Long-term efforts towards connected and comparative histories before the second half of the twentieth century

Historians have developed new ideas of the ‘global’ many times. The gradual creation and renewal of the field was fuelled by an attention to cultural experiences outside people’s own environments, by efforts to understand growing intercultural connectedness, and by the dynamics of unequal power relationships. These realities exposed conceptual and empirical limitations, and made historians rethink their narratives. Worldwide transformations and the growth of interaction have come in waves, due to the discovery of new lands or technologies that shrank distances. The exploration of earlier cross-border entanglements has also seen times of greater attention, and times of neglect.Footnote ¹³ The older traditions are worth noting, because they created a set of conceptual tools and narrative paradigms to which later historians could refer. As they are comprehensively dealt with in the literature, and as readers of this journal will be familiar with major works, the following survey will be brief, focusing on continuing conceptual revisions in coming to terms with the global past.Footnote ¹⁴

In ancient times, political expansion and the spread of monotheistic religions intensified cultural contacts, and sparked reflections on how to write history with a wider horizon. Communities across the world had collectors of ethnographic information about neighbouring cultures and interpreters of the(ir) world(s), who sought to explain diversity and connectivity. The central impulse for conceptual revision with long-lasting impact was supplied by the process of European exploration and conquest in the sixteenth century. The experience with hitherto unknown lands, and the emergence of increasingly interdependent worlds, had to be incorporated into historical reflection. Exploration created a wealth of travelogues and reports about the new worlds, which rested upon indigenous knowledge. This fed epistemological doubts, and prompted historians to revise earlier histories, in view of the growing diversity and the emerging comparative perspectives.Footnote ¹⁵ Other forms of expansion too, such as the Mughal conquests in South Asia, led to encounters with other peoples, and to the influx of foreign literature, changing ideas about history and the world.

Later, in the eighteenth century, multiple innovations were introduced which systematized the study of foreign populations. Scientific observation replaced the rather arbitrary collection and reproduction of testimonies. Methodical data collection became a standard, and this translated into the cataloguing of knowledge regarding non-European regions in large encyclopaedias. Writings about other parts of the world spurred debates as to what constituted an appropriate depiction of other cultures. As intensifying transcultural interactions influenced all sides, the historical discussion about them was not a privilege reserved to European authors.Footnote ¹⁶

The eighteenth century has often been maligned for its Eurocentric stance towards history. Indeed, the philosophies of the Enlightenment were an expression of universalist reasoning, which were often fleshed out as the rise and fall of civilizations in the frame of a progressive history of humankind, driven by a seemingly superior European agency. However, it was also a time that gave birth to debates on methodological standards, which would help to dispel universalist positions. Some scholars rejected taking Europe as the benchmark, and followed their curiosity about non-Western perceptions. This inspired a transfer of indigenous records to Europe, which became the basis for new accounts. Historians in specific locales, such as the University of Göttingen, collaborated with anthropologists and philologists on new formats to depict the world’s past. The conviction that non-European cultures have noteworthy histories guided the way towards more decentred and empirically grounded approaches.Footnote ¹⁷

Another moment in the search for new ways of understanding the ‘global’ occurred in parts of Europe in the mid nineteenth century, triggered by the profound changes that came with industrialization, new communication technologies, and mass migration. The movement of people, ideas, and goods increased, and connections, transfers, and exchanges of information expanded. This entailed a search for an explanation for these transformations: in short, for the development of capitalism and globalization. It focused on socioeconomic dynamics and once again took the form of historical reflection. Karl Marx is surely the most famous interpreter of this development, drafting a whole programme for world history writing; other authors gave the comparison of cultures new shape and direction.

When the practice of history became professional, and historiography was institutionalized as an academic discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, the basic conditions for world history changed significantly. Lured by the promise of resources, historians linked their craft to the nation-state, and turned to national themes and trajectories. They omitted any comprehensive conception of history that encompassed various regions of the world. World history became identified with dilettantism, and the study of other cultures was handed over to other disciplines.Footnote ¹⁸

Even so, efforts to come to grips with the world at large did not end; they continued at specific locales and in particular institutional settings. Just as other periods of intensified entanglements led to new concepts, so too did the decades up until the First World War. The intensification of colonialism, and the growing power of the US and Japan, lent a new quality to global relationships, which necessitated new historical interpretation. Owing to the worldwide ascent and professionalization of historical interpretation, the settings in which world history was produced diversified and approaches pluralized. Syntheses, such as the Modern Cambridge history by Lord Acton (1834–1902), were published, and other authors, such as Karl Lamprecht and later Jawaharlal Nehru, searched for new concepts. Added to that, world histories were popular as never before, and new ideas were fleshed out to some degree in books aimed at a wider audience.

We can observe three characteristic features of world historical interest around 1900. First, there was an intense methodological discussion about the possibilities and limits of comparison and a history of entanglement – a debate that has continued to this day. Second, new disciplinary coalitions were formed. Regional sciences appeared to be partners for decoding general historical patterns, while the interplay with geography shifted notions of space. Third, a growing network of individual researchers and institutions arose that acknowledged and, in some cases, supported, each other’s efforts to write a new kind of history beyond the nation. Among other venues, they met at the International Congresses of Historical Science, which had taken place since 1898. World historical scholarship was also on the rise outside Europe, especially in the Ottoman empire, China, India, and Japan.Footnote ¹⁹

The two decades following the First World War resulted in distinct formats of historicizing global connections. A multitude of new syntheses were written, with different orientations.Footnote ²⁰ Added to that, a large number of multivolume world and universal histories appeared. The process of decolonization produced a new awareness of non-European pasts, and, in this process, the topoi of difference and cultural diversity began to appear as a leitmotif. This provoked the question of how plurality and divergence could be integrated in conventional narratives.

Overall, we can see that world history writing escaped the trap of conceptual uniformity and universalism. Sets of conceptual tools and narrative paradigms were developed early on, which later historians could use. The conceptual renewal unfolded as an open process, not in a cumulative manner, not least because, rather than being based on a sudden realization at one particular site, it developed from very different vantage points and efforts in different places. Shifting meanings and approaches, pluralization, and a professionalization in grasping humanity’s past were characteristic features.

The development of world history in the United States between the 1920s and the 1970s

Calls for global historical knowledge emerged in the United States long before the 1960s. The waves of immigration around 1900 and after the two world wars fostered the need for world-oriented education and scholarship in support of the struggles of an immigrant society. Added to that, the Spanish-American War in 1898 accelerated US imperial ambitions and the race with the European powers for dominance in their own hemisphere and beyond. This had to be explained internally, for example, by constructing historical legacies. The new world order established after the First World War, and the beginning of decolonization processes, offered a special opportunity for expanding the country’s geopolitical role towards a hegemonic position. Although the US decided in 1920 not to join the newly founded League of Nations, many scholars, supporting the ideas behind the League, stepped up their efforts to persuade the public of the importance of international peace work and an internationalist foreign policy. The significance of educating young Americans to have ‘international minds’ grew in the 1920s, and even more so after the end of Second World War, when the country was instrumental in setting up the United Nations.

The rise of the US as a hegemonic power, and calls for inclusiveness in response to immigration and the demands of ethnic minorities, spurred the need for knowledge and imagination about the world and the regions that were being penetrated. Furthermore, it led to growing doubts about whether European universal histories could represent the realities, experiences, and needs of one’s own society. Consequently, a broad movement of conceptual renewal evolved. It was grounded in rising critiques of orientalist and universalist positions, which fed into the expansion and professionalization of the study of Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern societies in history and regional disciplines. A turn towards source-based analyses and a differentiation of approaches took place, which developed into new explanatory frameworks and conceptualizations. This was echoed in world historical reflections; those involved began to scrutinize prevailing Eurocentric narratives, and prepared for an empirical turn.

I wish to highlight two aspects of world history in the United States before the 1970s in more detail. First, I want to concentrate on a central arena for this trend, namely the field of teaching, and particularly the area of graduate education. The US world history movement started in the 1980s as a teachers’ movement, which sought to replace the traditional general history course in schools and colleges – in which the history of Europe or the West had masqueraded as the history of the world – with proper world history courses.Footnote ²¹ That meant, in the first place, the inclusion of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East in the curriculum. This reorientation had its origins in a profound revision of the treatment of other world regions within graduate history education, which began in the 1920s, and which I will illustrate with a case study.

Second, I will introduce the University of Chicago as one particular site of world historical self-reflection, where different approaches and narratives were advanced in interdisciplinary debates. I want to show a pluralization of approaches in understanding the ‘world’ upon which world historians from the 1960s onward could build. It will also become clear that this diversity had its roots in the institutional circumstances of the historical discipline and academic system, and in specific locales and constellations that witnessed their own institutional and intellectual dynamics.

The development of world history in the US was substantially based on expertise in non-Western pasts. This expertise was formed not only in research, but also in teaching, especially in graduate education. Until the expansion of graduate education in history in the 1960s, every new generation of historians was trained at a limited number of universities. In 1950, three-quarters of doctoral candidates were still enrolled at twenty (of the sixty) history departments in the country. Among them, the departments at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago had a special position. Their share in the total number of defended dissertations before 1970 (13,519) was one-fifth (2,784); in some periods, almost every second PhD in the discipline was granted by these three institutions.Footnote ²² In addition to the sheer numbers, they were also central players in the training of young talent and the production of new historical knowledge via the theses written. Many of their students found jobs in higher education and research. According to a survey of Harvard’s History Department in 1939–40, over half of their graduates were employed in (private) research universities and institutions.Footnote ²³ This concentration, as problematic as it has been, implied that intellectual shifts at these places ushered in changes for the discipline.

In the five decades until the end of the 1960s, how PhD students at Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago were taught about non-European and global pasts, and how they were instructed to research them, changed profoundly. Instruction on these themes multiplied, and became more decentred. Source-based material and literature from the regions were increasingly put on the reading list. In addition, the teaching staff, who were often eminent scholars in their regional fields, prepared their own textbooks and handbooks, as well as translations of major works from the regions, so that the non-European cultures could be studied with the same methodological standards as European or ‘Western’ ones. The more source-based instruction became, the larger the tension with existing universalist frames. Consequently, alternative approaches and narratives were tried out in front of and with the students. The fact that world and global history is practised in an empirical manner today has one of its origins here. Let me illustrate these shifts in greater detail in terms of the MA and PhD programmes at the history departments at Chicago and Harvard.Footnote ²⁴

Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and, later, Africa had been a permanent fixture in these universities’ graduate curricula since the end of the First World War, and study of them grew steadily. Having been able to choose from an average of four or five courses a year in non-European history during the 1920s, students could choose from twenty-eight (Harvard) or forty-four (Chicago) courses by the 1960s. Non-European and transregional topics made up 17.9% (Harvard) and 20.2% (Chicago) of the entire instruction during the whole period (the number of classes totalled 4,635 at Harvard and 4,785 at Chicago). Most of the globally oriented courses presented world-regional considerations, while the others dealt with European expansion and colonialism, empires, and international history.

In addition to the quantitative increase, teaching about the world changed in quality. First, traditional themes of world historiography, including the rise and fall of great powers, were taught in a new way. To give but one example, those who taught diplomatic relations included a group who recalibrated the field of international history in the 1950s and 1960s. William L. Langer, John Fairbank, and Ernest M. May, and later on their students, including Joseph Fletcher, Akira Iriye, and Charles S. Maier, tried to grasp their subject in a global perspective. They argued that US foreign policy should be reconstructed from a consistently transnational perspective, and in relation to the so-called Third World, as well as the socialist bloc (or ‘Second World’), by examining international source material and incorporating knowledge from regional studies or area studies. Fletcher, for example, covered an area ranging from the Pacific across the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean in his work, and emphasized interactions between Eurasian societies. We have here the environment in which prominent scholars in today’s debates received their intellectual imprint.

Second, world regions were taught in a more nuanced way, as the temporal and spatial focus in the knowledge presented about Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America became more differentiated. Fewer courses sought totality; regions were no longer dealt with as a whole, as continental areas. Over time, analyses of shorter periods and limited areas prevailed. It is important to note that cultures of the world were generally not framed in terms of national histories, based on the Western model. About one-third of the courses covered an entire region, less than half focused on single societies, and one-fifth addressed other spaces. Once again, the differences are striking. The tendency towards a regional focus was largely in the field of South American history. A national perspective dominated in the treatment of Asia, while the Middle East was to a considerable extent presented in cultural and religious demarcations. Accordingly, the ‘non-Western’ sphere dissolved as a single unit. Other societies and cultures were examined, studied, and taught in varying and fragmentary ways in the mid twentieth century, in a similar way to what students were taught about their own cultures.

Details about the newly addressed spaces are revealing. Cross-border processes after the Second World War were emphasized in Asian history. Although South Asia was probably a synonym for India, the mainland and the archipelagos in Southeast Asia were soon examined, as were Central Asia and Inner Asia later on. In the Middle East, the Ottoman empire and the spread of Islam were highlighted. In this way, doctoral students were taught that following the spaces of historical action was just as plausible as taking on a world-regional perspective. Subsequently, West Asia and Mesopotamia were singled out. Specific spatially differentiating perspectives developed from the interwar period, and later intensified. In parallel, names and concepts of the regions shifted. The clearest example is that of the Middle East. Initially, the word ‘Oriental’ appeared in course titles, but this disappeared after 1944. After the Second World War, the term ‘Near East’ was replaced by ‘Middle East’. The expression ‘Far East’ changed to ‘Asia’, and parts of it, such as ‘East Asia’, were increasingly highlighted. Concerning South America, the term ‘Spanish America’ competed with ‘Hispanic America’, before ‘Latin America’, including Brazil, was finally established.

These trends resulted largely from the fact that topics were increasingly taught in a research-oriented way. This is evident in the relationship between overviews and research-based courses. The former were meant as an introduction to the subject, whereas the latter presented the current state of research in preparation for work on a thesis. Of the 101 courses at Harvard University dealing with the wider world, 48 were designated as courses for research, or primarily for graduates, while 50 were intended for undergraduates. In Chicago, the ratio was similar. Thus, by no means were areas outside Europe presented to doctoral students merely as part of a general, basic stock of knowledge. Consecutive courses were introduced for distinct topics, such as the history of China in the nineteenth century, which began with an overview course and continued with research seminars on specific aspects, before progressing to seminars on methods, sources, and the state of research, as direct preparation for theses.

Teaching translated into research, since it shaped the choice of topics and conceptual tools for theses. A total of 1,442 theses in history were defended at the universities of Harvard and Chicago between 1918 and 1969. Of these, 158 were devoted to Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and (partly) African societies, and another 51 to transregional processes. These analyses amounted to a substantial share of the historical research of their time in these fields. Doctoral students generated vast and multifaceted knowledge of cultures, traditions, and histories of most world regions, as well as interactions among them during the first half of the twentieth century. Only half of the students confined themselves to national borders when studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of the others, some conducted research with a decidedly world-regional perspective, considered transregional constellations, or selected events on the seas (the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Red Sea), or in the archipelagos of Oceania, and also in Australia.

The steady expansion and realignment in understanding of the global past was only partially accomplished by historians; it also developed in interdisciplinary cooperation. At the two universities, 108 scholars – 60 in Harvard, including 2 women, and 48 in Chicago – contributed to history classes dealing with processes and developments outside Europe and the US. Some were employed by the history departments, but many came from other disciplines. Eighteen people were employed by the history department at Harvard University, and twenty-four faculty members came from other institutes. The teaching staff at the University of Chicago comprised twenty-three members of the history department, and eighteen members from other parts of the university. Colleagues from other disciplines even outnumbered the historians in the history departments in certain fields, such as Asian and Middle Eastern history. As a result, doctoral students were regularly exposed to questions and approaches from neighbouring disciplines.

Regional disciplines and area studies had the largest share. All but five of the scholars who were not on the payroll of the history departments were attached to the departments of non-Western languages and cultures, or area studies centres, and, in one case, the anthropology department. These scholars often imparted analytical standards and stocks of knowledge that differed from what was customary in history. Language skills and the analysis of original sources were a methodological imperative in their fields from the outset; that they became equally important in history was closely linked to the input and criticism of these faculty members. The introduction of contemporary research from disciplines dealing primarily with Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and African societies became a source of intellectual renewal. They strengthened doubts about the Eurocentrism of previous historiography, and contributed to a decade-long move away from the universalism of historiography.

There were several factors that caused the large-scale involvement of specialists from area studies programmes, or from regionally defined disciplines. The first concerns local dynamics, for instance, the recurring convergence at Harvard of strategic interests. In the mid 1930s, Serge Elisséeff, Director of the Department of Semitic Languages, worked on the separate institutionalization of sinology, which was established in 1937 as the Department of Far Eastern Languages (DFAL). Well-attended classes, including history students, were a good argument for the project. Later, in 1953, members of DFAL considered giving the department a new name, one that would convey concern not only with Asian languages and literature, but also with the cultures and histories in the region. They wanted to open their own courses dealing with historical matters to history students more systematically, to prevent conflict with the history department. The bridge-building was warmly welcomed in both departments. The interest of doctoral candidates in learning about other cultures, especially Asia, was growing, but meeting that curiosity and expanding the respective course offerings was not easy. It would have taken much longer to fulfil this need by making appointments in the history department than by collaborating with colleagues from the Asian department. The second factor was the comparatively high number of scholars who had an interest in both in-depth regional studies and broader contextualizations, and who tried to combine the best of both worlds in their work. In fact, quite a few scholars pursued their academic careers by moving between the disciplines.

Two examples must suffice here. Herrlee G. Creel was a sinologist and historian, who held his first position as a lecturer in Chicago’s history department, moved from there to the DFAL for a tenured post in the field of Chinese literature and institutions, and was appointed half a century later as Martin A. Ryerson Professor of Chinese History, back at the history department where his career had started. Charles S. Gardner was among the first doctoral students in the history department at Harvard to do a PhD in Asian history. While he was writing his doctoral thesis, Elisséeff invited him to teach at the Department of Semitic Languages; he did so, bringing in his disciplinary background. By 1936, he had devised four courses, including a methodology seminar (‘Historical method in the study of Chinese history’) and an overview course (‘History of China: political and cultural evolution from antiquity to the present’). After the defence of his thesis in 1935, Elisséeff invited him to join the institute faculty and promptly opened up Gardner’s courses, Elisséeff’s own, and those of his doctoral student Edwin O. Reischauer to students of history. Gardiner then dealt with cross-disciplinary boundaries in multiple ways.

One could name others, such as Bernhard S. Cohn, an anthropologist and later Professor of South Asian History at the Chicago history department. Joseph Fletcher, mentioned above, received his PhD from the DFAL, joined its faculty, and was promoted to Professor of Chinese and Central Asian History. There was close cooperation between John Fairbank (History) and Edwin O. Reischauer (DFAL and the Yenching Institute). The close connection between historians and regional specialists, in globalizing historiography and providing contextualization in the area disciplines, is certainly a topic to be explored further in the future, particularly in its international dimensions.

A diverse teaching staff trained the next generation of doctoral students in history in an interdisciplinary and international manner. They conveyed to those students the latest debates and recent research results in their fields. By doing so, they changed the representation of foreign cultures in the curriculum and in theses. The expansion, pluralization, and professionalization of world-regional instruction in historical graduate education are, to a considerable extent, the results of joint efforts. It became an important part of the intellectual heritage for later world historiography. A critical mass of young historians of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East had emerged by the early 1960s, who could establish themselves and anchor their fields in the canon and structures of the historical discipline. From these positions, they later spawned the world history movement in the 1980s.

The second major aspect of world history in the United States that I wish to highlight is the beginning, well before the 1970s and 1980s, of world historical reflections in which different approaches and narratives were advanced in interdisciplinary debates. After the end of the Second World War, the University of Chicago became a hub of reflection on how to devise new notions of the global past. The Chicago Committee on Social Thought (CST) and the Department of Anthropology developed into sites to move away from universalist metaphysical concepts of history, and proposed new kinds of global interpretation. Despite the complex and fraught relationship between world history and anthropology, and the different trajectories that they have taken, the two fields shared an interest in understanding humanity, and in countering Eurocentrism.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, joint endeavours developed, in particular constellations in which anthropologists were instrumental in pinpointing theoretical approaches imbued with notions of Western superiority, and in extending the sources of historical inquiry to include non-written testimonies. A long-term collaborative project on ‘intercultural studies’, which brought together a group of area studies specialists, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians interested in developing methodologies of cross-cultural comparisons, was of particular importance among the Chicago activities.

Here, interest in non-European societies became increasingly sui generis, and intercultural relationships were regarded as mutually influential constellations. Moreover, the empirical exploration of global contexts took precedence over theoretical derivations. In particular, the regular meetings, such as the study group on ‘Interregional and intercultural comparison and interrelations’, including Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill as participants, turned into a lively and steady debate on how to overcome universalist and Eurocentric accounts of the world’s past.

The well-known CST, established in 1942, provides material for in-depth consideration on its own. Here, it must suffice to say that the founding fathers, including the anthropologist Robert Redfield, aimed at nothing less than a historically informed analysis of society and a new formula for the general history of civilization, which was reflected in the initially proposed name: the ‘Committee for the Study of Civilization’.Footnote ²⁶ History was to be ‘treated in terms of the inter-relations between various aspects of historical development in particular periods and regions’, bringing to mind a ‘historical sociology’ (an idea which is currently recurring).Footnote ²⁷ Following the announcement of the plans, criticism was expressed. Harley F. MacNair, an expert on Asia at the History Department, condemned the implicit Eurocentrism most clearly. The acceptable name of the new CST was proposed by James Rippy, a historian of Latin America. It ‘would remove the word history from the title but it would leave the committee free to retain the historical or any other approach’.Footnote ²⁸

Though some committee members had hoped that the CST would provide space for inquiries into the philosophy of history, something else happened. Owing to a lack of internal and external agreement, the group became a nucleus of intensive debate on concepts of general or world history. While some members were in search of historical principles, and, to this end, buried themselves in metaphysical reflection and the great books, others were interested in an interdisciplinary comparison of the world’s societies and cultures. During the debates, unempirical statements lost plausibility, and awareness of the problems of universalistic explanations arose, which also changed the view of world history. Some of the approaches discussed were closer to comparative sociology, which emerged with the works of Theda Skocpol, Michael Mann, and Charles Tilly, and included European developments, while others were inspired by the regional sciences, which were also in a state of transition.

It was Redfield, among others, who distanced himself from the universalist agenda, which his co-founder John U. Nef promoted rigorously, and tried to realize his ideas in other ways. An opportunity presented itself in 1945, when he organized, along with Fay-Cooper Cole, the then Director of the Anthropology Department, a tenured position for their younger colleague Sol Tax. In return, they expected Tax to revise the curriculum of the graduate programme.Footnote ²⁹ Over the summer, Tax devised three new courses: ‘Human origins’, which gave an overview of the evolution of humankind, ‘Peoples of the world’, which presented a panorama of world cultures, and ‘Culture, society, and the individual’. The first course developed quickly into a colloquium, in which most of the faculty debated with senior doctoral students about the state of research, and discussed new issues. The debate focused on the beginning of humanity, which is why John Wilson, an Egyptologist, and Thorkild Jacobsen, an Assyriologist, were invited to read Oswald Spengler, Pirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, and, in particular, Gordon V. Child together.

Redfield, freed from past obligations, formulated an ambitious research programme that would analyse social transformations across time and space, with a focus on non-European regions. In principle, the CST was just the place for such an endeavour. Redfield, however, had understood that the turn away from a search for universal principles towards an interest in general insights into social development would be highly contested by Nef and within the CST. He therefore proposed setting up an interdisciplinary Institute of Cultural Studies, with the main aim of developing a new methodology of cultural comparison, based on source-based examinations instead of theoretical discussion alone.Footnote ³⁰ Redfield had hoped for financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. However, both refused, albeit not for ideological reasons – after all, they shared the aim of dismantling the Eurocentric state of research. Yet, Redfield had played for high stakes by requesting sixteen professors, nine postdoc positions, and a total of US$1 million.Footnote ³¹ In a second move, he approached the Ford Foundation with more modest requests, and his application was approved. In August 1951, he received US$75,000 from the Ford Foundation for collaborative research into intercultural studies, later renamed ‘Comparative civilizations’. Two years later, the follow-up application made another US$100,000 available.Footnote ³²

The money was invested extremely effectively. For a decade and a half, cross-cultural studies were pursued under the auspices of the Anthropology Department with a variety of colleagues. The guiding principles of the research project arose partly from disappointment over the CST, and partly from a changing paradigm in anthropology. In the interwar period, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Melville J. Herskovits, among others, stressed cultural relativism detached from evolutionary perspectives. Against this, Redfield and his colleagues argued in the 1950s for a double shift of perspective: for generalization, namely for the question of general traits of social communities and comparative methods, and for the exploration of change. They hoped to develop a theory of social transformation by studying ‘primitive societies’ under the rubric of ‘social anthropology’, which combined the discipline’s descriptive approach with methods from sociology to identify general trends.Footnote ³³

The activities and the collective thought processes within the project are impressive: five major international conferences (two each on recent research into Chinese and Islamic intellectual history, and one on the relationship between language and culture), and the launch of a book series entitled Comparative studies of cultures and civilizations, were the beginning.Footnote ³⁴ This was followed by intensive collaboration with colleagues from other universities, and the invitation of like-minded people from abroad, for example, Tullio Tentori (Italy), Ali Orhman (Turkey), and Georges Creppy (Gold Coast, or Ghana). In 1958, the project initiated the Journal of Comparative Studies in History and Society, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. It was intended to provide anthropologists, sociologists, and historians with a platform for exchange, and to make three areas more prominent: the reach of comparative methods, a general social and cultural history, and the ‘spatial expansion of societies’.Footnote ³⁵ By that time, several doctoral candidates had obtained their doctorates on aspects of the research programme, and postdoctoral positions had been created.

The most important thing, as far as world historiography was concerned, was a research seminar called ‘Comparison of cultures’, held in 1951. While the comparative approach prevailed in the first years – Marshall Hodgson and Bernard Lewis, for example, compared the conquest of Latin America with colonization by the British – later reflections about the understanding of interdependent developments became the main focus. This was reflected in the change of the name to ‘Study group: interregional and intercultural comparison and interrelations’. In 1957, the seminar was devoted to ‘the nature, extent and character of the contacts between the major civilizations … [the] delimitation of the separate civilizations; the nature of parallel developments in the different cultures; the possibility that some events are continental in scope and significance and, thus, cannot be understood in the view of one area only’.Footnote ³⁶

It was, therefore, only natural that Hodgson introduced his interregional approach, and, more generally, his programmatic views on world history, to the participants. According to him, world history should be decentred and interactive, instead of diffusionist and metaphysical. Above all, however, he was interested in exploring the common, that is the global setting of connected regions and civilizations (the ‘interrelations between the imperfect wholes’). He wanted not only to put all regions in perspective, but also to see the whole variety of ‘historical complexes’, to be able to understand the connections between different scales of human action and organizations as crucial factors for development.Footnote ³⁷ In any case, he believed that historical development should emerge as being driven by interactions and interdependencies. Quite a few arguments that informed later debates in the 1980s and 1990s were formulated in his essay ‘Hemispheric interregional history as an approach to world history’ (1954).Footnote ³⁸ It is noteworthy that Hodgson developed his ideas at a critical distance from four ‘precommitments’ – that is, different images of the world, which dominated world history writing in his view: the Christian/Judaeo-Christian, the Marxist, the Westernist, and the ‘four-region pattern’. The concept of precommitments (today, we might say ‘lenses’) was Hodgson’s way of organizing the principle options available to world historians in the 1950s and 1960s, and to situate himself in these vivid debates.

Some time later, William McNeill, who, like Hodgson, continuously attended meetings, put the manuscript for his book The rise of the West up for discussion.Footnote ³⁹ In it he wrote against the predominant narrative about ‘Western civilization’, in which the past is presented as moving from ‘Plato to NATO’ and the transatlantic unity of western Europe and the US. This version of the ‘rise of the West’ had been established since the 1920s, not least because it made it possible for US scholars to integrate the US into traditional Europe-based universal histories, and, thereby, to establish their own tradition of world history writing. Western civilization was presented as world history that mattered; it allowed those who created this narrative to instil the idea that the US was the heir to the European democratic traditions, and thus had the responsibility to defend the free world, if necessary with arms.

Directed against this, McNeill offered a world historical narrative in his synthetic work that gave the world outside the West much more attention. Like Arnold Toynbee, he saw civilizations as central actors, yet, in contrast to Toynbee, he conceived of them not so much as separated entities, but as interacting systems. Although based upon the established notion of diffusion, McNeill presented contacts between people from distant places and different cultures as a main driver of historical change, and showed the rich practice of borrowing, appropriating, and adapting from ‘foreign’ traditions. In later works, he recognized a trans-civilizational environment in which encounters unfolded.Footnote ⁴⁰

Various approaches to world historical considerations were sharpened in the debates of the study group. McNeill appropriated the cultural concept of anthropologists and emphasized cultural borrowing and civilizations, while Hodgson deconstructed the Eurocentrism of previous works by situating Europe at the periphery of a structurally interdependent Eurasian space. Globalizing non-European history would, according to Hodgson, also enable scholars to resituate Europe and the West in a large-scale constellation, and, from there, to rewrite the European past. Both scholars implicitly addressed the contemporary processes of decolonization, and the question of what the new postcolonial world order would look like. Hodgson’s answer was closer to later postcolonial studies, whereas McNeill’s reflected more the spirit of the post-war period, which called for the inclusion and representation of all as the best way for an all-encompassing organization of the world. Basic aspects of the debates were weighed up against each other, and when, in 1966, the History Department of the University of Chicago introduced the PhD field of world history, they were explored by doctoral students.

The interdisciplinary exploration of patterns of social development in the ‘Comparative civilizations’ project prompted a revision of the college curriculum at the University of Chicago. From 1956, students in their first year could choose from three ‘non-Western civilization’ courses, dealing with India, China, and the Islamic world, in addition to the courses on Europe and the US.Footnote ⁴¹ The two core aims of these courses were to identify the specific developmental trajectories of the respective cultures, and to present the relationships and mutual influences between geographically separate societies. An honours course was set up for the second academic year, in which the cultures were no longer taught separately, but instead highlighted connections between them. A string of junior scholars was appointed, with additional support from the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation; this enabled the publication of syllabuses intended for use at other institutions.Footnote ⁴² These courses opened the way for further inclusions: Russia, Japan, Africa, and South Asia joined the series of civilization courses. They were significant, as they acclimatized colleagues and students to global perspectives, and created the basis for the teaching of world history. McNeill, who had already begun to develop a college course on world history before the publication of The rise of the West, offered this course from 1964, and soon based it on his own textbook A world history (1967).

Debates about the concepts and interpretations of global processes, in which today’s notions of the global crystallized, were not limited to the University of Chicago. McNeill and Hodgson were two voices, among others, searching for a new and less Eurocentric world history. Just a few kilometres away, Leften S. Stavrianos had taught world history at Northwestern University since the early 1950s. He also did it in a way that differed profoundly from earlier concepts; in fact, his approach was as innovative as Hodgson’s. He proposed a course on the genesis of contemporary worldwide entanglements for the academic year 1954–55. In this, he wanted to demonstrate the fading influence of the West, and the end of its global hegemony. Stavrianos considered an all-encompassing universal history obstructive for an understanding of this development. Instead, he wanted to consider dynamics, institutions, and actors who built interactions and entanglements. He wanted to teach particular themes that illustrated this process, rather than a chronology that started at the beginnings of humankind. In his view, following a firm global approach meant elaborating on worldwide patterns in human history, instead of contrasting and linking national and regional variations. Such a perspective had to systematically consider all parts of the world in their changing positions in the global fabric. He argued that world history was much more than an interactive European history. Any genuinely global perspective must transcend the equation of the ‘West’ with the world.Footnote ⁴³

In terms of the plurality of world historical concepts, it is noteworthy that the Rockefeller Foundation decided to invest in 1950 in a new programme that would support new approaches to general history and the study of world regions, including their relationships. Three different formats were distinguished: universal history, understood as interpretative syntheses; world history as the study of cross-border, large-scale interdependencies; and the history of the twentieth century, whose understanding came close to the new global history, promoted later by Bruce Mazlish and others.Footnote ⁴⁴ As we will see in the following section, however, intensive efforts to renew world history were not limited to the United States.

Global history since the 1950s: multiple traditions, multicentric debates, and interdisciplinary exchanges

The 1940s and the end of the Second World War brought renewed attention to the global past and a continuation of the research for innovative approaches. Historians worldwide broadened their horizons geographically and culturally in response to war, the coming of a new world order based on multilateralism, the United Nations, the formation of blocs, and decolonization. Eurocentric positions became the target of ever stronger criticisms, and the inclusion of the ‘Near and Far East’, Latin America, and Africa was put on the agenda. This trend had two causes: a greater participation of historians from the newly independent countries, and coalitions with area studies, leading to non-European history being institutionalized. The demand for extensively documented empirical, source-based work, and the move away from philosophically inspired universal history, remained a challenge, but it was, nevertheless, addressed in innovative ways. Major collective projects for compiling new world historical accounts began. An international commission set up by UNESCO began editing a Scientific and cultural history of mankind (1952–75); simultaneously, a group of Soviet scholars at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow worked on the Vsemirnaja istoria (World history; 1955–65) under the direction of Evgenij Zhukov. Each project obviously took note of the other. In addition, efforts were made in many historiographies to incorporate all regions of the world into conceptual work and historical narratives.

In East-Central Europe, well-established historical research and teaching on global issues were advanced by creating new institutional spaces. In Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (and also in the German Democratic Republic), historical institutes were established at the academies of sciences between 1945 and 1953; soon after, the founding directors – Tadeusz Manteuffel in Warsaw, Eric Molnár in Budapest, and Josef Macek in Prague – created departments for general or universal history. Chairs for world history were added at universities: for example, at the Charles-University in Prague. Eminent historians who were internationally connected, such as Zsigmond Pál Pach, Péter Gunst, Marian Małowist, Witold Kula, and Jerzy Topolski, advanced research on interregional relationships across the centuries. In addition, a new generation of experts on Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East entered the scene, and took part in the project of imagining the globe.Footnote ⁴⁵ The situation was no different in the Soviet Union. Professorships for world history had existed in Russia since the 1880s and a rather small division at the historical institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was expanded in 1969 into a major department.Footnote ⁴⁶ The institutionalization was linked to redirections of research questions, conceptual tools, and narratives.

The conceptual renewal and experimentation of today have its roots in several methodological impulses. These emerged from epistemological criticism raised by arguments within neighbouring disciplines. Taking up arguments from critical geography and new political geography developed after the end of the Cold War, historians slowly began to see space as socially constructed, as created by people, and not only as the background to, or container of, their activities. From the moment that ‘space no longer appears as a static platform of social relations, but rather as one of their constitutive dimensions, itself historically produced, reconfigured, and transformed’, it becomes a crucial topic of investigations.Footnote ⁴⁷

Earlier on, a group of scholars developed alternative approaches at a critical distance from the modernization paradigm. Studies by Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein worked out large-scale economic and political interactions and global inequalities based on dependency and world-systems theories. In doing so, they drew on inspirations from a wide range of disciplines and research carried out in other parts of the world. The Latin American origins of dependency theory, and the notable reception of east central European scholarship by Wallerstein, are only the tip of an iceberg; likewise, Wallerstein’s world-systems approach received much attention, especially in eastern Europe, where historians such as Jacek Kochanowicz reconceptualized it and introduced greater nuance.

Postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars picked up on the criticism of colonialism, but enhanced the understanding of political and economic dimensions with analyses of cultural conditions. They began deconstructing colonial premises, discourses, and narratives, and the venture of ‘provincializing Europe’ targeted the existing Eurocentric order of knowledge. Works in this field have clarified, for instance, that processes of colonization and decolonization need to be seen as entangled, reciprocal histories of the ‘West’ and the ‘Global South’, rather than as a unidirectional influence of Europe, or a catching-up development on the part of other regions. Part of this shift towards a relational history was a questioning of linear and teleological narratives of the emergence of the modern world.Footnote ⁴⁸ In response to the idea of ‘multiple modernities’, interactions and differences were confirmed as crucial themes in historiography, and heterogeneity was set as the leitmotif against older ideas of homogenization. Consequently, the theoretical tools at hand – concrete knowledge about idiosyncratic developments in the ‘Global South’, and cross-cultural imbrications in colonial and postcolonial contexts – grew together.

In the mid 1980s, French scholars of German studies, and German scholars working on France, began to replace the traditional perspective of analysing cultural impacts and hegemonic interferences by studying complex relationships between different societies in terms of ‘cultural transfer’ (transferts culturels). This approach was developed in parallel with others based on concepts of diffusion and comparisons. Jerry Bentley, for example, developed the notion of ‘cultural encounter’, while Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler highlighted connections between colonial metropoles and peripheries, creating an impetus towards a new imperial history.

Cultural transfer studies challenged the dominant diffusionist approach, according to which cross-cultural interaction reproduces hegemonic political and economic power relations. While emphasis had been placed on one side of the interaction, namely the originating context, attention was now also paid to the receiving side, including motivation and receptiveness. Instead of studying encounters as unidirectional imprints of one culture’s ideas and practices onto another, interactions came to the foreground of cultural transfer studies. Based on this redirection, historians outlined the roles of concrete historical agents in the active appropriation and adaptation of goods, ideas, knowledge, and customs, whereas these same agents had figured merely as passive recipients in earlier diffusionist models.

Histoire croisée (entangled history), which developed from, and in critical response to, the concept of ‘cultural transfer’, and its initial focus on national frameworks, proposed a more thorough constructivism in terms of the units and scales of analysis. It draws on earlier discussions regarding the variation of scales (jeux d’échelles) in microhistory, and insists on the reconstruction of all relevant spatial and temporal scales. Starting out from specific historical situations, scholars observe how actors (including the researcher) cross and interlink a variety of spaces and scales.Footnote ⁴⁹

Past relationships and interactions between people across spaces have been pursued more recently in a wide range of fields, including transnational or imperial history. Specific topics, such as multiethnicity, are discussed in a global perspective. In addition, historians have begun to draw on the natural sciences to explain historical changes since the Big Bang, and to advance the notion of the Anthropocene. The fact that a global turn has taken place in many disciplines across the human and social sciences also resonates in history. In parallel, historical studies of global connectedness are influenced by the emergence of interdisciplinary fields, such as urban, migration, interregional, and global studies.Footnote ⁵⁰ The more the discourse on contemporary globalization has broadened the research agendas in the individual disciplines, and at their crossroads, the more pluralistic the production of notions of the global has become.

Another crucial aspect of global history today is the fact that it has become a global practice. Historians from all corners of the world are concerned with exploring local–global relationships and the transgression of bounded spaces. This widespread interest has led to the emergence of research institutes and teaching programmes devoted to global history, which often pursue a profiled research agenda.Footnote ⁵¹ Furthermore, scholars have united and created regional scholarly associations for mutual exchange. Today, these are the Asian Association of World Historians (AAWH), the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH), and the World History Association (WHA). In 2008, these regional organizations joined forces to create the Network of World and Global History Organizations (NOGWHISTO), which, two years later, was accepted by the International Commission of Historians as an affiliate.

However, world historical scholarship does not converge, but preserves and renews its internal differences. Individual scholarly interests, intellectual trajectories, and local institutional settings matter, but national and regional environments also influence conceptual debates, research, and historical narratives. The positionality of world historical studies is often covered by increasingly pluralistic and internationally connected practice, but that does not do away with the specificities. World and global history have many faces. One should also not forget that there are enough places where the trend towards the ‘global’ is fended off in favour of national or other separated identifications; after all, historicizing multifaceted interactions is one way to order them, and can be used to gain control over them.