Two new developments are reshaping the way we study history. The social and cultural theories that stimulated much of our writing, from the 1950s on, have lost their vitality, creating uncertainty about how history will be written in the future. At the same time, talk of globalization has proliferated like kudzu; it coils around any attempt to determine the direction of the future or the meaning of the past. Is globalization the new theory that will reinvigorate history?
Or will it choke off all other possible contenders?
Despite the continuing popularity of biographies of famous people and books about major wars, history the discipline is in crisis—and not just because of university budgets. The nagging question, so hard to answer: “What is it good for?” Once upon a time the answer seemed clear. In the 19th century, (male) students studied ancient Greeks and Romans as models for future leaders. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, history took on the role of teacher to the nation, reinforcing, and in many cases creating, national identity.
National history is still the bread-and-butter of history teaching everywhere. While maintaining its preponderance, however, it has changed, often in controversial fashion. National narratives were already coming under fire in the 1950s; political history, in particular the study of the actions of high-ranking government officials, no longer satisfied an increasingly diverse and educated public. Social history—the study of groups outside elite circles—rose to the forefront.
But success brought its own problems. Was it enough to add the previously excluded to the national narrative, or did the narrative of the nation-state itself require dismantling? Was the role of the historian to provide a cohesive national narrative, however narrowly or broadly conceived, or to provide a critique of the defects of any such narrative? Was history even about narrative? Was there even any truth behind our narratives?
Globalization offers a new purpose for history: understanding our place in an increasingly interconnected world.
To explore those issues, scholars and activists turned to new kinds of theories: Marxism and some version of modernization theory, that is, an account of the distinguishing features of modernity, how they emerged, and where they would take Western society in the future. But in time, historians also began to question those theories. Marxism was limited by its blindness to culture; modernization theory came to be seen as excessively tied to Western values and models of development.
A focus on culture offered a way out of those impasses, with new theories that drew attention to language, symbols, and ritual, and gave priority to interpretation of meaning over causal explanation. It was no longer a question of explaining why certain kinds of workers had revolted, for example, but rather of investigating how workers came to think of themselves as different in the first place. The new cultural theories were grouped together under various and often confusing labels: the linguistic turn, poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, or just plain “theory.”
Historians who pursued theoretical models have been accused variously of ignoring politics and of politicizing their studies, of paying insufficient attention to the agency of human actors and of paying too much attention to the agency of all-too-unique individuals, of attributing too much to words in general and not enough to particular words in social, economic, and political documents. Those criticisms, though not without their merits, overlook the rhetorical and political nature of the reference to culture.
Proponents of cultural theories object to attempts to reduce culture to something else. They do not agree on one meaning of culture (or language, or discourse), but frankly they do not worry much about their failure to agree on definitions. They are more interested in rejecting views of culture as an automatic byproduct of economic forces or social position.
That helped blow apart the consensus about the utility of history, but it failed to offer an alternative to earlier social theories. What began as a penetrating critique ended up seeming less like a battering ram and more like that proverbial sucking sound of a flushing toilet.
Must historians choose between a return to the previous approaches or no approach at all?
Globalization offers a compelling alternative. It tells a global story, even though it often still privileges the West, and it offers a return to the “big questions,” such as how and why the West rose to global hegemony. Where cultural theories emphasized the local and the micro-historical, globalization underlines the importance of the transnational and macro-historical.
It also offers a new purpose for history: understanding our place in an increasingly interconnected world.
Globalization, however, is not without its own problems of explanation. Much depends on how it is studied, in particular whether it is approached from the top down or the bottom up. Viewed from the top down, globalization is a process that transforms every part of the globe. Viewed from the bottom up, it is more likely to be a series of transnational processes in which the histories of diverse places become connected and interdependent. The shift in perspective does not lead to similar final results; on the contrary, the different perspectives yield divergent understandings of what globalization has been and is as a process.
The top-down perspective is one of world or global history. The international patterns of the exchange of goods and peoples almost inevitably take pride of place. If trade or commercial exchange is not foregrounded, then the movements of peoples and diseases are instead. The importance assigned to worldwide processes and especially economics derives to some extent from the availability or lack of availability of data. It is easier to compare per-capita income, for example, than it is to measure opportunities for personal development that take other, noneconomic forms. For earlier periods, economic indicators may be the only quantitative ones that are readily available. Just by virtue of enlarging the scale, then, the globalization paradigm favors economic and other structural explanations.
The bottom-up perspective makes it possible to revise the globalization paradigm in fundamental ways. Economic motivation need no longer be considered inherently primary, and even in the many instances where trade is the goal, it is clear that other factors—changing tastes, personal interactions, family ties, literacy, religious sensibilities—make global economic transactions possible. Moreover, the nation-state is not necessarily the relevant unit of comparison, an assumption often made only because most economic statistics were gathered by states in the modern period.
The case of ostrich feathers—those that adorned ladies’ fancy hats in the late 19th and early 20th century—is particularly instructive. Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian Jews who migrated from the Russian Empire to South Africa in search of economic and social opportunities served as key middlemen in the ostrich-plume trade. They sold their merchandise to Jewish feather merchants in London. Some Sephardic Jewish family firms in London bought plumes that had been carried by trans-Saharan camel caravans to Tripoli and other North African cities. Still others came from Aden, where Yemeni Jews dominated the trade. The feathers were then re-exported to Paris and New York. The pioneering historian of the trade, Sarah A. Stein, explains that it has been largely overlooked because it falls “in the as-yet-untheorized interstices of economic and cultural history.” It can be traced only by following the local routes of supply and demand, however far-flung. Moreover, its rise and fall depended, as do all commodities, on changes in cultural patterns, in this case in ladies’ fashions.
This kind of bottom-up study effectively counters the notion that globalization is another name for modernization, that is, for the homogenization of the world through the circulation, absorption, and imposition of Western values. Globalization grew from a multitude of sources in the early modern period and beyond. The West did not globalize the world on its own; adventurous and enterprising people across the world brought their various locales into greater interconnection and interdependence.
Unlike some cultural theorists, the historians employing bottom-up approaches to globalization have not shied away from questions of causality or even from the so-called big questions. They have asked, for example, why certain commodities stimulated new consumer demands when they did, and why certain groups or places played extraordinary roles in establishing globalizing networks. Instead of looking at why some nation-states succeeded and others failed on the march toward modernization, they have posed a better question: How did different peoples in various parts of the world, not necessarily identifiable by nation-state, contribute to globalizing markets, religions, politics, and culture?
Now that those diverse approaches have shown their fruitfulness, other scholars, or even those who undertook these groundbreaking studies themselves, will be able to sift through the results and advance higher-level generalizations about the processes of globalization and how they have changed over time.
While those various approaches have highlighted many important aspects of globalization that were previously ignored, however, they still have fallen short in one significant respect: They have yet to provide a coherent alternative paradigm of globalization.
But a global, mega-long-term history is not the only story to be told. Historians have always known that answers to historical questions require careful attention to the scale of analysis. If you want to understand how industrialization got started in England, for example, you might very well study a city like Birmingham, one of the sites of early industrialization, or even an individual like James Watt, who perfected the steam engine. If you want to understand why industrialization started first in England, however, you would choose a different angle of vision, comparing England with other countries, like France, its chief rival in the 18th century. More recently, historians have argued for a comparison between England and China, noting that the technological superiority of the West was far from given in the 18th century and that understanding its eventual emergence requires a wider contrast.
Given the variety of questions that call for a historical approach, no one template is going to rule the roost. That variety is not a sign of the fragility or frivolity of history or the inherent biases and prejudices of historians. Seeing cannot take place without a standpoint. The constant evolution of the purpose of history is a sign, rather, of its vitality. Every new age looks for an understanding of its place in time, and without history it would not have one.
Lynn Hunt is a distinguished research professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and a former president of the American Historical Association. This essay is adapted from her book Writing History in the Global Era, to be published in September by W.W. Norton and Company.
