The Weaving Chronicle: Global and World History: Is There A Difference?

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There is a growing trend in Academia and that is the discussion of global history. Global History is a fascinating and exciting field but it does have a few draw backs. You may recall a world history class in high school or maybe one in college. If you were like me in undergrad I took two American history courses and two Western Civilization classes. Global history is slightly different than world history. World History does not quite work the same way.

World history gives a couple of misleading impressions, first for the American students it tends to make them think that main division between studies is American history and world history making American history sound more important than it is. Now don’t get me wrong I am an Americanist and enjoy American history more than any other regional study that History has to offer. However, one does have to acknowledge that there are older civilizations than that of the United States. A global perspective tries to put the history of the United States in the context of the rest of the world. World history gives the impression to be monolithic. It shows that civilizations rise and fall without much connection of one to another. “Global history is superior in this sense because it recognizes that civilizations are not static, they fight each other, trade with each other, convert each other and infect each other.”[1] Global history can use a number of approaches in its study, Social history, Military history, economic history, intellectual history and of course Cultural history. It allows historians to see the big picture, how different civilizations have interacted and how ideas, like Industrialization and Globalization, go from Europe to Asia and vice versa. Large complicated narratives can streamlined and studied as a big picture history.

Global history is a useful tool to historians but, just like anything else, there is a tradeoff. Some of the challenges for a historian using Global History is that it streamlines those large historical questions but, it can lose some of the intricacies of the argument. Smaller details can be lost, Global history is not as good at looking at smaller stories. The type of stories better told trough micro-histories and biographies. Cultural history can be done but it is hard to do a global-cultural history because one must be an expert in so many different cultures in order to see them interact it becomes too general. [2]