By Paul Horton.
No question is more puzzling to teachers of World or Global History than, when did the modern world begin?
We inherited this question from the hand-me-down versions of Western Civilization and European history that served as the foundations for World History as it gradually evolved away from the “Rise of the West” approach of William McNeill in the 1950s to the decentered (“nonEurocentric”) and delinked Global History of today.
This debate moved to center stage with the recent controversy surrounding the curriculum of the AP World History course. While the new consensus of global historians is that we must move modern to earlier dates to critically assess “connected histories” that suggest that European Exceptionalism is on shakier ground, conservative historians and organizations like the National Association of Scholars argue that the Renaissance still represents a fundamental shift in the course of World History that demarcates “traditional” cultures from “modern” cultures.
When the College Board sought to begin a course revision at 1450, a date corresponding to the beginning of the Renaissance, historians pushed back to demand that the course begin at 1200 in order to incorporate new research on global economic and cultural exchanges that set the stage for the Renaissance.
But, despite this debate, the course still accepts the idea that what we call modern began in Europe with economic and cultural developments in Italy that were diffused to the rest of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and that this new secular orientation was expressed later in the Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment. The bedrock idea of Western Civilization and European History, the idea that Europe invented what is modern, represents the core of the College Board World History course and the central feature of most high school history world history textbooks.
But questions about what is modern will not go away. From within the historical profession much work is beginning to locate characteristics of what can be called modern cultural attitudes in earlier periods all over the world. Other historians call into question the idea that Europe ever existed as a separate entity, that the closer we look, the more we can detect evidence of intercultural exchanges that predated what were thought to be “European” ideas. More recently, historians of Europe have called attention to the possibility that the Renaissance does not represent a break with the past as it was a continuation of a global evolution and merging of ideas from all over the world.
Outside of the history profession, sociologists, semioticians, anthropologists, and linguists have done much to reinforce the idea that Europe may not have invented what is modern so much as Europe forced its own knowledge structures on other cultures.
In this sense, what we call “modern” might be what anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff call the “colonization of consciousness.” In effect, in this sense, the term “modern” becomes a legitimation of a secular European hegemony. While the “rest” has benefitted from what is “modern,” Europe has extracted resources and labor, and has silenced “the Subaltern.” In creating “the modern world,” Europe has created “people without history,” an exploitable peasant “other.”
The sociologist Gurminder K. Bhambra in her Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination, argues that “there is a need to reconsider the conceptual framework of modernity from a wider spatial and historical context, one that regards the very concept of modernity itself as problematic.” She goes so far as to “challenge continued privileging of the West as the ‘maker’ of universal history and seek to develop alternatives from which to begin to deal with the questions that arise once we reject this categorization.” (1-2)
Historian and critical theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty takes issue with the very idea of historicism (the idea that history can explain everything) and western social science, including, very predictably, Weber, Marx, and the modernization theory prevalent after WWII. For Chakrabarty, Western history and social science are constructed in part to obscure the voices and histories of the “subaltern” who experience the world and understand history from perspectives that western historicism and social science cannot grasp. “In Europe itself, it [historicism] made possible completely internalist histories of Europe in which Europe was described as the site of the first occurrence of capitalism, modernity, or Enlightenment. These ‘events’ in turn are all explained mainly with respect to ‘events’ within the geographical confines of Europe…The inhabitants of the colonies, on the other hand, were assigned a place ‘elsewhere’ in the ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’ structure of time.” In this conception of European historicism, everyone outside of Europe is placed in a “waiting room” until they are invited inside, if they ever are invited. (Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 7-8)
Semiotician and Renaissance scholar Walter D. Mignolo goes a step farther to describe what he calls the Darker Side of the Renaissance which is nothing short of the intentional and systematic destruction of native ways of understanding and knowing and replacing the traditional oral and symbolic knowledge of native peoples with the written discursive practices of European letters that were a practice of Renaissance scholarship. According to Mignolo, “[T]he outside of modernity is precisely that which has to be conquered, colonized, superseded and converted to the principals of progress and modernity.” (quote from “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality, and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, 462).
Given the relative obscurity of postcolonial theory and its distance from world history preservice teacher training, world history teachers might wonder, how do I raise these questions with my students?
I have used the following lesson to defamiliarize the idea of modern in discussions with my students. The following exercise asks them to define the terms ancient, classical, early modern, and modern for themselves and then examine descriptions of cities that might contain elements of all of these categories.
Students really struggle with this assignment, but I have found that the struggle is a worthwhile beginning to a discussion that leads into some of the very issues that are raised above.
Lost Cities” Assignment: Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern?
“Google” and read each of the stories below (these brief histories are all published in the British newspaper, the Guardian):
Lost Cities #9: The Great Zimbabwe
For each “lost city” mentioned above answer the following questions after you define the terms immediately below:
Part I: Definitions
Define the following (use the dictionary if you need to)
Ancient:
Medieval:
Early Modern:
Modern:
Part II: Answer each of the following questions for each city
1) Which elements of the description of this city indicate that it is closer to ancient? Why? Be specific.
2) Which elements of the description of this city indicate that it is Medieval? Why? Be specific.
3) Which elements of the description of this city indicate that it is early modern? Why? Be specific.
4) Which elements of the description of this city indicate that it is modern? Why? Be specific.
Part III: Meet in groups to discuss your responses and answer the following questions:
- What made this assignment difficult?
- Was it easy to differentiate between Medieval and early modern? Between Early Modern and Modern?
- Should we change our definitions of historical period? Why? Why not?
- You are attending a history conference and your committee has been assigned to formulate a more “inclusive” definition of “modern.” Recommend and alternative definition to the definition that you used above based on your examination of the cities above. Be prepared to share and defend your new definition.
Paul Horton is History Instructor at University High School, The University of Chicago Laboratory School
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