Global exchanges and unity
The growth of intellectual, economic and socio-political networks of exchange in the paleolithic and agrarian eras prompted the defence, augmentation and revision of universal and later world historical views.
Labels and typologies were used to bestow respect upon, to accommodate or to subjugate newly encountered peoples. In many European universal histories, for instance, race and gender typologies coalesced in narratives of the stagnation of the effeminate East and the progressive perfection of the masculine West. Some writers used other cultures to make criticisms about their own: to take one example, Voltaire (1694-1778) used the history of China in Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Espirit des Nations to highlight the savagery, superstition and irrationality of Christian Europe. Corresponding examples from outside of Europe may also be found, like Wei Yuan (1794-1856), who compared the historical paths of Europe and China in Haiguo Tuzhi (Illustrated Treatise on the Sea Kingdom), or the argument that learning the superior technology of the Europeans could be a means to control them. Universal histories were also used to promote the interests and ideals of particular social groups: for example, Philip Melancthon (1497-1560) and BishopJacques Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704) saw universal history as an excellent means to defend Christian beliefs. Promoting a different cause, in The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) Christine de Pizan narrated a hierarchically arranged universal history of female warriors, good wives and saintly women to empower female readers to aspire to the city of womanly virtue. Joseph Swetnam, on the other hand, argued in his pamphlet The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle and Forward women (1615) that women are, like the rib that they were fashioned from in the Judaeo- Christian creation story, ‘crooked by nature'.Universal histories proliferated after the aggregration of printing technologies in fifteenth-century Europe. This made decisions on the proper means of researching, writing and reading them increasingly urgent to many writers. In Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, for example, Jean Bodin (1530-96) advanced that the logical order of universal history was chronological, from the general to the specific and from Europe outwards to the rest of the known world. Misorder, in his view, could weaken the powers of the mind. Conversely, Christopher Cellarius (1638-1707) argued for the tripartite division of history into ‘ancient', ‘medieval' and ‘new' periods.