World historiography during the early modern period
Starting from the late fifteenth century, the European conquests began having massive impacts on entire world regions, particularly the Americas and the coastal regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.
This also heavily influenced conceptions of history and “world” in societies that were being colonized by European powers. By contrast, in regions such as China or the Arabic World, European influences on historical thinking remained far more limited, and they did so until the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Yet European expansionism was not the only transformation of power systems that proved to have a strong influence on “world historical thought” in important regions. For instance, Indian conceptions of the world were affected by the Moghul conquests and the ensuing influx of Islamic literature.[36]The growing information about an increasingly interdependent world characterized by trans-continental flows of silver, spices and other commodities was chiefly gathered by European agents. But it also left its mark outside of Europe.[37] For example, Jesuit annotated world maps, which contained historical information, met such a degree of interest in early seventeenthcentury China that there were multiple editions within a year of their first publication.[38] A telling example are also the annals by the Franciscan-educated Meso-American nobleman Chimalpahin who in his native Nahuatl language recorded both local history as well as events from Europe to Japan.[39] In addition, important Ottoman schools, which emerged during the expansion of the empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, incorporated some newly obtainable facts about other parts of the world. For instance, already during the 1500s some historically oriented works dealt with the Americas.[40]
In Europe, travelogues and learned accounts about distant lands and peoples appeared and dramatically widened the amount of information available on different parts of the world.
An important example is Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes’ Historia Generaly Natural de las Indias, which was first published in 1535. Additional works include a history of China written fifty years later by the Augustinian Juan Gonzales de Mendoza,[41] as well as the writings of Richard Hakluyt (d. 1616) and his students who portrayed British explorations in different parts of the globe.[42] These reports were often highly constructed and written through decidedly Christian or other European lenses. Yet at the same time they provided information about other world regions and their cultural heritage that could hardly be ignored by “world historical” scholarship.The growing knowledge about different world regions fed into the epistemological crises of European historiography.[43] During the early modern period, many societies experienced their own “culture wars” or “history wars,” for example between religious and proto-secular narratives. In this context, newly accessible non-European chronologies and historical records gave the debates on the nature and purpose of historiography a very peculiar spin. Especially Europe’s universal historical traditions were being challenged through them: for instance, translations of Chinese, Japanese and Indian chronologies ran counter to biblical modes of historical periodization.[44] After all, Chinese timelines, of which proven records seemed to exist, preceded the assumed dates of events such as the deluge. This was obviously incompatible with the idea that such events had affected the entire world at the same time. Still, many later universal historians did not abandon the idea of global biblical timelines but instead chose to re-compute them. An important example for a work of this kind is Jacques-Benigne Bossuet’s Discourse of Universal History (1681).
As part of a more general trend, however, the connotation of “universal history”[45] became more disentangled from its biblical meanings.
Now the term increasingly referred to works that covered most, if not all, parts of the known world - no matter whether these works were based on Christian timelines or not.30 Partially reflecting the growing specialization of area expertise among scholars in most branches of historiography,31 the eighteenth century witnessed the publication of some prominent multi-authored erudite universal histories. An example is the 65-volume Universal History that was mainly edited by the Arabist George Sale between 1747 and 1768.It was particularly during the Enlightenment period when world historical reflections enjoyed an elevated standing among Europe's intellectual circles. Some of the most renowned thinkers of the time chose to engage in cultural or civilizational comparisons in order to accentuate their own ideas. For instance, Jean-Marie de Voltaire (d. 1778) or ChristianWolff (d. 1754) referred to Jesuit and other reports from China in order to espouse their ideal of political order without legal privileges for aristocrats and clergymen. An interesting development during this period is the growing number of cultural or civilizational comparisons. An example, which continues to be renowned up until the present day, is Charles de Montesquieu's (d. 1755) Spirit of the Laws. The work is centered on the idea that climate has a strong influence on forms of political, social and legal order.32 Other scholars focused on different topics, for example Joseph de Guignes (d. 1800), who even compared historiographical methods and traditions across cultural boundaries.
The rising presence of comparative scholarship should not lead us to hurriedly celebrate Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, however. Thinkers like Voltaire may have referred to outside cultures in order to accentuate their critique of conditions at home. Yet at the same time they regarded European culture as a uniquely enabling framework for human reason - and it was reason that they appreciated more than any other human quality or talent.
Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Kames (d. 1782), William Robertson (d. 1793) or Adam Ferguson (d. 1816) tended to operate with even more clearly defined conceptions of civilizational maturity when theorizing about changes in political, social and economic systems. In most works, the main narrative put European regions ahead of other civilizations, at least in respects considered to be crucial for the progress of societies. At the sameno longer widely used in Anglophone publications but the expression remains rather common in some other languages, including French.
30 Tamara Griggs, “Universal history from Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment,” Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), 219-47.
31 For the following see particularly Woolf, A Global History of History, pp. 281-343.
32 Charles de Montesquieu, De VEsprit des Loix (Geneva: Barrillot & fils, 1748). time, both Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and their counterparts in the rest of Europe still regarded “civilization” chiefly as a pluralistic category. The idea that every epoch and people was characterized by distinct principles and hence could not be evaluated by universal criteria was particularly enunciated by thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder (d. 1803).
During the 1600s and 1700s, European world historical scholarship certainly had no parallels in China, India or elsewhere in terms of the amount and quality of information available about other world regions. Yet at the same time, it would be erroneous to celebrate historical scholarship during the European Enlightenment as the global cradle of critical inquiry and multi- perspectivity. As discussed, most world historical works coming out of the European Enlightenment carried more belief in European exceptionalism than is often assumed. Furthermore, around the same time other parts of the world also experienced intellectual movements that criticized homemade notions of cultural superiority. For instance, during the late Ming dynasty some Buddhist texts argued that India ought to be understood as the “Middle Kingdom” rather than China.[46]