Page 163 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

48 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to
fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian’s writings should be open to no
suspicion of partiality or animosity. • Leo XIII (1810–1903)

pointed out, this reordering averts the categorical pairing historian Rashid al-Din wrote the Collected Chronicles, an
of huge and tiny countries, for example, the questionable immense work of history and geography that encom-
notion that Luxembourg and Slovenia are countries on passed not only the lands of the Dar al-Islam but also
the continent of Europe paralleling China and India as India, China, Inner Eurasia, the Byzantine empire, and
countries in Asia. The idea of a Eurasian continent has Western Europe. Indeed, Rashid al-Din, along with other
also been useful in the study of numerous historical well-educated scholars and travelers of his time, may have
processes whose proper geographical frame is that land been among the first people in world history to possess
mass as a whole.These developments include the disper- a consciousness of Afro-Eurasia in all its length and
sion of Indo-European-speaking populations from China breadth as an interconnected whole. In the early modern
to Ireland between the fourth and first millennia BCE; the centuries, when geographers were rapidly accumulating
long-distance migrations and invasions of pastoral groups knowledge about the earth’s every nook and cranny,
(Scythians, Germans, Huns,Avars, Magyars,Turks) in the European scholars wrote a number of “universal histo-
past three millennia; the opening of the trans-Eurasian ries” that divided the world into primary parts, whether
Silk Roads; the east-west flow of technologies, ideas, and continents or civilizations, but that also acknowledged
religions; the forging of the Mongol empire in the thir- Asian peoples, if not yet Africans south of the Sahara,
teenth century; the rise of the Russian empire in the sev- as having contributed in some measure to “Old World”
enteenth; and the emergence of the Soviet Union after history.
1917.All these developments notwithstanding, however, In the twentieth century, several world history pio-
Eurasia has not so far come close to disturbing the con- neers, including Alfred Kroeber, Arnold Toynbee, Mar-
ventional school wisdom that the world has seven conti- shall Hodgson,William McNeill, and Leften Stavrianos,
nents, not six. adopted varying conceptualizations of the “ecumene” (or
in Greek, the oikoumene) to describe the belt of inter-
Afro-Eurasia as an linked agrarian civilizations that began to emerge in the
Arena of History fourth millennium BCE and that eventually extended
The failure of Eurasia to supersede Europe and Asia on from the Mediterranean basin to the North Pacific.
the continental honors list suggests that Afro-Eurasia Hodgson frequently used the term Afro-Eurasia in con-
faces a steep climb to acceptance, despite its value in for- nection with the ecumene, defined by him as “the vari-
mulating questions about long-term and large-scale ous lands of urbanized, literate, civilization in the
change in world history. The human eye can readily see Eastern Hemisphere” that “have been in commercial
Eurasia as a single bulk of land but requires serious re- and commonly in intellectual contact with each other...”
education to perceive the Mediterranean and Red seas, (Hodgson 1954, 716). On occasion, Hodgson also
together with the Suez Canal (whose navigational width employed the term Indo-Mediterranea, though without
is 180 meters), as something other than lines between detailed explication, to delineate the region of intense
great spatial compartments. human interactivity that ran from North India to the
On the other hand, several scholars of world history Mediterranean basin, a region that overlay parts of Asia,
have either explicitly or implicitly envisaged Afro-Eurasia Africa, and Europe.
as a single field of historical development, thereby ignor- In The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Com-
ing or minimizing the conventional threefold division as munity, William McNeill postulated the progressive “clo-
having any bearing on the comparative or world- sure of the Eurasian ecumene,” that is, the interlinking of
historical questions they wish to pose. In the early four- Eurasian civilizations,as a key historical dynamic,though
teenth century, when a chain of Mongol-ruled states his definition of Eurasia implicitly incorporated the
stretched all the way from Korea to Bulgaria, the Persian Mediterranean and Indian Ocean littorals ofAfrica as well.