2

Problems in global history

DAVID WASHBROOK

Perhaps the first problem raised by global history concerns what, exactly,
it is: what kind of perspective does it offer? As, no doubt, is the case with
all ‘new’ or revisionist movements in historiography, global history has
spent most of its time distinguishing itself from its antecedents and
clarifying to itself what it is not. Most obviously, it is not ‘national’ history
and, fundamentally, it seeks to break bounds with those traditions which
take the frontiers of ‘the nation’ to supply the ultimate determinants of
history, meaning, and identity.1 Also, it is not international history: a
history of the world written simply in terms of the relations between
different ‘national’ or ‘proto-national’ entities. In extension of that logic,
especially for the last five hundred years, it is also not imperial history or
the world seen largely through the lens of the ‘expansion of Europe’. In
global history, erstwhile colonial ‘peripheries’ are viewed as agents in their
own right, interacting with erstwhile metropolises and capable of effecting
change in the latter as much as they change the former. By that logic, too,
global history is also not modern history in the sense of history as
modernization: the transfer of the West’s unique modern culture to the rest
of the world or, more mystically, the universal sprouting of cultural seeds
that were first planted in the West.
Yet, if global history is emphatically not any of these things, what
precisely is it in its own right? This may be much more difficult to say. A
great deal of self-styled global history explores two different, though often
complementary, features. On the one hand, there are connections and
networks, frequently spanning vast geographical spaces and epochs, which
hint at the extraordinary interdependence of life on this planet, and over a

1
For a panoptic survey of the historiography of the global, see A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Global
History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (London, 2006).

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Writing the History of the Global

very considerable period: the tea, porcelain, and textile trades of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which linked artisans in China and
India to markets in the Levant and Western Europe; the sugar, cotton, and
tobacco trades, which connected labour from Africa to land in the Americas
to manufacturers in Bristol and Lancashire to consumers back across the
globe; the timber and beaver-pelt trades, which engaged producers on the
wildest frontiers of ‘civilization’ with the latest fashions of society in
London and Paris.2 The resulting networks created the context in which
were forged the commercial and industrial revolutions taking place in the
Western European ‘middle’ at the beginning of what we like to call the
‘modern’ era.3 The emergence of industrialization in Britain by the early
nineteenth century, for example, would now seem to have been a global
event with multiple points of causation; and, also, with an astonishingly
long gestation period, challenging previously neat conventions of period-
ization and, especially, putting facile notions of the origins of ‘modernity’
under scrutiny.
Equally, and on the other hand, global history may offer a rather
different orientation of comparison, which particularly seeks not only
points of difference between one culture or society and another—as in older
applications of the comparative method—but also, and crucially, points of
similarity. Very striking now, across the vast swathe of humanity who
inhabited a ‘Eurasia’ stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans,
would seem the similarities in the bureaucratic states, scribal societies,
commercial economies, and literary cultures (including, even, separation
of classical from vernacular traditions) that developed in them all at or
about the same time—if not in exactly the same way nor, of course, with
exactly the same outcome.4 Global history has helped to promote a much
stronger sense of the commonalities in human affairs against which to set
a much more refined appreciation of what precisely was different about

2
Classic works include: K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India
Company (Cambridge, 1978); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History
(Cambridge, 1984); Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England
(Cambridge, 2002); Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford,
2005).
3
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society
(Bloomington, 1982); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004).
4
Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (California, 1991); Sheldon
Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (California, 2006); John Darwin, After
Tamerlain: A Global History of Empire since 1405 (London, 2007).

22
 Problems in global history

some contexts, and may have given rise to further differences between
them.
So, then, connections and comparisons are the stock-in-trade of global
history, often giving a starkly novel appearance to phenomena, events, and
chronologies that had seemed familiar. But a new appearance for what
purposes and to what ends? How exactly does global history reshape our
perceptions of the past and the world in which we live?
Tritely, perhaps, it redirects attention back to the significance of the
universal—a concept that has taken a severe battering in recent years from
the post-structuralist revolt against the Enlightenment’s supposed
tyranny.5 However, that may be no bad thing in a Western intellectual
context which, since at least the rise of scientific racism in the nineteenth
century, has been inclined to give greater emphasis to the differences
between, and ‘incommensurability’ of, races/ethnicities/nations/cultures.6
In the world post-9/11, if we can find no bases for a universalist history,
we may have very little with which to oppose strategies of ‘communica-
tion’ between races/ethnicities/nations/cultures articulated principally
through violence. As Tony Hopkins has recently put it, global history
informs—it can be hoped—the re-emergence of a ‘global citizenry’.7
More prosaically, however, global history may also serve as a critical
tool to advance further that questioning and destabilization of received
wisdom, or certainty, associated with the original post-structuralism of
Michel Foucault, but whose spirit has rather been lost in the structuralist
inversions of latter day ‘post-colonial’ theory.8 In its own way, global
history also challenges ideas about authenticity, determinacy, and
authority (or authorship). If the global history of the ‘British’ industrial
revolution takes us to China, on the one side, and the Americas, on the
other, by what rights any longer does it deserve to be described as ‘British’:
whose, really, is it? Equally, if, in global history, so much appears to have
depended on the contingencies of ‘conjuncture’—on the often chance
coming together of events and developments having multiple origins, often
on different continents—what any longer can be said to determine what?
Global history provokes and promotes forms of disaggregation and
‘deconstruction’ in relation to which most of the signposts to our

5
Not least, in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
6
Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London, 1977).
7
Hopkins, Global History.
8
Robert Young, White Mythologies (London, 1990).

23
Writing the History of the Global

conventional classifications of the world, and understandings of its past,

get turned around or upside down. In a world made by the supposed rise
of the nation state, the driving force of European capitalism, the immanent
urges of modernity become dissolved into fragments, coincidences,
accidents which often appear serendipitous. Things fall apart . . .
Yet is it possible to be satisfied if matters are left only there: with global
history as a species of critique, pulling historical meaning apart but never
putting it back together again? The retreat over the last decade from post-
structuralism—and, indeed, the latter’s adoption of modes of ‘strategic
essentialism’ designed to secure ‘position’9—indicates the difficulty. To
find meaning, it still may be necessary to construct meta-narratives,
theories of determinacy and causation, ‘knowing subjects’ to whom moral
responsibility can be imputed. We just don’t want the same ones as before:
stories of the conquests of Western Europeans, theories validating the
‘genius’ of their Reason, moralities exposing the barbarity of their ‘others’.
But how successful has global history been, thus far, at finding or erecting
those signposts to a new, and significantly different, historical under-
standing of the meaning(s) of the past? It is here that a number of problems
remain, which is hardly surprising given the novelty of the perspective. In
particular, three out of, no doubt, very many sets of issues currently seem
particularly significant.
First, for the history of the last five hundred years, there is the problem
of what, actually, to do with Western Europe? Our older world histori-
ography was extremely Eurocentric: David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty
of Nations leaves no doubts as to who has wealth and who not; John Roberts
has entitled his version of world history The Triumph of the West.10
Understandably, there has been a desire to turn away from such positions
now, a desire to ‘put Europe in its place’. But how exactly is that to be done?
Some historians have suggested that we simply leave Europe out: in
postmodernist terms, ‘refuse’ it and seek to write from alternative, often
deemed peripheral or marginal perspectives.11 But there is an awful lot
to leave out: empirically, forces and agencies emanating from Europe

9
The concept was defined by Gyatri Chakraborty Spivak; see Donna Landry and Gerald
Maclean, The Spivak Reader (London, 2006).
10
David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998); John Roberts, The Triumph
of the West (Boston, 1985).
11
Gyan Prakash, ‘Writing Post-Oriental Histories of the Third World’, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 32/2 (1990), 383–408.

24
 Problems in global history

over the last half-millennium obviously did impact on multiple societies

around the globe and come to play an important role in reshaping
them. Doubtless, it would be possible to find some peoples and groups
whose existence has been unaffected by Europe: just as Richard Cobb, in a
famous protest against the centrality accorded in French history to the
Revolution, once found a man who had lived through the entire experience
of 1789–95 without apparently noticing that a revolution was taking
place.12 But he was insane and lived locked up in an attic . . . and one
suspects that many of those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who did
not notice the Europeans also must have been somewhat remote from
everyday life.
Rather more promisingly, perhaps, we might concentrate more on
‘South-to-South’ contacts: interactions between non-European societies,
which have become marginalized in our understanding by the central focus
on Europe. Very often, these were extremely important and extensive,
especially so far as the Chinese and Islamic worlds were concerned. Recent
studies have revealed ‘networks of trade and civilization’, pre-modern
‘world systems’, and ‘informal’ economic and cultural empires stretch-
ing across large areas of the globe long before Western Europeans emerged
from their harbours, or even from their caves.13 They have also started to
challenge the significance attached to the European historical experience
with regard to some of the latter’s own chosen themes: for example, Islamic
Roots of Capitalism.14 However, the problem again is that, post-1500, very
often what was carried along South-to-South trade routes or knowledge
networks appears to have involved, or to have been mediated by, the
European presence itself. In the end, from the sixteenth century, Asia may
have come ‘to meet Africa to meet America’, but it was through goods,
commodities, and slave trades organized principally by Europeans.
An alternative approach has been suggested by Dipesh Chakrabarty in
his celebrated attempt to provincialize Europe.15 Here, emphasis is placed
on the reactions, adaptations, and resistances to European culture taking
place in particular localities across the world—in Chakrabarty’s case,
Calcutta and Bengal. Europe, in global history, becomes many different

12
Richard Cobb, The Police and the People (Oxford, 1972).
13
K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe (Cambridge, 1986); Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European
Hegemony (Oxford, 1991).
14
Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism (Syracuse, 1998).
15
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, 2000).

25
Writing the History of the Global

things, in very many different places: its meanings reinterpreted in the light
of local cultures and ‘provincialized’ across the world. And, of course, such
an approach does have much scope. However, if we pull back from
Chakrabarty’s specific province to take a panoptic view of the world,
another problem becomes obvious. If the rest of the world is to be presented
as a series of provincial experiences of Europe, then Europe continues to
remain at the centre of the global project, to be its metropolis. We still come
back to a Eurocentric perspective in which it is the advent of Europe, very
explicitly in Chakrabarty’s case, which is taken to be the starting point of
‘history’ in Bengal itself.
However, another way to ‘provincialize Europe’ might be to turn the
latter into a province itself: convert it from the ‘knowing subject’, and active
agent, of global history into much more an object determined by that
history. Here, much has already been done by the history of commodities
and consumption to show how the Western European economy was
reshaped and restructured by its interactions with other parts of the world.
How, for example, in Britain the first ‘national’ markets were constituted
by the import of tropical crops and Asian goods; how Britain’s first modern
industries arose in competition with, and to imitate, Chinese porcelain and
Indian textiles.16 Britain itself was a product of the global economy and not
simply its progenitor.
Also, the history of colonialism has begun to invert its previous
orientation: to consider how Western European society was affected by and
developed as an artefact of its imperial context rather than just vice versa.
For example, the British domestic state—even the idea of ‘the state’ in
Britain—seems to have been transformed in the nineteenth century by the
experience of ‘ruling the world’, especially India which even gave the
British the concept of ‘civil service’.17 The evolution of British social ideas,
especially the rise of ‘scientific racism’, also appears hard to dissociate from
the experience of conquering large numbers of ‘inferior peoples’ at the time,
especially in Africa.18 And no less important, as Simon Shaffer particularly
has shown, ‘science’ in Britain, perhaps from as early as the seventeenth
century, developed as the nodal point of an imperial network of ideas and
information, which sharply marked the character of its knowledge and

16
McKendrick, Birth; David Washbrook, ‘From Comparative Sociology to Global History’,
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40/4 (1997), 410–43.
17
C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian (London, 1988).
18
Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971).

26
 Problems in global history

understanding.19 With Europe now seen much more as the meeting place
of ideas and experiences taken from across the world, and as the construct
of its global context, conceptions of Europe’s unique and originary ‘genius’,
and of its singular role in remaking culture and society across the world,
come to be ‘put in their place’. Europe is perceived as a province within a
global society, not as the metropolis determining all other provinces.
A second and related problem in global history concerns relations of
power and exploitation. Obviously, moving away from a Eurocentric
position means no longer being able to lay not only ‘the glory’ but also ‘the
blame’ for projects of ‘world domination’ onto Europe and Europeans
alone (since the category itself begins to dissolve). But does this mean that
relations of power and exploitation have no, or only a limited, place in
global history? Some critics have certainly claimed so: they see global
history as an attempt to displace imperial history and the need to
acknowledge the many culpabilities of the European historical record outre-
mer. ‘Connections’ and ‘networks’ now stand in for relations of force and
coercion; conjunctures and coincidences obscure moral responsibilities;
violence towards others becomes a near-universal phenomenon; the
expansion of trade and ‘culture-contact’ is celebrated in its own right,
ignoring what might have been its quite disastrous effects on local dis-
tributive systems and livelihoods. Nonetheless, it may be important to
avoid making global history into a simple vehicle of historical legitima-
tion for the contemporary triumph of globalized capitalism, which certain
of its formulations have come close to doing.20 Yet how might this be
accomplished?
Many of the tools of the ‘old’ Left—and even of the self-styled New Left
of the 1960s and 1970s—now appear particularly blunt. Appeals to class
sentiment, and suppositions regarding the rise of transnational, global
bourgeoisie, become entangled when stretched across continents and
imbricated in multiple and different social, religious, and cultural con-
sciousnesses.21 Equally, lines of gender and racial domination become
confused when encountering multiple and different ideologies of social

19
Wiiliam Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Shaffer (eds), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe
(Chicago, 1999).
20
Most notably, Niall Ferguson, Empire (London 2004).
21
For a sensitive discussion of the difficulties of applying ‘class’ in non-European (specifically
Indian) contexts, see Rajnarain Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge,
1994).

27
Writing the History of the Global

hierarchy. If it seems ‘simpliste’ now to lay all of the world’s evils at the
door of European colonizers, it is no less so to put the blame on global
‘property-owners’, men, or the ‘white’ races.
However, one concept drawn from the older toolkit might still prove to
have a valuable cutting edge, even if its passing into desuetude was not
without good reason. This is the concept of ‘dependence’ or, perhaps,
‘structured difference’. Following the sociological discourse of con-
temporary ‘globalization’, global history also has become much concerned
with issues of universality and particularity, of homogeneity and
difference, which it handles largely in terms of interactions and adaptations
between imported and indigenous or local cultures—which is fair enough,
as far as it goes. But what this may miss are the ways in which some
differences are structured into particular localities by coercive—if also quite
subtle—means; and also how it is precisely the differences between one
thing and another that are important in sustaining the individual character
of each.
For example, an amazing feature of nineteenth-century Britain—
amazing and puzzling, not least, to many contemporary continental
Europeans—was its capacity to sustain a liberal democracy at home while,
at the same time, running a despotic empire across two-fifths of the world.
How did these two starkly different political profiles subsist together? The
answer would seem to lie in Britain’s possession of India, where it kept and
built up its military forces and practised forms of authoritarian government
which its rulers could only dream of at home. British rule structured India
as a military barracks, a garrison state, as a complement to its own domestic
liberal constitution. Similarly, Britain’s ability to continue expanding its
cotton textile industry, in particular in the later nineteenth century,
reflected its enforced access to the Indian market. Britain and India came
to have very different histories in the nineteenth century, but this was a
result of the very closeness of their relationship, not their distance—social,
cultural—from each other. They existed as two sides of the same coin, but
each with a very different face.22
Now ‘dependency theory’ of the older kind had its problems, especially
from its insistence that structures could never change, and were fixed
permanently.23 With the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) occupying
pride of place on the floors of global stock-exchanges today, that theory is

22
Washbrook, ‘Comparative Sociology’.
23
Andre Gunder Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment (New York, 1966).

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 Problems in global history

obviously mistaken. But ‘dependency theory’ was at least capable of

appreciating relations of ‘structured difference’ and ‘unequal exchange’,
which are at risk of disappearing in other approaches to global history. In
the last five hundred years, much of the world may have been made
‘together’ out of common historical processes, but it was not made the same
nor with equal life opportunities for everybody.
A third set of issues or problems for global history concerns how to
appreciate and evaluate those ‘life opportunities’. One of the major benefits
of global history has been the way that it has rescued economic history,
which was in danger of falling prey to the enormous condescension of
contemporaneity and disappearing from the curriculum: a valid response,
perhaps, to the suicidal efforts of econometric historians from the 1960s
onwards to professionalize their discipline (i.e. make it respectable to
economists) and thus render it either trivial or incomprehensible to
everybody else. However, global history has helped to rescue economic
history from its darkest hour and to make it relevant once again, not least
in informing the present context of capitalism’s greatest crisis for seventy
years. It may be no exaggeration to say that through attempts to re-explore
‘the Great Divergence’, reassess the origins of industrialization, and re-date
the history of a global economy itself, global history has made its greatest
contributions so far.24
But must its perspective only remain confined to the economic—or even
more broadly ‘materialist’—dimensions of the past? What of the world of
the mind, of culture, ideas, and aesthetics, which informs how various
peoples came to perceive and evaluate their own lives? To some extent
these issues can be approached from materialistic groundings in con-
sumption, fashion, and taste, and global explorations in these areas have
been particularly fruitful. However, we may also need a global history of
the mind: necessarily an ‘intellectual’ rather than a ‘cultural’ history since
the concept of ‘culture’, with its links back to ‘structuralism’ and the
relativism of late nineteenth-century racism, is necessarily suspicious. But
how to write a global intellectual history?
Recently, we have been offered some significant attempts. Andrew
Sartori’s essay on ‘global concept history’ seeks to examine how major
intellectual debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—such as
that around ‘the problem of culture’ in the Arnoldian sense—have been

24
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed
(Cornell, 2000).

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Writing the History of the Global

handled across the world, in his case specifically in Bengal.25 Equally, Chris
Bayly is currently engaged in exploring the global history of ‘Liberalism’.26
Such works are enormously valuable. At the same time, however, it may
be necessary to be very careful about the nature of the concepts or ideas
whose global histories are being examined, if we are to avoid sliding back
towards Eurocentrism. After all, in both of these cases, not only did the
ideas and the debates around them originate in Europe, but so did most of
the more generally recognized contributions to their elaboration. Europe,
here, would also become ‘provincialized’ only in Chakrabarty’s quite
limited sense. Perhaps it would be different if the focus instead were on
‘Marxism’ to whose theory, at least in the twentieth century, the greatest
contributions have come from non-Europeans.27 But these days doubt has
arisen regarding the significance of Marxism—and, even then, the ghost of
Eurocentricity would continue to haunt the proceedings.
An alternative might be to move to a higher level of abstraction and to
consider conceptual themes which were common in many different
settings: to look at how they were handled in each context, how ideas cross-
flowed between the settings, and how dialogues became interactive.
Examples might include concepts of authority and obedience, of repre-
sentation and equality and, not least, of rights and obligations—where,
contrary to certain views, the idea of rights was not simply the provenance
of ‘freeborn Englishmen’. Of course, we already have a number of
comparative studies of these phenomena in particular contexts, but usually
under the aegis of structuralist conceptions of culture, designed to elicit
only ‘difference’, and with the direction of historical change presumed to
flow exclusively from West to East.28 However, in my own field of India,
recent research has suggested much wider possibilities. The works of
Perlin, Guha, and O’Hanlon, for example, have drawn attention to the
strong ‘rights-based’ political culture of pre-colonial western India.29 Here,

25
Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History (Chicago, 2008).
26
C. A. Bayly and E. F. Biagini (eds), Guiseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic
Nationalism 1830–1920 (Oxford, 2008).
27
E.g., Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Min.
28
For example, Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (London, 1970).
29
Frank Perlin, ‘State Formation Reconsidered’, Modern Asian Studies, 19/3 (1985), 415–80;
Sumit Guha, ‘Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country’, in Changing Conceptions of Law and
Justice in South Asia, ed. Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha (Delhi, 1997); Rosalind O’Hanlon,
‘Cultural Pluralism, the State and Empire in Early Modern South Asia’, Indian Economic and
Social History Review, 44/3 (2007), 363–81.

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 Problems in global history

individual rights were partially seen to derive from membership of specific

(caste, religious, and ethnic) communities which collectively held statuses,
identities, and real properties. Such a conception of rights came to inform
the evolution of colonial—Anglo-Hindu—law, which by no means
consisted only of the imposition of ‘alien’, Western nostrums. Indeed, it
may even have affected the development of law in Western metropolises
themselves.
In Britain, the law was very slow to move beyond a context of universal
sovereignty and atomized, individualized rights to recognize the claims of
a cultural pluralism in which different communities of subjects might be
seen to have legitimately different prerogatives and needs—for all that
medieval law had operated precisely on these principles in the distant
past.30 Arguably, it was not until the 1960s that British domestic law
considered issues of ‘positive discrimination’ and differential religious
obligation.31 However, when it did, it is striking that the context should
coincide with a major influx of migrants from the former colonial world,
bringing with them their own ideas of right and re-creating in Britain
something of the ‘multiculturalism’ that marked most colonial contexts. It
is tempting to consider how far the discourse of rights in contemporary
Britain draws on concepts taken from members of the ‘other cultures’ now
inhabiting its space, and also on the experience of handling ‘multi-
culturalism’ in the societies that Britain once attempted to rule. The Empire
finally strikes back . . . Conventional forms of intellectual history have told
us what Europe has given to the rest of the world. Maybe it is now time for
a global intellectual history to tell us what the rest of the world is giving to
Europe and, albeit at a remove, giving back to itself as well.

30
Alfred P. Smyth (ed.), Medieval Europeans (New York, 1998).
31
James Hand, ‘A Decade of Change in British Discrimination Law’, Commonwealth Law
Review, 43/3 (2008), 595–605.

31