Dividing the great sweep of history into discrete eras is inevitably a subjective exercise.
For example, once their religions had achieved success, Christians and Muslims pivoted history around their founders' lives, much as the Jews before them had calculated time from the supposed date of the creation of the Earth.
Some Romans (and many of their later admirers) employed a system of dating based on the supposed founding of their capital city (ab urbe condita). Renaissance Europeans saw their era as the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of a Modern period characterized by a revival of classical standards. That division of history into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern eras is still in use. Fortunately, the impulse to devise new schemas is rare. In proposing to split the human past into two unequal periods, this chapter does not intend to launch a new calendar or mandate new names for historical eras. Rather, it is a meditation on the global past from the perspective of our own times.Projected beyond the Mediterranean world where it evolved, the division of history into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern can be a clumsy fit. In places like China and India, for example, the distinction between Ancient and Medieval is not so clear as in the Latin West, and the beginning of Modern history is usually placed well after 1500. In parts of Africa below the Sahara, one can identify an era of medieval empires, such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhay in the Western Sudan, Solomonic Ethiopia, and the Zimbabwe empire. Outside the Nile Valley, however, there is no readily apparent era of classical antiquity, despite the continent's uniquely long human history.1 [139] Since the Americas also lack an age of classical antiquity (except for the Maya), historians commonly divide their history into pre-Columbian, colonial, and independent eras. World historians mostly evade the problems of a one-size-fits-all schema by just ignoring it, though it is harder to evade the tripartite schema's implicit assumptions about the development of high culture (“civilization”) and aristocratic society, which do not accord well with present-day views of class, gender, and cultural diversity.
In addition, having no common periodization can reduce world history to a series of regional narratives, which some have argued was in fact the case until the world began to globalize.[140]A more fundamental problem is that the conventional periodization omits most of human history. Initially this was done out of simple ignorance, which is evident in the Jewish calculation that human creation occurred in 3760 bce or the more refined calculation by Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) that the world began on a day in late October 4004 bce, a calculation that remained popular in some circles well into the nineteenth century. Since the advances in science by Darwin and other biologists undercut the assumption of an actual creation event and archaeologists uncovered evidence of human life much further back in time, historians have been willing to concede the existence of something called “prehistory” that might be worthy of study by other disciplines, while steadfastly persisting in beginning “history” at about the same date that the Jews and Ussher said marked Creation. In effect they agree with Samuel Noah Kramer's famous proposal a half-century ago that history begins at Sumer in Mesopotamia some 6,000 years ago.[141] Some historians may be willing to push the date back another 2,000 years or so to the beginning of agriculture. Yet that definition of history still excludes 95 percent of human existence, if one restricts one's definition of “human” to modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) who appeared some 200,000 years ago. The omission grows to 99.6 percent if one includes earlier forms of humankind existing from about 2.5 million years ago.
The argument for beginning history about 6,000 years ago is often based on the fact that that is when writing appeared. While written records do make the reconstruction of the past easier, they are not so crucial or so reliable as was once assumed. As will be discussed below, we have learned a great deal about “prehistoric” times in the past half-century, and that knowledge tells us more about daily life than the legal texts, proclamations, and religious and philosophical speculations that dominate ancient writing.
In addition, tying history closely to written texts excludes the majority of humans, who, until recent times, were illiterate. It was once quite common to argue that non-elites, most non-Western people, and most women essentially had no history, although few will openly defend that proposition now.A second remarkable omission from most historians' conception of “history” is what some would term “current events,” often whatever has occurred since they earned their degrees. While safeguarding historical objectivity from contamination by “presentist” norms, such an omission largely abandons the idea that historical study should give a perspective on the present. That may be a better trade-off than mining the historical record primarily for things that support contemporary notions, but neither position achieves a balance between history for its own sake and history as a dialogue between past and present. Contemporary events are not simply more of the same; they are essential to understanding our past.
Like it or not, we live in a new age, the age of globalization. Global interactions - economic, cultural, and political - have shifted into high gear and the pace of change continues to accelerate. Yet few historians include globalization in their teaching and writing; even fewer seek to explain how globalization came about. As historian Tony Hopkins has pointed out, “the analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of globalization... is currently the most important single debate in the social sciences,” a debate, he notes, that most historians ignore.[142] By leaving the explanation of the current trajectory of events to other disciplines, historians are truncating their professional duty in a way that may be even more irresponsible than the omission of humanity's first 200,000 years. Far from being a passing phase, the bundle of changes called globalization is a crucial aid in making sense of history.
For these reasons, world historians recognize the need for a framework that encompasses the full range of human history, embraces all types of people, and acknowledges that globalization is not a passing fad but a significant outcome of deep historical forces. In aid of that enterprise this chapter looks at history in terms of two dominant historical trends: divergence and convergence. From the beginning most of history was a story of divergence: humans' biological and cultural differentiation as they evolved and dispersed across the planet. For the past millennium, history has been dominated by convergent forces, of which globalization is the latest phase. During this era that I call the Great Convergence, human interaction, trade, and intercommunication have increased at a rapid rate.