The return of universal history So I focused on the reading by David Christian which is the return of universal history.

So first we need to define what is meant by the term universal history. There are many different definitions, as you can see, as well as many different terms used, including world history, global history, trans-national history and macro-history. Perhaps the simplest definition that I have found is a comprehensive and perhaps also unified history of the known world or universe. (encyclopedia) However, the definition Christian uses is the attempt to understand the past at all possible scales, up to those of cosmology, and to do so in ways that do justice to both the contingency and specificity of the past and also to the large patterns that help make sense of the details. (Christian) So why did universal history disappear? David Christian has used some quotes from Alice in Wonderland to illustrate his points. This one refers to the fact that universal history disappeared slowly, and not quite completely, somewhat like the Cheshire Cat. To most historians today, universal history seems a nave, archaic, and out dated form of historical thought, which has been abandoned, along with chronicle writing, as the discipline of history matured into a modern, professional branch of scholarship in the late 19th century. While it has now virtually completely disappeared, it is curious to examine how this occurred, as until the late 19th century, universal history pervaded historical thought in most human societies. This included creation myths, dynastic histories, sacred religious histories, and more. Towards the end of the 19th century, with the Enlightenment, universal history was expelled from the discipline as part of the process by which the discipline of history demonstrated its scientific credentials. To this end, historians would need to narrow their focus and lower their goals, as the demand for facts, rather than theory or speculation, grew. This empirical turn meant that history did not exist without written evidence. As Langlois and Seignobos wrote, The historian works with documents. Documents are the traces which have been left by the thoughts and actions of men of former timesno documents, no history. This meant that a proper universal history was not possible, as much of it was undocumented. As scholarly focus narrowed, nationalism encouraged it further. As Christian says, It offered a historical objectthe nation-statethat set clear, manageable, even alluring boundaries to historical research, attracted significant amounts of government funding because of its importance in public education, and attracted the attention of a wide readership interested in the history of its own imagined community. Nationalism also offered the discipline of history an artificial sense of wholeness. There was also a growing emphasis on history as a profession, rather than an area of study or learning. This in turn relates back to nationalism. As history became institutionalised, with a growing emphasis on careers and

scholarly journals, precision was increasingly valued rather than relevance, and left no room for the grand narratives of world history. So why is universal history returning? There are a number of reasons for this. As Leopold von Ranke wrote, Universal history comprehends the past life of mankind, not in its particular relations and trends, but in its fullness and totality. The discipline of universal history differs from specialized research in that universal history, while investigating the particular never loses sight of the complete whole, on which it is working.In this manner, universal history has never truly vanished, just like the Cheshire Cat, and is returning slowly, starting with the easier bits. In the last few decades there has been a resurgence of world history which is now flourishing. An important reason that world history is now flourishing is the data that historians can draw upon has changed and expanded greatly, due to the century of detailed research in history and other disciplines. This means that historians are more able to collate data and analyse it to create a clearer understanding of the world. This is also because of the Chronometric Revolution. This refers to the development of new techniques to assign absolute dates to past events. The development of new chronometry techniques means that historians are not limited to the written word for evidence. This chronometric barrier confined empirical historical study to several thousand years. The development of various techniques in the 20th century, in particular the radiometric dating technologies, opens this to include a chronology of the prehistory of the world, and was not limited to literate societies, but could also be applied to non-literate. Through these changes, it has also become apparent that history is merely one of the disciplines that attempts to understand the past. With the advancements, it became clear that historians could collaborate with many other disciplines, like archaeologists, palaeontologists, geologists, biologists and cosmologists, to gain a better understanding of the world, and not simply human society. It provides a context for research, the questions asked and the significance of information, as historians begin to see large patterns in history. While the previous narrow focus of historical scholarship hides large patterns, universal history exposes them to further study and analysis. Christian notes three large and interrelated patterns in human history. The first is increasing and eventually accelerating control of biospheric resources by humanity as a whole. The second pattern, made possible by the first, is a slow and accelerating increase in the total number of human beings. The third, intimately tied to the first two, is an eventual increase in the complexity, diversity, and interrelatedness of human societies once population growth ceased to take the form of migrations, and began, instead, to generate larger and denser communities. And to finish, how can universal history impact on general education? David Christian explores three ways. The first is to provide students the ability to

grasp the underlying unity of modern knowledge. Rather than providing students with more knowledge, it is necessary to help them navigate the information available. Courses in universal histories can help overcome a sense of fragmentation by providing maps through the vast ocean of modern knowledge. They should be able to teach students about the past in ways that help them understand that history, literature, biology and cosmology are not separate intellectual islands, but parts of a single, global, and interdisciplinary attempt to explain our world. Second, this coherent vision of the past should help people in many different walks of life to understand better the complex relationship between our own species and the biosphere. Such understanding will be increasingly important as we learn more about some of the dangerous consequences of our astonishing ecological and technological creativity as a species. Finally, there is the possibility that it may provide the framework within which we can create histories that can generate a sense of human solidarity or global citizenship as powerfully as the great national histories once created multiple national solidarities. By doing so, historical scholarship and teaching may be able to play a vital role in tackling the global problems faced today.

Bibliography Christian, David. (2010). The return of universal history. History and Theory, 49, 6-27. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2010.00557.x

Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (2005). Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group The Cheshire cat vanishing (image) from Lewis Carolls Alice in Wonderland, drawn by John Tenniel (1855-6) retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cheshire_Cat_vanishing_(de tail).jpg The grinning Cheshire cat (image) retrieved 25 October 2013 from http://echostains.wordpress.com/tag/alice-in-wonderland/