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A PRIMER FOR TEACHING WORLD HISTORY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................ixHow to Make Use of This Book.....................................................xiIntroduction Why Design? Thinking through World History 101.....................1PART I. LAYING FOUNDATIONS.......................................................11One Timing: When to Start.......................................................13Two Centering Connectivity......................................................25Three How to Do More than "Include Women".......................................37Four World History from Below...................................................49PART II. DEVISING STRATEGIES.....................................................61Five The Event as a Teaching Tool...............................................63Six Genealogy as a Teaching Tool................................................73Seven Empire as a Teaching Tool.................................................83PART III. TEACHING TECHNOLOGIES..................................................93Eight Teaching "Digital Natives"................................................95Nine Global Archive Stories.....................................................107Ten Testing (for) the Global....................................................117Epilogue Never Done.............................................................127Notes............................................................................131Select Bibliography..............................................................141Index............................................................................149

Chapter One

WHEN TO START

DECIDING WHICH SLICE or slices of time to cover in a world history course is one of the most daunting hurdles for someone designing an introductory-level syllabus under that rubric. Ideally your syllabus should bracket off a targeted period with specific dates (for example, 1450–1900 or 800–1492), but it can also identify a beginning point, with the promise of ending in the contemporary moment, a moment broadly or narrowly conceived (for example, 1350–present or 1850–2012). Either way, your chronological markers should do more than delimit decades or swaths of time. Nor should they simply sit in the second half of your course title, the results of a quick decision or the products of available textbooks and source readers. They should serve as orientation devices, allowing students to follow a temporal blueprint that you have designed out of a commitment to tracking specific timeframes, whether epic or quotidian. And chronological markers should act as recurrent pedagogical reference points as the course unfolds, drawing students' attention back to the specific moment in time for all events, ideas, movements, politics, economic developments, and encounters you would have students engage. The dates you choose should, in other words, underscore on a regular basis the temporal contingencies of the histories you are generating—contingencies that mark the global past as much as they do any other history. Chronological markers are foundational, in short, to the architecture of your syllabus. As such, they announce the chronological dimensions of your argument about the scope and scale of world history and provide an opening for sharing your choices and your focus with students.

If you are free to choose your start and end dates, making that choice may seem daunting or vexing. But taking the leap and imposing a temporal frame on the global landscapes that your course animates—thinking about beginning and ending dates—actually takes you to the heart of debates about the when, the where, and the how of world history. In curricula taught in the United States, an obvious point of departure might be 1500—in part because this enables teachers to stage "New World" conquest as a monumental event. That break aligns with older models of medieval, early modern, and modern divisions. Such models can be Eurocentric, but they need not be: "c. 1500" can be a useful pivot point for capturing the simultaneity of the Mughals, the late Ming and the Qing, and (more of a stretch) the Tokugawa era, simultaneous with each other and with the so-called age of discovery. If you are set on a civilizational approach, sometime around 1500 might well suit you. This is especially true if you are willing to view the starting date as somewhat flexible. There's no reason, for example, not to call your course World History from 1500 to the Present, but do an opening session or two on why you chose 1500 as your point of departure and what the world looked like at 1500. One tack is to provide students with a short (or long) genealogy of that moment. Such an exercise might involve using Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas (1492) as a critical antecedent. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) might work just as well; so, for that matter, might a focus on Tenochtitlan in the thirteenth century, two centuries before Cortés. If you want the emphasis on temporality to come full circle, you can talk about how excavations near the city site of Tenochtitlan in the 1970s uncovered the Piedra del Sol (Stone of the Sun), initially believed to be an Aztec calendar. Discussion of the stone's actual function (as an archive of Aztec cosmology) would return you to the history of time measurement before 1500, beyond the West, at the heart of a sophisticated and powerful civilization. In some classrooms, the Piedra del Sol might be mobilized as evidence of "the time of the Other." In other syllabi, it might spark a conversation about contemporary museum display and the reliance of global tourism on the "ruins" of the past. Or a conversation might begin about the sense of difference between us and them that tourism tends to produce.

Before you put your stake in the ground at any particular place, you might want to consider other possibilities for the parameters of your world history syllabus. Work by scholars like Janet Abu-Lughod and Andre Gunder Frank, for example, suggests that there is good reason to push the start date back a few hundred years before 1500, in order to get outside the New World-Old World dyad and to think about the premodern world as multiaxial—to think about it more precisely as global, rather than as operating from the presumption that the modern and the global are necessarily synonymous or in lockstep. Here the example of Afro-Eurasia—a hyphenated name that scholars like Gunder Frank have suggested captures the intercontinental world of trade and exchange that characterized the fourteenth century and the fifteenth—works well as a spatial device because it dramatizes a very specific moment in "global" time when these regions were interlocked, if not also mutually constitutive. Although this may sound self-evident, students need examples big and small to help them appreciate why such regional formations are contingent on a specific timeframe. Afro-Eurasia is a good example, in part because it was not transhistorical: it animated worldly processes and was animated by them at a specific conjuncture. It models, as well, one form that the global took in world history before modern times. As an example of premodern globality, Afro-Eurasia is priceless...