Abstract
Professional historians were few in number before the twentieth century. Professional historians focusing on the broad patterns and connections of world history could hardly be found at all. In fact, the professional study of world history did not begin until one hundred years after the nineteenth-century creation of modern universities. Yet many thinkers before the twentieth century searched for broad patterns in human history, and their ideas and terminology continue to influence those who have come after. In this review of global historical thinking, I begin with the European Renaissance and trace historical thinking from that time to the opening of the twentieth century. Then I cast the historiographical net more widely, considering how world historical analyses from regions outside Europe and from earlier times fit into current understandings of world history.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a general survey of the historiography in the Western tradition, including a substantial treatment of world and universal history, see Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago, 1983);
see also Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, N.H., 1997);
Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994);
Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and the Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1998);
and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. Jan van der Duesen ([1946] Oxford, 1993).
For recent reviews of global historiography, see Jerry H. Bentley, Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, 1995),
and Daniel Segal, “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), 770–805.
Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds ([1566] New York, 1960); and Bodin, De la vicissitude ou variété des choses on l’univers (Paris, 1577);
J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Growth and Origin (New York, 1932), 37–38, 43–14.
In the words of Bury, “Both here and in his astrological creed, Bodin is crudely attempting to bring human history into close connection with the rest of the universe, and to establish the view that the whole world is built on a divine plan by which all the parts are intimately interrelated. He is careful, however, to avoid fatalism.” See Bury 1932:43. For a later and somewhat conflicting history of the idea of progress, see Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980).
The distinction between “history” and “natural history” remained as an artifact of the classical era. The Natural History of Pliny the Elder, widely read in Latin and in translation in early modern Europe, ranged across the cosmos, geography, medicine, animals, plants, and minerals, but also included painting and architecture. See Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols. ([ca. 70 C.E.] Cambridge, Mass., 1949).
Two fine general treatments of the dispute of the ancients and the moderns are Bury 1932: 37–126, and Hugh Kearney, Science and Change 1500–1700 (New York, 1971), 216–35.
Universal History, 65 vols. (1736–1765), published by George Sale, George Psalmanzar, Archivald Bower, and others. See also Thomas Astley (Pub.), A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. (London, 1745–1747); for an analogous publication in French, see J.-P. Labat, Voyage du Chevalier des Marchais, 3 vols. (Paris, 1728). For a discussion of the impact of this literature on later British thought, see Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa (Madison, 1964).
For examples of earlier narratives and compilations on travel, see G. R. Crone, trans. and ed., The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century (London, 1937);
Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, trans. and ed. Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones ([1602] Oxford, 1987);
Olfert Dapper, Beschreibung von Afrika ([1670] New York, 1967).
Vico [1725]; Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White, eds., Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore, 1969);
Peter Munz, “The Idea of ‘New Science’ in Vico and Marx,” in G. Tagliacozzo, ed., Vico and Marx (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1983), 5–10;
Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976); Breisach 1983: 210–13.
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams ([1756] New York, 1991).
Denis Diderot, ed., Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols. (1751–1765); P. N. Furbank, Diderot: A Critical Biography (New York, 1992).
Johann Gottfried von Herder, On World History, eds. Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze, trans. Ernest A. Menze and Pichael Palma ([1784–1791] Armonk, N.Y., 1997).
The ten stages in Condorcet’s scheme are divided by the following turning points: the formation of peoples, the development of agriculture, the development of the alphabet, the height of Greek sciences in the age of Alexander, the decadence of sciences in the late Hellenistic era, the rise of medieval scholarship in the era of the Crusades, the development of printing, the rise of philosophy shaking authority (Descartes), the French Revolution, and the future. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Carstat, Marquis de Condorcet, Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain ([1795] Paris, 1900).
On Condorcet’s antislavery activism, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975), 97, 328.
Leopold von Ranke, “The Great Powers” [1833], in Ranke, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, trans. and ed. Roger Wines (New York, 1981);
Ranke, Weltgeschichte, 8 vols. (1883–1887). Peter Novick, in a thorough and enlightening discussion of the flawed translation of Ranke’s tradition into American universities, argues that “Ranke’s greatest contribution was to apply to modern history those documentary and philological methods which had been developed for the study of antiquity … and in his development of the seminar for the training of scholars.”
Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1987), 26.
German compendia on world history began in the early nineteenth century, peaked late in that century, and continued into the twentieth century. See, for instance, Heinrich Leo, Lehrbuch der Universalgeschichte, 6 vols. (Halle, 1835–1844);
Wilhelm Oncken, ed., Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen, 32 vols. in 4 series (Berlin, 1879–1890); Ranke 1883–1887;
Hans Delbruck, Weltgeschichte, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1931).
For a single-author, multivolume work translated from German into English, see H. G. Helmolt, ed., The History of the World, 8 vols. ([1899] New York, 1901–1907).
Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, trans. Harriet Martineau [1855], introduction by Abraham S. Blumburg (New York, 1974). This was originally published as Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols. (Paris, 1830–1842).
For a useful selection from all of Comte’s works, see Gertrud Lenzer, ed., Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings (Chicago, 1975).
Comte’s second major work was Système de philosophie positive, 4 vols. (Paris, 1851–1854). Mary Pickering notes that Comte anticipated in the Cours the vision of a religion of positivism that he was later to emphasize in the Système. On this point and on the correspondence and debates of Comte and Mill, see Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1993), 505–38, 678;
and John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism ([1865] Ann Arbor, 1965).
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (New York, 1939);
David McLellan, Karl Marx (New York, 1975);
Paul M. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays (New York, 1972);
Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley, 1981).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York, 1968), 35–63.
For Marx’s earlier notes, see Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan ([1844] New York, 1964).
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon [1852], in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 95–180.
Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus ([1857] London, 1973 ). The manuscripts were published in a limited edition in Moscow (1939–1941), and then in East Berlin in 1953.
Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks, ed. Gordon Wright ([1847–1853] Chicago, 1967);
Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II, 4 vols. ([1849–1861] London, 1953);
George Bancroft, History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent, 10 vols. (Boston, 1873–1874);
Vasilii Kliuchevskii, A History of Russia, 5 vols., trans. C. J. Hogarth ([1904–1922] London, 1911–1931).
Perry Tapper analyzed the development of three approaches within national history, focusing on event, process, and personality: the taking of the Bastille as written by Michelet and Mignet, the British expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia as written by Parkman and Bancroft, and the personality of Peter the Great as portrayed by Kliuchevskii and Plataonov. Perry M. Tapper, “Who Are We? Tales of National Identity” (M.A. thesis, Northeastern University, 1991).
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (London, 1876, 1882, 1896);
Robert L. Carneiro, ed., The Evolution of Society: Selections from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (Chicago, 1967);
William Peterson, Malthus (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 226.
For the thoughts of a German historian who criticized the national framework but continued to use it, see Karl Lamprecht, What Is History? Five Lectures on the Modern Science of History, trans. E. A. Andrews ([1904] New York, 1905).
In sociology see, for instance, Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis ([1887] East Lansing, 1957).
For studies of Weber’s life and work, see Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber, an Intellectual Portrait (New York, 1960);
and Dirk Käsler, Max Weber: An Introduction to his Life and Work trans. Philippa Hurd ([1979] Chicago 1988).
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons ([1904] New York, 1958);
Weber, The Religion of China. Confucianism and Taoism, trans. Hans H. Gerth ([1916] New York, 1968);
Weber, The Religion of India. The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale ([1916–1917] Glencoe, 1958);
Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale ([1917–1919], Glencoe, 1952).
H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946), 46–50, 65–69.
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Ross and Claus Wittich, trans. E. Fischoff et al., 3 vols. ([1956] New York, 1968), I: xxvii;
Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 4th ed., ed. Johan Winckelmann (Tübingen, 1956). Bureaucracy is the focus of a substantial section of the third volume of Economy and Society.
Witold Rodzinski, A History of China (Oxford, 1979);
Ralph Croizrer, “World History in the People’s Republic of China,” Journal of World History 1 (1990), 151–169.
Philip K. Hitti, A History of the Arabs (London, 1937);
Abu Ja’far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari, History of Prophets and Kings, 39 vols., numerous translators ([915], Albany, 1987–1998); Ibn Khaldun [1377];
Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin, 1979);
Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography (Berkeley, 1972).
Stanford Shaw has provided an exceptionally thorough description of historical writing in Turkish from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1976).
Ainslee T. Embree, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (New York, 1988).
Edwin Reischauer, Japan: The Story of a Nation (New York, 1970);
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, N.Y., 1998).
Bartolomé de las Casas, História de las Indias, 3 vols. ([1566] Caracas, 1986);
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001). When the German scholar Humboldt spent five years in Latin America in the early nineteenth century, he was able to read numerous historical and scientific treatises (mostly unpublished) of scholars he visited; these became an important part of Humboldt’s publications.
Key Arabic-language documents on the West African savanna of the early modern era include Tarikh al-Kittab and Tarikh al-Fettash. Nehemiah Levtzion, ed., trans. J. F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge, 1981).
On more recent times in Africa, see Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (London, 1998).
See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, trans. H. M. Wright ([1961] Madison, 1965);
for a skeptical critique of oral tradition, see David P. Henige, Oral Historiography (London, 1982).
In the United States at much the same time, a widespread interest in oral histories grew up as part of the expansion of social history. In this genre, the interviewees spoke mostly of their own experience rather than that of their ancestors. See Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York, 1986).
I wish to acknowledge the structural similarity of this argument to one developed recently by Maghan Keita in his review of more than a century of African American scholarship with regard to Africa. Afrocentrism, he found, is not a recent intellectual fad but the continuation of a discourse about the place of Africa in the world that has continued, with many important twists and turns in the debate, from as early as the nineteenth-century writings of E. W. Blyden and George Washington Williams. Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (New York, 2000).
Copyright information
© 2003 Patrick Manning
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Manning, P. (2003). Historical Philosophy to 1900. In: Navigating World History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973856_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973856_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6119-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-7385-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)