Lund The Global History Manifesto

How the Global Optimism Literature Can Help Solve the Crisis of the Global History Subdiscipline
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-87-430-9990-1
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 140 Seiten

This book, in a sentence, claims that an ahistorical and ill informed doom and gloom atmosphere in Western public debate threatens to turn into a selffulfilling prophecy; that a new 'Global Optimism Literature' represented by e. g. Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker, based on vast historical sources and social scientific data fortunately intends to correct this misperception; that the also newly emerged sub-discipline of Global History in spite of severe birth diseases could contribute substantially to this mission; and when it all comes down to it: do we have a choice anyway?

Martin Lund is a Global Historian educated at the Universities of Manchester, Tübingen, Lund and Copenhagen. He also holds a graduate diploma in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lund, Martin

Leseproben

Introduction

Maybe our progress started when our ancestors got up and started walking on two legs. From then on we would conquer the world and create today’s global civilisation. Or maybe, on the contrary, that was when trouble started as we could then fight each other more effectively, subdue all other animals and all of Mother Nature too. What defines whether you consider the full trajectory of human development up until today to be positive, negative or somewhere in between? Is it your DNA, or the chemistry in your brain, your personal background and childhood, or your personal opinion? Or is it facts? This book, in a sentence, claims that an ahistorical and ill informed doom and gloom atmosphere in Western public debate threatens to turn into a self fulfilling prophecy, that a new ‘Global Optimism Literature’ based on plentiful available historical and social scientific data fortunately attempts to correct this misperception, that the also newly emerged sub-discipline of Global History in spite of its severe birth diseases could contribute substantially to this mission, and when it all comes down to it: do we have a choice anyway?

In contemporary social and political sciences, this universal debate could be characterised as taking its point of departure in two books, Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) and Samuel P. Huntington’s (1996). In summary, Fukuyama claimed that after the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union had fallen, there was no longer any viable alternative, like the one offered by the ‘second world’ of communism during the Cold War, to the Western, liberal, market economic, democratic state structure. A few years later, this optimistic analysis, at least seen from a Western perspective, was challenged by Huntington’s prediction that the World would rather see a new confrontation or ‘clash’ between ‘civilisations’, e.g. between a Western and a muslim civilisation, which he had defined along with other civilisations based on cultural and other identifiers. The dichotomy between these two works’ main theses has been representative for and often referred to in the discussion of the grand narrative of contemporary history and whether we live in a peaceful and positive historical period or the opposite.

Judging by the overall current picture drawn in the public debate in and among media, politicians and citizens in the ‘West’ at the time of writing, Huntington could be claimed to having been right in his pessimistic assumptions and Fukuyama to having been overoptimistic. A so called ‘doom and gloom’ atmosphere or trend seems to be dominating in the public debate based on a range of seemingly related recent events and trends in Western politics and society. Trump, Brexit, terrorism, the Syrian civil war, financial globalization, migration and climate change constitute a seemingly insurmountable challenge to Western civilization or even the whole ‘global village’. The doom and gloom trend is often manifested in media as the stated assumption of an underlying fact of our time in wordings like ‘in these turbulent times’ or ‘this age of populism’. The doom and gloom trend will be documented and exemplified in chapter 1.

Perhaps as a reaction to the doom and gloom trend, what could be labeled as a new genre of social science literature and thinking has emerged in recent years. We may coin this the ‘Global Optimism Literature’, which will be presented and analysed in chapter 2. Psychologist Steven Pinker’s monumental books (2018) and (2011) and the late Swedish human development and medical professor Hans Rosling’s TedTalks and written materials showcasing the lack of knowledge of the actual global physical state of humanity among Western populations may be some of the better examples of this new literary genre with most public resonance globally. Other prominent representatives are the Singaporean political scientist Kishore Mahbubani, Georgetown University human development professor Steven Radelet and Swedish historian Johan Norberg. These thinkers, who may not have anything else in common than an opposition to what is perceived as doom and gloom thinking, warn against excessive pessimism regarding the current and future state of mankind and attempt to increase awareness of some of the crucially positive developments in most recent human history including improved global human health, diminishing global (if not national) economic inequality, the relatively low number of current military conflicts and especially the near extinction of fullblown interstate wars. Most of these works seek to substantiate their optimistic claims with UN statistics, graphs, and many other types of data.

But where are the historians in this debate on optimism versus pessimism? One of the main trends within the historical discipline currently and in the later years has been Global History, which is a sub-discipline that aims among other foci to focus on the so called ‘grand narratives’ in history. This relatively new sub-discipline encompasses attempts to explain the emergence of trade routes, it follows particular trading goods such as silk or sugar and it is generally looking at the history of globalization, i.e. how did global convergence come about during the last few centuries and how did the continents’ inhabitants come into contact with each other. But in spite of the global scope of Global History, it is closely connected with and often ends up rather contributing to existing and traditional historical sub-disciplines such as imperial, economic, social and other forms of history. It is also marred by theoretical, methodological and moral challenges which allow some Global History debates to end up as blame games over historical wrongdoings and guilt questions regarding slave trade, conquests, imperialism and exploitation along west-east, north-south as well as eurocentricantieurocentric dividing lines.

The inability and the impediments of the current Global History sub-discipline are described in chapter 3. This description is relatively detailed and quite a few examples of grand narratives in Global History and their problematics are given compared to the other chapters. This is to show how advanced and prolific the discussion of grand narratives has become within this field that is promoted in this book as a central research discipline for dealing with grand narratives in future. It is also to provide an introduction to this interesting new sub-discipline for readers who are so unfortunate not yet to be acquainted with it.

As a remedy to the Global History crisis outlined in the preceding chapter, chapter 4 will outline the Global History Manifesto, i.e. a ‘call to arms’ of the sub-discipline’s representatives, Global Historians, to take upon themselves the responsibility to qualify the excessively pessimistic assumptions of the doom and gloom trend and achieve the goals described in the beginning and the end of this introduction. Borrowing inspiration for the title from Jo Guldi’s and David Armitage’s book (2014), this easily read monograph, or series of essays if you will, goes a few steps further than, and to a certain degree attempts to qualify, Guldi’s and Armitage’s main argument. It claims that, in addition to the ‘longue durée’ scope of history advocated by Guldi and Armitage, Global Historians have an inherent obligation to correct the public doom and gloom picture of human current affairs and increase awareness among the broader public, media and politicians of a fact based synthesis of human history, which constitutes a clearly rising curve on most relevant parameters as documented in detail in the Global Optimism Literature. Where Guldi and Armitage call for a much needed increased focus on longer term perspectives, here, the focus is on optimistic versus pessimistic perspectives. That the Global History sub-discipline, so central to achieving exactly the long term assessment of history that Guldi and Armitage call for, is not adequately represented in their can be seen from the fact that the book mentions the word ‘global’ only seven times, once in a direct quote by Thomas Piketty, five times in the endnotes, and once in the index. The present book serves to remedy this, probably unintended, shortcoming.

This book solely focuses on the grand theories and attempts at finding a general direction in all of mankind’s global history up to now and possibly in the future. As a result, there is no mention of perceived wrongdoings by any agents in history such as empires, states, ideas or persons. While focusing entirely on existing Global History literature and its methodologies, this book is strictly historiographical and methodological in nature and therefore does not attempt to deal with a specific historical field or period with its inherent source materials, methodology and literature. Only source materials, methodologies and literature relevant for a critical analysis of current Global History studies have therefore been taken into account.

Lastly, although focused on the perceived biases among many Global Historians and other researchers, the book has not utilized a linguistic turn or postmodernist historiographical or methodological angle as it, on the...