The relational shift: postcolonial, transnational, new imperial, comparative and new world histories
Postcolonial scholars also adapted dependency and world system theory. First brought to the attention of world historians with the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), postcolonial theorists enhanced political and economic criticisms of colonialism with cultural analyses.
Representation and language are crucial for the construction of an ‘Other': for example, Marshall Hodgson (Rethinking World History, 1993), Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe, 2000), Ranajit Guha (History at the Limit of World-History, 2002) and Samir Amin (Global History: A View from the South, 2010) argued that the language, concepts, periodisation and structure of world histories can minimise and even mask the historical activities of those ‘outside' the West. Guha's work advances an alternative, asking us to consider whether the work of the Indian poet Tagore might serve as the foundation for a new approach to history. World historians with an interest in postcolonial themes such as Michael Adas (Islamic and European Expansion, 1993) and Margaret Strobel (Gender, Sex, and Empire, 1993) sought to balance the demands of aligning the experiences of colonised subjects and recognising the specificities of race, class, nationality, religion, sexuality, and epistemic, social, political and economic hierarchies and gender relations.Dependency, world system and postcolonial world histories formed part of the wider shift in the twentieth century towards the study of relations between peoples across the globe. This shift is clearly discernible over the long career of William H. McNeill, who is often taken as a central or ‘father' figure in twentieth-century world historical studies. While the theme of diffusion shaped his first major world historical work - The Rise of the West (1963) - the depth and breadth of his interest in world historical webs of interaction emerged more fully in Plagues and Peoples (1976), The Pursuit of Power (1982), Keeping Together in Time (1990) and The Human Web (2003, with J.
R. McNeill). Human interaction on the largest scale - over the globe - was also the subject of new global historical studies. New global historians like Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (Conceptualizing Global History, 1993), Anthony Hopkins (Globalization in World History, 2001), Roland Robertson (Globalization, 1992), Manuel Castells (The Information Age, 1996-98) and Arjun Appadurai (Modernity at Large, 1996) looked to economic, anthropological, political and cultural evidence to track the phenomenon of globalisation - the emergence of an integrated anthropogenic globe - over the course of the twentieth century.Transnational, comparative, new imperial and new world historians were also interested in human interaction, but their works were smaller in spatio-temporal focus than those of other world historians. This contraction may be explained by reference to, among other things, the perception that the recent explosion in evidence made large-scale synthesis too demanding, and postmodern and postcolonial claims that large-scale narratives were instruments of intellectual imperialism. Of particular interest to these writers were phenomena such as intergovernmental organisations, internationalist movements, technological exchange and diffusion, migration and diasporas, cultural hybridity and transnational corporations. For example, Fernand Braudel (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Era of Philip II, 1949), Philip Curtin (The Atlantic Slave Trade, 1969; The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 1990; Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, 1984), Niels Steensgaard (The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, 1974), K. N. Chaudhuri (Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 1985; Asia before Europe, 1990), Eric Jones, Lionel Frost and Colin White (Coming Full Circle, 1993), John Thornton (Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680, 1992; A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820, 2012), Adam McKeown (Chinese Migrant Networks, 2001; Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders, 2011) and Matt Masuda (Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, 2012) analysed trade and cultural diasporas centred on the Mediterranean, Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.