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Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term*
DAVID NORTHRUP
Boston College
| World historians confront two huge conceptual tasks. One is horizontal integration: how to interconnect in each era the broad range of human experiences around the world. The other is vertical integration: how to identify patterns in the long sweep of past time. Neither task is easy, though the first seems to attract more attention. Despite the limited significance of synchrony in earlier historical eras, world historians are rightly concerned with this "horizontally integrative macrohistory"1 because it challenges perspectives arbitrarily based on national, regional, and cultural units. We tend to delight in clever books that recount the variety of human experiences at a particular moment of time, even though such comparisons may lead to no larger conclusions.2 |
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Charting world history's vertical or chronological axis has its own problems and, despite some notable efforts, seems to receive less critical attention. The effort may not appear fruitful, for, as Ross Dunn has observed, "no periodization scheme for world history can intelligibly integrate all, or even most, phenomena except perhaps at the very broadest and thus least useful levels of generalization." Whether out of passive acquiescence or an active global vision, world history textbooks generally borrow from European history the ancient/medieval/modern triptych and nearly always divide history at 1500 C.E.3 A serious discussion of these assumptions seems called for. Just as our colleagues in the Annales school have discovered deeper meaning in history in the long term (la longue durée), more of us in world history need to emulate what David Christian has done in arguing the case for "Big History" by concerning ourselves with the structure of ultra-long-term history.4 |
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Although I have been as likely as anyone else to devote more energy to horizontal macrohistory than to its chronological cousin, others' quests for history's long-term meaning and structure have periodically captured my attention. I had just begun teaching my first world history survey at Tuskegee Institute in 1968 when I happened upon Carlo M. Cipolla's slender volume, in which he argues persuasively the simple proposition that global history has been shaped by two revolutions: the agricultural and the industrial.5 The roles of climate and disease in shaping history have also added striking new dimensions to understanding the past on a larger-than-human scale.6 Over the years I have benefited from other debates about momentous turning points in world history, notably the recent discussions over how and when the West overtook the East, an event that Kenneth Pomeranz has elegantly named the Great Divergence.7 Such turning points may not always lie in the distant past. Tom Friedman has persuasively argued that the almost simultaneous ending of the Cold War and the rise of the Internet marked the beginning of a new era of history.8 |
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In the spirit of such thoughtful works, this essay puts forward a simple temporal model of world history. It proposes that world history can be divided into just two ages: one dominated by divergence and, since about 1000 C.E., an age of convergence. Beginning with the early human communities in Africa and their migration to the rest of the world, people honed their survival skills by adapting culturally to a multitude of different environments. In relative isolation from each other, communities refined particular specialized technologies, designed appropriate clothing and food preparation techniques, worked out differing belief systems and ways of reasoning, developed myriad languages and systems of writing, and devised distinctive styles of art and architecture. |
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