Introduction

sanjay Subrahmanyam

Introduction

Although the practice of writing history on a large scale can be traced back many centuries - perhaps nearly as far back almost as the writing of history itself - each recent generation has refined and modified its habits in view of changes in method, as well as in perspective.

At the other end of the early modern period, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, and the world at large embarked on a distinctly industrial age based on the systematic harnessing of mechanical power, many writers ^[1] reflected on what the previous three or four centuries had wrought by way of change, and they often came to the conclusion that the period that was ending was momentous for the world in more ways than one.

The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. Their consequences have already been very great; but, in the short period of between two and three centuries which has elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What benefits or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee. By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another's wants, to increase one another's enjoyments, and to encourage one another's industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial.^[2]

Smith's position here is typical of his thinking, but also somewhat more subtle than is sometimes suspected. He excludes from the comparison of the ‘greatest and most important events' the human discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel, since these were not ‘recorded' events in the history of mankind. As for 1492 and 1498, he highlights them precisely in terms of suggesting that contact and commerce are in general to be preferred to isolation and autarchy, since they increase the benefits to all participants through the division of labour and specialization. But he is also commend­ably cautious in distinguishing between ideal and reality.

To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commer­cial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned. These misfortunes, however, seem to have arisen rather from accident than from anything in the nature of those events themselves.

In other words, Smith recognized that one of the characteristic features of the preceding three centuries had been the creation and consolidation of great colonial empires (typically centred in Europe), which had proceeded to commit ‘every sort of injustice' rather than simply embarking on ‘improve­ments'. Further, the Scottish savant did not simply lay such charges at the door of the benighted Catholic Iberians; as is well known, he reserves some of the most savage criticisms in his text for the behaviour of the East India Companies founded by the Dutch and English nations.^[3] Still, his use of the term ‘accident' to place in parenthesis many inconvenient and painful histor­ical processes can only appear to us today to be inadequate. In turn, such a recourse to euphemism has to be explained, as we shall see below, by a particular form of teleology, wherein such ‘accidents' could be juxtaposed to the very inherent ‘nature' of the broad historical process, the direction of which was already largely determined.

Adam Smith is generally recognized as one of the key innovative figures of the later phase of the Western European Enlightenment, but he shared many ideas with other thinkers of that broad movement.

Could one have found such a view expressed in Europe three centuries earlier? In certain respects, Smith's position shares with a broad swathe of earlier thinkers a distinct faith in a history that has both a direction and an end, in short what the German philosopher Christian Wolff first defined in 1728 as ‘teleology'. Wolff himself, while professing a deep and abiding interest in distant lands such as China, was however very much intellectually located in Christian theology, albeit in a rationalistic strain thereof.^[4] Smith's rather materialistic understanding of the idea of progress would therefore not have found much of an echo with him, and even less in writers of the sixteenth century in Europe, or even the Mediterranean world. For such writers, the dominant paradigm for understanding large-scale history was an eschatological one, which sometimes shaded off into more constrained forms of providenti- alism with a reduction in scale.

In the late years of the world shall come certain times when the Ocean Sea shall loosen the bonds of things; a great land shall open up and a new seaman like the one who was Jason's steersman and who was called Tiphys shall discover a new world, and then the island of Thule shall no longer be the outermost of lands.^[5]

Later Iberian writers like Bartolome de las Casas, Lopez de Gomara and even Jose de Acosta would continue to find in the Senecan text, if not a holy prophecy, then at least something akin to the sibylline texts in which the ancients presciently saw what the moderns would come to achieve. Such forms of reasoning and historical emplotment went far beyond the Christian world, even if they were not always intended to analyse the same sequences of events. For Muslims, the tenth century of their Hegiran calendar began in 1494 to 1495 of the Common Era, and ended in 1591 to 1592. As a consequence of this brute calendric fact, there was both much popular expectation and sophisticated theological speculation on what that century would bring in terms of world-historical events. Several monarchs of the Muslim world, from those of Morocco to the Ottoman Empire, to Mughal India, seized the occasion to present their own claims as the central millenarian figures that would ‘renew' the Muslim community.

It is not concealed and veiled from the minds of intelligent people, who have received the light of divine aid and are illuminated by the rays of wisdom and knowledge, that in this terrestrial world, which is the mirror of the celestial, there is nothing that excels love and no propensity so worthy of cultivation as philanthropy, because the peace of the world and the harmony of existence are based upon friendship and association, and in each heart illuminated by the rays of the sun of love, the world of the soul, or the faculties of the mind are by them purged of human darkness; and much more is this the case, when they subsist between monarchs, peace among whom implies the peace of the world and of the denizens thereof.

Composed by Akbar's chief ideologue of the time, the celebrated Shaikh Abu'l Fazl ibn Mubarak, this opening passage is thus a call for peaceful exchange, at a great distance from the realities of Mughal-Habsburg relations, which consisted of an ongoing series of petty skirmishes both on land and on sea. The next passage then embarks on a still bolder gambit, relativizing the truth of various religions:

As most men are fettered by the bonds of tradition, and by imitating the ways followed by their fathers, ancestors, relatives and acquaintances, every one continues, without investigating the arguments and reasons, to follow the religion in which he was born and educated, thus excluding himself from the possibility of ascertaining the truth, which is the noblest aim of the human intellect. Therefore we associate at convenient seasons with learned men of all religions, and thus derive profit from their exquisite discourses and exalted aspirations.^[7]

The letter then goes on to ask that the Habsburgs send the Mughals an authentic version of the Christian scriptures, so that they might examine them in the context of wide-ranging discussions in their court. The implica­tion here is that the Mughal ruler, as a millenarian and messianic figure, pretty much stands above religions and their petty differences. Rather than promoting a project for the worldwide spread of a single faith, the Mughals claim to stand here for a policy of balance, in which different communities and their beliefs can find a place.

This exchange between Mughals and Habsburgs allows us to consider at least one broad framework within which early modern world history could be conceived and written, namely that of inter-imperial competition. About a dozen significant empires of varying dimensions can be said to have existed between about 1400 and 1800. These would include the Russian state based at Moscow and expanding to the east and southeast, the Chinese state of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Mughal Empire in South Asia, the Ottoman domains stretching from Basra and Baghdad in the east to the Maghreb in the west, and the Spanish, Portuguese, French, British and Dutch Empires. Other imperial projects of shorter duration can be found in Central Asia, Southeast Asia and also arguably in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. These empires coexisted in turn with smaller states, sometimes by co-opting them into larger systems, but also by using them as ideological foils - as we can see in the relationship between Safavid Iran, on the one hand, and the Ottoman and Mughal Empires on the other. At the same time, it is one of the characteristics of the early modern period that no single empire from amongst these achieved a hegemonic status, even to the extent that the British Empire was able to do so in the nineteenth century. The greatest of the early modern imperial enterprises in terms of physical extent at least (if not of population) was the joint Hispano-Portuguese monarchy of the period 1580 to 1640. Although three Habsburg rulers of that time claimed that they ruled notionally over the ‘four parts of the world' (in the sense of having possessions in the four continents - albeit not in Australia), they could never claim a real superiority or domination over some of the other empires of the time.^[8]

From this simple political fact alone, we can deduce that early modern world history should not be written from a single centre, and that it must necessarily be thought of as polyphonic. It would be a signal error to see these centuries as just preparing the ground for the hegemonic systems that would emerge later, and we would thus ourselves succumb to a particularly simplistic form of teleological thinking. Processes leading towards unification and homogenization certainly existed, but they were also accompanied by other processes which led to political, economic and cultural division and fragmentation. This is one of the reasons why not every significant trend of this period can be summed up under the heading of a single characterizing scheme such as ‘globalization'. It is precisely in order to have a better grasp of this complexity that we have chosen in these volumes to vary scales of analysis, as well as varying the points of perspective. Before turning to a consideration of these, however, some further macroscopic considerations may be in order.

Debates and differences

The two parts of Volume 6 of the The Cambridge World History essentially concern the ‘early modern' centuries, those running from about 1400 to 1800. This is a period characterized by an intensification of long-distance contacts, best symbolized perhaps by Ferdinand Magellan's project of a voyage of global circumnavigation from west to east. Magellan (in Portuguese: Fernao de Magalhaes) was born into a family of minor nobility in the north of Portugal in about 1480, and first made his way to the Indian Ocean when he was about 25 years of age. There, he participated in a number of naval combats, and came to acquire first-hand knowledge of Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Portuguese conquest of the great port-city of Melaka in August 1511. On returning to Portugal, he was eventually disappointed with the rewards he received for his services, and therefore resolved to mount his project of circumnavigation from west to east with Spanish support, using his own cartographic knowledge as well as the networks of correspondents and informants he possessed in the larger Iberian world. Magellan misread the location of the anti-meridian defining the geographic partition between Spaniards and Portuguese, and claimed that a significant part of the Moluccas (or Spice Islands) could be seen as falling to the Spanish Crown. He was thus able to gather enough financial support to set out with a fleet of five vessels and some 230 men in late September 1519, and after numerous difficulties entered the Pacific Ocean over a year later, at the end of 1520. By March, Magellan found himself in the Philippines, and began a process there of trade and negotiation, amply mixed with threats of violence. A reaction inevitably ensued, and the Portuguese captain was eventually killed on the small island of Mactan (near Cebu) in April 1521. The feeble remnants of the fleet eventually limped home to Spain in early September 1522, just under three years from the day of their departure. Yet, when compared to the voyages of 1492 and 1498, there is a reason that this voyage of 1519 to 1522 stands out. Conceptually, in terms of the redefinition of space that it produced, and its implications for cosmography, it may be seen as more important in many ways than Gama's voyage a quarter of a century earlier. But it also remained orphaned, in the sense of having no rapid follow-up or consolidation. The expeditions of GarciaJofre de Loyasa and Alvaro de Saavedra in 1525 to 1527 were unable to return to their points of departure, and the same fate befell the Grijalva and Villalobos expeditions of the late 1530s and early 1540s. It was not until 1565, then, that Andres de Urdaneta was able successfully to complete a return voyage from the Philippines to New Spain, making a trans-Pacific economic and cultural link a real possibility on an ongoing basis.^[9]

From the last quarter of the sixteenth century onwards then, the idea of an integrated global history based on the existence of worldwide networks of trade, exchange, conquest and circulation can be thought to have at least partly become a reality. American plants, birds and even some animals now reached the Indian Ocean not only via the Atlantic and Europe, but directly through the Pacific. The so-called ‘Manila Galleon', which linked together the Mexican port of Acapulco and the Philippines, was perhaps a fragile thread, but it was nevertheless an important one. To some extent, Asian spices and other plants were also to have an impact on the Americas as a result. Not only administrators and powerful traders, but even more humble travellers with some degree of curiosity, could think of making a voyage around the world. An important early example is the Italian Francesco Carletti, who after trading slaves alongside his father in the Atlantic, then embarked on a voyage that took him from Mexico and Peru to the Philip­pines, to China and Japan, then to Goa, and eventually back to his native Italy, where he wrote his Ragionamenti, devoted to his circumnavigation between the years 1594 and 1602. His rough contemporary was the Breton Pierre-Olivier Malherbe, who claimed for his part to have made a leisurely voyage around the world from 1581 onwards, eventually returning to his native France only in 1608. Malherbe was to boast not only of having known the Mughal emperor Akbar, but of having ‘gone by land from New Spain or Mexico, where he stayed a long time, to Peru and the extremity of the kingdom of Chile, making it a point to see all that was rare and singular by way of cities, inhabitants, countries, plants, animals, and ruins'. Not least of all, Malherbe claimed he had ‘seen and descended [the mine] of Potosi, where he learned to be a great miner of metals, since the said [mine] is the richest in the world, and has no end to it'.¹⁰

This evocation of the iconic Bolivian mine of Potosi was to be very nearly an obligatory point of passage from the last third of the sixteenth century onwards. The mine came to stand not only for the unparalleled riches of America (also evoked in the celebrated myth of El-Dorado), but for the Spanish Empire that largely controlled them. But these were ambiguous riches, as we already see in the closing years of the sixteenth century, when the precious metals brought by the returning Spanish fleets to Europe were blamed for inflation and social instability in Iberia, as well as in the world beyond, even as far as the Ottoman Empire. A widespread ‘decline' literature began to arise in this period, in which empire and its attendant novelties were portrayed as much as a curse as a blessing. However, it is now increasingly clear that a good part of Potosi's silver went not to Europe, but across the Pacific. In other words, the substantial Chinese demand for silver in the period was met in part through the ramifications of the

1^o See Gregoire Holtz, ‘Pierre-Olivier Malherbe: TheJourney of a Manuscript from India to France (First Half of the 17th Century)' in Vijaya Rao, (ed.), Reaching the Great Moghul: Francophone Travel Writing on India of the 17th and 18th Centuries (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2012), pp. 20-39.

Acapulco-Manila link, as a complex trade-pattern grew up linking Manila, Melaka, the Portuguese settlement of Macau and the port of Nagasaki in southern Japan. It was also through this network that the first Tokugawa ambassadors appeared in Mexico in 1614, en route to Europe, attracting the attention of the Nahuatl-language chronicler Chimalpahin. Again, the first colonies of East Asians who appeared in American cities such as Lima and Mexico clearly traversed this passage, as did a good many of the more ambitious merchants of the time, whether marranos or Armenians.

Every history of the early modern period is thus at least partly a history of trade and merchants, who were the most conspicuous actors of the period alongside the usual warriors and conquerors who populate earlier epochs as well. Two of the most substantial attempts to write early modern world histories in the second half of the twentieth century demonstrate this fact well enough. The first is Fernand Braudel's three-volume work, Civilisation materielle, economic et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siecle, which first appeared in 1979, and was translated soon after into English and a host of other lan­guages.¹¹ The second, more schematic and certainly more controversial, is the historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System, the first volume of which - largely devoted to the sixteenth century - appeared already in 1974, and of which subsequent volumes dealing with the periods from 1600 to 1750, from the 1730s to the 1840s, and from 1789 to 1914, have since been published.^{[10] [11]} Braudel in his volumes evoked the encoun­ters between different ‘world-economies' (economies-mondes) at a variety of levels, defining a ‘world-economy' as ‘a fragment of the universe, a part of the planet that is economically autonomous, and essentially capable of being self-sufficient, and whose connections and internal exchanges give it a certain organic unity'. From this perspective, quite large zones such as the Indian Ocean, pre-Columbian America or the Russian Empire could be thought of in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries as ‘world-economies', without a clear hierarchy between them. While each of these ‘world-economies' might possess some degree of internal differentiation, their interactions might then produce further integration or frictional conflict, with no outcome being considered as historically inevitable. Braudel's world history, while largely focused on material life, nevertheless remained remarkably open-ended.

11

12

In contrast, Wallcrstcin's vision can better be compared to a deterministic model, located in a clear if apparently unstated teleology. Here, the creation of a modern and capitalistic ‘world-system' is essentially the work of Euro­pean agents acting over ever wider spaces. It is the dynamism of the Western European economy, emerging from the demographic collapse of the latter half of the fourteenth century, that permits the progressive ‘incorporation' of other parts of the world, which become subordinate to the powerful Euro­pean core that is first located in the Iberian Peninsula, and then shifts to northern centres such as Amsterdam and London, as we move from the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. The building of the ‘world-system' is thus coterminous with the traditional narrative of a succession of European empires, first constrained by their subordination to the remnants of ‘feudal' institutions, and then increasingly liberated from them. Thus, first America, then the Indian Ocean, and eventually the Islamic World and Africa, are brought into the ambit of this unified system, as ‘peripheries' in relation to a dynamic European core. Posed ostensibly in the language of ‘dependency theory', and as a variant of the grand Marxist narrative, it has been claimed sometimes by critics that Wallerstein represents a ‘neo-Smithian Marxism'.¹³ But this may be giving a less than fair treatment to Adam Smith, who in fact had a rather sceptical view of the functioning of the key European mercantile institutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, Waller- stein's project represents the apogee of an unapologetically Eurocentric world history, which is dismissive of the dynamic potential of most non-European societies, whose fate seems to be to await more or less passively their formal conquest, or informal ‘incorporation' by European agents. Societies like those of South and East Asia, or of the Middle East and Africa, are assimilated here into some variant of an ‘Asiatic Mode of Produc­tion', a sort of historic slumber of homeostasis from which only contact with Europe will awaken them.

It was thus only natural that Wallerstein's construct would evoke sceptical reactions amongst historians of the non-European world, who had long struggled against hegemonic models such as those of ‘Oriental Despotism' (revived by Karl Wittfogel in a controversial work of 1957), and the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production', which had also known a number of late avatars. These reactions took a number of different forms, of which at least three principal ones can be enumerated. The first was the work of macro-historians and ^{[12] [13] historical sociologists, who pointed to the inadequacy of core-periphery models in rendering a sufficiently subtle account of the variety of institutional arrangements that existed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries to organ­ise trade and exchange. Thus, the trade between India and Central Asia, or India and East Africa, already involved a considerable degree of differenti­ation and specialization. Central Asian elites came to dominate some of the major political systems of South Asia, while at the same time powerful South Asian traders came to control some of the key Central Asian markets, to cite but one example. The complex relationship between the Mughal and Safavid domains is another thorny matter. Could one really talk of a north Indian ‘core' in relationship to an Iranian ‘periphery', to cite another example? Similar questions could be asked with regard to the relationship between coastal China, Korea and Japan.}

A second set of concrete doubts emanated from the work of comparative historians, who set about asking whether systematic comparisons between European and non-European institutions always redounded in favour of the former. If this were indeed so, how did Armenian, Hokkienese or Gujarati traders not only survive, but even prosper in the face of stiff European competition until well into the eighteenth century? Similarly, historians of science and technology suggested that a triumphant European narrative, wherein the rest of the world was already subordinate to the hegemony of a purely home-grown European science and technology by 1700 or 1750, was something of a mirage. These comparative projects eventually gave rise to two broad debates by the end of the twentieth century. One, more focused on economic indicators, was that on the ‘great divergence', and centred on when Western Europe effectively diverged in its economic trajectory from the rest of Eurasia; in recent years, the debate has largely dealt with the question as it is posed in the context of the Europe-China comparison by Kenneth Pomeranz.¹⁴ The second debate, more concerned with political institutions and political culture, has developed around the wide-ranging synthesis proposed by Victor Lieberman through the paradigm of ‘strange parallels'. Here, Lieberman argues that a number of distinct trajectories were possible in Eurasia over the long term (say 800 and 1800 ce), but that they do not correspond to the core-periphery geographies of older ‘world-systems'

theory.¹⁵ On the one hand, the unifying factors in Eurasian history are brought out; and on the other hand, it is suggested that even a space like Southeast Asia or Western Europe should in fact be carefully separated into varying trends.

A third tendency that has been visible since the 1980s is one that challenges the Wallersteinian perspective on account of its empirical poverty and monophonic character. Here, the emphasis is much more on the richness and variety of source-materials that can be tapped with regard to the early modern period, which thus also have the effect of creating a far more nuanced vision of historical agency. 1⁶ Wallerstein's view of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, to take one example, is made up of claims such as that ‘Vasco da Gama came, saw, and conquered far more and far faster than Julius Caesar', and that as a result ‘in a very few years, Portuguese ships completely dominated the extensive trade of the Indian Ocean'.¹⁷ Such a stance simply cannot be sustained in view of a variety of source-materials now available to us in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman; and indeed, even a close reading of the Portuguese archives of the period show it to be unsustainable. The growing literature on ‘encounters' now leads us away from such one-dimensional renditions to a closer reading of sources, which give us a sense of the fine grain of situations, and the tangled threads of actors' motivations. This then is partly a question of scale in history-writing. The shifting focal points the reader will find in various chapters of Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History therefore represent an attempt to capture some of the problems of grappling with a variety of source-materials in the writing of world history.

Demography and material life

It remains for us to deal with a few other important questions of a macro­scopic level in this Introduction, before setting out the structure and logic of the volumes themselves. One of these, which has also naturally concerned the editors of other volumes, is the question of demography posed on a worldwide scale. As we are generally aware, population statistics are both

1 ⁵ Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 2 vols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003-9). Also see the responses, often rather critical, to Lieberman's ideas in Victor B. Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c.1830 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

1 ⁶ See e.g. Frank Perlin, The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative, and Popular Infrastruc­tures in Asia and Europe, 1500-1900 (Aldershot: Variorum-Ashgate, 1993); also Sugata Bose (ed.), South Asia and World Capitalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).

¹⁷ Wallerstein, Modern World-System, vol. 1, pp. 215-16.

Table 1.1 Estimate of world population, 1400-1800 (millions)

unreliable and uneven for the centuries before 1800. Any estimates are thus based on heroic assumptions and extrapolations, and are better treated therefore as ‘guesstimates'. Here is one such broad view for the centuries under survey in these volumes.^[14]

These figures provided by the Italian demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci, based on an earlier estimate by Jean-Noel Biraben, while necessarily subject to caution, are nevertheless a useful point of departure for a discussion of world population. He suggests that in about 1400, the world's population was somewhat lower than that in 1200, mainly on account of the intervention in the fourteenth century of massive waves of the Eurasian plague. He then sees population growth as continuing more or less uninterrupted over the next four centuries, with a marked acceleration after about 1750. However, this growth is also accompanied by some significant redistribution. Asia, which had accounted in 1400 for 54 per cent of world population, had increased its share in 1800 to as much as 67 per cent. Europe's share of population was 16 per cent in 1400, and over 19 per cent four centuries later. The most substantial transformation in the negative direction was caused by the American population collapse of the sixteenth century, with only a partial recovery being evident even as late as 1800, based in part on processes of migration - very largely from Africa and Europe.

The difficulties with these numbers can be seen by comparing them to an alternative projection, from the economic historian Angus Maddison. The two sets of numbers are not entirely dissimilar, but they do diverge in some interesting respects. Maddison's global figures for 1500, 1600 and 1700 are always below those of Biraben and Livi-Bacci, sometimes by a factor of over

Table 1.2 An alternative estimate of world population, 1500-1820 (millions)

*Note: some areas have been omitted, so the totals shown here are not the sum of the five areas specified in the table.

10 per cent. It is only at the very end of the period, in the early nineteenth century, that their figures finally appear to converge.¹⁹

Further, Maddison's estimates have the advantage of pointing to a brute fact of early modern history, namely that India and China between the two of them appear to have accounted for half (or at times slightly over half) of the world's population. But we may also emphasize a significant difference in the two chronologies. Unlike Biraben and Livi-Bacci, who see a growth rate of around 18 per cent between 1600 and 1700, Maddison is quite reserved regarding population growth in the seventeenth century, which he perceives as barely attaining 8.5 per cent over the whole period. As we can see from Table 1.2, this is largely accounted for by a significant fall in the Chinese population according to his estimates for the period. This pessimistic view of world demography in the seventeenth century has recently been given further support by Geoffrey Parker, in an ambitious attempt at a total global history for the period. Parker argues that a combination of negative climatic events (the ‘Little Ice Age') and other natural phenomena, taken together with incessant war-making and poor political management, created a situ­ation wherein the global population actually fell in absolute numbers - much as it had in the fourteenth century. In his view, which is in fact more extreme than that of Maddison, ‘with the exception of Japan, New England and New France, the demographic balance of the seventeenth century was negative'.²⁰ This would separately imply a fall in population not only for China, but also for Europe and India, trends that are not currently accepted in a universal manner by demographers of the latter two regions. It is thus worth noting

1 ⁹ Angus Maddison's estimates are widely available on a number of websites, such as www.ggdc.net/MADDISON/oriindex.htm. See also Angus Maddison, The World Econ­omy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001).

²⁰ Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 674. that we are even today far from attaining a consensus with regard to all the basic trends in world demography for the early modern period.

If this is the case even with such a relatively simple matter as demography, the matter is immeasurably more complicated when one turns to questions such as the comparative study of production, revenues, standards of living and the like. The debate sparked off by the publication of Pomeranz's thesis on the ‘great divergence' has already been mentioned above. To sum the matter up in broad terms, Pomeranz wished to challenge an older consensus which posited that by the seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, many parts of Western Europe already enjoyed a far higher standard of living than even the most prosperous parts of the non-European world (and notably Asia and Africa). The significance of this claim had been twofold. The first was to suggest that Europe had enjoyed a long and unique cultural trajectory that had enabled it to produce unique and superior institutions that were in turn singularly well adapted to give birth to prosperous societies. The second aspect was the implication that European prosperity of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries owed little or nothing to the building of colonial empires, but instead had far older roots going back into early modern times, if not earlier still. In contrast, Pomeranz wished to argue, first, that the alleged ‘divergence' had begun rather late, and second, that it could not be divorced from the creation of European empires in the Atlantic which enabled certain crucial resources to be made available at cheap rates. While a part of the debate that has followed has been empirical - namely identifying appropriate data with which to refine the comparison, as well as extend it to other regions of the world like South Asia, much of it has undoubtedly been strongly motivated by rather elementary ideological considerations. These include the desire on the part of some historians to defend the ‘exceptional­ism' of European values, a question not unrelated to the contemporary politics of migration in Europe. But they also touch upon a large and thorny question, namely attitudes towards colonialism and in particular the Euro­pean colonial empires. One can see why it may be necessary from certain ideological standpoints to divorce the question of European prosperity from the colonial question. For to argue that European industrialization and prosperity were in some way linked to unequal power relations with the rest of the world would not only sully the immaculate birth of European modernity, but might even lend itself to the language of ‘reparations'.

At any rate, it would seem that the part of the Pomeranz Debate that has enabled a widening of the body of empirical materials from which compari­sons can be made has been somewhat fruitful. More technical debates on how comparisons should be made, and what should be compared, are also of some significance. But what is also glaringly evident is the extremely thin basis of the comparisons, even as they are made today. To take but one world region into account, namely South Asia, materials on standards of living are so thin, and so limited to a few coastal regions, that it is clear that we have no real sense today of variations within South Asia, let alone differences between South Asia taken as a whole, and China, East Africa or England. It thus appears that we are still very often better off with qualitative comparisons, with all their limitations, than with the illusory certitudes of quantitative comparisons, especially if these in reality reflect no more than the ideological prejudices of those making the comparisons. Whether these qualitative exercises are in turn of an extremely wide-ranging character, such as that of Lieberman mentioned above, or more limited examinations of two or more trajectories, is quite another matter. Certainly, issues such as the nature of political institutions or cultural complexes are far more amenable to this type of analysis.

In an exercise such as this in world history, we are thus obliged in one fashion or another to engage, whether explicitly or implicitly, with a certain number of debates regarding the appropriate conceptual categories to be deployed. Given the nature of the historical profession today, it is largely inevitable that no tight epistemological consensus underlies these chapters, even as a certain variety of viewpoints can be found in any academic insti­tution devoted today to the study of history. While the problem of convergence-divergence animates some of the writings that follow, other authors have chosen quite different angles of attack. Some privilege ideas of connection rather than comparison, whether such connections are of a material nature - goods, monetary media, microbes, animal species and so on - or in terms of cultural flows. Within this tendency, there are also historians who maintain a greater or lesser distance from classic ideas of diffusion or ‘transfer'. Again, the weight given to material and cultural phenomena often varies a great deal from chapter to chapter and from one historian to another. And yet, despite this diversity, there is little doubt that these volumes bear the unmistakable stamp of the time in which they are written, and can hardly be mistaken for exercises in world history from the early twentieth century, or even from 1950. To take but one obvious instance, even if the preoccupation is not entirely new, historians of the early twenty-first century are particularly mindful of problems linked to the environment, to the fragile nature of the ties between men and nature, as well as to the concerns caused by the non-renewability of many of the resources on which the prosperity of modern societies is based. Even if many of these limits were made evident in recent times, it is no coincidence that the Senecan prophecy regarding Thule, ‘the last of the lands', played the part it did already in the imagination of the sixteenth century. Early modern experiences with ‘island Edens' and the destruction of many ‘exotic' species certainly had a part to play in the matter, as historians of the last generation have taken pains to underline.²¹

An overview

The architecture of these twin volumes requires some explanation, as do some of the choices that have been made for the inclusion and exclusion of themes. The first book in the volume, Foundations, opens with a section entitled ‘Global matrices', consisting of five wide-ranging chapters that deal respectively with the relationship between environment and history, dis­eases, technologies and their transformation, patterns of urbanization on a world-scale, and gender and sexuality in the context of social history. These chapters of considerable scope, together with the present introduction, set the stage for later chapters that are often somewhat more limited in their geographical scope. These chapters naturally approach questions to a large extent from a materialist standpoint, though cultural questions are by no means absent here. They enable the reader to have a sense equally of the comparative and connective dimensions of practising world history today. Equally, they are interesting in that they represent the writings of historians across a significant generational spread.

A second set of chapters, entitled ‘Macro-regions', then takes a somewhat different approach, breaking down the space of the world into significant clusters, which have in the recent past been the object of significant historio­graphical interest. The section begins with a chapter devoted to the heritage of the ‘world-conquering' Mongols of the thirteenth century, which also serves as a connection into the preceding volume of the series, edited by Benjamin Kedar and Merry Wiesner-Hanks. As we are aware, several signifi­cant early modern dynasties bore the imprint of a Mongol heritage, some by way of direct descent (as with the Indian Timurids or Mughals), still others in

²¹ Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). more indirect ways. Individual chapters in this section then deal with the Indian Ocean, which has been the object of a real historiographical renais­sance in the past generation, the Americas before the European conquest and Africa. One of the purposes of this section is to provide a certain number of spatial building blocks in order to have a better-balanced world history. We note for example that Africa is often given short shrift in world-historical analyses, either because it did not fit the civilizational conceptual framework of earlier generations, or because it could only be treated through a reductive lens, such as that of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

A third set of chapters deals with ‘Large-scale political formations' such as the Iberian Empires, as well as Sino-Russian competition, before conclud­ing with a broad-ranging discussion of the Islamic Empires of the period, which deliberately chooses to go beyond the classic triptych of Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals. These chapters are concerned to accomplish several objects: to consider imperial spaces as zones of analysis, and to look into the interactions between formations that are often kept apart in a somewhat artificial manner (such as the Dutch and English, or the Portuguese and Spanish Empires).

A fourth section then addresses the problem of space in a somewhat different manner, by using the idea of the ‘crossroads' that has gained influence in the past few decades, particularly after the work of the French historian Denys Lombard, author of Le Carrefour javanais (‘The Javanese Crossroads').^[15] Chapters here treat classic regions such as the Mediterranean, but also more intriguing zones such as Southeast Asia and Central Asia, as well as the Caribbean. No doubt other instances could have been added to this section, such as the Baltic Sea or the South China Sea. These chapters also seek to build on the recent spurt of interest in ‘thalassography', or the use of maritime zones as areas of analysis to go beyond conventional national or imperial histories.^[16] The volume then concludes with an ambitious and wide-ranging comparative analysis of political trajectories, which seeks to understand both the gradual changes in state-forms worldwide, and the eventual emergence of Western Europe into a position of dominance - a process that we must note, however, was still incomplete as well as highly contested in 1800.

The first book in this volume can be considered therefore to be largely, though not exclusively, organized around spatial questions, as well as ques­tions of how space should be divided and reconfigured for the purposes of historical analysis. We have deliberately eschewed for the most part the use of ‘civilizations' as building blocks, a strategy that would in the early twenti­eth century have appealed variously to the Weberians, as much as to Arnold Toynbee or Oswald Spengler. While the analysis of comparative civilizations continues to have a hold on the popular imagination, in particular in the genres of the ‘West and the Rest' or the ‘Clash of Civilizations', it appeared to us that it had largely run its course as a heuristic tool.

Indeed, rather than simply assuming the existence of civilizations based on stable religious identities, as Weberians might once have done, the second book, Patterns of Change (Part II of Volume VI), here attempts at one and the same time to address large questions of circulation and interaction, and the issues raised by some categories that were treated as self-evident or natural by earlier generations. Its opening section, entitled ‘Migrations and encounters', is made up of individual chapters that treat migration as a worldwide phenom­enon, as well as warfare, a crucial theme that has been a staple of debates since at least the 1980s, in the aftermath of controversies concerning the concept of the ‘military revolution' in the early modern period. There are also considerations in the following chapters of various types of encounters and inter-cultural exchanges, as well as the legal forms and structures that mediated such exchanges. This is followed by an extended set of chapters organized under the rubric of ‘Trade, exchange and production'. These chapters address important questions that have preoccupied early modern world historians of the past several generations: the so-called ‘Columbian Exchange' of flora and fauna between the New and Old Worlds, the emergence and consoli­dation of the African slave trade in much the same period, the circulation of precious metals and the emergence of a global monetary system, as well as a consideration of the trading and entrepreneurial systems that made such exchanges feasible. Indeed, one of the advantages of organizing a volume on the early modern period is the plethora of debates that have abounded in the historiography in the past half-century. Some of these have concerned various sorts of material ‘revolutions': military, monetary, scientific, com­mercial and so on. But there have also been significant debates concerning what one might term ‘mental revolutions'. One of the most important of these calls into question a central category through which world history was once organized, namely religion. It thus appeared to us entirely justi­fied to devote a section to the problem of ‘Religion and religious change', beginning with a chapter devoted to the ‘invention' and generaliza­tion of the idea as a conceptual category, followed by a series of case studies devoted to Christianity, Islam and the East Asian religions. Since the ambi­tion of these volumes is not to be encyclopedic, there are certainly exclu­sions here, which are of course partly made up through discussions in other chapters. We have thus often used the case study or a series of case studies to illustrate a large point, rather than claiming to treat an issue comprehensively.

The second book closes two complementary reflections on the very practice of world history, in terms of tracing its intellectual genealogies into the early modern period. While this might appear to some to be an unusual choice, it seemed to us important, also in order to recognize the emergence into prominence of a new intellectual history, or history of ideas, in the past few decades. These chapters of a somewhat more reflexive nature also are intended to redress the balance in regard to the often highly materialist emphasis of world histories as they are practised in the English-speaking world. They also address questions regarding the various ways in which different trends and tendencies in historiography - such as ‘microhistory' and ‘world history' - can be reconciled, or treated as productive of a set of fecund and productive tensions.^[17]

Concluding remarks

Writing world history, like writing any history on any scale, is indeed a matter of choices. Our intention was certainly not that of the imaginary seventeenth-century empire where first ‘the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province', before subsequently attaining an even higher level, namely ‘a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it'.^[18] In the at-times artificial debate that has in recent decades opposed ‘national' histor­ians and ‘world' historians, a criticism that is sometimes heard is that the spatial ambitions of world history render it impossible.^[19] Yet, as Borges's story cited above makes clear, we are all pretty much in the same boat here. No one would reasonably expect a ‘national' historian of Thailand or France to provide coverage of every town and province, every social category and cultural manifestation, or every political tendency, within his or her space of predilection.

At the same time, it is clear that world history - whether in its present-day incarnations or those of the past - places certain types of demands on the historian that histories on a smaller scale may not. What is called for is a grasp of a wider and more disparate literature, as well as in many cases a mastery of a great number of sources and archives. But there is also a balance to be struck between monographic research and the synthesis, each of which require distinct skills and approaches. It should be clear that these two volumes, like the others in the series of the Cambridge World History, are tilted towards the genre of the synthesis. Yet, it should also be evident to the reader that the thirty and more contributors to these two volumes are without exception also perfectly familiar with primary materials, often in more than one archive, and thus have spent their professional careers navigating between the genres of monograph and synthesis. This is worth emphasizing, even if we have deliberately chosen to keep citations to primary and archival materials limited in the pages that follow. There is little doubt that, in other circumstances, these volumes might have turned out differently. Some chapters that were originally in our plan could not be brought to fruition, because authors had other conflicting commitments, or because of situations offorce majeure. It is also very likely that these volumes would have turned out rather differently if their authors had written from a different set of locations, rather than their current positioning, which is - with some notable exceptions - largely Euro-American. But the fact is that the interest in world history remains uneven in the early twenty-first century: if it is now often accepted in the academic worlds of the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany, it is still seen as relatively marginal in many other parts of Europe, and subject to often violent critiques, sometimes based on deep misunderstandings regarding its nature. Equally, in most parts of Asia, world history has been slow to emerge side by side with national or regional histories, although there are again some important exceptions to this rule.²⁷ This is partly due to the hold of national­ism on the teaching of history, although there are undoubtedly other reasons which also account for it. At any rate, it is very likely that a generation or two from now, if such an exercise were attempted once again, many new themes would have emerged, while others would have been discarded or reduced to a small place. Let us not forget that in the end, world history too is a form of provisional history.

²⁷ See the interesting reflection in Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge University Press, 20Il).

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ι.ι World map 1500

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i.2 Map of the world c. 1800