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World History for International Studies (Final Study Guide)
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A combination of lecture and reading notes for the International Studies World History course
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WORLD HISTORY FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FINAL EXAM
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WORLD HISTORY FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FINAL EXAM
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L1 – What is History?It is…
- Time
- Space (i.e., village, states, nations, oceans, outer space)
- Structures & Process (i.e., individual choices, feminism, Churchill in WW2)
- Agency (different institutions)
- Story (Looking for continuity and change… trends)
- Multiple perspectives of time and history
o Unable to put values of the present to the past
o Use the values of the past to look at the future
o Different perspectives on map: Eurocentric // Chinese-centric // American-centric
History: the study of change over time in the human past
- It's tricky… what is past? What are the starting and end points?
- The past may be over, but its history itself changes over time
o The way we recount it changes
- Starting point: the emergence of hominids, ~7 million years ago
Method of studying it (needing certain parameters)
- archeology, geology, carbon dating
- discovery, information
- reconstruction, chronology, causality, interpretation
- Discussion: colleagues sharing their research
- Debate
- Method/Tools: compartmentalizing time as a chronology
- Divide it by time frame (i.e., prehistoric) / region (i.e. Africa) / feature of event (i.e.
emergence of hominids)
- It is about…
o change over time (migration out of Africa)
o major ruptures (end of ice age)
o causality (the spread of homo-sapiens after the ice age)
o Big exploits and momentous events (the development of tools to survive the icy age)
- The environment we were formed in, who we are > different way of presentation >
Preconceptions, biases… so try to see history through someone else's eyes
Key terms when defining world history
1. Historicism: The study of history in its unique context, time, and place. It is the task of the
historian to try to get as close as possible to the lived historical experience.
o The study of the past is an exercise in interpretation
o Developed in the 19th CE, Ranken Revolution, by Leopold von Ranke
• Emphasizing context, place, and culture to write history
• Need for a careful approach to context
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, o If we lived through the period of the past: there is subjectivity, partial view, partiality,
perception, and perspective involved
• So, historicism allows historians to engage in history writing by trying to step into
the shows of contemporaries.
o Each period of history has its own unique beliefs, norms and values and is best
understood only in its own historical terms and contexts
o This approach refrains from universalist claims about history
• Trying to study history by applying a present-day moral yardstick is not correct >
fails in the exercise of understanding history as it was (related to historiography)
o Use of sources is crucial:
• Primary sources: Sources produced at the time of historical events, by
contemporaries, unmediated by others in ex post facto interpretation.
▪ produced by those directly involved or with direct knowledge or experience of
those events
▪ Ex: Written text (diaries, notes), drawings, paintings, autobiographies, video,
or audio recordings
• Secondary sources: Sources produced after the historical events containing
interpretation and assessments which are part of the debate of history.
▪ Ex: Books and articles written over the course of time about the historical
events that are subject of study
▪ They engage in direct and indirect debate with each other and build our
knowledge base through combination, refinement and (re)interpretation
• Ex: Clay tablets containing hieroglyphs (Primary source)
▪ Usage of Rosetta stone to crack the translation (Secondary source)
2. Meta History: The interpretation of history according to an overarching meaning or internal
logic, leading towards an ultimate end point.
o Another instrument of interpretation
o The opposite of historicism because meta history seeks to make universal claims about
history
o There's logic and there's end (ex: laws of history // framework > to explain what
happens in history)
o Allowing historians to discover patterns and regularities over a period
o Theology
o History as progress
o Problems:
• Speculative - evidence?
• Teleological reasoning, based on its purported end / goal
▪ Because we think that we know the endpoint of the course of history,
everything is interpreted as functioning towards that goal so other alternative
and valid interpretations are overlooked
o Ex: European Middle Ages
• People believed that the course of history defined by God
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,3. Historiography: The pre-existing knowledge base including, importantly, debate about a
particular historical subject. It is the existing recorded state of the understanding of history.
(More focused on academic debate)
o Historical arguments
o Theories
o Ex: debate about modernity
• A product of enlightenment, marked by scientific discovery, personal liberty,
religious tolerance, and the idea that reason rather than beliefs guide human
behaviors
• Enlightenment has not been a uniform experience.
• Modernity as a product of the Enlightenment can mean different things to different
people, notably it facilitated the further conquest of territories, colonization and
repression.
• The fruits of modernity have been distributed unevenly and the question needs to
be posed whether these fruits have been fruits at all when they caused racism, war
and genocide.
o Interpretations of the past which changes over time (ex: Cold War)
• The emergence caused by soviet aggression
• However, it was not so much the soviet, instead it was the Americans with their
Capitalism and wanting to expand their ideology
• The interaction between the Americans and the soviets of rivalry
o The trends
• States, wars and men - political history
• Social History, economic history
• Women's and Gender history
• Cultural history and history of ideas
▪ How these ideas emerged
▪ The consequences
▪ Different lens
• Local history, microhistory, subaltern history
• History animals, disability history
• Religious (Christian, Jewish) and Dynastic Rationales - Meta History; divine/dynastic
intervention (rise and fall accounted and written)
• European Enlightenment, scientific revolution
• Emergence of liberal version of history - Meta History: "Advance of Freedom"
Can we learn from history?
- The end of the Cold war - The outbreak of the Ukraine War
- 9/11 - Most of the general population didn’t
- The financial crisis (2008) see it coming
- Pandemic - There's a learning curve to not repeat…
Can we draw from historical analogies?
- Munich Conference: don’t appease dictators
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,- Ex: The Sleepwalkers
o Clark said "There is no analogy between 1914 and the situation in Ukraine now"
• In 1914: there were multiple states that wanted to change their state and were
unhappy… no alliance system
• Now: there's only one clear person that's unhappy… who's violating sovereignty
- Helps us "foresee" what will happen
Skills of the Historian:
1. Research 4. Close reading 7. Presentation
2. Judgement 5. Concise writing
3. Persuasive argument 6. Question framing
Are we entering a new geological time?
- Exiting the Holocene?
- Started between 1750-1800?
- Since 1950: stage 2 of the Anthropocene, the great acceleration?
- Arguments against: we're still developing, microplastic
World history: The study of history from a world perspective focusing on the spread of people,
goods and ideas and increased interconnectedness.
The project of World History
- Main actors: societies and civilizations
o Civilization are the main drivers of change as they develop contacts and interactions
over the course of time
o The main motor of social change < encounters and interactions
Core concerns
- Pre-occupation with the idea of increasing connectivity, mobility of people, goods and
ideas, and exchange between people transcending borders and boundaries.
- Aim: telling the story of the multiplicity, but also commonality, of the human experience
across time (Ex: colonialism)
- Subscribes to a core meta narrative:
o a story of ever-increasing connections and connectivity to create an interconnected
world is in essence a meta-history.
o highlighting connections, World History also exhibits a normative strand of subscribing
to the ideal of helping to create a ‘global citizenship’.
• Global Citizenship: The field of World History operates in the belief that the study
of the process of ever-increasing connections can help in the formation and
education of future generations of responsible and informed global citizens. This is
the cosmopolitan ideal of the field.
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,Universal History
- Ever increasing complexity
- Where trends and patterns are developed
- Humans can learn collectively
- Control over bio-spheric resources as the main driving forces explaining the visible pattern
of development
- Borrows heavily from other fields of expertise (i.e., geology, chemistry, and physics) >
multidisciplinary
Interdisciplinarity: Several distinct academic disciplines are used to create a synergetic effect
towards a common understanding.
- use these pre-existing research findings and the existing materials > devise comparative
research designs whereby they can compare between different places and time frames.
- use the material to discover similarities and differences, patterns and trends that are not
visible when limited to one particular time frame, location or even theme.
- Comparative research designs: An approach to conducting research through comparison.
This comparison can focus on different groups of people, time frames, locations, themes but
also definitions, concepts, and theories. Usage of primary and secondary sources
o Usage of primary and secondary sources
o Interpretation and discovery of pattern
20th CE
- Oswald Spengler
o The decline of the western world
o Identified 8 world civilization
o Controversial: he did not use the scientific standards to support his arguments… no
sources → Popular in Nazi circles
- Arnold Toynbee
o Identified 26 civilizations > all rise and falling
o Focused on external challenges in successful and unsuccessful civilization
o Controversial: not binding by an academic standard… limited in sources
Disappearance of World History?
- Requirements of Science and the 'rankean' revolution
- The rise of nationalism
- Fragmentation of scholarship, ever increasing specialization
Comeback of World History
More information and data to draw from
- Development of technology – DNA
- More techniques to apply - 'chronometric revolution'
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, L2 – Communications
Chapter 2: different cultures of communication and how they have shaped the development of
several key civilizations in the history of Africa, notably Ancient Egypt and the Sahelian Empire
of Mali, as well as our modern understanding of these historical states.
- written language had evolved to a very high level, yet, oral communication remained
central in the day-to-day activities of these societies
- oral recounting of history forms a long standing pattern in human societies and forms an
important entry point in the understanding of human connections and the human
relationship to history.
Meaningful communication: the deliberate act of transferring information through verbal
(speech / writing) or nonverbal (drawing, movements, objects) mediums
- recognized how developments of visual symbolic communication (rock art) often developed
in close collaboration with the development of acoustic expressions.
- The study of history is intimately connected to the study of communication, as historians
are interested in the recorded past
- Chronological perspective: breakthroughs in the history of communication (list
technological advancements in modes of writing → increased the magnitude of this mode
of transmittance → Pivotal in human history
o invention of writing (c. 3400 BCE)
o invention of the printing press (woodblock printing c. 200 CE; Gutenberg 1440 CE);
o the invention of the telegraph (1844)
o the invention of the internet (c. 1970 CE)
- Anachronistic element to chronological perspective of written forms of communication, as
it hinders our understanding of previous societies and civilizations who, for the most part of
human history, despite the ability to write, were predominantly oral cultures.
Historiography
Oral history: The study of history through orally transmitted sources. Historians distinguish
between sources which are part of an oral tradition and the field of Oral Literature, such as epic
poetry or folklore, and oral sources which recount only a one generational/individual memory of
certain historical events. Such life stories and interviews are recorded after the historical events
have occurred, and as such provide a testimony of both the past and the present. At the same
time, they offer historians evidence of otherwise undocumented events or perspectives.
1. Early historians = master storytellers with the ability to justify certain societal structures and
values
o Stories to make sense of the natural world, to transmit experiences and skills, and
stories about social groups and their ancestry.
o These oral traditions about our ancestral heritage are the earliest forms of history, the
practice of narrating past events and providing meaning and significance for those
people and events that came before.
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, 2. Persistence of oral communication is seen as more deliberate and self-conscious
o paved the way for contemporary historians by developing methodologies for the use of
oral traditions as well as creating collections of transcribed traditions for future
researchers.
o Historians concerned with why non-written modes of communication continued to be
used.
o We shouldn’t just be interested but also how the story is told and how we came to use
certain communicative ways to shape and narrate those stories that bind us .
Orality literacy shift: a key shift in the course of history where the nonverbal transition to oral
transition to the write transmission
- Emergence of writing due to the need for counting and calculating > recording ownership /
value of goods
- This Writing becomes important: cuneiform > recording, text collection, reliability of
transmission
- Cuneiform is the first form of written communication with the purpose of recording books
o Developed first from accounting systems
- Changed the way we think and remember
- expressions of thought went from being predominantly participatory as communication was
mostly uttered in the presence of other people → becoming more internalized and
‘distanced’ with regards to time, space and community.
o This change caused expressions of information to become more eternalized but at the
same time also disconnected from immediate feedback.
- Consequences:
o Democratization of written works
o Record keeping system > improved agriculture
o Taxes
o There's record due to this shift
o Biased
DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING
- Allowed societies to store vaster amounts of information more easily for longer periods of
time and share this information across greater distances.
- Global cross-pollination → triggered a rapid cultural, economic, and political development.
Herodotus (father of history in Western tradition)
- used oral sources throughout his work
- prided himself on having first account oral testimonies to give his work more credibility
- Worked on Oral history
- The Histories (c. 430 BCE): oral performance for the purpose of public lectures, and only
later written down in book form
▪ in the late Iron Age, written transmissions of historical information were certainly not
deemed more reliable than oral communication.
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