Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors 

President's Corner | Agriculture as History | The Study of the Nobilities of Latin Europe | 
Crossing Borders | Interview with J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill | Big History | Dispatch from Germany |
The Past Perfect | The Third American Republic | The Battle Over Constitutional Interpretation | The Prisoners | Letters

Volume IV, Number 2

WEBS OF INTERACTION IN HUMAN HISTORY† J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill

One of the most pressing tasks world historians have had in recent years is to develop a more adequate conceptualization of human history as a whole, one that combines the insights of the comparative history of separate civilizations with world systems analysis. Any schema, moreover, that fails to take into account the importance of humanity’s encounters and collisions with the organisms of the earth’s ecosystem and the reciprocal impact of climate and environment on human history is clearly inadequate. Admittedly, the attempt to understand human history as a whole is a daunting task, but one that historians cannot avoid simply because of its magnitude and complexity. With that in mind, we advance the notion of the centrality of webs of interaction in human history as the basis of a more satisfactory account of the past. The career of webs of communication and interaction, we submit, provides the overarching structure of human history. 

A web, as we see it, is a set of connections that link people to one another. These connections may take many forms: chance encounters, kinship, friendship, common worship, rivalry, enmity, economic exchange, ecological exchange, political cooperation, even military competition. In all such relationships, people communicate information and use that information to shape their future behavior. They also communicate, or transfer, useful technologies, goods, crops, ideas, and much else. Furthermore, they inadvertently exchange diseases and weeds, items they cannot use but which affect their lives (and deaths) nonetheless. The exchange and spread of such information, items, and inconveniences, and human responses to these, shape history. 

What drives history is the human ambition to alter one’s condition to match one’s hopes. But just what people hoped for, both in the material and spiritual realms, and how they pursued their hopes, depended on the information, ideas, and examples available to them. Thus webs channeled and coordinated everyday human ambition. 

Although always present, over time the human web changed its nature and meaning so much that we will speak of webs in the plural. At its most basic level, the human web dates at least to the development of human speech. Our distant ancestors created social solidarity within their small bands through exchanges of information and goods. Beyond this, even tens of thousands of years ago, bands interacted and communicated with one another, if only sporadically. Despite migrations that took our forebears to every continent except Antarctica, we remain a single species today, testament to the exchange of genes and mates among bands through the ages. Moreover, the spread of bows and arrows throughout most of the world (not Australia) in remote times shows how a useful technology could pass from group to group. These exchanges are evidence of a very loose, very far-flung, very old web of communication and interaction: the first worldwide web. But people were few and the earth was large, so the web remained loose until about 12,000 years ago. 

With the denser populations that came with agriculture, new and tighter webs arose, superimposed on the loose, original web. The first worldwide web never disappeared, but sections within it grew so much more interactive that they formed smaller webs of their own. These arose in select environments where agriculture or an unusual abundance of fish made a more settled life feasible, allowing regular, sustained interactions among larger numbers of people. These webs were local or regional in scope. 

Eventually, after about 5,000 years, some of these local and regional webs grew tighter still, thanks to the development of cities that served as crossroads and storehouses for information and goods (and infections). They became metropolitan webs, based on interactions connecting cities to agricultural and pastoral hinterlands, and on other interactions connecting cities to one another. Metropolitan webs did not link everyone. Some people (until recent times) remained outside, economically self-sufficient, culturally distinct, politically independent. The first metropolitan web formed 5,000 years ago around the cities of ancient Sumer. The largest, formed about 2,000 years ago by a gradual amalgamation of many smaller ones, spanned most of Eurasia and North Africa. 

Some of these metropolitan webs survived, spread, and absorbed or merged with others. Other webs prospered for a time but eventually fell apart. In the last 500 years, oceanic navigation united the world’s metropolitan webs (and its few remaining local webs) into a single, modern worldwide web. And in the last 160 years, beginning with the telegraph, this modern worldwide web became increasingly electrified, allowing more and faster exchanges. Today, although people experience it in vastly different ways, everyone lives inside a single global web, a unitary maelstrom of cooperation and competition. 

• • • 

All webs combine cooperation and competition. The ultimate basis of social power is communication that encourages cooperation among people. This allows many people to focus on the same goals, and it allows people to specialize at what they do best. Within a cooperative framework, specialization and division of labor can make a society far richer and more powerful than it might otherwise be. It also makes that society more stratified, more unequal. If the cooperative framework can be maintained, the larger the web gets, the more wealth, power, and inequality its participating populations exhibit. 

But, paradoxically, hostile competition can also foster the same process. Rivals share information too, if only in the shape of threats. Threats, when believed, provoke responses. Usually responses involve some closer form of cooperation. If for example, one kingdom threatens another, the threatened king will seek ways to organize his subjects more effectively in defense of the realm. He may also seek closer alliance with other kingdoms. Competition at one level, then, promotes cooperation at other levels. 

Over time, those groups (families, clans, tribes, chiefdoms, states, armies, monasteries, banking houses, multinational corporations) that achieved more efficient communication and cooperation within their own ranks improved their survival chances and competitive position. They acquired resources, property, followers, at the expense of other groups with less effective internal communication and cooperation. So, over time, the general direction of history has been toward greater and greater social cooperation—both voluntary and compelled—driven by the realities of social competition. Over time, groups tended to grow in size to the point where their internal cohesion, their ability to communicate and cooperate, broke down. 

The tight webs of interaction, linking groups of all sorts, tended to grow for several reasons. They conferred advantages on their participants. Through their communication and cooperation, societies inside metropolitan webs became far more formidable than societies outside. Participation in a web brought economic advantages via specialization of labor and exchange. Military advantages came in the form of larger numbers of warriors, often full-time specialists in the arts of violence, aware of (and usually choosing to use) the cutting edge of military technology. Epidemiological advantages accrued to people living inside metropolitan webs, because they were more likely to acquire immunities to a wider array of diseases than could other people. 

All these advantages to life inside a web came at a cost. Economic specialization and exchange created poverty as well as wealth. Skilled warriors sometimes turned their weapons against people who looked to them for protection. And people acquired disease immunities only by repeated exposure to lethal epidemics. Nonetheless, the survivors of these risks enjoyed a marked formidability in relation to peoples outside of webs. 

But there was more to the expansion of webs than this. Webs were unconscious and unrecognized social units. But nonetheless they contained many organizations—lineages, tribes, castes, churches, companies, armies, empires—all of which had leaders who exercised unusual power. These leaders caused webs to expand by pursuing their own interests. Leaders of any hierarchy enjoy an upward flow of goods, services, deference and prestige. They normally struggle to expand the scope of their operations so as to increase this upward flow. Their followers help, to avoid punishment and to earn a share (however paltry in comparison to the leaders) of the anticipated rewards. In the past, this urge to expand often came at the expense of people outside of existing webs, who were poorly organized to defend their own persons, property, territory, or religion. Survivors found themselves enmeshed in new economic, political, and cultural linkages, in a word, in a web. Thus leaders of organizations within a web, in seeking to enhance their own power and status, persistently (if unconsciously) expanded the webs in which they operated. 

Webs also tended to expand because communications and transport technology improved. Writing, printing, and the Internet, for example, were major advances in the transmission of information. Each reduced information costs, and made it easier to build and sustain larger networks of cooperation. Sailing vessels, wheels, and railroads, similarly, cut transport costs and promoted cooperation and exchange over broader spaces and among larger populations. 

So webs involved both cooperation and competition, as their scale tended to grow. So too did their influence upon history. The original worldwide web lacked writing, wheels, and pack animals. The volume and velocity of messages and things that circulated within it was always small and slow by later standards. Its power to shape daily life was weak, although it could occasionally transmit major changes. But the more tightly woven metropolitan webs that evolved in the past 5,000 years transmitted more things more quickly, and thus played a larger role in history. As webs grew and fused, fewer and fewer societies existed in isolation, evolving in parallel with others, and more and more existed and evolved in communication with others. Between 12,000 and 5,000 years ago at least seven societies around the world invented agriculture, in most cases quite independently: parallel pressures led to parallel solutions. The steam engine did not have to be invented seven times to spread around the world: by the 18th century once was enough. 

The power of human communication, cooperation, and competition shaped the earth’s history as well as human history. Concerted human action upset prevailing ecological relationships, first through the deliberate use of fire, coordinated hunting of big game, and the domestication of animals and plants. Eventually, humankind learned to divert ever-larger shares of the earth’s energy and material flows for our own purposes, vastly expanding our niche and our numbers. This, in turn, made the infrastructure of webs—the ships, roads, rails, and Internet— easier to build and sustain. The process of web-building and the process of enlarging the human niche supported one another. We would not be six billion strong without the myriad of interconnections, the flows and exchanges of food, energy, technology, money, that comprise the modern web. 

How people created these webs of interaction, how those webs grew, what shapes they took in different parts of the world, how they combined in recent times into a single worldwide web, and how this altered the human role on earth is the subject of our short book. 

William H. McNeill, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, is widely considered to be the dean of world historians. His most recent book is Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Harvard University Press, 1995). J.R. McNeill is professor of history at Georgetown University. His Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (Norton, 2000) was co-winner of the World History Association Book Prize. 
 
 

An Interview with J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa in anticipation of J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Birds-Eye View of World History (Norton, forthcoming in 2003).

William H. McNeill, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, is widely considered the dean of world historians. His most recent book is Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Harvard University Press, 1995). J.R. McNeill is professor of history at Georgetown University. His Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (Norton, 2000) was co-winner of the World History Association Book Prize. 
 

Yerxa: What are you trying to accomplish with The Human Web?

JR McNeill:  A number of things at the same time, I suppose. On the intellectual level, my dad and I are trying to get across a vision of world history—one that is, we hope, coherent, accessible, and compelling. And our vision, simply stated, is that the means of interaction among communities throughout history have served to provoke the changes that are the main currents of history, and this is quite consistent from the earliest human times to the present. The emphasis is on communications, networks of communications, technologies of communications, and of transport as well.

Yerxa:  How do your webs of communication and interaction improve upon existing conceptual schemes in world history?

JR McNeill:  There isn’t a wide variety of existing conceptual schemes within world history, if by world history we mean attempts to tell the whole story of the human experience—or perhaps I should put it better—attempts to give structure, pattern, and meaning to the whole history of the human experience. By far the dominant approach, certainly within the English-language historical tradition, has been to divide the world up—at least over the last 5,000 years—among various civilizations. That is, to take elite culture as the primary unit of analysis, because it is elite culture that defines a given civilization, whether that is Egyptian, Chinese, or what have you. And this is the approach that informs most of the textbooks, but it is not the only one. In the last fifteen to twenty years a rival vision has popped up—one that my father has done something to advance beginning forty years ago—and that is to see world history as the story of interaction among various cultures and to privilege cross-cultural exchanges, influences, contacts, etc. I would say the primary exponent of this view currently is Jerry Bentley, editor of the Journal of World History and author of what I believe is the best textbook on the market. But that’s about it in terms of coherent visions of world history. So what this web concept tries to do is take the latter of these two positions a little bit further and try to give some structure to the concept of, not perhaps cross-cultural interactions, but cross-community interactions. That is, people need not be of different cultures when interacting; they can be approximately of the same culture and yet locked in some competitive struggle or, equally, locked in some sort of cooperative arrangement. So we try to give a bit more structure and pattern to the notion of group interaction than does any other vision of world history that I’m aware of.

William McNeill: Let me add a bit here. When I was young, there were two visions of world history that were commonplace. One was based on notions of the Judeo-Christian revelation, and it understood meaningful history as the history of God’s relationship to men. This was far from dead; there were lots of people in the United States, and in other countries as well, for whom this version of world history was the true one. That is, God’s relationship to man was what really mattered. At the core of this vision of world history was the assumption that Christians were the people who had received the true revelation. Muslims had exactly the same view of their world, but it was a different revelation from the same God. And then there was the 18th- and 19th-century secularization of the Christian epos—as I like to call it—that was taught in the universities. This vision of world history was anchored in the notion of progress, interpreted in largely material terms: technological improvements, printing, and all the changes that followed from that, as well as changes of ideas. The notion of European progress had been ascendant up to the First World War. And when I was a young man, the First World War presented a tremendous challenge to vision of human progress. It contradicted everything in which those who thought Europe was progressive had believed. This was simply unresolved by historians who still thought of progress as the old, Enlightenment sort of vision. For them, history stopped with 1914 and the controversy over war guilt, and there was no effort to meet this great intellectual challenge to the picture of progress. Progress was one of the great ideas of the Western world, and I was brought up with all that. I distinctly remember the week in which I encountered Toynbee as a second-year graduate student at Cornell.  I suddenly realized that the history I had been taught had been confined to ancient Greece and Rome and the Western world, and the rest of the world only joined history when the Europeans conquered it. 

Yerxa:  What year was this when you first encountered Toynbee?

William McNeill:   It must have been 1940. I didn’t know Toynbee’s reputation at all. Cornell's library only had the first three volumes of A Study of History, and since Cornell did not have any formal graduate courses then, I had free time—something that I’ve never had since—to explore Toynbee's thought. I was captivated by his picture of a multiplicity of civilizations, each—as he said—philosophically equivalent to another, and this meant that the world was enormously wider than I had previously understood.  When I wrote my Rise of the West [1963], I was still very much influenced by Toynbee and his vision of the multiplicity of civilizations as the way to handle world history. And then later I was influenced to some extent by world-systems analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein and others, but I also felt that the world-systems approach was also not totally satisfactory. So now here we are advancing an alternative model, the web. The web extends from every word you say, every time, every message. This is the texture of human life within families, within primary communities, within cities, and among all kinds of subgroups with professional linkages. We have, it seems to me, a conceptual scheme that puts the world together in a far more effective fashion than had been true before. 

Yerxa:   Seen through the lens of webs of interaction, history reveals a trajectory toward greater size and complexity. Is this necessarily so? To borrow from the late Stephen Jay Gould, if it were possible to replay the tape of human history from the beginning, would we be likely or unlikely to see the same or similar trajectory?

JR McNeill: Certainly, this is a meta-question. My answer to it, which I offer without great confidence, is that if we were to replay the tape of human history from precisely the same initial starting conditions—let’s say 100,000 years ago or one million years ago—that the probability is that we would end up with approximately the same results in very broad patterns. And I stress approximately. We would likely see an evolution toward greater complexities of social arrangements and an evolution toward larger and larger units of society. Now, that is not to say that we would necessarily arrive at an industrial revolution; we would not necessarily arrive at a world with lots of democracies in it. Those seem to me on this scale to be matters of detail that could easily have turned out differently. But the proposition that the general drift of cultural evolution is toward more complex and larger-scale social units seems to me highly probable. Not absolutely ironclad, guaranteed, but highly probable.

Yerxa:  What does all this suggest about human agency? If these webs function as the driving force of historical change, how should we view human agency? 

JR McNeill:  I would say that the webs are the shaping force of human history, not so much the driving force. The driving force is the ambitions—individual and collective—of people. There’s plenty of room for human agency, but as Marx put it, men make their own history, but not just as they please. I think this is an apt aphorism. The webs shape what is possible, but the driving forces are the opportunities and challenges that people see. Now those challenges and opportunities that they see, what they are aware of—all that is dependent upon the information that comes to them. Information that comes to them comes via these webs of interaction. So human agency, within the context of the webs, works to shape ultimate results. And then on the more detailed level—getting away from the meta-scale and the grand vision—there is plenty of room for contingency and human agency on what for most historians are rather large-scale questions: whether it’s the nature and character of the French Revolution or the Taiping Rebellion or of Alexander’s Macedonian empire. On these scales, which are pretty big scales for historians to operate on, there is still plenty of room for contingency and human agency. Had Alexander died at age sixteen instead of thirty-three, things would have been quite different. 

Yerxa:  We’ve seen an explosion of books dealing with macro-historical themes. What do you make of this?

JR McNeill: I’m delighted to see an explosion of macrohistories. I note that many of them are not written by historians; they are written by journalists or, in the case of Jared Diamond, someone who is part ornithologist and part human physiologist. This seems fine to me; the additional perspectives of people outside of the cadre of professional historians is very welcome. But I do wish that historians would also more frequently adopt the macro-perspective for two reasons. First of all, intellectually, historians, as a group, need to operate on every scale—not that every individual historian needs to do so, but as a group. That is, micro-studies are necessary and valuable, but to make them maximally interesting and useful, they need to be situated and contextualized in larger-scale macrohistorical patterns. At the same time, macrohistories are impossible without the large number of microhistories. So both scales and, by extension, all scales between the smallest and the largest are helpful and useful. But the professional training of historians in this and other countries is very slanted toward producing small scale studies, and they exist in great profusion. I do not object to that. I do wish that there were more historians eager to operate on the larger scale at the other end of that spectrum. Secondly, I think it’s important because historians, at present, have some purchase on the public imagination. This is delightful, but it is not a birthright of historians. There are academic disciplines that exist tenuously because they don’t have anything directly to say to the general public. I’m thinking, for example, of classics, which one hundred years ago was a vital discipline in the universities and is now a marginal one within certainly American universities. And this has happened to other disciplines as well. History, happily, has avoided developing its own impenetrable jargon, although there are historians who have succeeded magnificently in writing impenetrable jargon. Nonetheless, on the whole, historians still write accessibly, which rather few academic disciplines still do. And a number of historians write things that the general public is happy to read. In order to maintain that situation and, ideally, in order to improve it and expand the general interest in the work of historians, I think historians need to write at the big scale. The general public in most cases will not be interested in microhistories. There’s always an exception to that; there’s always a market for certain kinds of military or presidential histories in this country. But in general, it’s the bigger pictures, the bigger sweeps that are going to be the most appealing to the general public. So I am eager to see historians do that and not leave the field of macrohistory to historical sociologists, ornithologists, and journalists.

Yerxa:  What is your assessment of the present state of world history?

JR McNeill:  I’m pretty cheerful about it, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I believe in world history; I think it is a feasible project both as a teaching enterprise and as a writing enterprise. Obviously, I think the latter; otherwise I wouldn’t have written this book with my dad. I also believe it is appropriate as an educational mission for young people in this and in all countries. And I’m happy to say that I think it’s getting better, in at least two respects: the number of people in the field is growing and the quality of work in the field is improving. In the English-language community, I think that’s primarily due to the Journal of World History, which has been going for about twelve years now and has served as a forum for ideas, very effectively in my view. And then as a pedagogical matter, the number of world history courses in this country is growing by leaps and bounds, and in some other countries that’s true as well. I don’t know if that’s true generally around the world, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. And this seems to me a positive development. Now more than ever—although I think it has always been the case—it would be desirable to educate people in the broadest human context rather than in their own national context or, for example in this country, in the Western Civ. context. Those things are actually useful and valuable, but on their own they are quite incomplete. As a pedagogical matter, the growth of world history is a very favorable development. 

William McNeill:  The field is experiencing very rapid evolution. There are a lot of people interested in world history all of a sudden, and fortunately there are some very good minds at work. One of most impressive, in my opinion, is David Christian. Of course, many others are doing serious work. Peter Stearns has joined the chorus, and, if I may say, my son and I are doing serious work. This maturation of world history is not surprising.  Obviously, the world is a tightly integrated whole today, and anyone who looks at the world knows that the European past—much less the American past—is not the whole past. We are immersed in this worldwide web. And I think it is very important to know how it got that way, which is why my son and I wrote our book. 

Yerxa: Do you think rank and file historians have paid sufficient attention to world history?

William McNeill: Of course not.

Yerxa: Why not?

William McNeill: In my opinion, one of the problems has been the historical profession’s resistance to history that is not based in primary texts. We have an enormous fixation on, what seems to me to be, the naïve idea that truth resides in what somebody wrote sometime in the past. If it's not written down, it isn’t true. And that’s absurd. But it’s the way historians are trained: you have to have a source, and if you don’t have something you can cite from an original source, in the original language, then you’re not a really good historian, you’re are not scientific, you’re not true. The idea that truth resides in what was said is highly problematic. People in the past didn’t always know what was most important even when it was going on around them. Similarly, we probably don’t know what’s most important going on around us today. To assume that only our conscious awareness of what we think we are doing is what should constitute history is silly. What happens is a process in which hopes and wishes and consciousness enter, but we don’t get what we want; we get something mixed with what other people want, with unsuspected and surprising results for all concerned, over and over again. Now if you take only what has been written down—that which happens to have been preserved, which is a small fraction of what was actually written down—as what historians should deal with, you automatically abbreviate the human career. You leave out pre-history; you leave out all the non-literate populations; and you concentrate in effect on a very small number of people, often a very skewed example of the upper classes even, the clerics, the literate, which was sometimes very, very small.  So clearly I consider the obsession with written sources to be an absurdity if you’re trying to understand what happened. It means that people who write books such as ours—which is full of lots of hypotheses based upon little or no material evidence and great leaps of the imagination—may be dismissed as having engaged not in history but historical speculation. I think this is why many people avoid world history. They have their own Ph.D. to work on; they have to do a book; having done that they’re now an expert on whatever it is; they have new problems to look at and new sources to consult; and they’re too busy to think of the larger context in which their own particular study takes place. My son’s remarks about the importance of world history’s context for more specific history are exactly right. Don't misunderstand me; I don’t wish to overthrow textual history, history based on sources. Far from it. It’s the interweaving of that with larger concepts that I support. Ever since 1914 there has been no received sense of the whole drift of human history. After the notion of progress was basically discredited, no one dared ask what mattered for the history of humankind as a whole. I think that if we can begin to do that, there will be a great healing for history and history will be in much more fruitful contact with the other social and biological sciences.

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President’s Corner
by George Huppert

It seems fitting, as my term of office has come to an end, that I should say a few words about how we are doing as an association. Perhaps I should also provide a few candid observations regarding my experiences while in office. It was in June of 2000, at our second national conference in Boston, that I found myself nominated for the office of president of our society. I accepted, not without some reluctance. Now, two years later, I have to confess that this has been a pleasurable and instructive experience. Of course, there is some fairly time-consuming work involved, but the net benefit, which I had not counted on, has been a remarkable widening of my horizon. As a historian of Renaissance France, I have maintained relations over the years almost exclusively with other specialists in my field, both here and in Europe. I rarely used to read books or articles unrelated to my research. This is not something I am proud of, but somehow there was never enough time to stray from my own work. This failure of mine is probably not unique in our profession.

Over the course of the past two years, things have been quite different. Inevitably, mixing with all kinds of historians, I have come into contact with any number of interesting colleagues whose work, of necessity, I had to sample, at least in passing. This has turned out to be an exhilarating experience. I recommend it highly.

During my tenure, the Historical Society has matured, and in the process, undergone considerable changes. We started out, four years ago, in reaction to trends in the profession that concerned us. As we went along, talking to each other and inviting contributions to our meetings and publications, we gradually realized that we were creating a new forum and a new community. We may have started out like angry prophets in the desert, calling the wrath of heaven down on miscreants who were wrapping trivia in the swaddling cloth of ideology. But now, four years later, we have created a unique organization, a smaller, calmer meeting ground, where we can talk to each other “in an atmosphere of civility, mutual respect, and common courtesy.”

This we have achieved. The next step is to overcome fragmentation. This is the daunting task with which I have saddled the program directors for our next conference. 

As it happens, one of the program directors, Peter Coclanis, is the new president of the Historical Society. We could not have chosen a better man for the job. Peter is one of the many colleagues whom I would never have gotten to know had I not accepted the job of president. In the past two years, I have not only read his work, which is first rate, but also worked closely with him and learned to appreciate his affable and supportive presence. I look forward to further close collaboration with him. 

George Huppert is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His book After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Indiana University Press, 1986) is now available in a second, expanded edition. 

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Agriculture as History
by Peter A. Coclanis
Peter A. Coclanis is the Historical Society's new president

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A Fair Field Full of Folk (But Only Beyond the Sea): The Study of the Nobilities of Latin Europe
by D'Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton

The field in which I work is one of the oldest in the history of historiography, and one of the most vibrant in the discipline today, attracting not only scores of active historians, but some of the best minds in the profession. Nevertheless, in North America my field has never been popular, and has become increasingly marginalized since World War II. The field I refer to is the history of those hereditary societal elites that are most commonly called “nobilities,” groups distinguished by a claim to descent from ancestors who held one or more of a certain range of honorable statuses, and by the transmission of membership to all of their legitimate children at birth. Nobilities have dominated not only in high barbarian societies like those of the Celtic and Germanic peoples in the first centuries of the Christian era, but in most agricultural civilizations and in a number of important societies (including the British Empire) in the first stages of industrial civilization. In most of Europe, and in some of the overseas colonies of France, Spain, and Portugal as well, the nobility remained the dominant order of society in the economic sphere into the 19th century, and in both the cultural and the political spheres until the early 20th century.

Unfortunately, the violent overthrow between 1917 and 1919 of many of the socio-political regimes in which nobilities had been dominant cast a cloud over many aspects of nobiliary history. Studies of such themes as heraldry, knighthood, knightly orders, chivalry, courts, and courtliness fell suddenly out of fashion among professional historians, and even were treated with scorn in some countries. Historians did not cease to study nobiliary history, but they now restricted themselves to themes that seemed politically neutral or particularly relevant to contemporary questions. Scholarly attention everywhere focused not on the nobility or its culture as such, but upon the institutions through which its members had exercised their political and military authority—especially those that had come to be associated with the artificial construct “feudalism."

Since the end of World War II, however, under the influence of such distinguished historians as Georges Duby, Jacques Boussard, Pierre Feuchère, and Philippe Contamine, in France; Léopold Génicot in Belgium; Gerd Tellenbach, Karl Bosl, Karl-Ferdinand Werner, and Werner Paravicini in Germany; Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and Salvador de Moxó in Spain; Giovanni Tabacco, Gina Fasoli, and Sylvie Pollastri in Italy; and K. B. McFarlane, Maurice Keen, Malcolm Vale, Chris Given-Wilson, Peter Coss, David Crouch, and Nigel Saul in England, interest in the history of the classic nobility before the Reformation has grown steadily in most European countries. The growth in scholarly production increased slowly to 1960, but exponentially thereafter, and now exceeds 100 works a year. The expansion of studies of the later medieval nobilities in the last fifty years has involved not merely a growth in the number of books and articles published, but an increase in the number of subfields devoted to different themes. Some of these were essentially revivals. After half a century of neglect, studies of knighthood, the knightly social stratum, knightly culture (especially the ideology and mythology of chivalry), and knightly organizations began to appear in the early 1970s, and have given rise to major works of synthesis, and to regular international colloquia in England and Portugal. Similarly, the history of royal and princely courts, of the great households that formed the institutional core of such courts, and of the ideology of courtliness that governed the behavior of their habitués, have become important themes of scholarship in the last twenty years. So has the history of the buildings in which courts and households functioned, including villas, halls, manor-houses, palaces, and castles. The new science of castellology is a particularly vital subfield, and inventories of castles (with plans and maps) have been made for several countries. Finally, the ancillary fields of heraldry and sigillography (the study of seals) have been revived in most of the countries of Europe through the founding of national societies and of an international academy to promote comparative scholarship. 

These subfields all owe something to the antiquarian tradition, in which they began in the 16th century, but others have been created in response to fashionable trends in the discipline as a whole. Although racial distinctions in the modern sense were not relevant to the history of European nobilities before the 15th century, the increasingly important notion of the “purity of blood” characteristic of nobilities from that century onward contributed to later forms of racism, and has accordingly been examined with some care. More importantly, the rise of gender studies has inspired work on noblewomen, the noble family as a functional unit, and the ideals of both womanliness and manliness in the noble order. 

Studies of nobiliary gender roles (an important element of the ideology of chivalry) are closely related to other studies by historians and anthropologists of the growing set of social phenomena associated with the word “honor.” The importance in most pre-industrial societies of what I call the “honor nexus”—the set of culturally determined attitudes and behaviors associated with esteem and its positive and negative bases and manifestations—was admirably set forth in a recent essay in these pages by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Historically Speaking, June 2002). Noble status actually rested upon a recognized claim to superior honorableness derived both from descent from honorable ancestors and from adherence to their behavioral code—the core of which was usually a form of pugnacious hypermasculinity, requiring the assertion and defense of the honorableness of both individual and kindred. Historians of nobiliary honor before 1500 have traditionally concentrated on the nature of the current version of the code (including the codes of chivalry and courtliness), and the attitudes and behaviors they engendered. Recently, however, historians have been giving increased attention to the ways in which inherited honorableness could be augmented through the acquisition of new domains (the principal source of honorable wealth, power, and rank) or, alternatively, on the conferral of increased honorableness through such acts of royal grace as admission to the nobility or the general order of knighthood, promotion in nobiliary rank, appointment to an honorific office, or admission to a princely order of knighthood like the Garter or the Golden Fleece—all practices that grew steadily from about 1280/1325 to about 1660, and persisted thereafter. 

While many long-neglected areas of nobiliary history have thus been investigated since 1970, the established subfields have themselves been revolutionized by new techniques and supplemented by new ancillary sciences. Feudo-vassalic institutions, for example, have been carefully distinguished and examined, and their changing position in the military systems of different kingdoms has been set against the development of various alternative systems of recruitment and organization, especially retaining by contract. The latter system was also employed after about 1350 to establish political clienteles or “affinities” comparable to vassalages, and this phenomenon has also attracted considerable attention from scholars since World War II. Growing numbers of detailed studies of the formation and growth of particular principalities, baronies, castellanies, and manors in Latin Europe, or of all of the dominions of one of these classes of a particular region, have given us far more precise ideas about the history of these nobiliary jurisdictions. And historical cartography can now depict very clearly the complex relationships among jurisdictions on all levels. 

Historians have also given us a much clearer notion both of the range of sources of nobiliary incomes and of the changing ways in which noble estates were administered. Biographical, genealogical, and lineal or dynastic studies (generally possible only for the nobility before about 1500) have continued, and have been increasingly supplemented by anthroponymic and prosopographical ones. They have also been supplemented, especially in France and England, by detailed studies of the nobility of a single district in a period of from one to three centuries. The study of the nobility’s place as the second of the functional “estates” of society was also revived in the 1970s, as was the study of the closely related function of noblemen as members of one or more of the chambers of the representative assemblies that began to be created in the decades around 1300: the Parliaments of England, Ireland, and Scotland, the Estats of France and its regions and provinces, the Cortes of Castile, and so forth. 

In many European countries, the history of the nobility both before and after 1500 has moved steadily in the direction of becoming a recognized division of the discipline since its revival after World War II. Ever larger numbers of historians have devoted ever larger parts of their scholarly activities to questions in which some part of some nobility, at least, occupies a central place. By contrast, the place of nobiliary studies in the pre-industrial historiography in North America was never very great, and despite the prominence and productivity of some of its practitioners (including Sidney Painter, Joseph Strayer, Bryce Lyon, Warren Hollister, Bernard Bachrach, John Freed, Joel Rosenthal, Theodore Evergates, Patrick Geary, and Constance Bouchard among the medievalists), its share of the places in the profession has actually declined in relative terms (along with that of medieval studies) since 1970. 

It disturbs me that a subfield of historiography that is not only important because of the centrality of its object in the history of most pre-industrial civilizations, but is actually flourishing in most of Europe, should be so small and isolated in North America. Several factors seem to have contributed to its marginality in the United States in particular. In the first place, nobiliary studies—like pre-industrial studies more generally—appear to have been a victim of the parochialism and presentism that underlie most academic historiography in the United States, and lead a substantial majority of historians here to concentrate on the history of this country and on themes that explain some aspect of its current culture. Since there is nothing resembling a nobility in the United States today, and the upper class has hidden itself so effectively since 1945 that most citizens believe it has ceased to exist, it is easy for American historians to believe that there is no point in studying the history of nobilities. 

Another factor that surely contributed to the decline in interest in the field of nobiliary history after 1970 is the triumph of the radically populist and anti-elitist attitudes associated with the New Social History, and the subsequent rise of its various politically correct offshoots. The more extreme adherents of these schools have not been content to promote the study of their particular neglected category (something that in itself can only be praised for widening the scope of historiography), but have actively opposed the study of elites of all kinds, whom they typically portray as hateful oppressors of the poor, weak, and non-white. This attitude—defensible in political contexts, but not in academic ones—not only discourages graduate students from undertaking work on nobilities, but also makes the hiring and tenuring of those who have undertaken such work extremely difficult. 

My own position is that nobilities should be studied regardless of one’s personal feelings about them for the simple reason that they were the socially, politically, and culturally dominant element of most agricultural civilizations—and therefore for all but the last century or two of recorded history. I also believe that the primary obligation of historians is to understand the totality of the recorded past as fully as possible, not merely to explain present conditions through highly selective lines of inquiry that ignore most of past reality. 

Even from a presentist perspective, however, it can be argued that the history of the classic nobility of Latin Europe, at least, is worthy of more widespread attention in the United States. Many elements of American culture—those associated with constitutional government, political liberty, and property rights, as well as those associated with comfort, security, courtesy, fashion, and “high culture”— were created either by or for members of that nobility: especially, of course, in England. Indeed, in the decades between about 1870 and 1900, the ideals of the English gentry spread throughout the newly crystallized upper class of the United States generally, and are not wholly extinguished in that class today. Just as the common culture of the United States cannot be understood without understanding the culture of England from which it is still very largely derived, so the culture of its most powerful class cannot be understood without a good knowledge of that of its English predecessor. The culture of chivalry has also been maintained in the officer corps of the armed forces of the United States, whose members are all officially “gentlemen” and still carry knightly swords on formal occasions. 

Let me finally propose a very different argument in favor of the study of nobilities and the societies they dominated. One of the principal reasons for studying the culture of agricultural civilizations, including that of Latin Europe, is that they were very different in many fundamental respects from the industrial civilizations of today, and invariably held very different beliefs about the just distribution of prestige, civil rights, property, and power in society. With a tiny handful of partial exceptions, they maintained steep and rigid social hierarchies composed of juridical and differentially privileged orders rather than economic classes, and were organized politically as hybrids of monarchy and various forms of aristocracy. As recent events suggest, Americans need a much greater awareness of just how recent and unusual their most cherished social and political beliefs really are by world-historical standards, how far they must seem from being “self-evident truths” in the eyes of the members of other civilizations even today—and how precarious their own egalitarian, libertarian democracy really is. 

In any case, refusing to study the classic nobilities of Latin Europe because they are irrelevant to Americans is clearly an indefensible position. Refusing to study them simply because one does not approve of elites is downright silly. After all, few today approve of slavery, racism, fascism, or genocide, but these unpleasant topics have nevertheless attracted a good deal of attention from historians. Nobilities, for all their faults, made many contributions to historical cultures that are still generally regarded as positive, and are at least equally deserving of the attention of scholars. 

D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton is a fellow of the Medieval Institute and associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is an expanded second edition of his The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1326–1520 (Boydell Press, 2000). 

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Crossing Borders[*]
by Peter Paret 

In 1942, at the age of eighteen, I became a freshman at Berkeley. The basic history surveys seemed to me—no doubt unfairly—little better than verbal equivalents of the lists of dates and events familiar from my school years in Europe. Different altogether were the elegantly clear lectures on British history by George Guttridge, which he permitted me to attend although the course was limited to upper-division students. I was drafted the following year, and did not return until the fall of 1946. From my second period at Berkeley I recall with special pleasure William Hesseltine’s summer session course on the American Civil War, his left-wing take on events only rarely exploding in bursts of sarcasm; and a survey of Sicily in the Middle Ages, delivered—chanted would be more accurate—by Ernst Kantorowicz. It was not difficult to see that his search for universals, at its most impressive when animated by such specifics as the phrasing of a Papal missive or the architecture of a Norman watchtower, could reflect only a part of how things had actually been. His respect for evidence was that of the artist as much as that of the scholar.

I was twenty-five years old when I graduated. Family obligations took me back to Europe, and I did not begin graduate study at King’s College, London until 1956. The choice of the University of London was motivated by my wish to remain in Europe for the time being, and by the presence at King’s of Michael Howard, at that time a lecturer in war studies. My intention to write a dissertation on war seemed to clash with my preoccupation with literature and the fine arts. But service in an infantry battalion in New Guinea and the Philippines raised questions that did not disappear when the fighting stopped. How men faced danger; how the course of fighting could be described and interpreted with some accuracy; how a country’s social and political energies were transformed into organized violence—these were matters to investigate and understand. 

Graduate study at King’s placed few restraints on the student. I audited Howard’s excellent survey of the history of war, took the necessary qualifying examinations, and attended two seminars at the Institute of Historical Research: one conducted by Howard; the other, on European history, by W. Norton Medlicott, who with great professionalism and kindness oversaw a large, international group of students trying their hand on a wide range of topics and approaches. One of his assistants, Kenneth Bourne, later Medlicott’s successor as professor of international history at the London School of Economics, became a life-long friend. 

My dissertation addressed the change in Prussian infantry tactics at the end of the 18th century and in the Napoleonic period. The subject may seem narrow and technical, but it was closely linked to issues of broad significance, from an expansion of operational and strategic possibilities to the treatment of the common soldier and his place in society. The so-called break-up of the linear system of the ancien régime—more correctly, its modification by column and open order—had long been associated with the American and French Revolutions, an interpretation emotionally validated by the powerfully symbolic contrast between citizen soldiers and mercenary automata. Not surprisingly, I found that the change was the outcome of developments antedating 1776 and 1789. In two later articles I demonstrated—at least to my satisfaction —that the War of American Independence had little impact on European military practice. 

While working on the dissertation, I gained teaching experience as a resident tutor in the Delegacy of Extra-Mural Studies at Oxford. I began to review books for several journals, but with a troubled conscience, not yet having written a book myself. I also published a number of articles, but on subjects far removed from my dissertation topic: two on current defense issues, which led to membership in the recently founded Institute for Strategic Studies, a third in the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research on the history of the Third Reich. The latter resulted from a chance discovery. While searching for 18th-century military manuals in the library of the Royal United Service Institution, I noticed a crudely bound folio, used by library attendants as a tray for their tea mugs, which turned out to be the register of a Gestapo prison established on July 21, 1944, the day after the attempt on Hitler’s life. It had come as war booty to the library, where it remained unnoticed. The volume was of some historical importance because it dated the admission, release, or execution of several hundred prisoners. With the help of a former inmate, the Rev. Eberhard Bethge, a relative and biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I located and interviewed survivors, as well as relatives and associates of the victims, and reconstructed the history of the prison and of the prison community. 

Until I defended my dissertation in the spring of 1960, I gave little thought to finding an academic position. The expansion of colleges and universities, especially in the United States, was at high tide, and opportunities seemed to exist everywhere. The difference between conditions then and now can hardly be exaggerated. Today the pernicious institutional reliance on temporary appointments places a burden on a new generation of scholars that forty years ago we could not have imagined. At the time I never doubted that something would turn up, even though I labored under two handicaps: at thirty-six I was older than many of my peers, and I had no academic contacts in the United States, to which I now wanted to return, my future wife, a psychologist, having been offered a position in New York. It was lucky for me that Klaus Knorr, then the associate director of the Center of International Studies at Princeton, was starting a research project on “internal war.” At a conference in Oxford, at which I gave a paper on the subject, he offered me a one-year renewable appointment as a research associate at the Center. 

In Princeton I was one of two historians among a group of highly theoretical social scientists. My fixation on the tangible and specific prevented me from profiting as much as I had hoped from the variety of abstract orientations I now encountered; the efforts of my new colleagues to create hypotheses and taxonomies by committee baffled me. I made up for my theoretical naïveté by being among the first to publish work credited to the project—a study of the constants of internal war and pacification as illustrated by the uprising of the Vendée during the French Revolution, and with John W. Shy, at the time an instructor in the history department, an article on “Guerrilla War and U.S. Policy.” The latter piece was reprinted in various places, and led us to write a short book, Guerrillas in the 1960s, which appeared in 1961. A revised edition followed in 1962. The book evidently filled a need; for some years even the service academies used it, although our argument that resorting to unconventional war would pose serious difficulties for this country went against a strong current of official opinion. Two years later, I wrote a book on a related subject, guerre révolutionnaire, the doctrine, developed by the French army in Indochina and Algeria, of opposing insurgents with variants of their own methods. The doctrine was an impressive intellectual response to a military-political problem, but deeply compromised by psychological and moral shortcomings. 

The part of the book I most enjoyed writing was a chapter on the doctrine’s historical antecedents; clearly I was not cast for a career as a defense analyst. Several historians, among them Felix Gilbert, whom I had met even before he came to Princeton in 1961, knew my dissertation and some papers I had written on German history and historiography, and recommended me to departments that had openings in modern European history. In the fall of 1962 I joined the history department of the University of California at Davis. 

Davis had only recently expanded from the agricultural college of the university to a general campus, and the history department made new appointments every year. Its rapid growth was guided by several able men: the agricultural historian James Shideler; Bickford O’Brien, author of two books on Muscovy; and Walter Woodfill, whose book on musicians and society in England I had read some years earlier. They made certain that the department became known for strong teaching and that faculty research was supported. During a period of constant change, with its inevitable tensions, they maintained a rare sense of mutual responsibility and collegiality. 

In 1966, the year I was promoted to professor, I published my revised dissertation on the era of Prussian reform. Among the changes was a fuller discussion of Clausewitz’s activities in the reform movement. In the following years I wrote several articles on his life and thought, and by 1969, when I joined the Stanford history department, I had decided to write a book on the development of Clausewitz’s ideas in conjunction with a study of his life. Above all, I wanted to analyze the interaction of Clausewitz’s intellectual growth and creativity with the culture in which he lived, and with the political and military changes he experienced. I was far less interested in Clausewitz’s “influence”—especially on modern war. I studied him as I would have studied Montesquieu for his political theories or Kleist for his drama and prose— for what they achieved in their time, not for their impact on French political thought or German literature in the 20th century. 

During the years I worked on the biography, I diverted time to related projects, among them the translation, with Michael Howard, of Clausewitz’s On War, and a new edition of Makers of Modern Strategy, a collection of essays by different authors, first published in 1943, and now reissued with seven of the original essays and twenty-two new ones. These works confirmed my identity as a military historian—a specialization of doubtful esteem in this country, even if some departments offered courses in the field, usually by professors of American history. The subject suffered from the emotional and political reverberations of the war in Vietnam, and from the dominance of social history at the time, although it seems strange that social historians should not be interested in the impact that arrangements for attack and defense have always had on society. Nor did it help that much writing on war consisted of possibly dramatic but hardly analytic campaign narrative. That more than a few military historians took a broader, integrative approach did not lessen the sometimes unpleasantly doctrinaire dismissal of a field of study the significance of which for our understanding of the past is self-evident.[1]

The Stanford history department, like my former department at Davis, paid attention to teaching. Only the chair— George H. Knoles when I arrived—and a few others with significant administrative responsibilities had reduced teaching loads. At various times I taught the second and third quarters of the year-long freshman survey, an undergraduate course on the history of war; but I mainly taught undergraduate and graduate courses in European history and culture. A graduate colloquium, in which we defined and analyzed the political and social themes of Daumier’s lithographs from the 1830s to 1880, has stayed in my mind as particularly stimulating. 

Clausewitz and the State was published in 1976. A few articles followed that continued to explore themes of the book from different perspectives or as new material became known. Dispatches from British diplomats in the British Museum and the Public Record Office allowed me to reconstruct Clausewitz’s failed effort, against conservative opposition, to exchange active service for a diplomatic appointment—an episode indicative of his fascination with politics as well as of the reactionary pressures to which he was exposed in Prussia after 1815. 

But the main focus of my research was shifting away from war to the interaction of art and politics. Once again, a personal element gave direction to my work. Even as a boy I had been superficially aware of the conflict over modernism in German art at the end of the 19th century, because my maternal grandfather, an art dealer and publisher, had been active in support of the new. Art historians generally approached the subject from an exclusively modernist perspective. To strip the conflict of its myths and to understand its historical as well as art historical significance called for more balanced treatment. In archives in Berlin, Potsdam, and Merseburg, especially in the files of the imperial Zivilkabinett, I found information on official policy and on conflicting attitudes toward modern art in the cultural bureaucracy to complement documentation on the avant garde. The first result was an article in 1978 (“Art and the National Image: The Conflict over Germany’s Participation in the St. Louis Exposition,” Central European History 11 [June 1978]). Two years later I published a book on the politically most significant of the secessionist movements that in the 1890s sprang up throughout Central Europe: The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany. 

In a generously positive review, Carl Schorske noted that I had scarcely tried to analyze the work of the artists whose struggle for acceptance I traced (American Historical Review 87 [October 1982]). His point was well taken. Although it can be useful to separate the social and political impact of a work of art from its aesthetic characteristics, and the degree of attention given to content and style should fit the historian’s purpose, my study of the quarrel between Wilhelm II and the Secession should have said more about the art itself. But at the time, more so than today, I was troubled by the subjectivity of aesthetic theory, and I was very conscious of the fact that such phenomena as patronage policies are more susceptible to firm interpretations than would be a work’s strengths and weaknesses. 

The German translation of the book led to an exhibition of Secessionist artists in Berlin, which I helped curate. Since then I have worked on a number of exhibitions, and closer contact with paintings and graphics has given me some of the art historical freedom I previously lacked. I did not stop writing on subjects that concern art without being about art: in 1981“The Tschudi Affair,” a study of Wilhelm II’s attempt to replace the director of the Berlin National Gallery with a conservative, which was defeated largely by senior officials in the cultural bureaucracy;[2] and the 1984 Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture— The Enemy Within—which discussed the Jewish painter Max Liebermann as president of the Prussian Academy of Arts from 1920 to 1932—a tenure the Right denounced as a subversion of German culture. But increasingly the work of art itself moved toward the center of my research. 

In 1986, I became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Two years later I published Art as History, which in works of art and literature traced the rise and decline of German liberalism. The book included a study of the historical poems of Theodor Fontane, a writer I have admired since adolescence, when—much too early—I read Effi Briest. It was the beginning of a sequence of essays and of talks at meetings of the Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft, which continue to the present. 

Two further works centered on images. I collaborated with Beth Irwin Lewis—her just published book Art for All? continues her important exploration of the role of art in German society—and my son Paul on a study of posters as historical documents, Persuasive Images, which appeared in 1992. Several preliminary studies—one a seminar paper at the Institute, later published as a pamphlet, Witnesses to Life: Women and Children in some Images of War, 1789–1830—led in 1997 to Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art, which brought together my two principal research interests. 

Earlier essays became building blocks for a third book. Among the posters we examined for Persuasive Images were vicious and powerful specimens by the National Socialist propagandist who worked under the pseudonym “Mjölnir”—hammer of the Norse god Thor. I combined his work and the record of his trial after 1945 in a talk at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society. [3] After thirty-three years I had returned to the history of the Third Reich. In an expanded version, which noted that Mjölnir hounded the sculptor Ernst Barlach as a degenerate artist, the piece was included in a collection of my essays on cultural history, entitled German Encounters with Modernism, 1840–1945. To strengthen the volume’s continuity, I wrote two new essays, one on Barlach, which made me realize that I still had more to say about him. The result was An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938, which is being published this coming spring. Again, as in the conflict over modernism in Wilhelmine Germany, I have tried to address the motives and actions of all sides: the reasons for Hitler’s hatred of modernism in art, which was anything but a whim; the search by Goebbels and some other National Socialists for an acceptable “Nordic modernism”; and Barlach’s refusal to be intimidated, expressed above all in the further radicalization of his art. 

Forty-five years ago, when I first attempted to write about history, my subjects were social groups—inmates of a Gestapo prison, sons of the poor forced to serve in the armies of the ancien régime and of the First Republic—or such impersonal phenomena as military doctrines. Later I turned toward the creative individual, whether in war, art, or literature. Creativity and its place in society became primary interests. In writing about social groups or about war or high culture, I searched for links between different, even disparate elements. I made comparisons not only to generate questions and sharpen delineations, but also to explore the relationship among some of the many components of the networks of ideas and action that together constitute historical reality. Crossing borders that separate fields of study has not been invariably welcomed. Dogma, categories, and the pride of specialization can be remarkably powerful. Still, the edgy freedom of our academic world has been a forgiving environment in which to catch hold of bits of the past, perhaps add to their factual substance, and give them new—temporary— meaning. 

Peter Paret is Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2003).

[1] I have discussed the opposition to the history of war in the 1960s and 1970s in “The History of War and the New Military History,” in my collection Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton University Press, 1992) and, more recently, in “The History of Armed Power,” in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Blackwell, 2002). 

[3] Journal of Modern History 53 (December 1981). 

[3] “God’s Hammer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136 (June 1992).

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BIG HISTORY
by Marnie Hughes-Warrington

It is a common complaint that world history—as practiced by historians—does not live up to the scope of its terms. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, for instance, have argued that the “central challenge of a renewed world history at the end of the 20th century” is to tell of the world’s past in a global age.[1] Some have interpreted this as a call for the study of human interactions through frameworks wider than that of the nation-state, while others see it as an invitation to consider something bigger: the origins and evolution of the earth and its inhabitants. For a small but growing number of historians, though, even the shift from world to global history is not enough. What they seek is way beyond the commonly perceived boundaries of history, and thus the comfort zone of many historians. For them, history must tell the biggest story of all, that of the origins and evolution of human beings, life, the earth, and the universe—hence, “big history.”

Unlike the Big Bang, big history does not begin with a single point. Probably the strongest claim we can make on its origins is that it arose in the context of the enormous growth of historical sciences such as cosmology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and geology in the 1980s. How it reached those trained in areas traditionally considered far away from the sciences is via the vast outpouring of popular science publications that followed. Of particular relevance are those works in which writers draw together separate fields, such as the Big Bang (cosmology) and the origins of life (biology) (e.g. Isaac Asimov, Beginnings [1987]; Preston Cloud, Cosmos, Earth and Man [1978]; Arnaud Delsemme, Our Cosmic Origins [1998]; Siegfried Kutter, The Universe and Life [1987]; Harry McSween and Brian Swimm, Fanfare for Earth [1997]; and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story [1992]). Such works evidently revealed the possibilities of interdisciplinary studies and suggested a bigger project uniting the sciences and humanities. 

It is only with the publication of works by David Christian and Fred Spier in the 1990s that we begin to see big history assume a historiographical profile. Christian’s interest in big history first emerged, rather pragmatically, during a lively staff meeting in 1988 at Macquarie University, Sydney, where he taught until 2001. At the meeting, Christian suggested that first year classes should “start at the beginning.” Thinking more about that suggestion, he became intrigued by the questions “What is the whole of history?” and “Where does human history begin?” and was led back to the point where there is no evidence or certainty about “before:” the Big Bang, some 12–15 billion years ago. In 1989, “HIST112: An Introduction to World History” began and, two years later, his “The Case for ‘Big History’” appeared in the Journal of World History. That Christian came to big history via teaching rather than theory shows very clearly in his various writings on the subject: he readily adopts and adapts ideas from an incredibly varied range of sources without the fear of someone trained to know his historiographical boundaries. Even his decision to describe what he was doing as “big history” suggests a “work in progress”:

When I first used the label “big history” in the early 1990s, I felt it was simple and catchy; and it helped me avoid some simple circumlocutions. In retrospect, I fear the label was also grandiose, portentous, and somewhat pretentious. So I need to make it clear . . . that I use the phrase with some hesitation. I continue to use it because it has acquired some currency in the last ten years, and . . . I can’t think of anything better![2]

Though Christian’s account of the past, present, and future shifts continually, his work is at base a “map of reality” or “a single, and remarkably coherent story, a story whose general shape turns out to be that of a Creation Myth, even if its contents draw on modern scientific research.”[3] The modern creation myth begins with the origins of the universe (as suggested in the Big Bang theory) and goes on to tell about the origins of the stars and planets, the earth and life, human beings and societies and ends with speculations about our cosmic future. 

Christian’s historiographical reflections on big history are very much focused on those who engage with it: it is a project in which past, present, and future must be drawn together for understanding of self and of others. Spier’s historiographical writings, on the other hand, concentrate more on patterns in the subject matter. Spier was introduced to big history by Johan Goudsblom, who in turn first learned about it from Christian. Spier and Goudsblom introduced a big history course to the University of Amsterdam in the 1995–96 academic year, and Spier has convened the course since Goudsblom’s retirement in 1998. Goudsblom has written about the way the course was set up in Stof Waar Honger uit Onstond (2001), but their “Big History Project” will be better known to English readers through Spier’s The Structure of Big History (1991, revised as Geschiedenis in het Groot: Een alomvattende visie, 1999). Drawing on his training in historical sociology, Spier argues that “regimes” are the organizing principle of big history. The term “regime” enjoys such a wide usage in sociology that it is difficult to attribute any technical meaning to it at all. Spier suggests that all uses of the term refer to “more or less commonly shared behavioral standards,” “patterns of constraint and self-restraint,” and “an interdependency constellation of all people who conform more or less to a certain social order.” Such definitions clearly refer to human behavior, so in order for the term to be useful in big history, he extends its meaning to “a more or less regular but ultimately unstable pattern that has a certain temporal permanence.” [4] Spier detects such patterns at all levels of complexity and in a wide range of places and times, from the fundamental atomic forces, through hunter-gathering societies, to the orbits of the planets.

As Spier notes, there is clearly an alignment between regimes and what Christian—drawing on Stephen Jay Gould—calls “equilibrium systems.” These are systems, as Christian writes, “that achieve a temporary but always precarious balance, undergo periodic crises, re-establish new equilibria, but eventually succumb to the larger forces of imbalance represented by the principle of ‘entropy.’”[5] In Christian’s more recent writings, though, the concept of “equilibrium systems” has disappeared. He is still interested in patterns, and the “constantly shifting waltz of chaos and complexity,” as This Fleeting World attests, but he does not want to stake out a technical term or system of structures as Spier does. 
Christian and Spier, like all “big historians” are interested in patterns of balance and imbalance between order and disorder, but they express their interest through different conceptual frames. Drawing on Marshall Hodgson’s concept of “transmutations,” for instance, John Mears suggests that in human history, for instance, we see three radical periods of imbalance that led to the introduction of deep changes in the organization of societies: the revolution of the Upper Paleolithic, the advent of complex societies, and the global integration of human societies. Akop Nazaretyan, in Intelligence in the Universe: Origin, Formation, Prospects (1991) and Civilization Crises within the Context of Universal History (2001), argues that in all contexts of historical change—the universe, earth, biota—we see punctuated equilibria, but that, overall, history shows a directional tendency toward negentropy (loosely, the increase of order and information in a system). Eric Chaisson also looks to entropy, but realizes its implications more fully through physics. In Cosmic Evolution (2000), Chaisson notes that the universe appears to be getting more complex: after the Big Bang, elementary particles came together to form simple atoms; gravitational attraction among atoms laid the foundations for galaxies; within galaxies, stars, and planetary systems differentiated; and in these, with the emergence of the heavier elements, complex chemical, biological, and ultimately cultural entities arose. Chaisson argues that this increase in complexity is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. The second law, in its statistical-mechanical interpretation, suggests that disorder (the opposite of complexity) increases in closed systems, but as structures like galaxies, stars and organisms are in an open system, they are able to generate and sustain complexity by exporting enough disorder to the surrounding environment to more than make up for internal gains. For Chaisson, complexity is to be found as energy density. He analyzes the flows of energy through various objects and shows how these flows seem to be related to the complexity of the objects. The greater the energy flow, the greater the complexity. And through a table and a series of graphs, he shows that complexity increases from atoms to galaxies to societies and therefore also increases over time. This is what is meant by “cosmic evolution.” 

As the case of entropy shows, conceptual frames and emphases vary among big history practitioners. Indeed, apart from a common interest in the large-scale patterns in the history of the universe, earth, and life, it might be difficult to identify them as “big historians” at all. Of help here is Wittgenstein’s family resemblances view of concepts. On this view, concepts like “big history” are not characterized by a list of criteria that all works and practitioners must satisfy, but rather by a network of overlapping similarities or “family resemblances.” 

Conceptual matters aside, where are we to locate big history in “the house of history?” Recently, Christian has spoken of big history as macrohistory: might this offer us a clue? Historiographically, macrohistory refers to the study of large-scale social systems or social patterns. On the face of it, this definition would certainly fit well with the sociological orientation of both Spier’s and Johan Goudsblom’s works. In stretching “regimes” beyond the social, though, they step way beyond the territory of sociology. Consequently, macrohistory is not big enough to encompass big history.

Big history can be more fruitfully located in the tradition of universal history that began with the new internationalism fostered by Alexander the Great. Writers like Diodorus of Sicily (ca. 90–21 BC) claimed that peoples of different times and places could be connected by universal history into one body through the efforts of historians, “ministers of Divine Providence”:

For just as Providence, having brought the orderly arrangement of the visible stars and the nature of men together into one common relationship . . . so likewise the historians, in recording the common affairs of the inhabited world as though they were those of a single state, have made of their treatises a single reckoning of past events . . . . (The Library of History, §1.1.3–4)

This idea of a “single reckoning of past events” was readily adapted in an eschatological fashion by Christian and Islamic writers such as St. Augustine of Hippo (City of God [413–26]), Paulus Orosius (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans [ca.417]), Bishop Otto of Freysing (The Two Cities [1146]), Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah [1357–58]), and Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (Discourse on Universal History [1681]). Growing information about the non-European world from the 16th century onward revealed the limitations of monotheistic narratives, but universal history continued to thrive. In the hands of Gimbattista Vico (The New Science [1744]) and later Johann Gottfried Herder (Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind [1784–91]), Immanuel Kant (“Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” [1784]), G. W. F. Hegel (Philosophy of History [1822–31]), and Leopold von Ranke (Universal History [1884]), universal history was transformed into a “new science” with a philosophical foundation. These writers searched for the presuppositions that shaped human actions and concluded either—as in the case of Vico—that history revealed a circular or spiral pattern of birth, life, decline, and regrowth or—as in the case of Hegel—the progressive realization of freedom. Later in the 19th century, Marx inverted Hegel’s philosophical program, suggesting that the material conditions of life shape human consciousness and society, not the other way around, and Oswald Spengler tracked the birth, growth, and decline of eight cultures, Western Europe included. 

Spengler’s work enjoyed enormous popular success, but increasingly, universal history was marginalized in the discipline. The epic works of H. G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin were judged to be overly speculative and insufficiently attentive to detail. Some felt as Pieter Geyl did about Toynbee: “One follows [Toynbee] with the excitement with which one follows an incredibly supple and audacious tight-rope walker. One feels inclined to exclaim: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas l’histoire.’”[6] Many dismissed these writers as an embarrassment to a discipline trying both to put itself on a scientific footing and to recover the experiences of ordinary people, people traditionally passed over in silence in surveys of “civilization.” To most historians, universal history was like a rogue relative that no one wants to talk about.

Histories on a larger scale did not of course disappear in the latter half of the 20th century, as the world- and macro-historical works of William McNeill, Marshall Hodgson, Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel, Philip Curtin, Peter Stearns, Alfred Crosby, Eric Wolf, and Clive Ponting testify. But the perception was that single, all-encompassing, unified histories—which seemed to fit Lyotard’s description of “grand narratives”—could not withstand methodological or ethical scrutiny. Allan Megill, for instance, concludes his entry on universal history in the Dictionary of Historians and Historical Writing in the following fashion:
One historiographical strategy in what is now called “world history” is the making of limited comparisons between different parts of the world that the historian selects for comparison in the hope of generating insight. Such work, however, is clearly not universal history as it was known in the past, but a mark of its absence.

Except for big history, that is. The interest that big historians have in a “single . . . coherent story” marks them out as universal historians. But they have also adapted universal history in at least two important ways. First, big history stretches much further backwards in time than any earlier universal history. This is clear from the introduction to even the most recent universal histories such as H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History. Wells’s history begins with the geology of the earth: prior to that there is no history, for space is “cold, lifeless, and void.” Wells is not unusual in this conclusion, for up until about forty years ago, the majority of people—including scientists—believed that the universe was static, unchanging, steady. Now, all but a tiny number of scientists believe that the universe has an origin—an explosive event dubbed the Big Bang some 12–15 billion years ago; that it is expanding and cooling and thus changing; and that it will continue to do so long into the future. The Big Bang is the agreed starting point for big historians as it is for physicists.

Second, big history veers away from the anthropocentrism of earlier universal histories. Traditionally, universal historians—if they consider the sciences at all—have presented the origins and evolution of the earth and life as a prologue to human history. Big history relocates humans in the biota, on the earth, in the universe. In doing so, it reveals how small, destructive, and recent a phenomenon we are. Such a view of humanity appears to clash with the conventional historiographical desire to seek out the individual, to seek out agency. It is as if the lens through which we view the past has got stuck at a certain magnification—the “viewing individual actions” lens—and that over time we have forgotten that other lenses are available. Big history invites us to consider the past over different scales and helps us to see new patterns, like those of regimes, punctuated equilibrium, negentropy, or cosmic evolution. Thus it is with big history, I believe, that we see the realization of William H. McNeill’s claim that historians can contribute to what Edward O. Wilson calls “consilience,” the unity of knowledge.[7]

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A Dispatch from Germany
by Michael Hochgeschwender

Recent discussions among both German historians and the German public about German history have been shaped by two apparently contradictory schemes. On the one hand, the events of 1989-1991—the fall of the Berlin wall, the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire, and German reunification—led to an intensified and renewed interest in the history of the German nation-state. On the other hand, in the light of European unification, globalization, and the events of September 11, 2001, Germans also feel the need to see their history in an international context.

Since 1989, German historians have tended to focus on national history, especially the Nazi past and the murder of European Jewry. Mass media, especially television, fed this trend. For example, Guido Knopp, Germany’s leading TV historian, concentrated his attention on the history of the Third Reich and the Second World War. Further, he and the influential weekly Die Zeit—together with other media—covered all the major historiographical debates relating to 1933-1945, such as the heated controversies about the theses of Daniel Goldhagen, Norman Finkelstein, and Peter Novick. This media coverage, however, was only a small part of a larger effort to come to terms with the German past. 

Professional historians tried to cope with the problems of the pre-Nazi era. This research produced de