Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term world history means different things to different people. To some it brings to mind a basic survey of all the world's past. To others it means foreign history – the history of lands other than one's own. To a few it retains a meta-physical scent, recalling the efforts of Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, and others to distill philosophical significance from the historical record. To many it carries strong macrosociological connotations, reflecting the influence of dependency economics and world-system analysis across the boundary lines of several scholarly disciplines. As understood by a growing constituency, however, the term world history suggests yet a different approach to the past. It does not imply that historians must deal with the entire history of all the world's peoples, and certainly not all at the same time. It refers instead to historical scholarship that explicitly compares experiences across the boundary lines of societies, or that examines interactions between peoples of different societies, or that analyzes large-scale historical patterns and processes that transcend individual societies. This kind of world history deals with historical processes that have not respected national, political, geographical, or cultural boundary lines, but rather have influenced affairs on transregional, continental, hemispheric, and global scales. These processes include ... log in or subscribe to read full text