The professionalization of historical scholarship and world historical ideas
World historical narratives depicting Europe as a self-enveloping culture of rationality became even more pronounced and widely shared during the nineteenth century. Moreover, they now started gaining more ground outside of the West.
Eurocentric interpretations of the world's past were conditioned by the present: the global frameworks of a century in which much of the planet's landmass was subjugated under European rule. During the 1800s and early 1900s it was particularly the spread of history education systems and university-based departments that helped to translate Eurocentric world orders into commonly accepted ways of world historical thinking. In an intricate and drawn-out process, history departments with professors employed as civil officials were being established, first in parts of Europe and North America and subsequently in other world regions.[47]Modern historical scholarship around the world came to be characterized by similar criteria for obtaining degrees such as the doctorate, and it cultivated identical tools such as the use of the footnote. Furthermore, societies with highly divergent epistemological traditions developed similar definitions of what was acceptable into the canon of academic historiography.[48] There was a growing demand for Western-style scholarship that, however, did not lead to a complete homogenization of historical thinking across the globe. Rather, locally specific traditions continued to season patterns and paradigms even within new forms of university-based historical scholarship.
Also in the field of historiography, the emerging global academic system did not operate on the logics of a flat world. Rather, the power patterns of a colonial or imperialist world order left a deep imprint on the professional milieu of academic historians, which was nationally divided but at the same time transnationally entangled.[49] In other words, from its very beginnings the global system of academic historiography, the single national units were not horizontally aligned.
As a global network of knowledge, academic historiography was characterized by significant hierarchies that reflected nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western dominance. In this pattern, the position of central societies and peripheral ones became clearly visible in daily academic practice. For example, historians in societies such as Germany, France, Great Britain or the United States only needed to be familiar with scholarship in some supposedly “advanced” key societies in the West. By contrast, their colleagues in other parts of the world, ranging from Chile to Japan, could hardly build a career as historians without even considering (either through translations or through reading relevant texts in English) the most relevant literature produced in the West.[50]These hierarchical sociologies of knowledge also impacted the ways in which world historical narratives developed in different societies around the globe. In Europe, the tendency to narrate the history of the world while assuming the privileged position of a higher civilization got even more accentuated during the 1800s. Moreover, the notion that European learning was equipped with unique amounts of information about other cultures added further stimulus to the idea that as a global powerhouse, the continent was uniquely equipped with the potential to develop master narratives for the rest of the world. Whereas many Enlightenment thinkers had at least professed the ideals of civilizational learning, the most influential world historical works of the nineteenth century were written from the posture of a higher civilization. The readiness to accept alternative cultural perspectives as viable options decisively declined.
There was also a shrinking interest in scholarship that was trying to relate Western history to other cultural experiences in a rather equal manner. Many of Europe's most influential thinkers now envisioned history ultimately as a progressive force that was no longer driven by providence but by civilizational achievements.
An important example is the positivism of Auguste Comte (d. 1857), who regarded evolvement toward higher forms of sociopolitical order as one of the main principles of history. His positivism was based on the idea that scientific knowledge, which was seen as universal and basically without cultural attributes, was a key to achieving progress.[51] Needless to say, he regarded parts of Europe as the cradle of scientism, which seemed to elevate their history above any other cultural experience.In addition, historical interpretations by representatives of German idealism, most notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831), were committed to the idea of human progress but operated on different assumptions. Hegel doubted the existence of absolute truths and rather assumed that all ideas were closely interconnected with their own historical contexts. According to him, historical interpretations progressed with the self-realization of human kind at large. For Hegel this meant that only at the end of human progress, which he understood as a self-enveloping process of individual and collective freedom, would it be possible to gain a holistic perspective of the meaning of history. In Hegel's eyes, it was European societies, most notably Prussia, which had come close to establishing the societal and political conditions of human freedom. His verdict on other civilizations was that they were either, like Africa, without any kind of historical progress or, as in the case of China, stuck in rather early stages of it.
Such crude Eurocentrism was by no means limited to positivism and German idealism but also dominated many other nineteenth-century philosophical schools, including Marxism.[52] Even Max Weber's civilizational comparisons, which stemmed from very different academic traditions, were chiefly based on the hypothesis that in contrast to all other cultures, Europe had given birth to a civilization with uniquely rational and hence universalizable character traits.[53] While Weber certainly was not a blind advocate of progress, his famous introduction to The Sociology of World Religions is centered on a cascade of questions about what character traits of European civilization were lacking elsewhere in the world.[54]
Certainly, also in the West there were counter-currents to this Eurocentric mainstream. Yet at the same time, nineteenth-century European cultural identities and visions of world order not only manifested themselves through changing world historical narratives.
They also grew visible through the changing position of world history within the guildhalls of historians. Universal history or world history as a genre itself became far more marginalized in Europe than it had been before. As an overall trend, knowledge about world regions outside of the West was less and less regarded as belonging to the standard portfolio of modern education. Generally speaking, the rest of the world was seen as too far behind the Western engine to be seriously studied as a guide or reference. Around the same time, the study of world regions such as China or India was segregated into special fields like sinology or indology, which were largely philologically oriented and primarily focused on the premodern period.[55]In the newly established history departments it was the new national histories that were commonly regarded as defining the rhythm of the field. In addition to other intellectual transformations this meant that macroscopic cultural and social comparisons declined both in number and impact. Within this changing intellectual climate, world historical accounts continued being written but were often regarded as emerging from a fading genre. Moreover, many world histories now tended to brush over territories where national states had not yet been established. This neglect of large swaths of Africa, Central Asia and other parts of the world reflected the now common idea that the nation state constituted the highest form of political order.
While (or after) this was happening in Europe, a related trend took place in a growing number of societies elsewhere. The outcome of this transformation did, however, often point in a very different direction. In many societies, ranging from the Ottoman Empire to China and from India to Japan, “world history” started gaining a more prominent standing rather than declining in importance. It did so in conjunction with the growing appeal of national historiography and new, scientific methodologies.
The new importance of world history in a good number of countries outside of the West reflected an important intellectual transformation spreading across several influential opinion camps: Western powers were often not only regarded as almost worldwide hegemons but also as the source of ideas that were central for modernization efforts. As part of the same trend, a large number of historical works written on all continents did either explicitly or implicitly endorse the idea that Europe was a uniquely dynamic civilization whose rationalism, dynamism and opportunities for freedom carried a high potential for the other parts of the world.[56] Through studying the example of advanced societies many historians between Latin America and Southeast Asia hoped to gain knowledge that they regarded as immediately relevant for their own societies' modernization drives.[57]As a consequence, the history of Europe received much attention at both the levels of research universities and the general education system. In numerous states history education developed a dual concentration, focusing on national or regional history on the one side, and Western history on the other side. The latter was often institutionalized as “world history.” For instance, historiography under the Tanzimat reforms in the late Ottoman Empire, treated “Europe” as an important reference space.[58] Also the efforts toward gaining new conceptions of history in Japan were heading in similar directions, even though in this case Rankean influence was more accentuated than in Turkey.[59] At the same time, the Japanese education system put great emphasis on Western history or “world history” in addition to national history. Likewise, in China after the revolution of 1911 Western history became part of the middle school and, a little later, of university curricula[60] - which reflected a common tendency to conceptualize the pathways of Western Europe and the Atlantic as the epicenter of a global transformation.[61]
Outside of the West, this triumph of Western-oriented national history could occur in both independent countries and under colonial conditions.
In both types of situations, parts of the local elites displayed a strong interest in historiographical concepts and methodologies of Western provenance.[62] They played a strong role in nation-building programs of independent or newly decolonized societies ranging from Japan to Egypt. But also under colonial rule the cultures of historiography could acquire a dual character of this kind. Here historical thinking was often forced onto the binary lines of national/local history on the one side and the history of the colonizer or Europe at large on the other side. An illustrative critique of a colonial history education system was articulated by the Caribbean historian and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams (d. 1981).[63]