In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Ruptures in History
  • Bruce Mazlish (bio)

Humans have a need to make some sense of the past by dividing it up. Often using the moon as a marker, they have devised calendars. With the coming of civilizations, division by dynasties and kingdoms became the marker. With Christianity, we have the widely accepted B.C./A.D. dating scheme. By the time of the Renaissance— another “timely” rubric—the notion of tripartite division of time emerged: ancient, medieval, and modern history—one that is still largely with us and has spread from the West to the rest of the globe. This framework is not terribly helpful, however, when dealing with non-Western history. To speak of medieval Islam, for example, really means Islam at the time of the European Middle Ages; they are not the Middle Ages in the Islamic world. Somewhere around the 17th century, we have the idea of an “Age,” as in the Age of Louis XIV. The French Revolution of 1789 largely ended dynastic periodization, although the word “Age” has hung around.1


Click for larger view
View full resolution

Nazi field marshal Wilhelm Keitel on the stand at Nuremberg. From the film Nuremberg (Department of Defense, 1950).

Given this background of how we measure change in the past, we must remind ourselves that historians generally see the past is both continuous and discontinuous. Stringing together facts, in what often appears to be a functionally deterministic way, historians draw a smooth line through the past. Both the facts and the continuity are, we now realize, constructed. We construct what is a fact and recognize that we could have emphasized other ones. And we impose continuity upon those we have selected. Equally important, however, is the recognition of ruptures in history.

“Rupture” comes from a Latin word that means “to break.” Not surprisingly, there is no allusion to history. If one looks up “rupture” on Google, one finds that it is mostly defined in geological or surgical terms. The historical definition we must work out for ourselves. I suggest that we think of it as a major cut in the continuity of the past. Against the view of the human past as marked by continuity, ruptures mark abrupt change.2

Some ruptures are of a relatively minor nature, others of major significance. Among the former, we are told, for example, that “Naval combat as it had been fought for millennia does appear to have changed after 1945.”3 Combat between huge battle fleets, like we witnessed in the Pacific during World War II, seem a thing of the past. Surely, this represents a rupture.

There are two other ruptures that I consider more significant, especially for the way they point to the future. The first is what I call the “Judicial Revolution.” 4 It starts with the Nuremberg trials of 1946, and with two important assertions made in the course of the prosecution. One is that war itself is a crime. Earlier there was recognition of war crimes—that is, crimes committed during a war. But now war itself was asserted to be a crime. Here we are at a major rupture in the history of military conflict. Another assertion at Nuremberg was that the Nazis and their allies had committed crimes against humanity. Genocide was the most prominent of these, but other actions also were so labeled. Whatever problems in implementation—and there have been many—the principle was established that those who committed either war crimes or crimes against humanity were subject to international jurisdiction, unrestrained by appeals to national sovereignty. Here, indeed, is a rupture in the domain of international law.

Another major rupture of our time, in my view the most significant and far-reaching, is the coming of globalization. A hotly contested topic, it often evokes heated passion. Some detest the impact of globalization, while others deny that it is anything new. I stand in the camp of those who consider globalization to be a truly tectonic shift.

Globalization is primarily a post-World War II development. The term “globalization” emerged sometime during the 1950s and gained widespread currency thereafter. Once in existence, it could then be applied to the history of the...

pdf

Share