Suchergebnisse

This article discusses the challenges and constraints on the way toward more ecumenical forms of world historical scholarship. Refuting the charge that world history is necessarily Eurocentric in nature, the article points out that it is impossible to discuss intercultural conceptions of world history without touching on the international structures, flows, and hierarchies that characterize the field. The article argues that several transformations within the social sciences and humanities may prove to be relevant for transcultural and world history. The article concludes that internationally convincing perspectives can be gained only if the international landscapes of historiography become more ecumenical.

World history can provide a context for regional and national histories, but what is
the context for world history itself? If world history is about the history of human
beings, asking this question means asking about the place of human beings within modern
knowledge. While most traditional cosmologies put humans at the center of the
picture, the temporal and spatial scales of modern science are so vast that humans can
seem to vanish entirely. Yet if we order the contents of our universe by complexity
rather than by size or longevity, things look different. This paper explores arguments
suggesting that human societies and their evolution may be among the most complex
objects available for scientific study. Such conclusions hint at the significance of world
history beyond the history profession and also suggest the extraordinary difficulty of the
challenges world historians face.