Writing World History: Which World?

Salles, Jean-Francois The Asian Association of World Historians 2015 The Asian review of world histories Vol.3 No.1

Far from being a recent world, the concept of "a [one] world" did slowly emerged in a post-prehistoric Antiquity. The actual knowledge of the world increased through millennia leaving aside large continents (Americas, part of Africa, Australia, etc.-most areas without written history), and writing history in Antiquity cannot be a synchronal presentation of the most ancient times of these areas. Through a few case studies dealing with texts, archaeology and history itself mostly in BCE times, the paper will try to perceive the slow building-up of a physical awareness and 'moral' consciousness of the known world by people of the Middle East (e.g. the Bible, Gilgamesh) and the Mediterranean (mainly Greeks).

Mapping World History in Korea

HWANGBO, Yeongjo The Asian Association of World Historians 2015 The Asian review of world histories Vol.3 No.2

It has been about twenty years since world history in a new sense was introduced to Korean academia. At first, it was the educators who showed a lot of interest in world history. But, before long, world/global history came to exert an important influence on history research and teaching in Korea. Even though certain unfavorable conditions still exist, the need for world/global history is growing and a number of academic institutes and scholars are putting in a great deal of effort to advance it in Korea. Here, we examine the changing meanings of world history on the basis of the history of concepts and provide a general idea of its introduction and diffusion in historiography and history education in Korea.

Digital Maps and Automatic Narratives for the Interactive Global Histories

CHEONG, Siew Ann,NANETTI, Andrea,FHILIPPOV, Mikhail The Asian Association of World Historians 2016 The Asian review of world histories Vol.4 No.1

We describe a vision of historical analysis at the world scale, through the digital assembly of historical sources into a cloud-based database, where machine-learning techniques can be used to summarize the database into a time-integrated actor-to-actor complex network. Using this time-integrated network as a template, we then apply the method of automatic narratives to discover key actors ('who'), key events ('what'), key periods ('when'), key locations ('where'), key motives ('why'), and key actions ('how') that can be presented as hypotheses to world historians. We show two test cases on how this method works. To accelerate the pace of knowledge discovery and verification, we describe how historians would interact with these automatic narratives through an online, map-based knowledge aggregator that learns how scholars filter information, and eventually takes over this function to free historians from the more important tasks of verification, and stitching together coherent storylines. Ultimately, multiple coherent storylines that are not necessary compatible with each other can be discovered through human-computer interactions by the map-based knowledge aggregator.

"All This is Indeed Brahman" Rammohun Roy and a 'Global' History of the Rights-Bearing Self

Banerjee, Milinda The Asian Association of World Historians 2015 The Asian review of world histories Vol.3 No.1

This essay interrogates the category of the 'global' in the emerging domain of 'global intellectual history'. Through a case study of the Indian social-religious reformer Rammohun Roy (1772/4-1833), I argue that notions of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (which have been preoccupying concerns of recent debates in intellectual history) have multiple conceptual and practical points of origin. Thus in early colonial India a person like Rammohun Roy could invoke centuries-old Indic terms of globality (vishva, jagat, sarva, sarvabhuta, etc.), selfhood (atman/brahman), and notions of right (adhikara) to liberation/salvation (mukti/moksha) as well as late precolonial discourses on 'worldly' rights consciousness (to life, property, religious toleration) and models of participatory governance present in an Indo-Islamic society, and hybridize these with Western-origin notions of rights and liberties. Thereby Rammohun could challenge the racial and confessional assumptions of colonial authority and produce a more deterritorialized and non-sectarian idea of selfhood and governance. However, Rammohun's comparativist world-historical notions excluded other models of selfhood and globality, such as those produced by devotional Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta-Tantric discourses under the influence of non-Brahmanical communities and women. Rammohun's puritan condemnation of non-Brahmanical sexual and gender relations created a homogenized and hierarchical model of globality, obscuring alternate subaltern-inflected notions of selfhood. Class, caste, and gender biases rendered Rammohun supportive of British colonial rule and distanced him from popular anti-colonial revolts and social mobility movements in India. This article argues that today's intellectual historians run the risk of repeating Rammohun's biases (or those of Hegel's Weltgeschichte) if they privilege the historicity and value of certain models of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (such as those derived from a constructed notion of the 'West' or from constructed notions of various 'elite' classicized 'cultures'), to the exclusion of models produced by disenfranchised actors across the world. Instead of operating through hierarchical assumptions about local/global polarity, intellectual historians should remain sensitive to and learn from the universalizable models of selfhood, rights, and justice produced by actors in different spatio-temporal locations and intersections.

Tabriz on the Silk Roads: Thirteenth-Century Eurasian Cultural Connections

Prazniak, Roxann The Asian Association of World Historians 2013 The Asian review of world histories Vol.1 No.2

Tabriz under Mongol Ilkhanate rule commanded a global reach in the thirteenth-century Afro-Eurasian world. Tabriz functioned during this period not only as a commercial emporium and diplomatic center but as a seat of innovative artistic and intellectual activity. Consideration of Tabriz as a world historical city offers insight into the economic and social dynamics that shaped a critical passage in Eurasia's history including regions of the Mediterranean and East Asian zones.

Settlement and Resettlement in Asia: Migration vs. Empire in History

MANNING, Patrick The Asian Association of World Historians 2015 The Asian review of world histories Vol.3 No.2

At its simplest, this essay provides a narrative of migration in Asia since the arrival of Homo sapiens some 70,000 years ago. More fully, it presents the case for conducting long-term, world-historical interpretation for Asia with attention to multiple perspectives, which has become increasingly central to global historical analysis. Following an introductory articulation of the benefits of long-term interpretation, the second section presents a balance of three perspectives-empire, exchange, and migration-as frameworks for interpreting the Asian past. The third section presents further detail on migration in long-term Asian history. The concluding section identifies four changes in patterns of migration during the past two centuries and emphasizes the underlying importance of cross-community migration in long-term human biological and social evolution.

Teleology, Discontinuity and World History: Periodization and Some Creation Myths of Modernity

Pomeranz, Kenneth The Asian Association of World Historians 2013 The Asian review of world histories Vol.1 No.2

Discussions of world history often focus on the pros and cons of thinking on large spatial scales. However, world history also tends to employ unusually large timescales, both for research and teaching; frequently it is framed around a teleology and a series of "revolutions" which mark milestones taking humans from a very distant past to "modernity". Moreover, world history usually rejects regionally specific period markers (e.g. Renaissance), making periodization within this long timespan especially difficult. This article surveys various approaches to these problems, and shows that any of them, if treated as sufficient by itself, introduces significant distortions. It argues for a world history that highlights this problem, rather than hiding it, and which uses the need to deploy multiple timescales simultaneously to clarify the distinctive intellectual contribution of historical thinking.

The World as Seen from Venice (1205-1533) as a Case Study of Scalable Web-Based Automatic Narratives for Interactive Global Histories

NANETTI, Andrea,CHEONG, Siew Ann The Asian Association of World Historians 2016 The Asian review of world histories Vol.4 No.1

This introduction is both a statement of a research problem and an account of the first research results for its solution. As more historical databases come online and overlap in coverage, we need to discuss the two main issues that prevent 'big' results from emerging so far. Firstly, historical data are seen by computer science people as unstructured, that is, historical records cannot be easily decomposed into unambiguous fields, like in population (birth and death records) and taxation data. Secondly, machine-learning tools developed for structured data cannot be applied as they are for historical research. We propose a complex network, narrative-driven approach to mining historical databases. In such a time-integrated network obtained by overlaying records from historical databases, the nodes are actors, while thelinks are actions. In the case study that we present (the world as seen from Venice, 1205-1533), the actors are governments, while the actions are limited to war, trade, and treaty to keep the case study tractable. We then identify key periods, key events, and hence key actors, key locations through a time-resolved examination of the actions. This tool allows historians to deal with historical data issues (e.g., source provenance identification, event validation, trade-conflict-diplomacy relationships, etc.). On a higher level, this automatic extraction of key narratives from a historical database allows historians to formulate hypotheses on the courses of history, and also allow them to test these hypotheses in other actions or in additional data sets. Our vision is that this narrative-driven analysis of historical data can lead to the development of multiple scale agent-based models, which can be simulated on a computer to generate ensembles of counterfactual histories that would deepen our understanding of how our actual history developed the way it did. The generation of such narratives, automatically and in a scalable way, will revolutionize the practice of history as a discipline, because historical knowledge, that is the treasure of human experiences (i.e. the heritage of the world), will become what might be inherited by machine learning algorithms and used in smart cities to highlight and explain present ties and illustrate potential future scenarios and visionarios.

Global History: Continental and Maritime

WANG, Gungwu The Asian Association of World Historians 2015 The Asian review of world histories Vol.3 No.2

World history today has been greatly influenced by the fact that it was the revolution in naval power during the past two centuries that made the world truly global. This has led to a new master narrative that re-framed five millennia of recorded history in order to explain the ultimate triumph of the maritime economies. The result of such revision is to underestimate and distort the role of continental Eurasia in the shaping of the three key civilizations that developed independently and remain distinct: the Mediterranean, the Indic and the Sinic. Only by a fuller reappraisal of the linkages of trade and war dominated by the Eurasian central forces for most of history can we understand the global pressures perennially at work. By setting the continental and the maritime in their total historical context and recognizing their importance today, we can better explain what is happening and what is likely to continue to influence the course of world history.

Think Globally, Act Locally Environmental History as Global History in the First Global Age

Polonia, Amelia The Asian Association of World Historians 2015 The Asian review of world histories Vol.3 No.1

The paper is oriented towards a reflection on the epistemological extension of world history. This discipline is currently opening up for new subjects and new foci of interest, with environmental history being one of them. The paper debates the interaction between the global and the local as one of the main issues of world history. It analyses the impacts of the interconnectivity of diverse regions as well as different geographical and cultural complexes, during the period between 1500 and 1800. Assuming that the sea in its economic, cultural and environmental dimensions contributed actively to world history, and is, in itself, a major factor of globalization, the paper intends to highlight interdependencies which fostered connections between the local and the global. It further submits to discussion which was the impact of an on-going globalization process, based on maritime dynamics, on the environment. Through an analysis centered on the impact of European overseas expansion, some environmental impacts will be analyzed. The paper aims at questioning environmental history as an emergent theme of world history, based on the historical experience of connecting worlds developed in the First Global Age (1500-1800).