Preface
The twentieth century is the first in which comprehending world history has
become possible. Previous generations of scholars knew too little about other
parts of the world beyond their own. Cosmopolitan historical research, begin-
ning in the German university revolution around 1800, reached a critical mass
in the early years of our own century. Then appeared the first great efforts to
break out of a Eurocentric viewpoint and to sketch the shapes on a world scale:
Weber, Spengler, Toynbee, Kroeber. Their work is judged of mixed quality
today, not surprisingly for pioneering efforts; that it appeared simultaneously
indicates it was based on an underlying shift in the means of intellectual
production. The literature of that generation, in T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James
Joyce, and Hermann Hesse, shares the quality of opening a treasure chest of
world culture; The Waste Land could quote from ancient India as well as
pre-classical Greece, and Pound’s Cantos extended the range of allusion from
Renaissance Italian to medieval Chinese.
Two generations later, we are in a position to understand world culture
much more deeply. Ironically, as scholarship has filled in more gaps and given
firmer contours to what formerly was just coming into focus, we face new
obstacles to understanding. We suffer from cognitive overload, from having
amassed too much information to assimilate it. Disciplinary specialization and
subspecialization are predictable in an academic profession that since 1960 has
grown worldwide to a size dwarfing anything before. That is one reason why,
since European universities expanded recently from elite to mass systems,
doctrines have arisen attacking the very possibility of knowledge. Although the
world is certainly not a text, today when several hundred thousand publica-
tions appear every year in the humanities and social sciences, and another
million in the natural sciences, it may well feel as if we are drowning in a sea
of texts.
Will we close our eyes on knowing world history at just the time when we
have the resources to break out of our regional cultures? Practitioners of world