Large predictions in history. To what extent is it possible to predict the course of large-scale history -- the rise and fall of empires, the occurrence of revolution, the crises of capitalism, or the ultimate failure of twentieth-century Communism? One possible basis for predictions is the availability of theories of underlying processes. To arrive at a supportable prediction about a state of affairs, we might possess a theory of the dynamics of the situation, the mechanisms and processes that interact to bring about subsequent states, and we might be able to model the future effects of those mechanisms and processes. A biologist's projection of the spread of a disease through an isolated population of birds is an example. Or, second, predictions might derive from the discovery of robust trends of change in a given system, along with an argument about how these trends will aggregate in the future.
One issue needs to be addressed early on: the issue of determinate versus probabilistic predictions. . Michael Mann on power. In 1986 Michael Mann began a strikingly ambitious project -- to give a theoretical and historical account of the history of power in human history. This effort came to closure in the past few months with the publication of volume 3 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945) and volume 4 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011).
(Two other titles were published as offshoots of this project, Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.) This is an amazing corpus, and I think it throws important light on both the theory and the history. It is historical sociology on a macro-scale; and yet Mann also provides careful, almost ethnographic details at the level of individual actors -- fascists, ethnic paramilitaries, legislators, colonial administrators. We shall see that these structural crises had multiple causes and stages cascading on top of each other in unexpected and unfortunate ways.
Actor-centered history. It is easy enough to ask the question, "How can we best explain the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of German fascism, or the Industrial Revolution in England? " And we often want to paraphrase questions like these along causal lines: "What were some of the causes of the fall of Rome, what were the causes of the rise of fascism, what were the causes of the Industrial Revolution? " But are these really good questions? Is this really the right way of thinking about historical explanation? What if we think that there is an overwhelming amount of contingency and path dependency in history?
We might consider this alternative way of thinking of history: think about "social conditions and processes" rather than discrete causes; couch historical explanations in terms of how individual actors (low and high) acted in the context of these conditions; and interpret the large outcomes as no more than the aggregation of these countless actors and their actions. Colonies in a Globalizing Economy 1815-1948. Provincializing the First Industrial Revolution.
The Long 20th Century. Great Transformations. Mark Blyth argues that economic ideas are powerful political tools as used by domestic groups in order to effect change since whoever defines what the economy is, what is wrong with it, and what would improve it, has a profound political resource in their possession. Blyth analyzes the 1930s and 1970s, two periods of deep-seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century. Viewing both periods of change as part of the same dynamic, Blyth argues that the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by "embedding liberalism" and the 1970s, those who benefited least from such "embedding" institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. "[R]emarkably rigorous, original, and interesting work.... Blyth breaks new ground by using Frank Knight's concept of uncertainty as a linchpin for this theory of institutional change....
Questions of Modernity. Empire... Colonialism. Scientific racism, militarism, and the new atheists - Opinion. Scientific racism is a term seldom used today but which has a long and ignoble history in the modern world. In the late 18th century, the renowned scientist and philosopher Christoph Meiners published his famous treatise The Outline and History of Mankind. Central to his analysis was a qualitative comparison of peoples by race - a comparison which his own popularly-accepted findings claimed revealed a clear hierarchy.
Drawing in large part on the now-discredited science of Phrenology (the measurement of human skulls), Meiners described whites as being endowed with clear superiority to all races in both their intellectual as well as moral faculties. About blacks, his scientific analysis was far less generous - finding them not only to be inferior to whites in every mental capacity but in fact "incapable of any mental feeling or emotion at all", as well as "unable to feel physical pain". Institutional racism Islam is not a race "It is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism. Christoph Meiners. Christoph Meiners (31 July 1747 – 1 May 1810) was a German philosopher and historian, born in Hemmoor.
He supported a polygenist theory of human origins. Christoph Meiners Chistoph Meiners was born in Warstade (now a part of Hemmoor) near Ottendorf. He started at a gymnasium in Bremen in 1763, and was a student at Göttingen from 1767 to 1770. In 1772 he became extraordinary professor, and in 1775 full professor, of Weltweisheit at the University of Göttingen. From 1788 to 1791 he co-edited the anti-Kantian journal Philosophische Bibliothek.[1] He wrote on comparative history and cultural history. He is now known mostly for his critical attitude towards Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft and the concept of Enlightenment. Polygenism[edit] Meiners was a polygenist: he believed that each race had a separate origin. According to Meiners: Meiners claimed the Negro felt less pain than any other race and lacked in emotions. Meiners also claimed Native Americans were an inferior stock of people. World history. World history is more timely today than ever.
“Globalization” is almost a cliché, from “The world is flat” to “the homogenization of cultures” to the “commodification of place.” Everyone recognizes the fact of globalization in the contemporary world. But we need to understand the many ways in which many parts of the world were deeply and systemically interconnected long before the post-World War II wave of revolutions in communications networks, rapid travel, containerized shipping, and military power contributed to the current interconnectedness of most countries and peoples. We need a strong historiography for the global world. And we need better and more detailed understandings of the histories of many of the regions of the world, taken in their own terms. To be most productive, however, we need to approach the tasks of global history with some fresh thinking.
There are several key points that have emerged as fundamental. A second is to expect variation rather than convergence.