How do world historians organize events that occur across the globe? There are certain themes that world historians often use to guide their analysis. Think of themes as categories, ideas, or concepts that organize how someone thinks about a subject.
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World historical themes are focused on comparison and connection, broad systems, and global interactions. In AP World History, which is a specific world history course, there are some particular themes we use to find patterns, trace processes, and make comparisons. Interaction between humans and the environment: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like the rise of agriculture, the spread of disease, changing climates, or demographic changes.
Development and interaction of cultures: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like the emergence and spread of new religions, influence of different religions or cultural traditions on one another, and the spread of new ideas like humanism or human rights. State building, expansion, and conflict: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like how different empires have risen and fallen, in which ways rulers have increased their legitimacy, and different kinds of conflicts between societies.
Creation, expansion, and interaction of economic systems: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like the Silk road, the emergence of global trade, the emergence of banking and systems of credit, and the rise of capitalism, communism, and globalization. Development and transformation of social structures: To understand this theme, historians might look at things like the effects of specialization of labor, or how ideas about race, gender, and class have shaped social hierarchies. Themes cover some pretty big ideas--and pretty big movements across space and time!
But these big ideas are all made up of details from smaller case studies, and understanding these specific historical events and processes in a bigger context is the engine that drives world historical thinking. This specific historical knowledge gives you the raw material to build understanding of bigger processes, systems, and themes. For example, the Silk Road is a subject of world historical interest because it provides many instances of economic, cultural, and environmental interactions. By zooming in on some specific examples of these interactions, you can start to develop a wider understanding of how trade patterns developed and changed, how cultures interacted and adapted, or how diseases spread.
Studying the Silk Road can reveal connections between things as diverse as the Chinese silk industry, Buddhism, and plagues! For over 1, years, the Silk Road—or, more accurately, roads —connected much of the Eastern Hemisphere through trade.
Not just goods, but also ideas and diseases accompanied traders, missionaries, and armies as they travelled these routes. A look at the Silk Road might take you to a specific caravan in Central Asia, where you might look at how Buddhist religious beliefs traveled, changed, and spread. World history involves thinking on different scales--zooming in and zooming out--and shifting focus. The questions of World History. Historians try to understand what happened in the past by asking questions. More specifically, historians ask particular kinds of questions:.
Type of historical question Example Contextualization What was the historical context for a specific historical development or process?
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How might the content of a historical document or artifact be affected by the circumstances in which it was created? Comparison How similiar were certain things?
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What differences existed between certain things? Causation Why did something happen? What were the effects of something? Continuity and change What has stayed the same over time? How did something change over time? World historians ask these same kinds of questions—usually just on a broader scale! However, the different focus of each historian will lead them to ask questions about the Industrial Revolution on different scales.
Data from Paul Bairoch "International industrialization levels from to Through this lens, Ferguson viewed world history as humanities struggle to reach an ideal society. Henry Home, Lord Kames was a philosopher during the Enlightenment and contributed to the study or world history. Then, in order to form larger groups, humans transitioned into the second stage when they began to domesticate animals. The third stage was the development of agriculture. This new technology established trade and higher levels of cooperation amongst sizable groups of people.
With the gathering of people into agricultural villages, laws and social obligations needed to be developed so a form of order could be maintained. The fourth, and final stage, involved humans moving into market towns and seaports where agriculture was not the focus.
What is World History?
Instead, commerce and other forms of labor arouse in a society. By defining the stages of human history, Homes influenced his successors. He also contributed to the development of other studies such as sociology and anthropology. World history became a popular genre in the 20th century with universal history. Influential writers who have reached wide audiences include H. Wells , Oswald Spengler , Arnold J. Spengler's Decline of the West 2 vol — compared nine organic cultures: His book was a smashing success among intellectuals worldwide as it predicted the disintegration of European and American civilization after a violent "age of Caesarism," arguing by detailed analogies with other civilizations.
It deepened the post-World War I pessimism in Europe, and was warmly received by intellectuals in China, India, and Latin America who hoped his predictions of the collapse of European empires would soon come true.
In —, Toynbee's ten-volume A Study of History came out in three separate installments. He followed Spengler in taking a comparative topical approach to independent civilizations.
History of human rights
Toynbee said they displayed striking parallels in their origin, growth, and decay. Toynbee rejected Spengler's biological model of civilizations as organisms with a typical life span of 1, years. Like Sima Qian , Toynbee explained decline as due to their moral failure. Many readers rejoiced in his implication in vols.
Volumes 7—10, published in , abandoned the religious message, and his popular audience slipped away, while scholars picked apart his mistakes. McNeill wrote The Rise of the West to improve upon Toynbee by showing how the separate civilizations of Eurasia interacted from the very beginning of their history, borrowing critical skills from one another, and thus precipitating still further change as adjustment between traditional old and borrowed new knowledge and practice became necessary.
McNeill took a broad approach organized around the interactions of peoples across the Earth. Such interactions have become both more numerous and more continual and substantial in recent times. Before about , the network of communication between cultures was that of Eurasia. The term for these areas of interaction differ from one world historian to another and include world-system and ecumene. Whatever it is called, the importance of these intercultural contacts has begun to be recognized by many scholars.
Walter Wallbank and Alastair M. With additional authors, this very successful work went through numerous editions up to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It attempted to include all the elements of history — social, economic, political, religious, aesthetic, legal, and technological. Dunn at San Diego State are leaders in promoting innovative teaching methods.
What is World History?
In schools of architecture in the U. This reflects a decade-long effort to move past the standard Euro-centric approach that had dominated the field. In recent years, the relationship between African and world history has shifted rapidly from one of antipathy to one of engagement and synthesis. Reynolds surveys the relationship between African and world histories, with an emphasis on the tension between the area studies paradigm and the growing world-history emphasis on connections and exchange across regional boundaries.
A closer examination of recent exchanges and debates over the merits of this exchange is also featured. Reynolds sees the relationship between African and world history as a measure of the changing nature of historical inquiry over the past century. The theory divides the history of the world into the following periods: Regna Darnell and Frederic Gleach argue that, in the Soviet Union, the Marxian theory of history was the only accepted orthodoxy, and stifled research into other schools of thought on history.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the academic field. For a global overview of historical events, see History of the world. For the album by Mad at the World, see World History album. Oxford University Press, , pp. The Rise of the Rich: Retrieved 25 May Qin Dynasty 3rd ed. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, 3 vols. Henry Miers , Sir; John Dowson. The Muhammadan Period Vol 3. An Introduction to History ed. The Soul and the Body in Hegel's Anthropology. History of Philosophy Quarterly. An Essay on the History of Civil Society.
The University of Chicago. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: Explicit use of et al. Reynolds, "Africa and World History: Historical materialism is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself" Marx, Karl: Letter to editor of the Russian paper Otetchestvennye Zapiskym , His ideas, he explains, are based on a concrete study of the actual conditions that pertained in Europe. The Community of Rights 2 ed.
University of Chicago Press. Marxists sometimes distinguish between 'personal property' and 'private property,' the former consisting in consumer goods directly used by the owner, while the latter is private ownership of the major means of production.