ABSTRACT
Nowadays world history has become quite fashionable. Schools and colleges have begun to offer courses in it and to demand that applicants for jobs be prepared to teach it. A world history journal and association, of which this volume is a product, have come into existence. Unfortunately, the history of the entire globe is too vast to be effectively grasped, let alone studied with the care historians customarily require. But neither, on the other hand, can historians committed to national histories simply dismiss as inconsequential the larger issues that link the world together across the usual regional specializations. A good start has been made with recent studies focused on ecology, disease, and the like. I would like to argue that one exceptionally rewarding way of making history global is to focus upon issues of imperialism and colonialism. Of course, in practice the historiography of imperialism has been, to a very large extent, hardly less Eurocentric than the traditional accounts of Western civilization. You simply add on Vasco da Gama or the exploits of Clive, or else, following Immanuel Wallerstein, you construct a “world system” emanating out of the European heartland. Such histories conventionally either devise theories of European expansion, or they detail the policies that shaped the patterns of conquest and rule—why here? not there?—in particular times and places. In these accounts, each colony is assumed to exist only in its relationship to the imperial center. These studies, in effect, conceive of the British Empire as a set of strings—or better yet, as a network of telegraph wires—running from each colony to the metropole. Nor is the problem resolved by studying colonial nationalism or, for that matter, the doings of the now famous “subaltern.” In such accounts, each colonial struggle or subaltern movement is inevitably enclosed within the confines of its own territory. It is, one might say, as if each colony’s national leaders were tugging on their own string, to free it from imperial Britain. The colony’s history is written in isolation from that of its neighbors.
