ABSTRACT
By rights world history ought to encompass both the grand commonalities and the particular patterns of human experience. But this is a tall order for two reasons: First, because the main means of discerning common themes is comparison of different local variations, which tends to reduce entire cultures to schematic representations of singular entities, “India,” “China,” “the West,” each with its own iconic characteristics enduring through world-historical time as if intact. Second, because the main materials for study are products of the strong modern traditions of national histoiywriting, which insist on the singularity of each nation, often reaching far back in time before “the nation” existed and enshrining national difference in a hallowed patriotic past. There is no easy escape from this double dilemma of historical caricature, which amounts to ethnocentrism from without—the way we see China—and from within—the way Chinese see China. But we can at least stress the point that the distinctive national themes are in fact particular patterns of grand commonalities in world history. And we can also show how the particularities operate as ideological values and mythic guides in the context of each national history. “Being Chinese,” after all, was an operative notion in China’s history for millennia, just as “being Indonesian” possessed signal importance in the twentieth-century history of Indonesia.
