How to Write the History of the World

March 2004 * Historically Speaking How t? Write the History of the World Lauren Benton In one ofJorge Luis Borges's short stories a royal mapmaker is asked to fashion increasingly accurate maps of the kingdom until, finally, he covers the kingdomwith a map. This parable is a warning to all historians but especially to world historians, who maystruggle more than otherswith pressures simply to "cover" time and territory. Reaching beyond mere coverage is crucial to the field's development, and to its status within the profession. How can we write the history ofthe world in a way that is not just broad but also broadly influential? This question poses itselfat a time when world historyhas already arrived as a serious research enterprise. Once the nearly exclusive realm ofa few—WilliamMcNeill, Philip Curtin, Alfred Crosby, and some others—the field now draws scholars who no longer consider an association with world history as a mark of hubris, a paean to mass marketing, or evidence (God forbid) ofa preoccupation with undergraduate teaching. The field has its own journal, theJournal ofWorld History, which has seen the quality ofits articles rise steadily and now routinely publishes both original research, much ofit done by junior scholars, and important synthetic pieces. Meanwhile, scholarly interest in the topic of globalization has helped to forge an interdisciplinary audience with an interest in the longue, longue durée. Yet questions remain about the sorts of methodologies aspiring world historians might embrace and promote. Aiming for comprehensiveness and relyingon oldernarrative techniques are not serious options. Without a conceptual framework, the data threaten to overwhelm argument. Otherwise, we could sensibly choose to produce a 5,000bookseries , each title evokingJohn E. Wills's recentbook 1688:A WorldHistory; thatis, we could write the history ofthe world one year at a time. Whatever else its virtues, world history has not produced a significant volume of methodologically thoughtful discussions or theoretically influential studies. There are, to be sure, discernible methodological patterns and debates in the literature of world history, and some ofthese do contain lessons for other subfields. Following the title of Donald Wright's well-crafted book from 1997, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, one approach involves alternating attention between global processes and local experiences. This methodology informs a number of prominent world history initiatives , including efforts to place formerly insular national histories in global perspective. But the approach may ultimately prove less importantto world historicalwriting, and to fields seeking a connection to world history, than two other common strategies. One ofthese approaches we might label circulationist. Its objects of study are the movements around the globe of—in no particular order—commodities, capital, ideas, people, germs, and ways of marking ethnic and religious difference. Like so many tops spinning, these circuits together comprise what CA. Bayly has called "archaic globalization " in the early modern period and what observers ofthe contemporaryscene call simply "globalization" (forgetting, sometimes, that it has a history). By shifting our gaze from one sphere ofcirculation to another, we simulate a perception ofthe whole of global interconnectedness. Following Arjun Appadurai,we can give these circuits names— either his unwieldy labels of ethnoscape, bioscape, financescape, and so on, or the more traditional Latinate categories we already associate with established areas of study, such as migration, diffusion, or expansion . Another approach to globalization in its earlyand late forms is less familiarbutjust as important. Rooted in comparisons, it purports to uncover the structural similarities of polities thatmaybe distantinplace and time. Here the historian finds globalizing influences by surmise, and by arithmetic; so many similarities in so many places suggest common connections to forces crossing borders and oceans. When done well, this technique reveals hidden continuities. Itfocuses our eyes not on global circulation but on its imprint, origins, and contexts: for example, status and class distinctions, strategies of resistance, institutions ofrule, and nationalism. Circulationist projects appear to be in much greater supply. In part, this is because of a certain transparency of social theoretical constructs related to the movement of people, commodities, and ideas. For example , the conceptof"networks" hasworked its way into mainstream historical studies and has provided avocabularyforhistoricalwriting on topics as diverse as European migration , Third World urbanization, and...