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Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change*
KENNETH POMERANZ
University of California, Irvine
| The revival of world history as a legitimate part of academic departments in Western (especially North American) research universities is not much more than thirty years old. Having emerged, in many cases, under the influence of world-systems theory, the field has sometimes been criticized for being too heavily oriented toward political economy and to a lesser extent toward other kinds of history (such as environmental history) with a strongly materialist bent. And many of the pioneers of the field—including some not enamored of a world systems approach—found that strongly materialist approaches offered clear advantages for scholars breaking out of conventional national or civilizational frameworks. The general comparability across cultural zones of a pound of cotton, an acre of cleared land, or the work that can be done by a steam engine made the study of both comparisons and connections far easier for such items than for ideas, and thus proved useful as topics to begin from. |
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Meanwhile, world history as a teaching field often defined itself against Western civilization courses, which, at least in their "Plato to NATO" form, often epitomized the pitfalls of an idea-centered history: they often constructed their topic around a presumed unity of Greco/ Roman and/or Judeo/Christian heritages in ways that made some sense for reading Aquinas or Jefferson in Great Books courses, but much less sense for understanding the concerns of laboring people, the commerce in the goods those laborers produced, and so on. So when the discipline became divided over "cultural/intellectual" versus "social/material" approaches in the 1980s and 1990s, it is not surprising that most of those involved in world history leaned in the latter direction and were sometimes perceived as doing so even when they didn't. |
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Thus, while world history has been a very innovative field, it has sometimes seemed theoretically and methodologically conservative in terms of these particular debates. Increased knowledge of non-European histories complemented epistemological critiques of master narratives derived from European experience, but insofar as skepticism about big stories became an article of faith, it also militated against seeking to construct any sort of world history. In the short run, this has not helped recruitment in the field. And ultimately, of course, world history, like any national or local history, must integrate culture, politics, economics, environment, and so on, no matter how difficult this is on a given spatial or temporal scale; if it does not, it fails to partake of one of the defining virtues of history as a discipline. |
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For these and other reasons, world history has much to gain from developing research agendas with a strong social history component and from thinking of social history in broad terms that provide a strong bridge between the more materialist topics world history has tended to emphasize and histories of culture. |
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Moreover, world history already has many varieties and other antecedents besides world-systems theory; many of these other tendencies have always had a strong social history component. For instance, while Braudel's influence led in one stream through Wallerstein to international political economy, it led along another path, through the Annales school, to the aspiration for a "total history" that was in large part a social history of everyday life. Another route to world history led through area studies, with an emphasis on rich contextualization and interdisciplinarity that is very congenial to social history. Despite the geographically bounded nature of area programs (at least as originally conceived), many people trained in those fields have wound up in world history, either via involvement with unconventional, non-"civilizational" area programs (Wisconsin's Tropical Societies program, Mediterranean, Atlantic, or Indian Ocean Studies, etc.) or because as specialists in "exotic" areas they took the lead in developing undergraduate surveys that went beyond Europe and the United States. Still others have reached world history via the comparative history and comparative macrohistorical sociology of Charles Tilly, Barrington Moore, Michael Mann, George Frederickson, and others. |
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