Paris Metro Pass, 1970’s

I became a world historian just as the field emerged in the U.S. in the 1970s. By the 1980s I was increasingly self-consciously casting my work on the Middle East and North Africa in world historical terms, even as I was developing world history pedagogy at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at UC Santa Cruz. In 2006 I became the founding Director of the “Center for World History” at UCSC–about which see below.

I didn’t set out to become a world historian. However, I think I was always impatient with localist narratives shorn of their larger comparative contexts. Growing up Catholic in the religiously more diverse world of the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s encouraged my curiosity.  Why different communities of belief existed was an essential puzzle, especially when my best friend was not Catholic. Even as a boy, I already had the characteristic bifocal historical gaze of the world historian.

Although world history as a subject of instruction did not yet exist, in high school and college I consistently sought out topics that featured social and cultural complexity. This habit of mind was subsequently reinforced by the training I received in the Princeton joint Ph.D. program in European history and Middle East studies. In an effort at finding coherence, I sought to bring together the history of France and its Mediterranean Arab empire.

Without fully understanding the consequences, it was in this fashion that I set out to became a comparative world historian of French colonialism in the Arab Mediterranean. When It came time to select a dissertation topic, I decided to write about Moroccan Resistance to French colonialism in the era of the “Moroccan Question” (1900-1912). For me this meant exploring both the French and the Moroccan aspects of this conflictive relationship seriously.

This led me to my first published essay, “Morocco and the Near East: Reflections on Some Basic Differences.” Using my training I sought to compare the history of pre-colonial Morocco with that of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire. Did nineteenth century Morocco adopt administrative and military reforms parallel to the Ottoman tanzimat? If so, what was their fate? The question opened up the comparative history of the eastern and western Arab worlds.

Much of my work in the 1970s and 1980s, both as a researcher as well as a teacher, was taken up with proposing comparative historical understandings within and across regional boundaries. For example, I wrote a number of essays on social movements in the greater Arab world, as well as another series of essays on orientalism—European colonial representations of their subject populations—and how they were similar and/or different.

By the 1990s I had come to see that the scope of world history was not limited to the comparison of specific cases. My new approach pre-supposed that human history operating on “world time,” with developments in one region of the inter-connected zones of Afro-Eurasia diffusing across the other zones over time. The ideas of Marshall Hodgson helped launch down this trail. Helping devise and maintain the all-UC world history research group (1990s and 2000s) became a generational project from which many benefitted.

For example, we know that gunpowder first developed in China, and subsequently diffused around the Afro-Eurasian world. This set off the gunpowder revolution as a global phenomenon. As diffused around the world, it brought large scale changes not only in military strategy and tactics, but also of the fiscal structure of states.

These days I am thinking about the Mediterranean region in the making of the modern world and of the production and consumption of global commodities as an approach to world history.

Granada & the Alhambra
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