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World History in Context*
David Christian
San Diego State University
| History is all about context. As Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and HMargaret Jacob have written, "what historians do best is to make connections with the past in order to illuminate the problems of the present and the potential of the future."1 That is why historians so often complain about fields such as international relations that focus almost exclusively on current events and issues. However, historians haven't always been so good at putting their own discipline in context. Oddly enough, this applies even to world history. One of the virtues of world history is that it can help us see more specialized historical scholarship in its global context. But what is the context of world history itself? This is a question that has not been sufficiently explored by world historians.2 Yet it should be, for all the reasons that historians understand so well when we criticize other disciplines for neglecting context. |
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One of the aims of world history is to see the history of human beings as a single, coherent story, rather than as a collection of the particular stories of different communities. It is as much concerned with nonliterate communities (whether they lived in the Palaeolithic era or today) as with the literate communities that generated the written documents on which most historical research has been based. World history tries to describe the historical trajectory that is shared by all humans, simply because they are humans. Understood in this sense, world history is about a particular species of animal, a species that is both strange and immensely influential on this earth. So, to ask about the context of world history is to ask about the place of our particular type of animal, Homo sapiens, in the larger scheme of things. This question encourages us to see world history as a natural bridge between the history discipline and other disciplines that study changes in time, from biology to cosmology. |
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Modern Cosmologies often seem to Decenter
Human Beings
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| In most creation stories, humans are reasonably close to the center of the universe. In the Ptolemaic system, which dominated cosmological thinking in medieval Europe, the earth was at the center of a series of transparent spheres. Attached to these spheres were the planets, the sun, and the stars, all revolving around Earth, whose main function, it seemed, was to provide a home for human beings. However, the evolution of modern cosmologies has decentered the earth and the human beings who inhabit it. In the sixteenth century, Copernicus offered some powerful new arguments to suggest that Earth revolves around the sun. In the seventeenth century, Giordano Bruno argued that every star could be a separate sun, perhaps with planets of its own. By the eighteenth century, it was common to suppose that the universe might be infinite in both time and space. The universe of contemporary cosmology has limits in both time and space, but it is still huge—so huge that it can make our species and the planet we inhabit seem utterly insignificant. |
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