| |
|
Book
Review |
|
Hughes-Warrington, Marnie. Palgrave Advances in World Histories
(Chippenham, Wiltshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 286 pp, $29.95.
|
|
|
What is world history? That, in Marnie
Hughes-Warrington's view, is the wrong question. "World history," she writes,
"is not a thing, but an activity." In that spirit, Hughes-Warrington frees
this collection's contributors to explore the field's diversity and controversies.
Essay anthologies are notoriously uneven. While the quality of the
work in this Palgrave collection does vary, the whole is far greater than
the sum than its parts. |
1 |
|
Hughes-Warrington's introduction sets the
tone for the entire collection. "Historical practices are ethical
practices, infused by decisions [about] what world history ought to be.
. . . Put simply, historians privilege and they exclude." If it is unethical
to take a field's boundaries for granted, then this collection is a call
for intellectual integrity. |
2 |
The first six essays in World Histories speak
exactly to what historians "privilege and exclude." Patrick Manning's "Methods
and Materials" focuses on the development and professionalization of world
history. While noting that the field crosses disciplines to develop
wide-ranging frameworks, Manning acknowledges the risks of theory. David
Christian's contribution, "Scales," looks at the relative strengths of doing
world history at seven time scales, some short and some substantially longer.
A subsequent essay, Craig Benjamin's "Beginnings and Endings" echoes Christian's
call for "big history" of on the scale of geologic time. Too much
mainstream world history, writes Benjamin,
. . . has settled for a
conservative, traditional and anthropocentric set of assumptions that
articulate a clear starting point to history, and a disengagement of
human history from that of the environment in which it has unfolded.
Ricardo
Duchesne is also critical of world history, but for very different reasons.
In "Centers and Margins," Duchesne acknowledges the damage Western notions
of superiority have done to historical work, but is equally scathing about
the:
narrow-minded, anti-western
ideology has taken hold of much of world history writing in recent decades,
a new orthodoxy which espouses, as a matter of political principle,
the idea that there has been no cultural progression in history.
|
3 |
|
Taken together, Duchesne, Benjamin,
and Christian urge world historians to challenge the categories and question
the assumptions undergirding their work. |
4 |
|
The remaining articles are more eclectic,
addressing a wide range of significant issues. Michael Lang's "Modern, Postmodern,
World" is an excellent introduction to postmodernism and its problems while
Hughes-Warrington's "Readers, Responses, and Popular Culture" looks at the
world history's widest audience, a discussion that leads her, at one point,
to consider the influence of Arnold Toynbee on Isaac Asimov's sci-fi
Foundation series. J. Donald Hughes, in "The Greening of World History"
argues that world historians have a particular responsibility to embed their
narratives not only within the context of regional and local environmental
conditions, but within that of a "worldwide ecosystem." Deborah Smith
Johnson completes the volume an essay on "World History Education."
Unfortunately, given its placement at the very end of a book weighted toward
historiography and scholarship, the paper appears an afterthought. |
5 |
|
The strongest essay in this second
group of articles is Judith Zissner's "Gender." Students in any history
course will benefit from Zissner's argument that all societies have constructed
gender, and that all human lives have, in some way, reflected those social
constructions. Gender, in short, means much more than women's or family
history. Zissner wonders why world history has been resistant to this notion.
Perhaps it is because recovering gender history seems to require meticulously
fine-grained investigation rooted in particular places and times (Laura
Gowing's Domestic Dangers comes to mind here). Scaling such
work up to the size of a global narrative presents a considerable challenge. |
6 |
|
Hughes-Warrington's volume is an excellent
addition to Palgrave Advances, a series that surveys the most current trends
in scholarship. These articles make a splendid introduction for students
new to the field. The select bibliography at the end of each essay
provides ample opportunities for further study. |
7
|
Karen Guest Whitehurst
Independent Scholar |
