Toward a History of Histories of Civilization

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses efforts to write non-Eurocentric histories if civilization, beginning with H. G. Wells’s bestselling Outline of History, an early attempt to move beyond older European histories with their Western focus and ideas of linear progress over time. I then discuss several transitional works in the second half of the twentieth century, before turning to three contemporary works – one Japanese, one Chinese, and one American – that explicitly break with the older Eurocentric emphasis. With these examples in mind, we see the value of multiple histories of the multiple worlds of world civilization.

摘要

此文讨论了编写非欧洲中心主义文明史的努力, 首先是 H.G. 威尔斯的畅销书《历史大纲》, 这是超越旧欧洲历史的早期尝试, 因为旧欧洲历史一直以西方为中心, 并认为随着时间的推移会取得线性进展。之后, 此文讨论了 20 世纪下半叶的几部过渡性作品, 最后谈到三部当代作品——一部日本作品、一部中国作品和一部美国作品, 它们明确打破了旧欧洲中心论的重点。有了这些例子, 读者就能看到世界文明多重世界的多重历史的价值。

KEYWORDS:

• world history
• world literature
• civilization
• H.G. Wells

关键词:

• 世界史; 世界文学; 文明;H.G.威尔斯

1.

In considering ways to rewrite the history of world civilization, it is useful to reflect on both the achievements and the limitations of previous attempts to write such histories. How can we learn from the history of histories of civilization – including the problematic history of the term “civilization” itself – in order to escape the cultural imperialism that has so often underwritten previous efforts? Can civilization still be discussed in the singular, even for today’s global era, or should we rather speak of multiple civilizations? Is the very term “civilization” still useful, or would it be better to replace it with a more broadly applicable term such as “culture”?

As has often been discussed, most recently by Professor Cao Shunqing in this journal’s first issue for 2023, most histories of civilization have been written in Europe or North America and have often shown a pronounced Eurocentrism.¹ Even when these histories have gone beyond the realm of Western Civilization, they have often presupposed a Western understanding of civilization, identified with linear progress leading to the rise and worldwide spread of Western science and technology. In principle, Europe’s growing engagement with the wider world would ultimately lead beyond Eurocentrism itself. Already in the mid-1700s, Voltaire studied Chinese philosophical texts as a way to move beyond Christian dogmatism, and he repeatedly critiqued European civilization from the perspectives of outsiders – an ancient Zoroastrian in Zadig (1747), Brazilian tribesmen and a Turkish dervish in Candide (1759), and even a visitor from outer space in Micromégas (1752).

Influenced by Voltaire and by Rousseau, the Marquis de Condorcet wrote an ambitious and influential civilizational history, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795), in which he envisioned a dawning world of affluence, individual rights, and moral compassion. Civilization’s history is key in his account. As he says in his introduction: “If it is useful to observe the various societies that exist side by side, and to study the relations between them, why should it not also be useful to observe them across the passage of time?” (Condorcet 11–12). Yet Condorcet had limited sympathy for the specificity of Asian civilization, which he saw as mired in “shameful stagnation in those vast empires whose uninterrupted existence has dishonoured Asia for so long” (39). Condorcet was a champion of equal rights for women and the abolition of slavery, and he was no imperialist, but in his wake promoters of European empire used the history of civilization to justify conquest and colonial rule, which they idealized as a mission civilisatrice needed to free the non-Western world from their age-old stagnation.

Just because this was long the predominant pattern, it is useful to consider significant exceptions, in which histories have been written against the prevailing tide of Eurocentrism. In this essay, I will look at H. G. Wells’s ambitious Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man (1920), which broke with Eurocentrism a full century ago. Next I will discuss the gradual diminution of European emphasis in editions of a textbook used in many American college courses from the 1940s to the present. I will close with two examples of recent histories, one Japanese and one American, that have grappled with the practical and conceptual challenges of writing a truly global history of civilization.

2. World history after the first world war

H.G. Wells’s Outline of History is of interest both politically and as a narrative. Its author was a prolific and prominent novelist whose fiction is marked both by social engagement and by a pronounced historical sense. In his most famous novel, The Time Machine (1897), his hero voyages from prehistory to the final days of the solar system. Wells’s satirical masterpiece Tono-Bungay (1909) offers a penetrating analysis of changing class relations and the onset of a commercialized modernity, while his bestselling wartime novel, Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), is centrally concerned with the devastating impact of militarism and the need to find a lasting basis for peace. The Outline of History is a kind of nonfiction sequel to these works. Written with a novelist’s eye for narrative drama, and brought to life with vivid details, Wells’s Outline enjoyed wide and lasting popularity; my copy is from the twenty-eighth reprinting (January 1930). By then Wells had changed his subtitle to read: The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. The new subtitle emphasizes the book’s accessibility and sets human history, as in The Time Machine, within the broader history of life on earth.

Wells opens The Outline of History by confronting the objection that even British history is so vast that it already strains the limits of what a reader can absorb or a college course can cover. He allows that world history can’t simply be an endless agglomeration of national histories: “If an Englishman, for example, has found the history of England quite enough for his powers of assimilation, then it seems hopeless to expect his sons and daughters to master universal history, if that is to consist of the history of England, plus the history of France, plus the history of Germany, plus the history of Russia, and so on” (v). Wells’s formulation of this dilemma, and his response to it, directly foreshadow the perspective of the Italian-American comparatist Franco Moretti eighty years later. In his “Conjectures on World Literature,” Moretti observes that far too many novels were published just in nineteenth-century England for anyone to read them all, “forty, fifty, sixty thousand – no one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will. And then there are French novels, Chinese, Argentinian, American. … ” (45). He argues that “world literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different. The categories have to be different” (46). So too Wells: “the only possible answer” to the problem of scale, Wells says, “is that universal history is at once something more and something less than the aggregate of the national histories to which we are accustomed, that it must be approached in a different spirit and dealt with in a different manner” (v).

Wells says that he has written his book “primarily to show that history as one whole is amenable to a more broad and comprehensive handling than is the history of special nations and periods, a broader handling that will bring it within the normal limitations of time and energy set to the reading and education of an ordinary citizen” (v-vi). Instead of piling up a mass of names and dates, his history will offer “general laws” of human history throughout the ages, treating such topics as the appearance and growth of science, the spread of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and the development of money and commerce. Having staked his claim for his approach, Wells emphasizes the importance of his project for the postwar world of the 1920s:

The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history throughout the world has become very evident during the tragic happenings of the last few years. Swifter means of communication have brought all men closer to one another for good or for evil. War becomes a universal disaster, blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the baby in its cradle and sinks the food-ships that cater for the non-combatants and the neutral. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas … . A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations.

(vi)

The urgent italics are his.

In keeping with this emphasis, the Outline ends with an eighty-page chapter on the Great War, pointedly entitled “The International Catastrophe of 1914,” together with a brief concluding chapter, “The Next Stage of History,” in which he argues passionately for a “Federal World Government.” This is, then, a thesis-driven, even utopian world history, grounded in Wells’s socialist internationalism and infused with his disgust at the massive slaughter during the recent war. He blames the conflict squarely on nationalism and imperialism, and he senses that the disaster of the war has not diminished their influence. Indeed, he sees the newly formed League of Nations as only a renewed attempt at global control by major-power elites. He describes the League as “exemplary only in its inefficiencies and dangers,” and remarks that “the League does not even seem to know how to talk to common man” (1091–2).

The Outline of History is Wells’s attempt to address “common man” and to reveal fundamental historical processes that could counter what T. S. Eliot described three years later as “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot 177). Throughout the thousand pages leading up to his concluding chapters, Wells teases out countervailing forces amid the endless succession of tribal, imperial, and national conflicts across the ages. While he gives disproportionate space to the Mediterranean world in antiquity and the European world thereafter, he devotes far more space to non-Western cultures than most historians of his day would do, always seeking examples of efforts toward a common understanding of humanity. He places great emphasis on world religions, on science, and on education as providing the building blocks of a workable world order, and he looks to commonalities of everyday life, even offering an archeologically based portrayal of “the daily life of the first man” in the Neolithic age (59–64). Drawing on a multitude of specialized studies, The Outline of History is a remarkable work of synthesis and advocacy.

3. An emerging global perspective

While “the Great War” of 1914–1918 came to be known in retrospect as World War I, it was the war of 1939–1945 that took on fully global proportions and that stimulated a new interest in cross-civilizational study. In the United States, the G.I. Bill brought multitudes of returned servicemen onto college campuses, all with new experiences of world cultures from Europe to North Africa to Asia and the Pacific islands. A formerly isolationist nation was now deeply entwined with global politics, commerce, and cultures. Many new courses began to be offered in “Western Civ” (often in a binary contrast to Soviet and Chinese Communism), while other courses sought for the first time to present a far broader understanding of civilization. At first, the new “World Civilization” courses often involved merely adding a couple of weeks to a formerly “Western Civ” course, but gradually the textbooks that served these courses evolved toward a more equal approach.

A good example is Civilization, Past and Present (1942) a pioneering textbook for this new market, coauthored by T. Walter Wallbank, a specialist in modern European history, together with Alastair Taylor, a historian of international relations, and Nels Bailkey, a classical historian. They published their book in two volumes (one for each semester of a year-long course), with the expansive subtitle A Survey of the History of Man, His Governmental, Economic, Social, Religious, Intellectual, and Esthetic Activities from the Earliest Times to the Present, in Europe, in Asia, and in the Americas; interestingly, a reprint was issued in 1944 for use in the U.S. Army. Now in its thirteenth edition, it has evolved significantly over the course of the past eighty years.

As the book’s original subtitle indicates, in the 1940s pride of place was given to Europe, with Asia playing a secondary role before the authors turned to their ultimate emphasis: the value of global history for students training to take part in America’s presence on the contemporary world stage. By the tenth edition of 2003, the European basis of Civilization Past and Present had been transformed. Reworking their book for a new century – and in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 – the authors inform instructors in a note on “Changes to Organization and Content” that whereas the volume had formerly featured chapters on classical Greece and Rome before turning to Asia, chapters on Ancient China and Ancient India have been moved to “precede chapters on Greece and Rome to reflect a more appropriate chronological placement” (xxiii). So too, chapters on the rise of Islam and on African civilization now precede medieval Europe. New attention is given to Korea and to Southeast Asia and Oceania; these additions have been made partly by increasing the book’s length but also by trimming several chapters on Europe. The book’s original lead author, T. Walter Wallbank, was no longer alive by 2003 (though his name still appears on the cover and title page), but already in the 1950s and 1960s he had gone on to write individual histories devoted to India/Pakistan and to Africa. The lead editor for the 2003 edition, Palmira Brummett, was a Middle Eastern historian at the University of Tennessee who specialized in cross-cultural encounters. She and the surviving original authors, Alastair Taylor and Nels Bailkey, were now joined by Neil Hackett (a historian of the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East), Robert Edgar (a professor of African studies), and George Jewsbury, a specialist in Russian and East European history. Surprisingly, the 2003 edition didn’t include any specialists in Asia or in Latin America, but the twelfth edition of 2007 (Edgar et al.) added an East Asianist, Barbara Moloney, as well as chapters on Latin America. In her contributions, Moloney gave new weight to Asia’s importance in world history. Thus she rewrote a chapter formerly given the rather modest title “The Growth and Spread of Asian Culture, 300–1300,” which became “Culture, Power, and Trade in the Era of Asian Hegemony.” Asia itself was now seen more capaciously: whereas in 2003 the chapter dealt only with India, China, Korea, and Japan, Moloney’s version includes several pages each on Indonesia and the Pacific Islands.

Thus during the second half of the twentieth century, what we might call a “post-Eurocentric” movement was well underway, and this “post-Eurocentrism” accelerated in the early 2000s – with the “post-” prefix acknowledging that Eurocentrism still figures within the expanded presentation, much as modernism is still present within postmodernism and colonialism lurks in many postcolonial locales. While these changes are most visible in the World Civilization courses and their textbooks, even some of the texts being written for the ongoing “Western Civ” courses began to show a new global awareness. In 1962 Wallbank, Taylor, and Bailkey responded to their publisher’s request for a version of their book that would be tailored to the many courses still devoted to Western Civilization. While they narrowed their geographic scope accordingly, their single-volume Western Perspectives: A Concise History of Civilization still has a strongly progressive, internationalist outlook. Their title directly acknowledges that they are presenting a specifically Western perspective; this is no longer an unreflective portrayal of civilization as essentially Western.

The fourth edition (1973), which I have at hand, begins with a chapter on ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and West Asia, before going on to chapters on “The Glory that Was Greece” and “The Grandeur that Was Rome.” The author for the Near Eastern material, Nels Bailkey, had trained as a classicist specializing in Roman history, but he had come to take a lively interest in ancient Mesopotamia as well, and he had moved far beyond older ideas of the philosophy of history as a Greek invention. In 1969, he wrote an admiring essay on the ancient Babylonian poet Kabti-ilani-Marduk, titled “A Babylonian Philosopher of History.” Working only with translations but drawing extensively on Assyriological scholarship in English and German, he analyzed the poet’s narrative poem Erra and Ishum, which concerns the causes and consequences of a civil war in Babylon. He described Kabti-ilani-Marduk as advancing a sophisticated philosophy of history, anticipating Arnold Toynbee’s signature paradigm of “challenge and response” as the drivers of civilizational change.

Later in the Western Perspectives volume, Islam is given significant space, and the book’s final chapters become fully global. The book’s seventh and final section is entitled “Toward a New World.” It features three chapters, only the first of which reflects the common Cold War dichotomy: “The Quest for a World Order: The West and Communism Since 1945.” Then comes a genuinely global chapter, “The West and the Third World” (on Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia since 1914), followed by a concluding chapter, “Toward a New Life Style: Intellectual and Cultural Ferment in the Twentieth Century.” Finally comes a ten-page “Epilogue: The Challenges Ahead,” which offers liberal advocacy for increased attention to problems of overpopulation, environmental degradation, and economic inequality, and the authors stress the need for international cooperation. As they say, “The concept of the nation-state as the most important unit of the international political order no longer seems to satisfy the requirements of the new age. … Barring nuclear holocaust, the way ahead seems to lie in the direction of some kind of international community” (539). They praise the ecumenicalism of Pope John XXIII (though with no mention of Islam, Buddhism, or other religions), and they conclude their book by expressing a hope that a study of the past “that is intelligently rooted in the possibilities of the future can open the way to a new Renaissance in human creativity. Who knows – we might even succeed in establishing the world’s first humane civilization” (543).

4. Civilization, civilizations, or cultures?

A recurrent question is whether “world civilization” really is one thing or is instead a combination – or conflict – of two or more civilizations. Often world civilization has been seen in terms of a dichotomy between “mighty opposites” (to recall Zhang Longxi’s book of that name) such as “the West” versus “the East” or “the Communist world,” or perhaps a somewhat broader mapping of the West, East Asia, and two or three other large blocks such as Islam, Africa, and Latin America. The civilizational approach has tended to marginalize or altogether exclude most of the world’s smaller countries, and often entire continents. As the literary scholar Rey Chow has written of comparable developments in comparative literary studies, early efforts in the 1970s to broaden the spectrum of literary studies weren’t so much dismantling the great-power canon as extending its sway by admitting a few new great powers into the alliance:

The problem does not go away if we simply substitute India, China and Japan for England, France, and Germany … . In such instances, the concept of literature is strictly subordinated to a social Darwinian understanding of the nation: “masterpieces” correspond to “master” nations and “master” cultures. With India, China, and Japan being held as representative of Asia, cultures of lesser prominence in Western reception such as Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Tibet, and others simply fall by the wayside – as marginalized “others” to the “other” that is the “great” Asian civilizations.

(Chow 109)

If “civilization” is to be retained as an organizing concept, it should be understood in such a way as to include as many as possible of the world’s cultural traditions, treating the smaller countries and the less commonly spoken languages as civilizations in their own right. This can’t be done merely be paying lip service to the value of Mayan or Vietnamese civilization; historians and literary scholars need to bestir themselves to learn more languages, and meanwhile to work closely with people who already know those languages and cultures. Some years ago, after I gave a lecture in Beijing on the foundational work of modern Vietnamese literature, Nguyen Du’s Truyen Kieu (The Tale of Kieu, c. 1810), a Chinese colleague remarked that he had only heard of it as “a bad translation of a mediocre Ming Dynasty novel.” While Nguyen Du did indeed base his magnificent verse narrative on a minor Chinese work, The Tale of Jin, Yun and Qiao (金雲翹), he transformed it both poetically and philosophically. It is no more accurate to consider his seminal work merely as a translation of a mediocre Chinese source than it would be to dismiss Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a derivative retelling of an anecdote from the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus. But my Chinese colleague had no way to test his impression against the original; neither he nor any of his colleagues could actually read Vietnamese.

In using a term such as “civilization” in English, or wenming in Chinese, we need to be fully aware of what it may exclude if we define it in terms of a few great powers. Often, for example, civilization is associated with a culture’s access to writing – or even, in Condorcet’s case, the invention specifically of the alphabet. Yet such a definition marginalizes preliterate societies, including many of the cultures of the premodern world as well as of precolonial Africa more recently, and it understates the vitality of oral traditions and of “orature” in many parts of the world today. Even when it is not linked directly to writing, civilization can be understood in terms of long-lasting continuity across centuries or even millennia. This definition works to the advantage of a few countries such as China, India, and Greece, but to the disadvantage of most of the world’s other traditions. It would be better to think of civilization in multiple forms, much as world literature is increasingly described today in terms of distinct world literatures in the plural. A comparable shift can be seen in discussions of cosmopolitanism, in the movement from a title such as Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism (2006) to Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta’s Cosmopolitanisms (2017). As Robbins and Horta observe in the introduction to their collection, “by this point one would almost say that cosmopolitanism would look naked without that final ‘s’” (1).

While my focus has primarily been on the Anglo-American tradition with which I am most familiar, it is important to note that discussions of civilization have not been confined to Western sources, nor have Asian discussions been exclusively Chinese. A valuable discussion of the understanding of civilization in modern Japan can be found in Haneda Masashi’s Atarashii sekaishi e (2011), translated into English in 2018 as Toward Creation of a New World History. Professor Haneda, of Tokyo University, gives an illuminating account of the evolution of history texts for Japanese students during the postwar era, starting with a chapter devoted to “Tracing the History of World History” – an approach that has been an inspiration for my essay here. Professor Haneda gives an illuminating analysis of a textbook published in 1960, Nihon kokumin no sekaishi (World history for the Japanese people), which has had an impact comparable to Civilization Past and Present in the United States. The Japanese textbook based its world history on the then still common “mighty opposition” of East and West, seen as separate but equal civilizations until Western modernization enabled the spread of European imperialism and the creation of a unified world in the nineteenth century dominated by the West.

Haneda notes that this framework would be condemned today as Eurocentric, but he observes that the Japanese textbook had at least opened up the East/West binarism to some extent. Though the authors see “the West” in singular terms, they describe Asia as comprised of not one but three distinct and largely independent civilizations: China and its surrounding regions, India, and West Asia. Further, the authors argued (perhaps optimistically) that World War I had led to “the collapse of the Euro-centric world order and the establishment of independence and autonomy for Asian and African peoples” (Haneda 57), with the several world civilizations becoming far more interconnected than in the premodern era, and playing a more equal role than during the age of empire. Of equal interest in Professor Haneda’s study is his second chapter, in which he compares this Japanese world history with textbooks published in France in 2001 and in China in 2009 (Wang Side’s Shijie tongshi). Haneda concludes that “world history is perceived in France as something totally different from how it is perceived in Japan” (74). He says while it was understandable in the past that different countries would shape their understanding of world history differently, “the situation is totally different today, when it is a serious problem that people in the world do not share a common world history” (75). As I write these pages, Vladimir Putin’s army continues to wreak havoc on Ukraine, and though the invasion is no doubt grounded in economic and political concerns, it is equally a war of competing histories, centered on the question of whether Ukraine even has a history as a genuine country or a culture distinct from Russia.

Professor Haneda goes on to sketch the outlines of a potential common world history, grounded in an ecological awareness of everyone as inhabitants of the earth. Such an awareness would no doubt develop differently in different countries, perhaps in ways that Professor Cao’s “variation theory” could encompass, but at present we are far from achieving a common worldwide understanding, and I think that it is more appropriate to speak of world histories in the plural, just as we should speak of a multiplicity of civilizations. In this respect, it is notable that the American textbook Civilization Past and Present changed its title in 2007 to Civilizations Past and Present, in the plural.

Even when the concept is pluralized, the idea of civilizations tends to favor long-lasting continuities, typically with some major power at their center, whether China for East Asia or Paris as “the capital of the nineteenth century,” in Walter Benjamin’s phrase (in which the reference is to nineteenth-century Europe rather than to the globe). All in all, it may be better to speak of individual and regional “cultures” rather than broad-brush “civilizations.” I am not alone in this view. In A History of Chinese Literature (2023), written in English for nonspecialist readers, Zhang Longxi consistently speaks of Chinese culture, rather than Chinese civilization. His book is an excellent example of the kind of non-Eurocentric national literary history, written by a Chinese scholar for an international readership, for which Professor Gu Mingdong calls in his essay “A Feasible Approach to Constructing a Chinese Discourse System.” Professor Zhang’s Chinese literary history had a global inspiration: he decided to write it after serving as one of the primary editors and authors for the global collection Literature: A World History (Damrosch and Lindberg-Wada, 2022), which Theo D’haen discussed earlier this year in this journal.

As a closing example of a non-Eurocentric global history of culture, I will cite a new book by my Harvard colleague Martin Puchner, Culture: The Story of Us from Cave Art to K-Pop. He wrote this book to accompany a planned anthology of historical and literary texts for American courses in world civilization, but he pointedly speaks of culture, rather than civilization. Even “culture” is a term that he wants to free from a possessive nationalism. As he says in his opening paragraphs:

Here’s one view of culture: the earth is populated by groups of humans, and these groups are held together by shared practices. Each of these cultures, with their distinct customs and arts, belongs to the people born into it, and each must be defended against outside interference. This view assumes that culture is a form of property, that culture belongs to the people who live it. … There is a second view of culture that rejects the idea that culture can be owned. This view is exemplified by Xuanzang, the Chinese traveler who went to India and brought back Buddhist manuscripts … . Culture, for these figures, is made not only from the resources of one community but also from encounters with other cultures. … When seen through the lens of culture as property, these figures might appear to be intruders, appropriators, even thieves. But they pursued their work with humility and dedication because they intuited that culture evolves through circulation; they knew that false ideas of property and ownership impose limits and constraints, leading to impoverished forms of expression.

(5–6)

In keeping with his emphasis on cultural borrowings and appropriations, Puchner focuses on suggestive moments of cross-cultural fertilization, and he eschews any stable civilizational presentation. He begins with art produced more than thirty thousand years ago in a cave in southern France, but he does not present France as “the capitol of the Neolithic age.” Instead his focus is on universal processes of artistic creation and cultural memory. He proceeds to chapters on Nefertiti, Plato, and India’s King Ashoka, and continues on to such varied locales as Heian Japan, Abbasid Baghdad, Aztec Tenochtitlan, and postcolonial Nigeria.

Several of Puchner’s chapters do concern Europeans, but most of them are venturing abroad and absorbing cross-cultural inspiration: Luís Vaz de Camões composing his epic Lusiads in Indochina, Ernest Fenollosa falling in love with Japanese art. The heroes of Puchner’s “story of us” are cultural mediators like Fenollosa or, a millennium and a half earlier, the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang, who made his epochal “journey to the west” to acquire Buddhist texts to bring home and translate. As Puchner writes of Fenollosa, “All mediators are ambiguous figures. Fenollosa went to Asia as part of a modernizing invasion yet became deeply engaged in its history” (361). And he says that Xuanzang “was drawn to India by a power that is an inevitable result of cultural mobility: the lure of the distant origins of an import” (127). He concludes that “even more important than Xuanzang’s work as a translator was what he represented: someone who had followed a cultural import back to its source (just as Christians would later undertake travels to the Holy Land). Cultural imports create complicated force fields in which a distant origin promises access to the source of a movement or faith even when the cultural import has long been assimilated by a new host culture” (139).

Puchner’s cultural history is built from a very personal set of selections that reflect emphases in today’s multicultural America, no doubt inflected as well by his own experience of emigrating from Germany to the United States. Other cultural historians might choose to retain more of a “civilizational” dimension of historical continuity within a given cultural space than we generally see in his book. Culture, after all, is created not only by migrant writers or imported artworks but also by people who stay at home and who learn from their predecessors, and Puchner’s own chapter on Xuanzang discusses the interplay of Indian Buddhism with China’s homegrown Confucian tradition. That said, even profoundly local figures can have an increasingly global presence today. Dante remained a Florentine even while writing The Divine Comedy in exile, Shakespeare made his entire career in London, and Confucius rarely strayed far from what is now Shandong Province, but you can attend performances of Hamlet in the reconstructed Globe Theater in Tokyo, or play the Dante’s Inferno video game anywhere you have internet access, and study Chinese in Confucius Institutes around the world. Nor do we encounter Dante or Shakespeare or Confucius purely as foundational figures from the distant past; they are equally enmeshed in the shifting currents of contemporary world culture. As a closing image of this duality, I will offer a fan that I picked up on a hot day a few years ago, when I visited Confucius’s birthplace. On either side of his portrait, the great sage is celebrated in two dimensions: as “Founder of Chinese civilization” and as “Superstar of world literature.” A cultural history of world civilizations today should strive to do justice to both perspectives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The American Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock has written extensively on the challenge of conducting cross-cultural comparison on an equal basis. See his essays “Comparison without Hegemony” and “Conundrums of Comparison”