The Prospect of Global History

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the success of US policy in the Philippines, even though a long war of resistance to American rule had still to be concluded: I believe I am speaking with historic accuracy and impartiality when I say that the American treatment of and attitude toward the Filipino people, in its combination of disinterested ethical purpose and sound common sense, marks a new and long stride forward, in advance of all the steps that hitherto have been taken, along the path of wise and proper treatment of weaker by stronger races.16 Wheat Meat and animal fats Cotton textiles Iron bars Pig iron Cotton Coal Copper Hides Wool Tin Cofee Sugar constitutional history—the one an almost over-fashionable mode of enquiry, the other not fashionable at all—can proitably be pursued in tandem, and I will focus mainly on the long nineteenth century. First, I want to stress the importance of approaching written constitutions as texts, which share many points in common with other forms of manuscript and printed writing. Second, I want to argue that the rapid spread of these instruments was due in part to their capacity for serving diferent and by no means always emancipatory political projects and conigurations. Finally, I want to glance at some of the changes in the geography, forms, and repercussions of constitutions occurring from the 1860s onwards. S P R E A D I N G T H E WO R D he contagion of constitutions has been a heterogeneous phenomenon. Written constitutions have varied markedly in length, durability, format, provisions, and in terms of the aims of their makers and the political systems embedded by them. In the United States and in much of Latin America, constitutions worked from the outset to create and perpetuate republics; but, elsewhere in the world, the majority of these instruments coexisted before 1914 with forms of monarchy. he diversity of written constitutions has unavoidably also been a product of linguistic diference. he most common Japanese word for ‘constitution’, kempo, meaning rules and regulations and itself a compound derived from two Chinese characters, does not have the same political connotations as the Anglophone term; and some regimes anyway consciously shied away from employing the word ‘constitution’ or close equivalents.8 he document granted by the restored Louis XVIII in France in 1814 was explicitly a chartre, so as to distinguish it from its Revolutionary and Napoleonic predecessor constitutions; while the Tunisian ‘constitution’ enacted in 1861 and dismantled three years later was not even called a Dustûr (the Arabic word later used for a Constitution) but rather seen as qanûn (laws).9 Such multiple variations might seem to preclude any useful examination of constitutions across diferent chronologies and geographical contexts, and this kind of argument is sometimes made. A recent valuable set of essays on the Age of Revolutions explicitly rejects any ‘difusionist model’ in regard to democratic movements in diferent parts of the world, stressing the importance rather of paying close attention to local experiences and ‘difering institutional environments and political cultures’.10 Yet this sets up too stark a binary. To a greater degree even than is usual, in regard to constitutions, states and empires ‘lie Figure 2.2 Spice and cofee price gaps, Amsterdam relative to Southeast Asia, 1580–1939 Source: Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jefrey G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’ European Review of Economic History 6, 1 (2002), pp. 23–50, p. 33.

Med Tabriz it Eu Granada erranAthens ph Baghdad Tunls ean Herat ra Damascus S tes Fez ea Isfahan Kabul Jerusalem R P Cairo Basra ers ia n Gulf Medina Se Source: Stephen N. Broadberry, ‘Accounting for the Great Divergence’, LSE Department of Economic History Working Paper 184 (2013), p. 23.Such was the debate on the acceptability of smoking in the Ottoman Empire that the great scholar of Damascus, Abd al-Ghani Nabulusi, felt impelled in 1681 to write a long treatise on the subject to say that although he did not like the practice it was perfectly legal. Samer Akkach, Letters of a Sui Scholar: he Correspondence of Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641–1731) (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 105–8. 40 Eric Burns, he Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2007). 41 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (London: John Murray, 2008); River of Smoke: A Novel (London: Penguin Group, 2011). 42 Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Sh. Bira, Mongolian Historical Literature of the XVII–XIX Centuries Written in Tibetan, trans. Stanley Frye (Bloomington: Tibet Society, 1970), 29. 26 David Brophy, ‘he Kings of Xinjiang: Muslims [sic] Elites and the Qing Empire’, Études Orientales: Revue Culturelle Semestrielle 25 (2008), pp. 69–90, p. 69. 27 Qing shilu, vol. 5, p. 955 (KX 183.2b–3a), KX36/4/5 (24 May 1697); vol. 5, p. 964 (KX 183.20b–21a), KX36/5/24 (12 July 1697). 28 Ma Tong, ‘A Brief History of the Qâdiriyya in China’, trans. Jonathan Lipman, Journal of the History of Suism 1, 2 (2000), pp. 547–76; Ma Tong, Zhongguo Yisilan jiaopai menhuan suyuan (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1986), pp. 83–92. 29 For more on Sui and Muslim networks, see Francis Robinson in this volume. How can global history can be applied instead of advocated? The new volume The Prospect of Global History examines this question and explores the fast growing field of global history across a wide geographical and chronological range. Bukhara and Samarkand as a bridge between Persia and Gansu.36 Although this project failed, Jesuits in Persia, relying in part on Armenian merchants, were able to augment overland itineraries from Isfahan to China via India and Siberia with a third running through Herat, Balkh, Bukhara, and Turfan.37 Another scholar sifting the various currents of information at Beijing in this period was Chen Lunjiong. His father, a Fujianese merchant with experience abroad, had advised the Qing court on how to capture Taiwan in 1683 and was rewarded with a high position in the Qing military. French Jesuits, in a 1717 letter home, described their debates with him over his ierce opposition to Christianity. Chen Lunjiong, whom he had once taken on a mission to Japan, served in Kangxi’s bodyguard in the early 1720s and around the end of that decade composed an account of the eastern hemisphere. Although principally concerned with the maritime world, Chen’s map and text described Central Asia, including the Caspian Sea, Siberia, and territories he described as ‘Galdan’ (the Junghars), ‘Samarkand’ (Muslim Central Asia), and Persia.38 Chen seems to have had conidence in his knowledge of Central Asia, for in 1736 he memorialized about Siberia’s important strategic position relative to the Junghars.39 Chen’s case reminds us that Inner Asian developments were by no means overlooked on the maritime frontier. Galdan’s death in the foothills of the Altai on April 4, 1697, irst reported to Kangxi on June 2, was reported at Nagasaki by a Chinese ship that had put to sea from Ningbo on July 14.40 Taken individually, none of the conduits of information reviewed here is a certain source for Ghombojab’s list of the ‘sons of Chaghatai’. his is perhaps not surprising. A year after Ghombojab completed his work in Beijing, another genealogy of the descendants of Chinggis, the Histoire Généalogique des Tatars, was published at Leiden. his was the work of Abu ’l-Ghazi Bahadur Khan (1603–63), ruler of Khiva, like Ghombojab a historian and descendant of Chinggis. he content of his work was gleaned over the course of a life in which he had travelled throughout Central Asia and lived in Persia and among the Qazaqs and Torghuts (Kalmyks). Originally written in Chaghatai Turki, the text was interpreted into Russian by a Muslim scholar, and then into German by Swedish prisoners of war. If it is, as the modern scholar Bertold Spuler has judged, ‘widely defective for the earlier periods’, this is surely due to the heterogeneous sources from which its author assembled it.41 It seems likely that Ghombojab’s work was formed by a comparable fusion of diferent sources of information ricocheting around the Qing Empire, particularly Kangxi and Yongzheng-era Beijing. 36 For an overview of these Jesuit eforts see Felix A. Plattner, Jesuits Go East, trans. Lord Sudley and Oscar Blobel (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1950), pp. 166–215. 37 [Jacques Villotte], Voyages d’un Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jesus, en Turquie, en Perse, en Armenie, en Arabie, & en Barbarie (Paris: J. Vincent, 1730), pp. 643–5. 38 Chen Lunjiong, Haiguo wenjian lu (no location: no publisher, 1730), 1.28a, 41b. 39 Qing shilu, vol. 9, pp. 516–17 (QL 21.32b–33a), QL1/6/29 (6 Aug 1736). 40 Hayashi Shunsai, Ka-I hentai (Tokyo: Tōyō bunko, 1959), vol. 3, p. 1921. 41 Cliford E. Bosworth et al (eds), he Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1967), vol. 1, p. 121.

Two of the book’s editors, James Belich (Beit Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History, University of Oxford) and John Darwin (Professor of Global and Imperial History, University of Oxford) will examine the book and global history with: Preface We envisage this volume as the irst in a new series in global history which is characterized by historical depth, a wide geographical range, and the concrete application of diferent approaches to global history, engaging with multiple methodologies, coming from an interdisciplinary perspective, and teasing out connections and their limitations by asking challenging questions. Some of these ideas are explored in this volume. he Editors ships, but pursued prey, accepted risk, and carried guns and diseases as well as any. Mughal expansion into India, Islam’s America, might just be the greatest postplague spread of all. Morocco, which did have plague and guns, conquered a large chunk of West Africa in the late sixteenth century, projecting its power over 1,700 kilometres.52 Giancarlo Casale has recently demonstrated that the Ottoman Empire was not inactive or unsuccessful in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century, and it established substantial domains in East Africa.53 But the Ottomans already had a vast empire, including most of southeast Europe. Like China, it did not need to chase furs or ish; other peoples brought them to it. Unlike Europeans, it was not squeezed out of the Mediterranean slave market; it was doing the squeezing. Instead, it became the anvil on which European expansion had to hammer itself out. 52 Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250–1800, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 57. 53 Giancarlo Casale, he Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Figure 2.3 Real (CPI-delated) pepper prices, 1400–1600 Source: Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jefrey G. Williamson, ‘Did Vasco da Gama Matter for European Markets?’ Economic History Review 62, 3 (2009), pp. 655–84, p. 668.

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We live in a world of rapid economic change, of enormous concentrations of economic power, sharp social inequalities, and drastic disparities in the distribution of political power – both between and within states. […] If we, as historians, want to remain relevant to public debate, we need to engage these issues. Footnote 13

his paper embraces the multiple, fragmented, indirect negotiations so lucidly evoked by the great Dutch historian. While it can hardly be doubted that they diminish the proitability of commerce, it is precisely in their social and political complexity that they add up to another kind of connectedness. And it is in that area that we might ind a hopeful way of extending the idea of global history to larger tracts of the discipline. T R A J E C TO R I E S O F A D E S I R A B L E P RO D U C T: T H E A N C I E N T I M AG I N A I R E O F I N C E N S E his paper concerns, at least as a starting-point, the ‘passage of goods’, to use De Vries’ term. It focusses on a particular cluster of goods, the aromatic resins of trees 2 Roger Chartier, ‘La conscience de la globalité’, Annales HSS 56, 1 (2001), pp. 119–23. 3 Jan De Vries, ‘he Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World’, he Economic History Review 63, 3 (2010), pp. 710–33. 4 De Vries, ‘he Limits’, p. 711. 5 De Vries, ‘he Limits’, p. 710. For two recent studies on connections between distant sectors of the Qing frontier see John Herman, ‘Collaboration and Resistance on the Southwest Frontier: Early Eighteenth-Century Qing Expansion on Two Fronts’, Late Imperial China 35, 1 (2014), pp. 77–112; Matthew W. Mosca, ‘he Qing State and Its Awareness of Eurasian Interconnections, 1789–1806’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, 2 (2014), pp. 103–16. Figure 2.4 he wage-rental ratio in England, 1500–1936 Source: Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jefrey G. Williamson, ‘From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Industrialisation and Distribution since 1500’, Journal of Economic Growth 10, 1 (2005), pp. 5–34, p. 8. Takii Kazuhiro, he Meiji Constitution: he Japanese Experience of the West and the Shaping of the Modern World (Japan: International House of Japan, 2007), p. vii. 9 I owe this information to my Princeton colleague, M’hamed Oualdi. 10 Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially pp. 7 and 191.Astrology Astrology is a second area of shared knowledge and experience worthy of the attention of the global historian. here has been considerable reluctance until recently to consider its signiicance for understanding aspects of Muslim societies up to the nineteenth century. In this respect Muslim societies are little diferent from human societies at large. From the beginning of time humans have sought to ind meaning Francis Robinson T H E ‘ P ROT E S TA N T T U R N ’, A P RO C E S S O F C H A N G E W I D E LY E X P E R I E N C E D List of Figures 2.1 he Anglo-American wheat trade, 1800–2000 2.2 Spice and cofee price gaps, Amsterdam relative to Southeast Asia, 1580–1939 2.3 Real (CPI-delated) pepper prices, 1400–1600 2.4 he wage-rental ratio in England, 1500–1936

Writing Constitutions and Writing World History Linda Colley I N T RO D U C T I O N Demonstrating how new written constitutions have progressively afected most peoples across the globe can seem a straightforward enterprise.1 Between 1776 and 1780, eleven one-time American colonies drafted state constitutions. hese had an impact on the US Federal constitution of 1789 which in turn inluenced the constitutions of Revolutionary France, and—along with the latter—helped precipitate new, often ephemeral constitutions in Haiti, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, and elsewhere. By 1820, some ifty constitutions were in being in Continental Europe, and this represented only a fraction of the total number attempted. In Northern Italy alone, at least thirteen new constitutions were drafted between 1796 and 1810. Some eighty more constitutions were formally implemented between 1820 and 1850, many of them in Latin America. In the second half of the long nineteenth century, written constitutions spread conspicuously beyond Europe and the Atlantic world. Between 1850 and 1914, they were adopted—in various forms and with varying degrees of success—in Australia, Japan, China, Tunisia, the Ottoman Empire, the Philippines, and parts of Polynesia and the Malay Peninsula; and attempts were made to introduce them in the hai kingdom of Siam, Iran, and some Indian princely states. Both World Wars sparked intense bouts of new constitution-writing. So, dramatically, did the collapse of the Western European empires after 1945 and the fall of the Soviet empire. Of the 190 or so constitutions now in existence, by far the majority have been drafted or revised in the last sixty years. Every year, it is estimated, men and women in at least ten countries are at work on a new constitution.2 1 Earlier versions of this paper were given at the ‘New Directions in Global History’ conference at the University of Oxford (27–29 September 2012), and the ‘Constitution-writing in the long eighteenth century’ symposium at Princeton University (11 April 2014). I am grateful for the responses on those occasions, and for the subsequent critiques of Jeremy Adelman, James Belich, Peter Holquist, and Jeremy Waldron. 2 Lists of written constitutions are available in Zachary Elkins and Tom Ginsberg, he Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 215–30; and the database of the Comparative Constitutions Project: (accessed 1 February 2015). he Constitutions of the World Online database gives the texts of most of these documents, implemented and abortive, from 1776 to 1849. More than a generation later, Governor heodore Roosevelt, Jr, conirmed Root’s judgement. Writing in the light of his experience in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, he stated in 1937 that he could not ‘conceive of the United States having a consistent, long-range colonial policy’, and added that the Republic would continue ‘to it our policies in the islands to our own internal political opinions’.19 Of course there were dedicated oicials and some achievements: roads were built; education was encouraged; health provision was improved. It is hard, however, to argue that the American development efort was superior to that of the other Western empires. It was certainly no more popular, despite impressions to the contrary. US troops were not greeted as liberators. Fierce resistance in the Philippines lasted for a decade after the United States declared, in 1902, that it had 18 Quoted in Perkins, Denial of Empire, p. 204. 19 heodore Roosevelt, Colonial Policies of the United States (London: Nelson, 1937), pp. 195–7. he Real American Empire Antony G. Hopkins I N T RO D U C T I O N he 19 March 2013 marked the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.1 he moment passed in the United States with little notice and no celebration. It is unlikely that the mood at future anniversaries will be any diferent. In 2003, however, the event stimulated an extraordinary outpouring of books and articles featuring the phrase ‘American Empire’. Commentators ranged across the full spectrum of possibilities. For some, the notion of an American Empire was novel; for others, it was the logical culmination of the superpower status the United States had achieved since the Second World War and had consolidated after the fall of the Soviet Empire. All parties eagerly searched for comparisons that would validate their preferred view of this latest manifestation of American power. Some observers regarded the United States as the stabilizer of last resort, as Britain and Rome had been in their day; others viewed the Iraq War as evidence that the Land of the Free was loitering with intent to disturb the peace—just as Britain and other predecessors had done before their ‘glad conident morning’ gave way to ‘life’s night’.2 Nearly everyone agreed that the United States was an empire. Amidst the rush of events, few commentators paused to relect on the meaning of the term, or whether it was necessary to deine it. With one or two notable exceptions, historians absented themselves from this debate. Most historians like events to settle before they comment on them, and even then they are inclined to clothe their observations in qualiications, elaborations, and pleas for further research. From a historical perspective, after all, a decade is no more than a long weekend. Yet, now that invasion has turned into withdrawal and occupation has turned optimism for ‘remaking the Middle East’ 1 his is a revised version of a keynote lecture delivered at the conference ‘New Directions in Global History’ held in Oxford in September 2012. I have made minor revisions and expanded the paper slightly. Given the broad range of the script, I have kept citations to a minimum, though I have referred to some of my own publications, where relevant, for the convenience of readers who wish to pursue some of the issues summarized here in greater detail. Most of the chapter, however, is derived from a larger study on the history of the American Empire I am currently completing, and is based on a much wider range of research produced by other scholars. 2 Robert Browning, ‘he Lost Leader’, in Robert Browning, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (London: Edward Moxon, 1845). The event is part of Book at Lunchtime, a series of bite size book discussions, with commentators from a range of disciplines. Muslim expansion to 900 Muslim expansion to 1300 Muslim expansion to 1500 Muslim expansion to 1700 Muslim lands lost by 1300 Muslim lands lost by 1500 Muslim lands lost by 1700Global History’ written with capital letters denotes the academic discipline and its various discourses, ‘global history’ its object of study. In the case of ‘Historical Sociology’ such ambiguity is unlikely to occur; capitals are used only for reasons of symmetry. 2 Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: heories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch. 3; Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Global History in a National Context: he Case of Germany’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 20 (2009), pp. 40–58. 3 No individual author can be named for this period. Its main achievement was a cooperative work: Walter Goetz (ed.), Propyläen-Weltgeschichte: Der Werdegang der Menschheit in Gesellschaft und Staat, Wirtschaft und Geistesleben, 10 vols (Berlin: Propyläen, 1931–3). in terms of Islam, there should be no problem. Indeed, the religiously based systems of connectedness in the Muslim world are an important global story. S H A R E D WO R L D S O F K N OW L E D G E A N D E X P E R I E N C E In the following section, I will highlight those potential global history subjects which low from research on the Muslim world: storytelling, astrology, and astronomy, and the impact of commodities. Global history – history on a global scale – is not an historical programme, still less a uniform approach to the history of the world. Its appeal and its value lie precisely in the multiple vistas it opens up, in the connections it suggests, in the questions it asks. “An extensive sight or view; the view of the landscape from any position”, was an early definition of “prospect”. That might serve quite well to describe the prospect of global history. (p. 183)