A Companion to World History by Northrop Douglas

Author:Northrop, Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

Connecting

CHAPTER TWENTY

Networks, Interactions, and Connective History

FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO WITH BENJAMIN SACKS

Global history, strictly understood, is the history of what happens worldwide – across the planet as a whole, as if viewed from a cosmic crow’s nest, with the advantages of immense distance and panoptic range. Sometimes global events arise beyond the reach of human agency. Climatic lurches or microbial mutations or seismic convulsions or the dispersion or extinction of some nonhuman species can affect all the world’s peoples more or less simultaneously. Usually, however, cultures change because of their own internal dynamic or because of what, for purposes of this chapter, I shall call “connections”: transmutative contacts with other cultures. Historians sometimes use the word to mean something else: similarities or commonalities arising not from genuine connections but from parallel experiences or related environmental influences or supposed evolutionary effects. Examples include the independent development of agriculture, the state, and the city in various unlinked places, “connected,” if at all, only by involvement in supposedly universal processes, such as progress or Providence or “development” or increasing complexity or “class struggle.” “Connections,” in these usages, do not appear in these pages because the changes they denote, while important in themselves, are most helpfully designated by their own names (Mazlish 1993; 2004; 2005; 2006; 2009).

Connections properly understood – those made, and those severed – are important because they serve to document and calibrate the most pervasive processes detectable in the history of the world: the processes of divergence and convergence, which make cultures at different times more and less like each other. Understanding those processes is worthwhile because, if we can achieve it, we can see how and perhaps why humans differ from other cultural animals: the range of cultural variation is immeasurably greater in homo sapiens than in any other cultural creature we know of – including, most notably, extinct species of the genus homo and the more remotely kindred primates who, among surviving animals, most resemble us in other respects. Broadly speaking, if we accept that our species has a common origin in a small community of culturally uniform human creatures in East Africa, perhaps around 200,000 years ago, it follows that the astonishing, prolific multiplication of human cultures since then has been the result of many episodes of divergence. Some cultural differentiation arose in the course of migrations into new environments, which demanded or imposed adaptations of the migrants’ ways of life. Other instances occurred as a result of cultures’ relative mutual isolation in a patchily inhabited world. Others again, presumably, may have been the result of conscious self-differentiation between neighboring or sometime-neighboring peoples. Other changes, which contributed to divergence, may have been visionary or optative in nature, arising in the minds of the people who espoused or imposed them.1

Convergence has happened alongside divergence and, increasingly, has become the dominant trend, as sundered cultures have reestablished contacts and influenced each other. Whenever we see languages, religions or ideologies, food and foodways, technologies, kinship systems, political and economic institutions, laws, and tricks

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