Book Review
World History: Ideologies, Structures and Identities
World History: Ideologies, Structures and Identities. Edited by PHILIP POMPER, RICHARD H. ELPHICK, and RICHARD T. VANN. Malden, Mass. and Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1998. Pp. ix + 286. $66.95 (cloth); $33.95 (paper).
We have here a very valuable collection that must help anyone to clarify what world history is. This is by no means a hegemonic book, where we end up being told how to "do" world history. To the contrary, the collection is particularly useful because it represents so many points of view, and thus will stimulate discussion and no doubt rebuttal from practitioners of very divergent versions of world history. I will now proceed to comment seriatim on the offerings.
The volume fittingly begins with a chapter from William H. [End Page 350] McNeill, who is generally considered to be the doyen of the field. In a typically graceful and lucid discussion, he sketches various historiographical traditions, and sees the way forward as being the study of "trans-civilizational encounters" (p. 27) based on the notion of ecumenical history. He ends on a positive note, claiming that the field has a social purpose, for "constructing a perspicacious and accurate world history, historians can play modest but useful part in facilitating a tolerable future for humanity as a whole . . ." (p. 40).
Bruce Mazlish provides a close investigation of ways in which the words ecumenical, world, and global have been used as adjectives to modify "history." This is an interesting discussion. It seems that we should use "world" as an essentially descriptive geographical term to cover the world (earth?) or large parts of it, just as Immanuel Wallerstein does, while "global" implies connections. This is an active word, as in the currently fashionable analysis of globalization. Indeed, he thinks globalization since the 1970s has created a new world, and historians need to explain its origins. As Pomper points out in his introduction, a distinction between world and global is not yet widely made; Mazlish convinces me that greater precision is needed. However, in most of this book the contributors use the two terms interchangeably. In a chapter devoted to types of world history, it is a pity that neither here nor elsewhere is David Christian's notion of Big History discussed.
In a wide-ranging discussion, William Green finds that World History, being new, is not as bounded by traditional notions of periodization as are other fields of history. He discusses world-system analyses, especially André Gunder Frank's work, at length, and it is a pity that Frank's provocative ReOrient came out too late to be considered, for this is Frank's most complete statement of his thesis. There may still be here a tendency to privilege the West, for he says that people away from the "mainstream" (p. 64) do not deserve much attention. By this he means sub-Saharan Africa and the pre-Columbian Americas, but this of courses raises the thorny question of what is the "mainstream," which areas have been the motors of world history? It seems that Ashis Nandy, whose chapter I will discuss presently, would not agree with this sort of discrimination.
Janet Abu-Lughod has contributed a very reflective piece in which she teases out some of the implications of her earlier work. One notion which had some resonance for me was her stress on how historians, or at least good ones, finally recognize patterns emerging from their research, and then can stop reading. For her, the patterns came from political and economic factors. This is a most agreeable, broadly humanistic essay.
The most comprehensive chapter is by Michael Adas. In his excellent [End Page 351] overview he critically assesses the contributions of, among others, Theda Skocpol, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf, Janet Abu-Lughod, and also postmodern historians, whom he briskly dismisses. One portion of his theme is a plea to world historians to take account of the contingent, of ideology and of individuals, rather than to follow the dominant structural trend in most other sorts of history (p. 83). This is necessary in order "to achieve fuller understanding of the human experience in its global manifestations" (p. 84). An admirable aim certainly, and at the end of his chapter he identifies books which he thinks are representing the sort of world history he wants to see written. This chapter would make very useful required reading for an undergraduate offering in history.
S. N. Eisenstadt contributes a rather dense chapter on the construction of collective identities, their collapse and then reaggregation in different forms. His rather opaque account is saved by some valuable case studies. Equally challenging is Lamin Sanneh's study of marginality and African Islam, a very rich and provocative piece. Essentially he shows how some groups, often marginal ones, can be agents to achieve structural change. He nicely combines analysis of ideology, structure, and identity. While he does not explicitly say he is "doing" world history, in fact his contribution is world history in practice, unlike other more general chapters of this book.
Ashis Nandy has written a fine, entertaining, engaged chapter enriched by a dry and very pointed wit. He is excellent on the difference between the historically minded (who, although dominant, are very much a minority) and the ahistorical, that is, the vast majority in the world today who use a very different method to reconstruct the past. His case study of the Hindu puranas and other texts, which he presents not as texts which with care can be used by history, not as alternative histories, but as alternatives to history. This brilliant, iconoclastic chapter, which is enriched by a revealing analysis of writings on the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992, ends by saying that for the "little" cultures of India "the past shapes the present and the future, but the present and the future also shape the past" (p. 178).
Lewis D. Wurgaft writes on two different, but parallel, strands concerning identity, one clinical, the other cultural. He discusses in detail Erik Erikson's history writing and its critics, both postmodernists and feminists, and then turns to the second strand, national identity. At first sight this may seem to be an unlikely combination, but in fact it enables Wurgaft to explore successfully the grounds for a psychologically informed world history. Francis Fukuyama follows with an interesting defense of his much criticized End of History notion. He still insists that liberal democracy and free markets are the best regime, or [End Page 352] the least bad. Yet recent political economy analyses point to advanced capitalist societies having a distribution of opportunities which goes roughly 40:30:30. This means that 40 percent of people in, say, Britain, or the United States, have meaningful and relatively secure jobs, 30 percent have insecure drudgery jobs, and 30 percent are marginalized, being either on welfare, or sleeping out, or in prison. Surely we can do better than this! True, Fukuyama notes merely that the existing situation is the "least bad," but this is hardly a ringing endorsement.
The final chapter is something of a letdown. Theodore H. Von Laue attempts to take account of globalism as it relates to world history, and ambitiously puts forward some perspectives with which to help teachers and students. Unfortunately, his main theme is the importance of religion, and even leaving aside the problems involved with this, he privileges monotheistic religions, and within them Christianity. In any case, much of his work is frankly platitudinous with rather jejune comments on power, environment, intercultural communication, the rise of the West, and so on.
Finally, my readers may find that they have previously read large parts of the book under review, for six of the eleven chapters are a republication, though not acknowledged, of a special issue of History and Theory, vol. 34, 1995. Indeed, Fukuyama's piece has been twice recycled, for it originally appeared in an edited collection, and his references to other contributions in this earlier book make for confusing reading.
With this caveat, I found reading this collection very worthwhile. The aim of the editors, none of whom contributed to the book except for the very useful introduction by Philip Pomper, is to stimulate discussion among teachers and students involved in the burgeoning field of world history. This book will make an excellent text for a graduate-level seminar, while it will also be of great interest to those who teach in the field.
MICHAEL N. PEARSON
University of New South Wales
