From the Author to the Reader
The use of history is to give value to the present hour. Ralph Waldo
Emerson
The old term "western civilization" no longer holds. World
events and the common needs of all humanity are joining the culture of Asia
with the culture of Europe and the Americas, to form for the first time a world
civilization.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
This book is distinctive in three ways. First, it connects the past
to the present. History is something more than "one damned thing after
another," as a famous historian once complained. That type of history is
more likely to give intellectual indigestion than intellectual understanding. This
does not mean that only the study of current affairs is useful and worth while.
Rather it means that the past should be
analyzed in a manner that is meaningful for the present, and that
the relationship between past and present should be noted and emphasized. This
is why each of the four parts of this volume ends with an essay entitled
"What It Means for Us Today."
The second distinctive feature of this book is that it connects not
only the past and the present but also the present and the future. Many argue
that history cannot be used to foresee the future because it is not an exact
science like chemistry or physics. They argue that history deals with human
beings whose actions cannot be predicted with the precision and certainty with
which a chemist can predict what will hap pen when element A is combined with
element B. Therefore it is argued that the historian can not use the past with
the confidence with which a scientist can use predictable experiments in the
laboratory.
Ix
X
On first thought this argument seems correct, but it we think again
we find that it is false. Its error becomes clear if we compare meteorologists
with historians. Meteorologists are very successful in predicting that tornados
will strike in this region or that, and therefore they are considered
scientists. But meteorologists cannot predict which house in a given region
will be struck and which house will not. This does not mean that meteorology is
not a science. It only means that different sciences provide different levels
of predictability. Therefore chemists with their flasks can predict more precisely
than meteorologists with their gauges. Yet meteorology remains a valid science
with useful predictive purposes, and it is becoming steadily more precise with
the use of computers and satellites.
So it is with history. It cannot be used like a crystal ball to
predict which political party will win or what national leader will be assassinated
or which country will have a revolution or where a war will break out. But
history, properly studied, shows what combination of conditions and policies
have resulted in the past in assassinations and revolutions and wars. If we
understand such past patterns, then we have some guide to the present and the
future. But if we have not studied the past, the present will seem mysterious and
the future terrifying.
The last chapter in this volume is entitled "Second Industrial
Revolution: Global Repercussions." It shows that all societies today-developed
and underdeveloped, capitalist and socialist are experiencing profound internal
disruptions as well as the external threat of "nu clear winter." If
we end our history with that chapter, the future will indeed seem hopeless. For
this reason the final chapter is followed by a concluding essay entitled
"Human Prospects,' in which we try to find some guidelines from our study
of the past and present so that we can have some idea what to expect in the
future.
This brings us to the third distinctive feature of this book, which
is that it is a world his tory. It deals with the entire globe rather than with
some one country or region. It is concerned with all peoples, not just with
Western or non Western peoples. It is as though you, the reader, were perched
on the moon looking down on our whole vast planet. From there your viewpoint
would be different from that of an observer liv ing in Washington, D.C.,
London, or Paris-or for that matter, in Peking, Delhi, or Cairo.
We cannot truly understand either West ern or non-Western history
unless we have a global overview that encompasses both. Then we can see how
much interaction there is be tween all peoples in all times, and how important
that interaction is in determining the course of human history.
At first the interaction was fitful and rather slight. But then the
Europeans Columbus and da Gama set forth on their overseas explorations. In the
following decades they and their successors brought all parts of the world into
direct contact, and the intimacy of that contact has grown steadily to the
present day. By contrast, the many human communities prior to 1500 had existed
in varying degrees of isolation. Yet this isolation was never absolute. During
the long millennia before the European discoveries, the various branches of the
human race had interacted one with the other-though the precise degree to which
they did differed enormously according to time and location. The details of
this teraction, from rly human his tory to roughly the year 1500, are the
subject of this book. Following that date, the earth, in relation to
humankind's growing communication and transportation facilities, has been
steadily shrinking faster and faster, so that today it has become a
"spaceship earth." a "global village."
If we accept the fact that all peoples share a common world history,
how can we possibly learn about the whole world by taking a single course or
reading a single book? Some historians say that world history, by definition,
encompasses all civilizations, and thus it is a subject far too broad for
classroom purposes. Western civilization, they say, is barely manage able by
itself; how can all the other civilizations including the Chinese, the Indian,
and the Middle Eastern-also be encompassed? The answer, of course, is that they
cannot, and that world history, thus defined, is obviously impracticable. But
such a definition is inaccurate and misleading. World history is not the sum of
histories of the civilizations of the world, just as Western history is not the
sum of the histories of the countries of the West.
If the study of Western civilization were simply a series of surveys
of British history, of German history, of French, Italian, Spanish, Balkan, and
the rest, Western civilization would not be a feasible subject of study. Yet,
in fact, it is feasible, and the reason is that the approach is not
agglomerative. Rather although it naturally considers the essential internal
developments of the principal states, it focuses on those historical forces or
movements that affected the West as a whole, such as Christianity, Islam, the
Crusades, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the
scientific and industrial revolutions, and so forth. So it is with world history,
though the stage in this case is global rather than regional, and the emphasis
consequently is on movements of worldwide in fluence.
In the first half of this text, we will see that in Paleolithic
times, for example, humans emerged in Africa and gradually spread through
Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas. The lateful breakthrough to agriculture
occurred during the neolithic period, followed by metalworking and assorted
other crafts and leading to urban life and civilization. This in turn led to the
development of the great Eurasian civilizations the Chinese, Indian, Middle
Eastern, and European-which for millenia developed autonomously along parallel
lines. The amount of interaction among Eurasian civilizations varied as a
result of powerful interregional historical forces such as Hellenism,
Christianity, Buddhism, and the recurring invasions from the central Eurasian
steppes.
xi
The second half of this World History text, by contrast, focuses on
the emergence of West ern Europe as the occurrence of greatest global
significance in early modern times. At the end of the fifteenth century, Europe
was only one of four Eurasian centers of civilization, and by no means the most
prominent. By the end of the eighteenth century, Western Europe had gained control
of the ocean routes, had organized an immensely profitable worldwide commerce,
and had conquered vast territories in the Americas and in Siberia. Thus, this
period stands out in the perspective of world history as one of transition from
the regional isolation of the pre 1492 era to the West European global domination
of the nineteenth century.
If the early modern period is seen from this viewpoint, then it
becomes apparent at once that the traditional topics of European his tory are
irrelevant for world history and must be discarded. In their place,
accordingly, the following three general topics are emphasized in this study:
1. The roots of European expansion (why Europe, rather than one of
the other Eurasian centers of civilization, expanded throughout the world).
2. The Confucian, Moslem, and non-Eurasian worlds on the eve of
Europe's expansion (their basic conditions and institutions, and the manner in
which they affected the nature and course of European expansion).
3. The stages of European expansion (Iberian
stage, 1500-1600; Dutch, French, and British stage, 1600-1763;
Russian Siberian
stage).
This organization allows us to clarify the main trends in world
history during these centuries, and in a manner no more difficult to understand
than the very different organization usually followed in the European History
course. Also, the reader should note that the role of Western Europe in this
early modern period is emphasized, not because of any Western orientation, but
because from a global view point Europe at this time was in fact the dynamic
source of global change. This is true also for the nineteenth century when the
unifying feature of world history was Europe's domination of the globe.
Finally, in the twentieth century, world history becomes the story of the
growing reaction against Western domination and the dangerous groping toward a
new world balance.
This, in a nutshell, is the rationale and structure of world
history. It is a structure that is no more complex than that of Western history.
The difference is merely that the stage is our planet, not just the continent
of Europe.
Acknowledgments
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