Trajectories outside of academia
Reflecting upon the evolution of world history leads us to some foundational questions about historiography at large.1 After all, we need to leave the international landscapes of modern-day universities behind and consider multifarious ways of dealing with the past, throughout the world.
Particularly if we are regarding a wide variety of cultural contexts, history and historiography are rather hard to define. Quite a lot of scholars have debated the demarcation lines between history and other genres such as literature. For example, there is the question whether to include oral traditions such as legends, myths or even songs into the picture. The same is the case with religious texts, which played an important role in the genesis of historical scholarship.[17] [18]In recent years, academic historians have become somewhat more reluctant to use modern Western definitions as the universal standard from which “historiography” can be understood. This growing willingness to pay more attention to other genres and cultural possibilities also impacts the ways in which we conceptualize the trajectories of “world history.” When we have to be more flexible with the meaning of “history,” it will be impossible to define the “world” in “world history” as a space of clear-cut, universal dimensions. In any culture and time period, the history of the world could only possibly mean the history of one's own world, that is, the world one was exposed to through lived experiences, personal travels and the accounts of others. In that sense, the worlds of a fourteenth-century Maya, a Northern European, a Japanese or a Polynesian were certainly unlike each other. Yet at the same time they had a decisive element in common: they all reached far beyond single political realms or cultural habitats.
Seen from this perspective, world history differed from other forms of history in the very basic sense that it not only focused on one's own heritage but also sought to include “others” into the picture.
If we define world history along those very basic lines, we certainly find important examples for it all over the globe. This is even the case with societies that did not transmit historical information through writing but rather orally, often using special mnemonic techniques.[19] For instance, in Australia Aboriginal legends and songs dealt with the history of the known world and its peoples.[20] An African example are the Arokin, a professional group in the Yoruba kingdom in present-day Nigeria, Togo and Benin, whose task has been to remember experiences and recount them orally.[21] Already at a rather early stage, the accounts of Arabic travelers and traders impacted this tradition by providing information about other parts of the world. In return, Sub-Saharan oral traditions were an important source for written Muslim reports, which found their ways into Arabic “world historical” scholarship. As this example suggests, already at an early stage there was no categorical divide between oral and written forms of world history.[22]It would be flawed to treat such oral - mythological and other - traditions merely as the precursors to today's world historical scholarship. This would assume that these earlier traditions of world history have ceased to exist and university-based approaches largely came to replace them. Yet up until the present day oral accounts and legends play a strong role around the world, and so do decidedly religious visions of world history. For the latter, one only needs to think of the pluriverse of today's religious schools, a large number of which disseminate their own interpretations of the world and its history. Examples range from history education at many Islamic madrasas to the wealth of Christian world history textbooks in the United States. Particularly in fundamentalist circles, many of these texts are written from unambiguously Islamic or biblical perspectives, sometimes even demonizing other societies and cultures.[23]
Hence there is little reason to render religious traditions of world history to a distant past, and the same is the case with oral traditions. Both are vibrant genres, and as such they continue to influence the world historical interpretations of countless people around the world. Given the state of the art of scholarship dealing with the evolution of world history, this chapter will not be able to systematically cross the divide between religious and secular forms of world history; neither will it be able to provide a balanced perspective between elite and other interpretations of the global past.[24]1 will chiefly concentrate on educated circles and highbrow texts, and for my discussion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this means that I primarily focus on academic literature.