A Plea for World System History

I plead for writing a world history that is as comprehensive and systematic as possible. It should offer a more humanocentric alternative to western Eurocentrism. This history should seek maximum “unity in the diversity” of human experience and development. Therefore, we should not only make comparisons over time and space, we should also seek more connections among distant and seemingly disparate events at each historical point in time. Moreover, we should systematically seek to systematize both the comparisons and the connections. Thus, our historical inquiry may well find more than comparative commonalities among parts of the whole. We may also discover common features and relations among historical events, which are derived from their common participation in a whole. For the long period before 1492, this “whole” world history should concentrate on the unity and historical interrelations within the Asio-Afro-European “old” “eastern” hemispheric ecumene, stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic—before Columbus (again) crossed the latter. The principal idea I advance is the principle, indeed the imperative, of doing a “macro” world system history. The main reason to do so is that, as the old adage goes, this historical whole is more than the sum of its parts. This holistic principle does not deny the necessary “micro” history of its parts. However, it is necessary to remember that all the parts are also shaped by—and can only be adequately understood in relation to—their participation in the whole and their relations with other parts. Such “comprehensive” macro attention to the whole and its essential structure and