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David Northrup
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orld historians confront two huge conceptual tasks. One is horizontal integration: how to interconnect in each era the broad
W
range of human experiences around the world. The other is vertical
integration: how to identify patterns in the long sweep of past time.
Neither task is easy, though the first seems to attract more attention.
Despite the limited significance of synchrony in earlier historical eras,
world historians are rightly concerned with this horizontally integrative macrohistory 1 because it challenges perspectives arbitrarily based
on national, regional, and cultural units. We tend to delight in clever
books that recount the variety of human experiences at a particular
moment of time, even though such comparisons may lead to no larger
conclusions.2
Charting world historys vertical or chronological axis has its own
problems and, despite some notable efforts, seems to receive less critical attention. The effort may not appear fruitful, for, as Ross Dunn has
observed, no periodization scheme for world history can intelligibly
* This is an expanded version of the presidential address given at the annual meeting
of the World History Association at George Mason University on 19 June 2004.
1
I first encountered this phrase in Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy
in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 226, where it is attributed to Joseph Fletcher.
2
For example, John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), Olivier Bernier, The World in 1800 (New York: John Wiley, 2000), or
John E. Wills Jr., 1688: A Global History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
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in the distant past. Tom Friedman has persuasively argued that the
almost simultaneous ending of the Cold War and the rise of the Internet marked the beginning of a new era of history.8
In the spirit of such thoughtful works, this essay puts forward a simple temporal model of world history. It proposes that world history
can be divided into just two ages: one dominated by divergence and,
since about 1000 c.e., an age of convergence. Beginning with the
early human communities in Africa and their migration to the rest of
the world, people honed their survival skills by adapting culturally
to a multitude of different environments. In relative isolation from
each other, communities refined particular specialized technologies,
designed appropriate clothing and food preparation techniques, worked
out differing belief systems and ways of reasoning, developed myriad
languages and systems of writing, and devised distinctive styles of art
and architecture.
But at some point rising forces of convergence overtook those promoting ever-increasing diversity. The changeover was neither abrupt
nor sudden. Forces for convergence had long operated in parts of the
ancient world: regional empires consolidated disparate peoples and
overlaid their traditions with a common culture, world religions spread
universalistic beliefs, and long-distance traders spread ideas and technologies as well as goods. Irregularly at first and then with increasing
force and speed after 1000 c.e., historical forces drew people closer and
closer economically, culturally, and politically. This Great Convergence, as I shall call it, provides a useful framework for understanding
the past thousand years of world history and the phenomena that in
recent years have come to be called globalization.
Like most good (and bad) ideas that I have ever entertained, this
one depends heavily on others work. Direct inspiration for the beginning of the Great Convergence came from reading the introduction
David Eltis wrote for a volume he edited on global migrations:
From the emigration of Homo sapiens from Africa perhaps 100,000
years ago, to the Viking visits to North America, and Chinese and
Arab contacts with the Indonesian archipelago, migration meant in
essence the settlement of the globe. In the absence of continuing
1997); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 12501350
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Frank, ReORIENT. The vast literature on this
subject had been insightfully summarized by Gale Stokes, The Fates of Human Societies,
American Historical Review 106 (2001): 508525.
8
Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor Books, 2000),
pp. xixxii.
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Since nothing in the works that Eltis cited contained any hint of the
global vision behind his sweeping analysis, I recently asked him if inspiration had come from elsewhere than his own fertile mind. His reply
took me aback: he had borrowed the basic idea from an article he happened upon in a copy of Air Canadas in-flight magazine, enRoute. That
source appears less surprising when one learns that the article was written by Canadian historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer, whose brilliant
television series War PBS broadcast two decades ago.10 The particular article is not considered important enough to be listed on Dyers
website or new enough to be on enRoutes, but in a personal communication Dyer relates that it was spun off of an essay he wrote for an exhibition at the LAnse aux Meadows Viking colonization site in Newfoundland. Dyer saw the meeting of the Vikings westward voyages
with the Eurasian eastward movement in eastern Canada about the
year 1000 as the closing of an era. He used the term Full Circle to
describe the coming together of the two migration streams that had
left Africathe one that had turned right into Asia and the other
that had turned left into Europe.11
History and Globalization
If one inspiration for the Great Convergence model is thus derived
from considering a momentous watershed in the forward movement of
historical events, the other inspiration for the Great Convergence
9
David Eltis, Introduction: Migration and Agency in Global History, in Coerced and
Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 1.
10
The print version is Gwynne Dyer, WarPast, Present, and Future (New York: Crown
Publishers, 1985).
11
Gwynne Dyer, Full CircleFirst Contact: Vikings and Skrealings in Newfoundland
and Labrador, 2000, available at http://www.darkcompany.ca/fullcirc/fulcirc1.htm, and
personal communication, 13 May 2004.
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Although these various attempts to periodize the history of globalization are all useful in some ways, the suggestion here is that the entire
sweep of changes from the completion of the Full Circle to the globalization of today can productively be brought together in the larger
framework of the Great Convergence, which also broadens the scope
of the issues to be treated. The globalization models emphasis on
economic and political systems needs to be combined with the migration focus of Dyer and Eltis, and one also needs to bring in cultural
and social forces that have collided and converged over the past millennium.
Hopkins and company are on the right track in placing the expansion of the West within the broader global convergences underway well
before 1500 and in seeing globalizations deep historical roots. But the
Global Convergence model goes one step further in proposing that
their archaic period can usefully be divided into two periods: one during which converging forces were notable exceptions to the still dominant forces of divergence and a second during which globalization /
convergence became the dominant historical force.
Every historian will recognize that convergence was a powerful element of history well before 1000 c.e. Human expansion was not a oneway flow, moving ever outward from some center. Besides migrating to
new lands, people also doubled back, conquered, and mixed with earlier settlers. Even in ancient times, long-distance trade networks linked
surprisingly distant parts of the world. One of the most noted characteristics of ancient times was the rise of empires that united disparate
peoples, at least superficially, under yokes of military power and common laws, common languages and religious systems, and networks of
trade. Both within such imperial frontiers and across them, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam spread
widely.
While there can be no sharp divide between discrete ages of divergence and of convergencecertainly not one pegged to a conveniently round number in an arbitrary calendarDyer and Eltis are not
alone in seeing 1000 c.e. as an approximate turning point. Middle
Eastern historian Marshall Hodgson saw 1000 as an important dividing line between the classical period of Islamic expansion unified under
the Abbasid Empire and the broader expansion of the multicentered
and interrelated Islamic world of later times. Jerry Bentley cites a con-
Arena, ca. 17501850, in Hopkins, Globalization, pp. 4572. Bayly has expanded this treatment in The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
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see the causes in human dispersal and isolation. As a general rule, the
number of languages in a region is inversely proportional to its population density. Thus the widely dispersed peoples of the Pacific constitute less than 1 percent of the worlds population but speak 19 percent
of living languages. The isolated valleys of highland New Guinea are
home to a quarter of the worlds languages. On the other hand, densely
populated and interconnected East Asia and modern Europe have far
fewer languages than similar areas in Africa.
The sheer number of languages in the world and the arbitrary gradients that separate them makes an accurate count difficult, but by
about a millennium ago it is estimated that there were some 10,000 or
15,000 languages in use. Today the number of living languages is down
to 6,000 or 7,000, and linguists expect that as many as half the languages now in use will cease to be spoken by the end of the twenty-first
century. Those languages most at risk are those of small, once isolated
communities that are now in closer contact with their neighbors and
the world at large. However, the decline in living languages is not general or headed to single digits. Some six hundred to seven hundred contemporary languages have more than 100,000 speakers each and are
continuing to add new speakers.16 The rise of English as the first global
language is also a clear expression of the present intensity of the Great
Convergence.
The spread of some languages and the decimation of others have
greatly accelerated in the past two centuries, but language consolidation and extinction have been well underway for much longer. The
trend is best documented in Europe, which today is home to the smallest number of established languages of any region in proportion to its
population size. However, a millennium ago, there were some two
hundred distinct languages spoken just in the British Isles. By the sixteenth century the hybrid tongue that evolved into modern English
somehow became supreme and the vast majority of the others were
heading for extinction.17 One could trace similar processes eastward
across the face of Europe as political centralization, public education,
and broadcast media have promoted standardized national tongues.
16
Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 14th ed., accessed at http://www.ethnologue
.com; Frances Karttunen and Alfred W. Crosby, Language Death, Language Genesis, and
World History, Journal of World History 6 (1995): 157174.
17
Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 2037. The linguistic babel of the later Middle
Ages is nicely captured in the parts of Michael Creightons Timeline (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1999), set in the 1300s.
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By splitting history at 1000 c.e., the model proposed for the Great
Convergence eliminates the most problematic categories, medieval
and early modern, and their fixed Eurocentric time frames. This division is not entirely unprecedented, even in the West. Oxfords regius
professor of modern history is concerned with the flow of history not
since 1800 or 1500 but since antiquity. Moreover, a great advantage of
centering history at 1000 c.e., as world historians such as David
Christian have already done, is that its length allows for the worlds
different chronologies of modernization to play themselves out at their
own speed and on their own timetables.
The modern era (however defined) is not just a series of changes
within a larger timeframe; it is also a point of view, an interpretation
of the past from perspectives of the present. The Great Convergence
model similarly depends on hindsight and oversimplifies the past to
enhance our ability to make sense of it. The point Christopher Bayly
offers with regard to globalization applies equally well here:
In its most useful sense, globalization is a heuristic device, not a
description of linear social change. It draws attention to dynamics that
transcend the old units of analysis in different academic fields and
attempts to quantify or to model them. While at some periods global-
18
Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 109.
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ization might appear to be a linear process it was at best a very discontinuous one. Archaic globalization was itself a ruptured process,
set back by the fall of ancient empires and the Mongol invasions.19
Although presentist perspectives risk oversimplifying and distorting history, it is doubtful whether long-term and global history can be
meaningful if each time and place is considered just in its own context. We might have a nice academic debate about this, but once one
brings bright young students into the picture, the jig is up. A key reason why students are increasingly eager to study world history is that
it explains the presenttheir present. Not only does it place them at
the center of things, but it also makes the past a meaningful backlight
to give perspective on the future decades of their lives. In my experience, an introductory history course modeled around convergence and
globalization during the past millennium generates enough student
enthusiasm to atone for its limitations.
Our students are not the only people living in the present; we historians do too, and our fascination with world history is a product of
the forces of globalization in our times. It is no coincidence that world
history is an American passion. From the perspective of the Great
Convergence, world historys popularity in the United States represents this countrys creation by convergent transnational forces and
the fact that the United States has become the primary force for globalization and the primary beneficiary of it. As Daniel Headrick has
put it:
It is no coincidence that interest in world history (in the educational
market) has grown in step with Americas global dominance. . . .
World history is the benign face of globalization. When we [Americans] write and teach world history, we are presenting a world view
that reflects the ideals we have. . . . But globalization is not all benign
ideals. We are not only a diverse and tolerant society; we are also the
900-pound hegemon.20
19
20
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erful bias in favor of trade, common languages and religions, and uniform law codes and architectural stylesexcept in modern times! 21
For reasons that appear related to the conflicts and uncertainties that
change always brings, as well as to political orientations, academic historians are inclined to overemphasize the destructive potential of
recent convergence/globalization and to understate its potential for
beneficial results.
In reflecting on why the good British Empire of his childhood had
become an evil empire by his undergraduate years, Niall Ferguson has
raised some larger historical issues. His suggestion that the shift
reflected changing politics more than an advance in historical understanding has been controversial, as has his view that, if political passions are put aside, the empire will be seen to have had beneficial as
well as detrimental aspects, and those who gained and those who lost
from it were not neatly divided by their skin color. Among the enduring positive legacies of British dominion he counts the dissemination
of the English language and of British legal, political, athletic, and
religious traditions.22
In more guarded language, the general editor of the new Oxford
History of the British Empire suggests that, while issues of blame continue to be debated, recent scholarship about the empire is focused less
on winners and losers than on the interaction between British and
indigenous peoples. 23 However, such two-sided approaches are also
hard to detect in textbooks and other popular accounts of the scramble for Africa, which tend to concentrate their attention on aberrant
outbursts of greed and racism, exemplified by such easy villains as King
Leopold and Cecil Rhodes.24 To be sure, greed and racism were conspicuous parts of the process, but (unless one wants to argue that some
eras see more evil forces at work than others) personal moral failings
should be no larger a part of the historical explanation of imperialism
21
David Northrup, Comparative Perspectives on Colonialism and Imperialism,
unpublished paper presented at the Eighth Annual International Conference of the World
History Association, Victoria, British Columbia, 25 June 1999.
22
Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons
for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), pp. xixxvi.
23
William Roger Louis, Foreword, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5,
Historiography, ed. Robin W. Winks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. x.
24
Adam Hochschilds justly celebrated King Leopolds Ghost (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1999) is a good example of this genre, whose accurate detailing of the Congo Free
States many failings is not accompanied by a larger framework to explain how this could
have taken place.
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than they are of, say, industrialization or the American Civil War.
Were Leopold and Rhodes really cut from the same cloth as David
Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer?
If the European side gets highly selective coverage, Africans fare
no better in popular accounts. Their role is likely to be confined to
being victimized, and the New Imperialism is frequently presented as
the continuation of a process of European dominance that began with
the first Portuguese mariners in the fifteenth century and continued
through the Atlantic slave trade. Specialists and more thoughtful
world historians take a different approach. The father of world systems,
Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that sub-Saharan Africa was not subordinated to the emerging Atlantic system in the early centuries of European expansion (as the Americas were), but remained external to it
until the mid eighteenth centuryas was also the case in South Asia,
the Ottoman Empire, and Russia.25 More recently one of the foremost
historians of the Atlantic slave trade has put the same argument in different conceptual language. With regard to the establishment of slavery and plantation economies, David Eltis argues, what happened in
the Americas was what Europeans wanted to happen in Africa but
could not bring about. 26 This image of an Africa that was strong and
lightly engaged is in sharp contrast to the weak and victimized Africa
of the surveys and textbooks.
Eltiss argument also suggests that any consideration of the reasons
for the New Imperialism in Africa might benefit from examining Africans inability to continue operating from positions of strength and
from thoughtful comparisons with the fates of other once powerful
states and regions. After all, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, India,
China, and Japan also faced multiple challenges in trying to engage
with rapidly converging economic and political forces in the nineteenth century. By the late 1500s, Atlantic Africans, South Asians, and
East Asians were all trading with the early European mariners freely
and from positions of strength. In China and Japan, centralized states
were able to put limits on the degree of involvement, whereas in India
and Africa, local interests seeking to expand involvement generally
won out over those wishing to limit it. These relations evolved slowly
at first, then changed abruptly in the nineteenth century. For reasons
25
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Expansion of
the Capitalist World-Economy, 17301840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), chap. 3.
26
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 139.
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27
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date. Before this essay concludes, however, it is worth asking how much
light the model throws on the understanding of world history before
that date. Even if the term Great Divergence were not already in use
for a different purpose, it would be of questionable utility in explaining
the immensely long trajectory of late and classical antiquity, the agricultural revolutions, and the earlier millennia of human existence
except in one respect. Even so, it is startling that historians generally
and world historians in particular are so neglectful of forces for divergence in antiquity. Rather than following linguists and biologists in
examining divergence in all its forms, most historians of the period
before 1000 devote nearly all their attention to examples of convergence: the formation of centralized empires and religious systems, cultural zones and civilizations, and city-centered trading networks.
The bias against treating the divergence theme is so profound that
even when empires fall and belief systems fragment too spectacularly
to be ignored, these events are generally presented as regrettable and
exceptional rather than as natural expressions of the eras dominant
theme. Moreover, it seems likely that one reason why so many longterm surveys disregard history before agriculture and especially before
agriculture-based empires (the history-begins-at-Sumer approach) is
the impossibility of fitting these profoundly important and profoundly
long periods of early human history into the cherished framework of
political and cultural convergence.
One cannot dispute that the theme of convergence is far easier to
grasp and teach than that of divergence. Convergence appeals to a profound human desire to find pattern and order in even the most diverse
and chaotic situations. The emphasis is observable in the section headings of every world history textbook, my own included: regional convergences and interregional connections grow ever stronger until in
1000 or 1500 global consolidation takes a firm hold. This emphasis on
convergence is neither fanciful nor wrong-headed. Convergent forces
were gaining strength well before 1000, and their importance in shaping the modern world needs no apology.
The issue is not that convergence deserves less attention but that
world history loses something important in neglecting the theme of
diversity. A hint of what is lost comes from another great recent curricular change in the United States that parallels the growth in world
history: the rise of specialized ethnic and minority histories. To pioneering black and Jewish studies programs have been added those of
various Hispanic, Asian, and Native American groups as well as the
Irish, Italians, and other European groups. In addition, pioneering
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womens studies have given rise to studies of gender and sexual orientation. In some cases the two trends are combining. On a recent trip
to southern California, I found that the Chicano history that was just
emerging when I was a graduate student in the 1960s has been joined
by Chicana history and gay Chicano and lesbian Chicana histories.
On the surface, such programs may appear incompatible with world
history. World history struggles to write a meganarrative of all humanity, while ethnic and minority studies focus on the diverse histories of
different groups and the things that separate them. Despite these divergent tendencies, world historians in the United States are generally
sympathetic to the growth of such studies. In part this seems to be due
to the fact that, by challenging the primacy of a melting-pot national
history, diversity studies foster the acceptance of a larger integrating
narrative that ties American minorities to the wider places and
themes that helped create them. But it seems a more profound point
can be made. Just as world history is a response to the enormous convergence of human experiences in this age of globalization, the spread
of diversity studies in the United States (and subnational ethnic movements in Europe and elsewhere) also reflects the fact that globalization
both poses challenges to particular identities and permits easier expression and celebration of differences. Despite widespread fears of Americanization (even in America), there is clear evidence of vibrant
cultural diversity in our globalizing world and in the existence of multiple centers of local, regional, and global cultural influence.31
If one were to apply this insight to the teaching of premodern history, the strategy would be to show how divergence and convergence
interact. Just as in the contemporary period diversity studies and movements represent a strong reaction against national and international
homogenization, so too in earlier ages one needs to stress that sustained efforts to promote universal religions, long-distance trade and
trading languages, and imperial systems arose in reaction to the enormous diversity, isolation, and parochial norms of the times. We must
guard against both excessive denigration of convergent forces in our
own times and excessive celebration of them in ancient times. For
throughout history, it is the complex interactions of these forces that
need to be considered if we are to make sense of the past and present.
31
See the many examples in Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Many
Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
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Conclusion
The Great Divergence model simplifies but does not directly challenge
most existing conceptions of history. By moving the beginnings of the
modern era back five centuries, it allows for the changes associated
with modern to be regionally defined and recognizes that they were
often discontinuous and operated on different schedules in different
places. The Great Divergence is also compatible with the history of
globalization and with world history in general. By proposing a sharper
focus on the dominant changes taking place in different places, it
encourages rethinking global changes in comparative terms and from
a long perspective.
It would be pompous and foolish to imagine that even historians
who are clear-headed and daring enough to have embraced the field of
world history will rush to adopt the concept of the Great Divergence
that is sketched in this brief essay. Historians, like history, are not
inclined to make leaps. The Great Divergence model is not meant to
be a resolution of historys mysteries but a challenge to reexamine
large issues and long trajectories from its novel perspective.
Whether one views rising global interaction through the long lens
of the Great Convergence or the shorter one of globalization, its importance cannot be denied however much it may be debated. The long
perspective of world history can contribute greatly to global understanding. Putting aside present realities to study the different realities
of earlier times is a part of this. Equally important is acknowledging
that the impulse to teach world history is itself a product of our times
and to use the peculiarly intense convergence of our age to focus
attention on the long historical trajectory that helps us understand
the present and contemplate the future.