$Unique_ID{how04742} $Pretitle{} $Title{World Civilizations: Introduction Prologue} $Subtitle{} $Author{Stearns, Peter N.;Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.} $Affiliation{} $Subject{history world civilizations societies international major human time civilization new} $Date{1992} $Log{} Title: World Civilizations: Introduction Book: Prologue Author: Stearns, Peter N.;Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B. Date: 1992 Prologue The study of history is the study of the past. Knowledge of the past gives us perspective on our societies today. It shows different ways people have identified problems and tried to resolve them, as well as important common impulses in the human experience. History can inform through its variety, remind us of some human constants, and provide a common vocabulary and examples that aid in mutual communication. One of the ways in which peoples from different cultures understand one another is through shared historical information. The study of history is also the study of change. Historians seek to describe major changes in the human experience over time and to examine the ways in which those changes connect the past to the present. They try to distinguish between superficial and fundamental change, as well as between sudden and gradual change, and to explain why change occurs and what impact it has. Finally, they are attentive to the ongoing nature of change, pinpointing continuities from the past along with innovations. History, in other words, is a study of human society in motion. World history is not simply a collection of the histories of various societies, but a subject in its own right. World history is the study of historical events in a global context. It does not attempt to sum up everything that has happened in the past. It focuses on two principal subjects: the evolution of leading civilizations and the framework for international contacts among different societies. In the first category, world history identifies major stages in the development of important societies. In the second category, world history emphasizes major stages in the interaction between different peoples and societies around the globe. The Emergence Of World History Serious attempts to deal with world history are relatively recent. Many historians have attempted to locate the evolution of their own societies in the context of developments in a larger "known world": Herodotus, though particularly interested in the origins of Greek culture, wrote also of developments around the Mediterranean; Ibn-Khaldun wrote of what he knew about developments in Africa and Europe as well as in the Muslim world; and unsystematically, European historians in the 18th-century Enlightenment liked to compare the evolution of various societies along with their own. But it was not until the 20th century, with an increase in international contacts and a vastly expanded knowledge of the historical patterns of major societies, that a complete world history became possible. In the West, world history depended on a growing realization that the world could not be understood simply as a mirror reflecting the West's greater glory or as a stage for Western-dominated power politics. This hard-won realization continues to meet some resistance. Nevertheless, at various points since 1900, historians in several societies have attempted to develop an international approach to the subject that includes but goes beyond merely establishing a context for the study of the emergence of their own civilization. There are many other approaches to the study of history. The most familiar uses a purely national framework, such as the study of American history or French history, which at best is enlivened by some awareness of how one national tradition compares with the traditions of other societies. World history does not replace national histories entirely. The history of the United States, France, or China can be enhanced when there is a larger context to fit it in, for this facilitates more precise comparisons and underlines the ways in which national patterns were shaped by more general forces. The need to study world history, however, goes beyond the provision of a good starting point for examining one's own society. The surge of interest in world history has been fueled by three other, interrelated factors. The first factor has been an explosion of knowledge about the histories of societies outside the Western tradition, in some cases also older than that tradition. The known past is much larger than ever before. The perspectives and the interpretive insights history provides have greatly expanded. Analysis of a host of issues - the effects of a classical tradition on later cultural development, the relationship between religion and commerce, or the impact of the Industrial Revolution on women - simply cannot be confined to Western examples. The second factor involves the realization of the increasingly international context in which we live. Much of what happens in the United States can still be explained by national or even local contexts, but our economy and culture, as well as our military and diplomatic framework, are vitally shaped by developments around the world. For example, wars and revolutions in the Middle East and economic and population trends in Latin America have direct impact on the way we live. Living in an international context creates the need to understand this context and to apply to it the knowledge and perspectives of history. We need to know how other traditions besides our own have evolved, what beliefs and attitudes they produce, and what kinds of economic and political behaviors they generate. One world historian has put the case this way: History in the United States first concentrated on the national experience alone, as part of an attempt at self-understanding and as a means of building agreed-upon national values. In the 20th century Americans realized that they were caught up in a network of which Europe was a vital part. One response was the creation of programs in the study of the history of Western civilization that made us better able to deal with European issues in the post-World War II era. Now we need, and are developing, the same types of programs on a wider international level - and world history plays a key role here. The third factor follows from the growing analytical challenge world history poses. Historians increasingly understand that key aspects of past and present alike have been shaped by global forces - exchanges of technologies, ideas, religions, foods, and diseases. Defining and assessing the emergence of global forces and tracing their interaction with individual societies stand at the forefront of the world history agenda as a research area. Our understanding of these forces, though still incomplete, is steadily improving. In addition to explaining the need for world history, it is necessary to offer a few words at the outset about its manageability. No world history includes everything, or even most things, about the past. It focuses on the activities of human civilizations, rather than human history as a whole. No world history would be manageable if this distinction were not kept in mind. What Civilization Means In dealing with civilizations - societies that generate and use an economic surplus beyond basic survival needs - world history focuses on only a tiny portion of the more than 2.5 million years since the genus Homo first appeared in the savanna of eastern Africa. The era of civilized life makes up about 9000 of the 40,000 years that our own human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has inhabited the earth. Civilized life has made possible human population densities unimaginable in precivilized time periods; it has given human groups the capacity to reshape their environments in fundamental ways and to dominate most other living creatures. The history of civilizations embraces most of the people who have ever lived; their literature, formal scientific discoveries, art, music, architecture, and inventions; their most sophisticated social, political, and economic systems; their brutality and destruction caused by conflicts; their exploitation of other species; and their degradation of the environment - a result of advances in technology and economic organization. To be truly global in scope, our inquiry into the history of civilizations must not be constricted by the narrow, Western-centric standards for determining what is civilized. Many peoples have seen themselves as "civilized," regarding outsiders with different physical features and cultures as uncouth "barbarians" or even subhumans. For example, in awarding a society civilized status, most European and American writers have insisted that monumental buildings, cities, writing, and a high level of technology be present. These criteria banished from the realm of the civilized many societies that were highly advanced in other areas but deficient in the ones Western writers deemed critical. Clearly, another approach to the meaning of civilization has to be taken if one is to write a truly global history of the human experience. Different civilizations have stressed and therefore excelled in different facets of human creativity. The Chinese have consistently demonstrated the capacity to build large and effective political systems. But Chinese thinkers have formulated only one major religion, Daoism, and this has had only a limited appeal both within and beyond East Asia. By contrast, the peoples of India have produced some of humankind's most sophisticated and sublime religions, but they have rarely known periods of political unity and strong government. The civilizations of the Maya made remarkable discoveries in astronomy and mathematics, but their technology remained roughly equivalent to that of stone-age peoples as late as the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century. These examples suggest that, rather than stressing particular attainments such as the capacity to build pyramids or wheeled vehicles, a genuinely global definition of what it means to be civilized should focus on underlying patterns of social development that are common to complex societies throughout history. The attributes that determine whether a particular society is civilized or not should be freed from the ethnocentrism - or the tendency to judge other peoples' cultural forms solely on the basis of how they compare to one's own - and sense of moral superiority that have dominated definitions of civilization. For our purposes, civilization is a form of human social organization that arises from the capacity of certain peoples to produce food supplies beyond their basic needs, and to develop a variety of specialized occupations, a heightened social differentiation on a class and gender basis, intensified economic exchanges between social groups, and regional and long-distance trading networks. Surplus agricultural production spurs the growth of large towns and then cities inhabited by merchants, artisans, ritual specialists, and political leaders. Both specialization and town life contribute to an increase in creativity and innovation that have been characteristic of all civilizations. The Comparative Approach To The History Of Civilizations In concentrating on civilizations, world history offers an initial focus that greatly reduces the time period world history covers, and also draws attention to civilizations that covered particularly extensive geographical areas. Even in emphasizing major civilizations, however, world history must offer other ways to select and highlight significant developments. One vital step involves a comparative approach to the major societies. Much of world history can be organized through careful comparisons of the leading characteristics of the principal civilizations, such as formal governments, family structures, and art. Remembering what civilizations have in common helps us to manage the complexity of world history and to highlight key distinctions among major societies. Comparison gives us a means of connecting historical developments within different civilizations and allows us to identify key patterns that ought to be remembered and explained. Comparison can also help capture the process of historical change. A single civilization can be compared across time, before and after change. Furthermore, a situation new to one society can be compared with similar situations that exist elsewhere. Consider the introduction of a new slave system, as happened in the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries. By comparing the American slave system with slave systems developed elsewhere, one can get a better fix on what American slavery involved and what changes it brought to the emerging society. International Contacts And Time Periods World history is not, however, simply a progression of separate civilizations that can be compared in various ways. An understanding of the kinds of contacts different civilizations developed - and their responses to the forces that crossed their boundaries - is as important as the story of the great societies themselves. For example, when the rate of international trade picked up, it presented questions for each major society to answer: How would the society participate in the trading system? What domestic impact did international trade have? How did one society's reactions to the new levels of trade compare with those of other major societies? World history is organized into major time periods primarily on the basis of changes in the nature and level of international exchange. Because of parallel developments, contacts, and crosscutting global forces, many civilizations display some common chronological features that suggest an international framework encompassing the individual societies. Establishing a sense of each time period of world history in terms of the characteristics of international interactions gives coherence to the larger story of world history. Some time periods see a particular trend toward the formation of empires; others involve the spread of major religions; others stress the impact of new technologies or production systems. Not all societies, in a given time period, neatly responded to the larger world forces - isolation from the wider world remained possible until just a few centuries ago - but enough did to enable us to define the basic chronology of world history. This book emphasizes six major time periods in world history. The first, covered in Part 1, involved the emergence of civilization. Early civilizations arose after people had formed a wide variety of local societies over most of the inhabitable globe. The early civilizations were regional, but they pulled more localized groups together into some shared institutions and beliefs; some of them developed limited contacts with other civilizations. The second period of world history saw the formation of much larger civilization units - the great classical societies of China, India, and the Mediterranean. Emphasis in the classical period rests on the integration of and the level of contact among these larger civilization areas. This was the period when elites in many parts of the world created systems of thought and artistic styles that continue to have force today: Confucian ideas about polite behavior and the social good, Greek ideas about nature, and Buddhist ideas about spirituality. The third, postclassical period in world history emerged as the classical civilizations underwent new challenge and decline. After about a.d. 500, civilization spread to new areas and new kinds of contact developed, involving the spread of novel religious systems, the increase of commercial exchange, and even the acceleration of international disease transmission. The fourth period of world history, beginning around a.d. 1450, saw the Americas and other previously isolated areas brought into the international framework as trade and exchange reached yet another level of intensity. Humble American crops such as corn and potatoes encouraged massive population growth in many societies - a trend that continues into our own time. Between about 1750 and 1920, the fifth period of world history was shaped particularly through the advent of industrial society in western Europe. Industrial technology brought new rates of international interaction and a new, and complex, balance of forces among the major civilization areas. Habits of work changed in response to new ideas of discipline and productivity; leisure changed as well. This was the time when key sports won an international audience. Finally, world history periodization took a sixth turn during the 20th century, again because of complicated changes in the nature of international contacts and the impact these contacts have on particular societies. The new global patterns of this century gain added meaning against the perspective of previous world trends. The basic framework for managing and understanding world history resembles a weaving loom, in which two sets of threads interweave. One set consists of the major civilizations, identified through their principal characteristics and traced over time; the second set involves parallel processes and contacts that delineate the principal time periods of world history. The interaction between civilizations and international forces form the warp and weave of world history, from civilization's origin to the present day. Analysis In World History In addition to comparison and periodization, which link the historical experience of individual civilizations, some world historians have been fascinated by a third, even more sweeping formula: regularities in historical development that can be identified and applied on a global basis. Do all civilizations rise, mature, and then fall in a process like that of human growth? Is there a historical law that proves that societies that begin to neglect the welfare of their lowest classes are doomed to decay? A variety of historical laws have been proposed, and even if some of them prove simplistic, the more insightful ones can raise valid questions about the larger processes of world history. World history involves comparison, assessment of global interaction, and consideration of more general formulas about how human societies operate. There are facts to be learned, but the greater analytical challenge is to use the facts to compare civilizations, to identify key periods of world history and the patterns of change from one period to the next, and to test general propositions about historical causation and development. Using this approach, world history becomes something to think about, not simply something to regurgitate. With this approach the task of learning world history gains focus and purpose.