History, Histories, and Global Perspective

by Cliopatria

A few days back, Ralph Luker, Brian Ulrich, and Timothy Burke spent some time discussing issues of periodization and"narrative threads" in African History. I was busy changing diapers at the time, but a (no doubt brief) lull in baby care provides me with the opportunity to call attention to an excellent set of essays and resources provided by a special issue on"Africa in World History" over at World History Connected. Essays and articles range from an informal interview with Christopher Ehret to a reading list from World History Association Primus Inter ParesDavid Northrup to a nuts-and-bolts how-to by R. Hunt Davis Jr. I, however, recommend that you read everything. It might even make you a better person.

Full and honest disclosure requires that I admit that I and my mega-cool co-author Erik Gilbert contributed essays to the issue. But, hey, we did recently publish a book entitled Africa in World History, after all. It would have hurt our feelings if they hadn't invited us to contribute. Anyway, both his essay and my own address the issue of African"History vs Histories" as raised by Ralph Luker. Also important, and running through all of the essays provided, is the issue of how placing Africa in the wider context of World History changes our notions of African periodization and units of analysis. Conversely, how does placing Africa in the World History story change our existing classical/post-classical/medieval/pre-modern/modern system of periodization? Candice Gaucher raises this question in her own contribution. If regions such as Africa, the Americas, and Australasia don't fit our system of periodization, it doesn't mean they are"outside" of history, it simply means that our system of periodization is as yet poorly (incompletely) conceived.

It is worth noting, however, that the issue of"history or histories?" could (and should) also be raised regarding European History. Years ago when I was strong armed into teaching a European History survey, I was shocked by the oppressive orthodoxy of the"standard model" of Euro/Western Civ history. The whole idea that history worked its way from east to west (Greece-Italy-Western Europe-England-USA) struck me as rather hackneyed and silly. As an Africanist, trained in a methodology that sees historical evidence in many forms (not just written documents), I wanted to hear something about what all those Angles, Saxons, or other folk were up to in the centuries before the Romans started to abuse them... but the silence of European History textbooks on the subject was quite profound.

Some Africanists and Afrocentrics have tried very hard to find or create a single coherent"story" for African history -- just like the one presented in Western Civ textbooks. I think doing so would be a mistake, because it oversimplifies and stultifies what is really a very complex and far more interesting human story. One of the great things about World History is that it gets us to question what we think we know about and how we think about our own areas of specialization. That is a very good thing.

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Jonathan Dresner - 11/19/2004

Perhaps its my relatively shallow understanding of both Africa and World Systems Theory (WST), but I found that it worked quite well for discussing the West African empires, as well. I'm not going to argue strongly for WST, except to note that no broad paradigm is going to deal with those issues (locality, etc.) terribly well, but I don't believe that negates the utility of these theories as a starting place and a general understanding.

As an Asianist (a modern Japanist, to be exact), I deal with the same sort of expertise expectations that you do: chronologically unbounded continental knowledge.... But then, as teachers, we are all broader than our research.

Timothy James Burke - 11/19/2004

The hard problem is that even if you try to "undo" a periodization that skews to Europe prior to the time when Europe was a dominant presence in the global economy, you're still going to be stuck with the entire apparatus of the field of African history, which names its subject as "Africa".

An Africanist is expected to be conversant with Iron Age settlement patterns in the Sahel and with the end of apartheid in South Africa, pretty much the whole continent south of the Sahara and from the beginning of history to the present-day. We all know that we have specializations, and that someone like me who works on the 20th Century in southern Africa is not particularly expert on state formation in the 8th Century in northwest Africa. But I'm going to be called upon to be expert about both at various moments in my professional career. A Europeanist is not generally expected to be able to speak about the late Roman Empire and Victorian Britain with a roughly equal level of confidence, in contrast.

There's no way to undo that expectation that I can see, to undo the idea of "Africa" as a teachable unity. So even if you try to talk about "African history" before 1350, when there is in no sense any such thing as "Africa", you're still going to be pulled back to trying to make sense of very diverse things under the same banner.

Of all the single-theme approaches I can think of, the only one that feels marginally successful to me is the materialist/environmentalist one--Iliffe or Reader, for example--where the argument is that African societies have had to deal with some comparably unforgiving material conditions in much of the continent, and so share something because of it. Not really my cup of tea, and I don't think this generalization tells you that much (not to mention leaves out "African" societies which had pretty favorable environments to deal with) but it rests on much more stable ground than Afrocentric proposals about the interior or cultural unity of the African subject.

Commenting to Jonathan Dresner, there's actually a lot of world-systems writing on Africa; in fact, Africa is one of Wallerstein's primary points of reference in a lot of his writing. But prior to the growth of the Atlantic system, a world-systems approach has to restrain its interest to the coast of East Africa, North Africa, Lake Chad and the Niger Bend. Most of the Atlantic coast and almost all of equatorial and southern Africa have to drop out--they have low levels of integration into the world economy, but they are NOT peripheries in the classic post-1500 sense, either. Beyond that, the relative disinterest of world-systems analysis in locality, particularity, alterity, and contingency has tended to clash more subtly with the trends in Africanist historiography (and postcolonial studies) in the past two decades.

Nathanael D. Robinson - 11/19/2004

It's hard to not periodize non-Western history at least partially on events that occurred in Europe. The rise of the nation-state, able to project its power, was a global phenomenon. It is unsatisfying to reference externals developments when periodizing, but it seems that "modern Europe" was an universally experienced event, even if agency was constrained for some people.

However, from the Western Civ perspective, ancient civilization is the story of how institutions that would integrate Europe would come into being--the Church and the Holy Roman Empire (despite Voltaire, it was an empire and it did carry on Rome's mission to keep together the barbarians). And even if other civilizations also built on the achievements of Greece and Rome, Europeans continually rediscovered Ancient civilization (perhaps obsessively so), creating links that extend beyond the linear development after the fall of Rome.

Jonathan Dresner - 11/19/2004

well, yesterday, at this point. I don't know what it's called by specialists, but it's the period right before Early Modern, I think (500-1500 CE).

I looked over the World History Connected essays and was quite surprised to see no evidence of World Systems theory as a useful tool in teaching Africa. I find the language and connecting mechanisms of metropole and periphery uniquely useful in making sense of Africa's interestingly uneven development in this period and the post-1500 as well. I have to explain what I mean, of course, and it's one of several times in the World History surveys that I delve deeply into historio-theory, but it works.