A widening view: gender and world history and world environmental histories
Relations of power between persons were also of central concern to women's and gender world historians. Gender history is not women's history, but rather the study of varying relations between constructed gender categories.
For example, Michel Foucault noted the shifting shape of ‘sexuality' across ancient and modern history (The History of Sexuality, 1976-84) and Ida Blom has demonstrated how varying gender systems shaped understandings of the nation-state.[15] More recently, Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Judith Zinsser have drawn attention to gender in world history writing, and argued that favoured concepts, narrative forms and even periodisation frameworks have served to render the experiences of many women and men invisible.[16]In the second half of the twentieth century, world histories took an increasing interest in the ways in which the organic and inorganic environment have both shaped and been shaped by human activities. Jared Diamond, for instance, looked at the role of environmental factors in the emergence of the ‘developing' and ‘developed' world divide (Guns, Germs and Steel, 1998) and John Richards at the environment in the age of exploration and conquest (The Unending Frontier, 2006). Brian Fagan considered the role of climatic phenomena like El Nino in shaping historical events (Floods, Famines and Emperors, 2001), while, in contrast, Mike Davis stressed the opportunistic use of El Nino by colonial powers to create a world market economy (Late Victorian Holocausts, 2001). John R. McNeill outlined growing awareness of the impact of human activities on the earth from the pedosphere to the stratosphere (Something New Under the Sun, 2000). Other writers have drawn upon conceptual models and theories from the natural sciences to explain historical changes: for example, in Nonzero (2000), Robert Wright looked to game theory, Stephen J. Gould (Wonderful Life, 1989) and Murray Gell Mann (The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994) disagreed about whether evolution implied increasing complexity, and Eric Chaisson tracked increasing energy flows from the big bang to the evolution of humans (Cosmic Evolution, 2000). More radically, too, writers like Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis (Microcosmos, 1986) questioned the privileging of human actions and argued for a world history centred on cells.