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David Northrup

Journal of World History, Volume 16, Number 3, September 2005,

pp. 249-267 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2006.0010

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jwh/summary/v016/16.3northrup.html

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Globalization and the Great

Convergence: Rethinking
World History in the Long Term*
david northrup
Boston College

orld historians confront two huge conceptual tasks. One is horizontal integration: how to interconnect in each era the broad
W
range of human experiences around the world. The other is vertical
integration: how to identify patterns in the long sweep of past time.
Neither task is easy, though the first seems to attract more attention.
Despite the limited significance of synchrony in earlier historical eras,
world historians are rightly concerned with this horizontally integrative macrohistory 1 because it challenges perspectives arbitrarily based
on national, regional, and cultural units. We tend to delight in clever
books that recount the variety of human experiences at a particular
moment of time, even though such comparisons may lead to no larger
conclusions.2
Charting world historys vertical or chronological axis has its own
problems and, despite some notable efforts, seems to receive less critical attention. The effort may not appear fruitful, for, as Ross Dunn has
observed, no periodization scheme for world history can intelligibly
* This is an expanded version of the presidential address given at the annual meeting
of the World History Association at George Mason University on 19 June 2004.
1
I first encountered this phrase in Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy
in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 226, where it is attributed to Joseph Fletcher.
2
For example, John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), Olivier Bernier, The World in 1800 (New York: John Wiley, 2000), or
John E. Wills Jr., 1688: A Global History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

Journal of World History, Vol. 16, No. 3

2005 by University of Hawaii Press

249

250

journal of world history, september 2005

integrate all, or even most, phenomena except perhaps at the very

broadest and thus least useful levels of generalization. Whether out of
passive acquiescence or an active global vision, world history textbooks
generally borrow from European history the ancient/medieval/modern
triptych and nearly always divide history at 1500 c.e. 3 A serious discussion of these assumptions seems called for. Just as our colleagues in
the Annales school have discovered deeper meaning in history in the
long term (la longue dure), more of us in world history need to emulate
what David Christian has done in arguing the case for Big History
by concerning ourselves with the structure of ultra-long-term history.4
Although I have been as likely as anyone else to devote more
energy to horizontal macrohistory than to its chronological cousin,
others quests for historys long-term meaning and structure have periodically captured my attention. I had just begun teaching my first world
history survey at Tuskegee Institute in 1968 when I happened upon
Carlo M. Cipollas slender volume, in which he argues persuasively the
simple proposition that global history has been shaped by two revolutions: the agricultural and the industrial.5 The roles of climate and disease in shaping history have also added striking new dimensions to
understanding the past on a larger-than-human scale.6 Over the years
I have benefited from other debates about momentous turning points
in world history, notably the recent discussions over how and when the
West overtook the East, an event that Kenneth Pomeranz has elegantly
named the Great Divergence.7 Such turning points may not always lie
3
Ross Dunn, Periodizing World History, in The New World History: A Teachers
Companion, ed. Ross Dunn (Boston: Bedford /St. Martins, 2000), p. 359. Though they use
different labels, the periodization schemas by Peter Sterns and William Green that Dunn
anthologizes approximate the ancient /medieval/modern model. In contrast, Jerry Bentleys Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History, American Historical
Review 101 (1996): 749770, dispenses with a Middle Age and proposes a division in 1000
c.e. between ancient/classical/post-classical ages and premodern/modern ages.
4
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004).
5
Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population (Hammondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books, 1962).
6
Some valuable works are William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York:
Anchor, 1976); Philip D. Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the
Conquest of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 13001850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Robert
Rotberg, ed., Health and Disease in Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000);
Mike Davis, The Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nio Famines and the Making of the Third
World (London: Verso, 2001).
7
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China
Transformed and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,

Northrup: Globalization and the Great Convergence

251

in the distant past. Tom Friedman has persuasively argued that the
almost simultaneous ending of the Cold War and the rise of the Internet marked the beginning of a new era of history.8
In the spirit of such thoughtful works, this essay puts forward a simple temporal model of world history. It proposes that world history
can be divided into just two ages: one dominated by divergence and,
since about 1000 c.e., an age of convergence. Beginning with the
early human communities in Africa and their migration to the rest of
the world, people honed their survival skills by adapting culturally
to a multitude of different environments. In relative isolation from
each other, communities refined particular specialized technologies,
designed appropriate clothing and food preparation techniques, worked
out differing belief systems and ways of reasoning, developed myriad
languages and systems of writing, and devised distinctive styles of art
and architecture.
But at some point rising forces of convergence overtook those promoting ever-increasing diversity. The changeover was neither abrupt
nor sudden. Forces for convergence had long operated in parts of the
ancient world: regional empires consolidated disparate peoples and
overlaid their traditions with a common culture, world religions spread
universalistic beliefs, and long-distance traders spread ideas and technologies as well as goods. Irregularly at first and then with increasing
force and speed after 1000 c.e., historical forces drew people closer and
closer economically, culturally, and politically. This Great Convergence, as I shall call it, provides a useful framework for understanding
the past thousand years of world history and the phenomena that in
recent years have come to be called globalization.
Like most good (and bad) ideas that I have ever entertained, this
one depends heavily on others work. Direct inspiration for the beginning of the Great Convergence came from reading the introduction
David Eltis wrote for a volume he edited on global migrations:
From the emigration of Homo sapiens from Africa perhaps 100,000
years ago, to the Viking visits to North America, and Chinese and
Arab contacts with the Indonesian archipelago, migration meant in
essence the settlement of the globe. In the absence of continuing
1997); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 12501350
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Frank, ReORIENT. The vast literature on this
subject had been insightfully summarized by Gale Stokes, The Fates of Human Societies,
American Historical Review 106 (2001): 508525.
8
Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor Books, 2000),
pp. xixxii.

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journal of world history, september 2005

exchange between old and new communities, migration resulted in

continual goodbyes. . . . Migrations gave rise to new cultures and societies that remained largely unaware of their place in the increasingly
diverse kaleidoscope of humanity. . . .
A little over a thousand years ago, the broad pattern of dispersion
began to change as peoples in the far west, the far east, and then the
south of the Old World launched extensive transoceanic, or at least
transmaritime, satellite communities, whose existence involved the
maintenance of retraceable sea-borne connections.9

Since nothing in the works that Eltis cited contained any hint of the
global vision behind his sweeping analysis, I recently asked him if inspiration had come from elsewhere than his own fertile mind. His reply
took me aback: he had borrowed the basic idea from an article he happened upon in a copy of Air Canadas in-flight magazine, enRoute. That
source appears less surprising when one learns that the article was written by Canadian historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer, whose brilliant
television series War PBS broadcast two decades ago.10 The particular article is not considered important enough to be listed on Dyers
website or new enough to be on enRoutes, but in a personal communication Dyer relates that it was spun off of an essay he wrote for an exhibition at the LAnse aux Meadows Viking colonization site in Newfoundland. Dyer saw the meeting of the Vikings westward voyages
with the Eurasian eastward movement in eastern Canada about the
year 1000 as the closing of an era. He used the term Full Circle to
describe the coming together of the two migration streams that had
left Africathe one that had turned right into Asia and the other
that had turned left into Europe.11
History and Globalization
If one inspiration for the Great Convergence model is thus derived
from considering a momentous watershed in the forward movement of
historical events, the other inspiration for the Great Convergence

9
David Eltis, Introduction: Migration and Agency in Global History, in Coerced and
Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 1.
10
The print version is Gwynne Dyer, WarPast, Present, and Future (New York: Crown
Publishers, 1985).
11
Gwynne Dyer, Full CircleFirst Contact: Vikings and Skrealings in Newfoundland
and Labrador, 2000, available at http://www.darkcompany.ca/fullcirc/fulcirc1.htm, and
personal communication, 13 May 2004.

Northrup: Globalization and the Great Convergence

253

comes from looking backward through time to discover the origins of

the contemporary globalization. Social scientists and journalists who
address the globalization model generally treat it as a recent phenomenon, produced by the end of the Cold War, the explosion of global
trade, and the spread of high-speed electronic communications. The
World is 10 Years Old, proclaimed Merrill Lynch ads in October 1998;
It began when the [Berlin] Wall fell in 1989. Francis Fukuyama playfully proposed that the resulting triumph of the West marked the end
of history. 12
While respecting the uniqueness of the present age, some historians and historically minded writers have suggested that contemporary
globalization has a much older history. Tom Friedman argues that the
free trade and imperial expansion of the later nineteenth century
formed an earlier Age of Globalization, which was interrupted by the
world wars and global depression. He traces globalization ultimately to
the forces of the Industrial Revolution. Historians such as Geoffrey
Gann, Bruce Mazlish, and Robbie Robertson would push globalizations beginnings back to the era of European expansion that began in
the fifteenth century.13
There is no denying the unique importance of the voyages of Vasco
da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and their followers in tying all the
continents together and setting in motion an ever accelerating interchange of goods, microbes, ideas, and people, but others have suggested still earlier beginnings. In the stimulating collection of essays
he edited titled Globalization in World History, Anthony Hopkins and
his coauthors employ a tripartite sequence: (1) modern globalization
dating from the Industrial Revolution, (2) a largely European protoglobalization era of political and economic integration in the 1600s
and 1700s, and (3) an archaic globalization era with multiple regional
centers and stretching across a very broad swath of history from
antiquity to the seventeenth century.14
12
The Merrill Lynch ad is cited by Friedman, Lexus, p. xvi; Francis Fukuyama, The
End of History? was originally published in the summer 1989 issue of The National Interest and reprinted along with a wealth of other commentary and a valuable resource guide
in Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century: A Reader, eds. Patrick OMeara, Howard
D. Mehlinger, and Matthew Krain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
13
Geoffrey Gann, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 15001800 (Lanham,
Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Bruce Mazlish, An Introduction to Global History,
in Conceptualizing Global History, eds. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1993), pp. 124; Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization: A
History of a Developing Global Consciousness (London: Zed Books, 2003).
14
A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002),
pp. 47; C. A. Bayly, Archaic and Modern Globalization in the Eurasian and African

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journal of world history, september 2005

Although these various attempts to periodize the history of globalization are all useful in some ways, the suggestion here is that the entire
sweep of changes from the completion of the Full Circle to the globalization of today can productively be brought together in the larger
framework of the Great Convergence, which also broadens the scope
of the issues to be treated. The globalization models emphasis on
economic and political systems needs to be combined with the migration focus of Dyer and Eltis, and one also needs to bring in cultural
and social forces that have collided and converged over the past millennium.
Hopkins and company are on the right track in placing the expansion of the West within the broader global convergences underway well
before 1500 and in seeing globalizations deep historical roots. But the
Global Convergence model goes one step further in proposing that
their archaic period can usefully be divided into two periods: one during which converging forces were notable exceptions to the still dominant forces of divergence and a second during which globalization /
convergence became the dominant historical force.
Every historian will recognize that convergence was a powerful element of history well before 1000 c.e. Human expansion was not a oneway flow, moving ever outward from some center. Besides migrating to
new lands, people also doubled back, conquered, and mixed with earlier settlers. Even in ancient times, long-distance trade networks linked
surprisingly distant parts of the world. One of the most noted characteristics of ancient times was the rise of empires that united disparate
peoples, at least superficially, under yokes of military power and common laws, common languages and religious systems, and networks of
trade. Both within such imperial frontiers and across them, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam spread
widely.
While there can be no sharp divide between discrete ages of divergence and of convergencecertainly not one pegged to a conveniently round number in an arbitrary calendarDyer and Eltis are not
alone in seeing 1000 c.e. as an approximate turning point. Middle
Eastern historian Marshall Hodgson saw 1000 as an important dividing line between the classical period of Islamic expansion unified under
the Abbasid Empire and the broader expansion of the multicentered
and interrelated Islamic world of later times. Jerry Bentley cites a con-

Arena, ca. 17501850, in Hopkins, Globalization, pp. 4572. Bayly has expanded this treatment in The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Northrup: Globalization and the Great Convergence

255

siderable amount of literature documenting the emergence of an age of

transregional empires and trade in Eurasia from 1000 that was a transition to the modern age. This polycentric interaction is also central
to William and John McNeills latest vision of world history, which
depicts the centuries after 1000 as characterized by thickening webs
of intensified interaction in the Old World that marked this as an age
of consolidation. 15
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the operations of the
Great Convergence are in clearer focus. This period saw the revival of
trade on the Silk Roads and in the Indian Ocean with important connections to Europe and across the Sahara. Linked in part to this commercial expansion, larger political units arose: the Mongol conquests
(12061283) and Yuan China (12791368), the Islamic empires of
Delhi (12061398) and Mali (ca. 1240ca. 1500), and the founding
of the long-lived Yi dynasty in Korea in 1396. Connected to the rise
of Indian Ocean trade were the African kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe
(ca. 1250ca. 1450) and Solomonic Ethiopia (1270 forward). Meanwhile, the cultural map of the Old World was being altered by the
spread of Christianity in Russia and other parts of northeastern Europe
and the spread of Islam in India, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast
Asia. Yet, because these developments were complex and reversible,
none is a compelling illustration of the process.
Babels Ebb: The Tumbling Tower of Languages
Although rarely given consideration by historians, a fundamental
change in language dynamics provides a telling example of how millennia of divergence turned into convergence. The biblical account of
the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:19 sets the scene. When their engineering skills enabled humans to begin constructing a tower that would
reach to the heavens, the jealous Yahweh reflected, They are just one
people, and they all have the same language. If this is what they can do,
then . . . let us . . . make such a babble of their language that they will
not understand one anothers speech. Rather than attributing linguistic proliferation to divine punishment, historians are more inclined to
15
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and
World History, ed. Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.
181187; Bentley, Cross-Cultural Interaction, pp. 766769; J. R. McNeill and William
H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Birds-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 116ff.

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journal of world history, september 2005

see the causes in human dispersal and isolation. As a general rule, the
number of languages in a region is inversely proportional to its population density. Thus the widely dispersed peoples of the Pacific constitute less than 1 percent of the worlds population but speak 19 percent
of living languages. The isolated valleys of highland New Guinea are
home to a quarter of the worlds languages. On the other hand, densely
populated and interconnected East Asia and modern Europe have far
fewer languages than similar areas in Africa.
The sheer number of languages in the world and the arbitrary gradients that separate them makes an accurate count difficult, but by
about a millennium ago it is estimated that there were some 10,000 or
15,000 languages in use. Today the number of living languages is down
to 6,000 or 7,000, and linguists expect that as many as half the languages now in use will cease to be spoken by the end of the twenty-first
century. Those languages most at risk are those of small, once isolated
communities that are now in closer contact with their neighbors and
the world at large. However, the decline in living languages is not general or headed to single digits. Some six hundred to seven hundred contemporary languages have more than 100,000 speakers each and are
continuing to add new speakers.16 The rise of English as the first global
language is also a clear expression of the present intensity of the Great
Convergence.
The spread of some languages and the decimation of others have
greatly accelerated in the past two centuries, but language consolidation and extinction have been well underway for much longer. The
trend is best documented in Europe, which today is home to the smallest number of established languages of any region in proportion to its
population size. However, a millennium ago, there were some two
hundred distinct languages spoken just in the British Isles. By the sixteenth century the hybrid tongue that evolved into modern English
somehow became supreme and the vast majority of the others were
heading for extinction.17 One could trace similar processes eastward
across the face of Europe as political centralization, public education,
and broadcast media have promoted standardized national tongues.

16
Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 14th ed., accessed at http://www.ethnologue
.com; Frances Karttunen and Alfred W. Crosby, Language Death, Language Genesis, and
World History, Journal of World History 6 (1995): 157174.
17
Richard W. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 2037. The linguistic babel of the later Middle
Ages is nicely captured in the parts of Michael Creightons Timeline (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1999), set in the 1300s.

Northrup: Globalization and the Great Convergence

257

Standardized Asian languages such as Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu,

and Arabic have also achieved dominance on a large scale.
This process of convergence to single national languages (or a small
number of official languages) has not been universal. In sub-Saharan
Africa, for example, little language consolidation seems to have taken
place before 1850, and the creation of national states and national languages since 1950 does not seem to have imperiled many of the continents two thousand spoken languages. Although Nigerias postcolonial
policy of using English as its national language has given it the third
largest number of English speakers of any country in the world, Nigerians show little sign of following the British Isles in abandoning their
two hundred indigenous languages in the foreseeable future. Only time
will tell, but it appears that the current stage of the Great Convergence
is fostering a rising proportion of multilingual people and a falling proportion of monoglots.
The topic of language extinction generates fierce emotions, particularly because those languages that are most endangered are those of
populations that have suffered in other ways from the forces of imperialism and globalization. Both endangered species and endangered
languages are rightly the subjects of efforts to slow or prevent their disappearance. However, in the larger sweep of time, the creation and
extinction of languages needs to be seen as part of a natural historical
process that is analogous to the creation and extinction of species. One
can judge the outcome from different points of view, but there is no
denying that just as divergence fostered the emergence of new languages and cultures during most of human history, that trend has now
been reversed.
The Modern in World History
In addition to highlighting an important watershed in history, the
Great Convergence model fosters a more global conception of longterm periodization. Historians and other researchers are generally comfortable with the application of the term modern to the past two centuries (however much they may differ about what that word means),
and, as was seen above, this time span also works for conceptualizing
the more recent phases of globalization. However, identifying chronologies leading up to modernization in different parts of the world
is more problematic for two reasons.
First, the framework and chronological limits of early modern
that are so deeply ingrained in European historiography do not work

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journal of world history, september 2005

elsewhere, except, perhaps, for colonial Latin America. Indeed, the

traditional idea of early modern may not even be that helpful for
understanding European history because medievalists are inclined to
place the beginning of Latin Europes economic and cultural renaissance in 1200 or even 1000. Moreover, because the European experience was neither global nor primary, the pace of developments associated with becoming modern varied tremendously around the world.
In many places the transition to modern times began well after 1500;
in some, such as China, such trends began centuries earlier. As Philip
Curtin points out:
Between . . . 960 and . . . 1127, China passed through a phase of economic growth that was unprecedented in earlier Chinese history, perhaps in world history up to this time. It depended on a combination
of commercialization, urbanization, and industrialization that has led
some authorities to compare this period in Chinese history with the
development of early modern Europe six centuries later.18

By splitting history at 1000 c.e., the model proposed for the Great
Convergence eliminates the most problematic categories, medieval
and early modern, and their fixed Eurocentric time frames. This division is not entirely unprecedented, even in the West. Oxfords regius
professor of modern history is concerned with the flow of history not
since 1800 or 1500 but since antiquity. Moreover, a great advantage of
centering history at 1000 c.e., as world historians such as David
Christian have already done, is that its length allows for the worlds
different chronologies of modernization to play themselves out at their
own speed and on their own timetables.
The modern era (however defined) is not just a series of changes
within a larger timeframe; it is also a point of view, an interpretation
of the past from perspectives of the present. The Great Convergence
model similarly depends on hindsight and oversimplifies the past to
enhance our ability to make sense of it. The point Christopher Bayly
offers with regard to globalization applies equally well here:
In its most useful sense, globalization is a heuristic device, not a
description of linear social change. It draws attention to dynamics that
transcend the old units of analysis in different academic fields and
attempts to quantify or to model them. While at some periods global-

18
Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 109.

Northrup: Globalization and the Great Convergence

259

ization might appear to be a linear process it was at best a very discontinuous one. Archaic globalization was itself a ruptured process,
set back by the fall of ancient empires and the Mongol invasions.19

Although presentist perspectives risk oversimplifying and distorting history, it is doubtful whether long-term and global history can be
meaningful if each time and place is considered just in its own context. We might have a nice academic debate about this, but once one
brings bright young students into the picture, the jig is up. A key reason why students are increasingly eager to study world history is that
it explains the presenttheir present. Not only does it place them at
the center of things, but it also makes the past a meaningful backlight
to give perspective on the future decades of their lives. In my experience, an introductory history course modeled around convergence and
globalization during the past millennium generates enough student
enthusiasm to atone for its limitations.
Our students are not the only people living in the present; we historians do too, and our fascination with world history is a product of
the forces of globalization in our times. It is no coincidence that world
history is an American passion. From the perspective of the Great
Convergence, world historys popularity in the United States represents this countrys creation by convergent transnational forces and
the fact that the United States has become the primary force for globalization and the primary beneficiary of it. As Daniel Headrick has
put it:
It is no coincidence that interest in world history (in the educational
market) has grown in step with Americas global dominance. . . .
World history is the benign face of globalization. When we [Americans] write and teach world history, we are presenting a world view
that reflects the ideals we have. . . . But globalization is not all benign
ideals. We are not only a diverse and tolerant society; we are also the
900-pound hegemon.20

Headrick goes on to wonder how readily the rest of humanity can

embrace world history when doing so involves cuddling up to the
American behemoth now at its center.
Here is the dilemma that the Great Convergence poses. As Tom
Friedman puts it, globalizations best features are represented by the

19
20

Bayly, Archaic, p. 48.

Daniel R. Headrick, personal communication, 18 January 2004.

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journal of world history, september 2005

Lexus automobile, a superb machine modern industry has created for

a global audience through high-tech global cooperation, and the olive
tree, the fundamental human love of home, cultural values, and particular beliefs. But one can see as well the perils of globalization, in
which the Lexus also represents unprecedented luxury for the elite that
can afford its power, and the olive tree represents narrow ethnocentrism, prejudice, and a zero-sum game. If the Great Convergence has
brought the promise of peace and prosperity, it has also brought the
perils of war, genocide, and hegemonic elitism. Those who would
understand the dynamics of the modern world need to keep these
dilemmas in mind. However much the West has shaped the modern
era, various parts of the world continue to follow different paths and
different chronologies.
Empires and Imperialism
An exploration of the complex trajectories of economic and cultural
convergence would require much more space than is available here,
but the simpler process of political convergence may serve to illustrate
the kinds of comparative and narrative issues that need to be addressed.
Political amalgamation has a very long history, until recent times
largely in the form of empire building. Indeed, survey courses usually
begin with the ancient river valley empires and devote considerable
attention to their successors in classical and post-classical antiquity.
However, modern empire building is rarely examined from a long-term,
comparative perspective, especially not since the rise of anti-imperial
liberation movements that focused attention on such empires shortcomings.
It is striking to contrast the fulsome praise textbooks generally
accord the long-term benefits brought by ancient empires with their
reluctance to acknowledge any positive legacies of modern European
empires. There seem to be three reasons why ancient empires get better press. First, the passage of time has made us much more aware of
their positive legacies and more forgiving of their short-term brutalities. Second, as has often been remarked, winners write the histories
at least until recently. The third reason brings us back to our theme:
in antiquity historians perceived the convergence of commerce, culture, and politics that empires brought as a positive force. Recent historical narratives may no longer praise the conquest and taming of
barbarian, pagan, and primitive peoples, but there is still a pow-

Northrup: Globalization and the Great Convergence

261

erful bias in favor of trade, common languages and religions, and uniform law codes and architectural stylesexcept in modern times! 21
For reasons that appear related to the conflicts and uncertainties that
change always brings, as well as to political orientations, academic historians are inclined to overemphasize the destructive potential of
recent convergence/globalization and to understate its potential for
beneficial results.
In reflecting on why the good British Empire of his childhood had
become an evil empire by his undergraduate years, Niall Ferguson has
raised some larger historical issues. His suggestion that the shift
reflected changing politics more than an advance in historical understanding has been controversial, as has his view that, if political passions are put aside, the empire will be seen to have had beneficial as
well as detrimental aspects, and those who gained and those who lost
from it were not neatly divided by their skin color. Among the enduring positive legacies of British dominion he counts the dissemination
of the English language and of British legal, political, athletic, and
religious traditions.22
In more guarded language, the general editor of the new Oxford
History of the British Empire suggests that, while issues of blame continue to be debated, recent scholarship about the empire is focused less
on winners and losers than on the interaction between British and
indigenous peoples. 23 However, such two-sided approaches are also
hard to detect in textbooks and other popular accounts of the scramble for Africa, which tend to concentrate their attention on aberrant
outbursts of greed and racism, exemplified by such easy villains as King
Leopold and Cecil Rhodes.24 To be sure, greed and racism were conspicuous parts of the process, but (unless one wants to argue that some
eras see more evil forces at work than others) personal moral failings
should be no larger a part of the historical explanation of imperialism

21
David Northrup, Comparative Perspectives on Colonialism and Imperialism,
unpublished paper presented at the Eighth Annual International Conference of the World
History Association, Victoria, British Columbia, 25 June 1999.
22
Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons
for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), pp. xixxvi.
23
William Roger Louis, Foreword, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5,
Historiography, ed. Robin W. Winks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. x.
24
Adam Hochschilds justly celebrated King Leopolds Ghost (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1999) is a good example of this genre, whose accurate detailing of the Congo Free
States many failings is not accompanied by a larger framework to explain how this could
have taken place.

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journal of world history, september 2005

than they are of, say, industrialization or the American Civil War.
Were Leopold and Rhodes really cut from the same cloth as David
Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer?
If the European side gets highly selective coverage, Africans fare
no better in popular accounts. Their role is likely to be confined to
being victimized, and the New Imperialism is frequently presented as
the continuation of a process of European dominance that began with
the first Portuguese mariners in the fifteenth century and continued
through the Atlantic slave trade. Specialists and more thoughtful
world historians take a different approach. The father of world systems,
Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that sub-Saharan Africa was not subordinated to the emerging Atlantic system in the early centuries of European expansion (as the Americas were), but remained external to it
until the mid eighteenth centuryas was also the case in South Asia,
the Ottoman Empire, and Russia.25 More recently one of the foremost
historians of the Atlantic slave trade has put the same argument in different conceptual language. With regard to the establishment of slavery and plantation economies, David Eltis argues, what happened in
the Americas was what Europeans wanted to happen in Africa but
could not bring about. 26 This image of an Africa that was strong and
lightly engaged is in sharp contrast to the weak and victimized Africa
of the surveys and textbooks.
Eltiss argument also suggests that any consideration of the reasons
for the New Imperialism in Africa might benefit from examining Africans inability to continue operating from positions of strength and
from thoughtful comparisons with the fates of other once powerful
states and regions. After all, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, India,
China, and Japan also faced multiple challenges in trying to engage
with rapidly converging economic and political forces in the nineteenth century. By the late 1500s, Atlantic Africans, South Asians, and
East Asians were all trading with the early European mariners freely
and from positions of strength. In China and Japan, centralized states
were able to put limits on the degree of involvement, whereas in India
and Africa, local interests seeking to expand involvement generally
won out over those wishing to limit it. These relations evolved slowly
at first, then changed abruptly in the nineteenth century. For reasons

25
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Expansion of
the Capitalist World-Economy, 17301840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), chap. 3.
26
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 139.

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263

that are much discussed, the capacity of Western societies to impose

convergence shot ahead of Asians and Africans capacities to maintain
a more equal relationship. The Great Divergence of East and West and
of North and South was part of a global phenomenon that needs to be
discussed globally with full attention to all sides in the engagements.
The discussion also needs to include the recent outcomes as well as
early beginnings if the full story is to be told. Thus, the ascendancy of
postwar Japan, the Asian Tigers, and now the Asian giants of China
and India may be seen as reclaiming that earlier, more balanced role,
while the predicament of much of contemporary Africa is eerily similar to the weaknesses evident in the nineteenth century. Africans
deserve sympathy, aid, and protection from gross exploitation, but their
plight needs to be seen comparatively as well. As Friedman puts it,
Poor [African] countries have fallen behind in the globalization age
not because globalization failed them, but because they failed to put in
place even the minimum political, economic and legal infrastructure
to take advantage of globalization. 27 Those who fall victim to the
destructive side of convergence may not be wholly to blame for their
fates, but their societies are not exempt from the consequences either.
Adopting long-term and comparative perspectives on empire building does not minimize the injustices that the New Imperialism brought
nor obscure the base motives of many imperialists, but it does raise
other important issues. One issue is the justification for evaluating the
impacts of ancient and modern empires by different standards. Empires
were not all cut out of one mold, and individual empires clearly exhibited different characteristics at different stages in their histories. The
power of modern weaponry and economic forces and the reach of
modern telecommunications all increase the speed with which change
occurs and the scale on which political forces operate. Yet it seems
doubtful that there is a fundamental divide between the empires of
antiquity and those of recent centuries. Was Alexander the Great
really that different from Rhodes? Was the creation of the British
Empire even half as destructive as the conquests of the Mongol Empire?
It may be that good world historians need to pay more attention to the
destructive aspects of older empires as well as more attention to the
legacies that former subjects of newer empires have found worth
keeping.
The political changes associated with present-day globalization may
also benefit from a long-term, comparative approach. The future is

27

Friedman, Lexus, p. 356.

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uncertain, but fears of convergence leading to homogenization seem

exaggerated. Languages, cuisines, and other manifestations of culture
are leading to greater conformity to fewer standards, as the McNeills
put it, but they also perceive that each part of the world is now exposed
to multiple cultural standards and that the interaction of these cultural
norms promotes diversity.28 At the political level something similar
seems underway. There seems little chance of fulfilling twentieth-century futurologists visions of a single world government. The idealists
dream of a democratic world government now seems as unlikely a
prospect as does the alternative scenario of a global empire, long a staple of futuristic fiction. Rather than leading to fewer options, globalization and the Great Convergence seem to lead to more connections,
a web of interrelations among many centers of power. The overwhelming characteristic of political globalization is not centralization of the
sort once found in the Soviet Union but decentralization, what Friedman calls the four democratization trends evident in recent globalization: democratization of technology, finance, information, and decision
making.29 Instead of one world government or an all-powerful American empire, there is a growing trend for disparate international governmental organizations to set policies, make regulations, and impose
penalties on once autonomous nations. At the same time, the world is
criss-crossed by a growing number of international nongovernmental
organizations whose political impact may rival that of official governments: transnational corporations and churches, charitable and environmental organizations, professional societies, and human rights
groups. There are some fifty thousand nongovernmental, not-for-profit
global organizations, and they hold some five thousand international
congresses yearly.30
Teaching Divergence
As its name proclaims, the Great Convergence model is more concerned with interpreting events since 1000 c.e. than those before that

McNeill and McNeill, Human Web, p. 317.

Friedman, Lexus, pp. 4472. Raymond Grew, On the Prospect of Global History,
in Mazlish and Buultjens, Conceptualizing Global History, p. 234, also argues against confusing globalization with homogeneity.
30
John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
p. 5.
28
29

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265

date. Before this essay concludes, however, it is worth asking how much
light the model throws on the understanding of world history before
that date. Even if the term Great Divergence were not already in use
for a different purpose, it would be of questionable utility in explaining
the immensely long trajectory of late and classical antiquity, the agricultural revolutions, and the earlier millennia of human existence
except in one respect. Even so, it is startling that historians generally
and world historians in particular are so neglectful of forces for divergence in antiquity. Rather than following linguists and biologists in
examining divergence in all its forms, most historians of the period
before 1000 devote nearly all their attention to examples of convergence: the formation of centralized empires and religious systems, cultural zones and civilizations, and city-centered trading networks.
The bias against treating the divergence theme is so profound that
even when empires fall and belief systems fragment too spectacularly
to be ignored, these events are generally presented as regrettable and
exceptional rather than as natural expressions of the eras dominant
theme. Moreover, it seems likely that one reason why so many longterm surveys disregard history before agriculture and especially before
agriculture-based empires (the history-begins-at-Sumer approach) is
the impossibility of fitting these profoundly important and profoundly
long periods of early human history into the cherished framework of
political and cultural convergence.
One cannot dispute that the theme of convergence is far easier to
grasp and teach than that of divergence. Convergence appeals to a profound human desire to find pattern and order in even the most diverse
and chaotic situations. The emphasis is observable in the section headings of every world history textbook, my own included: regional convergences and interregional connections grow ever stronger until in
1000 or 1500 global consolidation takes a firm hold. This emphasis on
convergence is neither fanciful nor wrong-headed. Convergent forces
were gaining strength well before 1000, and their importance in shaping the modern world needs no apology.
The issue is not that convergence deserves less attention but that
world history loses something important in neglecting the theme of
diversity. A hint of what is lost comes from another great recent curricular change in the United States that parallels the growth in world
history: the rise of specialized ethnic and minority histories. To pioneering black and Jewish studies programs have been added those of
various Hispanic, Asian, and Native American groups as well as the
Irish, Italians, and other European groups. In addition, pioneering

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womens studies have given rise to studies of gender and sexual orientation. In some cases the two trends are combining. On a recent trip
to southern California, I found that the Chicano history that was just
emerging when I was a graduate student in the 1960s has been joined
by Chicana history and gay Chicano and lesbian Chicana histories.
On the surface, such programs may appear incompatible with world
history. World history struggles to write a meganarrative of all humanity, while ethnic and minority studies focus on the diverse histories of
different groups and the things that separate them. Despite these divergent tendencies, world historians in the United States are generally
sympathetic to the growth of such studies. In part this seems to be due
to the fact that, by challenging the primacy of a melting-pot national
history, diversity studies foster the acceptance of a larger integrating
narrative that ties American minorities to the wider places and
themes that helped create them. But it seems a more profound point
can be made. Just as world history is a response to the enormous convergence of human experiences in this age of globalization, the spread
of diversity studies in the United States (and subnational ethnic movements in Europe and elsewhere) also reflects the fact that globalization
both poses challenges to particular identities and permits easier expression and celebration of differences. Despite widespread fears of Americanization (even in America), there is clear evidence of vibrant
cultural diversity in our globalizing world and in the existence of multiple centers of local, regional, and global cultural influence.31
If one were to apply this insight to the teaching of premodern history, the strategy would be to show how divergence and convergence
interact. Just as in the contemporary period diversity studies and movements represent a strong reaction against national and international
homogenization, so too in earlier ages one needs to stress that sustained efforts to promote universal religions, long-distance trade and
trading languages, and imperial systems arose in reaction to the enormous diversity, isolation, and parochial norms of the times. We must
guard against both excessive denigration of convergent forces in our
own times and excessive celebration of them in ancient times. For
throughout history, it is the complex interactions of these forces that
need to be considered if we are to make sense of the past and present.

31
See the many examples in Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Many
Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003).

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Conclusion
The Great Divergence model simplifies but does not directly challenge
most existing conceptions of history. By moving the beginnings of the
modern era back five centuries, it allows for the changes associated
with modern to be regionally defined and recognizes that they were
often discontinuous and operated on different schedules in different
places. The Great Divergence is also compatible with the history of
globalization and with world history in general. By proposing a sharper
focus on the dominant changes taking place in different places, it
encourages rethinking global changes in comparative terms and from
a long perspective.
It would be pompous and foolish to imagine that even historians
who are clear-headed and daring enough to have embraced the field of
world history will rush to adopt the concept of the Great Divergence
that is sketched in this brief essay. Historians, like history, are not
inclined to make leaps. The Great Divergence model is not meant to
be a resolution of historys mysteries but a challenge to reexamine
large issues and long trajectories from its novel perspective.
Whether one views rising global interaction through the long lens
of the Great Convergence or the shorter one of globalization, its importance cannot be denied however much it may be debated. The long
perspective of world history can contribute greatly to global understanding. Putting aside present realities to study the different realities
of earlier times is a part of this. Equally important is acknowledging
that the impulse to teach world history is itself a product of our times
and to use the peculiarly intense convergence of our age to focus
attention on the long historical trajectory that helps us understand
the present and contemplate the future.