One of the most important links between ecological history and world history is the so-called Columbian exchange, through which pathogens from the Americas entered Europe and those from Europe devastated the indigenous populations of the Americas. The Native Americans got much the worse of this exchange; the population of Mexico suffered catastrophic losses, and that of some Caribbean islands was totally destroyed. The effect on Europeans was much less severe. It is now thought that syphilis entered Europe from Asia, not the Americas.
Overt moralizing in historiography tends to attract professional criticism, and historians in Europe and the United States, where nation-states have long been established, no longer feel the moral obligation that their 19th-century predecessors did to exalt nationalism. They can therefore respond to global concerns, such as the clear-cutting of rainforests and global warming. It has become obvious that the world is a single ecosystem, and this may require and eventually evoke a corresponding world history.
There is, however, a powerful countertendency: subaltern history. Subaltern is a word used by the British army to denote a subordinate officer, and “subaltern studies” was coined by Indian scholars to describe a variety of approaches to the situation of South Asia, in particular in the colonial and postcolonial era. A common feature of these approaches is the claim that, though colonialism ended with the granting of independence to the former colonies of Britain, France, the United States, and other empires, imperialism did not. Instead, the imperial powers continued to exert so much cultural and economic hegemony that the independence of the former colonies was more notional than real. Insisting on free trade (unlimited access to the domestic markets of the former colonies) and anticommunism (usually enforced by autocratic governments), the old empires, as the subaltern theorists saw it, had reverted to the sort of indirect rule that the British had exerted over Argentina and other countries in the 19th century.
The other belief that united subaltern theorists is that this hegemony should be challenged. Orientalism (1978), by the literary critic Edward Said, announced many of the themes of subaltern studies. The Orient that Said discussed was basically the Middle East, and the Orientalism was the body of fact, opinion, and prejudice accumulated by western European scholars in their encounter with it. Said stressed the enormous appetite for this lore, which influenced painting, literature, and anthropology no less than history. It was, of course, heavily coloured by racism, but perhaps the most insidious aspect of it, in Said’s view, was that Western categories not only informed the production of knowledge but also were accepted by the colonized countries (or those nominally independent but culturally subordinate). The importation of Rankean historiography into Japan and Russia is an example. The result has been described rather luridly as epistemological rape, in that the whole cultural stock of colonized peoples came to be discredited.
Although originally and most thoroughly applied to the Middle East and South Asia, subaltern history is capable of extension to any subordinated population, and it has been influential in histories of women and of African Americans. Its main challenge to world history is that most subaltern theorists deny the possibility of any single master narrative that could form a plot for world history. This entails at least a partial break with Marxism, which is exactly such a narrative. Instead, most see a postmodern developing world with a congeries of national or tribal histories, without closures or conventional narratives, whose unity, if it has one at all, was imposed by the imperialist power.
The project of bringing the experience of subordinated people into history has been common in postwar historiography, often in the form of emphasizing their contributions to activities usually associated with elites. Such an effort does not challenge—indeed relies on—ordinary categories of historical understanding and the valuation placed on these activities by society. This has seemed to some subaltern theorists to implicate the historian in the very oppressive system that ought to be combated. The most extreme partisans of this combative stance claim that, in order to resist the hegemonic powers, the way that history is done has to be changed. Some feminists, for example, complain that the dominant system of logic was invented by men and violates the categories of thought most congenial to women. This is one of the reasons for the currency and success of postmodernist and postcolonialist thought. It licenses accounts of the past that call themselves histories but that may deviate wildly from conventional historical practice.
Such histories have been particularly associated with a “nativist” school of subaltern studies that rejects as “Western” the knowledge accumulated under the auspices of imperialism. An instructive example was the effort by Afrocentric historians to emphasize the possible Egyptian and Phoenician origins of classical Greek thought. Martin Bernal, for example, tried to show in Black Athena (1987) that the racist and anti-Semitic Orientalist discourse of the late 19th century (particularly but not exclusively in Germany) obscured the borrowings of the classical Greeks from their Semitic and African neighbours. That there were borrowings, and that Orientalist discourse was racist and anti-Semitic, is beyond doubt, but these are findings made through ordinary historical investigation—whose conventions Bernal did not violate, despite the speculative character of some of his conclusions. How much distortion there was would also seem to be an ordinary, though difficult, historical question (made more difficult by the claim that the Egyptians had an esoteric and unwritten philosophical tradition that has left no documentary traces but that may have been imparted to Greek thinkers). But no historian could accept the claim that Aristotle gained knowledge from the library at Alexandria, since it was not built until after his death. If the idea that effects cannot precede causes is merely a culture-bound presupposition of Western-trained historians, then there is no logical basis for rejecting even a claim such as this. The nativist subaltern historians deserve credit at least for raising this issue (though, of course, not with such extreme examples). However, the price to be paid is high: if there are no logical categories that are not culture-bound, then people from different cultures cannot have a meaningful argument—or agreement—because these require at least some mutual acceptance of what will count as evidence and how reasoning is to be done. Most subaltern historians have therefore steered between the Scylla of contribution history and the Charybdis of nativism, and their emphasis on studying the mass of the people rather than colonial elites has had a powerful effect not only on the history of Asia and Africa but also on that of Europe and even the United States. Methodology of historiography