Maybe Courses: The Whole Enchilada

Monday Miscellany

This is also not a maybe class: it’s on the schedule for Fall 2022, and this is the nearly finished syllabus. I am at the absolute hardest point in course design for me, which is making the last decisions about what to take out in order to get to manageable amounts of reading.

This is about the fourth or fifth time I’ve taught this class. It’s not a class on the history of the world. Instead, it’s actually close to a specialized survey course on a particular literary form—I’m teaching “universal history” as a genre which has been powerfully influential in structuring the West’s sense of itself and its own power and as such is a really troubled and troubling genre. Historians with an interest in global history, world history and comparative history are at some pains to distinguish what they do from “universal history” as a genre, though there are important points of disciplinary cross-over where world history in the disciplinary sense and universal history interact.

I still cherish the time some years ago when a far-right website doing one of its periodic round-ups of “silly courses” that were presumed to be evidence of left-wing academic perfidy threw this class into a list because the intern who had been assigned to the task saw the title and assumed it was a class on the history of Mexican cuisine. (Not that there would be anything wrong with that.) It was particularly delicious because, as other bloggers who read my annoyed response to the conservative publication noted, this course was actually quite demanding in terms of the readings and there were quite a few conservative texts on the syllabus. (At that time, for example, we read Francis Fukuyama’s End of History.)

It’s a once-a-week 3-hr discussion-based class, so the reading load is pretty heavy. It kind of has to be. I’ve made what feels like a valid pedagogical shift in this course’s content this time around, though. In the past, I’ve crammed in heavily selected and annotated versions of many of the source texts—one year in the week on Enlightenment universal histories we actually tried to read a bit of Vico, Voltaire, Rousseau and Hegel and it just didn’t work. That either has to be a month of the whole class—at which point it’s really not my jam and there are other people better qualified to teach it—or we have to mostly be reading about universal history in relationship to the Enlightenment. So this time that’s the approach I’m taking most weeks—we’re reading analyses of the genre in particular contexts. That’s going to require me to do a bit of a mini-lecture in the early going particularly just so the wider context of that historical moment is available for the conversation, and it’s going to require us to take on faith some of what various scholars say about a primary source. Trying to actually read Rashid al-Din in a translated form is just too tough in a course that’s not built extensively around that goal, for example—even Kamola’s book is hard to read just for one chapter—but I think that week will do a lot to put into play the reasons why intellectuals like Rashid al-Din and ibn Khaldun were drawn to universal history as a form. (One of the through lines of the entire course is that universal history is closely tied to particular kinds of real and imagined sovereignty or particular kinds of states and regimes.)

But I know I’m still over the line right now in terms of where I want to be—there’s too much reading in some weeks and yet I’m still full of desires to put more in there in a few cases.

History 80C The Whole Enchilada

Fall 2022

Swarthmore College

Professor Timothy Burke

This course is an overview of what is often called universal history, a genre of historical writing in which authors write about the history of everything: all human experience, and sometimes the rest of the history of the universe to date as well. 

Contrary to how the term sounds, universal history is a mostly modern and Western genre, though its earliest defining examples were written by Muslim intellectuals in the early modern period.

In this course, we will be reading universal history as a form of writing rather than studying world history as a historical subject, though the two do overlap in ways that we will be constantly tracing throughout the semester. No prior knowledge of world history overall is required: we will be asking instead about what happens substantively and stylistically when an author decides to write a historical account that is meant to address the entirety of human experience–and about what motivates this kind of writing. We’ll also be tracing how (or even whether) “world history” as a genre changed over time. 

As such, the course requires some close reading: the texts themselves are the center of our attention, rather than the informational content. For the most part, we will be working with a single chapter or two, occasionally even just short passages, or we will be reading a summary analysis of a particular world history where the text itself is just too much to handle. 

Also, a caution: the texts we are reading in this course are overwhelmingly by male authors. This reflects the history of universal history as a genre, and it is an issue we will dwell on with some frequency. The critics we will read later in the semester will also speak to this point. One question we will try to continuously think about is whether there are forms or possibilities for universal histories which are also dramatic alternatives to the genre as it appears here, and if so, why they have not been written or pursued. 

There are three major writing and presentation assignments in the semester. The first is a short 2-3 page response paper focused on ibn Khaldun’s work. The second is a 4-5 page analysis of a “World History Through X” book (e.g., “world history through five key foods, world history through 9 ½ glasses, world history through potatoes, world history through intimacy, world history through fashion, world history through cross-cultural trade” etc. I will provide a list of recommended books for this paper. The final paper is due after the end of classes and will be a 10-12 page analysis based on one of several prompts. We’ll talk about that paper early in the semester so you can make plans about how to approach it. 

In each class session, we will spend time in the first half working with our texts to build an understanding of what universal history as a genre looked like at a particular moment. In the second half, we will try to extend, critique or complicate that moment in the history of the genre. We will be reading between 100 to 300 pages a week: we will have a discussion at the end of each class about next week’s reading and strategies for skimming, managing and focusing that reading. 

I’m also designing the final paper assignment. Generally in a mid-level discussion-focused class with substantial reading, I look to offer a choice between two different kinds of 10-12 page papers—one prompt that invites ambitious syntheses of the material we studied, and another prompt that asks the writer to do a bit of research that extends or complicates the material that we studied, in this case likely by building out one of our particular weekly themes.

Week 1  Universal History

Ward Mitchell and Dunne, The New World History, Introduction

David Christian, “The Return of Universal History”

I always want to keep the first week light. This year is going to be a particular challenge because I’m flying home the day before classes begin, which is the first time I’ve done that in my career—and judging from the news about flying at the moment, there’s some risk that I’ll get stuck en route. I have a plan for that, at any rate, and I’ll be communicating with the students soon about that plan.

Week 2 Where Does Universal History Come From?

Genesis (Chapters 1-18 (through the story of Abraham)

Herodotus, The Histories, pp. 1-15

Craig Benjamin, “State Expansion and the Origins of Universal History”

The Benjamin reading is our first chance to connect the history of particular political forms and structures with universal history as a genre, with a useful introduction of the point that Chinese history-writing, of which there has been quite a lot, was quite explicitly not universal history. Herodotus is useful in that respect because classical Greek historians wavered on this point in interesting ways: they took an interest in the history of non-Greek societies, but they also did not try to write a “history from nowhere”, e.g., a universal history that did applied the same lens to all societies. There were Greeks and there were not-Greeks and Greek history mattered more and mattered differently.

Week 3 Islamic Scholars and Universal Histories

Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, selection

Stefan Kamola, Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, Chapter 4

Ibn Khaldun pays off a direct reading, I think. (We’re not reading the whole thing, obviously.) It’s easy to see why his text was of such great interest to European intellectuals once they were exposed to it.

Week 4 Enlightenment Universal Histories

Tamara Griggs, “Universal History from Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment”

Brett Bowden, “Universal History”, in The Strange Persistence of Universal History in Political Thought

Robert Darnton, “Voltaire, Historian”

1st paper due by 5pm: Response to Khaldun

This week gives me a lot of anxiety because it will go better if at least a few of the people we’re going to encounter through Griggs and Bowden are somewhat familiar to at least some of the students. But I’ll come ready to provide background information in any event.

Week 5 Decline and Revolution

Paul Blackledge, “Historical Materialism”, Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx

Karl Marx, “Idealism and Materialism”

David Engels, “Oswald Spengler and The Decline of the West”

Read the Table of Contents in H.G. Wells, The Outline of History and “Writing”

In one iteration of this class, we tried reading most of Spengler all by itself, with no scholarly analysis of it and it was a pretty miserable experience (not just because the text is so drenched in despair). But I do want to get the students thinking about the relationship between forms of modern political mobilization and particular ways of calling upon history, a point that will come back into force when we read some of Priya Satia’s Time’s Monster near the end of the semester. Marx of course is famously hard to teach in terms of his theory of history because it’s so diffusely everywhere in his writing but nowhere is it laid out in a highly focused way (compared, say, to his analysis of commodity fetishism).

Week 6 World Systems and the Annales School

Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, very short selection

Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Duree”

Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Introduction

Hamalainen, “Crooked Lines of Relevance”

Here’s where we cross over into material that historians would include in their own disciplinary canons (rather than their theoretical perspectives). I’m just going to do the shortest bit of Braudel (like Wells in the previous week) so they can see how he implements his understanding of the Annales program. Eric Wolf sometimes gets overlooked in this context, but we’re doing this work with him this week to set up our reading of The Dawn of Everything a bit later on.

I am toying with doing Abu-Lughod in this week and maybe cutting Braudel down further, if for no other reason to relieve the uninterrupted sausage fest of authors. But it’s a lot to handle. Abu-Lughod does put Huntington in the following week in a new perspective. Another choice I could make is to drop Hamalainen’s useful contextualization of Wolf, I suppose.

Week 7  World History and Popular Culture

Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations”

William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Introduction

Joan Rubin, Making of Middlebrow Culture, Chapter 5

Speaking of things I just cannot find a way to excerpt meaningfully, I’d love to teach a bit of Will and Ariel Durant, but it’s hard even to find much in the way of scholarly analyses of them, despite the fact that their books found their way into so many middle-class households in the U.S. at a particular moment. I expect this week is going to really focus on Huntington in terms of discussion: it kind of carries over the point from the previous week about how particular envisionings of universal history were pinned to particular kinds of political projects. (McNeill is interesting in that respect as well in that his sharp critique of ruling classes as macroparasites never seems to have been taken up by people whose politics would find that conceptually useful.)

Week 8 Big History

William H. McNeill, “History Upside Down” (on GGS)

J.M. Blaut, “Jared Diamond: Euro-Environmentalism”

Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000, short selection

Yuval Harari, “Why Humans Run the World”, YouTube video

Reading Guns, Germs and Steel has been a staple of this class every other time, but I kind of want to move on and do something else. I will likely put in some of David Christian’s Maps of Time in my last revision, because I like it a lot, but it’s hard to know how to make room for everything that would belong in this week. Getting Blaut in there showcases an important critic of Eurocentric world histories, and getting Hansen (at last) gets a female author in the syllabus as a scholarly author of world history. (The Year 1000 isn’t quite “big history” in Christian’s sense but close enough, I think.)

Week 9 Universal History’s Margins

Miles, Who Cooked The Last Supper?

Hughes-Warrington, “Coloring Universal History”

Manning, “Locating Africans”

I’d like to find more material fitting this week’s approach—attempts to provide universal history/world history that seeks to include or center peoples, identities and places that universal history often excludes. It’s hard I think because the historiography which rebukes universal history most strongly in this respect is specific, e.g., thoroughly against universalizing frameworks. I suppose we could read a work of specified history or microhistory this week just to get a sense of how that alternative plays out, but it’s a rather abstract point to make via a particular text.

Week 10 World History Through X

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, selection (we will be reading much but not all of the book)

Sara Butler, “Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker”

Paper 2 due by 5pm: World History Through X Analysis (4-5 pp.)

I very much dislike Pinker’s book, like most historians do (there’s a great anthology of critiques) so it will be interesting to see what students make of it. To some extent, in genre terms, I’m using him as a proxy for what I call “world history through X”, a template for many books in the last twenty years, most of which are less polemical and provocative than Pinker’s book. (E.g., you can write a global history of potatoes without claiming that it’s french fries all the way down or whatever.) I thought about James Scott’s Against the Grain, but we’re getting that argument embedded inside The Dawn of Everything.

Week 11 The Dawn of Everything

Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn of Everything (pp.1-163, 328-440)

I’ll have to do a lot of work coaching students in advance on how to read through the parts of the book that we’re going to engage. A fair amount of the syllabus is set up to give them a handle on how to read this book critically and place it in perspective to other universal histories.

Week 12 Against Universal History

Satia, Time’s Monster, Introduction and Chapter One

Gurminder Bhambra, “Historical Sociology, Modernity and Postcolonial Critique”

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Introduction

It’s actually hard to find great compact scholarly or intellectual writing that is centrally focused on universal history as a form and that provides a fully realized critical history of its uses and genealogy. Satia and Chakrabarty’s texts will work pretty well for this purpose. I might knock off Bhambra, but maybe not—it’s useful. Historical sociology of the kind Charles Tilly wrote kind of falls out of this syllabus (as it often does in historical scholarship, in complicated ways.)

Week 13 I Just Want to Know What Happened

Roberts and Westad, The Penguin History of the World

Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe

Fernandez-Armesto, The Oxford Illustrated History of the World

World History for Dummies

Final paper due December 16th. 

Just short little excerpts for this week—I’ve kind of learned not to over-assign at the end of the semester. But this will help us return to the question of whether there’s a way to talk about the history of everything that avoids the problems of universal history, and also to talk about the desire for that kind of knowledge—when it arises, what it means. The technical problem of how to represent everything in narrative terms without having the kind of reductive, theoretical or instrumental purposes that often shape universal history is really evident when you read formal disciplinary attempts to write comprehensive world histories. (An author like Gonick makes cunning use of visualization to make some of the detail and compression digestible.)

Image credit: Photo by Alexandra Golovac on Unsplash