Part I - Forms of Inquiry and Argumentation

1 Explanation The Limits of Narrativism in Global History

Jürgen Osterhammel

Next to overcoming Eurocentrism – and perhaps any other form of value-laden centrism – the other big promise made by global history is to widen horizons, multiply the forms of human experience considered by the historian and increase the number of voices that are recovered from the past. Yet richness is not an end in itself. If the temptation of empirical overabundance is not resisted, world history turns into an ocean of the picturesque and the world historian into an old-fashioned polymath.

The obvious remedy is to employ concepts, patterns and strategies of emplotment with the purpose of giving shape to historical representation. In other words, sheer description tends to exhaust itself. In one of the most underrated contributions to historical theory, Siegfried Kracauer put it like this: ‘One might also say that the historian follows two tendencies – the realistic tendency which prompts him to get hold of all data of interest, and the formative tendency which requires him to explain the material in hand.’ ¹ It seemed to be a matter of course for Kracauer, writing in the 1960s, to equate the ‘formative tendency’ with ‘explanation’. As his subsequent discussion shows, Kracauer uses the term quite broadly – similar to how another great theorist, the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller, was later to employ it when she wrote that ‘explanation’ was identical to ‘making something understood’.² In other words, to explain means ‘to make sense’ of what historians find in their sources. It also means to translate the past into the present and make it comprehensible while, ideally, not obliterating its strangeness.

Explanation builds upon description. It is the attempt to impart meaning to the evidence by distinguishing outcomes from causes and then tracing specific causes behind specific outcomes. Ágnes Heller adds an anthropological afterthought, which she does not really follow up: ‘“Why” is the elementary question, the first real question of a child. “How” is more sophisticated; it is a diffident “why”.’³ Explanation responds to a very basic human need; it is a naive expression of pristine amazement. Description – Kracauer’s ‘realistic tendency’ – already belongs to the answer. It requires care, even precision, a certain distance of the describing observer from the object under examination. It is by no means easy to give a good description, of historical events or of anything else. In a third step, to pick up Heller’s train of thought, explanation re-enters, fortified with method. Sense-making becomes systematic, follows certain conventional rules of logic and argumentation and sometimes aims at higher orders of abstraction.⁴

It should, therefore, be taken with a pinch of salt if historians deny any intention to explain, as was fashionable at the peak of the cultural turn. The more historians turned away from politics and economics, and the closer they drew to literary studies and certain tendencies in cultural anthropology, the lower fell the regard in which explanation was held. This was all the more true for the related concept of ‘causation’. In the 1980s, as R. Bin Wong aptly points out, ‘causation was no longer as central a concern of historians as it once was’.⁵ Neither was explanation.

Though it is impossible to speak about explanation without mentioning ‘causes’, I shall avoid the concept of ‘causation’. In analytical epistemology, ‘explanation’ and ‘causation’ or ‘causality’ are different if related topics.⁶ Among philosophers, causality presently seems to be the more exciting of the two. There is now consensus that (a) causation unfolds in processes, and (b) that it can be probabilistic. Other aspects of the topic are more controversial.⁷ The present chapter focuses on explanation, leaving aside causality.

I shall argue, empirically, that not all kinds of global history aim at explanation, but a lot do – sometimes explicitly, often in subcutaneous, implicit and hidden ways that should be brought to light. While I agree with Siegfried Kracauer that not everything in the social and political past is (rationally) explicable and that we must reckon with the existence of ‘irreducible entities’,⁸ I want to show that explanation ought to matter for the field of history, but even more so for that of global history, which is confronted with unusually rich and diverse evidence. Explanation is an important tool for reducing complexity in a ‘formative’ (Kracauer) way.

To be sure, there is a wide variety of explanatory approaches, none of them particular to global history. In actual practice, explanations are of differing quality, on a scale from brilliant to utterly unconvincing.⁹ It is an important task of scholarly critique to assess that quality in individual cases. The only general rule is a formal one that holds true for history as it does, more or less, for all scholarship: the imperative to avoid monocausality. Yet, under special circumstances, explanations have to be monocausal. Ancient Pompeii was destroyed in AD 79 by a volcanic eruption and by nothing else. Still, historians usually steer clear of monocausality and unilinear determinism. The decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire require a much more complex explanatory design than the end of Pompeii. At the same time, explanations should be elegant and parsimonious, stopping short of overcomplexity. Such overcomplexity may degenerate into long lists of factors that are suspected to be operative in a vaguely specified manner. In their practical work, historians are likely to look for graspable, intuitively plausible explanations; they prefer – or should prefer – controlled simplification to comprehensive fuzziness. Not everything is related to everything else – as a vulgar notion of globality tends to imply. The business of explanation consists, to a large extent, of taking decisions about what is relevant and what is less so in making sense of a particular historical constellation.

Since explanation has rarely been discussed in the theoretical literature on global history, this chapter begins with a brief overview of what historical theory and the methodology of the social sciences may have to offer global historians.

General Theories of Explanation

The word ‘explanation’ basically refers to two different things. Firstly, it can mean to give reasons – often moral justifications – for one’s own actions or those of other humans. As Charles Tilly has put it, human beings are ‘reason-giving animals’.¹⁰ For historians, this is an object of study. We look in the sources for attempts by historical actors to provide reasons and motives for their actions, and we do not expect such explanations to be ‘logical’ or ‘rational’. Secondly, to explain something can mean to account for states of affairs by identifying connections between ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ – in other words, by providing causal analysis. In this case, reasons and causes are established by the analyst, sidelining the self-expressions of the actors or taking a distancing view of them. The second meaning of ‘explanation’ transcends subjective intentionality and encompasses ‘structural’ considerations that often require hindsight and transgress the awareness of the historical actors. The question of ‘why people do what they do’ is not answered best by those people themselves.¹¹

The philosophical theory of explanation derives from Aristotle and, in modern times, from John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843).¹² Its application to history basically begins with Carl Gustav Hempel’s 1942 theory of explanation that went through various modifications up to its final version developed in the 1960s – still a benchmark approach.¹³ Ever since the later Hempel, the theory rests on two assumptions: (a) it is nominalist or constructivist and does not require the assumption that causes ‘exist in reality’; (b) it presupposes that a specific effect and its specific cause, or causes, are connected by something more general: not necessarily an invariable and time–space-insensitive ‘natural law’ or ‘iron law of history’, but perhaps a more limited regularity.¹⁴ That regularity should be empirically rich as well as theoretically plausible, for instance when historians cite a well-established sociological theorem or an evidence-based insight from demography to help them account for a specific phenomenon in social history or the history of population.

General theories of explanation are nowadays worded much less rigorously than they used to be in the days of Carl G. Hempel.¹⁵ They often allow for ‘contexts’ of various kinds. Such ‘pragmatic’ theories¹⁶ have become acceptable, and even influential, as a result of the historicising and relativising turn in the philosophy and sociology of science inaugurated by Thomas S. Kuhn and others in the 1960s. Wesley C. Salmon, perhaps the most influential philosophical theorist of explanation in the generation after Hempel, has allowed for ‘causal networks’ and ‘etiological explanations’.¹⁷ In the last phase of his work, Hempel himself used ‘soft’ formulations such as asking what ‘made a difference’ or how ‘relevant’ causal factors were. He also envisaged ‘fine-grained mechanical explanations’¹⁸ that generate knowledge about ‘how things work’.¹⁹ Today’s major authority on explanation, James Woodward, even permits counterfactuals (i.e. sentences of the type ‘What if things had been different …?’).²⁰ In sum, the general theory of explanation is nowadays perhaps less parsimonious and elegant than in Carl Gustav Hempel’s foundational design of 1942, but much closer to the actual practice of scientists and less prescriptive than it used to be. Even so, philosophers still look for general criteria to assess the quality of particular explanations and to detect logical flaws in them.

Historians are busy people and unlikely to spend much time on the intricacies of the general theory of explanation. Still, denying its relevance would be an anachronistic relapse into crude dichotomies of science versus humanities, ‘nomothetic’ (law-based) versus ‘idiographic’ (case-based) disciplines or quantitative versus qualitative approaches. It would be a denial of the basic methodological unity of all the sciences.²¹ The boundaries between the famous ‘two cultures’ have become porous, not least through the rise of digital awareness in the humanities, including global history, where sometimes datasets of enormous volume and variety have to be processed.

In Defence of (Historical) Explanation

The heyday of debates on historical explanation was in the 1960s and 1970s. For our time, Paul A. Roth, one of the few remaining exponents of an ‘analytical’ theory of history in a loosely conceived Hempelian tradition, diagnoses ‘an almost total neglect of historical explanation within philosophy of science’.²² This is generally true for the ‘formal’ theory of history (in German: Historik), which has to be distinguished, following Ernst Troeltsch, from the ‘material’ philosophy of history that grapples with the big sweep of ‘real’ history.²³

The formal theory of history and the numerous programmatic self-reflections of historians tend to be almost silent on explanation. When historians ponder what they are actually doing, they rarely come to the conclusion that they elaborate explanations. The latest careful discussion of historical explanation, using numerous examples from the historiographical literature, dates from the previous century.²⁴ Achim Landwehr, a prolific German theorist, sees the historian’s task in the description of complexity and declines any further ambition; he does not even mention the issue of explanation.²⁵ Jörn Rüsen has downgraded the relative position of explanation within his comprehensive system of historical knowledge from version to version.²⁶ Reinhart Koselleck, who is enlightening on almost any question within the theory of history, was largely reticent on matters of explanation. Global historians, too, are diffident on the issue of explanation. Sebastian Conrad, today’s foremost theorist of global history, does not show much interest in it. Where he touches upon the matter, he apologises to the reader that his brief remarks might appear ‘rather technical and inconsequential’.²⁷ Diego Olstein has interesting things to say about contextualisation, comparison and connections, but next to nothing on explanation.²⁸

Why this white spot on the map of historical theory? There are at least three possible answers:

1. (a) Historians believe that explanation is something to be left to cliometricians, with their social-scientific minds, and to schematic historical sociologists, as it is no primary concern of the mainstream. They are reluctant to admit that, whether they are aware of it or not, they answer ‘why’ questions all the time. Few historians are likely to endorse the unequivocal assertion made by the Canadian philosopher Mario Bunge: ‘All the historical sciences have the same aim, namely, to discover what happened and why it happened: they seek truth and explanation, not just yarn.’²⁹ And not everyone would agree with Paul Veyne when he says that ‘to explain more is to narrate better’.³⁰

2. (b) A second explanation of non-explanation would be that this is not what the public expects from science in general, and from historical studies in particular. The public is said to be keen on ‘yarn’. This, too, is dubious. The pandemic year 2020 was a time when science – from virology to empirical social research – faced an unprecedented demand for discovering the causes of our multiple predicaments. Explanations were indispensable for finding remedies and practical solutions and for predicting the future. Historians were quite successful in explaining how we got to where we are – and, more specifically, how and why similar causes led to diverging outcomes.³¹ After Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, historians of Eastern Europe were in great demand to give reasons for the Russian leadership’s motives, goals and conduct against the backdrop of the long-term history of the region.

3. (c) The third possible reason for the occlusion of explanation in historical theory comes closer to the mark: a powerful ‘narrativist turn’ since the 1970s, set in motion and sustained by cultural theorists and literary critics, gained intellectual hegemony at the expense of the analytical theory of history. It seemed to be closer to the activity of writing history than the abstract deliberations of the logicians in the Hempel tradition. Narrativist theorists believe that history is about constructing plots whose rootedness in evidential research, or the lack of it, is of subordinate importance to theory. While few working historians were (and are) persuaded that this approach offers an adequate description of what they are actually doing, narrativism conquered Anglo-American theory and came to lead a life of its own. The much more nuanced narrativism of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur was not as influential internationally as it should have been. Nor was Michel Foucault’s non-analytical concept of ‘genealogy’.³² Despite Foucault’s worldwide celebrity, few global historians have so far worked in such a genealogical mode.

In sum, explanation is a permanent concern and standard procedure of all historical sciences, including archaeology, palaeontology, historical demography and so on. Its current neglect in the formal theory of history does not mirror its real significance.

Analytical and Narrativist Theories

The analytical theory of history applies thought patterns from the logic of scientific research to the humanities and is primarily concerned with methodology. Reaching its high point in the influential works of Arthur C. Danto (1965) and Louis O. Mink (1987),³³ and represented today by Paul A. Roth and, with certain limitations, Aviezer Tucker,³⁴ it addresses the central theme of how historians establish the truth, or other forms of epistemic authority, of their verbal propositions. Analytical theorists have never shown much interest in analysing texts written by ordinary historians. They usually deal with brief and simple speech acts. Though this can hardly be otherwise for the sake of philosophical clarity, it limits the impact of analytical theory outside its own circles. Most historical explanations are complex argumentative constructions that cannot be reduced to atomistic events and isolated propositional sentences. Correspondingly, analytical theorists tend to have a reductive and old-fashioned understanding of real-life historiography, which they prefer to see as a linear chronicle of political events.

Paradoxically, the same is true for the arch opponent of the analytical school: narrativist theory. It is simply much easier to tell – and to analyse using the tools of narratology – a tale in the style of l’historie événementielle than to express multivariable causal arguments in narrative form.³⁵ Thus, both schools of theory suffer from an inbuilt bias against all kinds of structural history and also against cultural history of a more sophisticated bent.

Narrativist theory, to this day labouring under the shadow of Hayden White’s celebrated Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973),³⁶ must not be taken too seriously in its far-reaching agnostic claims: that historians are unable to establish anything like the ‘truth’ about the past, that their utterances lack an extralingual referent and so on.³⁷ White himself has impressively analysed a handful of nineteenth-century historiographical classics that were written in co-evolution with the historical novel. His approach, and the more mundane and technical methods of the narratology of literary historians,³⁸ however, fail to do justice to research-based historical scholarship and its textual strategies, which are not primarily governed by literary techniques of spinning a tale. Moreover, form and rhetoric, though important for historical studies, are not essential for them. Whether the Gordian Knot can be cut by postulating something like ‘narrative explanation’ – in Jörn Rüsen’s view a ‘discursive practice’ that synthesises all aspects of historical writing³⁹ – remains controversial. A recent survey of the literature concludes ‘that it is hard to say what a narrative explanation precisely consists of’.⁴⁰ A new and promising approach to the connection between narration and argumentation suggested by a team of authors around the Spanish philosopher Paula Olmos has yet to reach the historiographical debate.⁴¹ So far, narrativism has difficulty offering criteria for assessing the quality of a specific explanation. To put it bluntly, any explanation seems to be acceptable as long as it is disguised as a good read.

A recent work by the Finnish theorist Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen fails to inspire more confidence than earlier narrativist theory. His Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (2015) is the epitome of ultra-narrativism. The author, proud to represent ‘the dominant school’,⁴² is interested ‘not so much in the generation of historical knowledge and explanation as in the forms in which it is presented’,⁴³ and he dismisses Carl G. Hempel’s covering law theory, and with it analytical theory as a whole, as ‘(in)famous’,⁴⁴ unworthy of philosophical attention. Kuukkanen wants to liberate – in an age of interdisciplinarity – the humanities from ‘disciplinary externalism’, a term that appears to refer to the purported straightjacket of the natural sciences.⁴⁵ He sees no way of assessing the intrinsic worth of works of history. Rather, he subscribes to something like textual Darwinism: ‘The plausibility of a historical thesis depends on its impact within the argumentative field.’⁴⁶ The winner takes all.

More nuanced theoretical suggestions went down on the battlefield between the two tendencies, but deserve a new look. This applies to the philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum, with his urbane and learned attempt to bridge the chasm between the analytical and the narrativist schools.⁴⁷ Mandelbaum argues realistically that rather than spin linear plots, historians construct multilayered ‘sequences’ into which they incorporate explanatory elements.⁴⁸ The task of the historian is not so much to string together the pieces of a story as to clarify the relations between the various elements in a two-dimensional tissue. Mandelbaum also makes the important point that in analysing change historians should never forget ‘external’ factors.⁴⁹ It is always a promising working hypothesis, says Mandelbaum, that there is an ‘outside’ to one’s particular field of investigation – in other words, an external arena from where forces may impinge on what at first sight looks like a closed system: for instance, a nation-state. Though Mandelbaum is never quoted by global historians, his insights are much more pertinent for global history’s concerns than anything offered by current narrativism or analytical theory.

Another author worth (re)discovering is the Austrian sociologist, philosopher and historian of ideas Karl Acham, who began his career with an excellent summary and critique of the analytical school.⁵⁰ He has since reflected deeply on what Hempel already allowed for as ‘explanation sketches’: less rigorous than strictly universalist ‘nomological’ explanations and able to accommodate the plurality of factors and scales characteristic of the humanities.⁵¹ After many decades of struggling against the eviction of ‘meaning’ (Sinn) by a methodology of history subservient to the natural sciences, another veteran, the aforementioned Jörn Rüsen, has finally arrived at a sceptical verdict on narrativism to which he had always shown a close affinity. In Rüsen’s view, the triumph of that school has led to the consequence that ‘the problem of rationality was suppressed [verdrängt] rather than solved’, and, along with it, the question of the scientific nature (Wissenschaftlichkeit) of the work performed by historians.⁵² Following up on this, a slightly different answer to narrativism might be: the principal aim of historical studies is not to tell stories but to ask questions and provide the strongest possible rational justification for the answers given to those questions on the basis of the best available evidence.⁵³

In sum, both major schools within the formal philosophy of history - the disciples of Carl G. Hempel and the followers of Hayden White – offer only limited access to what Marc Bloch called le métier de l’historien, especially to the questions of how historians explain in actual practice and how their explanations might be improved. The analytical tendency, however, has a sense for the interplay between the general and the particular in historical reasoning and maintains the idea of an intersubjectively valid logic in the service of truth, whereas the narrativists lack respect for historical research and assimilate historical writing to the construction of fictional tales.

Sequences and Mechanisms: Explanation in the Social Sciences

The social sciences are close neighbours of historical studies. Both deal with individual and collective human behaviour; both study change over time; both differ from the natural sciences in that it is impossible (history) or difficult (social sciences) for them to observe reality directly or under laboratory conditions. A few remarks shall be offered about sociology, a discipline that since the days of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber has occupied a middle ground between Verstehen (hermeneutical understanding) and Erklären (explanation).⁵⁴

Unlike philosophers of history, sociologists are not interested in telling historians what to do. Thus, we have to reverse the perspective. Is there anything historians can learn from sociologists when it comes to explanation? Three points may be worth exploring further.

1. (a) Historical sociology has always been a decidedly explicatory discourse, comparison being its preferred method.⁵⁵ One of its favoured approaches is a dynamic comparison between developmental paths and trajectories. Historians tend to complain about the remoteness of historical sociologists from primary sources and of a certain formalism or schematism in their comparative thought experiments. Yet, in the best case, the chosen explanatory set-ups are complex as well as transparent, involving neatly defined factors and plausible hypotheses about the interplay between those factors over time.⁵⁶ The entire Great Divergence debate – to many observers quintessential global history – owes a lot to the social science methodology of comparison.⁵⁷

2. (b) A relatively new concept, explicitly conceived of as a way to facilitate causal explanations, is that of the mechanism.⁵⁸ Such an approach would either look at psychological mechanisms that make individual and collective behaviour more or less predictable,⁵⁹ or postulate medium-range and small-scale regularities between certain causes and certain effects in ‘processes involving large populations and interacting networks of organisations’.⁶⁰ Mechanisms as regularities of limited scope partly fulfil the requirements for ‘covering laws’ which are essential in Hempel’s nomological model of explanation. They also show a family resemblance with Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘patterns of repetition’, a fascinating though under-elaborated element of Koselleck’s mature, and rather sketchy, theory of history.⁶¹

3. (c) A recent innovation in theoretical sociology is the use of temporal sequences and ‘syntaxes’ for purposes of explanation.⁶² That concept involves the close study of temporal shifts and conjunctures and may help to better describe the concatenation of causal factors that historians like to employ in a less systematic fashion than sociologists. Sequencing works best when it is seen as preparing explanation rather than replacing it. Similarly, within the vast field of theories of time, sociological contributions stand out in their resolve to overcome the antagonism of experienced or subjective time against measured or objective time. They are particularly good at dissecting complex processes into their constituent elements and at postulating causal connections between those elements.

What these three sociological approaches have in common is that they reveal the bare bones of their explicatory arrangements in a way that can alert historians to their own strategies of reasoning. The explicatory or ‘configurational’ models ⁶³ used by (historical) sociologists tend to be much more intricate, and therefore better attuned to the practice of historians, than the often reductive and simplistic ideas about nomological, intentional or narrative explanation cherished by analytical and narrativist philosophers of history alike.⁶⁴

How Do (Global) Historians Explain?

In the study of historiographical texts, explanation has received much less attention than rhetoric and narrative emplotment. There are surprisingly few in-depth analyses of how historians actually practice explanation, even with regard to the great classics of the historiographical canon. Tim Rood’s Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation and Jonas Grethlein’s wide-ranging work on ancient historiography can serve as models for what is deplorably lacking for other authors and epochs.⁶⁵ Even less is known about the crafting of the routine research output in today’s discipline. How do normal historians handle explanation? Since actual practice remains obscure, firm foundations are lacking for normative assessments: what is a good explanation?

Nobody should expect a straightforward and universally valid answer. How we explain depends to a large extent on what we want to explain. Explanations in intellectual history are different from those in economic history. It is one thing to discover the reasons behind an individual political decision, quite another to account for a macro-process such as the outbreak of a multi-state war, the collapse of an empire, or a trajectory of economic development or implosion. A plausible guess is that what is difficult to analyse in most fields of historical study is even more difficult for global history. Though this should not be misunderstood as a claim to superiority, global history has to handle more factors and variables and a greater number of diverse actors and social configurations than is the case for most other fields of history. The ritualised assurance that global history is, or should be, multi-archival and multi-lingual is just a consequence of the fact that it is a rather complicated, disparate and sometimes messy affair. Since explanation is a way to reduce complexity, the burden that lies on explanation in global history is a particularly heavy one. It has to tame – to use a buzzword – ‘vibrant’ plurality.

Under these circumstances, critical interventions that probe the soundness (Woodward) of argumentation and explanation are highly welcome. I single out three of them.

Firstly, several distinguished historians, not known as sworn enemies of global history, have applied the emergency brake to a merry-go-round of high-sales publishing and launched a vehement attack against ‘fake global history’.⁶⁶ ‘Global history’, the critics declare, ‘has become an excuse for authors to make outlandish claims, based on the belief that they will not be subject to the usual scholarly scrutiny.’⁶⁷ Such ‘outlandish claims’ include sloppy explanations. The general justification of this charge derives from two related observations. On the one hand, there is a certain pressure in the ‘trade’ section of the book market even for respectable historians to exaggerate the colourfulness of their materials and the drama of their interpretations. On the other, wide-ranging works that cut across academic compartmentalisation are difficult to assess in terms of specialised scholarship. They easily slip through the net of responsible scrutiny and are applauded by overwhelmed reviewers for superficial virtues such as daring assertions, unparalleled comprehensiveness or the alleged uncovering of secrets.

Secondly, and closer to the issue of explanation, Princeton historian David A. Bell has undertaken an interesting thought experiment.⁶⁸ Bell, an expert on Europe around 1800, raises a helpful question: ‘What is gained from placing it [the French Revolution] in a global perspective, and what is lost?’⁶⁹ For ‘French Revolution’ one can easily substitute any major historical phenomenon or mega-event that has conventionally been considered within a non-global context and is now seen through the unaccustomed spectacles of global history. Bell supports his major question with a long lists of complaints about the over-ambitiousness of historiographical globalisers. While one does not have to follow him through all the twists and turns of his philippic, his focus on the French Revolution ensures that explanation occupies centre stage in his intervention. Very few episodes in history have been linked to more why-questions than the French Revolution. Why did a major upheaval occur in France and not elsewhere? Why in 1789? Why did the Ancien Régime succumb? Why did the Revolution go through a process of radicalisation? And so on. These questions have usually been raised and answered within a French or a European framework. A global approach, still under debate, suggests longer concatenations covering the entire North Atlantic space or even regarding French domestic developments as part of a general world crisis.⁷⁰ Bell offers a useful distinction of general applicability when he insists that ‘inward influences’ – the causal impact of external actors and events – and ‘outward influences’ – effects, often long-term and unspecific, reaching out into the world – follow different logics.⁷¹ This is generally true. Some local events have global ramifications, most others do not. (Not every assassination of the member of a royal house leads, as did the shots of 28 June 1914 at Sarajevo, to global war.) In reverse, the fact that an event acquired universal significance does not always mean that its origins were ‘global’; most ‘world religions’ have distinctly local roots.

From the vantage point of the historiographical practitioner, David Bell confirms a lesson also to be learned from the methodology of explanation: if additional – in this case, ‘global’ – factors are being added to an explanatory model, hypotheses are needed that specify precisely the possible causal connections between the new factors and the other elements of the model. Invoking an atmospheric ‘globality’ does not explain anything. Nor are fuzzy ‘waves’ that ‘sweep’ around the globe proper candidates for independent variables and fundamental causes. It is from theorists such as Maurice Mandelbaum and from the sociological analysis of temporal sequences that one should take away the imperative to disaggregate complex processes into their constituent parts and look for specific connections rather than for general connectivity.

Thirdly, Peer Vries, whose early work in the formal theory of history sharpened his later acuity as a global economic historian,⁷² sums up his experience as a pioneer of the field in a stern admonition: ‘More energy should be devoted to determining the exact extent and impact of the various kinds of “contacts” and “exchanges” of which global historians are so fond.’⁷³ Calling for ‘more methodological awareness’, Vries goes on to note that the seemingly avant garde label of global history camouflages a lot of scholarly practices that are ‘strikingly traditional’.⁷⁴ A new kind of history – as long as that ambition is kept alive – requires methodological adjustments and innovations. A global perspective, this is Vries’s persuasive argument, is always worth a try even though it cannot claim a priori superiority over conventional approaches.

Varieties of Explanation in Global History

Even if Peter Perdue, a distinguished historian of China, exaggerates when he says that the term ‘global history’ nowadays ‘can refer to almost anything’,⁷⁵ it remains true that many different kinds of history have comfortably settled under the umbrella of global history. That umbrella becomes even wider if one includes the more popularising trends within the global history discourse – in other words, those books that shape public impressions of what global history is about and why it is important. The discrepancy, for instance, between global microhistory and those macro-approaches that border on historical sociology and consider the ‘very long run’ is so enormous that a shared strategy of explanation is almost ruled out. Thus, there is no manner of explanation that is a distinctive feature of global history.

Still, a few basic ways of handling explanation can be discerned:

(1) Non-Explanation

A great deal of what goes under the label of global history was never meant to explain anything. I suggest calling this the ‘panoramic’ approach, to be distinguished from ‘analytical’ global history. Entirely legitimate, panoramic global history appears in the shape of various globalising genres. One such genre are the fashionable globalised histories of particular nation-states, patterned on L’histoire mondiale de la France.⁷⁶ They do not count as explanatory history simply because they pursue only modest analytical aims. These voluminous tomes have to be seen as synthetic statements intended for national education.

A second non-explicatory genre are general histories of the world. Nowadays they are wary of big questions and the corresponding big answers. William H. McNeill, writing in the halcyon days of the Pax Americana, put a major puzzle into the title of his work: The Rise of the West.⁷⁷ Yet his treatment remained safely in the descriptive mode and deserves to be remembered mainly for its imaginative periodisation and a few crisp chapter headings (‘Moslem Catalepsy, 1700–1840 AD’, etc.). McNeill told a story. He did not distinguish systematically between causes and effects and therefore did not offer an explanatory model, let alone a theory.

McNeill’s master of sorts, Arnold J. Toynbee, had been of a different cast of mind. Especially in his best decade, the 1930s, Toynbee was a dedicated explainer and anything but a spinner of epic tales. While Toynbee’s lack of interest in sociology and ethnology makes even his best works – the first six volumes of A Study of History⁷⁸ – look old-fashioned, his approach to explanation was rational and unpretentious. He did not believe in perennial ‘laws of history’ and, in a sense, anticipated the middle-range ‘causal mechanisms’ (Renate Mayntz) and ‘patterns of repetition’ (Reinhart Koselleck) mentioned earlier.⁷⁹

Today, the better one-volume world histories are playful philosophical reflections decked out with illustrative pluckings from the past.⁸⁰ When the burden of writing a history of the entire world is shouldered in scholarly earnestness, all sorts of rump explanations are attempted with hardly ever a sense of satisfaction. With everything remaining half-said, unintended monocausality can hardly be avoided.⁸¹ In a nutshell, much of published global history is never meant to serve as a stepping stone towards explanation. It is merely exhibitive: materials from all over the world are assembled and displayed, enriching people’s knowledge and strengthening their sense of diversity and their cosmopolitan outlook.

(2) Pan-Explanation and Explanation Through Comparison

The other end of the spectrum of explanatory intensity is marked by works where comparison is used to identify those variables that make a causal difference. These works are global – in a non-methodical way – if they straddle commonly respected cultural boundaries. ‘Non-methodical’ means that the logical strategies used in a comparison between Britain and France and in a comparison between France and Japan are basically the same. The only two differences, certainly requiring careful attention, are (a) a greater obtrusiveness of the ‘cultural’ dimension that cannot be disregarded or bracketed in a ceteris paribus way; and (b) a greater relevance of ‘emic’ (as distinct from ‘etic’) nomenclatures – in other words, ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ terminologies. To illustrate the second point with examples from comparative social history: samurai in a Japanese, shenshi (scholar-officials) in a Chinese, gentry in an English and noblesse de robe in a French context are local categories that are almost impossible to translate and difficult to subsume under generic terms of higher abstraction and universality.

The apotheosis of comparativism in global history was attained in the Great Divergence Debate.⁸² Here everything revolves around explanations in response to one of the biggest why-questions ever asked: Why did ‘the West’ (or Europe, North-Western Europe, etc., respectively) achieve worldwide superiority in the modern era? What accounts for the increasing economic disparities between different parts of the world? The debate started almost a century before the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s famous book⁸³ with Max Weber’s titanic effort, undertaken at a time when the social and economic study of Asian societies had barely begun, to account for the emergence of rational capitalism in the Occident by contrasting it with supposedly dead-end trajectories in China, India and elsewhere. In the early twenty-first century, the debate has been the most important laboratory for macro-historical explanation through comparison. Regardless of innumerable disagreements among a vast array of authors, the participants share a few commonalities.

Though history books would be unreadable without narrative, no participant in the debate relies on narrative alone to produce explanations in the sense of the theorists’ ‘narrative explanation’. Mirroring developments in the real world, general attention in these explanations has shifted from probing the ‘rise’ of Europe to finding reasons for the delayed ‘rise’ of China. Thus, the explanandum remained more or less the same across more than a century – why did the ‘normal’ disparities in wealth, power and cultural creativity between major parts of the world result in one dramatic bifurcation, a great divergence among so many small divergences?⁸⁴ – whereas the candidates for the losing and winning positions changed several times. Concurrently, the basic parameters – or variables, in the language of quantification – of explanation have kept shifting, which complicates the debate considerably. What was it that diverged in the first place? Economic growth, capitalism, scientific ingenuity, power/imperialism or modernity at large? All those aspects are related but by no means identical.

In this teeming mass of sophisticated reasoning, monocausal explanations singling out culture, the environment or institution-building as the causal factor of last resort have not entirely disappeared. Yet there seems to be general consensus in favour of more complex models of explanation that meet the criteria of a multi-factorial design combined with parsimonious elegance. Pomeranz’s model shares these virtues with earlier contributions such as E. L. Jones’ pioneering contribution of 1981.⁸⁵ Subtle disagreements continue in regard to claims of explanatory ‘power’. Solutions to the big riddle of original bifurcation have moved from strong determination (i.e. a broad and powerful ‘Western tradition’ rooted in the Middle Ages or even Greek Antiquity⁸⁶) to weak determination through small differentials that engendered huge effects. This shift from necessity to contingency reflects a general transformation of – mainly Western – thinking from structuralism to postmodernism or poststructuralism, and also an evolution in theories of explanation as they incorporated probabilistic elements. Such a general intellectual stance, however, will not remain uncontested since those who see themselves as victors in historical struggles do not like to be told that they prevailed by mere chance. The current Chinese leadership and the scholars who happen to agree with it, for instance, insist on a deeply rooted (‘5,000 years’) path-dependency and thus on the unassailable necessity and legitimacy of the country’s ever-growing strength. The politics of explanation includes the question of how much explanatory weight one is projecting onto the past.

Much more remains to be said about the Great Divergence Debate. Addressing a major problem of world history, it is nevertheless conducted with intellectual tools pioneered by comparative sociologists from Max Weber to Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol and Jack Goldstone. It is a truly transdisciplinary exercise. But is there anything specifically global about it? Surely the geographic scope of the cases considered is worldwide even if holistic ‘civilisations’ have been replaced by economic macro-regions as the preferred units of analysis. At the same time, the logical set-ups of explanation and the comparative procedures do not differ very much from those at closer range. Once ‘culture’ no longer counts as the major explicative variable,⁸⁷ the Great Divergence ceases to be a ‘transcultural’ issue. Thus, there is no longer a fundamental methodological gap between an intra-European comparison and one targeting different regions in China, India or Europe.

The Great Divergence Debate confirms the point that systematic comparison remains one of the most fruitful explanatory tools in the social sciences. Attempts to discredit comparison by playing it off against ‘relational’ history have failed as far as methodology is concerned. The basic compatibility of comparison and the analysis of transfer was already established two decades ago.⁸⁸ Remarkably, comparison has recently been rediscovered in the ‘soft’ humanities – for instance, in literary studies – even among those of a basically post-modernist persuasion.⁸⁹ However, outside of economic history, fields characterised by a preponderance of why-questions are relatively rare. Usually, explanation is set in wider descriptive frames. For example, it is an interesting problem of global cultural history why certain religions and some languages expand – and may even become ‘world religions’ and ‘world languages’ – while others stay local and do not ‘travel’.⁹⁰ Admittedly, these are not the central concerns of religious history and the history of languages, but they are very important issues for a history of cultural interaction that adopts a global perspective.

(3) Mixed Explanations

Between the extremes of non-explanation and pan-explanation, a wide middle ground opens up where the search for causes is mixed up with a host of other considerations. These cases are ‘global’ to the extent – one should remember David Bell’s discussion of explanations of the French Revolution – that external and ‘long-distance’ vectors are accorded special prominence in relation to internal ones. This also means that causal chains and sequences – what has been called ‘the transitivity of causation’ ⁹¹ – are usually longer than in internalist explanations. The factors impinging from the outside are often difficult to identify and trace to their origins. Characteristic, therefore, are forms of comparison that are incomplete, rudimentary or implicit and subcutaneous in a plurality of cases not strictly conforming to methodological requirements and standards. One could speak of ‘wild’ explanations, depending on the individual case, of quasi-explanations, crypto-explanations or proto-explanations, sometimes even of pseudo-explanations that qualify impolitely as ‘fake global history’. Since in the humanities the line between academic and popular forms of expression is much more difficult to draw than in the natural sciences, the rigour of explanation, comparison and other logic-bound methodical procedures can be softened in many grades and shades. James Woodward, the great philosophical authority on causal explanation, suggests some kind of ‘continuity’ between causal explanation in science and ‘causal knowledge of a more mundane, everyday sort’.⁹² In extreme cases, conspiracy ‘theorists’ concoct their own explanations of historical phenomena that can be perfectly consistent and formally rational, but based on substantially mistaken and irrational premises. Systems of delusion and closed worldviews derive their attractiveness to their true believers from a claim to be able to make sense of anything.

(4) Explanations as Counterfactual Thought Experiments

While philosophy takes counterfactuals very seriously,⁹³ manuals of historical method are likely to admonish us that they should be avoided, and no less an authority than Richard J. Evans has expressed well-considered reservations against the abuse of thought experiments for fanciful speculation about alternative pasts.⁹⁴ The genre of fictitious ‘alternate histories’ is an old one and is well-developed in contemporary popular culture. Laurent Binet’s novel Civilisations (2019),⁹⁵ in which Columbus fails and the Incas invade Europe, even won a prize from the Académie Française. Serious historians have peppered their books with speculations about China winning the Opium War and sending a punitive Armada to Britain.⁹⁶ Even so, few global historians are likely to risk their reputation with similar literary experiments. Still, one might pause and ponder whether we do not perform counterfactual thought experiments all the time. When we prepare a multi-factorial explanation of a complex phenomenon, is it not a normal, if pre-methodical, mental procedure to remove a factor – or to neutralise it to ceteris paribus status – and imagine the consequences of its deletion or disregard? Or to add another factor and see what happens? Perhaps it is worth considering Cass Sunstein’s advice to ‘dismiss counterfactual history when it is based on false historical claims’ and when it crosses the boundary between the plausible and the fantastic,⁹⁷ without rejecting it for experimental purposes: ‘any causal claim is an exercise of counterfactual history’.⁹⁸ Shouldn’t one simply add counterfactual speculation to the toolkit of historical heuristics?

(5) Explanation and Context

Almost anything can be placed within ‘a global context’ – in other words, a context of all contexts that encompasses the various national and regional contexts commonly handled in historiography. Global history could even be defined as an exercise in context maximisation. Bookshops are full of volumes on ‘X in global [world] history’. However, context as such is no virtue and no end in itself. It may be interesting to learn what happened elsewhere at the same time, or to draw parallels across the world, or to discover sources created by travellers and other eye-witnesses from afar whose existence had so far been overlooked by historians. Yet descriptive context as such does not explain anything. In each individual case, context has to be reduced to specific and traceable connections. To put it in more technical language: how does one select causally relevant contexts from among a huge repository of virtual contexts? How does one translate context into particular variables that correspond with classes of information found in the sources – in other words, variables that can be ‘tested’ empirically? How does one make claims about quantities – how much is ‘much’? – and proportions, about the relative power of impacts and the strength, stability and persistence of effects?

(6) Explaining Dynamics

While it may be correct to say that global historians tend to privilege the synchronic over the diachronic dimension – in other words, space over time – they are still keenly interested in dynamics. Global history is by no means a static discourse. The very centrality of mobility as a research topic speaks against such a suspicion. Dynamics enter the picture in two rather different shapes. On the one hand, the motive of long-term ‘change’ is being projected on the planet as a whole. Climate change and the shrinking of biodiversity are anthropogenic processes of worldwide scope. Does global history possess the intellectual tools necessary for making a significant contribution to explaining these processes? Probably, these kinds of macro-dynamics require micro-scaled and detailed analyses of their origins and consequences. On the other hand, global history is likely to be better equipped for understanding ‘diachronic’ dynamics – that is, processes that can best be observed as they move ‘horizontally’ from place to place. The frequently noted obsession of global studies with mobility and flows points in this direction. Processes of relocation and diffusion, of expansion and contraction, of the formation and metamorphosis of networks are rewarding objects of description. ‘Contagion’ has become a key term for global histories of disease and financial panics. But how to go beyond description? How to come up with accounts for motion that are neither unilinear and mechanical (A leads to B, B to C, etc.) nor tautological (mobility increases because the world is accelerating, and so on)? Would that not be a good opportunity to incorporate into explanatory models certain middle-range mechanisms and regularities of spreading and infectious connectivity drawn from epidemiology or financial market research?

That final question leads us back to the elementary options in the formal theory of history. Unfortunately, the squaring of the circle has not been accomplished: A concept of ‘analytical narratives’ was never elaborated adequately,⁹⁹ although it is intuitively obvious what such narratives might look like.¹⁰⁰ Global history – a wide umbrella covering very different approaches – cannot be content with producing narratives and, if explaining is intended at all, relying on the miracles wrought by a phantom called ‘narrative explanation’. Rather, explanation has to be made explicit as a logical procedure, with a little help from analytical theories of history, constrained as they largely have been by a fixation on a conventional history of political events. More promising are social science methodologies, especially middle-range theories, mechanisms and patterns of repetition. Such analytical devices can be incorporated into complex, though not overloaded explanatory sketches. In the event of success, global history is not just an exercise in diversity but makes a deprovincialised past speak to the future.

2 Comparison Its Use and Misuse in Social and Economic History

Alessandro Stanziani

A few years ago, Gareth Austin, a well-known economic historian specialising in Africa, took up Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bing Wong’s proposal to develop a form of ‘reciprocal comparison’ in which Africa (Austin’s case) and China (Pomeranz and Wong’s) would not be compared exclusively to the Western model as the exemplary scenario and exclusive yardstick.¹ The fundamental aim of these proposals was to break free from the ‘Eurocentrism’ underlying most economic history analysis. As Austin asserted, the point was not to reject any general model of economic development but rather to widen the definitions of city, market and private property to include practices found in non-European worlds.

Unfortunately, in practice, this claim turned into its reverse: Pomeranz and Austin ended up assigning to non-European countries features usually associated with more or less idealised Western countries. Thus, the Yangzi had real competitive markets and private property rules, while Ghana and other African countries might have had the same if corruption had not intervened. While at first sight it seems politically correct not to call Africans ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘naturally hostile’ to capitalism, ascribing them a proto-market economy was not empirically true and expressed a vision of comparison modelled on faith in the one capitalist world after the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’. Unlike the economic anthropology of the 1960s and the 1970s, which scoured the world for ‘alternative’ economic rationalities, this new approach sought to show that capitalist values had been globally widespread for centuries. Yet after the enthusiasm for globalisation and global history, after the long financial crisis and the return of nationalisms in response precisely to globalisation, we need something other than mere enthusiasm for capitalist values. It makes no sense to compare the Chinese, the African or the Indian ‘case’ exclusively to an ideal model of the West.

A first solution would be to take a closer look at non-Western values and categories of thought, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. Anthropologists, along with specialists in area studies and the second generation of subaltern studies (the first being mostly concerned with the social history of the peasantry), advanced this solution when making explicit or implicit comparisons. Thus, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s approach has the virtue of questioning the categories we use when we think about our world in comparison to others, and insisting on the need to take the values of other cultures into consideration.² It is perfectly legitimate to wonder if there are equivalents in other cultures to Western notions such as human rights, civil society, cosmopolitanism³ or even religion and secularism.⁴ This attention to ‘alternative’ values is necessary and welcome, but it also carries a risk. The insistence on ‘genuine’ Hindu, Chinese or Muslim values is a feature of nationalist political projects, but it also influenced several attempts made by Western specialists in so-called area studies to oppose the European perspective to a world history seen from a Chinese, Islamic or African perspective.⁵

This is a dangerous path: by emphasising more or less monolithic entities called ‘cultures’ or ‘civilisations’ or ‘area studies’, historians tend to overlook the cross-pollination and reciprocal influences that occur between ‘cultures’, which are never monolithic entities. This is one of the chief criticisms that ‘connected history’ has levelled against subaltern studies. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and supporters of entangled or connected history in general, has persistently stressed how European values and practices have been profoundly affected by interactions and exchanges with non-European worlds.⁶ Connected history has sought to overcome this wall of opposing civilisations and, while initially strongly critical of comparisons, Subrahmanyam recently acknowledged the possibility of using them.⁷

At the same time, the opposition between comparison, presumed to be subjective, and connection, viewed as objective and obvious, weakens entangled history and connected history in general.⁸ It seems senseless to oppose l’histoire croisée and connected history to comparative history.⁹ This is all the more relevant since comparisons actually connect entities, and create relationships between them, precisely by looking for analogies and differences. They also connect objects by comparing them according to a list of criteria. The connections found in archives are no less subjective than the comparisons made by the historian. Archives and documents are never ready-made; they are the product of the efforts made by the administrations, companies and actors at their source, and later by archivists and their classifications, and ultimately by historians who select a given document and present it in an equally particular way. In fact, each comparison requires a meta-language and, if not a proper translation, at least an exercise of commensurability between terms and within a given methodological framework.¹⁰

Therefore, this chapter will not question the terms of comparison and analogy in abstract methodological models; instead, it will place actors and debates in their appropriate historical context in order to understand why they were interested in comparison and why, in a given context, they practised it in one particular way and not in another. Moreover, each context will be resolutely transregional and comparison will be identified as a cross-cultural practice. I will therefore take my distance from current arguments relating comparison only to European colonial expansion.¹¹ This is certainly true in some periods and for some authors, but not for all. Infra-European tensions and competition were no less important in justifying comparisons than encounters with non-European worlds. The history of comparative investigations reveals precisely that the identification of ‘us’ and the ‘others’, of Europe, or the West, and the ‘rest’ was an extremely variegated exercise in both its approach and its conclusions, and it contributed to the mutual identification, and not just opposition, of all these terms. The interesting point to identify is how these multiple levels of comparison, geopolitical tensions and cultural transfers intervened in specific contexts. Even if comparison has been practised since Antiquity (both in Western and Asian historiographies),¹² or, even more radically, as some anthropologists and biologists argue, since the Palaeolithic, and even if it became more widely used in the Middle Ages in its analogic forms, I will mostly focus on the period from the eighteenth century to the present day. This is not to follow Michel Foucault who, in Les mots et les choses (1966), argued that comparison presented a major break in the seventeenth century, when the episteme moved from analogy to classification and distinction.¹³ The problem is that there is little empirical evidence of such a shift. Instead, as we will see, the two forms of comparison coexisted over the long run. Thus, my focus on the last three centuries responds to the epistemological evidence: comparison, as a form of translation, and analytical reflection are coessential to the relationships between the so-called human sciences, social sciences and natural sciences. The very possibility of identifying and separating these fields became relevant only from the eighteenth century onwards. I will begin with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its comparative philosophical anthropology; I will then move to the nineteenth century (Karl Marx, Max Weber) and the twentieth, examining the use and misuse of Weber (and Marx) during the decolonisation process and the Cold War, before arriving at global history nowadays. I will also evoke the Durkheimian approach to the comparative history of societies and its historical translation in the French Annales school, not to forget the comparative approaches in social and economic anthropology. I will conclude by suggesting some possible ways to practise comparisons in a global perspective.

Eurocentric Comparison: A Stain on the Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment raised two major relevant questions in comparison: on the one hand, the Eurocentrism of comparatism; on the other, the epistemological tension between historical sources and broader philosophical categories and thought. On the first point, subaltern, orientalist, post-modernist and finally global studies strongly criticise the Enlightenment as the source of Eurocentrism. In their view, most eighteenth-century authors explicitly or implicitly compared a more or less idealised European civilisation to ‘other’ backward areas and civilisations.¹⁴ Along a similar line, nowadays supporters of ‘multiple modernities’ erroneously mix up present-day approaches and those of the Enlightenment.¹⁵ In fact, most of today’s critical judgements reflect less the original aim of eighteenth-century authors than their influential interpretations over the following centuries. In the eighteenth century, comparison was made not on the basis of economic or sociological models – these fields did not yet exist – but starting from philosophy and physiology. Most authors compared the attitudes individuals had to ‘developing’ their body and personality; the category of ‘backwardness’ (retardation) was first applied to individuals (their bodily or psychological backwardness). But then, differences between individual capacities were turned into differences in social status in order to criticise the ‘old regime’. This passage from the individual to society finally led to different societies being compared in time and space.¹⁶ However, authors never compared different modernities and civilisations for the very simple reason that they constantly employed the term ‘civilisation’ in the singular: there was not a European or an Indian or Arab civilisation, but one single civilisation of humankind. The question instead was whether different values contributed equally to progress and civilisation, or whether some values, institutions and people were more advanced than others. The first approach imagined multiple scales of time and values and therefore compared countries in order to understand their possible mutual influence.¹⁷ The latter attitude, by contrast, imagined that some countries were more advanced than others on the scale of time and that their values would ultimately prevail over the rest. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Pietro Giannone were in the first group, together with the later versions of the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. Diderot and Montesquieu, as well as many ‘economists’ – the French physiocrats – tended to express the second attitude.

However, Europeans did not just reflect on the ‘others’. For much of the eighteenth century, for example, the French and the British constantly compared themselves to each other in terms of economic and social progress, warfare, science, population, techniques and so forth. This was because of the fierce competition between the two powers in Europe and on a global scale as they went about consolidating their respective empires. These two stakes – the nation and the empire – went together. Moreover, this was not just a European attitude, but one that was widespread in China, the Ottoman Empire and Russia, among others, where local elites compared themselves with the European powers.¹⁸ In all these cases, comparisons expressed not only the influence of contradictory attitudes that Western European thinkers exerted outside of their country, but also the emergence of new paradigms of comparison in non-European countries.¹⁹ Several authors reflected on comparison and expressed similar methodologies, some looking for ‘universal values’ and others associating the very notion of ‘specificity’ with longue durée persistent features in culture, institutions and the like. Reciprocal influence between thinkers in these areas was the rule. For example, Diderot believed in the reforming potential of Catherine the Great and the French monarchy.²⁰ Based on this belief, he distinguished between nations that had already achieved their highest level of civilisation and were starting to degenerate and those that remained closer to nature and could strive for a higher level of order and morality while avoiding the evils of civilisation. He placed America and Russia among the latter.²¹

After the 1770s, major political and social events pushed several philosophers to redefine their notion of progress, and therefore the object and content of their comparisons. The Pugachev uprising in Russia (1773–75) and the protests by masters and apprentices against the abolition of the guilds in France rapidly led to a revision of the enlightened monarchs’ projects in both countries. From the 1780s on, Diderot and Condillac associated their scepticism about enlightened despotism with a more general criticism of European civilisation.²² In other words, the encounter with Russia not only led French authors to reflect on France and Europe, but also to eventually reverse the tension between ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ countries. In turn, this was not a one-way cultural exchange between a presumed ‘centre’ and a ‘periphery’ of Europe (Russia); beyond the impact of the Russian experience on French reflections on modernity, this two-way avenue of reflection produced original thinking in Russia itself. Here, besides followers of French revolutionary thinkers such as Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev,²³ others adopted a more moderate attitude. Mikhailo Mikhailevich Shcherbatov claimed to be inspired by the French philosophes when he suggested keeping Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks.²⁴ These reinterpretations of the French Enlightenment in Russia did not express the ‘distortions’ of Russian authors but instead reflected the ambivalences of the Enlightenment itself and the cross-pollination across the Urals. They were anything but a monolithic ‘centre versus periphery’ phenomenon, as critics of European cultural imperialism often state.

In short, comparison in the Enlightenment expressed a philosophical attitude which sought to identify an epistemological framework to reflect on human civilisation as a whole. Within this overall attitude, one tendency consisted in measuring ‘backward’ areas in the light of the most advanced ones, while, conversely, another approach considered that the ‘corruption’ of Europe could be solved by learning from the ‘savage’ areas. How did the nineteenth century modify this exchange? To answer this question, we need to consider three major trends in comparative approaches during the nineteenth century, linked with the names of Marx, Durkheim and Weber.

Marx: Champion of Comparative Eurocentrism?

Nineteenth-century comparisons owed much to the emergence of positivism and the influence the natural sciences had on the social sciences. The former further developed reflections and practices on classifications which, once adopted by the social sciences, encouraged normative attitudes: comparison, based on the classification of societies, was a tool not just to understand but also to orient social change and public policies. In this context, Marxist forms of comparison raised two major concerns: on the one hand, again, the Eurocentrism of this approach; on the other, the tension between a general model and ‘local’ exceptions. As a great admirer of Charles Darwin, and also with the aim of criticising ‘vulgar socialism’, Marx sought to fill the gap between these fields. This is one of the reasons why Dipesh Chakrabarty considers Marx’s approach poorly suited to explaining contexts such as India. But this is not the only point; the relevant question is why and how did Marx himself imagine ‘Europe’, ‘India’ and ‘Asia’ and compare them? During the second half of the nineteenth century, the question arose in the main countries of Europe as to whether the ‘historical laws of development’ were the same everywhere. At that time, several countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, and also outside Europe (Japan, Latin America), stopped closing themselves off to European influence and instead sought to steer their own path to industrialisation and ‘modernisation’.

In this context, in the first volume of Capital, as earlier in the Critique of Political Economy and The Communist Manifesto, Marx accused classical political economy of putting forward abstract theories and laws that failed to take into account the historically situated nature of capitalism. He opposed the abstraction of economics to concrete, empirical analyses of societies and their history. In reality, he was less critical of models in general than of those who dehistoricised capitalism, such as the authors of the classical school. Indeed, his own approach led him to identify simultaneously the historical singularity of capitalism and its ‘general laws’. Marx adopted comparatism, but only to insert it into the wider laws of history. As a Hegelian, Marx was not against general theories and historical laws, only certain interpretations of this process. Marx did not criticise political economy for abstraction as such, but rather the particular form that naturalised capitalism. Instead, he proposed a schema meant to be both historical and general, with claims to universality. The passage from feudalism to capitalism is valid everywhere, along with the main characteristics of capitalist dynamics: alienation and commodification of labour, the monetisation of trade and commodity fetishism that inevitably accompany the trend towards a lower profit rate, alternating periods of crisis and expansion and the existence of the famous ‘reserve army’ of proletarians. Historical determinism and the philosophy of history come together in a positivist approach in which history serves less to question than to validate a general scheme.

Yet, as was the case for the Enlightenment, Marx also sometimes produced new attitudes when he moved beyond Germany or Britain. It is important to understand, even beyond an author’s initial intention, the role cross-cultural influences played (and play) in comparative historical investigation. Thus, the opposition between Slavophiles and Westernisers in nineteenth-century Russia stemmed precisely from the issue that concerns us here: comparison in its epistemological and historical dimensions. Starting in the 1840s, first Slavophiles and then Westernisers such as Alexander Herzen saw the Russian peasant commune as a historical singularity that could allow the country to move directly into modernity without going through a capitalist phase of development. The debate over the commune was inseparable from the comparison between Russia and Western Europe. This debate was at once ideological (the role of the peasantry in the revolution), empirical (how to prove the arguments used) and methodological (how to make comparisons). That is why this debate inevitably ended up being combined with the debate over method in the science of society. Marx did it, and Russian intellectuals did it as well. ‘Those who invoke private property’, noted Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, ‘think that progress in sociology and economics, as in natural science, consists in moving from simple to more complex forms’. From this point of view, by limiting specialisation, the commune did not contribute to backwardness but rather anticipated the future evolution of the developed countries.²⁵

But how were these conclusions to be reconciled with the Marxist thought with which these authors associated themselves? In other words, if historical laws existed, how could historical varieties be explained? One single path for each country, or multiple paths? The answer to these questions had an impact on the theory and practice of comparison itself: it offered a choice between normative comparison and historical determinism, on the one hand, and heuristic comparison and historical bifurcations, on the other. How so?

In a letter addressed to Nikolay Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky in 1877, Marx said he thought Russia could take a different route from the one in the West. Four years later, in a letter to Vera Zasulich, he wrote that the peasant commune was the basis for the social regeneration of Russia.²⁶ By turning his focus towards Russia and empirically casting doubt on his theory, Marx ended up unlocking it. Yet Marx was uncertain in this turn, and after him Engels pushed to standardise Marxism into a kind of orthodoxy which ignored the ‘alternative paths’ in history. This type of normative comparison has never disappeared from Marxist thought in all its variants; even worse, ‘late Marx’ seems even to have been forgotten again, after the parenthesis of ‘development studies’ during the Cold War. Would Max Weber and his followers provide an alternative?

The Use and Misuse of Max Weber

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, reflections on comparison took some new turns. First, the general social and political context focused attention on countries that were ‘catching up’ (such as Germany and the United States), inspiring new reflections on the putative ‘decadence’ of former leading countries, such as China or even, paradoxically, Britain. Meanwhile, the emergence of Japan encouraged comparative reflections on non-European areas and their presumed ‘backwardness’. Modernisation and the role of the state therefore acquired a major relevance in comparative investigations in history. Beyond this field, anthropology found new life in global investigations of ‘local’ people. In this context, physical and biological anthropology made use of natural sciences to classify and hierarchise peoples, while ethnography and cultural anthropology sought to compare by putting the accent on ‘cultural specificities’, and, eventually, comparative linguistics.²⁷ I will return to anthropology in the final part of this chapter.

Among the authors who contributed most to reflections on comparisons in this period, one reference is at least as important as Marx: Max Weber. He had enormous influence at the time and his ideas keep surfacing today in comparative and global history studies, via Charles Tilly, R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz, among others – this despite criticism of Weber by specialists in area studies and anthropologists such as Jack Goody.²⁸ We should be careful to distinguish Weber’s thought from the many approaches more or less inspired by him. Let us take one example among others: religion. Serious proof has never been found to substantiate the favourable connection between Protestantism and capitalism, or the tensions between Catholicism and Confucianism on the one hand, and capitalism on the other. Yet these elements continue to be evoked as if they were established truths – except when they are reversed entirely nowadays and Confucianism is invoked to explain China’s economic success.²⁹

Weber certainly had a Eurocentric approach, as did Marx before him. At the same time, when he wrote on China or India and compared them to Europe in terms of rationality, state, the economy, accounting and science, he posed a far greater challenge to his period and was much more nuanced than his critics usually argued. His main goal was not to oppose civilisation to backwardness and rationality to irrationality but to explain historical trajectories starting from social complexities. To be sure, Weber sought to explain the success of the West; but, at the same time, his explanations were far more complex than those of dozens of authors who claimed to be inspired by Weber. Much recent criticism of Weber applies more to ‘Weberian authors’ than to Weber himself.³⁰

Unlike Karl Marx or Émile Durkheim, Weber gave priority to comparison rather than to ‘whole’ dynamics (without neglecting them). This style of reasoning had its roots in the German ‘historical school’ of economics and in the attempt to insert the ‘nation’ into wider dynamics while preserving it as one possible unit of comparison. However, unlike the first generation of the historical school (Friedrich List, for example), looking for the ‘nation’ in a still divided Germany, and unlike the second generation (Wilhelm Roscher, among others), reflecting on the tension between casuistic and general historical laws, Weber pioneered a multi-scale and multi-angle comparative method. The crucial element in this process lay in the choice of the fields, on the one hand, and the variables, on the other. First, the fields: society, religion and the economy. All three enter into Weberian architecture to provide a fully integrated analysis of society. Next, within each field, Weber selected what he considered the relevant variables. For example, the comparison between Europe – mainly Britain – and China was made by focusing on private property or the role played by science in technological innovation, power struggles between entrepreneurs, capitalists and wage earners and so on. Capitalism was distinguished by the pursuit of profit and the rational organisation of production factors.³¹ Weber’s strength lay in conceiving a framework of comparative analysis that remained unchallenged for decades and which often served to legitimise the supremacy of the West, or, rather, of its ideal type.³² He shared with Marx the idea that profits and wage labour were the main features of capitalism. However, unlike Marx he did not seek to predict the course of history: normativity made way for a heuristic of the ‘model’ that aimed at opening doors and asking questions rather than identifying the ‘laws of history’. The global perspective was equally different: Marx reasoned in terms of extension; he presumed that the historical path of England, more or less idealised, would extend to the rest of the world. Weber did not imagine the future of other countries but instead sought to compare ideal types with empirical realities. He thus did not share Marx’s obligation to consider the case of India or Russia and ask if they fitted into his scheme.

What is important to retain here is the relationship Weber maintained between comparison and ideal types.³³ This link was crucial to incorporating historical analysis into a sociological perspective. Comparison requires constant terms; without them, it becomes impossible. According to Weber, this was the price to pay for reconciling logical rigour with empirical analysis. Not all these features would be taken up by Weber’s disciples.

Comparative history as it developed after the Second World War would have been impossible without the intellectual diaspora of Russian and Central European authors in the United States, originating from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires as well as the rise of Nazism. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Polanyi, Alexander Gerschenkron, Wassily Leontief, Albert Hirschmann and Simon Kuznets were just some of those who left continental Europe. Their sensibility and approaches owed much to the multiple encounters between the Germanic and Russian cultures, to which they added an always difficult dialogue with the Anglophone worlds (most of them were critical of American consumerism).³⁴ These experiences encouraged not just comparisons in their approach but, what is more, comparisons in which cross-cultural experiences were crucial.

To these multiple influences another must be added: the global Cold War, in which tensions between the two superpowers were transmuted into investigations (and subsequent policies) about the origins and solutions to ‘backwardness’. Alexander Gerschenkron is famous for his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. It involved proposing a scale of comparison to account for economic growth as well as for so-called ‘obstruction’ factors. Like Max Weber and others before him, Gerschenkron began by drawing up a list of Western characteristics on which his comparison would be based. He, too, emphasised cities, the bourgeoisie, markets and private property. Yet unlike Marx and, to some extent, Weber, he thought it was possible to arrive at industrialisation (but not capitalism) without a bourgeoisie. In other words, Gerschenkron gave new value to the late Marx’s investigation on the Russian path. He did not use it to explain the general laws of history, but instead to identify historical and future solutions to ‘underdevelopment’. ‘Backward’ countries (to use the jargon of the 1960s and 1970s) such as Prussia and Russia had ‘substituting factors’, notably the state. This was a clever solution to the problem raised by the need to reconcile particular features and historical specificities with general dynamics. If backwardness and diversity go together, then it is possible to conceive of alternative paths.³⁵

One might wonder, however, whether this solution really eliminates the confusion between historical time and logical time. Yet these two terms – the notions of backwardness and historical temporalities – are hardly compatible. In reality, economic backwardness refers to logical time (as identified in an economic model, for instance). Contrary to appearances, Gerschenkron did not compare Russia to England in specific historical contexts. Instead, he opposed an ideal image of the West (and of England in particular) to an equally ideal image of nineteenth-century Russia. English economic development was associated with the early introduction of a parliament, privatisation of the commons and, hence, the formation of a proletariat available for agriculture and industry. In contrast, Russia was associated with market towns – and therefore with a bourgeoisie – as well as the presence of an absentee landed gentry living off serf labour. These were ideal types instead of complex historical realities. This approach paid a heavy tribute to the climate of the Cold War.

Normative Comparison: From the Cold War to the Great Divergence

This work was part of a broader debate in the 1950s and 1960s. With decolonisation, economists raised the problem of (under)development and what should be done to remedy it. In the context of the Cold War, this issue was inseparable from the question of which economic and political form the new states would take: capitalism or socialism. The components of this debate were globalised. They not only compared the economic achievements of the USSR to those of the West, but also the trajectories of China, India and the countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia that were gaining their independence at the time. In fact, the debate over modernisation implied a strongly determinist philosophy of history, Eurocentric categories and postulates and, ultimately, circular explanatory arguments.³⁶ Herein lies the essential connection between Weber, Gerschenkron and development economics: Eurocentrism was the very basis of comparisons using ideal types. These comparisons, often centred on the twin notions of backwardness and progress, reflected issues that were not only intellectual but also political and therefore normative. The comparisons were not so much anachronistic as atemporal.

The normativity of comparison even increased over time, well beyond Gerschenkron’s approach. In particular, Walt W. Rostow put forward his theory of stages of growth in open opposition to socialism. He showed that the stages of growth were universal and that it was impossible to follow a path imposed from on high, as in the USSR. History served to validate the Western-style itinerary and the arrow of time moved in only one direction. Paradoxically, Rostow reproduced Marx’s argument, according to which the most advanced countries showed backward countries the way ahead.

In a similar vein, when Karl August Wittfogel published Oriental Despotism, the Cold War was at its height.³⁷ Using his Marxist training and Marx’s notion of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, the author described the USSR under Stalin as ‘despotism’. From this viewpoint, he was putting the Soviet Union in the same category as earlier forms of Asian power that were said to have developed highly despotic societies by controlling hydraulic resources. Wittfogel contrasted this type of organisation with slave-owning societies and feudal societies. Instead of slaves or serfs, oriental despotic societies subjugated the entire population to the will of high-ranking bureaucrats. What was really at stake in Wittfogel’s book was this: at the time of the Cold War, the USSR was viewed as a despotic system not only by liberals and conservatives but also by socialists and communists critical of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. For Wittfogel, as for Montesquieu and Marx before him, the analysis of Asia was actually intended as a discussion of political relationships within the ‘West’. In other words, we should not make the mistake of considering every opposition between ‘us’ and the ‘others’ as lacking tensions within the ‘us’.

There is another methodological insight to discuss in this kind of comparison: the relationship between causality and temporality. For example, comparative history and the sociology of state construction (at the very core of Max Weber, Charles Tilly, Theda Skopcol, Barrington Moore and Victor B. Lieberman) have often taught us to think in terms of nation-states. Even if an author such as Charles Tilly declares at the outset that we must avoid projecting recent constructions on the past, he cannot help doing so himself.³⁸ That is one of the consequences of studying the past in order to find the origins of the present. This reasoning raises two types of questions: it starts from the results and assumes the chronological antecedents were ‘causes’, even though there is no evidence, for example, that the growth of England was actually linked to the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1689 or that Venice lost its power because it was unable to produce a state like France. In the absence of empirical materials, the authors added a causality which is impossible to demonstrate. The solution lies very conveniently in post hoc ergo propter hoc. Temporal succession becomes synonymous with causality. Is it possible to shatter this kind of tautological reasoning?

A first attempt to solve this problem comes from the so-called debate on ‘the Great Divergence’, inspired by the title of Kenneth Pomeranz’s book. In Pomeranz’s approach, the Great Divergence is mainly related to colonial expansion and factor endowments. While Western Europe benefitted from its American colonies, and later from American markets and resources, Russian despotism and power limited Asian (mainly Chinese) expansion. We are apparently at the other end of the spectrum from classical Weberian approaches: instead of trying to fit the data into a model, here the data are used to confirm or disprove earlier studies without any pre-judgement. To be sure, these approaches do not fall into the trap of facile comparison mentioned earlier. They also avoid celebrating the West and, like every other global history approach, those used by proponents of the Great Divergence also propose important solutions to the question of how the singularities of the various parts of the world are interlinked and how they are connected to a larger whole (e.g. the comparison between the Lower Yangzi region and Lancashire leads to a reassessment of European and Chinese dynamics as a whole). This was a huge step forward from previous comparisons in terms of backwardness. But what about the model itself?

Pomeranz explains the Chinese dynamic according to the same criteria used for Europe – in particular, demographic growth, the protection of private property and the commercial and proto-industrial dynamic.³⁹ In other words, like Weber, David S. Landes, Karl Polanyi, Marx and so many others before him, Pomeranz retains the idealised British model made of privatisation of common lands, proletarianisation, industrialisation, bourgeois and individualist mentality, and so forth, and then extends it to China. Thus, Pomeranz overturns Weber but maintains his comparative method – which confirms the strength and polyvalence of the Weberian approach. At the same time, from a political standpoint, the whole debate over the Great Divergence stems from neoliberal Western intellectual orthodoxy after the fall of the Berlin Wall: markets and capitalism dominate the recent centuries of world history; institutions and perhaps factor endowments influence historical outcomes, not ‘mentalities’ or different economic attitudes (as anthropologists had expressed them). Finally, research work on the Great Divergence is problematic from the standpoint of political philosophy: how long will economic history – whether global or not – have to focus exclusively on growth and on ‘who was first’? The history of Russia – as well as the new Asian capitalism of China and India today – show that economic growth and markets are perfectly compatible with a lack of democracy and unequal social rights.

Marc Bloch or How to Reconcile Philology and Comparison

The First World War was experienced everywhere as a fundamental shift that broke up the old order. The United States asserted itself as the leading global power, while France and Great Britain, despite victory, were left to cope with the difficulties of reconstruction. Hostility to global economic, political and social dynamics stoked populist nationalism in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa and the Americas.⁴⁰ During the interwar period, historiographical nationalism reached heights never before achieved, even in the nineteenth century.⁴¹ The political role of nationalist history found its most extreme embodiment in the totalitarian states, where Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin made the rewriting of history the core of their respective political projects. Now nation and ethnicity became strongly connected and social Darwinism penetrated historical discourse.⁴² In 1920, Lucien Febvre published an article in the Revue de synthèse historique setting forth the political and social role of history in a ‘world in ruins’.⁴³ Febvre was not looking for a theory, but rather for an approach to history that would explain, among other things, the World War and its origins. This is where the global nature of history comes in: a global perspective is not as important in developing a political project for society (as was the case for Marx and Oswald Spengler, among many others) as it is in connecting different levels of history. Global history was histoire totale. Febvre emphasised that ‘posing problems correctly – the how and why –expressed the end and means of history. When there are no problems, there is no history – only narratives and compilations.’⁴⁴ The other issue pertained to the use of language in analysing societies distant from the historian in time or space. Febvre noted that mastering the language used is an absolute prerequisite to undertaking a historical study.

Marc Bloch also insisted on linguistic proficiency in his Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (1949) and in his famous article on historical comparison from 1928.⁴⁵ It is not by chance that, even nowadays and not only in France, historians who criticise comparativism and ‘socio-history’ refer to Bloch as one of the few acceptable methods for comparison. What essentially distinguishes Bloch and Febvre from Weber and his followers is mastery of languages and a rejection of general abstract models of analysis. Febvre maintained that researchers should not undertake analyses of a region unless they were proficient in the language; Bloch demanded similar linguistic proficiency. His approach shows the distance that separates him from Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Francois Simiand.⁴⁶ Bloch thought categories evolved over time, which accounts for his scepticism with regard to diachronic comparisons and his preference for synchronic comparisons. Moreover, in keeping with his insistence on knowing the sources and the language, Bloch restricted himself to comparisons within the ‘Western’ and Germanic European context and excluded Russia from his investigation. According to him, this was not only because he did not know Russian, but also because Russia did not belong to the same civilisation as France and Germany and therefore comparison would be useless.⁴⁷ Bloch’s approach invites us to think about relevant scales for comparison: even admitting for the moment that only synchronic comparison is justified, how does one go about choosing the relative spaces?

Bloch took for granted the relevance of comparisons within Europe. Of all his positions, this is perhaps the one that was most influenced by the interwar context; the tensions within European space motivated Bloch’s desire to claim its homogeneity despite the First World War and the conflict between France and Germany. These were indeed major challenges, especially when viewed from Strasbourg where Bloch lived. As a result, contrary to his own method, he assumed far more than he demonstrated the homogeneity of Europe and its relevance to making suitable comparisons. Despite the general success of this approach over decades, he was confusing the historian’s skills with analytical relevance. No doubt within the community of historians, as it was understood in France and in Europe and which Bloch defended in his work, the knowledge of languages was assumed to be indispensable for studying a region and producing comparisons and/or circulatory analyses. The refusal to make comparisons for reasons of ‘language’ or ‘civilisation’ is just as weak as making comparisons based on generalist models. This actually was a first important departure from the Enlightenment priority accorded to the ‘model’ or general concepts over empirical findings and which was inherited, in different ways, by Marx and Weber. The strength of this approach is to return sources, languages and archives to the core of the comparative investigation. The price paid was a methodological under-determination of the epistemological status of the origin of archives themselves, the selection of documents by the historians and the role of language across time and space, as we have shown in Bloch’s definition of ‘Europe’. Anthropology provides a possible solution to this problem.

Anthropology and Comparisons: A Dialogue with Historians and Economists?

To a certain extent, anthropology is always comparative, although not necessarily explicitly so.⁴⁸ Some major anthropologists, Evans-Pritchard among them, even argued the impossibility of achieving ultimate comparisons in anthropology; in doing so, they developed wonderful analyses on comparison itself.⁴⁹ In fact, ‘biological’ and nowadays ‘evolutionary’ anthropology insist on comparison as a natural artefact of the human mind, while, at the opposite end, cultural anthropology stresses the limits of comparison and its artificial nature. The former approach made use of the inductive method of the natural sciences when comparing and emphasised the differences, ‘all other things being equal’. This branch of anthropology was and still is close to economics, which adopted a similar method. By contrast, the latter approach sustained the so-called concomitant variations when comparing cases – that is, a complex set of multiple variations within and between the compared items. Anthropology offered a further device: it deconstructed the binary of ‘us’ and the ‘other’ so widespread in historical studies, in particular in imperial, colonial and postcolonial investigations. This approach overcame the notion of ‘specificity’ and therefore put an end to the comparison, if not the opposition, between essentialised ‘cultures’ and ‘area studies’.

Instead, circulation and translations became part of the comparison itself. Comparison was no longer a tool to confirm a given model but, on the contrary, an attitude to negotiate in situ the tensions between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’ while stressing the multiplicity of historical paths.⁵⁰ By subjecting the very notion of ‘culture’ to scrutiny, anthropology pushed historians to redefine their reasoning in terms of well identified ‘cultures’ or ‘civilisations’. No ‘culture’ is isolated from all others, and its representations and self-representations go well beyond the conventional opposition between ‘realities’ and ‘representations’, so dear to economic and some social historians. It is not by chance that anthropologists are usually critical of the very notion of ‘area studies’, as ahistorical, essentialist stabilisation of cultural identities.⁵¹ However, such a radical relativism and indistinction of the subject and the object, as embraced by Clifford Geertz and his followers, does not find unanimous consensus among anthropologists and historians.⁵² Among historians, the interface between post-modernist and post-colonialist deconstructivism and new reflective, critical reconstructions of the past has generated a multitude of approaches, including Carlo Ginzburg’s historical morphologies, Ann Laura Stoler’s ethnography in and of the archives, and Natalie Zemon Davis’s and Alf Luedtke’s historical anthropology, to name a few.⁵³

Meanwhile, from the early twentieth century, economic anthropology sought to articulate a different (from mainstream economics) relationship with history and other social sciences.⁵⁴ Hundreds of anthropological historical studies on local communities and their ‘economic’ behaviour all around the world saw the light of day. Intense debates over ‘multiple economic rationalities’, and the denial of supposedly economic relationships existing independently from cultural and social features, marked this huge trend during much of the twentieth century.⁵⁵ In the second half of the century, these were not just theoretical debates: concrete policies to be adopted in ‘developing countries’ were a major stake. Did ‘Africans’ or ‘Indians’ have to act like Londoners at the stock exchange to escape from poverty? The most interesting concern was that this attitude ultimately raised questions about economic behaviour and the boundaries between economic, social and cultural life in ‘advanced’ countries themselves. According to many anthropologists, optimising agents, as mainstream economics called them, were a fiction everywhere.⁵⁶ In short, the supposedly ‘local’ was not only connected to other ‘local’ entities and therefore to the global, but required that theories and interpretations of the ‘West’ itself be reframed. Historians, above all those who were close to microhistory, seemed extremely sensitive to this argument.⁵⁷ It is from this crossroads between history, anthropology and other social sciences that we may reflect on the present state and future orientation of comparative history.

Which Way?

The question this chapter sought to raise is not just how and whether historians should practise comparison but also, and more importantly, why historical comparisons matter in the political arena. In the eighteenth century, comparison was grounded in philosophy and expressed the deep involvement of ‘philosophers’ in the public sphere. To a certain extent, comparative history was part of political philosophy, which explains the criticisms most ‘philosophers’ raised vis-à-vis philology as a purely descriptive tool for ‘antiquarians’. At the same time, it would be a mistake to associate this comparative philosophical history with Eurocentrism. This was true for some but not all authors, precisely because the Enlightenment expressed contrasting attitudes towards the ‘centrality’ of Europe, its notions and the idea of progress.

The nineteenth century took a different approach. According to Marx, progress must come from the most advanced countries, above all Britain, and the categories of capital, labour, capitalism, exploitation and accumulation, although derived from a more or less stylised ‘European’ (actually British–German) perception, were supposed to be universally acceptable. Comparison was absorbed into the general laws of history.

Socio-economic comparative history acquired increasing importance in the public sphere during the twentieth century, precisely in relation to global phenomena such as the transmutation of Europe and increasing nationalist movements in the colonial world during and after decolonisation. Max Weber and his legacy were at the very core of comparative history for many decades. As such, Weber’s studies could lead to Eurocentric attitudes (in particular, on China or the role of Protestantism), but also to their opposite (studies on law and authority, parts of his economic history). As for Marc Bloch and the Annales school, multiple epistemological options and empirical conclusions were available.

This was not the case after Bloch for multiple reasons: the emergence of totalitarianisms and their use of history produced more rigid and tautological attitudes in liberal history as well. The Cold War and decolonisation exacerbated the problem rather than solving it, as we have seen with the debates around Alexander Gerschenkron, despite his attempts to identify multiple paths of development. Ironically, the end of the Cold War had an unexpected effect on comparative history: at first, renewed enthusiasm for the global gave rise to new ventures in comparative history, as attested by the debate on the Great Divergence. This debate marked the end of economic anthropology and of multiple paths to ‘modernity’. Comparison became a politically correct tool to confirm that Africans, Chinese and Indians were equally keen to embrace capitalism if only they had not been invaded by Western powers and later lived with corrupt governments. With the financial crisis, the opposition to globalisation and the new rise of nationalism, comparative approaches met with success among nationalist and civilisationist historians and observers, who stressed the radical opposition between Europe and Islam, the United States and the others, India or China and the West, and the like.

Is there another way to make use of comparison in the era of the global return of nationalisms? The answer is yes, but we need first to overcome some limitations in history teaching and history writing, beginning with the persistent institutional and analytic accent put on the so-called ‘singularity’ or ‘specificity’ of area studies.⁵⁸ Several authors have reflected on comparison and expressed similar methodologies, some looking for ‘universal values’, others associating the very notion of ‘specificity’ with persistent longue durée features, in culture, institutions and the like. ‘Specificity’, the very core of comparison, was identified in the ‘soul’ of the country, its traditions, customs and sometimes language and religious beliefs – we would say its structural longue durée components. Specificity is a structuralist notion today and was so in the past. Area studies still mention undefined ‘specificities’ of an area as synonymous with incommensurability and incomparability.⁵⁹

Sometimes, singularity is translated into uniqueness: a given region is said to be sui generis and therefore incomparable because unlike any other. Any justification of this position would require an explicit comparison, whereas this practice is rejected in the name of the very specificity and uniqueness of one area or another.⁶⁰ Together with its opposite – universalism and a single time scale – this was the most important legacy the Enlightenment left to historical comparisons. Such ‘singularity’ is also associated with the longue durée; persistent features may account for the presumed singularity of an area: its environment, culture, language, religion and state.⁶¹ In defining civilisations and area studies, the longue durée approach turns into a boomerang: what began as a heuristic tool (how to justify Europe instead of the Mediterranean? China instead of the Han culture?) becomes an intellectual prison.⁶²

Nor can reciprocal comparison solve the problem, despite Austin’s and Pomeranz’s assertions to the contrary. The answer is not to claim that all areas are equal, but to critically identify their multiple and variable (in time) singularities. These can only be detected in a connected history of the notions and practices of ‘singularities’ themselves. It does not suffice to say that France is like or unlike Senegal and Japan; presumed ‘specificities’ must be examined and not assumed; they have to be put into a dynamic historical global framework in which connections and comparison intervene. Areas are not monolithic entities existing by themselves but mobile configurations which respond to both sources and questions.

At the same time, as the history of comparison shows, a second shift is needed in contemporary historical practices. Schemes underlying historical comparative investigations are, explicitly or not, drawn from social sciences; they need to be historically decentred. What does this mean? To this day, global history reproduces the different paths to comparison inherited from previous centuries: neo-Marxists such as Immanuel Wallerstein or Giovanni Arrighi compare in order to identify a single path to post-capitalism. The world-system is a tautological model which leaves no room for historical bifurcations: the scene was set in the sixteenth century and ever since the periphery has been condemned to be a periphery and the core to be a core. Recent BRIC paths invalidate this theory. Paradoxically, globality is found again in a universal path, or even in a universal, pre-existing form of economic rationality. It is not by chance that some variants of the Great Divergence thesis combine Wallersteinian and neo-Marxist approaches: profit maximisation, exploitation and domination explain the ‘divergence’.

The problem is that historical comparison is based on ‘schemes’, if not rigid ‘models’, derived from philosophy, political economy, sociology, political sciences and anthropology. Comparisons are therefore often tautological because most of the social sciences are not only Eurocentric but also normative fields: they not only ask questions, they also pretend to give answers which fit the model and, where possible, they aim at predicting the future (economics constantly does so) while providing suggestions to the public sphere. Once the social sciences become normative, their use of history produces tautological schemes. And when normativity is combined with Eurocentric (and, recently, Sinocentric, Indocentric and Afrocentric) values and categories, then we are locked in historical ‘centric’ determinism and comparison is bound to fail.

However, there is no need to fall into this trap and we can still make comparisons which are neither deterministic nor ‘centric’. These two moves are interrelated. On the one hand, schemes may provide a heuristic, helping to pose questions instead of providing ready answers. If the answers do not fit the model, in particular in history, this means that historical research has genuinely contributed to our understanding of the world. This is the first contribution global history can make to the social sciences through comparatism: it can transform the normative into the heuristic.

On the other hand, much more than history, the social sciences are extremely ‘centric’ (in this case, mostly Eurocentric), even if nowadays attempts are made to decentralise the social sciences by basing them on presumed ‘Chinese’, ‘Islamic’, ‘African’ or ‘Indian’ categories. Thus, global historians must dare not just to ‘historicise’ the social sciences (as Marx, Weber and many others already argued), but to historicise them into a global perspective. Despite some recent attempts, a ‘global history’ of political economy, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, legal studies and so forth, that is not conceived as a series of chapters on, say, economics in India, in Japan, African sociology and the like, has yet to be written. In short, problematising the so-called ‘specificity’ of an area instead of taking it for granted, while mobilising the decentred social sciences, is the main goal of a heuristic and not normative comparatism in global history.

3 Time Temporality in Global History

Christina Brauner

Time, it has been argued, is the ‘last fetish’ of the historians’ tribe.¹ If this is true, global history has played, and continues to play, a peculiar role in that cult, at the same time acting as a devout believer and a fervent iconoclast. This ambivalence is connected to the diverse and divergent approaches assembled under the flag of ‘global history’. Global historians’ struggle with temporality points to problems of historical scholarship more broadly but also opens up possibilities for rethinking the discipline.

The Time of Global History

Time takes a central yet ambiguous role in the discourse of global history, as its definition demonstrates: global history, or so we are told, is the history our global and globalised present requires. It is, above all, required to explain the genesis of this global present, by studying historical globalisation processes or exploring the genealogy of growing connections. But global history’s claim to timeliness also operates on methodological levels: here, the reference to the global present serves to call for viewpoints beyond the national restraints of traditional historiography.²

As this rhetoric of timeliness shows, global history is situated within the discourse of globalisation.³ This does not mean that global history can only be written as a history of globalisation; on the contrary, a growing number of global historians have set out to criticise this paradigm of globalisation. Yet the connection to the discourse remains present, even if in the form of critique.⁴

Evoking present-day concerns to frame and legitimise historical studies in general, or certain research agendas in particular, is, of course, not peculiar to global history. Some may call such references ‘presentist’ and mean this as a reproach. From an epistemological perspective, though, all history is and must be presentist, as the viewpoint historians think and write from is necessarily located in the present.⁵ However, when globalisation theorists claim an unprecedented novelty of the global present, a more specific understanding of presentism is at play. It assumes a fundamental rupture between past and present, just as it is central to François Hartog’s definition of presentism as the ‘regime of historicity’ which governs our order of time today.⁶ In global history, such presentist reasonings lead to an uneasy co-existence with the discipline’s quest for historicisation, seeking to trace and explain the genesis of globalisation processes. With regard to the identity of the field, too, there are tensions between claims to novelty and the quest for venerable ancestors and ‘pedigree’.⁷ While such discussions concern the beginnings of global history both as subject matter and scholarly field, the contours of the global present itself, too, are far from clear: When does it begin? And what kind of future does a global present have?⁸

Still, the global present has a peculiar temporal identity: it is a present that claims to have become, finally and fully, a time of contemporaries.⁹ This claim is, above all, buttressed by allusions to an unprecedented experience of synchronicity – or at least the possibility of such experience – which is very much at the heart of globalisation definitions.¹⁰ Hartmut Rosa, for instance, discusses globalisation as ‘time-space compression’ and characterises it ‘temporally’ as the ‘dissolution of stable rhythms and sequences following the ubiquitous contemporisation (Vergleichzeitigung) of even the noncontemporaneous’.¹¹

Indeed, when global historians refer to ‘our present’, they equally presuppose an all-encompassing yet somewhat fuzzy community of experience. Moreover, synchronising approaches to the past have become a signature practice of global history. They serve not only to transcend traditional divides and seek out connections otherwise invisible but have also been championed as an antidote to lingering ‘centrisms’ of various kinds. Both on a historical and a historiographical plane, however, the effects of synchronisation remain ambiguous: Does it lead to the emergence of a homogenous time regime, or rather reinforce or even foster a plurality of times?¹² And what is, after all, the ‘noncontemporaneous’ that is, in Rosa’s wording, ‘contemporised’ in a globalising world?

Obviously, global history has its time. Reflecting on the consequences this entails for the practice of global historians leads to more general questions about temporality and historicity. It prompts us to consider the ‘politics of time’ or ‘chronopolitics’ inherent in our own scholarly practices and the institutional settings we inhabit.¹³

This chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge historical studies in general and global history in particular. Firstly, the chapter shows why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. The chapter moves on to consider the politics of periodisation as a particular challenge for decentring history, taking up the debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ as an example. Finally, it turns to synchronisation and contemporaneity as important concerns in global history, containing a promise and a problem at the same time.

The ‘Fetish’ of Time and the Pursuit of Global History

There is no history without time. Still, time has long been something of a ‘blind spot’ within the field.¹⁴ It takes a double role, featuring as the seemingly empty and transparent medium in which ‘history unfolds’ and as the product and means of historical narrative and representation. Recently, in the wake of what has eagerly been hailed as the ‘temporal turn’, time increasingly appears as a specific subject of study.¹⁵ Given this multiplicity of roles, it is important to distinguish between analytical and historical notions of time and temporality or – taking up a distinction from anthropology – the perspective of the scholarly observer (etic) and those of the actors involved in the field observed (emic).

Following Lorenz’s diagnosis, historical scholarship even suffers from ‘chronocentrism’, with temporal units, markers and divisions as its arguably most important denominators. This chronocentrism is perhaps most evident in the guise of periodisation, in terms of both historiographical operation and institutional structure.¹⁶ For global historians, periodisation presents a particular challenge. Thomas Bauer, a scholar of Islamic history and Arabic literature, has nailed this with perfection when he begins his essay Warum es kein islamisches Mittelalter gab (‘Why there were no Islamic Middle Ages’) as follows:

Compare the following two sentences:

‘Charlemagne was an important European ruler of the Tang period.’

‘Hārūn ar-Rašīd was an important Near Eastern ruler of the Middle Ages.’¹⁷

The two sentences perform periodisation as a standard historiographical procedure, classifying historical phenomena in an apparently meaningful way by assigning them to certain conventional units of time. The periodisation schemes they allude to – the European tripartite model of Antiquity–Middle Ages–Modernity and the Chinese dynasty–based model – are both part and parcel of specific historiographical traditions.¹⁸ The European model, however, has managed to gain currency well beyond the context from which it originated: even if its specific usage can be shaped by very different concerns (as we shall see), its proliferation is nonetheless tied to a long history of Western hegemony and colonisation. Perhaps it is when both sentences begin to ring similarly strange or familiar that global history has achieved some success.

Striving to evade Eurocentric and other universalising periodisation schemes, some scholars have turned to chronology for an alternative and seemingly ‘neutral’ order of things.¹⁹ Take, for example, the ‘national global histories’ that have recently been published in various European countries. In the Histoire mondiale de la France (2017), which set the model for the whole genre, chronology is chosen as an antidote against the ‘illusory continuities of traditional narrative’. The volume thus abstains from any overarching narrative but presents the reader with a multitude of chapters or ‘fragments’ all linked to one specific year and arranged in strict chronological order.²⁰

Yet such an order is neither neutral nor given. Every chronology presupposes the choice of a particular calendar. It is a choice we rarely think about in everyday life – indeed, such routinised phenomena are the often nearly invisible yet perhaps most pervasive effects of a politics of time. Moreover, chronology can also shape what is perceived as ‘history’ as such: by privileging ‘events’ over processes and the longue durée, it presents history as a sequence of distinct temporal units.²¹ It is such an equation of ‘historical’ and ‘chronological time’ that Lorenz has identified as one of history’s chronocentric ‘idols’.²²

A chronological framework, though, can also provide a starting point for more nuanced approaches to historical temporalities. So, even within the strict sequential order of the Histoire Mondiale de la France, the practitioner may question the very unity of historical time. Exploring the hoard of Ruscino, historian and archaeologist François-Xavier Fauvelle, for instance, prompts his readers to think not only about the presence of the past and the limits of our present knowledge, but also about past futures of the early-eighth-century Mediterranean world. Fauvelle sets the scene by directly addressing his reader:

Imagine yourself there. … The place you are standing is called Ruscino. … You live there amid familiar ruins. As soon as the alert is sounded, you hide your tools … Neither historians nor archaeologists know who you are nor what you did there. … You’re living in the provinces, but in a province that is no longer the province of anything. You are living in the outskirts of Perpignan, but you don’t know that because Perpignan does not yet exist.

His essay thus also shows how literary strategies – rather than theoretical reflection – can be used to make visible historical contingencies and different temporalities.²³

Others have rediscovered chronology itself as a possible way to move beyond ‘historical time’. Discussing the challenges the Anthropocene poses to concepts of time and history, Helge Jordheim suggests that chronology could serve to integrate timescales beyond those of human and social life. It allowed us to relate historical time to geological temporalities but also to the life cycles of microbes and viruses. To serve such a critical aim, chronology must not be taken as a given temporal order but a knowledge practice in itself – which is, as Jordheim highlights, indeed a return to a pre-modern understanding.²⁴

The most pervasive ‘blind spot’ in historians’ relation to time is perhaps the temporalising work they themselves perform, especially in drawing a line between past and present.²⁵ This line is constitutive for the very field of historiography. It is also part of a specific temporal regime, namely that of modern historicity. Here, with the dissociation of experience and expectations, history has first emerged as the collective singular of a unified past and the present became oriented towards an open and malleable future.

Historicising historicity, this specific constellation of temporal relations, has become a major concern in recent years, with Reinhart Koselleck’s work leading the way. With his analysis of historicity as a specific temporal regime emerging in the so-called Sattelzeit (‘saddle period’), Koselleck has made a decisive and unmatched contribution to denaturalising history itself. His role in inspiring critical reflection on questions of temporality and the regime of historicity – also far beyond the narrow field of historiography – can hardly be overestimated and, indeed, continues to grow.²⁶ At the same time, Koselleck has also left us with a substantial notion of modernity, maybe even with the last and possibly most refined refuge of such an understanding.²⁷ As Lynn Hunt has put it: ‘If modernity exists – and I still want to admit some doubts on this score – then it is at least in large measure a category having to do with the experience of time.’²⁸

Approaching modernity through the lens of temporality and historicity provides a sophisticated and reflexive understanding. Still, as with all attempts at conceptualising modernity, it is inextricably tied to the ‘pre-modern’, situated before and/or outside of European modernity. This ‘pre-modern’ remains cast in terms of ‘deficit’, measured against the yardstick of modern historicity: it has no open future, no sense of the difference of the past as past. Hence, the temporal understanding of modernity, too, can be read as a – even if sophisticated – reproduction of an old binary, contrasting the history of the West with its pre-modern Other.

In response, an interdisciplinary critique has emerged, ranging from postcolonial studies and global history to medieval studies.²⁹ In terms of historical critique, this has led to explorations of temporalities outside of modern Europe, adding historical depth and differentiation to a debate long centred on the Sattelzeit and its aftermath.³⁰ This helps to make visible conflicting temporal orders and, indeed, chronopolitics in what is much too often understood in terms of a given ‘culture’.³¹ Sometimes, though, this historical critique seems to falls prey to a certain precursorism: tracing the emergence of open futures and ‘historical consciousness’ ever further back in time, for instance, retains and, in fact, reinforces the basic tenets of ‘modernity-as-temporality’.³² Lately, critics have taken issue with the presumed domination of historicity itself, pointing to alternative and conflicting temporalities within European modernity.³³ Moreover, criticising historicity has also brought forth conceptual reflections on the inherent Eurocentrism of history as a discipline rooted in such an understanding – indeed, the very venture of historicising history presents a paradox in itself.³⁴ Here, the full power of the ‘fetish’ plays out: historicising historicity has the paradoxical effect of simultaneously questioning and perpetuating the historically bound understanding of history as a discipline. Global history, perhaps more than many other fields, needs to engage the practical consequences of this paradox.

The Politics of Periodisation and the Case of the ‘Global Middle Ages’

Many historians happily leave conceptual debates and reflections about the discipline’s epistemological foundations to those specialising in the philosophy and theory of history and the pages of respective journals such as History & Theory or Rethinking History. The problem of time and temporality, though, is particularly apt to demonstrate how allegedly ‘theoretical’ questions concern the everyday work of historians. To do so, this section focuses on a practice that is, at the same time, a banal operation and a highly political business: periodisation.³⁵ For global historians, periodisation presents a particularly acute challenge. As one of the most prominent manifestations of universalising Eurocentrism, it is central to all attempts at decentring historical studies. It is not only tied to the interplay of appropriation and critique, but also leads to wide-ranging questions about institutional and conceptual change.³⁶

The notion of a ‘Global Middle Ages’ has enjoyed a remarkably dynamic career since the 2010s: journals and handbooks advocate the study of ‘medieval worlds’ and ‘The Medieval Globe’, central conventions of medievalists have prominently debated ‘the Global Middle Ages’ and first jobs in the field have been advertised.³⁷ This career has come somewhat unexpectedly. Indeed, the wording ‘Global Middle Ages’ itself presents – once more – a kind of paradox.³⁸ As mentioned earlier, the ‘Middle Ages’ are part and parcel of a traditional European periodisation scheme that has been exported to the world. For this reason, the term has been heavily criticised by postcolonial scholarship and historians of the non-European world. Such critique is exacerbated by the fact that ‘medieval’ functions not only as a geographically but also as a temporally ‘mobile category’ around the globe: used as a signifier for ‘backwardness’, the ‘medieval’ plays a principal role in the temporalisation of difference.³⁹ Equally, historians of Europe themselves have long, and strongly, criticised the concept.⁴⁰

So why does the ‘Middle Ages’ enjoy such a career precisely in the field of global history? While definitions have often remained vague, the ‘Global Middle Ages’ serves a clearly designated function: it was designed as an instrument of critique – directed against traditional notions of the ‘medieval’ and its ‘Eurocentric straight jacket’.⁴¹Overall, this aims at a more inclusive understanding of the past.⁴² Some of the most prominent champions propose a programmatic understanding of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ as a venture to decolonise medieval studies.⁴³

Roughly and conventionally located between 500 and 1500, the ‘Global Middle Ages’ provides a heuristic framework that allows scholars to bring together coeval phenomena and processes formerly treated separately, to seek out unusual comparisons and to discover unknown or neglected connections. It resonates with a preference for a seemingly neutral chronological order, as outlined earlier, and points to the important role attributed to synchronicity in global history.

There are, however, also a few attempts to build a period concept with a specific period identity. Naomi Standen and Catherine Holmes, for example, who in 2012 initiated the interdisciplinary network ‘Towards a Global Middle Ages’, advocate such a ‘strong’ concept. They define the ‘Global Middle Ages’ as ‘a period of human history with distinctive characteristics; and as a powerful concept to “think with”’, set apart from a more amorphous global ‘pre-modernity’. So far, Holmes and Standen propose to understand it as a phase of ‘dynamic change and experiment when no single part of the world achieved hegemonic status’, as a ‘time of options and experiments’.⁴⁴ While such an understanding would certainly counter traditional narratives of both the Middle Ages and Western domination in globalisation processes, the specificity of the suggested characteristics remains controversial. Indeed, many global historians are sceptical about any kind of ‘strong’ periodisation schemes operating on a global scale and claiming universal validity.⁴⁵

Whether one subscribes to ‘strong periodisation’ or not, Holmes and Standen’s proposal clearly shows that thinking about the ‘Middle Ages’ in a global perspective also carries critical potential for global history, its periodisation and the definition of the ‘global’ itself. Indeed, no matter which terminology is chosen, every discussion of medieval history – or, for that matter, of any other ‘pre-modern’ period – from such a perspective has to engage with the temporality inherent in global history, just as it needs to engage with the inextricable connection between global history and the discourse of globalisation: Is there such a thing as ‘globalisation’ in a pre-modern world? Can the ‘Middle Ages’ actually be global? And, if so, what does ‘global’ mean in this context?

Such questions concern issues controversial within global history at large, and medievalists have approached them in various ways. Some stress the limited and fragmentary character of medieval connections, as judged against current models of globalisation and global modernity. Against this backdrop, Michael Borgolte, a pioneer of global medieval history in Germany, has argued in favour of an ‘Eurafrasian era’ in place of the ‘Global Middle Ages’.⁴⁶ While such an approach clearly sets global history apart from the history of globalisation, it still operates within the framework of globalisation narratives. According to its logic, a truly ‘global period’ only becomes possible with the beginning of globalisation. Indeed, the emerging periodisation scheme itself visualises the process of spatio-temporal integration.⁴⁷ Other scholars have called for a thorough and critical engagement with such a notion, aiming at a historicisation of globality.⁴⁸ Such pleas resonate with current critical reflections on ‘globalism’ from within the social sciences and contemporary history, drawing attention to its inherent teleology and hegemonic bias.⁴⁹ Studying ‘globalities’ in the longue durée may help to foster reflection on the remnants of modernisation theory in the discourse of globalisation and, once more, on the embeddedness of global history in this discourse.⁵⁰

No matter what definition of the global and the medieval they propose, all protagonists of the debate share the belief that global perspectives can serve as a critique of the ‘Middle Ages’ as we know it. The ‘Global Middle Ages’ act as a successful formula for this critique, although (or perhaps because) it pinpoints the paradox this venture entails. Indeed, scholars have reflected upon this in different ways: While some stress the provisional and, finally, transitory status of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ – for want of a better term – others frame the paradox as a strategy of deconstruction. Geraldine Heng, prominent champion of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ as a decolonising project, seeks to employ the notion of the Global Middle Ages to upturn ‘old tyrannies of periodisation in the West’ from within. To do so, she draws on the ‘asynchrony of global temporalities’. To establish this asynchrony, she relies on modernity as a yardstick, defined, though, as a recurrent ‘transhistorical phenomenon’, as ‘repetition-with-difference’. Heng uses this to identify ‘modernities’ across the medieval globe before their European manifestations. Pointing, for instance, to industrialised mass production and printing technology in China, she integrates Chinese history into the framework of medieval history and establishes its comparative ‘advance’ over Europe.⁵¹ This certainly helps to unsettle both long-standing narratives about the ‘West and the Rest’ and institutional divisions within academia. Yet, the ‘muddle of modernity’ remains: can a ‘transhistorical’ concept of ‘modernity’ help us to do away with the dichotomy of the medieval and the modern? For instance, if we search for industrial revolutions avant la lettre, doesn’t this reinforce European developments as a blueprint and yardstick of global synchronicity? In short: where does ‘breaking’ a concept ‘from within’ lead?⁵²

Such questions point to more general discussions within postcolonial studies about subversion, appropriation and change.⁵³ To explore the longer history of these discussions, let us briefly consider how the concept of the ‘Middle Ages’ has been employed to claim a place within history. In Indian and African historiography, for instance, it has been introduced by some to break with periodisation schemes structured around the pre-colonial/colonial divide.⁵⁴ Against such a divide, perpetuating assumptions of a static and ahistorical ‘precolonial’ age, François-Xaver Fauvelle has positioned the ‘African Middle Ages’ as a marker of ‘historical value’.⁵⁵ Locating the period between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries AD, he identifies the advent of Islam and the onset of direct European contact and Atlantic trade as relevant caesura. These dates are tied to external factors, to be sure, yet bear witness to the entanglements that connect African and Eurasian pasts. Fauvelle also singles out the specific documentary regime that characterises the period and continues to shape our knowledge practices. The ‘African Middle Ages’, he argues, is a move towards a more inclusive and truly globalising view of the ‘medieval world’, with Europe and Africa both studied as provinces of ‘a global world that deserves to be called medieval based only on its distinctive way of being global’.⁵⁶ Some reviewers have appreciated Fauvelle’s attempt at periodisation ‘in terms of global history’ and stress the importance of integrating African history into mainstream historiography as well as public discourse.⁵⁷ Other commentators, in contrast, are more sceptical and object to what they perceive as a return of Eurocentrism, or even ‘exoticism’.⁵⁸

The ‘African Middle Ages’, however, are no invention of Fauvelle’s. Comparable notions had already surfaced in African historiography and debates about intellectual decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.⁵⁹ They are tied to attempts at synchronising European and African history, frequently to the advantage of the latter and frequently through means of comparisons, with a particular interest in the history of slavery and serfdom.⁶⁰ Here, striking parallels to the agenda of the Global Middle Ages today emerge. And, just as today, such approaches were by no means uncontroversial: would a celebration of the African Middle Ages, with its grand empires of Ghana and Mali, help to decolonise the history of the continent? Or is it in danger of reproducing European notions of historicity, located in rulers and states?⁶¹

As Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul have observed, ‘the medieval occupies a fraught, paradoxical role in postcolonial politics’.⁶² When prominent protagonists of postcolonial scholarship – namely, members of the Subaltern Studies Group – engaged with European medievalists’ debates on feudalism and the peasant economy, this helped them take a stance with regard to the Indian present and future.⁶³ Similarly, the contested meanings of the Chinese Renaissance are less connected to scholarly debates about Eurocentrism than to discussions about different visions of Chinese identity and political futures.⁶⁴

The global proliferation of the Middle Ages is a postcolonial phenomenon itself, shaped by local appropriations that are part of specific local discussions and politics.⁶⁵ Reflecting on these ‘multiple Middle Ages’ leads us to reconsider the question of critique and change. From an analytical point of view, the transfer and transformation of concepts can be the subject of global conceptual history.⁶⁶ But it constitutes a methodological and, indeed, a practical challenge for all historians, as they themselves take part in processes of translation and entanglement. In this sense, the Global Middle Ages can serve as an example of global history’s potential to question concepts and institutions, but also for the difficulties and challenges such attempts at transformation face. This, as Suzanne Conklin Akbari has reminded us, is not only a language game: Speaking about ‘medieval Ethiopia’, for instance, also means claiming a place for Ethiopian studies within the medievalist community and access to its resources.⁶⁷ Politics of periodisation have their very material effects, too.

At the Same Time: Simultaneity and the Dialectics of Non-Coevalness

Global history is often understood in terms of space and spatial expansion. Yet it is also characterised by specific attention to time. ‘The concern with synchronicity, with the contemporaneous even if geographically distant’, Sebastian Conrad suggests, ‘has become the hallmark of global approaches’.⁶⁸ Numerous books and studies have followed such an approach, often choosing one specific year as their observational unit.⁶⁹ As we have seen, studying what happens at the same time in different places can contribute to dismantling traditional periodisation schemes. It serves as a powerful tool to counter the ‘denial of coevalness’ and the confinement to the ‘waiting room’ of history, in Chakrabarty’s felicitous wording. In this sense, synchronicity seems to contain a promise of equality, set to counter exclusions and divisions of traditional historiography. But what concepts of time underwrite synchronisation itself? The issue of synchronisation showcases how global historians approach time as iconoclasts and believers at the same time.

The very formation of Western scholarship is tied to the temporalisation of difference and the allocation of different temporalities. In his influential study Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), Johannes Fabian argues that anthropology as a discipline was built on a ‘denial of coevalness’. It assigned its subject of study – the allegedly ‘primitive’ cultures – to a time different from the one inhabited by the scholarly observer, a time before history and historical change. Precisely for this reason, studying ‘primitive peoples’ was thought to allow for insights into the deep past of ‘our own’ civilised societies. The ‘denial of coevalness’, in fact, was a denial of diversity, as all societies were supposed to follow the same scheme of development (if they developed at all).⁷⁰

While explicit denials of coevalness are on the retreat, the basic framework survives in the institutionalised division of labour between the disciplines, especially in the divide between history and area studies. Synchronising approaches can help to make visible these persistent divisions and potentially contribute to their undoing. This is also, as we have seen, what the champions of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ propose. According to Jürgen Osterhammel, a focus on simultaneity characterises global history at large: global history ‘highlights the simultaneity of societies in various parts of the world … Few literary devices have been more successful in overcoming Eurocentric habits of seeing.’⁷¹ Pitted against the temporalisation of difference, simultaneity becomes associated with a promise of equality and equivalence.

The issue of ‘being at the same time’, however, is trickier than it might seem. Some ambiguity already appears when we consider the vocabulary that is usually employed but rarely reflected upon. Compare, for instance, the different terms used in the statements quoted so far – namely, ‘simultaneity’, ‘synchronicity’, ‘coevalness’ and ‘contemporaneity’. Although these terms might appear similar or even synonymous at first glance, on closer scrutiny one finds that they contain allusions to different temporalities and, in fact, point to a conflation of emic and etic notions of time. If we want to unpack the different concepts and layers of temporality involved, some analytical distinctions might be helpful. Simultaneity, for one thing, can be understood in terms of an analytical framework of calendrical or chronological time: referring to things, events, processes happening at the same time from an external observer’s point of view, without any necessary connection between them drawn by internal observers. Synchronicity, on the other hand, usually designates the active relating of phenomena and processes that result from the ‘work of synchronisation’, as Helge Jordheim has called it.⁷² Understanding synchronicity as a product of making relations rather than a given helps to uncover the economic and political rationales involved and consider unexpected outcomes. As Vanessa Ogle has astutely demonstrated, attempts at a global standardisation of time in order to synchronise ‘the world’ have led to a greater variety of times, to hybridisation and the co-existence of different temporalities.⁷³ Historians are also engaged in the ‘work of synchronisation’ – for instance, by integrating distinct yet simultaneous phenomena in the same narrative and one explanatory framework, regardless of potential connectivity or historical perceptions.

In line with this distinction, studying global history through the lens of simultaneity does not necessarily imply a focus on connectivity and connections. Simultaneity is tied to an observer’s (etic) perspective and does not presuppose that the observed actually experience each other as ‘being at the same time’ or share the same understanding of time and temporality. Such a framework of observation is what champions of the Global Middle Ages as an inclusive approach and ‘chronological container’ aim at: a framework that opens up space for comparison and historiographical synchronisation.

Coevalness and contemporaneity are linked to an actively and consciously shared time.⁷⁴ Sometimes, ‘intersocietal contemporaneity’ is distinguished from ‘interpersonal coevalness’. Yet, more often than not, contemporaneity and coevalness are used interchangeably and refer to experiences of time as shared time.⁷⁵ Sharing time contains a promise of commonality, maybe even of potential equality. For better or worse, it presupposes that there is one single time ‘we all’ are living in.⁷⁶ As we have seen, a central tenet of globalisation discourse posits the ‘global present’ as that time in which we all have become, fully and finally, contemporaries.

Tracing such temporal characteristics of globalisation, historians have turned to the study of ‘global events’ or ‘global moments’: ‘global moments’, according to the influential definition proposed by Dominic Sachsenmaier and Sebastian Conrad, are ‘events with global repercussions’, ‘events of a popular significance that appealed to people in discrete and distant locations’. Such moments, Sachsenmaier and Conrad suggest, are characteristic of the ‘high time of globalisation since the late nineteenth century’, resulting from a preceding emergence of a ‘global consciousness throughout much of the world’.⁷⁷ Global moments, in their reading, are thus tied to specific historical conditions, showcasing how the process of globalisation brings about experiences of a ‘shared time’ worldwide.

The term itself, however, has been put to more generalised use and expanded to periods well before the late nineteenth century. Indeed, we read, for instance, about Polybius’ ‘global moment’ in the context of shifting Roman discourses about mobility, or find the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Samalas discussed as a ‘global moment’ in the 1250s.⁷⁸ This travelling concept thus brings us back to the relation between simultaneity, synchronicity and contemporaneity: Polybius’ ‘global moment’ is discussed in terms of historical perceptions of shared time and practices of synchronisation. The Samalas eruption as a global event, in contrast, emerges from analytical observation of simultaneous processes and phenomena, as the result of synchronisation of disparate materials and timescales, not least through global comparison. The notion of ‘global events’ has thus travelled far from its origins, pointing, once more, to the importance of precise terminology. It equally illustrates the fascination of synchronisation that goes beyond a mere observational device – indeed, past simultaneity seems to contain a promise of potential contemporaneity.

Contemporaneity, despite its claim to unity, comes with its own Other. Remember, for instance, how Rosa characterised globalisation ‘temporally’ as the ‘dissolution of stable rhythms and sequences following the ubiquitous contemporisation (Vergleichzeitigung) of even the noncontemporaneous’.⁷⁹ Evidently, this alludes to the often-quoted figure of the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen (which roughly translates as ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’). However, while this figure is often employed to assert an ecumenical vision of pluritemporality, Rosa hints at the final dissolution of such diversity in an encompassing contemporaneity.

But what is the contemporaneous, after all? And how can Rosa distinguish it from the ‘non-contemporaneous’? The statement contains a normative understanding of contemporaneity – implying, once more, a distinct unity of times in time.⁸⁰ Peter Osborne has described the notion of contemporaneity as an ‘operative fiction: it regulates the division between the past and present within the present’, bound up with the project of ‘global modernity’. Given ‘growing social interconnectedness’, ‘constructions of the contemporary increasingly appear as inevitable’. In this transition from ‘fictional to historical narrative’, he locates the role of the ‘global histories of the present’ that aim at ‘an empirically consistent hypothetical unity of the present, beyond pure heteronomy or multiplicity’.⁸¹ When we observe the role of the ‘global present’ in global history, we observe this operative fiction in action.

While these normative implications of ‘being at the same time’ are often invisible, they come to the forefront when we compare the topos of the ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’ to the figure of anachronism. While the two figures are structurally related, they come with starkly different value judgements. One of the most thought-provoking analyses of anachronism has been proposed by Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, anachronism is less ‘a question of facts’ than ‘a question of thought’. Accordingly, he defines the ‘reproach of anachronism’ as follows: ‘The accusation of anachronism is not the claim that something did not exist at a given date. It is the claim that something could not have existed at this date.’⁸² When anachronism is about historical potentiality, it presupposes a distinct notion of what is do-able (say-able or think-able) in a certain time.⁸³ Thus, anachronism is tied to an understanding of ‘time itself as the principle of immanence that subsumes all phenomena under a law of interiority. The truth of history is then the immanence of time as the principle of co-presence and co-belonging of phenomena.’⁸⁴ Obviously, the mechanism at work in anachronism is similar to the one implied in the ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’. In both cases, phenomena (people, processes) are ‘out of time’ – and both presuppose a universalising viewpoint from which to establish temporal order and to diagnose its distortion. Curiously, though – and here the politics of time set in – the topos of the ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’ has evolved into a self-evident shorthand of a diversity-conscious history whereas anachronisms still count among the mortal sins in the field.⁸⁵

Next to the notion of ‘shared time’, the figure of ‘being out of time’ has also received increasing attention lately.⁸⁶ In the wake of Fabian and others, we are used to associating non-coevalness (or non-contemporaneity) with imperial politics and colonialism. However, is the assertion of non-coevalness always an imperial gesture? Or can it also be part of resistance and subversion? Berber Bevernage, a Belgian historian and theorist of history, has made a powerful case for the multiple usages and meanings of non-coevalness.⁸⁷ Building on examples from his research in transitional justice, he argues that being non-coeval can equally operate as a subaltern, critical strategy, especially tied to experience of violence and trauma. Moreover, he draws attention to the fact that the benevolent assertion of coevalness can also distort our view on inequalities even within the global North – so living as a refugee is also and decisively characterised by the absence of a future, as humans usually inhabit it as a space of expected actions. Recognising the lack of coevalness inherent in such an experience is, Bevernage argues, no imperial gesture but rather a starting point for critical action.

The problem of non-coevalness is tied to different configurations of past, present and future – and, indeed, to struggles about the very division between them. Within the context of global history, it is the ongoing debate about the legacies of colonialism and imperialism that draws attention to the diverging approaches. When issues of reparation and restitution are at stake, for instance, the relation between past and present shapes the very scope of legal and political action: Even if responsibility for past actions can be clearly attributed, it is often less clear who is to be held accountable today – and whether one can indeed claim responsibility for the past.⁸⁸ In the case of reparations for slavery and the slave trade, for instance, determining who is to pay and who is to be paid raises complex questions about identity and continuity.⁸⁹ Are reparations about individuals or about institutions and social groups? Can past wrongs be compensated by financial means? Is there even such a thing as ‘restorative justice’ or a ‘reparatory history’?⁹⁰ A disciplined historian may easily disavow his profession’s competence for such questions and dismiss the issues at stake as anachronistic. Yet, this would be too easy a way out. Even if answers remain controversial (and they certainly will), the questions themselves remind us of the presence of the past and the way it shapes potential futures today.⁹¹

Conclusion

Among global historians, time and temporality are a source both of concern and hope. In the struggle against traditional periodisation and the ‘denial of coevalness’, temporalising practices such as synchronisation and the reference to chronology have been employed as a remedy. At the same time, pluritemporality and chronopolitics remain critical issues. To conclude, I highlight four points to further rethink temporality in global history and beyond.

1. 1. Global History and Its Time. Global historians take pride in actively embracing multiple voices and plural perspectives and in critically rethinking standards and procedures of historiography in general. Calling out the ‘fetish of time’ by assessing pluritemporalities thus appears to be their very mission. Yet, proceeding along these lines, we can also turn back to the temporality of global history itself: if global history is the history for our time, what happens when the times are a-changing? Or when the global present does not work as an ‘operative fiction’ anymore? How does this change global history, its narratives and its role? Is global history an episode in a broader movement towards a decentering of history and historical scholarship?⁹² Does its success lie, then, in turning global perspectives into the ‘new normal’?

2. 2. After Modernisation. Globalisation discourse entertains an ambiguous relation with modernity and modernisation theory.⁹³ The same goes for global history. Global historians, though, also grapple with modernity in a specific form – that is, the temporal regime of historicity. As the chronopolitics involved in this emerge nowhere more clearly than in the legacies of colonialism around the world, global historians can contribute to historicising historicity.⁹⁴ Studying periods before the onset of globalisation discourse, in particular, may help to make visible – even if inadvertently – silent assumptions about the ‘global’ and the ‘modern’.

3. 3. At the Same Time. Time has been described as the ‘unity of difference’. While any attempt at ontological definition is beyond a historian’s grasp, we have certainly observed that time is intimately connected to the making of differences: from outright denial of coevalness to the more subtle figures of anachronism and ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporary’. At the same time, a synchronising approach emerges as global history’s most prominent tool to envisage more inclusive histories. ‘To be at the same time’ seems to carry a promise of potential equality that oscillates between ethics, representation and historical truth. Or, as Chakrabarty phrased it: ‘We have “equal” histories of the past because we would like histories to be equal! Histories – actual events on the ground – do not necessarily become equal even if historiography makes them look so.’⁹⁵ If we take history seriously, we cannot do without accounting for inequalities.

4. 4. Doing History. ‘From wastes, papers, vegetables, indeed from glaciers and “eternal snows”’, Michel de Certeau observed, ‘historians make something different: they make history’.⁹⁶ For historians, critical reflection on temporalities is no detached academic exercise. On the contrary, it concerns the very core of their profession and their work. Rethinking time and temporality thus should lead us to consider on how we do history and under what circumstances: how we draw a line between the past and the present, how we routinely rely on established temporal markers to convey significance and inhabit institutions shaped by past politics of periodisation. At the same time, being historians, we also need to think about our capacity for doing things differently.

4 Quantification Measuring Connections and Comparative Development in Global History

Pim de Zwart

Global history has flourished in recent decades,¹ but has also increasingly attracted critiques by various scholars, who suggest that (some) global histories have overestimated the importance of global connections for (local) events² or exaggerated the impact of a particular historical figure on the course of global history.³ Quantification may provide a preventative bulwark against such critique. In this chapter, I will address the issue of quantification in global history. To what extent have claims in global history been backed up by quantitative data, and what are the potential benefits and pitfalls of quantification for the field?

To start with, it is important to establish what global history is. At the risk of oversimplifying, it seems that two types of global histories can be discerned: one that is focused on the analysis of global connections, or what is also termed ‘global connectivity’ or ‘globalisation’, and another that is concerned with making global comparisons.⁴ The former may concern the circulation of knowledge and ideologies, ecological exchange, commodity trade and migration, but also political cooperation and conflict, and tends to relate global to local developments and vice versa. A second type of global history is concerned with comparisons between developments in different parts of the world. In particular, contributions to the debate over the ‘Great Divergence’, or the rising gap in economic performance between the West and the Rest, fall under this heading.

Both the assessment of global connections and systematic global comparisons may benefit from formal reasoning backed by quantitative evidence. In order to argue that the era of ‘global connectivity’ started in the eleventh, sixteenth or twentieth century, one needs to have some measure of ‘global connectivity’ to assess when there was more of it. Valerie Hansen suggests that only the potential, not the actual, presence of objects from Asia in a Viking settlement in the Americas around the year 1000 is enough to be considered the start of globalisation.⁵ But there was no trade between the short-lived Viking outpost in Newfoundland and Europe, let alone Asia. Few historians will therefore agree that this was the defining moment when global connections crucially impacted the course of history.⁶ But what level or extent of global connections is sufficient to be considered as globalisation? Even if we do not wish to define a particular threshold in numerical terms, we need some measure and criteria to assess the increase/rise or decrease/decline of global connectivity over time.

Analyses of the consequences of global connections for developments in some particular place imply the evaluation of causal claims, as well as the weight these claims may carry (how much did development X contribute to event Y). Causal claims additionally require a strategy to convince people that it was actually global factor X that had a positive relationship with local factor Y, and not factors A, B or C that were also taking place at that time – that is, that causation rather than mere correlation is involved here. Quantification helps with this, because by controlling for factors A, B and C, one can (try to) approach ceteris paribus conditions. Similarly, in global comparative history, measurement is crucial considering the language of comparisons: equal to, more/less, higher/lower.

Despite this need for formalisation and quantification, many historians, including global historians, do not use quantitative data and are sceptical, or even hostile, towards the systematic use of quantitative data. This is especially the case when such data are used to uncover general patterns in history, or when history is used to test social science models, as some quantitative historians do. Some historians refute the idea that human history could be properly understood by trying to uncover general patterns, as they emphasise the ‘unique and particularistic nature of history’.⁷ Humans, their motives and their actions are too complex to be captured by any general law.⁸ As a result of such objections, many historians have been driven away from testing their hypotheses based on quantitative data, and, more generally, explanation and the establishing of causal relations.

From the 1960s, some historians started the study of cliometrics (or quantitative economic history), which sought general explanations based on research that formulated hypotheses and rigorously tested these using empirical, often quantitative, data. In the following decades, cliometrics became influential among other historians. Even Lawrence Stone, who was highly critical of cliometric work, acknowledged the benefits of quantification in Past and Present in 1979:

Historians can no longer get away with saying ‘more’, ‘less’, ‘growing’, ‘declining’, all of which logically imply numerical comparisons, without ever stating explicitly the statistical basis for their assertions. It [quantification] has also made argument exclusively by example seem somewhat disreputable. Critics now demand supporting statistical evidence to show that the examples are typical, and not exceptions to the rule.⁹

Yet he criticised the cliometricians for providing tables and graphs without giving sufficient, and easily accessible, description of the methodologies used to obtain those figures. This remains a problem to this day, and the increasing complexity of quantitative techniques leaves many historians without training in statistics unable to verify the findings of more sophisticated quantitative research. Especially in the United States, the barriers between historians in humanities departments and those historians influenced by the social sciences seem greater than ever.

Certainly, quantitative, like qualitative, evidence has many problems. When data are lacking, quantitative historians may provide estimates rather than actually observed datapoints. The assumptions underlying such estimates can and should be criticised. As new data and research comes to light, assumptions may need to be adjusted, and when the bias in a particular data source turns out to be more severe than expected, necessitating further modifications this necessitates further corrections. Yet a whole body of quantitative data should not be discarded too quickly. As in the case of qualitative evidence, it is important to see what story these sources may contain. Historical data are often inaccurate, but if the inaccuracies are random (such as typos made by local administrators), the quantitative evidence can still be used to obtain reliable estimates, as the average value obtained from such data (e.g. mean income in a country) will not be significantly affected (as, given enough observations, mistakes pushing the estimate upward are equally as likely as those pushing it downward). Furthermore, even if data are affected by bias (e.g. a source exploited to estimate average incomes in a country includes far more incomes at the bottom end of the income distribution than at the top), there are ways to account for such bias using additional information.

Additional problems arise when historical quantitative research relies on categories created by administrators in the past, such as colonial officials. In the Viceroyalty of Peru, colonial administrators created ethnic classifications (primarily for taxation purposes) that have very much persisted in statistical publications over time, but which ignore the complexities and changing nature of the social differentiations acknowledged by Peruvians themselves.¹⁰ Any quantitative analysis of historical demographic databases that employ these colonial classifications will need to take this into account. It is imperative that scholars grasp the political context in which the registration of people (and their characteristics) takes place before such registry’s data are employed in analysis.¹¹ Many historical developments are hard to capture in numbers and a focus on purely quantitative evidence would lead to availability bias (or the so-called ‘streetlight effect’). For example, when examining clearly measurable indicators, like GDP, wages and life expectancy, a clear view of human progress over the last centuries emerges, while if one included variables that historically have not been extensively quantified, such as biodiversity and pollution, such a view may be reversed. Moreover, quantitative methods are better at establishing whether there is a relationship between certain variables, but are less suited to explaining why this relationship is there.¹²

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the issues related to historical quantitative materials, and some have concluded that because inaccurate statistics will (always) lead to inaccurate conclusions, especially when they are put in a global comparative framework, any attempt to write quantitative global history is better abandoned.¹³ Many others disagree, as is evidenced, for example, by the contributions cited in the remainder of this chapter. Over recent decades, many new quantitative sources have been discovered and employed, methods have been developed and refined, and, consequently, views on global history have been improved: we know more about global history now, as a result of quantitative studies, than we did a few decades ago. Yet the historian has an obligation to be transparent about the problems with, and the reliability of, the data as a precondition for rectifying those problems and moving – slowly but steadily – to a more accurate picture of world history.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss how and to what extent quantitative evidence has been used in two main discussions in global history: (1) the debate over the origins of globalisation and (2) discussions surrounding the ‘Great Divergence’ in economic fortunes between the West and the Rest. Because of my own expertise, the focus of this chapter is on discussions in global economic history, but with implications for the field at large, as it is clear that quantification and its problems are not limited to economic history.

The Origins of Globalisation

A key question in global history is when and how the world became connected to such an extent that the history of the world, and its various components in terms of regions or countries, cannot be properly understood without taking those connections into account; in other words: when the process of globalisation started. For several decades, scholars have put forth suggestions regarding the point at which they believed the world had become a connected space. Eminent contributors to the debate, such as Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, emphasised the creation of a global economic system from the sixteenth century on and its role in creating global economic inequalities.¹⁴ Quantitative economic historians, such as Patrick O’Brien, Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, objected to these views.¹⁵ They suggested that the volumes and values of the commodities traded globally before the nineteenth century were insufficient to have had transformative effects. In particular, before the 1800s there were too many obstacles to intercontinental trade, in the form of monopolies, pirates and slow oceangoing ships, to allow the global integration of markets. The ‘narrow focus’ on quantification and integration was criticised by Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez (among others), who suggested instead that global connections before the 1800s fundamentally impacted all parts of the world, in particular from the founding of Manila in 1571.¹⁶

These different answers are the result of different conceptualisations of ‘transformative connections’ and ‘globalisation’, as well as differences in the measurement and the empirical evidence used to test the presence of those concepts in history and assess possible causality between global connections and transformative processes. It is therefore important to establish some definitions. For O’Rourke and Williamson, globalisation is equivalent to the integration of markets,¹⁷ while for Flynn and Giráldez, globalisation concerns the sustained interaction among all of the world’s heavily populated land masses on a scale that generated deep and lasting impacts.¹⁸ Jürgen Osterhammel distinguishes between ‘global history’, which is the history of ‘transformative connections’, and the ‘history of globalisation’, which contains the added element of ‘integration’.¹⁹ Following Osterhammel, it seems that Flynn and Giráldez are concerned with the former (although they would themselves disagree), while O’Rourke and Williamson are dealing with the latter.

The concept of ‘transformative connections’ is relatively broad and not clearly defined. I will take a stab at it here. It contains two elements: ‘connections’ and ‘transformation’. Flynn and Giráldez emphasise that the connections need to be ‘sustained’.²⁰ We find this also in other works which emphasise the ‘regularity’ or ‘stability’ of connections.²¹ Following the influential work of David Held et al.,²² one may want to investigate in the ‘intensity’ of the connections, which concerns the volume and value of global trade, the numbers of migrants or the amount of international financial transactions. Looking at the political and cultural domains, one may be interested in the numbers of international treaties or the amounts of international movies in local theatres. Additionally, we may need to assess how geographically extensive the connections need to be in order to be considered ‘global’. Abu-Lughod is content with contact between various integrated regions across Eurasia to talk of ‘world-systems’.²³ For Flynn and Giráldez,²⁴ what they consider the three thirds of the world – with the Pacific Ocean spanning a third of the Earth’s surface, the Americas and the Atlantic another third and Afro-Eurasia the final third – need to be in regular contact in order to count as global. Connections across Afro-Eurasia alone, in their view, certainly cannot count as globalisation.

What about the transformative effects, or what in the work of Held et al. and Flynn and Giráldez is termed ‘impact’? ²⁵ A crucial question is what do we consider ‘transformative’ or ‘deep’ and ‘lasting’ impacts?²⁶ For Wallerstein, the creation of a global division of labour is crucial,²⁷ and he notes that labour in the capitalist core of the world economy is free and remunerated with wages, while labour in the periphery is coerced. For Andre Gunder Frank and Eric Williams, the accumulation of capital is essential: because exchange in the world economy was unequal, this led to a flow of capital, or profits, from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘core’.²⁸ These profits were consequently invested in the capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. For the other parts of the world, global connections meant the deepening of poverty: the more a region in the ‘periphery’ was engaged with the world economy, the more ‘underdeveloped’ it became. For Flynn and Giráldez, the impact is not only economic but contains ecological, demographic and cultural elements as well.²⁹ They emphasise, for example, the importance of the American potato for the growth of the Chinese population. It is clear from these works that ‘transformative’ change may imply something different for different parts of the globe. For Europe it may mean an economic shift from agriculture to industry; for Asia it may mean the reverse (deindustrialisation). But global connections could also have led to a further entrenchment of pre-existing patterns and hinder development that could have taken place in their absence. The latter example may count as a deep and lasting impact, but ‘transformative change’ would be a misnomer. In the next section, we will look at the quantitative data that sheds light on this.

Measuring Connections

To assess the regularity and intensity of interaction in the early modern era, economic historians have relied on two sources: observations of prices of goods and volumes of trade flows from the accounts of internationally operating trading companies, as well as customs records.

First, prices of goods (and services) are at the centre of much economic history. They provide basic information about trends in supply and demand in (market) economies. In general, we know that when a product (or service) becomes more expensive compared to other goods or services, this is a sign of scarcity, while if a good becomes relatively cheaper this suggests an abundance of supply. As O’Rourke notes: ‘most economic data, like the quantities of output of various types of products in a country, require someone that counted these quantities, which, when we are counting the output across an entire city, province or country, implies a certain level of bureaucracy, which was generally lacking before the nineteenth century.’³⁰ Yet throughout history, from antiquity to the present, people and institutions have been buying and selling stuff. While most of these transactions went undocumented, many institutions, especially those that have been in existence for extended periods – such as churches, orphanages or chartered trading companies (such as the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) – kept records of their incomes and expenses, and these have often have been preserved.³¹ Additional price quotations can be compiled from price currents that were published weekly in some of the major urban commodity markets like Amsterdam and London.³² By comparing such price currents with prices observed in, for example, the VOC’s own accounts of the sales of their commodities at auction, it becomes clear that these are very closely correlated, giving credence to these figures.³³ Problems may arise if large institutions purchased in bulk and/or via long-term contracts with wholesalers, which implies that the prices paid by the institutions may be different from those in the local market place. By taking observations from a variety of such institutions in different cities, however, it is possible to compute price series that, at least in respect of the longer-term trends, seem robust. Economic historians have been compiling these price data since the late nineteenth century, and most of these figures are now relatively accessible. Drawing on the huge body of work on prices in economic history,³⁴ local series have been scrutinised for their reliability – for example, by checking whether price hikes can be related to local harvest failures or whether price declines are related to increased output and supply – and from this it emerges that price data are quite reliable overall.

Second, we have comparatively abundant information on early modern seaborne trade for two reasons: (1) it was conducted by large trading companies that kept extensive records of their activities; and (2) many states and cities from the late Middle Ages meticulously recorded seaborne trade for customs reasons. These data have been gathered, assessed and published for most European countries.³⁵ The trade between Europe and Asia in the early modern period is exceptionally well-documented because it was monopolised by a handful of chartered trading companies (the VOC, EIC, Compagnie des Indes, etc.) whose records on trade flows have been largely kept (only documents from the Portuguese Casa da India were lost in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755). These records allow for the construction of a complete image of Euro-Asian trade in the pre-1800 period.³⁶ For the trade between the Americas and Europe we are on significantly less firm ground, as that trade was operated by many smaller traders and not all those records have been localised. Nonetheless, on the basis of customs records in America and Europe and figures from the Spanish colonial fleet, some estimates of those trading volumes can be made as well, although the error margins are clearly larger.³⁷

What can such data tell us about the regularity and intensity of connections? In the centuries before the discovery of the passage to India via the Cape of Good Hope, intercontinental connections – those between Africa, Asia and Europe – took place partially over land and partially across the seas. The overland routes between Europe and Asia, the Silk Road, thrived at various point in time: in antiquity when it connected Han China with the Roman Empire, or during the Pax Mongolica in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Scholars such as Abu-Lughod have emphasised the importance of global interaction and the existence of early, non-Western ‘world-systems’ in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.³⁸ Overland routes, however, were vulnerable to political instability: armed conflict and bandits could severely disrupt trade flows for years. Connections along the Silk Road were thus not regular or stable. Neither were they intensive: volumes traded along those routes were small and amounted to only a fraction of the volume of goods brought back by Portuguese ships in the first decades of the sixteenth century.³⁹

It was thus only after c.1500 that intercontinental interactions became more regular, more intensive and more global. Trade was steady from then as each year a large number of ships left European ports for Asian destinations and even more sailed in the Atlantic triangular trade.⁴⁰ Overall trade volumes, both between Europe and Asia and between Europe and the Americas, increased substantially over the period between 1500 and 1800. Total volumes in Eurasian trade grew by an estimated 1.1 per cent per annum. Sustained over a period of 300 years, this implies a 25-fold increase of annual trading volumes: from 2,000 tonnes per annum around 1500 to 50,000 tonnes per annum by 1800.⁴¹ Trade across the Atlantic, where distances were shorter and there was greater competition among a multitude of smaller traders, probably grew even faster.⁴²

On the basis of a wide variety of studies of international trade in different countries of the globe (based on underlying customs and company records, as discussed earlier), O’Rourke and Williamson estimated that intercontinental trade grew by 1.06 per annum in the period between 1500 and 1800.⁴³ This implies that trade grew four times as fast as (estimates of) world population and more than twice as fast as (estimated) economic activity.⁴⁴ Over these three centuries, global connections, at least in terms of goods trade, thus became two to three times more important. Despite this impressive growth and the increasing importance of international connections, the total amount of trade as measured in quantities per person in many parts of the world remained remarkably low. The amount of Asian goods that landed in Europe was a measly 0.5 kg per capita per annum. For Asia at the end of the eighteenth century, the net inflow of silver constituted only 0.32 grams per person per annum,⁴⁵ which was less than 10 per cent of a daily unskilled wage in China.⁴⁶

So, what were the impacts of this small but growing global trade on local developments? A clear indication that Vasco Da Gama’s journeys mattered for European consumers are developments in the real price of pepper in Europe.⁴⁷ Over the course of the sixteenth century, the real price of pepper decreased five-fold, whereas before 1500 the real price had gone up. This implies that pepper was becoming more affordable for a wider range of consumers across Europe. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular, when competition on oceanic routes became fiercer with the entrance of northern Europeans and total volumes increased further, many exotic luxuries came within economic reach of large parts of the population. Various studies have documented the rise in consumption, including among the lower middle classes, of goods such as sugar, coffee and tea.⁴⁸ It is difficult to understand this crucial European development, also known as the early modern ‘consumer revolution’, without acknowledging the importance of international trade.

For early modern Europe, where documentation is best, quantification of the impact of global trade has developed the furthest. Formal econometric analyses have established a positive relationship between the volume of international trade and the development in GDP, real wages and urbanisation in Europe.⁴⁹ For other parts of the world, where historical documentation of trade patterns and economic indicators is less abundantly available and where trade may have represented a smaller part of total economic activity, such exercises are largely lacking. Formal quantitative assessment of the slave trades for African economic development has focused only on current economic outcomes and contains little information about immediate impacts.⁵⁰ Assessment of the role of international trade on economic development in the early modern Americas, Africa and Asia thus largely consists of argumentative reasoning on the basis of recently calculated figures on urbanisation, GDP and real wages in different parts of the world.⁵¹

Measuring Globalisation

Thus far, we have looked at some of the price and trade evidence that has been used to say something about ‘transformative connections’ in the early modern era. But what about ‘globalisation’ or the study of ‘integration’? Measuring global market integration is relatively straightforward. O’Rourke and Williamson note that the best evidence for market integration is that of the convergence of international commodity prices.⁵² The main characteristic of a single market is a unified price structure: two shops on the same street offering the same product need to charge the same prices (unless there are differences in quality) in order to both maintain customers; ‘[s]imilarly, in a single international market, prices for identical commodities will only differ across locations to the extent that trade costs … make arbitrage expensive’.⁵³ Evidence of commodity price convergence also automatically implies that there is an (economic) impact of this globalisation, as a change in prices resulting from international exchange will result in a reshuffling of resources in those economies that experienced price shifts.⁵⁴ To give an example: the rise of the wheat trade between the United States and Britain in the nineteenth century led to a massive decline in wheat prices in Britain. This allowed for a transfer of workers from the agricultural sector to the manufacturing sector and thus a crucial change in the economy and society: from an agricultural to an industrial society.

When did global commodity markets become integrated? Following O’Rourke and Williamson, the answer to this question until recently was: in the nineteenth century.⁵⁵ Before that era, deficient shipping technology, information asymmetries and monopolies, as well as low trading volumes compared with total population meant that domestic prices remained unaffected by global trade and events. It was only after the Napoleonic wars that technological progress involving steamships and railroads, as well as the demise of monopolies by chartered companies, caused commodity prices to converge globally.⁵⁶ This view has been highly influential among economists, and many economic historians also tend to refer to the nineteenth century as ‘the first age of globalisation’ without bothering to explain why.⁵⁷

Some recent research, however, has put this view in doubt. There is evidence of market integration along all major trade routes (between America and Europe, Africa and America, America and Asia, and Europe and Asia). Flynn and Giráldez had long observed a convergence of silver prices (expressed in gold) during both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which – since silver was the main medium of exchange globally – clearly indicates integration of global markets.⁵⁸ Klas Rönnback’s analysis showed price convergences for sugar between Brazil and Europe, coffee between Asia and Europe and tea between China and Europe, among others.⁵⁹ Additional evidence of integrating Atlantic markets came from an analysis by Rafael Dobado-Gonzáles and others of a large database of prices in grain markets in the Americas and Europe.⁶⁰ They suggest that, at least regarding grain markets, transatlantic integration started during the eighteenth century. Extensive work on trade between Europe and Asia was recently done based on new primary materials extracted from Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives.⁶¹ The VOC was the dominant party in the trade between Europe and Asia, responsible for 59 per cent of total Eurasian shipping in the seventeenth century and 44 per cent of the total in the eighteenth century. Most of the goods traded by the VOC exhibited price convergence between 1600 and 1800, and especially prices for those goods that became more important in the eighteenth century, such as textiles and tea, converged significantly. There is thus substantial evidence of price convergence across many goods and routes in the early modern era.

The integration of global commodity markets continued in the 1800s, after a temporary dip during the Napoleonic wars. Prices converged faster than in the preceding centuries.⁶² Nonetheless, establishing a new chronology for the process of globalisation is important as it substantially alters our interpretation of the drivers of global inequality. If one considers the nineteenth century as the dawn of globalisation, this puts emphasis on the role of the Industrial Revolution in determining the gap between rich and poor, while seeing, for example, the activities of chartered trading companies and the Atlantic slave trades as being inconsequential for long-term patterns of development. On the other hand, establishing globalisation as an early modern process highlights the crucial effects of the Columbian exchange, early colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, among others, in determining the current global income distribution.

The Great Divergence

The debate over the Great Divergence has spurred a huge amount of comparative global history research in the past two decades.⁶³ The main questions in this discussion concern the when and why of the rise in global economic inequality. The debate takes its name from the eponymous book by Kenneth Pomeranz, considered to be ‘perhaps the most influential book in global history ever written’.⁶⁴ In a special issue of the Journal of Global History, Stephen Broadberry and Jack Goldstone both noted that Pomeranz put forth a decisively quantitative thesis about the Great Divergence, containing suggestions about levels of urbanisation, consumption, trade and incomes, on the basis of very limited quantitative evidence.⁶⁵ The same can be said of the contributions of other scholars of the so-called ‘California School’. R. Bin Wong suggests that both pre-industrial Europe and China experienced ‘Smithian growth’ and ‘shared a common world of harvest insecurities and material limitations’ in a book that contains only one table (on life expectancy), no graphs and hardly any quantitative observations.⁶⁶ Susan Hanley suggested that Japanese living standards and physical well-being before the Meiji Restoration were not much below that in Britain before industrialisation, while providing little quantitative evidence for Japan and almost no comparative information on material living standards in other parts of the world.⁶⁷ Prasannan Parthasarathi, who can be credited with bringing India into this discussion, based his assessment of a late Indo-European divergence on three observations of weavers’ wages and three estimates of spinners’ incomes in Southern India in the mid-eighteenth century, the 1790s and 1800.⁶⁸ In his book of 2011, he gives six separate observations of real wages in South India, of which only three support his argument of high wages, while he also brings three additional observations for Bengal (north-eastern India).⁶⁹ It is hard to be convinced of the core arguments given such a fragile empirical basis.

It is important to note that these works represent a response to the conventional view of an early rise of the West, which was not based on much (reliable) quantitative evidence either. These views, which suggested that Western Europe forged ahead of the rest of the world in terms of per capita GDP, urbanisation and living standards, were in terms of underlying quantitative data based largely on the work of Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison.⁷⁰ Maddison’s data of per capita GDP for non-Western countries pre-1820s were no more than conjectures.⁷¹ It is only since the early 2000s that, in response to the work of Pomeranz and others, serious efforts have been made to improve the data, especially for non-Western countries. While studies have also compared other economic indicators, such as human stature and market performance,⁷² the focus in the remainder of this chapter will be on the two indicators that have been most prominent in the discussion: real wages and GDP. Whereas Pomeranz observed that ‘it seems likely that average incomes in Japan, China, and parts of Southeast Asia were comparable to (or higher than) those in Western Europe, even in the late eighteenth century’,⁷³ most of the latest quantitative research suggests otherwise.⁷⁴ Establishing the correct chronology for the Great Divergence is, of course, an important prerequisite for understanding the reasons for that divergence.

Measuring Comparative Incomes: GDP

Per capita GDP is by far the most widely used and accepted variable to measure the development of economic performance and income in societies. GDP is an ‘empirical construct that does not exist in the real world’,⁷⁵ and its calculation has become exceedingly complicated due to both the rising complexities of modern economies and the increasing sophistication of statistical methods. There are three ways to estimate GDP – these being expenditure, output and income approaches – but the general idea is to get an overview of total economic activity in a country, measured at market value. For this, one needs to estimate either the total expenditure of consumers, investors and government (expenditure approach), an estimate of total goods and services produced in a society minus intermediates (output), or the total incomes obtained from land, labour and capital (income). These data are difficult to obtain and require various assumptions and choices. Dealing with technological change and the construction of a price index to correct GDP figures for inflation generates additional problems. Despite this, GDP still provides a good indication of how rapidly or slowly economies are growing.⁷⁶

Difficulties in obtaining the necessary data increase when investigating GDP in the period before the late nineteenth century, when governmental statistical agencies started producing national statistics. Scholars need to make assumptions about the level of local consumption and production of food and clothing, for example, on the basis of wage and price developments and exploit the latest research on price elasticities of demand for these products (which allows estimation of consumed quantities).⁷⁷ In addition, even when there are relatively good estimates, assumptions need to be made to capture non-market income, such as the work of spouses within the household or food grown for domestic consumption. Further problems arise with non-marketed output, such as unpaid housework and ‘black market’ activities,⁷⁸ which are often substantial in pre-industrial economies.

As a result, historical GDP figures are generally expected and acknowledged to contain a certain margin of error.⁷⁹ There are methods to estimate such error, using information about the variability of the series and their underlying components; indeed, some recent historical GDP studies have calculated the margin of error.⁸⁰ Such error margins should be calculated in case errors are randomly distributed. Potential biases in data can be dealt with by calculating GDP series using a variety of assumptions to see how the results change and whether this alters the general picture sketched by the GDP numbers (‘robustness tests’). Calculating GDP in different ways (expenditure, output and income) can also help increase the robustness of findings. Over recent decades, various scholars have gathered figures from state tax records, customs accounts, probate inventories, farm accounts and many other sources,⁸¹ in combination with the latest tried-and-tested assumptions, to estimate new series of GDP from the late Middle Ages for a number of countries.

This new research into GDP largely upholds Maddison’s earlier conjectures. The latest evidence confirms that around the year 1000, higher incomes per capita were reached in Song China than in (what is now) Britain, but this was hardly in dispute. Yet by 1400, for which new estimates on China have recently become available, incomes in (what are now) Italy, Britain and the Netherlands were already substantially higher. England was one of the poorer parts of Europe in the Middle Ages, while Italy was one of the richer areas, so ‘it is likely that Italy was already ahead by 1300, and perhaps even earlier’.⁸² The gap only increased as GDP per head declined in China and would not return to 1400 levels until the twentieth century. The latest work on Japan shows lower incomes there than in China until the nineteenth century, and thus an even larger gap with the leading economies of Europe. The trend in Japan does suggest very slow improvement in incomes in the pre-industrial period. The first GDP estimates for India are available for 1600, when they are slightly higher than in China, but below those in Britain. After 1600 Indian incomes continuously decline, further increasing the gap. What is striking in the new research is that the gap between the economic leader in Europe and other parts of Europe was also very large. In the seventeenth century, average incomes in the Dutch Republic (now the Netherlands) were more than twice as high as in Britain.

On the basis of the problems outlined herein, even quantitative economic historians have been critical of historical GDP estimates. In particular, Deng and O’Brien have questioned earlier Chinese GDP estimates as they found the data to be of too low quality and not voluminous enough to produce consistent series of GDP or population. They argue that there are severe dangers in quantification on the basis of a limited and problematic body of evidence as the ‘origins and accuracy of such figures are too rarely investigated or questioned’.⁸³ Stephen Broadberry (and colleagues) responded two years later by presenting a large body of new data that did exactly that: investigating and revising earlier estimates of Chinese GDP.⁸⁴ Furthermore, when Peter Solar pointed out problems with their government output data, they updated their figures to take his suggestions into account.⁸⁵ This shows the benefits of these quantitative approaches that are based on generally accepted comparative methodologies: as the assumptions and underlying data are discussed openly, they can readily be criticised and improved. New estimates are then easily entered into the same comparative framework.

Measuring Comparative Incomes: Real Wages

A further issue with per capita GDP is that it is an estimate of the average income in a society and may give little information about the standard of living of the majority of the population. While there is a clear correlation between GDP and various aspects of well-being, the correlation is not perfect, and GDP itself, as Diane Coyle emphasises several times, is ‘not a measure of welfare’.⁸⁶ Due to a high degree of social inequality, large parts of a population can be denied decent schooling or healthcare, despite the relatively high GDP per capita of the states in which they reside. This, and the issues sketched earlier, have led to the search for alternative measures of living standards. Real wages – the purchasing power of an (often unskilled male building) labourer – represent a good alternative for the following reasons: (1) data on wages and prices are relatively widely available for a large number of countries far back in time; (2) as wage labour has existed since antiquity it requires no anachronistic concept or statistical artefact like ‘GDP’; (3) it directly measures incomes of those at the lower end of the income distribution. Real wages studies essentially ask very basic questions: how much did the average person earn for a day’s work; how did this change over time; and was a worker better off in Delhi or in London in the early 1800s?

But real wage comparisons are not without problems, either: how can the real value of the wage of a worker in medieval England, who lighted his house using wax candles and warmed himself by a fireplace full of firewood, be compared with a worker in the twentieth century who used electricity and a coal stove? Or how can the income of an eighteenth-century worker in England, who ate bread and meat and drank beer, be compared with that of a Japanese labourer in the same period who mainly consumed rice, beans and fish? In order to deal with this issue, Robert Allen developed a consumption basket based on necessary nutritional intake.⁸⁷ The aim of this methodology was to compare both the purchasing power of workers in the same region over time and the purchasing power of similar workers in different regions. A basket was defined that delivered the necessary nutrients, some 1,940 kcal and 40 grams of protein per day, mainly from the cheapest available staple in a region, as well as some required clothing and fuel (for heating and lighting). By defining a basket in this way, it was possible to compare the value of the wage relative to an early modern poverty line.

Using this methodology, real wages have been widely used in the Great Divergence debate and the last two decades have seen not only new estimates for various parts of Europe and North America, but also for China, India, Japan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. On the basis of these newly gathered data, the basic conclusion of a comparatively early Great Divergence (significantly before the Industrial Revolution) is essentially confirmed. In contrast to GDP estimates, real wages are often taken from urban areas and thus reflect the standard of living in the capital, or another major city, of a country. The first global comparative figures for 1600 suggest there was already a gap in real incomes between workers in Europe and India. In particular, wages in Amsterdam were substantially higher.⁸⁸ From the late seventeenth century, data for Batavia (now Jakarta, Java) become available, suggesting that these were also well below those in Western Europe.⁸⁹ Similar conclusions can be drawn on the basis of the evidence about Chinese and Japanese wages, with the latter in particular being at an extraordinarily low level.⁹⁰

These real wage estimates have also received a fair deal of criticism. With regard to the high wages observed for London, the extent to which the observed ‘wages’ actually reflect the money that entered the pockets of local workers has been questioned, as opposed to the price paid to labour organisers and recruiters, who also retained a share of that money.⁹¹ Taking this into account, London’s real wages may have been about 30 per cent lower than earlier estimates suggest.

For China as well as South and Southeast Asia, critics of real wage studies have noted that as these were predominantly agricultural societies, the wages of often urban workers cannot be taken as representative for the income of the broader population.⁹² Deng and O’Brien argue that wage rates cannot be compared across Eurasia because the ratio of wage-dependent workers is very different: in Qing China, wage workers represented about 3 per cent of the total workforce. By contrast, in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic this figure may have exceeded 50 per cent,⁹³ and similar figures may be expected for England and other parts of Western Europe. Despite this, when labour markets function more or less freely, as they did in Qing China according to Pomeranz, one may assume a certain relationship between wages earned and the living standards of rural populations, at least in the long term. If wages represent a far lower standard of living than that earned by agriculture, simply not enough workers would show up to perform the necessary work. This labour scarcity would then increase wages to a level where it provides an attractive enough alternative to other activities. Similarly, wages cannot consistently represent a far higher standard of living than that earned by the average peasant in the countryside as that would likely cause an abundance of labour offered on the market, which would put downward pressure on wages.⁹⁴ Therefore, as Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal write, ‘we know that when economies are growing rapidly, wages rise, and when economies run into trouble, wages fall’.⁹⁵ Deng and O’Brien, while primarily focused on China, extend their critical claims of real wages studies to other parts of Asia, such as India. Yet for pre-modern India, in particular around Calcutta, most sources suggest a highly competitive labour market, where wages clearly responded to supply and demand. From the 1750s to the 1770s, there is evidence that when the wages offered by the British in Calcutta were not high enough compared with private employers, this resulted in a shortage of workers. When the British needed a large number of construction workers to build a new gun carriage factory in 1804, they were well aware that they had to set the wages high enough to attract sufficient applicants.⁹⁶

Deng and O’Brien also dispute the evidence on which the Chinese wage series is based. As was the case with some of the price series discussed earlier, the sources of wage figures are often large institutions (governments, large companies, churches, etc.) that may not have paid market rates. Data on wages in China were gathered from such sources: government records (stating the costs incurred on construction projects), international companies (which hired labourers to load their ships), in addition to domestic firms (workers in local fuel stores). For Deng and O’Brien, these sources ‘seem to be neither voluminous, transparent, nor contextualised enough to serve as proxies for average daily wages or for the standards of living afforded by the private sector of the Chinese economy to a definable group of unskilled urban and agricultural workers at the bottom end of an income distribution scale’.⁹⁷ In addition, they observe that these wages are difficult to interpret because the non-monetary incomes of workers (such as board and lodging) remain unspecified, and, as these payments in kind were often substantial, they cannot form the basis for any wage comparisons. Other critics have questioned whether incomes based solely on male earnings provide an accurate image of household earnings. If in one part of the globe the contribution of women and children was much higher than in others, this could have implications for the gap in incomes.⁹⁸ The little information that we have on female incomes does suggest that women had higher incomes (relative to men) in parts of Asia, but that even including such incomes in the comparison is unlikely to close the gap.⁹⁹ Further issues have been raised regarding the seasonality of labour and the number of days per year and hours per week worked.¹⁰⁰

What matters, however, is whether issues related to the data are likely to alter the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies. The latest research on real wages in the Great Divergence does not suggest that any of these issues may actually affect the levels and trends to such an extent that the current picture needs significant adjustment. One analyst of London wage series, Judy Stephenson, observed that, taking into account the money that ended up in the pockets of labour organisers, wages in London were probably still higher than those elsewhere in the early modern period, and that the overall picture sketched by the real wage work thus remains unaltered.¹⁰¹ When Deng and O’Brien offer alternative observations of the number of calories obtained via unskilled wage labour in China, they suggest these data ‘might also support an inference that the great divergence could well have been on stream for some time before 1700’.¹⁰²

In order to arrive at final conclusions about the Great Divergence (as well as the origins of globalisation), one needs to look at a variety of indicators which, taken together, can show the full picture of economic development in an area. If there are large differences in the picture that emerges (e.g. between estimates of GDP and those of human stature or urbanisation), then it needs to be asked where these differences come from. Can they be explained convincingly, or do they suggest problems with (one of) the indicators? For now, it seems that most evidence, not only that on GDP and real wages, but also that on heights and urbanisation rates, points in more or less the same direction: to an early start of the Great Divergence. ¹⁰³

Conclusion

Over recent decades, economic historians have been feverishly gathering data on both global connections and comparative economic performance in different parts of the world. This recent research largely confirms many older insights, such as those put forth in the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and Angus Maddison. Global connections increased substantially over the early modern era and integration of global markets ensued. Efforts to formally estimate the impact of these connections for Europe suggest a significant positive association between international trade and economic outcomes. For other parts of the world, data demonstrating such links are less abundant, but it is certainly likely that the benefits of trade were not shared with most parts of Africa and Asia.¹⁰⁴ In addition, new estimates on GDP and real wages clearly go against the arguments of Pomeranz and other revisionists who have suggested that the Great Divergence took place in the decades following 1800.

Discussions surrounding the various issues related to the measurement of either globalisation or the Great Divergence are unlikely to stop anytime soon. Nor should they: for the process of knowledge accumulation in global history to take place, it is crucial that historians are transparent about not only the strengths but also the weaknesses of their data. When new data comes to light that suggest that, for example, the level of export trade in a certain country was substantially higher than initially thought, or that agricultural productivity was greater, this may mean an upward correction of GDP estimates and we may have to alter our views of the timing (and probably also the causes) of the Great Divergence. This is not a weakness of quantitative global history, but rather its strength. Because numbers can more easily be compared than qualitative information, and as the researchers are explicit about what is compared, new research can easily build on what is already available, gather new data for estimates that are shaky and investigate assumptions that seem disputable.

Quantification and the use of robustness tests with different assumptions allows such a validation and therefore presents a valuable contribution to global history research. This has put some earlier observations about the rise of a global economy and the divergence in living standards on a much firmer empirical footing and led to a more accurate chronology of these developments. It does not replace but complements qualitative research, especially since many historical events, processes and developments are difficult, if not impossible, to capture in numbers, giving rise to availability bias. It is hard to imagine a purely quantitative global history of philosophy, science or politics, even if it may aid in such endeavours. Quantification allows us to strengthen or debunk some claims about global trade and income comparisons, just as it obscures elements of world history that are less easily translated into numbers, making continuous conversations between quantitative and qualitative historians indispensable for an improved understanding of global history.