Journal of Design History

A World History of Design and the History of the World Victor Margolin J Design Hist 18:235-243, 2005. doi:10.1093/jdh/epi043

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Journal of Design History Vol. 18 No. 3

doi:10.1093/jdh/epi043

Article

A World History of Design and the History of the World

Victor Margolin

World history, as an institutional enterprise with a community of scholars, a journal, and a professional association, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Although comprehensive world histories continue to appear, design historians are only gradually confronting the question of how a world history of design might be written. A major problem is the limited denition of design that has, for many scholars, conned its study to industrialized regions of the world. We need to understand how different cultures have provided for their respective material needs, as well as how larger forces of politics and economics have shaped the conditions for material production in those cultures. Design is an integral component of modern production and a world history of design should argue for its vital role in economic development. Other issues include the rise of nationalism and the question of race. Looking at the history of design from a world perspective enables us to see that people of all ethnic backgrounds have been active designers within their own communities, even if they have largely worked outside the orbit of advanced industrialization. Writing a world history of design with an emphasis on how empires, nations, and other political entities have used it to advance their political and economic agendas links design to the larger problems of the world.
Key words: comparative historydesign historygraphic designhistory of decorative artsindustrial designmodernism

World history, as an institutional enterprise with a community of scholars, a journal, and a professional association, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Although comprehensive world histories by one or several authors continue to appear, there is also considerable activity by scholars who focus on specialized topics within a broad framework. Methodological issues are addressed at conferences and in a variety of publications. In short, world history has become a project with its own critical discourse.1 Among these scholars, however, design historians are yet to seek a place, primarily because the question of what forms a world history of design might take has only recently become a topic of discussion within the international design history community.2

Origins and theories of world history

In the opinion of William H. McNeill, who wrote an ambitious world history of his own, compre-

hensive histories with the long view can be traced back to early Greek and Chinese historians such as Herodotus and Ssu-ma Chen, who attempted to write about the entire world as it was known to them at the time. Other versions of history with the long view are the God-centred theological narratives written by both Jews and Christians. By the eighteenth century, scholars such as Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried von Herder sought to desacralize the inherited biblical history and emphasize human will and actions as shapers of events, albeit within larger patterns such as Vicos theory of historic cycles. Oswald Spenglers Decline of the West, the rst of whose two volumes appeared in 1918 at the end of World War I, and Arnold Toynbees monumental multi-volume A Study of History , published over eighteen years between 1936 and 1954, were the rst attempts in the twentieth century to reect on the worlds past and its future.3 235

The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.

Victor Margolin

The historian and theorist Bruce Mazlish considers both Spengler and Toynbee to be ecumenical historians whose aim in writing history is to prophesize and anticipate nal ends for humankind.4 Spengler believed that Western civilization had completed its cycle and was heading into an inevitable decline, while Toynbee foresaw a world in which all cultures would be joined together in a harmonious unity. Besides the category of ecumenical history, Mazlish posits two other categories of comprehensive historical writing, world history and global history. Though all three refer to the history of the world, Mazlish denes world history as a specic category to differentiate it from ecumenical and global approaches to the subject. Unlike Mazlishs broad vision of world history, his conception of global history is limited specically to tendencies, beginning in the 1970s, that have led to the present situation of globalization, which we are currently struggling to understand. Mazlish concedes that the denition of world history is vague but he cites an attempt by a colleague Jerry Bentley to delineate the eld: Thus, world history represents (among other things) a dialogue between the past and the present, in that it seeks to establish a historical context for the integrated and interdependent world of modern times.5 Notable in Bentleys denition is a pragmatic emphasis on using the past to understand the present, indicating a rm shift away from the tendencies of Spengler and Toynbee, who shared a prophetic interest in envisioning the future. Among those Mazlish cites as prominent world historians are William McNeill, whom he calls [t]he premier gure of modern world history, Fernand Braudel, the renowned French historian of the Annales school who pioneered the study of everyday life, and Immanuel Wallerstein, a sociologist whose multi-volume study of capitalism and its origins, The Modern World System, has been heavily debated.6 Wallersteins structural approach to history is too deterministic for many scholars and he has been open to criticism for not emphasizing sufciently the variety of social actors who actually shape historical events.7 The emergence of world history as an historical practice coincides with momentous changes that took place in the writing of history in general, beginning in the 1960s. As part of the progressive social movements that embraced civil rights, ecology, feminism, and sexual orientation, as well as other

causes, historians took a new interest in the lives of ordinary people. Consequently a shift of interest occurred among some scholars, who moved from political history, which had dominated the history profession for many years, to social history, with its many new topics ranging from population studies, urbanism and domestic life, to social class, sexuality, children and food.8 Writing in 1970, British historian Eric Hobsbawm traced a change in the meaning of the term social history from its initial reference to the history of poor people or the lower classes, including the social movements in which they were involved, to works on a variety of human activities that were difcult to classify except in such terms as manners, customs, everyday life and nally to what he saw as the most common and for him the most relevant meaning, its bracketing with economic history.9 Hobsbawm considered social history as central to the historians enterprise. Social history can never be another specialization like economic or other hyphenated histories he wrote, because the social aspects of human life cannot be separated from other aspects of his [Mans] being, except at the cost of tautology or extreme trivialization.10

World history and design history

Interest in social history began to grow just a few years before the emergence of the initial community of design historians in the mid 1970s.11 Although design history has deep roots in the history of art, the recognition of design as a valid subject of historical inquiry in the 1970s surely owes something to the concomitant democratization of subject matter in the broader historical eld. While there has been no formal consensus among design historians as to the founding texts in their eld, most consider Nikolaus Pevsners Pioneers of Modern Design and Siegfried Giedions Mechanization Takes Command to be the initial narratives against which subsequent ones, such as Adrian Fortys Objects of Desire: Design & Society from Wedgwood to IBM, have been written. Pevsners teleological account of practices that he saw leading up to the Modern Movement is, in its way, a material counterpart of Spenglers or Toynbees ecumenical history. That is to say, Pevsner had a vision of how the world should be in the future and he marshalled his evidence to support it. Giedion did not write a teleological history but he focused on a

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single feature of design (mechanization) and he provided an account of its unfolding that characterized it as a dominant trope of modernity. In the course of his history of mechanization he emphasized the work of many anonymous and previously unknown inventors, along with a handful of designers and architects who were already part of the modernist canon. This was a welcome expansion of the more limited narrative established by Pevsner, but Mechanization Takes Command was nonetheless a book driven by a singular idea rather than an exploration of how a range of complex forces and actors contributed to designs emergence as a signicant social activity. Both Pevsner and Giedion wrote their books within the years when Toynbee published A Study of History (in fact, Pevsners book came out the same year as Toynbees first volume) yet neither Pevsner nor Giedion made any reference to the world beyond Europe or the United States as Toynbee did. Why not? First of all, Pevsner and Giedion were interested in modernization and the consequences of industrialization and they emphasized those places where both seemed most evident. Pevsner was an art historian and actually moved well beyond his initial interest in Mannerist and Baroque painting to write about modern buildings and bridges, while Giedion was an engineer and then a critic and historian of architecture. Though not unaware of the social and political forces that shaped the modern world, the two emphasized objects in their writing more than issues of nationalism, imperialism, class or race, which served as contexts for the production of those objects. Neither historian had Toynbees drive to understand the world holistically. For both, the signicant events of their narratives occurred within distinct geographical boundaries. We can relate the geographic and topical limitations of the founding authors in design history to attempts to dene industrial design as part of a specic process of mass production which, in fact, has occurred and continues to occur only in specic parts of the world. As Toms Maldonado wrote in 1976: By industrial design is meant, normally, the planning of objects fabricated industrially, that is, by machine, and in series.12 John Hesketts 1980 survey Industrial Design also emphasized design for mass production as the dening factor for inclusion. What makes such a denition problematic is that it precludes the project of a world history of design by limiting the subject matter to

particular times and places. Thus, according to Maldonados denition, design only began with mass production and was limited to those places where it was part of the industrial economic system. By dening design as the planning of objects for mass production, a practice that takes place primarily in industrialized countries, historians are consigned to adopt an implicit hegemonic structure of relations between nations.13 There are those nations where design occurs and those where it does not. The case of graphic design is different. It has spread more widely than industrial design and over a much longer period. One can nd examples of printed books, public announcements and other materials in many countries and territories since the origins of printing in China and Germany. These geographic limitations of earlier design histories have been overcome to some degree in the past twenty years, particularly through the publication of books and articles on design in countries and regions that have not previously been covered.14 Both Design Issues and the Journal of Design History, the two major academic journals that publish articles on design history, have included articles on design in Turkey, China, Mexico, Japan, India, Romania and Indonesia, among other countries.15 Despite this growing volume of literature on design outside the Western mainstream, the community of design historians is only gradually confronting the question of how a world history of design might be written. A series of international conferences on design history that began in Barcelona in 1999, moved to Havana in 2001 and then to Istanbul in 2002 and Guadalajara in 2004, have also helped to remedy the problem of parochialism.16 There are good reasons to raise questions about a world history of design at this time, as design is spreading rapidly across the globe and practitioners from Beirut to Beijing seek national or regional precedents for their own work as well as a global context in which to locate their practices.

World histories of related practices

Precedents for writing the world history of a particular cultural practice can be found in a number of other elds besides design, such as art, architecture, technology, literature and science. What is always at stake in writing such a history is where and how the author or authors locate the practice in relation

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to the political and economic forces that have shaped the development of human societies. Does a specialist world history become simply the isolated chronicle of a particular practice or can that practice be related to other factors that contribute to the worlds development? In the case of technology, for example, Toynbee recognized its pervasive power in human affairs, as did Lewis Mumford in his massive history, Technics and Civilization. However, histories of other practices related to design, such as art, architecture, photography and lm have yet to make this connection effectively. Reviewing representative histories of various practices, one notes that each has peculiarities that contribute to the way world coverage is sought or achieved. For both histories of art and architecture, inclusion is global so long as non-European cultures are treated as ancient, traditional, or native. In H. W. Jansons History of Art, 3rd edition (1986), for example, all coverage of non-Western art and architecture ceases once the Renaissance begins. Marilyn Stokstads widely used Art History, as early as its rst edition of 1995, sought to remedy this omission to some degree by including, for example, contemporary art by Australian Aborigine artists and covering artists working in Mexico, such as Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, who are also part of the international canon. Histories dedicated exclusively to modern art such as Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, 3rd edition (2000) by Sam Hunter, John Jacobus and Daniel Wheeler do not reject art outside Europe and America entirely but they make only token references to it, usually because an artist from elsewhere, such as the Colombian Fernando Botero or the Korean Nam June Paik, has made some impact on the Western art scene.17 The case for architecture is similar. Non-Western architecture as embodied in the buildings and monuments of ancient civilizations or the grand Orientalist structures such as the Taj Mahal receive mention in architectural history texts, but modernism belongs almost exclusively to the West. In A World History of Architecture (2004) by Maria Moffett, Michael Fazio and Lawrence Woodhouse, the only example of a non-Western structure that is mentioned once the Renaissance begins is the Indian city of Chandigarh, capital of the Punjab, which was designed by a European architect, Le Corbusier. Histories of modern

architecture such as Modern Architecture (1976) by Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co or Kenneth Framptons Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd edition (1992) consider selected examples of nonEuropean or American architecture only as they relate to Western modernism, such as the design of Brasilia or the Japanese reaction to the New Brutalism. Dennis Doordans recent Twentieth-Century Architecture (2002) is considerably more inclusive and not geared solely to a Western paradigm. Doordan makes reference to the shell constructions of Mexicos Felix Candela, Hassan Fathys plan for the village of New Gourna in Egypt, the cultural centre in Jaipur by Indian architect Charles Correa, and architectpolitician Jaime Lerners urban designs for the Brazilian city of Curitiba. The histories of photography and lm differ from architecture and art in that they begin much later; photography with the rst daguerreotype in 1839 and lm with Edisons Kinetoscope around 1889. Naomi Rosenblums A World History of Photography (1989) is essentially a history of Western photography with a few examples of non-European or non-American work added towards the end of the book, particularly as they contribute to an international avant-garde. Rosenblum further assumes an implicit colonial attitude by discussing the work of nineteenth-century European photographers who photographed in exotic places such as Egypt, instead of looking at what local photographers were producing in those places. Recent histories of lm have been more inclusive than histories in other media. Early histories, however, such as Paul Rothas The Film Till Now, whose rst edition appeared in 1929, had little to say about lm outside the Western mainstream. Even in the latest edition, published in 1960, Rotha wrote that the lms of Egypt, which have been distributed throughout the entire Arabic-speaking world, were poor in quality and he stated that [t]here is not much of real importance to record of indigenous lmmaking in Asia and Africa.18 David Robinsons The History of World Cinema (1973) does feature the developed cinemas of India and Japan but, as with the histories of other practices, they are incorporated into a Western-dominated canon. Thus, the lms from previously marginalized countries that Robinson writes about are the ones that became popular in the West beginning in the 1960s, such as the Japanese lms of Yasujiro Ozu and Akiro Kurosawa and the

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Indian lms of Satyajit Ray. We hear nothing about the indigenous cinemas of these countries or others even though Bollywood has, for many years, been producing thousands of lms annually for domestic and foreign consumption. The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and written by an international team of authors, has gone further than most lm histories to be globally inclusive and, in fact, best exemplies a world history of any medium. In the section on sound cinema, there are essays on the cinemas of India, China, Japan, Australia and Latin America, while the section on the modern cinema attempts to be even more inclusive by covering almost all parts of the world, including the Soviet Republics, Turkey, sub-Saharan Africa, Canada, Indonesia and Hong Kong. The only problem with this volume is that the essays on national and regional cinemas are treated as separate subjects, rather than components of a larger shared narrative.

Issues related to a world history of design

How then can a world history of design overcome some of the problems evident in the histories of other practices and in the founding texts of design history itself ? The rst issue to be faced is the limited denition of design that has, for many scholars, conned its study to industrialized regions of the world. Rather than considering design to be a product of industrialization, we need to think more broadly about the conception and planning of material and visual culture. This enables us to nd design in all cultures while at the same time comparing the different conceptions of design and the ways of organizing design practice. The problem here is circular. Those being socialized into the history of design encounter the existing narratives, which have limited coverage outside the Western mainstream as is true in the histories of other practices. What is mounting the strongest challenge to that limitation is the research that is coming from scholars outside the territory covered by the current texts. In countries such as Turkey, Mexico, India and Brazil, where design education is well established and design history is just emerging, aspiring scholars are now adopting methodologies from the Western mainstream but are looking to their own cultures for subject matter.

Moving back in time to the beginnings of human culture, we can start with Southern African rock paintings as early forms of social communication and then show how such communication continued with the development of pictographs and alphabets. We can also consider African wood carvers who produced headrests, weapons and other material goods as designers within their own cultures at particular historical moments. However, it is possible to fall into the same trap that many historians of art and architecture have fallen into when they treat cultures outside the Western mainstream as primitive, traditional, or exotic. This is a problem when writing about design in Africa, for example, where the scholarship has been based primarily on the artefacts of traditional cultures and little work has been done on design and modernization.19 Instead we need to understand how different cultures have provided for their respective material needs as well as how larger forces of politics and economics have shaped the conditions for material production in those cultures. We cannot escape discussions of economic exploitation and imperialism when seeking to explain particular forms of design in a given culture. Whereas Pevsner, writing in 1936, opined on the abominable aesthetics of the products on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851, he said nothing about how that exhibition served Britains imperial interests. Instead we had to wait for more recent scholarship by Jeffrey Auerbach, Louise Purbrick and others to address this topic.20 As Karl Marx made abundantly clear in Das Kapital, production is rmly embedded in particular forms of economic organization that establish roles for entrepreneurs, managers and labourers, as well as for practitioners of all the ancillary occupations such as banking, bookkeeping and retailing that constitute the system of modern capitalism. The changing role of the designer in relation to evolving methods of production is thus an important component of economic history and needs to be emphasized. If design has been hard to detect in economic history, although it is an integral component of modern production, a world history of design can and should argue for its vital role in economic development. This is one way to assert its meaningful connection with other human activities. In the years between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the twentieth century, for example, the American economy was fuelled by the emergence of a new type of entrepreneur who

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transformed the factories that produced single products or a single line of goods into large conglomerates that managed the production of many products, sometimes hundreds, at one time. These conglomerates were vertically integrated, which meant that they handled lots of different activities related to the production and distribution of goods. Their control extended from the acquisition of raw materials to the direct marketing of their products to the consumer. The way in which the design of products ts into these larger processes of change is an important part of design history, and the internationalization and then globalization of these processes forms a signicant frame for the discussion of design from the late nineteenth century to the present. Another issue is the rise of nationalism, not simply as symbolic of a nations ideals but as the source of the products and instruments of communication on which the assertion of national identity has depended.21 Here, Wilhelmine Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provides a good example. Reading the discourse of design reformers such as Hermann Muthesius, and considering the designs of Peter Behrens for the AEG, we can begin to understand the motivation for strengthening the relation of art and industry through the invention of cultural forms that expressed national ideals, and then the incorporation of those forms into international marketing projects to advance Germanys economic interests. Design is heavily implicated in the drama of national competitiveness and it is here that a world history of design can assert a signicant relation to broader world histories such as William McNeills The Rise of the West. Although design is not a shaper of structure in the same way that monetary policy is, it is integral to the exercise of economic power through its role in the creation of technologies of production, commodities for trade and media for communication. Thus, unlike the existing world histories of art, whose principal actors are individual artists, the actors in a world history of design are also manufacturing institutions and governments that have used design as an instrument of economic and political nation building. Within the community of scholars interested in world history, one of the principal debates addresses the question of whether the historians focus should be on abstract economic and social structures (as

Immanuel Wallerstein, Andr Gunder Frank and others who espouse a world-systems model believe) or whether history is instead a pattern of events in which social actors such as housewives, designers, and politicians are animating gures. Because design originates with the individual designer or design team, even if others shape the conditions of work, a world history of design must inevitably be a narrative in which designers as social actors play an important role. What gets lost in the world-systems model are social issues such as race and gender that do relate to economics but have additional social meanings as well. A world history of design can, and should, address the question of race as part of a discussion of how nations have historically organized their systems of production. This topic has been notoriously absent in design history writing and a world history of design can demonstrate that race has played a larger part in designs history than has previously been recognized. Design historians have not explored the reasons why there have been few designers of colour in industrialized nations nor have they emphasized adequately the contributions that have been made. One of the few discussions on this subject was presented more than half a century ago by the African-American art historian James Porter who showed in his book Modern Negro Art that much of the American Souths material culture before emancipation was produced by slaves of African descent. As Porter writes:
In fact, anonymity, a condition of slavery, has largely erased rst-hand evidence of the Negros part in the ner crafts production of pre-Civil War America. Nevertheless we are assured through a variety of Colonial and post-Colonial sources that the Negro artisan early became the backbone of American industrial development in the South and in parts of the Middle East.22

Though Porter writes of the need to bring into history the forgotten achievements of those who have been socially marginalized because of race, it is also necessary to address the history of racism as it has been embodied in designed artefacts such as posters, book illustrations, sheet music covers and other forms of visual culture. Jan Nederveen Pieterse has taken up this subject in his book White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture, but the issue cuts across all ethnic groups.23 Looking at the history of design from a world perspective offers a more enlightened understanding of design and race. It

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enables us to see that people of all ethnic backgrounds have been active designers within their own communities even if they have worked mainly outside the orbit of advanced industrialization. It also helps us to see how design has been used to reinforce racial stereotypes as well as to promote positive social values. The lack of people other than Caucasians in design history can be compared to the absence of women in broader historical accounts until the rise of the feminist movement. Sheila Rowbothams Hidden from History and other books by feminist historians addressed the way that women have been overlooked in historical narratives. Design historians such as Cheryl Buckley have argued for a redenition of design in order to incorporate work that women have done that does not t the dominant denitions of design practice, although much design done by women within the mainstream practices remains to be documented. 24 This claim is supported by the exhibition Women Designers in the USA, 19002000, curated by Pat Kirkham at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, where the previously unknown accomplishments of women working in many different elds were on display and remain documented in the extensive exhibition catalogue.25

Conclusion
A world history of design will most effectively explain designs place in human culture by discussing it within a narrative that is driven by political, economic and social factors rather than treating it within a chronology of objects or styles that are distributed over time across a geographic terrain, no matter how wide. The latter is what historians of other practices have for the most part done thus far. In order to be chronologically and geographically inclusive and yet describe how the advent of mass production and mass communication, which occurred initially in Western Europe and the United States, created the conditions for modern design, I suggest a narrative structure that is based on three premises. First, throughout human history, all cultures have produced the basic material and visual artefacts they require to survive. In this sense, design in some form has been present in all parts of the world at all times. Secondly, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, however, designing responds to strong forces of economic and technological modernization and

becomes an integral component of mass production and mass communication. From this situation emerges the modern idea of a professional designer, although it does not preclude alternatives to this idea. Thirdly, the spread of modernization accelerates in the twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War, hence the modern idea of design becomes increasingly evident in all parts of the world during this period. In a narrative that emphasizes social actors and the forces with which they interact, style is neither a central element nor a persuasive means of organization. It is instead, a consequence of other factors that have close links to economic, social, political or aesthetic concerns. This shift of emphasis can be demonstrated with a salient example: Pevsners claim, which has been followed by many other historians, that Arthur Heygate Mackmurdos title page for his book Wrens City Churches, published in 1883, is the rst manifestation of Art Nouveau. Pevsner bases this claim on the argument that the curve undulating, owing, and interplaying with others, sprouting from corners and covering asymmetrically all available surfaces, can be considered the leitmotif of Art Nouveau.26 He nds formal analogies between Mackmurdos cover and similar uses of line in France, where the term art nouveau was not widely circulated until 1895. This relation has no meaning at all, given the fact that Mackmurdos influences were English and Art Nouveau on the continent originated from different sources. Hector Guimards whiplash line derives from that of Victor Hortas Tassel House in Brussels but Hortas iron tendrils have their origin in the architectural theories of Eugne Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Rather than serving as a link between the formal motif in an English chair and a French metro station, the term art nouveau is more signicant when it is related to French debates about manufacturing and production, as Debora Silverman demonstrated in her book Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Sicle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. By considering a set of objects previously classied under a stylistic rubric in relation to issues of manufacturing and national competitiveness, Silverman offered an entirely new reading of them and gave them a far greater signicance than they would otherwise have had as stylistic exemplars. She had less investment in delineating the origins of their visual attributes than she did in explaining their existence within a larger framework of events.

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Unlike Silverman, relatively few historians outside design history have incorporated material or visual culture into their research. Therefore, a history that connects design to world-shaping social forces can become a powerful argument for a greater attentiveness by historians to the realm of things and images. It can also provide a point of departure for design historians to engage with other scholars whose specialities are economic, social or political history.27 Writing a world history of design as a history of how empires, nations and other political entities have used it to advance their political and economic agendas, while also showing how designed objects and images have contributed to the formation of national and global sensibilities, links design to the larger problems of world history that Bruce Mazlish and other theorists are concerned with. This is a worthy objective and its pursuit will help to conrm designs central role in the development of human culture.
Victor Margolin Department of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago.

8 The social history literature, which covers everything from gender and population to the family, is vast. A seminal work is F. Braudels three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15 th 18 th Century (Harper & Row, New York, 19821984). G. Himmelfarb, a conservative historian, critiques the move towards social history in her collection of essays The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1987). 9 E. Hobsbawm, From Social History to the History of Society, in E. Hobsbawm, On History (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1997). 10 Ibid., p. 75. 11 The rst association of design historians, the Design History Society, was formed in Great Britain in 1977. In 1983 both the Scandinavian Forum of Design History and the Design Forum in the United States were founded. 12 T. Maldonado, Design Industriale: Un Riesame, revised and expanded edition (Feltrinelli, Milan, 1991), p. 9 [my translation]. The rst edition appeared in 1976. 13 This is evident in R. De Fuscos Storia del Design (Editori Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1985), whose subject matter is restricted to the industrial nations of Europe and the United States. 14 One demonstration of this expanded coverage is the catalogue of the Victoria and Albert Museums Art Deco exhibition, Art Deco, 19101939, edited by C. Benton, T. Benton and G. Wood, which includes essays on Art Deco style in various parts of the world. 15 See, for example, S. Amir, Industrial Design in Indonesia: Education, Industry, and Policy, Design Issues 18 no. 1 (Winter 2002) pp. 3648; W. S. Wong, Detachment and Unication: A Chinese Graphic Design History in Greater China since 1979, Design Issues 17 no. 4 (Autumn 2001) pp. 5171; H. Fujita, Notomi Kaijiro: An Industrial Art Pioneer and the First Design Educator of Modern Japan, Design Issues vol. 17 no. 2 (Spring 2001) pp. 1731; S. Kallestrup, Romanian National Style and the 1906 Bucharest Jubilee Exhibition, Journal of Design History vol. 15 no. 3 (2002) pp. 147162; M. Maynard, Grassroots Style: Re-evaluating Australian Fashion and Aboriginal Art in the 1970s and 1980s, Journal of Design History vol. 13 no. 2 (2000) pp. 137150; and H. Alpay Er, Development Patterns in Industrial Design in the Third World: A Conceptual Model for Newly Industrialized Countries, Journal of Design History vol. 10 no. 3 (1997) pp. 293308. 16 Proceedings of the Barcelona conference were published as Historia Desde la Periferia: Historia e Historias del Diseo/Design History Seen From Abroad: History and Histories of Design, A. Calvera and M. Mallol eds. (Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, 1999). 17 This is likely to change because of the intensied globalization of the art world. For example, a Nigerian, Okwui Enwesor, was selected to curate the international exhibition Documenta 11 in 2002. 18 P. Rotha, The Film Till Now, 3rd edn. (Twayne Publishers, New York, 1960), p. 617. 19 Although much of the research on African material culture considers objects of use such as masks to be art rather than design, there are exceptions such as the exhibition catalogue by Roy Sieber, African Furniture & Household Objects (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1980). However, Sieber concentrates on traditional objects and

Notes
1 See P. Pomper, R. H. Elphick and R. T. Vann, eds. World History: Ideology, Structures, and Identities (Blackwell, Malden, MA and Oxford, 1998), particularly the opening essay by P. Pomper, Introduction: The Theory and Practice of World History, pp. 120. The principal vehicle for this discourse is the World History Association and its Journal of World History, which has existed for almost fourteen years. 2 It was raised in several sessions at the 3rd International Conference on Design History and Design Studies, which was held in Istanbul in July 2002. 3 W. H. McNeill, The Changing Shape of World History, in P. Pomper, R. H. Elphick and R. T. Vann, eds. World History: Ideology, Structures, and Identities, pp. 2140. See also McNeills World History and the Rise and Fall of the West, Journal of World History vol. 9 no. 2 (Fall 1998) pp. 215236. 4 B. Mazlish, Crossing Boundaries: Ecumenical, World, and Global History, in P. Pomper, R. H. Elphick and R. T. Vann, eds. World History: Ideology, Structures, and Identities, p. 42. 5 J. Bentley, quoted in B. Mazlish, Crossing Boundaries: Ecumenical, World, and Global History, p. 44. 6 B. Mazlish op. cit. pp. 4446. 7 For a discussion of world-systems theory as a basis for historical writing, see R. A. Denemark, J. Friedman, B. K. Gills and G. Modelski eds. World System History: The Social Science of Long-term Change (Routledge, London and New York, 2000). Lauren Benton examines the critical responses to world-systems theory in From the World-Systems Perspective to Institutional World History: Culture and Economy in Global Theory, Journal of World History vol. 7 no. 2 (Fall 1996) pp. 261295.

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provides no pathway to look at more contemporary things. When there is an emphasis on the contemporary, one also courts the danger of representing design as a form of native bricolage whereby street artists make artefacts out of cast-off soda cans and other consumer waste. For examples, see the catalogue The Cast-Off Recast: Recycling and the Creative Transformation of Mass-Produced Objects, edited by T. C. Correll and P. A. Polk with essays by R. M. Livengood and M. C. Loschiavo dos Santos (Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, 1999). See J. A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999) and L. Purbrick, ed. The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2001). A good example of a design history monograph that foregrounds the issue of nationalism is David Crowley, National Style and the Nation-State, Design in Poland from the Vernacular Revival to the International Style (Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1992). J. Porter, Modern Negro Art with a new introduction by D. C. Driskell. (Howard University Press, Washington, D.C., c 1992), p. 4. See J. N. Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1992). See also R. Bachollet, J.-B. Debost, A.-C. Lelieur and M.-C. Peyrire, NgriPub: LImage des Noirs dans la Publicit (Somogy, Paris, 1987), a collection of stereotypes of blacks in (mostly French) advertising. 24 See C. Buckley, History, Theory, and Gender: Researching Womens Relationship to the History of Design, in S. Pizzocaro, A. Arruda and D. De Moraes, eds. Design Plus Research: Proceedings of the Politecnico di Milano Conference, May 1820, 2000 (Politecnico di Milano, Milan, 2000), pp. 3842 and Buckley, Made in Patriarchy: Theories of Women and Design A Reworking, in J. Rothschild, ed. Design and Feminism: Revisioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick and London, 1999), pp. 109118. The latter article references Buckleys seminal Made in Patriarchy: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Women in Design, in V. Margolin, ed. Design Discourse (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989). I. Anscombes A Womans Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day (Viking, New York, 1984) documents the better known women in the design history canon such as Margaret Macdonald, Liubov Popova, Sonia Delaunay, and Marianne Brandt, while P. Sparkes As Long as Its Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Pandora, London and San Francisco, 1995) raises political questions about womens relation to modernity and modern design. 25 P. Kirkham, ed. Women Designers in the USA, 19002000: Diversity and Difference (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000). 26 N. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design From William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. ed., p. 90. 27 A good example of collaboration among design historians and scholars in other elds is Design, Commercial Expansion, and Business History, a special issue of the Journal of Design History vol. 12 no. 1, 1999.

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