Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (review)

Manning's ambitious and invaluable guidebook aspires to accomplish several tasks: defend the intellectual feasibility of world history; trace the evolution of global thinking in history; summarize recent findings in world history and link them to trends in multiple disciplines; and propose agendas, methods, and analytic frameworks for future world historians. The only work of comparable scope read by this reviewer is Dunn's The New World History, a collection of cogitations on globally expansive inquiry.¹ Together these volumes constitute essential reading for anyone venturing to teach or write on world history.

Manning defines world history as "the story of connections within the global human community" (3), a definition that allows him to circumvent the arguments of those who discredit world history as "too big" in scope to be meaningful. The world historian need not be comprehensive in "coverage," he implies, so much as be attuned to patterns of interdependence, causation, and confluence that transcend boundaries. Manning's purpose is to identify and present a set of "navigational techniques" useful to historians, scholars in other disciplines, and inquisitive general readers. Historians trained in national or regional histories will find these techniques enlightening and empowering.

Interdisciplinarity is pivotal to Manning's view of world-historical practice. The increasing prominence of theories and methods from the natural, behavioral, and social sciences means that history "now addresses a wider range of areas, a longer time period, and a greater range of topics than ever before" (4). Manning devotes Chapter 7 to the importance of various disciplinary approaches—from linguistics to archaeology, epidemiology to ethnomusicology—to world historical studies. He notes, for instance, the influence of Charles Darwin on Oswald Spengler's "organic metaphor" for the "growth, maturation, and decline" of civilizations, as well as Albert Einstein's theories of relativity, which "suggested that world history should give greater emphasis to contingency" (114–115). While emphasizing the impact of this "disciplinary revolution," however, Manning maintains that "when the dust settles . . . the study of history will still be, recognizably, the offspring of historical studies in the past" (140), uniquely reliant on narrative and focused on change over time.

Much like world history itself, Manning's guidebook sacrifices depth for breadth. Economists, ecologists, sociologists, and biologists will find his brief treatments of their respective disciplines (Part III, "Results of Recent Research") superficial at best. The best chapter is that on "Cultural History," which is noticeably more insightful than the others. Other readers may be put off by the pleas for more institutional development ("the field as a whole cannot progress without research centers, graduate training, teaching preparation, library development, and more") (158). Nonetheless, this introduction to a daunting field and to global habits of mind is highly recommended.