The Prospect of Global History

Product Information

List of Figures 2.1 he Anglo-American wheat trade, 1800–2000 2.2 Spice and cofee price gaps, Amsterdam relative to Southeast Asia, 1580–1939 2.3 Real (CPI-delated) pepper prices, 1400–1600 2.4 he wage-rental ratio in England, 1500–1936 between 1815 and 1914.19 Table 2.1 gives Anglo-American price gaps for a variety of commodities between 1870 and 1913. In the case of agricultural commodities such as wheat and animal products, British prices were higher than American ones, so the price gaps are the percentage by which the former exceeded the latter. In the case of industrial commodities such as cotton textiles or iron bars, American prices were higher than British ones, so the price gaps quoted are the percentage by which prices in Boston or Philadelphia exceeded prices in Manchester or London. In nearly all cases (sugar is the outstanding exception) price gaps fell, indicating that transatlantic commodity markets were becoming better integrated. Nor was price convergence limited to the North Atlantic. Between 1873 and 1913, the Liverpool–Bombay cotton price gap fell from 57 per cent to 20 per cent; the London–Calcutta jute price gap fell from 35 per cent to 4 per cent; and the London–Rangoon rice price gap fell from 93 per cent to 26 per cent. Between 1846–55 and 1871–9, during which period Japan was opened up to trade with the rest of the world, the Japan–Hamburg nail price gap fell from 400 per cent to 32 per cent, and the reined sugar price gap fell from 271 per cent to 39 per cent.20 In the nineteenth century, such declining price gaps were ubiquitous, and often quite dramatic. hey involved all continents, and manufactured goods as well as primary products. Exceptions are rare, and where these occur they involved, as often as not, the intervention of governments trying to substitute ‘artiicial oceans’ 19 O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History. 20 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 404–5. Preface We envisage this volume as the irst in a new series in global history which is characterized by historical depth, a wide geographical range, and the concrete application of diferent approaches to global history, engaging with multiple methodologies, coming from an interdisciplinary perspective, and teasing out connections and their limitations by asking challenging questions. Some of these ideas are explored in this volume. he Editors

Global history seems to be the history for our times. Footnote 1 Huge syntheses such as the seven-volume Cambridge World History or the six-volume A History of the World suggest the field has come to fruition. Footnote 2 Robert Moore, in his contribution to the book under review, The Prospect of Global History, is quite confident in this respect: if there is a single reason for “the rise of world history”, it is “the collapse of every alternative paradigm” (pp. 84–85). As early as 2012, the journal Itinerario published an interview with David Armitage with the title “Are We All Global Historians Now?” Footnote 3 That may have been provocative but Armitage obliged by claiming “the hegemony of national historiography is over”. Footnote 4 List of Maps 7.1 Long-Distance Trade Routes and the Islamic World, c.1500 7.2 he Expansion of Muslim States and Populations, 900–1700 7.3 European Domination and the Muslim World, c.1920 ships, but pursued prey, accepted risk, and carried guns and diseases as well as any. Mughal expansion into India, Islam’s America, might just be the greatest postplague spread of all. Morocco, which did have plague and guns, conquered a large chunk of West Africa in the late sixteenth century, projecting its power over 1,700 kilometres.52 Giancarlo Casale has recently demonstrated that the Ottoman Empire was not inactive or unsuccessful in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century, and it established substantial domains in East Africa.53 But the Ottomans already had a vast empire, including most of southeast Europe. Like China, it did not need to chase furs or ish; other peoples brought them to it. Unlike Europeans, it was not squeezed out of the Mediterranean slave market; it was doing the squeezing. Instead, it became the anvil on which European expansion had to hammer itself out. 52 Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250–1800, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 57. 53 Giancarlo Casale, he Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). and Americanization were tried and eventually abandoned. Congress had little incentive to give imperial afairs priority over the pressing concerns of domestic voters. he insular possessions had no right to vote in mainland elections and were too insigniicant to make an impression on the wider public. he empire became a problem when, unexpectedly, it resisted the agents of freedom; once acquired, it became an increasing burden involving tarif subsidies and military commitments. Congress ignored its obligations as much as it could, and refused the funds needed to create a Colonial Oice and inance development. Professionally trained personnel were in short supply; governors were appointed for political reasons, either to be rewarded or exiled; few stayed in the job for more than two or three years. In these circumstances, crucial aspects of policy were decided not by the needs of the civilizing mission, but by the power of competing lobbies. he American colonies were typical in producing primary products, notably cane-sugar. Republicans favoured reiners on the east coast, who wanted free entry for raw sugar; Democrats supported beet and southern cane producers, who wanted protection against outside competition. he fate of colonial producers thus rested on the electoral cycle, as well as, of course, on uncontrollable changes in international demand. hey competed among themselves and with global producers elsewhere in a market that was steadily weakening throughout the twentieth century as a result of overproduction. Tarif concessions provided subsidies that could make fortunes, or, if withdrawn, break them. he result was a paradox. Formally, US policy aimed at preparing its overseas territories for self-government; efectively, the insular possessions became increasingly dependent on the mainland through the tarif advantages they enjoyed in the US market. Contemporaries were aware of these features from the outset. In 1902, Elihu Root, then Secretary of War, commented that: Philippine questions are so interwoven in the political game that the most curious results follow combinations of inluence . . . . Among a large part of the gentlemen who are actually discussing the subject, the question, ‘What will be good for the Philippines’ plays a most insigniicant part.18

Article contents

Takii Kazuhiro, he Meiji Constitution: he Japanese Experience of the West and the Shaping of the Modern World (Japan: International House of Japan, 2007), p. vii. 9 I owe this information to my Princeton colleague, M’hamed Oualdi. 10 Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially pp. 7 and 191. Muslim expansion to 900 Muslim expansion to 1300 Muslim expansion to 1500 Muslim expansion to 1700 Muslim lands lost by 1300 Muslim lands lost by 1500 Muslim lands lost by 1700 Source: Stephen N. Broadberry, ‘Accounting for the Great Divergence’, LSE Department of Economic History Working Paper 184 (2013), p. 23. Bukhara and Samarkand as a bridge between Persia and Gansu.36 Although this project failed, Jesuits in Persia, relying in part on Armenian merchants, were able to augment overland itineraries from Isfahan to China via India and Siberia with a third running through Herat, Balkh, Bukhara, and Turfan.37 Another scholar sifting the various currents of information at Beijing in this period was Chen Lunjiong. His father, a Fujianese merchant with experience abroad, had advised the Qing court on how to capture Taiwan in 1683 and was rewarded with a high position in the Qing military. French Jesuits, in a 1717 letter home, described their debates with him over his ierce opposition to Christianity. Chen Lunjiong, whom he had once taken on a mission to Japan, served in Kangxi’s bodyguard in the early 1720s and around the end of that decade composed an account of the eastern hemisphere. Although principally concerned with the maritime world, Chen’s map and text described Central Asia, including the Caspian Sea, Siberia, and territories he described as ‘Galdan’ (the Junghars), ‘Samarkand’ (Muslim Central Asia), and Persia.38 Chen seems to have had conidence in his knowledge of Central Asia, for in 1736 he memorialized about Siberia’s important strategic position relative to the Junghars.39 Chen’s case reminds us that Inner Asian developments were by no means overlooked on the maritime frontier. Galdan’s death in the foothills of the Altai on April 4, 1697, irst reported to Kangxi on June 2, was reported at Nagasaki by a Chinese ship that had put to sea from Ningbo on July 14.40 Taken individually, none of the conduits of information reviewed here is a certain source for Ghombojab’s list of the ‘sons of Chaghatai’. his is perhaps not surprising. A year after Ghombojab completed his work in Beijing, another genealogy of the descendants of Chinggis, the Histoire Généalogique des Tatars, was published at Leiden. his was the work of Abu ’l-Ghazi Bahadur Khan (1603–63), ruler of Khiva, like Ghombojab a historian and descendant of Chinggis. he content of his work was gleaned over the course of a life in which he had travelled throughout Central Asia and lived in Persia and among the Qazaqs and Torghuts (Kalmyks). Originally written in Chaghatai Turki, the text was interpreted into Russian by a Muslim scholar, and then into German by Swedish prisoners of war. If it is, as the modern scholar Bertold Spuler has judged, ‘widely defective for the earlier periods’, this is surely due to the heterogeneous sources from which its author assembled it.41 It seems likely that Ghombojab’s work was formed by a comparable fusion of diferent sources of information ricocheting around the Qing Empire, particularly Kangxi and Yongzheng-era Beijing. 36 For an overview of these Jesuit eforts see Felix A. Plattner, Jesuits Go East, trans. Lord Sudley and Oscar Blobel (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1950), pp. 166–215. 37 [Jacques Villotte], Voyages d’un Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jesus, en Turquie, en Perse, en Armenie, en Arabie, & en Barbarie (Paris: J. Vincent, 1730), pp. 643–5. 38 Chen Lunjiong, Haiguo wenjian lu (no location: no publisher, 1730), 1.28a, 41b. 39 Qing shilu, vol. 9, pp. 516–17 (QL 21.32b–33a), QL1/6/29 (6 Aug 1736). 40 Hayashi Shunsai, Ka-I hentai (Tokyo: Tōyō bunko, 1959), vol. 3, p. 1921. 41 Cliford E. Bosworth et al (eds), he Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1967), vol. 1, p. 121.

Let us take a brief example of a possible comparative study, one with little discernible evidence of transnational inluences associated with it, the relation between military elites and civilian elites in pre-modern governments. (Here, the object of comparative attention has to be whole political systems.) All developed polities rely on organized military defence, and thus have armies which tend to dominate coercive power; military leaders are thus normally major political players. But all developed polities also need trained and expert oicials to run them, whose careers are not typically focussed on the battleield. Furthermore, all developed polities have various levels of landed aristocracy, which, particularly (but not only) in the pre-capitalist world, tend to have their own direct access to political power, thanks to their private wealth. How did all these interrelate in the past? he Roman empire had two levels of landed aristocracy, focussed on the cities of the empire and on the capitals, which were both characterized for the most part by a very strong civilian culture, based on a literary education; both furnished the personnel for the civilian bureaucracy. he army, although perfectly capable of replacing emperors by coup, was relatively marginal to the standard career-structure of the other elites; although it was, as a result, rather more meritocratic too, wider social status depended more on wealth and education than on arms. Rome’s Byzantine successor, however, although maintaining much the same form of state, after c.800 developed a military rather than a civilian aristocracy; as a result, given that aristocrats could and did gain education and civilian training as well, there was a much closer link between civil and military careers, and military expertise had a much higher status—even emperors composed manuals of military strategy. In China, often compared to Rome, the aristocracy was more military under the Han and Tang dynasties than it was later, under the Song and Ming. In China career bureaucrats were more often called to arms than under Rome, but a separation of roles is clear by 1000, in the Song period, with local aristocratic elites more directed to the bureaucratic career-structure, and civilian/educated (‘mandarin’) values, than to the military one, which was relatively culturally marginal—Song China being in this respect more similar to Rome than was the Han dynasty with which it is most often compared. he Arab caliphate and its medieval successors in the Middle East from Egypt to Iran, at least after c.860, was dominated politically by military leaders and their clients—themselves often future leaders—who had great power but rarely any landed base or élite origin; here the educated landed elites either provided bureaucrats who were subjected politically to army leaders, or restricted their political ambition to provincial-level politics. his did not lead to a hegemony of military values, however, but rather to two cultural and political worlds which had relatively little to do with each other, except at the interface between politico-military strategy and governmental expertise (the level at which military and civil were linked everywhere, that is to say). Finally, in the smaller and simpler polities of medieval Western Europe, where landed aristocracies were fully militarized and bureaucracies fairly sketchy until the thirteenth century, military values reigned supreme as secular status markers; even after c.1250, when states and thus their oicials were more powerful, any secular leader needed to have a military training, and only a speciically ecclesiastical career (which usuallyMore than a generation later, Governor heodore Roosevelt, Jr, conirmed Root’s judgement. Writing in the light of his experience in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, he stated in 1937 that he could not ‘conceive of the United States having a consistent, long-range colonial policy’, and added that the Republic would continue ‘to it our policies in the islands to our own internal political opinions’.19 Of course there were dedicated oicials and some achievements: roads were built; education was encouraged; health provision was improved. It is hard, however, to argue that the American development efort was superior to that of the other Western empires. It was certainly no more popular, despite impressions to the contrary. US troops were not greeted as liberators. Fierce resistance in the Philippines lasted for a decade after the United States declared, in 1902, that it had 18 Quoted in Perkins, Denial of Empire, p. 204. 19 heodore Roosevelt, Colonial Policies of the United States (London: Nelson, 1937), pp. 195–7.

G L O B A L H I S TO RY ’ S N E E D F O R T H E O RY he vision of global history shared by many contributors to the present volume is far from that of an insular sub-discipline settling down into complacent self-suiciency. It is important to emphasize this point since the growth and internal professionalization of a new ield, and especially a successful one, tend to strengthen its sense of autonomy. he very ability to draw upon one’s own intellectual resources seems to be the hallmark of emancipation from a paternal master discipline. Yet, as this chapter will argue, such proud independence relects only in part the achievement of maturity. In more than one sense it is an illusion. Global History1 has to feed on conceptual inputs from outside its own purview. A major source of theoretical inspiration is historical sociology. his diagnosis partly results from the situation of Global History in Germany, to some extent also in Austria and Switzerland, a situation that may be representative of a much greater number of countries.2 Reconstructing the development of Global History only in view of the Anglophone experience provides a somewhat distorted picture. In the German-speaking countries, Global History has evolved neither from imperial history, as in Britain, nor from Western Civilization courses, as in the United States. he old German tradition of world history, from the Göttingen Enlightenment— with August Ludwig Schlözer as its main representative—to the Weimar Republic,3 was virtually defunct by the late 1980s, and Marxist approaches—the most important alternative route to a universal view of history—were thoroughly discredited after the collapse of communist East Germany where historical materialism remained the Figure 2.3 Real (CPI-delated) pepper prices, 1400–1600 Source: Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jefrey G. Williamson, ‘Did Vasco da Gama Matter for European Markets?’ Economic History Review 62, 3 (2009), pp. 655–84, p. 668. excluded people from the highest levels of political leadership) could exempt the ambitious from it. hese ive examples were all long-lasting and stable political systems (stability being here measured by the survival of the system, not of its individual leaderships—all these political systems in some periods and places, third-century Rome, tenth-century China, fourteenth-century Egypt, ifteenth-century England, had very short-term leaders, who died by violence). hey had in many respects similar political structures—the most distinct was probably the medieval west, which had much simpler structures until the fourteenth century or so. he military vs. civilian balance was not, then, itself of structural signiicance for their durability: an observation which already runs counter to some of the local historiographies for each of these large regions. It should also be clear, even from these highly summary descriptions, that the involvement of the landed aristocracy in military activity, or its absence, was fundamental for determining the parameters of socio-cultural status in each of these systems. Only in the Islamic world, with its unusually total separation between the military and the civilian worlds (in some Islamic polities, ruling military elites were exclusively recruited from abroad), were the military values of non-landed groups not marginal to the rest of society; indeed, only in the Islamic world did landed aristocrats not dominate political practice and most political power. But we can also see that the varying association of much the same elements led to wider political practices whose dynamics were quite distinct. To push this further, we would of course have to add more parameters: the role of taxraising in each system, or the level of centralization (how far did people look to the capital and the supreme ruler for advancement and cultural leadership in each system, and how important were provincial leaderships). We could of course also add more examples; Japan, the Guptas, the Khmers, the Aztecs, would all add variants on these basic patterns, to nuance our hypotheses and our explanations. But we can get a long way in posing, and sometimes answering, questions about how political systems worked in the past by developing just the examples presented here, in a comparative analysis. Looked at with a comparative eye, every society of the past, across the globe, gives us a new set of questions to pose of other societies, and a new set of alternatives. he global becomes, indeed, an array of possibilities. Every society has paths not taken; which, and why? Comparison allows us to see which they might be, and in which ways the ‘normal’ can be reigured as the atypical. he grand narratives which dominate our historiographies will often dissolve as a result. Not always; some of them are strong enough to resist. But the proper testing of each of the storylines which historians like to construct for the past is a testing which encompasses all the possibilities which global comparison can bring. CONNECTEDNESS he history of connectedness, strictly, perhaps, of uneven or diferential connectedness, is, inally, the most distinctive terrain of the global historian. It follows that For two recent studies on connections between distant sectors of the Qing frontier see John Herman, ‘Collaboration and Resistance on the Southwest Frontier: Early Eighteenth-Century Qing Expansion on Two Fronts’, Late Imperial China 35, 1 (2014), pp. 77–112; Matthew W. Mosca, ‘he Qing State and Its Awareness of Eurasian Interconnections, 1789–1806’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, 2 (2014), pp. 103–16.in terms of Islam, there should be no problem. Indeed, the religiously based systems of connectedness in the Muslim world are an important global story. S H A R E D WO R L D S O F K N OW L E D G E A N D E X P E R I E N C E In the following section, I will highlight those potential global history subjects which low from research on the Muslim world: storytelling, astrology, and astronomy, and the impact of commodities. constitutional history—the one an almost over-fashionable mode of enquiry, the other not fashionable at all—can proitably be pursued in tandem, and I will focus mainly on the long nineteenth century. First, I want to stress the importance of approaching written constitutions as texts, which share many points in common with other forms of manuscript and printed writing. Second, I want to argue that the rapid spread of these instruments was due in part to their capacity for serving diferent and by no means always emancipatory political projects and conigurations. Finally, I want to glance at some of the changes in the geography, forms, and repercussions of constitutions occurring from the 1860s onwards. S P R E A D I N G T H E WO R D he contagion of constitutions has been a heterogeneous phenomenon. Written constitutions have varied markedly in length, durability, format, provisions, and in terms of the aims of their makers and the political systems embedded by them. In the United States and in much of Latin America, constitutions worked from the outset to create and perpetuate republics; but, elsewhere in the world, the majority of these instruments coexisted before 1914 with forms of monarchy. he diversity of written constitutions has unavoidably also been a product of linguistic diference. he most common Japanese word for ‘constitution’, kempo, meaning rules and regulations and itself a compound derived from two Chinese characters, does not have the same political connotations as the Anglophone term; and some regimes anyway consciously shied away from employing the word ‘constitution’ or close equivalents.8 he document granted by the restored Louis XVIII in France in 1814 was explicitly a chartre, so as to distinguish it from its Revolutionary and Napoleonic predecessor constitutions; while the Tunisian ‘constitution’ enacted in 1861 and dismantled three years later was not even called a Dustûr (the Arabic word later used for a Constitution) but rather seen as qanûn (laws).9 Such multiple variations might seem to preclude any useful examination of constitutions across diferent chronologies and geographical contexts, and this kind of argument is sometimes made. A recent valuable set of essays on the Age of Revolutions explicitly rejects any ‘difusionist model’ in regard to democratic movements in diferent parts of the world, stressing the importance rather of paying close attention to local experiences and ‘difering institutional environments and political cultures’.10 Yet this sets up too stark a binary. To a greater degree even than is usual, in regard to constitutions, states and empires ‘lie Wheat Meat and animal fats Cotton textiles Iron bars Pig iron Cotton Coal Copper Hides Wool Tin Cofee Sugar

the success of US policy in the Philippines, even though a long war of resistance to American rule had still to be concluded: I believe I am speaking with historic accuracy and impartiality when I say that the American treatment of and attitude toward the Filipino people, in its combination of disinterested ethical purpose and sound common sense, marks a new and long stride forward, in advance of all the steps that hitherto have been taken, along the path of wise and proper treatment of weaker by stronger races.16 Med Tabriz it Eu Granada erranAthens ph Baghdad Tunls ean Herat ra Damascus S tes Fez ea Isfahan Kabul Jerusalem R P Cairo Basra ers ia n Gulf Medina Se lists of spaces, people, and events that are somehow linked to each other.85 However, connections alone do not suice to get to grips with the major institutions of the modern era, especially states and the structures of global capitalism. States and, by extension, empires are more than mere networks, as historical sociologists from Otto Hintze to Charles Tilly and Michael Mann have impressively shown.86 And global capitalism cannot be reduced to market integration and commodity lows, disregarding the ‘mercantilist’ intervention of states, the efects of war and the agency of entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers.87 Historical Sociology with its antennae for power and violence, and the processual dynamics of both, can remind Global History that the world has never been as ‘lat’, twodimensional and peaceful as some theorists of globalization tend to suggest. One might go on assessing the convergence and divergence between Global History and Historical Sociology in many diferent ields. here are topics of Global History that cannot be handled in a responsible manner without some familiarity with the relevant social science literature. It is hardly possible, for example, to work on the global history of the family in ignorance of the rich scholarly traditions in the sociology and anthropology of kinship and gender. In other instances, sociologists (and political scientists) will not be able to tell historians much they do not already know. hus while a few political scientists are authorities on the theory of empire, the most important elements of that theory were elaborated by historians—since the time of Edward Gibbon. C O N C LU S I O N : A M B I VA L E N C E he strengths and weaknesses of the respective disciplines vary from topic to topic. In general, Historical Sociology is strong on the methodology of explanation— which is generally not Global History’s forte, while Global Historians in their practice of writing frequently come up with reasonable solutions for problems that seem daunting and intractable in theory, for instance the relationship between processes and institutions.88 he relationship between Global History and Historical Sociology is an ambivalent one. Neither of those two minority ields enjoys comfortable acceptance by its home discipline, and neither is institutionally stable and self-contained. hey are both in search of thematic relevance, intellectual attractiveness, and scholarly stature. Cooperation between the two could be genuinely beneicial, not just a 85 he same concern was voiced from a sociologist’s point of view by Wolfgang Knöbl in his opening remarks at the workshop ‘Macrosociology and World History Writing’, Freiburg Institute of Advanced Study, Freiburg i.Br. (Germany), 10 to 11 February 2012 (unpublished manuscript, p. 4). 86 See, above all, Michael Mann, he Sources of Social Power, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986–2013); the most relevant volume for theoretical purposes continues to be vol. I. A highly original discussion of the history of the state from a global history angle is Charles S. Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014). 87 See as a wide-ranging survey Larry Neal and Jefrey G. Williamson (eds), he Cambridge History of Capitalism, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 88 On that see Karen Barkey, ‘Historical Sociology’, in: Hedström and Bearman, Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, pp. 712–33. Going global does not mean dumping comparative histories in favour of entanglements and connectedness. Indeed, a recurring theme for the field is the xylophone of convergence and divergence. It is laid out in Kevin O’Rourke’s confessions of an economist, which chart the ways in which historical evidence can illuminate economists’ quest for insights into when and how societies broke out of traps and lunged ahead of others, or slipped behind. He makes the case – which more global historians should heed – that prices can tell us stories about the pace, depth, and unevenness of market integration. Included are ways to understand better the winners and losers. These are curious times. Global history is booming. This wide-ranging anthology is one of many that have appeared in recent years. There’s global intellectual history, global conceptual history, global economic history, global ancient worlds, and global crises of the seventeenth century. A casual observer might fairly wonder if globalists are storming the discipline. If they are, it might be a long struggle. Recent evidence of foreign language training shows that the Angloworld is becoming more, not less, monolingual. American universities may not be platforms for Nation-Firsters, but they are becoming more parochial. Area studies are being downsized. What counts as social theory depends ever more on evidence from one country.

See Nicholas Noe (ed.), Voice of Hezbollah: he Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (London and New York: Verso, 2007), especially the introduction by Nicholas Blanford. 20 For an overall argument about modern connectedness see: Francis Robinson, ‘he Islamic World from World System to Religious International’, in Abigail Green and Vincent Viane (eds), Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 111–35. A. Commodity detail Liverpool vs Chicago London vs Cincinnati Boston vs Manchester Philadelphia vs London Philadelphia vs London Liverpool vs New York New York vs London Philadelphia vs London Boston vs London Boston vs London New York vs London New York vs London New York vs London their servants. And since few things are more various than susceptibility to misfortune and the capacity to recover from it, such a survey points us inexorably towards systematic comparison. C O N C LU S I O N If I were to seek a general term to characterize the claims on our attention of the millennium between 500 and 1500 I would plump for ‘intensiication’. It would serve, in the irst place, to distance the discussion of global history from the bizarre but profoundly inluential doctrine which held sway for so long, that intensive economic growth—the sustained increase of real income per head—had been attained only after 1500 and uniquely by Europe and its ofshoots. It would remind medievalists that it is still, though now a good deal ameliorated, their characteristic weakness to pay insuicient attention to the material circumstances of the things they study. It would focus attention on the single most persistent agent of change at most times and in most places, at any rate among sedentary people, namely the securing and distribution of surplus and, more especially, on the necessarily disruptive impacts of its increase on social relations. But ‘intensiication’ would not conine us to those things. It can frame questions that run well beyond them to every kind of increasing (or diminishing) complexity in society and culture as well as in material life. hat includes, for example, the development and application of instruments of government, and their capacity to penetrate small communities and override or support local hegemonies;39 the difusion of literacy and the institutions to sustain it, both topographically and socially; the creation of communities and their forms of association and representation; the extension of priestly power and inluence, the creation of ever-closer networks of shrines and pilgrimage routes and the inculcation of religious mentalities and practices;40 the growth of ‘gentry societies’, their mechanisms of recruitment, exclusion, and mutual support,41 or of merchant guilds or charitable associations.42 All these can be described in their ways as forms of intensiication. All might be considered, at every level, from the clearing of forests to the ruling of empires, from the point of 39 West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution, pp. 109–69; James Heitzmann, Gifts of Power: Lordship in an Early Indian State (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 40 Glen Dudbridge, Religious Experience and Lay Society in T’ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Valerie Hansen, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1126–1272 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Edward L. Davis, Society and the Supernatural in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 41 Leonora Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Chase Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: he Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, 2nd edn (London: Tauris, 2001); Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Robert Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: he Elite of Fu Chou, Chiang-si, in the Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 42 Hugh R. Clark, Community, Trade and Networks: Southern Fujian Province from the hird to the hirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Figure 2.2 Spice and cofee price gaps, Amsterdam relative to Southeast Asia, 1580–1939 Source: Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jefrey G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’ European Review of Economic History 6, 1 (2002), pp. 23–50, p. 33. Writing Constitutions and Writing World History Linda Colley I N T RO D U C T I O N Demonstrating how new written constitutions have progressively afected most peoples across the globe can seem a straightforward enterprise.1 Between 1776 and 1780, eleven one-time American colonies drafted state constitutions. hese had an impact on the US Federal constitution of 1789 which in turn inluenced the constitutions of Revolutionary France, and—along with the latter—helped precipitate new, often ephemeral constitutions in Haiti, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, and elsewhere. By 1820, some ifty constitutions were in being in Continental Europe, and this represented only a fraction of the total number attempted. In Northern Italy alone, at least thirteen new constitutions were drafted between 1796 and 1810. Some eighty more constitutions were formally implemented between 1820 and 1850, many of them in Latin America. In the second half of the long nineteenth century, written constitutions spread conspicuously beyond Europe and the Atlantic world. Between 1850 and 1914, they were adopted—in various forms and with varying degrees of success—in Australia, Japan, China, Tunisia, the Ottoman Empire, the Philippines, and parts of Polynesia and the Malay Peninsula; and attempts were made to introduce them in the hai kingdom of Siam, Iran, and some Indian princely states. Both World Wars sparked intense bouts of new constitution-writing. So, dramatically, did the collapse of the Western European empires after 1945 and the fall of the Soviet empire. Of the 190 or so constitutions now in existence, by far the majority have been drafted or revised in the last sixty years. Every year, it is estimated, men and women in at least ten countries are at work on a new constitution.2 1 Earlier versions of this paper were given at the ‘New Directions in Global History’ conference at the University of Oxford (27–29 September 2012), and the ‘Constitution-writing in the long eighteenth century’ symposium at Princeton University (11 April 2014). I am grateful for the responses on those occasions, and for the subsequent critiques of Jeremy Adelman, James Belich, Peter Holquist, and Jeremy Waldron. 2 Lists of written constitutions are available in Zachary Elkins and Tom Ginsberg, he Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 215–30; and the database of the Comparative Constitutions Project: (accessed 1 February 2015). he Constitutions of the World Online database gives the texts of most of these documents, implemented and abortive, from 1776 to 1849.