My thanks to Hannah Forsyth, Maïa Pal, and Manjeet Pardesi, for taking the time to read Making Global Society (MGS), and write thoughtful responses to it. It is always interesting to be shown frankly how others filter what you have done through their own concerns and expertise. The responses cover a range of positions. Forsyth seems to like a few bits, but not the whole. Pardesi likes the whole, but not some aspects. Pal is torn between liking and disliking the aggregative, big picture, approach.
The main focus of this response will be on the seeming tension between top-down, big picture approaches embracing a grand narrative on the one hand, and on the other hand, bottom-up approaches that favour a focus on the parts, and their interactions over the whole. This has parallels with the tensions among historians between ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’.
There are some real issues here, particularly about how big picture books can and should be written. But what initially seem like deep differences of approach are, in my view, largely false. While I very much favour countering the Eurocentric grand narrative of world history, I see the best way of doing that as constructing counter-grand narratives. I do not see a zero-sum game between top-down and bottom-up approaches, but rather a complementary division of labour.
It is common, and correct, for book discussants to point out what they think is missing from a book, and to call for additions. Given the amount of time and space MGS covers, it is particularly vulnerable to this type of criticism. Writing such a book is a balancing act between big themes, and the level and amount of detail necessary to support them. That level and amount can never be enough to satisfy specialists all along the route. The question is whether it is enough to carry the broader argument.
MGS is very long – already at the very outer limit of what even a university press will tolerate for a well-known author. Additions are therefore in a zero-sum game with what is already there. They have to be considered against what would have to be deleted to make room for them. I flagged this problem early in the book (p. xv) and I am not convinced that any of the proposed additions would be worth the cost of what would have to be taken away to make room for them. Would additional discussion and references of selected issues encumber the argument more than they supported it? If one subject is given more attention, why not all? This is the dilemma faced by authors writing big picture books.
At one end of the scale of proposed additions, Pal faults me for not explaining the causes of modernity. Doing that would not be just an addition to this book, but a wholly different book. No one has even come close to doing this so far, and I do not pretend to have the answer. I say plainly (p. 157) that explaining modernity is outside the aims of the book. For the arguments I want to make, it suffices to show the processes and the consequences of modernity, which are much clearer than its underlying causes.
At the other end of the scale come suggestions for specific additions. Here the question is more about the division of labour between any book, and the literature that comes after it. In my view, a book is successful to the extent that it opens up new areas and approaches, and suggests a research agenda that others pick up.
For MGS, a case in point is the list of primary institutions, which is a research agenda in itself. In this book, and earlier ones, I have already stuck my neck out pretty far in extending the list of primary institutions well beyond the classical English School set. Forsyth raises the question of whether there should be additional items in the list of primary institutions. She specifically mentions art. I hope someone will follow up this suggestion. I don’t have enough knowledge about art and art history to be a good candidate for this job. I suspect that within a global society framing, a case could be made for it, using the criteria given for identifying what is and is not a primary institution. Another possible candidate for such a follow-on study might be revolution. I am less sure about the case for that, but I would love to see someone more knowledgeable than me investigate it. If MGS makes an impact, it invites further work. If it doesn’t, then these questions don’t matter much.
Somewhere in the middle of the scale comes Forsyth’s desire for more on the hierarchical discourses behind the historical analyses. That kind of deconstruction can always be done, but there are compelling reasons for not doing that within MGS. It would open up an endless regress with no obvious stopping point. That would both sap the force of the argument and make the book impossibly long. Every book needs to find a balance between spin and pace, and books covering a very large subject area need pace more than spin. I chose to use a pretty orthodox, mainstream, approach to world history in order to minimise controversy over interpretations. It seems to me that looking behind that orthodoxy should be the subject of another book by another person. If the approach in MGS is interesting enough, then it provides an opportunity for someone to go deeper into it and unpack the consequences for the wider argument.
Similarly, Pardesi faults me for taking a Eurocentric view of science. Would it help the book to add in the long history of everything that went into the making of science? Or is it enough just to note this (p. 278), and focus on where science emerged and flowered as a stable, coherent, and pervasive social idea powerful enough to become a new global standard of knowledge? Again, this is the balance question between spin and pace, and I chose pace.
More complicated than problems of omission are disagreements about whether something is there or not. Such disagreements often arise from disciplinary difference. Much of the criticism in these three discussions comes from the tensions across disciplines and perspectives. Historians quite justifiably find much social science writing difficult and unpleasant to read. Less justifiably, they sometimes take insufficient interest in the theoretical components of the book. Some of these, notably the detailed approach to defining eras and transitions, and the use of primary institutions to sustain a narrative, have potentially big implications for historians.
One example of this issue arises around capitalism. In different ways, Forsyth and Pal say that discussion of capital and labour, and capitalism more generally, were hardly to be seen. This is true. In some perspectives, capitalism is favoured as a, or even the, principal social structure. I explain my preference for market over capitalism on two grounds (pp. 266-67). First, market is the more fundamental structure. Second, in my perspective capitalism comes with a lot of unhelpful and controversial ideological baggage which would distract from the central purpose of the book. Discussion of the market and trade in the book is quite extensive. There are also quite full discussions of wealth and class/caste inequality, and slavery. I do not think that international political economy is neglected as a topic. But it is discussed in different terms than these reviewers prefer.
Similar differences of perspective arise around gender. I do not quite know what to make of Forsyth’s comments on this. She finds it ‘grating to read about patriarchy, but very little about gender’, but then regarding masculinism she finds that ‘the book was much less so than most scholarship in international relations’. Gender inequality is a sustained theme of the book’s history of primary institutions across a long history. For at least the last seven millennia, far and away the main story about gender is patriarchy, and the book explores this in some detail. Again, the question of balance arises for how a big picture book like MGS can work. More attention to this particular topic would both overburden pace with spin, and exacerbate the problem of overall length.
Even more complicated, and more fundamental are differences rooted in disciplinary preferences about ontology and epistemology. The main issue here is my attempt in MGS to find a level of abstraction high enough to encompass all of humankind as a single subject, yet still allowing sufficient detail to sustain a narrative historical approach. Pal and Pardesi both have deep doubts about any such grand narrative approach.
This is a longstanding difference both within and between disciplines. Partly it revolves around the controversy over whether grand narratives are a useful way of pursuing understanding and insight, or whether they are necessarily so distorting that they should be rejected outright. This is both a general issue of principle, and a specific one of opposing the Western domination of the grand narrative genre. The view of interacting multiplicities is in part a reaction against the often Eurocentric grand narratives that dominated discussion of world history for a long time.
In principle, I am in favour of grand narrative approaches. I like them because I think holism adds a value that cannot be found by looking at parts and their interactions. Wholes are more than the sum of their parts. On this line, I am glad that Forsyth and Pardesi both like the big picture of deep pluralism as a way of seeing the present dynamics of global society. Deep pluralism is now the basic framing within which I am thinking about the present and the near future of humankind. While the general idea is validated daily by the news, unfortunately what is emerging is the contested rather than the cooperative version.
In one sense, wholes versus parts is an unresolvable problem. Either one thinks that it is possible and desirable to find a single grand narrative that unites the human story, or one thinks that the only fair way to approach it is by focusing on the multiplicity of perspectives, experiences, and interactions that compose the world. Many of those on the more critical side of academic analysis conclude that all grand narratives should be opposed. I think this is a mistake for two reasons. First, it should remain an open question as to whether grand narratives actually can capture the whole of humankind in an acceptable way. Second, grand narratives are an extraordinarily powerful way to convey ideas and stories. Giving them up puts those who oppose them in a weak position in the struggle for attention in relation to those who pursue them.
Grand narratives capture public and academic imagination like nothing else. If you don’t like the ones that are dominant, the best strategy, in my view, is to set out an alternative one. Reducing the world to fragments reduces your audience to those who are specialised in those fragments.
That said, I am wholly onside with the movement to counter West-centrism in thinking about history and international relations. I tried to design MGS specifically to show how a more global approach might be done. The book’s grand narrative is necessarily vulnerable to Pardesi’s critique that there is ‘too much smoothing out of details’. Yet it does, I think, put Eurocentrism’s grand narrative into a sobering global perspective. Its focus on humankind is homogenising. It both opens big spaces for the non-Western side of the story, and puts the Western story into a more balanced global context.
The question is whether the big picture thereby obtained adds sufficient value to compensate for the loss of detail. I aimed for a degree of abstraction that both supported a generalising grand narrative at the level of humankind, and enabled a quite detailed narrative historical approach. It is not clear whether that aim succeeded or not with these reviewers.
It is of course possible to take a zero-sum view of grand narrative versus particularist approaches. The case for a non-zero sum view of this issue is that it is in the dialectical nature of opposites to need each other, and to form a division of labour. Each would be impoverished without the existence of the other, if, indeed, they could exist at all. A quick glance through the five-hundred or so references in MGS reveals the extent to which its grand narrative rests on a wide-range of more particularist work. I like specialist work, and depend heavily on it for my own more general approach. I think this should be a two-way street. Each approach does things that the other cannot, and if all works well, each stimulates and informs the other.
The question is how to get the balance right between the big picture view and the details of the supporting argument. It will probably be impossible to please everyone about this. Most readers will naturally, and up to a point rightly, think that not enough is said about what interests them. But I hope we can move towards a bolder recognition that these two forms of work are more complementary than rival.
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