: the United States, Japan, and Russia. Each of these was,
in effect, an empire, with a strong central government. Each started out
far behind Western Europe economically. The most successful, and also
the most favored by geology, geography, and climate, was the United States,
which had the additional cultural advantage, in the mid-19th Century,
of consisting chiefly of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants
from Western Europe, for whom the aping of Western European economies
and technologies came easily. But Japan did not lag far behind; and Russia
made strenuous efforts to catch up as well, although it never quite managed
to join the core of economically super-advanced hegemonic nations.
But the breakthrough to modern capitalism and industrialism did not, and
I suspect could not have, occurred in the United States, Japan, or Russia.
That distinction belonged to Western Europe, and it was not a sudden breakthrough.
It took centuries to happen, from its barest beginnings in Renaissance
Italy to its climactic moments in the first half of the 19th Century in
Great Britain and parts of northern France, the Lowlands, and western
Germany. And it cannot be understood by the tools of Gray, Blue, Gold,
or Silver history alone. Everything that took place was, to a considerable
extent, predetermined by the hard facts of Green history. Green history
is the bedrock. And if modern global capitalist industrial and postindustrial
civilization manages to overshoot and exceed the carrying capacity of
the environment--which seems all too possible--the hard facts of Green
history will have the last word, too.
But I have one more color to discuss. If we are all fleas on the back
of Mother Earth, some fleas have a better purchase on her back than others.
This brings me to Red history, the history of the exploitation of some
human beings by other human beings, the history of class struggle, which
is rooted ideologically in 19th-Century utopian socialism and Marxism.
The term "exploitation" is freighted with all kinds of pejorative
connotations, but so it should be. Exploitation denotes the theft, or
the undervaluing, of the labor of some to enhance the well-being of others.
Without such exploitation, civilization--the process of creating urbanized
societies through division of labor and the production of agricultural
surplus--would never have emerged, and we would all still be living in
Paleolithic communities. Nevertheless, theft is theft, and all of human
history since Neolithic times is the history of theft. Theft gave us the
Pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, theft gave us the palaces of Venice and
Paris, theft gave us the paintings of Leonardo and the passions of Bach,
the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, and the ovens of Auschwitz.
So it is perfectly possible to construct a history of the world that stresses
the epic of human exploitation, the epic of what McNeill calls "macroparasitism,"[9]
the ways in which certain people have taken unfair advantage of other
people, have sucked the blood of other people, whether you call them slaves,
serfs, natives, indentured servants, tenant farmers, proletarians, the
working class, or even the bottom four quintiles of any contemporary population
as measured by net worth or income. The "bottom four quintiles"
may work best for present-day economically advanced countries because
in such countries technological progress has transformed the nature of
the working class, giving it relatively higher family incomes than in
the 19th Century, more education and skills, and a change in the preponderant
types of work required, from manual labor to brain labor. But although
this has in some segments of the working class diminished the theft of
value, it has not eliminated theft; and in any case, the past quarter-century
has seen a sharp reversal of the trend toward proportionately rising incomes
for people whose income is derived primarily from work, as opposed to
the ownership and investment of capital.
Over the long haul of global history, Red themes have much the same heuristic
power as Green themes. State and empire formation cannot be imagined without
the theft of surplus value; the glorious and inglorious shenanigans of
elites and the misery of the masses cannot be imagined without the theft
of surplus value; the immiseration of various subdued races and of women
cannot be imagined without the theft of surplus value; the uprisings of
underdogs that punctuate the pages of all global history cannot be imagined
without the theft of surplus value; the struggles between elites, as for
example of merchants and entrepreneurs against aristocrats and emperors,
as in Ming China or Bourbon France or Civil War America, cannot be imagined
without considering who gets to be the greatest thieves of surplus value;
the rise to near global mastery of the great multinational corporations
of our own time cannot be imagined without the theft of surplus value.
And it is not stretching matters too far to imagine that the history of
the 21st Century will turn on whether or not the exploitative capitalist
world-system self-destructs in an orgy of greed, comparable in many ways
and closely related in many ways, to humankind's ruthless exploitation
of Mother Nature.
Now when you put Green and Red global history together, you have a powerful
one-two punch. You have a vision of global history that is eminently subversive:
subversive of unfettered capitalism, subversive of the sovereign nation-state
system which has made and continues to make such capitalism possible,
subversive of Western European civilization, subversive of sexism, racism,
and imperialism, but also--please note--subversive of all civilizations
founded, as all have been, and until recently necessarily have been, on
the exploitation of Mother Nature and the theft of surplus value. Green
history and Red history give no license to Hindu nationalism, or pan-Islamic
evangelism, or nativist insurgency in any of its manifold forms. Green
history and Red history, to use Benjamin Barber's terms, do not favor
"Jihad" over "McWorld," or vice versa.[10]
To my way of thinking, the only conceivable future that Green history
and Red history can endorse is the supersession of the modern capitalist
world-system by a democratic ecologically wise global commonwealth, a
Green and Red world state.
But I do not argue that Green and Red history are the one, exclusive,
"scientific" way to do global history. They are certainly not
the only way to do global history. In the arena of competing ideologies,
all the players stake their claims to truth, and their claims to overarching
rationality and/or spiritual pre-eminence. In the final analysis, it is
not heuristic power, explanatory power, that wins the battle, but the
innermost convictions of the players. Here I relapse into my role as a
Silver historian, as a relativizing historicist. I am profoundly skeptical
about the possibility of a true social science on the model of physics
or biology. Human beings are somehow more than molecules or ants.
But come what may, I do believe that Green and Red history will, if the
human race survives, inherit the future, becoming, together, the dominant
paradigm in historical study in the course of the 21st Century. And rest
assured: historians are the custodians of the collective memory of humankind.
When presidents and prime ministers wonder how they will "go down"
in history, they mean how we, and all those like us, will read their performance
20, 50, or a hundred years from now. For it is not history that speaks:
it is we, we poor, fallible, blinkered, incomplete human beings who have
chosen to help create, help report, and help preserve the memory of our
species.
So I would contend that the sacrality of our function requires us to be
true to our knowledge and our convictions. If our knowledge and our convictions
incline us to use more of the greens and reds on our palettes than other
colors, so be it!
ENDNOTES
[1] Bruce Mazlish,
"Crossing Boundaries: Ecumenical, World, and Global History,"
in Philip Pomper, Richard H. Elphick, and Richard T. Vann, eds., World
History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities (Malden, MA, and
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 41-52; Nicholas D. Kristof,
"The World: A Better System in the 19th Century? At This Rate,
We'll Be Global in Another Hundred Years," New York Times (May
23, 1999), Section 4, p. 5; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System
I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy
in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); and Andre
Gunder Frank and Barry B. Gills, eds., The World System: Five Hundred
Years or Five Thousand? (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
[2] N.D. Fustel
de Coulanges, cited in G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in the
Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longmans, Green,
1952), p. 202.
[3] Walt Whitman,
"Song of 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).
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