The chronology of the world
From the start, Ranke acknowledged the “great whole” of “universal history.” Yet he never stopped contrasting it to the insurmountable meaning of the specific period. By hiding this antinomy inside the black box of national identity, Hegelian historiography appeared to resolve the problem.
And as nineteenth-century national consolidations helped propel territorial and overseas projections of state power, the universal chronology of national history modulated into an empirical possibility for nation-centric global history. Lamprecht claimed, as did Turner, that “world history remains the final goal of all historical science.”[108] By the first decades of the twentieth century, however, historiography's embedded national framework began to strain under the pressure of events. The unprecedented global theater of interlocking forces threatened the international and imperial designs of the most powerful nation-states, while new border-crossing lines of social reproduction increasingly fragmented political and personal identities. Territory and culture, ArnoldJ. Toynbee wrote in 1915, were becoming “less and less identical.”[109] What then could replace the nation-state as the unitary subject of history?Toynbee ventured “civilization,” a hemispheric framework that satisfied the demands of the global scale, while structuring into single, underlying units the otherwise dispersive trajectories of the present day. He maintained the familiar pattern, whereby his key term signified both a natural existence and an immanent meaning. Civilizations were “higher organisms,” each one a “living creature” with cycles of growth and death dictated by “nature herself.” A civilization was also an undivided “spirit,” a “law unto itself.” Each of these manifestations, in turn, inhabited a distinct temporal dimension.
The “life-history” of a civilization involved “movement in Time” and the “universality” of developmental stages. Alternatively, a civilization was “something permanent,” each of them, even dead ones, “contemporaneous” with all the others. Toynbee thus drew from the liberal commonplace of social evolution, but without its hierarchy of progress. Endeavoring to write world history free of Eurocentrism, he replaced temporal advancement with the spatialization of difference. Despite this, the spiritual side of civilization, unlike nationality in the earlier historiography, lacked the purposive agency of a corresponding state. The historical identity of civilization remained split, and hence unable to hyphenate chronology and immediacy. Throughout his career, Toynbee shuttled endlessly between determinism and mysticism: between tracing a “manifestly inevitable... ‘law'” across the “the history of Life on this planet” and witnessing for each “temporal abode” the “unchanging... inner light” of God.[110]Like Ranke, Toynbee acknowledged that his conceptions of spirit and history faced an “apparent contradiction.” And like Ranke, Toynbee's reception normally bifurcated onto one side or other.[111] By contrast, historians in the years between them proclaimed a confident reconciliation through the nation-state, and, in Toynbee's own time, events themselves helped to recenter historiography in the nation. As Toynbee began publishing A Study of History in the 1930s, various anti-Western struggles sharpened their nationalist historiographies, while rising intra-European violence helped to reassert the primacy of nationalist historiography there. These commitments remained well entrenched for decades, but the intensity and complexity of postwar global politics generated a fresh demand for worldscale historical writing. A long and large historical framework, William H. McNeill explained in 1954, provided “correction” to the confusing rush of daily events and could thus help build “a better and more stable world society.” The impulse toward thematic integration was additionally boosted by the high-modernism of what Carl Hempel, among others, called the “methodological unity of empirical science.” In anthropology, for instance, the idiographic culturalism dominant since Franz Boas now confronted the influential updating of evolutionary explanations.[112] Within historical studies, McNeill was surely the most prominent and influential exponent of these tendencies.
In his earliest works, McNeill concentrated on several present-day global challenges, including militarization, pressures on state sovereignty, enormous wealth disparities, and large-scale cultural and racial divisions. All of these rested, though, on an even more basic problem - “moral and religious uncertainty.” Technological modernization and the attendant worldwide mixing of ideas now corroded every long-standing system of belief. Western industrial rationality unleashed a global scale of human power, but left unanswered the question of human purpose. The intellectual foundations of social stability were everywhere fragmenting under this “infinitely varying strain.”[113] This split between universal instrumentality and disaggregated meaning constituted the dominant concern of McNeill's entire career. In The Rise of the West, he called it the “angry uncertainty of the twentieth century” and in the 1990s, “the radical instability that prevails worldwide.” Responding to this global crisis, world history - “generalizations and formulas... large numbers of men over long periods of time" - aided the moral restoration now needed for the human community as a whole. McNeill described The Rise of the West as “a secular substitute for the Christian worldview.” Expanding “the meaningful past” to the whole of humanity was a “moral duty,” a “holy calling.” In this sense, history functioned as a myth, “the most potent of all methods of political leadership.” McNeill regarded myths as accepted truths that “direct attention to what is common amidst diversity.” The “reality of world society” now required a single, unifying world history, “the grandest mythical plane of which we are capable.”[114]
McNeill's program encountered the obvious dilemma that disciplinary history was itself just one of the many competing strands in the worldwide tangle of messages, doctrines, and religions. On what basis could he assert meaning and morality for the globe given the predicament itself, the overlapping proliferation of other conceptions and beliefs? Here, McNeill swapped registers, grounding his “mythistory” on the universality of “evolution,” arguing that in the “long-run test for survival,” an “ever-evolving” world history would flourish over other, more rigid “faiths.” Flip side to the global crisis of belief, such evolutionary thought spanned McNeill's entire career.
Above all, he focused famously on cultural diffusion as a struggle of adaptation and survival, what he called the “mainspring” of “social evolution.” His world historical periodizations thus traced the major intervals of this process. In Past and Future, he periodized four great epochs of human transportation and communication: walking, horse-riding, sailing, and mechanical power. In The Rise of the West, he periodized the human adaptation process itself: the ancient era of transformative diffusions, the medieval era of interregional balance, and the tumultuous modern era of Western take off and global unification. In Plagues and Peoples, he downshifted the eras of adaptation directly into biology: early human struggles with parasites, coalescence into regional disease pools, Eurasian interactions, transoceanic interactions, and modern efforts of control. Across his many such books, McNeill labeled each of these periods an “equilibrium,” a more or less stable pattern of activity within which “revolutionary changes” provoked “transformations” that concluded one period and started another. With this concept, McNeill thus merged global periodization and evolutionary time. As systems of equilibria, he declared, historical and biological “patterns of change... are exactly parallel phenomena.”[115]In 1966, Marshall Hodgson identified The Rise of the West as “the first genuine world history ever written.” Since that time, McNeill's research and advocacy have influenced the discipline profoundly. In the era of “globalization,” his broad scope has moved to the center of historical studies. Network dynamics has largely replaced his attention to diffusion, but McNeill's two underpinning principles remain paradigmatic among today's generation of world historians. First, they commonly warrant their scholarship with an ethical import of global proportions, in Patrick O'Brien's words, to advance “moral purposes, connected to the needs of a globalizing world.” Jerry Bentley and David Christian, among many others, likewise endorse world history in this way.
More sensitive than O'Brien, however, they acknowledge the global jumble of competing conceptions, and so they also label world history a “myth.”[116] Second, many world historians employ naturalist and evolutionary models to explain change. Christian's chronology, for example, is driven by increasing cosmological complexity, and he ventures that a process of selection may inform both inorganic and cultural developments. Dan Flores calls for a “deep time” study of world “bioregions,” a “sequential” history that treats political borders as “mostly useless” and cultural heritance as a type of “natural selection.” The historical study of world systems likewise tends toward evolutionary accounts. And while most contemporary world historians continue to draw from traditional subdisciplinary models for interpreting change, even here, as in Bentley or A. G. Hopkins, global periodizations take from evolution its uniformity of time, what Christian in a related context calls, “absolute dates.”[117]Following McNeill, the study of world history has contributed substantially to the reframing of disciplinary scope, topics, and approach. Above all, it has insisted on relational and dynamic methods that historicize identities rather than presuming them. In its naturalist and evolutionary variants, world history has extended this transactional orientation to human beings themselves, who are then decentered - and opened - into ecological and cosmological contexts. In Maps of Time, Christian adds to this a wonderment and aesthetic joy that is otherwise totally missing from professional historical studies. The potential political and scholarly importance of such a stance is rich for disciplinary self-reflection. Yet the question remains, how does world history combine its descriptive chronology with historical meaning? How does evolution reconcile with moral purpose? Already in 1942, Hempel distinguished the homogeneous time of world history by limiting “meaning” to the “relevant connections” between events, whether “as ‘causes' or as ‘effects.'” Sixty years later, McNeill likewise displaced meaning entirely into sequence, professing that “conscious purposes...
largely cancel one another out, thereby sustaining an evolutionary process that no one intended.”[118] This subordination to chronology comes at obvious cost to understanding any past imaginings, beliefs, or desires. Causal sequences can condense and homogenize these meanings into factors, but only partially. Strongly functionalist endeavors, like Daniel Lord Smail's On Deep History and the Brain, are thus forced into large conjectures and teleological connections. As Wilfrid Sellars maintained, to rehearse an “intention” should not be confused with explaining it. A “way of life” can be “joined” to the “scientific image of man,” but not “reconciled” with it. For the writing of world history, a sentiment akin to this lies beneath Patrick Manning's sanguine call for “multiple dimensions” and “multiple perspectives.” It lies beneath Michael Bentley's conversely doubtful reproach that “one cannot pile up ‘monographs' from all over the globe and treat them as though they were scientific reports.” And it lay beneath Ranke's declaration that every period was immediate to God.[119]Related to this, the self-proclaimed morality of world history cannot rest on chronological sequence alone, and adding complexity or evolution will still not secure the link. Increasing levels of complexity could just as easily connote amorality, as in Nietzsche's idea of “greatness,” the uppermost incorporation of “multiplicity” and difference, and therefore “beyond good and evil.” In evolutionary science, various studies do find cooperation to be an adaptation, though generally as a structure, with locally contingent and indeterminate contents. As Michael Ruse notes in what is otherwise a statement of support, natural selection for cooperation provides “no foundations to normative ethics.”[120] Evolution may no longer be able to countersign for imperialism, but nor can it do so for some posited opposite. Smail, for example, seeks to replace the normal disciplinary “rupture” from the Paleolithic - what he derides as today's “sacred history” - with “a seamless narrative” of evolutionary “chronology.” He states, “I believe we are morally compelled to examine the hidden legacies that continue to prevent us from teaching a history that begins in Africa.”[121] One could easily agree, but also ask, who are “we” and from whence comes our moral obligation?
In the “seamless” recountings of world history, time is but a container, filled sequentially by causes and effects. Periodization thus appears like a typology, like a series of natural historical “ages.” Herder's differential temporality is gone. In homogenous time, periods are drained of immanent individuality, bonded instead to a universal imperative purportedly revealed by the globalization process itself. Here, world history shifts the spiritual unity of the nation onto the world as a whole. The field advances a moral claim, not merely as the civic application of its scholarship, but, by necessity, as its own foundation. Otherwise, the chronology of world history would become, like evolution, a description without meaning. As it stands, the insistent coupling of past events and universal historical significance is troubled by the convoluted global dynamic itself.The discipline's more self- reflective practitioners thus authorize world history as an integrative “myth.” Nonetheless, the causal chronology remains untouched, displaying in its scientism the irony of the modern “social myth,” described by Hans Blumenberg as “the residue left by a ‘demythologizing' process.”[122] The wedge in world history between sequential connections and meaningful purpose reproduces the global disjunction from which it starts. World history faces limits not because of its disciplinary roots in nationalism - the genetic fallacy of Heather Sutherland, among others[123] - but because it finds no political or cultural replacement for the synthesis of nation-state time.