I tire of hearing that practitioners of global history do not know what it is. Like scholars in every field, we differ about the remit of our work and specialize in different aspects of it. Enthusiasts for ‘Big History’ start the stories they tell with the Big Bang. Because I see history as a study of culture, I start with the evolution of cultural organisms. Others prefer the emergence of Homo sapiens or later starting points. Some global historians headline peoples’ relations with each other; some concentrate on human interactions with their environments. But a common objective unites all global historians’ efforts to see the past conspectually – to identify, describe and, if possible, understand changes that happen worldwide or, at least, across most of the parts of the biosphere that humans inhabit. Part of the merit of the effort, which makes it useful to all historians and integral to their common enterprise, is that knowledge of the history of the whole world multiplies the range of contexts, comparisons, and connections visible to students of parts of it. Broadly speaking, the wider the context, the more intelligible the history.

Pamela Kyle Crossley’s aim is to sort out our purported confusion or at least, as she says, ‘to introduce the basic theories and methods that have defined global history’ (p. 9) in only 120 generously printed pages. Her method is historiographical: she begins with H. G. Wells, and takes a rapid excursion among a few examples drawn from ancient and medieval cases, before dealing thematically with the efforts of some professional historians, mainly since the Second World War. She recognizes two practical difficulties: what to include and how to categorize it. Her solution to the first problem is,regretfully, to ‘omit ninety-nine items out of a hundred’ (p. 10). Among individual writers, Jared Diamond, Henri Pirenne, William McNeill, Karl Marx, Immanuel Wallerstein, and H. G. Wells get most coverage – not unreasonably, at least in some cases. Among unmentioned contributors are David Christian, Michael Cook, John Hobson, Eric Jones, Donald Lach, David Landes, Patrick O’Brien, Daniel Smail, and Jack Wills. Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong appear only as epicycles to a debate about world-systems initiated by Wallerstein. David Northrup turns up in the bibliography, but only as an authority on African history. Jack Goody and Eric Wolf feature only in an unglossed list of anthropologists ‘who have influenced … large-scale interpretations’ (p. 8).

There is little coverage of environmental history, except in respect of some diseases and implicitly in a brief discussion of rival theories of the origins of agriculture. Crossley entirely ignores the attempted contributions of evolutionary theory and sociobiology, and sidelines the surely instrumental debate about Eurocentrism, which she links mainly to critiques of Marx and Wallerstein. She has some good, clear, critical pages on Cavalli-Sforza, but work on modern global migrations gets no treatment. The background of globalization, which surely influenced the growth of global history as a sub-discipline, has no place in the book, nor has the important ‘World History’ movement initiated among US high school teachers.

Crossley has little confidence in her own categories, which, she disarmingly says, ‘I might have changed … had I written the book a year later’ (p. 10). Her choice is confusing. It is not clear why she ‘lumps’ (her word, in a slightly different context – p. 9) ancient and medieval writers into a single chapter, or why she concentrates within it on mythic constructions of the past. The roles of chronology and prophecy in inspiring historical storytelling find no place in her account. She mentions Priscus but not Orosius. I found it hard to reconcile her lines on Strabo with the text or with what I know of Strabo’s sources, inspiration, and methods. In claiming that ancient historians commonly acknowledged the universality of humankind and that medieval writers introduced characterizations ‘of newly encountered peoples as not human’ (p. 28) Crossley seems to invert or at best oversimplify the true order of events. I do not know from where she gets the idea that José de Acosta argued ‘that Mexicans were not humans’ (p. 30). If he ever made such a remark, it was clearly outside the mainstream of his strenuous efforts to locate Native Americans sympathetically in the panorama of humankind.

Chapters follow on what the author calls ‘divergence’ and ‘convergence’. When David Northrup proposed these terms (in work Crossley does not cite) as useful for constructing a narrative of the history of human cultures, he meant to designate the stories of how cultures grow respectively more unlike and more like each other, or mutually more distant or more reconnected, at different times. Crossley creates confusion by identifying divergence with diffusion – which usually denotes the spread ofcommon culture from its places of origin to other places and therefore constitutes a strand in convergence. For her, equally confusingly, ‘convergence’ denotes developments that occur independently ofeach other in lots of different places, or allegedly universally, whereas cases of convergence are normally and best understood as literally convergent – arising from cultural exchange and reciprocal influence.

Crossley complains that globalists’ ‘primary heuristic device’ is to say that ‘at the beginning of human history, there is more diversity. At the end of human history, there is little or none’ (p. 119), and then gleefully sets fire to this outrageous straw man. Most global historians, I am sure, would say the exact opposite of the opinion that Crossley ascribes to them. It is not clear why she includes William McNeill’s theory of parasitism in her chapter on convergence, or why Hegelian (and, principally, Marxist) interpretations are her only example of ‘many explanations … for … cultural, social and material changes’ (p. 53). She begins a chapter on ‘contagion’ promisingly by treating it as a cultural term, analogous to ‘corruption’ as used by Horden and Purcell, but gets sidetracked into a literal-minded discussion of historians of contagious disease. Her chapter on ‘systems’ is well informed and coherent, but may not be the best place to locate the debate on Eurocentrism.

The book ends with a rather hectoring chapter, called ‘What global history is’, in which the author tells fellow historians what they should and should not do. She accuses us collectively of entrapment in ‘a production of European and American historians who can never make themselves the object of study’ (p. 103). If true, this assertion – coming from a North American scholar, albeit one who has made highly distinguished contributions to Manchu and Chinese history – would invalidate most of the previous hundred pages. It is not clear, in any case, why we should set ourselves such an objective or why those of us who happen to be European or American are peculiarly disqualified from attaining it. She asserts inexplicably that ‘the historian and the writer of global history have little in common’ and that ‘The aspiring writer of global history has little use for the investigatory skills of the historian’ (p. 105). These propositions arise, I think, from fundamental confusion between what history is and what historians are conventionally trained for. Crossley claims that ‘few of us have developed … narratives free of’ Westernist bias (p. 107), while acknowledging that the modern history of the world may be usefully envisaged from a Western perspective. She insists that global historians ‘must bypass … European-derived notions,’ including such useful terms as ‘the West’, ‘westernization’, and ‘industrialization’ and ‘must … have a scheme that is easy to teach’ (p. 119). Confusing (I think) the problem of defining culture with that of identifying a culture, she excoriates historians of cultural exchange on the grounds that ‘If one cannot define a culture, how does one know when one culture is encountering another?’ She closes with an appeal for acknowledgement of the kaleidoscopic complexity of the subject, at which few readers – including those whom she unjustly accuses of imposing simplistic narratives on the diversity of the world – will jib. The book would have benefited from tighter editing: in such a short work, riven by so many omissions, it is disappointing to see much redundant and slapdash language.