Until recently, publication in the field of world history was equated almost exclusively with the production of introductory undergraduate or high school textbooks. This view was not without grounds, for the number of researchers in the field of world history was, and still is, tiny compared with student enrolments. As Ane Linvedt has noted in a survey of world history teaching in the United States, for instance, 66 per cent of high school students took a world history course in 1998, and that percentage has continued to increase as a result of the growing popularity of the Educational Testing Service's Advanced Placement test in world history. Further, 59 per cent of colleges and universities offer some form of course in world history.Footnote ¹ Yet while the number of introductory undergraduate world history courses is on the rise, fewer than a dozen universities offer graduate level programmes in world history and few academics identify world history as their primary field of research. For many undergraduate students in the US, study in the field of world history may be equated with the process of working through a textbook, the more notable of which include Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler, Traditions and encounters, Richard Bulliet et al., The earth and its people and Robert Tignor et al., Worlds together, worlds apart.Footnote ² The most recent curriculum report by the Australian Historical Association paints a similar picture, suggesting that the ever-growing number of undergraduate world history courses serve primarily to address poor student preparation and knowledge:

All of the authors reviewed in this article seek to extend the parameters of world history as a teaching and research field. How they do so varies according to the readers they seek. Migration in world history, Childhood in world history and Religion in world history – three of the twenty titles in Routledge's ‘Themes in World History' series – do so by moving on to the ‘specialised thematic’ ground traditionally located at the end of the ‘shift in the curriculum’ that begins with the world history survey. Only two of the titles in the Routledge series sit somewhat awkwardly under the rubric of ‘theme’: The Indian Ocean in world history and The United States in world history. The appearance of the first of these titles, however, may be explained by the dynamic growth of scholar and student interest in the role of oceans in facilitating global trade, exploration, conflict, and entanglement,Footnote ⁴ while a more pragmatic explanation for the second title is available by noting the size of the US market for world history texts.

The author of Migration in world history, Patrick Manning, professor at Pittsburgh University, is a prominent researcher in the field of world history and the co-ordinator of the World History Research Network. Migration runs as a thread through his many publications on slavery, colonialism, and francophone Africa, and elements of his previous work are certainly present in what is clearly designed to be a text for those unfamiliar with both the topic and the field. Migration in world history is more than a summative text, though, for Manning puts forward a clear case for the consideration of linguistic as well as genetic, textual, and material evidence in the study of human movements up to 50,000 years ago.Footnote ⁵ Languages are subject to ‘genetic evolution’ in that they give rise to ‘daughter’ languages with modified lexicons and grammar. Combining Joseph Greenberg's genetic classification of languages with a ‘least moves’ principle, Manning seeks to use linguistic evolution to track human migration patterns. Simply put, the ‘least moves principle’ entails locating the geographic mid-point that connects a particular group of languages. So, for example, the geographical origin for the romance languages of Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian would be somewhere in north-western Italy.

The model of linguistic analysis that Manning employs also assumes a single ancestor, and that, he argues, makes it more useful in identifying likely migration routes than the genetic studies that have traditionally been more favoured. Linguistic evidence, he argues, allows us to see that human migration began with the movement of populations from equatorial East Africa to the savannas of North Africa, and that people moved from there across the mouth of the Red Sea to South Arabia and then along the shores of the Indian Ocean to the South China sea and then across the oceanic straits to Australia and New Guinea before 50,000 years ago. Further, it allows us to see more clearly that people moved into the temperate zones of Eurasia via the eastern coast of Asia between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago and that the same wave of migration continued into the Americas after 30,000 years ago. Thereafter populations continued to move, and those movements were accelerated by transport and communication technologies. But movements were also hindered by the closure of travel routes due to political instabilities and disease. The cultural movement and mixing that we may be tempted to see as a recent consequence of globalization is thus for Manning a phenomenon much older in the making. Manning's book is a useful reminder to students of world history that much of human experience is not documented through textual evidence, but that nevertheless we can still endeavour to track and understand it.

Manning's reliance on linguistic evidence is a distinguishing feature of Migration in world history, and he shows how more specialized linguistic studies such as Peter Bellwood's First farmers and Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse's African languages might be usefully drawn together to present a longer and more global view of the past.Footnote ⁶ But it is also ultimately a limitation of the work. Manning dismisses genetic evidence a little too readily, arguing that sexual reproduction and the methodologies of collecting and analysing genetic evidence from current populations make the identification of clear migration routes from the past difficult. Linguistic evidence, however, is similarly complex, and the ‘single ancestor’ and ‘least moves’ approach deliver as best what can only be read as a model. Material evidence, particularly for periods prior to the emergence of writing, might also be more fully employed to chart patterns of movement and exchange. More synoptic consideration of genetic, linguistic, material, and textual evidence may be possible in works less constrained by a relatively short book length (here 193 pages), and they would be welcome in a field that tends to concentrate studies of migration on the last 500 years.

If long-term studies of migration are few in the field of world history, then studies of children and the concept of childhood are even more rare. Philippe Aries's argument in Centuries of childhood that the concept of childhood emerged among the upper classes in Europe from the sixteenth century is familiar to many historians.Footnote ⁷ And since the publication of Aries's work in the 1960s, there has been a rather heated debate about whether childhood is a distinctly early modern European concept, and whether its emergence marks a progressive development in human history.Footnote ⁸ Students of world history would surely welcome any work that draws together and extends the now scattered scholarship on the history of childhood. At first sight, Childhood in world history deserves such a warm welcome. The author, Peter Stearns – professor and provost at George Mason University – is an experienced researcher in the field of world history and counts among his many publications works on the rise of consumerism, nineteenth-century social unrest, and the history of the emotions. A more nuanced approach than might be ordinarily expected in an introductory undergraduate text is signalled by Stearns's argument in the introduction that ‘childhood’ is not always commensurate with the experiences of children. It is challenging to write a history of the experiences of children, as there is relatively little evidence left by children, as distinct from the institutions or individuals who look after them. The concept of childhood, on the other hand, is an easier quarry, for it is a concept formed, expanded, changed, and challenged by adults. Stearns's focus is thus adult and institutional perspectives of the ‘roles and functions, discipline, gender, health, material culture, relationships to family structure and … emotional life of children’ (p. 3). Further, he makes it clear that any work promising analysis on a global scale will be to a certain extent unstable because of a tension between variations across cultures and time and phenomena that do not appear to change significantly.

The concept of childhood sketched out in the introduction to Childhood in world history – which surely has the potential to expand or even disrupt scholarship in world history – remains unfortunately underdeveloped in the remainder of the work. This is due in part to Stearns's allegiance to a rather conventional world history chronology, one that places punctuation points at the emergence of agriculture, classical civilizations, monotheistic religions, industrialization, and globalization (pp. 11, 26, 31, 34, 36). With the emergence of agriculture, for instance, Stearns stresses that children are seen anew as an essential labour force (p. 15), and this argument is used in turn to support the now standard – but nonetheless questionable – assumption by world historians that agriculture ushered in gender inequality.Footnote ⁹ Might a thematic approach to the study of world history offer us the opportunity to challenge or expand the standard chronology? Can it provide us with new punctuation points, or even suggest that there are none?

Stearns is also silent on the important question of whether childhood as it is understood now is a product of modernity, and part of wider changes in understandings of discipline, social regulation, and punishment. That is, was the idea of childhood harnessed in recent centuries to serve desires for regulation, including self-regulation? Or has it always been a regulatory concept? Engaging with these questions would have added depth to his concluding remarks on how adult and institutional activities often lead to poor life experiences and expectances for children in developing and developed countries today. Are the problems of child labour and obesity, for instance, twin products of capitalist practices? Further, it would have opened up an analysis of how the concept of childhood has been used by adults to regulate the behaviour of other adults, both in domestic and imperial contexts. This is a topic deserving of more historical analysis, particularly if we are to know whether the construction of others as children or even infants is a necessary part of subjugation. World historians, Stearns informs us, are ‘understandably edgy about discussions that pay too much attention to the West, since one of their purposes is to rebalance historical understanding so that the West does not seem to be running the past’ (p. 54). A more carefully developed account of the history of childhood promises not only to note the experiences of people outside of the West, but also to illuminate the dynamics of international, social, and domestic relationships.

Of the three Routledge titles under review, John C. Super and Briane K. Turley's Religion in world history most departs from a chronological narrative structure. This may be due to them both being new to the field and thus not being burdened by conventional narratological presuppositions. By their own account, though, it is more a reflection of the nature of the topic under study. ‘Religion’ is a slippery and elusive concept, and various definitions by writers such as Durkheim tend to cast the definitional net either too wide or too small (p. 3). Explaining religious beliefs and practices is similarly difficult, with many writers failing to navigate between a Scylla that reduces religion to a private individual experience, and a Charybdis which reduces it to a purely sociological phenomenon. The latter may be particularly attractive for students who have little background knowledge of religious practices in the present or the past. Understandably, then, Super and Turley devote the first chapter of Religion in world history to describing the major tenets of different religions, from Christianity and Islam to Shinto, and to arguing for the shift from ‘religions in world history’ to ‘religion in world history’ on the basis of the definition of religion as numinous: ‘something beyond the human that calls for reference’ (p. 7). The ‘beyond’ alone in their definition raises many questions, but given that the text is designed for undergraduates, it suggests at least an operational model. Having identified many ‘paths’ to religious belief, Super and Turley proceed with a narrative that is heavily definitional, with chapter two, for instance, being devoted to major religious practices and chapter three focusing on sacred texts. Indeed such is the focus on definitions in Religion in world history that there is little space for the discussion of specific historical phenomena or even reflection on how definitions may change over time.

Super and Turley's one major concession to chronology is seen in their use of Karl Jasper's now veritable concept of an ‘axial age’ (Achsenzeit) to suggest that between 800 and 200 bce monotheistic, text-based, and transcendent religions gained a foothold over polytheistic, immanent, or oral beliefs and practices such as Shinto or animism.Footnote ¹⁰ Extending Jaspers, they ask whether the axial age meant the emergence of higher forms or religion or the trigger for secularization. This is a fascinating question, but one that readers are likely to make little headway in answering because of how little is said on secularization in the text, and the surprising absence of any discussion on atheism. As Lucien Febvre showed in The problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century, exploring the territory, boundaries and usage of the idea of unbelief can provide us with important information on the social mores of societies.Footnote ¹¹ Their later, provocative connection between Hebrew tradition and the evolution of science and capitalism (p. 38) remains similarly underdeveloped.

Religion is a topical issue, as is acknowledged by the writers in their argument that the violent acts committed in the name of fundamentalism today are different more in degree than in kind from those of the past (p. 15). They also caution readers to ‘avoid facile stereotypes’ (p. 107) but perhaps fall prey to this problem in their construction of a dichotomy between Islam and Christianity. They argue:

Their few comments on religious art and architecture are similarly broad brush, with them declaring that ‘[a]fter the Enlightenment religion began to lose its artistic compass, and thus much of its spiritual vitality’ and that ‘[m]uch of modern religious architecture is uninspiring at best, and ugly at worst’ (p. 164). These points would be hard for readers new to the field to counter as Religion in world history has relatively little to say on religion and violence in particular times and places, and on the incredible cultural outpourings of religions, from drumming techniques, dances, paintings, sculptures, choral music, films, and even world histories themselves.

While the Routledge ‘Themes in World History’ series is evidently designed to signal and even push for the appearance of upper level undergraduate world history courses, David Day's Conquest: a new history of the modern world seeks a wider audience. That is not a surprising strategy given the international sales of texts such as Jared Diamond's Guns, germs and steel, Bill Bryson's A short history of nearly everything, and the English translation of Ernst Gombrich's A little history of the world and the past successes of Arnold Toynbee's A study of history and Oswald Spengler's The decline of the west.Footnote ¹² Day is known primarily as a biographer of the Australian prime ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and historian of British–Australian relations in the Second World War. Conquest marks quite a departure from these both in terms of period and of cultural scope. Claiming to look across ancient and modern societies in all of the inhabited continents, and noting that the history of the world is essentially the history of migration, Day seeks to answer the question ‘How does a society that moves onto the land of another make that place its own?’ (p. xiii). The answer to this question, he contends, cannot be sought in the concepts of imperialism and colonialism alone because they suggest ‘the political control of distant territory’ and do not necessarily entail peopling and occupation (pp. 8–9). Rather Day suggests that we look to what he calls ‘supplanting societies’; a term that covers both the relationship between metropolitan powers and colonies and cases where societies move into adjoining territories or conquer an independent nation state (p. 10).

Supplanting is a process entailing three overlapping stages: a legal claim to a land, as signalled through practices such as flag planting or gun shot; effective or de facto proprietorship over the land as seen through exploration, the construction of dwellings and foundation stories, collection of resources, and naming; finally moral proprietorship, as evidenced in arguments to the effect that settlement brings a higher order of civilization or moral development. In three chapters, Day elaborates on these stages, looking to Italy and Ethiopia, Germany and Poland, Japan and Hokkaido, Greece and Macedonia, and Britain and Australia, New Zealand and the United States in modern history to identify cases where the names of places and even people were supplanted. Catherine the Great's expedition to Siberia and Japanese control of the Ainu provide examples where conquest is justified as a way of arresting moral degeneracy. Finally, Spanish rituals of conquest, involving reading statements of control and the firing of weapons, provide the focus of Day's account of legal supplanting. Running through these stages, Day later elaborates, is a ‘genocidal imperative’ that is all too often instantiated (pp. 244, 255). This is not only enacted upon prior inhabitants of a land, but also in acts designed to reinforce the existence of distinct sovereign territories. This, Day concludes, binds us to a present and future in which injustice and violence loom large, and he advises that

This is a less than convincing conclusion, for what complicates this picture of the world, are, among other things, empires and – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – multinational cartels and companies. Once they are factored into an analysis of supplanting activities, might Day's twin emphasis on nation states and genocide appear misplaced? Comparison with Manning's work also suggests that a combination of linguistic, genetic, textual, and material evidence is needed if we are to gain an appropriately nuanced and historically sensitive understanding of the place of migration in world history.

A closer look at Day's examples further reinforces the impression that this is a history based on overly limited evidence. Although he draws upon some examples from the ancient world – as with Constantine's use of relics to bestow protection upon conquered spaces – the majority of his examples postdate Columbus's journey to the new world in 1492. That is a pity, for ancient history provides the opportunity to test the robustness of the concept of ‘supplanting’ and Day's distinction between imperialism and supplanting. More examples from modern African history would provide a similar opportunity. Ancient and African examples, in particular, would likely show that Day's emphasis on distance in imperialism fits best the history of British settler societies like Australia. Much wider understandings of imperialism are now on offer, and writings like Ballantyne and Burton's highlight that supplanting may not just take place in physical spaces and texts, but also upon the bodies of those who conquer and who are conquered.Footnote ¹³

A stronger intimation of the transformative potential of cultural approaches to the study of world history is on offer in Geoffrey Gunn's First globalization: the Eurasian exchange, 1500–1800. Gunn is a prolific contributor to South-East Asian historical studies – particularly that focused on East Timor – and his rigorous assembly of primary sources from that region of the world in First globalization makes the text a valuable resource. More than that, though, his determination to consider culture in a field dominated by economically focused texts such as Kenneth Pomeranz's The great divergence and Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient promises the reader novel insights into ‘three centuries of mental struggle to accommodate the new discoveries within the ambit of the various, albeit evolving, European religious and philosophical establishments’ (p. 3).Footnote ¹⁴ Gunn's primary interest is in cultural exchange and asymmetries across Eurasia before industrialization, and in their synthesis in a process of globalization. One such perceived asymmetry that shapes Gunn's analysis is an imbalance in the number of texts published by Europeans on Asia as opposed to Asians on Europeans. This is explained, he argues, both by the greater number of European travellers to Asia, and by their ‘surprise of civilization’ (p. 6). Unlike Asian writers, he claims, European writers were bound by less of a moral imperative, and in documenting their wonderment at the sophistication of religious, cultural, and economic systems they fuelled a craze for travelogues. This, in turn, fed a market for confabulations and literary fabulists that was not paralleled in Asian locations.

Gunn's construction of a European advantage in terms of curiosity about other ways of life and a determination to apply that new knowledge marks out his book as a contribution to what are generally called ‘intrinsic’ explanations of industrialization or ‘the great divergence’. In world history studies at present, intrinsic arguments are outnumbered by ‘extrinsic’ analyses that connect European import substitution industrialization with the acquisition and use of colonies to produce raw materials and receive manufactured goods. Consequently, one would expect that the ways in which Gunn develops his argument – and the evidence he draws upon – would be of great interest to world historians. What is established in the remainder of his text, though, is a detailed descriptive typology of European text types, from travelogues and grammars to cosmographies and maps. Gunn's close treatment of a wide range of European sources will clearly be of interest to research students in search of potential archival sources. But more might be gleaned from the works in the form of a synoptic consideration of why they are evidence of ‘globalization’, how they connect with economic changes and whether a strong argument might be made for ‘unequal intellectual exchange’ as the prime driver of industrialization. In the absence of any extended consideration of Asian texts, it is also hard to see the ‘globalization’ of this text as anything other that assimilation to European modes of thought and production.

A more multifaceted view of globalization as the play of forces of uniformity and divergence, and of the global as inflected by the local is on offer in the edited volume Global history: interactions between the universal and the local. Global history is the second volume edited by A. G. Hopkins, an historian of imperialism and economic history at the University of Texas, Austin. Hopkins's first edited volume, Globalization in world history, made a convincing case for the consideration of ancient and non-western forms of globalization and thus for a global history of globalization. Global history builds upon those advances through a change of scale, showing how the local inflects global changes and vice versa and thus ‘fray at the edges’. The local, Hopkins argues, is not simply an antonym of the global; rather it is ‘partly a matter of degree and partly a matter of perspective. The degree depends on relativities of size and power. Perspective is important because what one observer regards as a locality or a periphery may be, for an inhabitant, a center – even the center’ (p. 9). The local, therefore is at least in part subjective. In eight chapters that range on topics from the Universal Race Congress of 1911, the emergence of a global market for Najavo textiles, Friedrich List and the shaping of the Japanese economy after the Meiji restoration, and attempts in the Ottoman empire to appropriate secular notions of modernization in the service of an indigenous ideology, the impact of individual, national, imperial, and multinational commercial imperatives are examined with due consideration to archival sources and a sensitivity to historical changes. A particular promising dimension of the volume is the persistent reminder that the global is commercial as well as national and imperial. This is expressed perhaps most clearly in Karl Miller's engaging and nuanced examination of the global marketing of ‘local’ music by phonograph companies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Studies such as this serve to support and promote a wider understanding of archival material, and, in turn, a wider vision of global history.

While the relationship between the local and the global is richly explored in this volume, it may be developed further in at least two ways. First, the relationship between the local and the global is somewhat disembodied, as with the other works considered in this review. Global history is more than an aggregate of geographical territories or a consideration of the links between territories. It is also something that may be experienced by individuals, affecting modes of dress, patterns of self-decoration (as with Maori tattooing) and movements through environments. Greater attention to these issues would help to convey that world history is not simply an aggregate of geographical territories. Second, a distinguishing feature of Global history is that all of the contributions but one – a reflective afterword by W. H. McNeill – are by members of the history faculty at the University of Texas, Austin. That this is a local volume is noted all too briefly, and readers may feel that an opportunity has been lost to explore and reflect on understandings of global history in that part of the United States. This is particularly important given the dominance of US-based scholars in the field and the questions raised about the relationship between global history and globalization. Is global history, as Raewyn Connell has suggested, the handmaiden of the ‘metropolitan North’, an approach to historiography that seeks ‘to close down, rather than open up, the self-knowledge of society and to silence the local voices of the “south”’?Footnote ¹⁵

Reflection on the making of global history need not commit scholars to the establishment of a single, agreed definition or even to tame the terminological thicket of world, global, international, transnational, and imperial histories – let alone their ‘new’ variants – which appears to have sprung up in recent years. Indeed such things are probably best avoided, for establishing carefully demarcated definitions is as unhelpful a move as arguing that the global and the local are antonyms. Advancing that global history is more of a research field and less comprehensive than world historyFootnote ¹⁶ gains us little insight for instance, because in practice, these definitions – as Hopkins puts it – ‘fray at the edges’. Very few scholars presently maintain a technical separation of world and global history because they are currently understood to be overlapping approaches. These approaches, in turn, are related to approaches to imperial, transnational, and international histories in the sense described by Wittgenstein's concept of ‘family resemblances’. How each of these approaches is defined or related to others reflects shifting local subjectivities. In short, global and world histories do not stand still. None of the works reviewed in this article are perfect instantiations of world or global history, and nor should we expect them to be so; they are rather, invitations to keep the boundaries of the field moving.