Another way in which women’s history can lead to a reassessment of history in general is by analyzing the concept of gender. Joan Scott has taken the lead in this effort. Gender, according to Scott and many others, is a socially constructed category for both men and women, whereas sex is a biological category denoting the presence or absence of certain chromosomes. Even physical differences between the sexes can be exaggerated (all fetuses start out female), but differences in gender are bound to be of greatest interest to historians. Of particular interest to women’s historians are what might be called “gender systems,” which can be engines of oppression for both men and women. World history
World history is the most recent historical specialty, yet one with roots in remote antiquity. The great world religions that originated in the Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—insisted on the unity of humanity, a theme encapsulated in the story of Adam and Eve. Buddhism also presumed an ecumenical view of humankind. The universal histories that characterized medieval chronicles proposed a single story line for the human race, governed by divine providence; and these persisted, in far more sophisticated form, in the speculative philosophies of history of Vico and Hegel. Marxism too, although it saw no divine hand in history, nevertheless held out a teleological vision in which all humanity would eventually overcome the miseries arising from class conflict and leave the kingdom of necessity for the kingdom of plenty.
These philosophies have left their mark on world history, yet few historians (except for Marxists) now accept any of these master narratives. This fact, however, leads to a conceptual dilemma: if there is no single story in which all of humanity finds a part, how can there be any coherence in world history? What prevents it from simply being a congeries of national—or at the most regional—histories?
Modernization theorists have embraced one horn of this dilemma. There is, after all, a single story, they argue; it is worldwide Westernization. Acknowledging the worth of non-Western cultures and the great non-European empires of the past, they nevertheless see the lure of Western consumer goods—and the power of multinational corporations—as irresistible. This triumphalist view of Western economic and political institutions drew great new strength from the downfall of the managed economies of eastern Europe and the emergence in China of blatant state capitalism. It is easier to claim worldwide success for capitalism than for democracy, since capitalism has been perfectly compatible with the existence of autocratic governments in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; but history does suggest that eventually capitalist institutions will give rise to some species of democratic institutions, even though multinational corporations are among the most secretive and hierarchical institutions in Western society.
Modernization theory has been propounded much more enthusiastically by sociologists and political scientists than by historians. Its purest expression was The Dynamics of Modernization (1966), by Cyril Edwin Black, which made its case by studying social indexes of modernization, such as literacy or family limitation over time, in developing countries. Extending this argument in a somewhat Hegelian fashion, the American historian Francis Fukuyama provocatively suggested, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), that history itself, as traditionally conceived, had ceased. This, of course, meant not that there would be no more events but that the major issues of state formation and economic organization had now been decisively settled in favour of capitalism and democracy. Fukuyama was by no means a simple-minded cheerleader for this denouement; life in a world composed of nothing but liberal nation-states would be, among other things, boring.
A much grimmer aspect of modernization was highlighted by Theodore H. Von Laue (1987) in The World Revolution of Westernization. Von Laue focused on the stresses imposed on the rest of the world by Westernization, which he saw as the root cause of communism, Nazism, dictatorships in developing countries, and terrorism. He declined to forecast whether these strains would continue indefinitely.
The stock objection to modernization theory is that it is Eurocentric. So it is, but this is hardly a refutation of it. That European states (including Russia) and the United States have been the dominant world powers since the 19th century is just as much a fact as that Europe was a somewhat insignificant peninsula of Asia in the 12th century. Some modernization theorists have caused offense by making it clear that they think European dominance is good for everybody, but it is noteworthy how many share the disillusioned view of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who compared the rational bureaucracies that increasingly dominated European society to an “iron cage.” More-valid criticisms point to the simplistic character of modernization theory and to the persistence and even rejuvenation of ostensibly “premodern” features of society—notably religious fundamentalism.
A considerably more complex scheme of analysis, world-systems theory, was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein in The Modern World System (1974). Whereas modernization theory holds that economic development will eventually percolate throughout the world, Wallerstein believed that the most economically active areas largely enriched themselves at the expense of their peripheries. This was an adaptation of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s idea that the struggle between classes in capitalist Europe had been to some degree displaced into the international economy, so that Russia and China filled the role of proletarian countries. Wallerstein’s work was centred on the period when European capitalism first extended itself to Africa and the Americas, but he emphasized that world-systems theory could be applied to earlier systems that Europeans did not dominate. In fact, the economist André Gunder Frank argued for an ancient world-system and therefore an early tension between core and periphery. He also pioneered the application of world-systems theory to the 20th century, holding that “underdevelopment” was not merely a form of lagging behind but resulted from the exploitative economic power of industrialized countries. This “development of underdevelopment,” or “dependency theory,” supplied a plot for world history, but it was one without a happy ending for the majority of humanity. Like modernization theory, world-systems theory has been criticized as Eurocentric. More seriously, the evidence for it has been questioned by many economists, and while it has been fertile in suggesting questions, its answers have been controversial.
A true world history requires that there be connections between different areas of the world, and trade relations constitute one such connection. Historians and sociologists have revealed the early importance of African trade (Columbus visited the west coast of Africa before his voyages to the Americas, and he already saw the possibilities of the slave trade), and they have also illuminated the 13th-century trading system centring on the Indian Ocean, to which Europe was peripheral.
Humans encounter people from far away more often in commercial relationships than in any other, but they exchange more than goods. William H. McNeill, the most eminent world historian, saw these exchanges as the central motif of world history. Technological information is usually coveted by the less adept, and it can often be stolen when it is not offered. Religious ideas can also be objects of exchange. In later work, McNeill investigated the communication of infectious diseases as an important part of the story of the human species. In this he contributed to an increasingly lively field of historical studies that might loosely be called ecological history.
Focusing on the biological substrate of history can sometimes capture a vital element of common humanity. This was an early topic for the Annales historians, who were often trained in geography. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie grounded his great history of the peasants of Languedoc in the soil and climate of that part of France, showing how the human population of the ancien régime was limited by the carrying capacity of the land. He went on to write a history of the climate since the year 1000. Even more influential were the magisterial works of Fernand Braudel (1902–85), perhaps the greatest historian of the 20th century. Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) had a political component, but it seemed almost an afterthought. Although it was not a world history, its comprehensive treatment of an entire region comprising Muslim and Christian realms and the fringes of three continents succeeded in showing how they shared a similar environment. The environment assumed an even greater role in Braudel’s Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2–3, 1979; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century). Although some of its claims seemed designed to shock conventional historical sensibilities—the introduction of forks into Europe, he wrote, was more important than the Reformation—no historical work has done more to explore the entire material base on which civilizations arise