Page 39 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

preface xliii

World War II, cast still further doubt on the idea that the Marxists emphasized a world system in which better-
recent emergence of constitutional government as exer- organized core states exploited peripheral peoples for
cised in a few nation-states in a small part of the world their own enrichment. But whether such world systems
was what gave meaning to the whole human past. were very ancient or dated only from the rise of modern
As usual, a few restless thinkers responded.The most capitalism divided this school into clashing factions.
notable were Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) in Ger- Others argued that cooperation was more significant
many and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) in Great than exploitation and that communication, allowing
Britain, both of whom elaborated on classical notions of the spread of new techniques and ideas within geo-
cyclical rise and fall by treating western Europe as one of graphical and ecological limits, was the governing pat-
several parallel civilizations that followed similar, perhaps tern of world history.
even identical, patterns of growth and decay. Spengler No single recipe for writing and studying world his-
and Toynbee both attracted many readers by offering a tory has yet emerged and none ever may, since different
new explanation for the shifting currents of world affairs, peoples, with different heritages and different local con-
but academic historians paid scant attention, busy as they ditions, are sure to remain at odds with one another,
were pursuing ever more numerous hotly debated ques- even if globalization persists and intensifies in times to
tions about specific times and places in the past. come. But it seems sure that as long as entanglements
Their investigations expanded literally around the with the rest of the world remain as inescapable as they
globe after World War II, when Asia, Africa, and every are today, national and local history will not suffice to
other part of the world started to attract the efforts of pro- explain how things got to be the way they are. In that
fessional historians. Simultaneously, archaeologists and case, that age-old question will surely continue to require
anthropologists were exploring the deeper, unrecorded teachers and scholars to provide some sort of world his-
past as well.The resulting very rapid advance in general tory for an answer.
information about diverse local pasts soon allowed a few This pioneering Berkshire Encyclopedia of World His-
ambitious world historians to develop more inclusive, tory is designed to help both beginners and experts to
more nearly adequate versions of the whole human sample the best contemporary efforts to make sense of
career. In the United States serious efforts to teach world the human past by connecting particular and local his-
history also began to invade high school classrooms after tories with larger patterns of world history. Contributors
World War II, as U.S. entanglements abroad became have no single viewpoint, but the editorial process, in
more and more obvious. Colleges and universities lagged choosing what articles to commission and how to dis-
behind, but of late many have also begun to teach the tribute attention, aimed at inclusiveness and aspired to
subject. insight. How well we succeeded is for users to discover.
What to emphasize and what to exclude remained a The only thing uniting those who cooperated to produce
critical question, for, like other scales of history, an intel- this volume is the belief that human history as a whole
ligible world history requires selective attention to the is important to study and think about, since genuinely
confusion of knowable facts. Some world historians inclusive world history is such a helpful, even necessary,
chose to organize their books around the rise and fall of guide for survival in the crowded world in which we live.
civilizations, as Spengler and Toynbee had done; others
William H. McNeill
took a continent-by-continent approach. A school of