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David Northrup

Journal of World History, Volume 16, Number 3, September 2005,pp. 249-267 (Article)

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Globalization and the GreatConvergence: Rethinking

World History in the Long Term*

david northrupBoston College

World historians confront two huge conceptual tasks. One is hor-izontal integration: how to interconnect in each era the broadrange of human experiences around the world. The other is verticalintegration: 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 integra-tive macrohistory1 because it challenges perspectives arbitrarily basedon national, regional, and cultural units. We tend to delight in cleverbooks that recount the variety of human experiences at a particularmoment of time, even though such comparisons may lead to no largerconclusions.2

Charting world historys vertical or chronological axis has its ownproblems and, despite some notable efforts, seems to receive less criti-cal attention. The effort may not appear fruitful, for, as Ross Dunn hasobserved, no periodization scheme for world history can intelligibly

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Journal of World History, Vol. 16, No. 3 2005 by University of Hawaii Press

* This is an expanded version of the presidential address given at the annual meetingof the World History Association at George Mason University on 19 June 2004.

1 I first encountered this phrase in Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economyin the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 226, where it is attrib-uted to Joseph Fletcher.

2 For example, John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1999), Olivier Bernier, The World in 1800 (New York: John Wiley, 2000), orJohn E. Wills Jr., 1688: A Global History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

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250 journal of world history, september 2005

integrate all, or even most, phenomena except perhaps at the verybroadest and thus least useful levels of generalization. Whether out ofpassive acquiescence or an active global vision, world history textbooksgenerally borrow from European history the ancient/medieval/moderntriptych and nearly always divide history at 1500 c.e.3 A serious dis-cussion of these assumptions seems called for. Just as our colleagues inthe Annales school have discovered deeper meaning in history in thelong term (la longue dure), more of us in world history need to emulatewhat David Christian has done in arguing the case for Big Historyby concerning ourselves with the structure of ultra-long-term history.4

Although I have been as likely as anyone else to devote moreenergy to horizontal macrohistory than to its chronological cousin,others quests for historys long-term meaning and structure have peri-odically captured my attention. I had just begun teaching my first worldhistory survey at Tuskegee Institute in 1968 when I happened uponCarlo M. Cipollas slender volume, in which he argues persuasively thesimple proposition that global history has been shaped by two revolu-tions: the agricultural and the industrial.5 The roles of climate and dis-ease in shaping history have also added striking new dimensions tounderstanding the past on a larger-than-human scale.6 Over the yearsI have benefited from other debates about momentous turning pointsin world history, notably the recent discussions over how and when theWest overtook the East, an event that Kenneth Pomeranz has elegantlynamed the Great Divergence.7 Such turning points may not always lie

3 Ross Dunn, Periodizing World History, in The New World History: A TeachersCompanion, ed. Ross Dunn (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000), p. 359. Though they usedifferent labels, the periodization schemas by Peter Sterns and William Green that Dunnanthologizes approximate the ancient /medieval/modern model. In contrast, Jerry Bent-leys Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History, American HistoricalReview 101 (1996): 749770, dispenses with a Middle Age and proposes a division in 1000c.e. between ancient/classical/post-classical ages and premodern/modern ages.

4 David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2004).

5 Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population (Hammondsworth, UK:Penguin Books, 1962).

6 Some valuable works are William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York:Anchor, 1976); Philip D. Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in theConquest of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Brian Fagan, The Lit-tle Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 13001850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000); RobertRotberg, ed., Health and Disease in Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000);Mike Davis, The Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nio Famines and the Making of the ThirdWorld (London: Verso, 2001).

7 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Mod-ern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); R. Bin Wong, ChinaTransformed and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,

Northrup: Globalization and the Great Convergence 251

in the distant past. Tom Friedman has persuasively argued that thealmost simultaneous ending of the Cold War and the rise of the Inter-net marked the beginning of a new era of history.8

In the spirit of such thoughtful works, this essay puts forward a sim-ple temporal model of world history. It proposes that world historycan be divided into just two ages: one dominated by divergence and,since about 1000 c.e., an age of convergence. Beginning with theearly human communities in Africa and their migration to the rest ofthe world, people honed their survival skills by adapting culturallyto a multitude of different environments. In relative isolation fromeach other, communities refined particular specialized technologies,designed appropriate clothing and food preparation techniques, workedout differing belief systems and ways of reasoning, developed myriadlanguages and systems of writing, and devised distinctive styles of artand architecture.

But at some point rising forces of convergence overtook those pro-moting ever-increasing diversity. The changeover was neither abruptnor sudden. Forces for convergence had long operated in parts of theancient world: regional empires consolidated disparate peoples andoverlaid their traditions with a common culture, world religions spreaduniversalistic beliefs, and long-distance traders spread ideas and tech-nologies as well as goods. Irregularly at first and then with increasingforce and speed after 1000 c.e., historical forces drew people closer andcloser economically, culturally, and politically. This Great Conver-gence, as I shall call it, provides a useful framework for understandingthe past thousand years of world history and the phenomena that inrecent years have come to be called globalization.

Like most good (and bad) ideas that I have ever entertained, thisone depends heavily on others work. Direct inspiration for the begin-ning of the Great Convergence came from reading the introductionDavid Eltis wrote for a volume he edited on global migrations:

From the emigration of Homo sapiens from Africa perhaps 100,000years ago, to the Viking visits to North America, and Chinese andArab contacts with the Indonesian archipelago, migration meant inessence 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 thissubject 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.


exchange between old and new communities, migration resulted incontinual goodbyes. . . . Migrations gave rise to new cultures and soci-eties that remained largely unaware of their place in the increasinglydiverse kaleidoscope of humanity. . . .

A little over a thousand years ago, the broad pattern of dispersionbegan to change as peoples in the far west, the far east, and then thesouth of the Old World launched extensive transoceanic, or at leasttransmaritime, satellite communities, whose existence involved themaintenance of retraceable sea-borne connections.9

Since nothing in the works that Eltis cited contained any hint of theglobal vision behind his sweeping analysis, I recently asked him if inspi-ration had come from elsewhere than his own fertile mind. His replytook me aback: he had borrowed the basic idea from an article he hap-pened upon in a copy of Air Canadas in-flight magazine, enRoute. Thatsource appears less surprising when one learns that the article was writ-ten by Canadian historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer, whose brillianttelevision series War PBS broadcast two decades ago.10 The partic-ular article is not considered important enough to be listed on Dyerswebsite or new enough to be on enRoutes, but in a personal communi-cation Dyer relates that it was spun off of an essay he wrote for an exhi-bition at the LAnse aux Meadows Viking colonization site in New-foundland. Dyer saw the meeting of the Vikings westward voyageswith the Eurasian eastward movement in eastern Canada about theyear 1000 as the closing of an era. He used the term Full Circle todescribe the coming together of the two migration streams that hadleft Africathe one that had turned right into Asia and the otherthat had turned left into Europe.11

History and Globalization

If one inspiration for the Great Convergence model is thus derivedfrom considering a momentous watershed in the forward movement ofhistorical events, the other inspiration for the Great Convergence

9 David Eltis, Introduction: Migration and Agency in Global History, in Coerced andFree Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 1.

10 The print version is Gwynne Dyer, WarPast, Present, and Future (New York: CrownPublishers, 1985).

11 Gwynne Dyer, Full CircleFirst Contact: Vikings and Skrealings in Newfoundlandand Labrador, 2000, available at http://www.darkcompany.ca/fullcirc/fulcirc1.htm, andpersonal communication, 13 May 2004.


comes from looking backward through time to discover the origins ofthe contemporary globalization. Social scientists and journalists whoaddress the globalization model generally treat it as a recent phenom-enon, produced by the end of the Cold War, the explosion of globaltrade, and the spread of high-speed electronic communications. TheWorld is 10 Years Old, proclaimed Merrill Lynch ads in October 1998;It began when the [Berlin] Wall fell in 1989. Francis Fukuyama play-fully proposed that the resulting triumph of the West marked the endof history.12

While respecting the uniqueness of the present age, some histori-ans and historically minded writers have suggested that contemporaryglobalization has a much older history. Tom Friedman argues that thefree trade and imperial expansion of the later nineteenth centuryformed an earlier Age of Globalization, which was interrupted by theworld wars and global depression. He traces globalization ultimately tothe forces of the Industrial Revolution. Historians such as GeoffreyGann, Bruce Mazlish, and Robbie Robertson would push globaliza-tions beginnings back to the era of European expansion that began inthe fifteenth century.13

There is no denying the unique importance of the voyages of Vascoda Gama, Christopher Columbus, and their followers in tying all thecontinents together and setting in motion an ever accelerating inter-change of goods, microbes, ideas, and people, but others have sug-gested still earlier beginnings. In the stimulating collection of essayshe edited titled Globalization in World History, Anthony Hopkins andhis coauthors employ a tripartite sequence: (1) modern globalizationdating from the Industrial Revolution, (2) a largely European proto-globalization era of political and economic integration in the 1600sand 1700s, and (3) an archaic globalization era with multiple regionalcenters and stretching across a very broad swath of history fromantiquity to the seventeenth century.14

12 The Merrill Lynch ad is cited by Friedman, Lexus, p. xvi; Francis Fukuyama, TheEnd of History? was originally published in the summer 1989 issue of The National Inter-est and reprinted along with a wealth of other commentary and a valuable resource guidein Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century: A Reader, eds. Patrick OMeara, HowardD. Mehlinger, and Matthew Krain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

13 Geoffrey Gann, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 15001800 (Lanham,Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Bruce Mazlish, An Introduction to Global History,in Conceptualizing Global History, eds. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (Boulder, Colo.:Westview Press, 1993), pp. 124; Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization: AHistory of a Developing Global Consciousness (London: Zed Books, 2003).

14 A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002),pp. 47; C. A. Bayly, Archaic and Modern Globalization in the Eurasian and African


Although these various attempts to periodize the history of global-ization are all useful in some ways, the suggestion here is that the entiresweep of changes from the completion of the Full Circle to the glob-alization of today can productively be brought together in the largerframework of the Great Convergence, which also broadens the scopeof the issues to be treated. The globalization models emphasis oneconomic and political systems needs to be combined with the migra-tion focus of Dyer and Eltis, and one also needs to bring in culturaland social forces that have collided and converged over the past mil-lennium.

Hopkins and company are on the right track in placing the expan-sion of the West within the broader global convergences underway wellbefore 1500 and in seeing globalizations deep historical roots. But theGlobal Convergence model goes one step further in proposing thattheir archaic period can usefully be divided into two periods: one dur-ing which converging forces were notable exceptions to the still dom-inant forces of divergence and a second during which globalization /convergence became the dominant historical force.

Every historian will recognize that convergence was a powerful ele-ment of history well before 1000 c.e. Human expansion was not a one-way flow, moving ever outward from some center. Besides migrating tonew lands, people also doubled back, conquered, and mixed with ear-lier settlers. Even in ancient times, long-distance trade networks linkedsurprisingly distant parts of the world. One of the most noted charac-teristics of ancient times was the rise of empires that united disparatepeoples, at least superficially, under yokes of military power and com-mon laws, common languages and religious systems, and networks oftrade. Both within such imperial frontiers and across them, Confu-cianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam spreadwidely.

While there can be no sharp divide between discrete ages of diver-gence and of convergencecertainly not one pegged to a conven-iently round number in an arbitrary calendarDyer and Eltis are notalone in seeing 1000 c.e. as an approximate turning point. MiddleEastern historian Marshall Hodgson saw 1000 as an important divid-ing line between the classical period of Islamic expansion unified underthe Abbasid Empire and the broader expansion of the multicenteredand interrelated Islamic world of later times. Jerry Bentley cites a con-

Arena, ca. 17501850, in Hopkins, Globalization, pp. 4572. Bayly has expanded this treat-ment in The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).


siderable amount of literature documenting the emergence of an age oftransregional empires and trade in Eurasia from 1000 that was a tran-sition to the modern age. This polycentric interaction is also centralto William and John McNeills latest vision of world history, whichdepicts the centuries after 1000 as characterized by thickening websof intensified interaction in the Old World that marked this as an ageof consolidation. 15

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the operations of theGreat Convergence are in clearer focus. This period saw the revival oftrade on the Silk Roads and in the Indian Ocean with important con-nections to Europe and across the Sahara. Linked in part to this com-mercial expansion, larger political units arose: the Mongol conquests(12061283) and Yuan China (12791368), the Islamic empires ofDelhi (12061398) and Mali (ca. 1240ca. 1500), and the foundingof the long-lived Yi dynasty in Korea in 1396. Connected to the riseof Indian Ocean trade were the African kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe(ca. 1250ca. 1450) and Solomonic Ethiopia (1270 forward). Mean-while, the cultural map of the Old World was being altered by thespread of Christianity in Russia and other parts of northeastern Europeand the spread of Islam in India, sub-Saharan Africa, and SoutheastAsia. Yet, because these developments were complex and reversible,none is a compelling illustration of the process.

Babels Ebb: The Tumbling Tower of Languages

Although rarely given consideration by historians, a fundamentalchange in language dynamics provides a telling example of how mil-lennia of divergence turned into convergence. The biblical account ofthe Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:19 sets the scene. When their engi-neering skills enabled humans to begin constructing a tower that wouldreach to the heavens, the jealous Yahweh reflected, They are just onepeople, and they all have the same language. If this is what they can do,then . . . let us . . . make such a babble of their language that they willnot understand one anothers speech. Rather than attributing linguis-tic proliferation to divine punishment, historians are more inclined to

15 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, andWorld History, ed. Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.181187; Bentley, Cross-Cultural Interaction, pp. 766769; J. R. McNeill and WilliamH. McNeill, The Human Web: A Birds-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Nor-ton, 2003), p. 116ff.


see the causes in human dispersal and isolation. As a general rule, thenumber of languages in a region is inversely proportional to its popu-lation density. Thus the widely dispersed peoples of the Pacific consti-tute less than 1 percent of the worlds population but speak 19 percentof living languages. The isolated valleys of highland New Guinea arehome to a quarter of the worlds languages. On the other hand, denselypopulated and interconnected East Asia and modern Europe have farfewer languages than similar areas in Africa.

The sheer number of languages in the world and the arbitrary gra-dients that separate them makes an accurate count difficult, but byabout a millennium ago it is estimated that there were some 10,000 or15,000 languages in use. Today the number of living languages is downto 6,000 or 7,000, and linguists expect that as many as half the lan-guages now in use will cease to be spoken by the end of the twenty-firstcentury. Those languages most at risk are those of small, once isolatedcommunities that are now in closer contact with their neighbors andthe world at large. However, the decline in living languages is not gen-eral or headed to single digits. Some six hundred to seven hundred con-temporary languages have more than 100,000 speakers each and arecontinuing to add new speakers.16 The rise of English as the first globallanguage is also a clear expression of the present intensity of the GreatConvergence.

The spread of some languages and the decimation of others havegreatly accelerated in the past two centuries, but language consolida-tion and extinction have been well underway for much longer. Thetrend is best documented in Europe, which today is home to the small-est number of established languages of any region in proportion to itspopulation size. However, a millennium ago, there were some twohundred distinct languages spoken just in the British Isles. By the six-teenth century the hybrid tongue that evolved into modern Englishsomehow became supreme and the vast majority of the others wereheading for extinction.17 One could trace similar processes eastwardacross 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, andWorld 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 MiddleAges is nicely captured in the parts of Michael Creightons Timeline (New York: BallantineBooks, 1999), set in the 1300s.


Standardized Asian languages such as Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu,and Arabic have also achieved dominance on a large scale.

This process of convergence to single national languages (or a smallnumber of official languages) has not been universal. In sub-SaharanAfrica, for example, little language consolidation seems to have takenplace before 1850, and the creation of national states and national lan-guages since 1950 does not seem to have imperiled many of the conti-nents two thousand spoken languages. Although Nigerias postcolonialpolicy of using English as its national language has given it the thirdlargest number of English speakers of any country in the world, Nige-rians show little sign of following the British Isles in abandoning theirtwo hundred indigenous languages in the foreseeable future. Only timewill tell, but it appears that the current stage of the Great Convergenceis fostering a rising proportion of multilingual people and a falling pro-portion of monoglots.

The topic of language extinction generates fierce emotions, partic-ularly because those languages that are most endangered are those ofpopulations that have suffered in other ways from the forces of impe-rialism and globalization. Both endangered species and endangeredlanguages are rightly the subjects of efforts to slow or prevent their dis-appearance. However, in the larger sweep of time, the creation andextinction of languages needs to be seen as part of a natural historicalprocess that is analogous to the creation and extinction of species. Onecan judge the outcome from different points of view, but there is nodenying that just as divergence fostered the emergence of new lan-guages and cultures during most of human history, that trend has nowbeen reversed.

The Modern in World History

In addition to highlighting an important watershed in history, theGreat Convergence model fosters a more global conception of long-term periodization. Historians and other researchers are generally com-fortable with the application of the term modern to the past two cen-turies (however much they may differ about what that word means),and, as was seen above, this time span also works for conceptualizingthe more recent phases of globalization. However, identifying chro-nologies leading up to modernization in different parts of the worldis more problematic for two reasons.

First, the framework and chronological limits of early modernthat are so deeply ingrained in European historiography do not work


elsewhere, except, perhaps, for colonial Latin America. Indeed, thetraditional idea of early modern may not even be that helpful forunderstanding European history because medievalists are inclined toplace the beginning of Latin Europes economic and cultural renais-sance in 1200 or even 1000. Moreover, because the European experi-ence was neither global nor primary, the pace of developments associ-ated with becoming modern varied tremendously around the world.In many places the transition to modern times began well after 1500;in some, such as China, such trends began centuries earlier. As PhilipCurtin points out:

Between . . . 960 and . . . 1127, China passed through a phase of eco-nomic growth that was unprecedented in earlier Chinese history, per-haps in world history up to this time. It depended on a combinationof commercialization, urbanization, and industrialization that has ledsome authorities to compare this period in Chinese history with thedevelopment of early modern Europe six centuries later.18

By splitting history at 1000 c.e., the model proposed for the GreatConvergence eliminates the most problematic categories, medievaland early modern, and their fixed Eurocentric time frames. This divi-sion is not entirely unprecedented, even in the West. Oxfords regiusprofessor of modern history is concerned with the flow of history notsince 1800 or 1500 but since antiquity. Moreover, a great advantage ofcentering history at 1000 c.e., as world historians such as DavidChristian have already done, is that its length allows for the worldsdifferent chronologies of modernization to play themselves out at theirown speed and on their own timetables.

The modern era (however defined) is not just a series of changeswithin a larger timeframe; it is also a point of view, an interpretationof the past from perspectives of the present. The Great Convergencemodel similarly depends on hindsight and oversimplifies the past toenhance our ability to make sense of it. The point Christopher Baylyoffers with regard to globalization applies equally well here:

In its most useful sense, globalization is a heuristic device, not adescription of linear social change. It draws attention to dynamics thattranscend the old units of analysis in different academic fields andattempts to quantify or to model them. While at some periods global-

18 Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1984), p. 109.


ization might appear to be a linear process it was at best a very dis-continuous 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 distort-ing history, it is doubtful whether long-term and global history can bemeaningful if each time and place is considered just in its own con-text. We might have a nice academic debate about this, but once onebrings bright young students into the picture, the jig is up. A key rea-son why students are increasingly eager to study world history is thatit explains the presenttheir present. Not only does it place them atthe center of things, but it also makes the past a meaningful backlightto give perspective on the future decades of their lives. In my experi-ence, an introductory history course modeled around convergence andglobalization during the past millennium generates enough studententhusiasm to atone for its limitations.

Our students are not the only people living in the present; we his-torians do too, and our fascination with world history is a product ofthe forces of globalization in our times. It is no coincidence that worldhistory is an American passion. From the perspective of the GreatConvergence, world historys popularity in the United States repre-sents this countrys creation by convergent transnational forces andthe fact that the United States has become the primary force for glob-alization and the primary beneficiary of it. As Daniel Headrick hasput it:

It is no coincidence that interest in world history (in the educationalmarket) has grown in step with Americas global dominance. . . .World history is the benign face of globalization. When we [Ameri-cans] write and teach world history, we are presenting a world viewthat reflects the ideals we have. . . . But globalization is not all benignideals. We are not only a diverse and tolerant society; we are also the900-pound hegemon.20

Headrick goes on to wonder how readily the rest of humanity canembrace world history when doing so involves cuddling up to theAmerican behemoth now at its center.

Here is the dilemma that the Great Convergence poses. As TomFriedman puts it, globalizations best features are represented by the

19 Bayly, Archaic, p. 48.20 Daniel R. Headrick, personal communication, 18 January 2004.


Lexus automobile, a superb machine modern industry has created fora global audience through high-tech global cooperation, and the olivetree, the fundamental human love of home, cultural values, and par-ticular beliefs. But one can see as well the perils of globalization, inwhich the Lexus also represents unprecedented luxury for the elite thatcan afford its power, and the olive tree represents narrow ethnocen-trism, prejudice, and a zero-sum game. If the Great Convergence hasbrought the promise of peace and prosperity, it has also brought theperils of war, genocide, and hegemonic elitism. Those who wouldunderstand the dynamics of the modern world need to keep thesedilemmas in mind. However much the West has shaped the modernera, various parts of the world continue to follow different paths anddifferent chronologies.

Empires and Imperialism

An exploration of the complex trajectories of economic and culturalconvergence would require much more space than is available here,but the simpler process of political convergence may serve to illustratethe kinds of comparative and narrative issues that need to be addressed.Political amalgamation has a very long history, until recent timeslargely in the form of empire building. Indeed, survey courses usuallybegin with the ancient river valley empires and devote considerableattention to their successors in classical and post-classical antiquity.However, modern empire building is rarely examined from a long-term,comparative perspective, especially not since the rise of anti-imperialliberation movements that focused attention on such empires short-comings.

It is striking to contrast the fulsome praise textbooks generallyaccord the long-term benefits brought by ancient empires with theirreluctance to acknowledge any positive legacies of modern Europeanempires. There seem to be three reasons why ancient empires get bet-ter press. First, the passage of time has made us much more aware oftheir positive legacies and more forgiving of their short-term brutali-ties. Second, as has often been remarked, winners write the historiesat least until recently. The third reason brings us back to our theme:in antiquity historians perceived the convergence of commerce, cul-ture, and politics that empires brought as a positive force. Recent his-torical narratives may no longer praise the conquest and taming ofbarbarian, pagan, and primitive peoples, but there is still a pow-


erful bias in favor of trade, common languages and religions, and uni-form law codes and architectural stylesexcept in modern times!21For reasons that appear related to the conflicts and uncertainties thatchange always brings, as well as to political orientations, academic his-torians are inclined to overemphasize the destructive potential ofrecent convergence/globalization and to understate its potential forbeneficial results.

In reflecting on why the good British Empire of his childhood hadbecome an evil empire by his undergraduate years, Niall Ferguson hasraised some larger historical issues. His suggestion that the shiftreflected changing politics more than an advance in historical under-standing has been controversial, as has his view that, if political pas-sions are put aside, the empire will be seen to have had beneficial aswell as detrimental aspects, and those who gained and those who lostfrom it were not neatly divided by their skin color. Among the endur-ing positive legacies of British dominion he counts the disseminationof the English language and of British legal, political, athletic, andreligious traditions.22

In more guarded language, the general editor of the new OxfordHistory of the British Empire suggests that, while issues of blame con-tinue to be debated, recent scholarship about the empire is focused lesson winners and losers than on the interaction between British andindigenous peoples. 23 However, such two-sided approaches are alsohard to detect in textbooks and other popular accounts of the scram-ble for Africa, which tend to concentrate their attention on aberrantoutbursts of greed and racism, exemplified by such easy villains as KingLeopold and Cecil Rhodes.24 To be sure, greed and racism were con-spicuous parts of the process, but (unless one wants to argue that someeras see more evil forces at work than others) personal moral failingsshould 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 WorldHistory Association, Victoria, British Columbia, 25 June 1999.

22 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessonsfor 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: HoughtonMifflin, 1999) is a good example of this genre, whose accurate detailing of the Congo FreeStates many failings is not accompanied by a larger framework to explain how this couldhave taken place.


than they are of, say, industrialization or the American Civil War.Were Leopold and Rhodes really cut from the same cloth as DavidLivingstone and Albert Schweitzer?

If the European side gets highly selective coverage, Africans fareno better in popular accounts. Their role is likely to be confined tobeing victimized, and the New Imperialism is frequently presented asthe continuation of a process of European dominance that began withthe first Portuguese mariners in the fifteenth century and continuedthrough the Atlantic slave trade. Specialists and more thoughtfulworld historians take a different approach. The father of world systems,Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that sub-Saharan Africa was not subor-dinated to the emerging Atlantic system in the early centuries of Euro-pean expansion (as the Americas were), but remained external to ituntil the mid eighteenth centuryas was also the case in South Asia,the Ottoman Empire, and Russia.25 More recently one of the foremosthistorians of the Atlantic slave trade has put the same argument in dif-ferent conceptual language. With regard to the establishment of slav-ery and plantation economies, David Eltis argues, what happened inthe Americas was what Europeans wanted to happen in Africa butcould not bring about. 26 This image of an Africa that was strong andlightly engaged is in sharp contrast to the weak and victimized Africaof the surveys and textbooks.

Eltiss argument also suggests that any consideration of the reasonsfor the New Imperialism in Africa might benefit from examining Afri-cans inability to continue operating from positions of strength andfrom thoughtful comparisons with the fates of other once powerfulstates and regions. After all, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, India,China, and Japan also faced multiple challenges in trying to engagewith rapidly converging economic and political forces in the nine-teenth century. By the late 1500s, Atlantic Africans, South Asians, andEast Asians were all trading with the early European mariners freelyand from positions of strength. In China and Japan, centralized stateswere able to put limits on the degree of involvement, whereas in Indiaand Africa, local interests seeking to expand involvement generallywon out over those wishing to limit it. These relations evolved slowlyat first, then changed abruptly in the nineteenth century. For reasons

25 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Expansion ofthe Capitalist World-Economy, 17301840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), chap. 3.

26 David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2000), p. 139.


that are much discussed, the capacity of Western societies to imposeconvergence shot ahead of Asians and Africans capacities to maintaina more equal relationship. The Great Divergence of East and West andof North and South was part of a global phenomenon that needs to bediscussed globally with full attention to all sides in the engagements.

The discussion also needs to include the recent outcomes as well asearly beginnings if the full story is to be told. Thus, the ascendancy ofpostwar Japan, the Asian Tigers, and now the Asian giants of Chinaand India may be seen as reclaiming that earlier, more balanced role,while the predicament of much of contemporary Africa is eerily simi-lar to the weaknesses evident in the nineteenth century. Africansdeserve sympathy, aid, and protection from gross exploitation, but theirplight needs to be seen comparatively as well. As Friedman puts it,Poor [African] countries have fallen behind in the globalization agenot because globalization failed them, but because they failed to put inplace even the minimum political, economic and legal infrastructureto take advantage of globalization. 27 Those who fall victim to thedestructive side of convergence may not be wholly to blame for theirfates, but their societies are not exempt from the consequences either.

Adopting long-term and comparative perspectives on empire build-ing does not minimize the injustices that the New Imperialism broughtnor obscure the base motives of many imperialists, but it does raiseother important issues. One issue is the justification for evaluating theimpacts of ancient and modern empires by different standards. Empireswere not all cut out of one mold, and individual empires clearly exhib-ited different characteristics at different stages in their histories. Thepower of modern weaponry and economic forces and the reach ofmodern telecommunications all increase the speed with which changeoccurs and the scale on which political forces operate. Yet it seemsdoubtful that there is a fundamental divide between the empires ofantiquity and those of recent centuries. Was Alexander the Greatreally that different from Rhodes? Was the creation of the BritishEmpire even half as destructive as the conquests of the Mongol Empire?It may be that good world historians need to pay more attention to thedestructive aspects of older empires as well as more attention to thelegacies that former subjects of newer empires have found worthkeeping.

The political changes associated with present-day globalization mayalso benefit from a long-term, comparative approach. The future is

27 Friedman, Lexus, p. 356.


uncertain, but fears of convergence leading to homogenization seemexaggerated. Languages, cuisines, and other manifestations of cultureare leading to greater conformity to fewer standards, as the McNeillsput it, but they also perceive that each part of the world is now exposedto multiple cultural standards and that the interaction of these culturalnorms promotes diversity.28 At the political level something similarseems underway. There seems little chance of fulfilling twentieth-cen-tury futurologists visions of a single world government. The idealistsdream of a democratic world government now seems as unlikely aprospect as does the alternative scenario of a global empire, long a sta-ple of futuristic fiction. Rather than leading to fewer options, global-ization and the Great Convergence seem to lead to more connections,a web of interrelations among many centers of power. The overwhelm-ing characteristic of political globalization is not centralization of thesort once found in the Soviet Union but decentralization, what Fried-man calls the four democratization trends evident in recent globaliza-tion: democratization of technology, finance, information, and decisionmaking.29 Instead of one world government or an all-powerful Ameri-can empire, there is a growing trend for disparate international gov-ernmental organizations to set policies, make regulations, and imposepenalties on once autonomous nations. At the same time, the world iscriss-crossed by a growing number of international nongovernmentalorganizations whose political impact may rival that of official govern-ments: transnational corporations and churches, charitable and envi-ronmental organizations, professional societies, and human rightsgroups. There are some fifty thousand nongovernmental, not-for-profitglobal organizations, and they hold some five thousand internationalcongresses yearly.30

Teaching Divergence

As its name proclaims, the Great Convergence model is more con-cerned with interpreting events since 1000 c.e. than those before that

28 McNeill and McNeill, Human Web, p. 317.29 Friedman, Lexus, pp. 4472. Raymond Grew, On the Prospect of Global History,

in Mazlish and Buultjens, Conceptualizing Global History, p. 234, also argues against con-fusing globalization with homogeneity.

30 John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),p. 5.


date. Before this essay concludes, however, it is worth asking how muchlight the model throws on the understanding of world history beforethat date. Even if the term Great Divergence were not already in usefor a different purpose, it would be of questionable utility in explainingthe immensely long trajectory of late and classical antiquity, the agri-cultural revolutions, and the earlier millennia of human existenceexcept in one respect. Even so, it is startling that historians generallyand world historians in particular are so neglectful of forces for diver-gence in antiquity. Rather than following linguists and biologists inexamining divergence in all its forms, most historians of the periodbefore 1000 devote nearly all their attention to examples of conver-gence: the formation of centralized empires and religious systems, cul-tural zones and civilizations, and city-centered trading networks.

The bias against treating the divergence theme is so profound thateven when empires fall and belief systems fragment too spectacularlyto be ignored, these events are generally presented as regrettable andexceptional rather than as natural expressions of the eras dominanttheme. Moreover, it seems likely that one reason why so many long-term surveys disregard history before agriculture and especially beforeagriculture-based empires (the history-begins-at-Sumer approach) isthe impossibility of fitting these profoundly important and profoundlylong periods of early human history into the cherished framework ofpolitical and cultural convergence.

One cannot dispute that the theme of convergence is far easier tograsp and teach than that of divergence. Convergence appeals to a pro-found human desire to find pattern and order in even the most diverseand chaotic situations. The emphasis is observable in the section head-ings of every world history textbook, my own included: regional con-vergences and interregional connections grow ever stronger until in1000 or 1500 global consolidation takes a firm hold. This emphasis onconvergence is neither fanciful nor wrong-headed. Convergent forceswere gaining strength well before 1000, and their importance in shap-ing the modern world needs no apology.

The issue is not that convergence deserves less attention but thatworld history loses something important in neglecting the theme ofdiversity. A hint of what is lost comes from another great recent cur-ricular change in the United States that parallels the growth in worldhistory: the rise of specialized ethnic and minority histories. To pio-neering black and Jewish studies programs have been added those ofvarious Hispanic, Asian, and Native American groups as well as theIrish, Italians, and other European groups. In addition, pioneering


womens studies have given rise to studies of gender and sexual orien-tation. In some cases the two trends are combining. On a recent tripto southern California, I found that the Chicano history that was justemerging when I was a graduate student in the 1960s has been joinedby Chicana history and gay Chicano and lesbian Chicana histories.

On the surface, such programs may appear incompatible with worldhistory. World history struggles to write a meganarrative of all human-ity, while ethnic and minority studies focus on the diverse histories ofdifferent groups and the things that separate them. Despite these diver-gent tendencies, world historians in the United States are generallysympathetic to the growth of such studies. In part this seems to be dueto the fact that, by challenging the primacy of a melting-pot nationalhistory, diversity studies foster the acceptance of a larger integratingnarrative that ties American minorities to the wider places andthemes that helped create them. But it seems a more profound pointcan be made. Just as world history is a response to the enormous con-vergence of human experiences in this age of globalization, the spreadof diversity studies in the United States (and subnational ethnic move-ments in Europe and elsewhere) also reflects the fact that globalizationboth poses challenges to particular identities and permits easier expres-sion and celebration of differences. Despite widespread fears of Amer-icanization (even in America), there is clear evidence of vibrantcultural diversity in our globalizing world and in the existence of mul-tiple centers of local, regional, and global cultural influence.31

If one were to apply this insight to the teaching of premodern his-tory, the strategy would be to show how divergence and convergenceinteract. Just as in the contemporary period diversity studies and move-ments represent a strong reaction against national and internationalhomogenization, so too in earlier ages one needs to stress that sus-tained efforts to promote universal religions, long-distance trade andtrading languages, and imperial systems arose in reaction to the enor-mous diversity, isolation, and parochial norms of the times. We mustguard against both excessive denigration of convergent forces in ourown times and excessive celebration of them in ancient times. Forthroughout history, it is the complex interactions of these forces thatneed 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., ManyGlobalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2003).


Conclusion

The Great Divergence model simplifies but does not directly challengemost existing conceptions of history. By moving the beginnings of themodern era back five centuries, it allows for the changes associatedwith modern to be regionally defined and recognizes that they wereoften discontinuous and operated on different schedules in differentplaces. The Great Divergence is also compatible with the history ofglobalization and with world history in general. By proposing a sharperfocus on the dominant changes taking place in different places, itencourages rethinking global changes in comparative terms and froma long perspective.

It would be pompous and foolish to imagine that even historianswho are clear-headed and daring enough to have embraced the field ofworld history will rush to adopt the concept of the Great Divergencethat is sketched in this brief essay. Historians, like history, are notinclined to make leaps. The Great Divergence model is not meant tobe a resolution of historys mysteries but a challenge to reexaminelarge issues and long trajectories from its novel perspective.

Whether one views rising global interaction through the long lensof the Great Convergence or the shorter one of globalization, its impor-tance cannot be denied however much it may be debated. The longperspective of world history can contribute greatly to global under-standing. Putting aside present realities to study the different realitiesof earlier times is a part of this. Equally important is acknowledgingthat the impulse to teach world history is itself a product of our timesand to use the peculiarly intense convergence of our age to focusattention on the long historical trajectory that helps us understandthe present and contemplate the future.

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