3 Dipesh Chakrabarty, "AHR Roundtable: The Muddle of Modernity," *American Historical Review* (116): 663–675, 663. Cf. also the essay by Moshfeg in this volume.

In this paper I want to highlight the complexities behind what seems to be one of the basic aspects of Western historiography from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and beyond: distinguishing medieval from modern and pre-modern from modern. I will argue that even inside the Western tradition, these operations were far from uniform and that they were strongly conditioned by the differences in national historiographical and intellectual cultures. Furthermore, I will show how perplexing and counter-intuitive the terminology in periodisation can be—with historians using qualified versions of the term 'modern' when they actually meant 'not-really-modern.' These ambiguities are often overlooked by later interpreters (especially critics of established schemes of periodisation), who often presuppose a stability of meaning in epochal terminology over long time spans and neglect the historians' capacity for constant reinterpretation of these terms. To illuminate these points, I will provide a case study: the hitherto overlooked emergence of early modern history as a distinct field of research in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

The field of early modern history is a particularly good example for studying the cultural determination of periodisation schemes and their variations even inside the Western tradition itself. During the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, two models existed side by side: the tripartite division into ancient, medieval, and modern history prevalent in the English-speaking world, as well as in Central and Northern Europe; and the French tradition of dividing history into four parts, thus splitting modern history into *histoire moderne and histoire contemporaine* with the French Revolution as the dividing line. This scheme was adopted by Italian, Spanish and other romancelanguage historians. For a long time, the curious fact that French 'modern history' actually ended in 1789 was not remarked upon. When homogenization was attempted, however, the two traditions clashed. In 1964, the European Council commissioned a book on European history with the goal of 'denationalising' historiography. In the German version, the entry on contemporary history by the Belgian medievalist Emile Lousse (1905–1986) and the Italian modernist Mario Bendiscioli (1903–1998) started with the following definition: "In der traditionellen vierteiligen Aufgliederung der Geschichte bezeichnet der Ausdruck die 'Neueste Zeit' die Periode, die der Neuzeit folgt."4 In English this would read as: "In the traditional quadripartite division of history the term 'contemporary times' (literally: newest time/era) denominates the period that follows the modern era (literally: new time/era)." While this assertion was

4 Mario Bendiscioli, and Emile Lousse, "Neueste Zeit," in: *Grundbegriffe der Geschichte* (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1964), 267; they did, in fact, reflect on the terminological and conceptual problem of 'modern' in their contribution on "età moderna." See the Italian version Mario Bendiscioli, and Emile Lousse, "Età moderna," *Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichtsunterricht* 7 (1959/60): 254–262.

obvious for French- and Italian-speaking historians, its translation into German or English renders it almost incomprehensible, if not bordering on the absurd: neither had there ever been a traditional division of history into four parts in German- or English-language historiography, nor was there any notion that the *Neuzeit* or the 'modern era' had ended and been followed by an even newer and different historical epoch. A translator more knowledgeable about recent developments in the field might have solved the linguistic and substantive conundrum by using the term *Frühe Neuzeit* or 'early modern history.' That the translator and the dictionary's editors did not use these terms clearly shows that they had not gained general currency in German historiography in the early 1960s.

The emergence of 'early modern history' as a concept, especially in German, British, and American historiography, is traditionally situated in the second half of the twentieth century.5 The first two post-war decades are seen as a time of gestation, of isolated usage of the term and rare attempts at defining early modern as a historical period. The 1970s, then, serve as a pivotal decade initiating widespread usage, first book series such as the *Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History* (the first volume of the series was published in 1970), or, in Germany, university chairs officially denominated for *Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit*. In addition, a number of book titles from the 1970s were extremely influential for the perception of the label 'early modern' in the English-speaking world: Peter Burke's *Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe* (1972), his *Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe* (1978), and Natalie Zemon Davis' *Society and Culture in Early Modern France* (1975) linked the label both to the questions and methods of the French Annales School and to the emerging new cultural history. During the last decades of the twentieth century, this had the effect of attaching a certain meaning to 'early modern' that transcended the basic *chronological*  operation of denoting the time from around 1500 to around 1800. Instead, it became a watchword for a methodological choice. Especially in the United States scholars in history and other humanities used the term as a battle cry against the Renaissance or rather, against the research agenda associated with the term Renaissance. In this

5 See generally and critically Wolfgang Reinhard, "The Idea of Early Modern History," in *Companion to Historiography*, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 2002), 281–292; Randolph Starn, "The Early Modern Muddle," *Journal of Early Modern History* 6 (2002): 296–307. For Germany Winfried Schulze, "Von den großen Anfängen des neuen Welttheaters': Entwicklung, neuere Ansätze und Aufgaben der Frühneuzeitforschung," *Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht* 44 (1993): 3–18; Thomas Maissen, "Seit wann und zu welchem Zweck gibt es die Frühe Neuzeit," in *Neue Wege der Forschung: Antrittsvorlesungen am Historischen Seminar Heidelberg, 2000–2006*, ed. Stefan Weinfurter (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), 129–153. A much longer view is taken by Phil Withington, *Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of some Powerful Ideas* (Cambridge: Polity 2010).

understanding, 'early modern' was to signify an interest in popular instead of elite culture, approaches to history informed by anthropology, constructivism and scepticism towards linear development.6

While Renaissance scholars fought a losing battle against the fashionable term, it was not until the turn of the millennium that the slightly postmodern reading of 'early modern' was challenged from a postmodernist position. Focusing on the presence of the word 'modern' in 'early modern,' cultural historians now began to question the term, its meaning and its usage.7 This question had not bothered historians before, even though it lay hidden in plain sight. With some irony Peter Burke had already alluded to it in 1978, in the introduction to his *Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe*: "The period with which this book is concerned runs from about 1500 to about 1800. In other words, it corresponds to what historians often call the 'early modern' period, even when they deny its modernity."8 But it was not until the late 1990s that the charge emerged, that 'early modern' not only meant modernity in disguise, but that the term and concept had originally been framed to refer to modernity and the process of modernisation.9 This reading seemed to be underpinned by chronology: 'early modern' as a terminology emerged almost in tandem with modernisation theory and its impact on the writing of history. Even though the term and concept do not feature prominently among the major authorities of modernisation theory proper, it is not hard to find it in use among historians from the 1960s onwards, who stressed the 'already modern' features of early modern Europe or even the early modern world.

In the following pages, I want to present a different chronology. I contend that 'early modern'—as a term and concept—was actually already well established in the United States by 1950 as its actual widespread usage can be found in and traced back to the 1920s and 1930s, and that its meaning at the time was akin to 'pre-modern,' or

'not-modern,' rather than being used to denote an early phase of Modernity. Some of the post-World War II comments about the modernity of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries have to be understood as a reaction to this view. This was only rarely acknowledged at the time. An exception was the 1972 textbook *Early Modern Europe 1500/1789* that appeared in William McNeill's *World Civilization Series*. The author, historian of France John B. Wolf (1907–1996), had started his teaching career in 1934 and had thus experienced the historiographical developments of almost four decades: "Until 1945," he began his overview, "American texts customarily presented the history of early modern Europe as a dismal era of absolutism, marked by tyranny, social injustice, and senseless war fought for the personal glory or dynastic interests of princes. This was in nice contrast to the Renaissance, presented as a period of individualism, or the French Revolution, seen as the opening of modern times." His own book, in contrast, was "intended as an introduction to the three centuries after 1500, a period vital in the formation of institutions of western society."10

When historical scholarship began at American universities in the nineteenth century, it was generally based on the classic tripartite division of history. In the practice of teaching history and of hiring academic historians, however, the main division was the one between Americanists, working on colonial and United States history, and Europeanists, working on European history, regardless of the period they were specialising in. Ideologically, the Teutonic Germ theory and, after its demise, the continuity of English constitutional history bound both camps together, until the growth of the field of American history and the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis severed the ties between them. At the turn of the century, ideas about historical continuity overrode the idea of strict epochal divisions among the Europeanists; furthermore, their small number at any given institution and the need for undergraduate survey courses led to strong overlaps between medievalists and modernists. Until World War I, the single general session on European history at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association indiscriminately featured papers on both periods.

This changed in the second decade of the twentieth century. The differentiation of medieval and modern history culminated in the founding of the journals *Speculum* (1926) and the *Journal of Modern History* (1929). The latter's scope was the entirety of the 'modern period' in its traditional sense: "the history of Europe and its expansion from the Renaissance to the close of the World War," as the first issue declared. At that point, however, the meaning of 'modern history' itself had already come under scrutiny. Was it just a random name for the time since 1500, or did 'modern' here indicate a specific affinity to the present, delineating a time of special significance for the modern, i.e. the contemporary world? And if so: when did it actually start?

10 John B. Wolf, *Early Modern Europe 1500/1789* (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1972), Preface.

The redefinition of modern history in American historiography can largely be attributed to the movement of 'New' or 'Progressive History' and its concept of presentism—that is, seeing the sense of any engagement with history in understanding the present or even in helping to solve the problems of the present.11 In 1907, James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936) and Charles Beard (1874–1948), both at Columbia University at the time, published a co-authored textbook titled *The Development of Modern Europe. An Introduction to the Study of Current History*. While it appeared five years before James Harvey Robinson's famous *New History*, 12 which gave the movement one of its names, the joint textbook can be seen as its first major manifestation. The subtitle already contains the clue. Not only does this book merge modern and current history, it already hints at the Progressive Historians' conception of the utility of history (both in the sense of *res gestae* and historiography): fostering a better understanding of the current world. "It has been a common defect of our historical manuals," the authors state at the start their own manual, "that, however satisfactorily they have dealt with more or less remote periods, they have ordinarily failed to connect the past with the present." Their solution was simple: "In preparing the volume in hand, the writers have consistently subordinated the past to the present. It has been their ever-conscious aim to enable the reader to catch up with his own times."13

What did this mean for the temporal scope of the history to be studied? "Obviously no special date can be fixed as the starting point of our story, for in some instances it will be necessary to go farther back than in others in seeking light on the present. … In general, however, Europe of to-day can be quite well understood if the wonderful achievements since the opening of the eighteenth century are properly grasped."14 The early eighteenth century seems to be a compromise between the two authors: while Beard saw the beginning of modernity mainly in the economic changes generated by the Industrial Revolution, the intellectual historian Robinson emphasised the scientific achievements of the seventeenth century.

At any rate, a number of differing timelines existed, even among the New Historians. What united them was their common understanding of the momentous shift in world history that had occurred around or since 1800. They even tried to outdo each other in finding the most evocative illustrations for this. The maverick Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968) posited in 1924: "George Washington [would] be far more at home on an Egyptian estate in the days of Tut-ankh-amen than in Richmond,

14 Robinson, *The Development of Modern Europe*, 2–3.

13 James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard, *The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History* (Boston: Ginn, 1908), iii.

Virginia, today."15 The great sceptic Carl Becker (1873–1945) used a similar image in his *Modern History* (1932): "If Socrates could have come to life in Paris in 1776, many things would have seemed strange to him; but he would not have had much trouble in making himself at home there. If Benjamin Franklin should enter Philadelphia today, with or without a loaf of bread under his arm, he would be less at home in his old home town after two hundred years than Socrates would have been in Paris after two thousand years."16 A year later Becker rephrased the thought in intellectually more challenging terms in his *Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers*—which was to become the most important American text on the Enlightenment for three decades and the main opponent of Peter Gay's project of resurrecting the value of the Enlightenment. "We are accustomed," Becker declared, "to think of the eighteenth century as essentially modern in its temper." After listing a number of commonly offered arguments for this view, he acknowledged: "All very true. … And yet, I think the philosophers were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought, than they quite realized or we have commonly supposed."17

The gist of these quotations is obvious: from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards, American historians of Europe started to disavow the classic definition of modern history as our own era that had begun around 1500. Instead, they posited that the contemporary world had only come into being in any recognisable form much more recently, be it in the seventeenth century or the early or even late eighteenth century. The preceding history was relegated to an almost perennial pre-modernity encompassing the millennia from Tutankhamun or Socrates to the birth of modernity. Mirroring the zenith of Progressive History, this historiographic development reached its first height in the 1920s and the 1930s.

Incidentally, however, these were the same decades that witnessed the breakthrough of the terms 'early modern age,' 'early modern times' or 'early modern history.' While they had existed since the 1880s, and had been used with increasing frequency since the turn of the century, it was not until the interwar years that they came to be widely employed in academic texts, in titles of articles, in university course descriptions, and even in professional job descriptions.18 In certain instances, the very same

people who argued for the relatively recent onset of modern times, used the term 'early modern' endemically in their writing. The most striking example is the aforementioned Harry Elmer Barnes, who is now either forgotten or only remembered for his role in revisionist history concerning the World Wars, eventually becoming the main intellectual sponsor of Holocaust denial in post-war America. Before 1940, however, he had been a major figure in American historiography publishing widely in journals and with prestigious publishing houses.19 As a student of James Harvey Robinson at Columbia, and a teacher at the New School for Social Research, formed by Robinson and some of his colleagues when they walked out of Columbia, Barnes had taken the gospel of Progressive History to heart. In fact, he was the self-appointed attack-dog of Progressive History, taking the polemics against established history and for the inclusion of the social sciences in the 1920s and 1930s to such extremes that it embarrassed even most of his ideological allies.

Barnes was able to combine a fervent belief in the novelty of modern civilisation with a concept of development in the preceding centuries: "the supplanting of medieval civilization by early modern culture and institutions between 1500 and 1800."20 Always the deliberate iconoclast, however, Barnes disparaged the well-established narrative of the transforming nature of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Taking his cue from his teacher Robinson, he painted them instead as reactionary movements. The truly progressive development in early modern times could not be grasped without understanding the "overwhelming importance of the expansion of Europe" and the colonial reverberations on European civilisation, he argued.21 In this way, Barnes created and fervently proclaimed the existence of an 'early modern period' that was a necessary step from medieval times to modernity—but unmistakably distinct from Modernity proper.

Early Modern Times", *Speculum* 2 (1927): 147–159 were the first articles with this title in major American historical journals. When Thorndike came back to Columbia in 1924 he immediately offered a course on "Intellectual History of Early Modern Times" (*Isis* 7 [1925], 109); in the same year R. Packard started a "Seminar in Early Modern History" at Smith College (*Catalogue of Smith College*, 1924–1915, 115). In 1933 Bernadotte Schmitt, Professor at Chicago and editor of the Journal of Modern History, complained to a colleague that "we have been searching for years for a man in the early modern field without much success." (Bernadotte Schmitt to Conyers Read, 31. January 1933, Univ. of Chicago Archive, Department of History Records 1910–1963, Box 5, F. 4.)

Other Progressive Historians interested in this period of European history were even less sanguine about the modernity of early modern times. Pride of place must be given to the views of James Harvey Robinson, godfather of the New History and prolific teacher of cohorts of Progressive Historians at Columbia. Trained as a medievalist, he came to emphasise the retarding elements in the religious and institutional life of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Only in the realm of science did he finally glimpse the emergence of a 'modern way' from the late seventeenth century onwards. This argument was further pursued by Lynn Thorndike, his former student and quasi-successor at Columbia. Thorndike led the 'revolt of the medievalists' (W.K. Ferguson) in the history of science, asserting the long continuity of scientific development and vigorously refuting any claims of an intellectual breakthrough in the Renaissance and Reformation periods.22 In fact, this man who first used 'early modern' in a title in the *American Historical Review*, spent most of his working life disproving the modernity of his chosen field of interest. His 1927 AHR-article began with the sobering observation: "The period that we have been too apt to glorify as an age of renaissance, of reformation, of discovery, was in many ways—for we must also remember the insane wars of religion and of ambitious monarchs—a time of setback, stagnation, distress, and abject misery." 23

Surveying the views of the Progressive Historians in the 1920s and 1930s, it becomes obvious that there are two models in conceiving the 'early modern.' The first one asserts the continuity of European developments, in institutions, in habits, in modes of thought—until the cataclysmic eruption of modernity that occurred at some point between the middle of the seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth century, depending on the historian's preferences. This, basically, is the concept that later came to be known as "Old Europe" (Dietrich Gerhard) or the "long Moyen Âge" (Jacques Le Goff).24 The other model was based on the construction of an early modern period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, perceived as a necessary stepping stone to the genuine modern world. This, of course, is the model that has largely become established in international historiography. Looking at the interwar period, however, it would be misleading to emphasise the disagreements between the exponents of both models and the competition between the two. Rather, they were united in proposing a totally new framing of modern history that was more akin to the French *histoire contemporaine* than to a traditional modern history/*Geschichte der Neuzeit*.

This affinity is mirrored in terminology: Historians of both persuasions would use 'early modern' to describe the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, regardless of

22 Lynn Thorndike, "Renaissance or Prenaissance," *Journal of the History of Ideas* 4 (1943), 65–74.

23 Thorndike, "Blight of Pestilence" (see note 18), 455.

24 Dietrich Gerhard, *Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000–1800* (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Jacques Le Goff, *Un long Moyen Âge* (Paris: Tallandier, 2004).

whether they believed them to be inherently pre-modern or at least in some ways proto-modern. Apparently, the almost innocuous word 'early' sufficed to categorically differentiate these centuries from the 'proper' modern age. During the interwar years, this mode of shortening the modern age was specifically American; no comparable development took place in British or German historiography. It was, in fact, a result of the general impact of American political and intellectual culture on the nation's historiography. The valorisation of industrial society and of democracy led the Progressive Historians to challenge the traditional view of modern history. Conversely, in the more state-centred European societies historians defined modernity primarily in terms of state-building and the modern state system. On that basis they perpetuated the concept of a long modern age/*Neuzeit*. 25

As indicated at the beginning, the object of this chapter is not merely to chart the periodisation choices of American historians of Europe in the interwar period, but also to generate lessons from this case study about the terminology and the intricacies of historiographical periodisation more generally. In my view, four salient observations emerge from this example:

25 The reasons for this divergence will be discussed in detail in my forthcoming book *Die Frühe Neuzeit der Moderne: die Entstehung einer Epoche in Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA*.

26 See his chapter in this volume.

have made sense to drop the label 'modern' altogether. They did not do it, nor did they ever consider it, neither in their publications nor, as far as we know, in their private correspondence. They were content with splitting off the 'early modern' from the 'modern' and did not ruminate about the residual meaning of the word they were using. Applying the established label and just qualifying it, made its propagation and professional communication much easier. The validity of this assumption can be proven best by invoking the later unsuccessful attempts to introduce new periods that would have broken up the established ones. The aforementioned case of 'Old Europe,' put forward by Dietrich Gerhard in Germany and the United States, testifies both to the sheer difficulty of establishing a new label and to the path-dependency of periodisation schemes, once they are ingrained institutionally.

Because of its seamless connection to established periodisation, the label 'early modern' generated no antipathy. Its very vagueness and ostensive familiarity opened the field for everyone to use it, in genetic variation, so to speak,27 as they pleased. So, from the 1930s onwards, the economic historian John U. Nef (1899–1988) would use the term consistently to stress the modernity of these centuries without ever commenting on the profound differences between his and e.g. Lynn Thorndike's understanding of the term.28

at the practice, therefore, offers a lens into these wider intellectual traits of specific societies. This circumstance has been put to use to analyse western periodisation as a whole, or to trace the chronological development of certain time-concepts—e.g. the Renaissance or the Enlightenment—in relation to the respective intellectual *Zeitgeist*. Rarely, however, have the subtle differences in periodisation between the national historiographies of Europe and the Americas—or other parts of the world—been used to understand their respective conceptions of past and present.31 The contrast between the contested nature of modern history in interwar American historiography and its hardly questioned prevalence in Europe, reveals much more about these societies than the mundane business of splitting up time may suggest. Disentangling the multiple histories of periodisation, as suggested here, need therefore not be denigrated as an instance of historiographical navel-gazing, but rather sheds light on the differing self-perceptions of specific societies and their respective cultures of narrating history.

31 One example for an attempt in this direction is Maissen and Mittler, *Why China did not have a Renaissance* (see note 29).

# 6. Historical Timeframes for Stateless Nations Analysing the Colonised Periodisation Paradox of Palestinian History

Susynne McElrone

# Introduction

Paths of historical progression and the ordering of historiography with the perceived absence of progression are the subjects of this chapter. Specifically, I will explore periodisation and temporalities of history in the context of histories with arguably non-linear progressions—some would say a history without progression—historiographies of stateless nations.1 Every student of history is familiar with the adage that those who

do not study and learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. At the heart of this statement is an idea that time is cyclical. More commonly, historians view time as linear. We may think of the past as a place. The metaphor is powerful. Once localised, we can 'visit,' and 'revisit' the past. We can 'map' it, two-dimensionally, along a line of time that stretches from the past through the present and into the future. Doing so, we can 'locate' past events at a measurable 'distance' from our lived present. Distance and detachment facilitate perspective, and perspective allows for the construction of insightful, analytical, rational explanatory narratives of the past, namely histories. Temporal distance allows us to measure and chart progression, endowing time with the quality of space.

However, as researchers in the interdisciplinary fields of postcolonial and memory studies attest anew, there is a disparity of distance between some pasts and the present where human experience is concerned. From above, and over the past century more vociferously from below, the importance of the past in the present has broadened. The retrospective demands upon the heirs of dominant histories for morality, culpability, and redress, which followed logically from the introduction of the banners of equality of all peoples and the principle of humanitarianism into international political discourse, prompted by the dissolution of empires and the rise of a world of nations, have irrevocably intertwined unsettled pasts consciously with the present, at least for now. The European Parliament acknowledged this entanglement in 2009, in its resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism, stating that "misinterpretations of history can fuel exclusivist policies and thereby incite hatred and racism […] the memories of Europe's tragic past must be kept alive in order to honour the victims, condemn the perpetrators and lay the foundations for reconciliation based on truth and remembrance."2

Arguably, periodising history facilitates the entanglement of the past with the present. In essence, it is an act of folding time back on itself. Periodisation highlights stretches of cohesion and points of rupture in narratives of the past that we mould by grouping selections of past historical events, and modes of thought and action, into a time-bound framework that reveals a logic of development we perceive retrospectively. In this way, periodisation conflates the then and the now by organising the past in a way which, ultimately, makes sense best in the present.

2 European Parliament, "European Conscience and Totalitarianism," resolution P6\_TA(2009)0213, April 2, 2009, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+ TA+P6-TA-2009-0213+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN, accessed July 31, 2022. Political uses of history should also be considered, of course. For an overview of historical politics in the eastern European context, see Alexei Miller, "Historical Politics: Eastern European Convolutions in the 21st century," in *The Convolutions of Historical Politics,* ed. Alexei Miller and Maria Lipman (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 1–20.

Moreover, periodisation is temporal and temporary and in function is impermanent. All periodisations will be subjected to re-evaluation and likely reorganisation in the future, as a result of, or sometimes in order to engender, a paradigmatic turn in our interpretation of the significances of the pasts they have ordered. We may ask, for instance, but not yet answer, whether the Cold War will be a period, a chapter, or merely a subheading in a larger chapter of world history, one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred years from now. The future restructuring of periodisations may be catalysed by uncovered aspects of the past that had remained hidden, future pasts that will have occurred in the interim, or the development of an innovative mode of thought that shifts perceptions about existent interpretations of the past.

Neither of these observations is an argument against periodisation. As a tool of historiography, periodisation is as useful to the historian as is a chapter to a novelist and their readers. By demarcating subjects or themes and following them from a beginning to an end, periodisation orders the past into a cohesive narrative of progression—and thus creates a specific *chronologics* of progress. The alternative, stagnation—what we define historically as such—would most logically be a singular period, typically demarcated by periods of descent and ascent, in either order. The question I wish to consider in this chapter is how to periodise unresolved histories which, I would argue, although not stagnant, are often viewed as lacking progression.

Alongside the Palestinians, on whom this chapter will focus, many stateless nations today—Tibetan, Tatar, Taiwanese, Tamil, Kashmiri, Kurd, Catalonian, and Uyghur, to name a few—live outside their homeland and/or in it under non-indigenous rule and have histories, varying in length, of aspiring to but not achieving and sustaining their sought autonomy or statehood. Many stateless nations lack broad political recognition and frequently face vigorous contestation of their legitimacy. This has less to do with the past than with the present and perceived future practical and political implications for other, established states and nations upon granting legitimation to stateless nations and witnessing their realisation as states.

Histories of many stateless nations share a common fate of censure and erasure. I examine the periodisation of Palestinian history as an exploration of how stateless nations periodise the history of their struggle for a still-unrealised state, and the significance of chosen schemes of periodisation. Before critically examining the periodisation of Palestinian history, a curiously neglected topic, and exploring possibilities for future alternatives to it, I begin with three observations on critical temporal aspects of Palestinian history that complicate the nation's historical time.3

3 On the concept of historical time/s, see Reinhart Koselleck, *Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time*, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Originally published as *Vergangene Zukunft, Zur Semantik geschichtlicher* Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979).

### Snags in the Fabric of Palestinian Historical Time

Firstly, Palestinian national history is transnational. The 1947–48 war that broke out upon announcement of British withdrawal from its League of Nations' Mandate over Palestine, resulted in the geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian population and the unravelling of the unilinear thread of historical time for the nation. Multiple, significantly distinct trajectories of Palestinian national experience sprung forth—in the Jordanian West Bank, Egyptian Gaza, for Palestinians newly made citizens of Israel, and for refugees. Each trajectory has its own history and has experienced historical time at different speeds.

About 750,000 Palestinians became refugees as a result of the war.4 United Nations' sponsored camps established in Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan (including the West Bank), and Syria still house refugee inhabitants today, a situation Lucas Oesch has characterised as "lasting temporariness."5 Sizeable Palestinian populations also moved to Egypt, Kuwait, and further abroad. By the beginning of 2017, the registered refugee population had swollen to 5,869,733 individuals, more than the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza.6 The approximately 160,000 Palestinians who did remain in 1948 in lands that became the State of Israel, were absorbed by the Jewish state, although this population was geographically circumscribed, with relatively few permitted to live in their pre-war homes, villages, or towns. Officially citizens, Palestinians were ruled over by an Israeli military government until 1966. They were effectively cut off from most interaction with the Arab world until 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in the June war. Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel number almost two million, comprising one-fifth of the Israeli population.7 Still feared by mainstream Israeli society to be a fifth column within the country, Palestinian citizens of Israel have only gradually come to express their

Palestinian identity publicly. While supporting the Palestinian freedom struggle, they also continue to work actively within Israel for the transformation of the Jewish state into a state of all its citizens.8 Mainstream Israelis and official parlance refer to Palestinian citizens of the country as Israeli Arabs, denying their Palestinian identity, or as Arab citizens of Israel, distinguishing them from citizens without qualifying adjectives. In the West Bank and Gaza, these Palestinians are referred to as *'arab thamāniyya wa-'arba'in*, the Arabs of [19]48. In Palestinian historiography, Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as a separate chapter, reflecting their experiences removed from the post-1948 mainstream of Palestinian national society and history.9

Refugees as a group have also been written out of the mainstream of the national narrative which—since the Oslo peace agreements signed 25 years ago between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—has become circumscribed to the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The refugees have not been historicised. That is, while the refugee 'problem' is a significant part of Palestinian history, the experiences of the refugees as a group—or groups—are not periodised *within* the historical national narrative, conveying a sense of objectification and of stagnation.

Generation after generation remain refugees, even though their numbers are substantial and growing, and some form of a right of return remains a Palestinian requirement for a peace settlement with Israel.10 Finally, the West Bank and Gaza populations are also separate societies. Passage between the two regions for Palestinians, when permitted at all, is a circuitous route through Egypt and Jordan.11 It stems from these actualities that a singular periodisation of Palestinian history cannot realistically encompass these distinct orbits of the nation.

Secondly, for Palestinians, the defining moment of national history is a tragedy that erases divisions between memory and history. Any Palestinian, asked where they are from, irrelevant of the location of their residence or birthplace, will answer with the name of the town or village in which their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, or great-great grandparents lived in 1947/8. The Nakba (Arabic, catastrophe), as the tragedy of these years is called—massacres, expulsions, transfers, the physical obliteration and erasure of villages—affected and continues to affect every Palestinian.12 Since the 1980s, many Palestinian village histories have been published about these destroyed Palestinian locales. With subtitles such as "our Palestine in the story of a village," "a homeland that refuses to be forgotten," "my village," "from memory of the elders to the hearts of the youth," and "a flower on the bosom of the Galilee," the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of this history are undeniable.13 Unresolved tragedies of nations, such as the Nakba for Palestinians, the Armenian genocide for the Armenian nation and state, and the 1944 *sürgün* (deportation) for

Crimean Tatars, are simultaneously experienced today as both afterlives of tragedy, that is, a remembered tragedy, and as an ongoing tragedy.14 Pierre Nora developed his concept of *lieux de mémoire* through reflection on "hopelessly forgetful modern societies" which "inherently value the new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past."15 For stateless nations, these sites of memory exist, too,16 but within a larger *milieu* of memory that has not dissipated. The past is not a cornerstone but, rather, the steel frame of the edifice of their present legitimacy as nations. The continued repercussions and reverberations of these present-versus-past defining moments engender a temporal complexity that suggests the suitability of multiple, overlapping historical times, a plurality of temporalities, with the period of the defining tragedy's long life layered over other, shorter periods that *have* come and gone.17

Thirdly, there is no disinterested Palestinian or Israeli history. This is not to make a claim about an absence of rigorousness in the scholarship. Rather, it affirms the obvious: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ignites passions around the world, including those of academics—on both 'sides.' Tensions in Israel/Palestine are incessant. Crisis after crisis fuel a 24-hour local news cycle, and long ago created a relentless sense of urgency regarding the future among all who follow these events. This urgency is part of the *chronologics* of writing this history, it is often expressed in the prefaces and afterwords of histories of the conflict, of Israel, and of Palestine, by drawing direct comparisons between the historical subject of study and present-day events—what Ilan Pappé has characterised as "the inevitable link"—and by offering prescriptions for the future.18

Palestinian studies, as a subject, seems at times to only be circling round and round, struggling not to drown in the whirlpool of denial in which it is compelled to

keep swimming, fighting for its voice to be listened to thoughtfully by mainstream Israel and Zionists. It is their listening that is the primary benchmark for acceptance. The United Nations and 137 of its member states—71 percent of the world's recognised countries—have recognised Palestine as a state. That said, this recognition has been powerless to help realise actual statehood. Dina Matar asked in the opening line of her 2011 book, *What it means to be Palestinian*,

How do you write a book on Palestine and the Palestinians when the very act of writing about, giving voice to, or representing the Palestinians is beset by two larger, interrelated problems: first that Palestinian history tends to be viewed solely in relation to Israeli history or narrative; and second that the story of the Palestinians, as ordinary human beings subjected to violent forms of power, remains a largely hidden one?19

In 2017, Columbia University's Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and editor of the *Journal of Palestine Studies* Rashid Khalidi opened his essay introducing a special issue of the journal on commemoration, by expressing a similar frustration, noting its longstanding quality: "the Palestinians continue to be elided from the historical record; in the words of Edward Said [in 1984], they have been denied 'permission to narrate.'"20

Historically speaking it is only recently, with the signing of the Oslo accords, that doors began to open to legitimation of Palestinians, their nationhood, and their history. Beshara Doumani's now-classic *Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900*, published in 1995, was representative of this new legitimacy. Doumani explicitly characterised one of his book's main goals as writing Palestinians into history.21 Since then, this project has met with spectacular success, overcoming obstacles such as the scattering, destruction, or inaccessibility of much documentary evidence of the past. Nonetheless, the politically motivated denial of Palestinian nationhood and history, in the academy and outside it, continues vociferously and acerbically and flames tensions worldwide. One popular illustration is the publication and rise to best-seller status on Amazon in 2017 of *A History of the Palestinian People:*

*from ancient Times to the modern Era* by the Israeli Assaf Voll. The book was purposely comprised solely of hundreds of blank pages.22 All this suggests, alongside other evidence, an undeniable immediacy of both the past and the future in the present—a *chronologics* of denial?

Coupled with a sense of non-progression politically by and for Palestinians overall, stagnation and powerlessness—this has prompted a view that a long twentieth century that has not yet ended may best be characterised as one period of Palestinian history. Louis A. Pérez has described the decades of Cubans' long independence struggle as "a state of continual becoming" in which "[t]he past had never really passed because it had never really ended."23 In essence, Khalidi argues the same has occurred with Palestinians, characterising the nation's history since the Balfour declaration of 1917 as a hundred years' siege.24

These snags in the fabric of Palestinian historical time reveal that the nation's history is spatially diverse and progresses along multiple, overlapping temporal tracks, each experiencing the passage of time at different speeds, from fleeting to frozen. It encompasses at any given historical moment the past, the present, and the future in a non-linear manner. These co-existing temporalities are all, simultaneously, present-day political battlegrounds. All this may be said to confound any periodisation or *chronologics* of Palestinian history as well as to suggest a dizzying array of historical periods. In the following sections, I will first examine the existent periodisation scheme of Palestinian history, which I characterise as principally colonised, and analyse its uses and its usefulness. The final section of this chapter will explore alternative periodisations.

### Historiography of Palestinian History

There have been fewer long-range studies of Palestinian modern history written since the Oslo accords than one may have assumed. Edward Said opined in 1999,

the fate of Palestinian history has been a sad one, since not only was independence not gained, but there was little collective understanding of the importance of constructing a collective history as a part of trying to gain independence. […] because of the collective Palestinian inability as

22 "Empty Book on Palestinian History Becomes Instant Best-seller on Amazon," *Haaretz,* June 22, 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/empty-book-on-palestinianhistory-is-amazon-best-seller-1.5487473, accessed July 31, 2022.

23 Louis A. Pérez, *The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past* (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 15, 19.

24 Khalidi, "Introduction" (see note 20).

a people to produce a convincing narrative story with a beginning, middle, and end (we were always too disorganized, our leaders were always interested in maintaining their power, most of our intellectuals refused to commit themselves as a group to a common goal and we too often changed our goals) Palestinians have remained scattered and politically ineffective victims of Zionism, as it continues to take more and more land and history.25

The corpus of long-range studies is heavily weighted instead toward histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and histories of historical Palestine, which is both a broader and at the same time a more circumscribed subject than the history of the Palestinian nation. There are also many long-range national histories of modern Israel.26 The first long-range modern history of the Palestinian nation appeared in 1993, a research synthesis authored by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling and American professor of international relations Joel Migdal.

*Palestinians: the Making of a People* was updated, expanded, and renamed in 2003.27 In 1997, Palestinian sociologist Samih Farsoun's *Palestine and the Palestinians* was published, authored with Christina E. Zacharia. An Arabic translation is used as a textbook in some Palestinian universities today.28 The English version was revised and expanded in 2006.29 Also in 2006, the Palestinian Authority's Education Ministry introduced a *History of modern and contemporary Palestine* as a textbook for upper-level high-school students on the humanities track, one of seven educational paths students can choose to follow as juniors and seniors.30 In the Palestinian Authority's educational system, history is taught from the fifth grade onwards, but national history is not the

focus. Fifth graders study ancient civilisations. The sixth graders' textbook is *History of the Arabs and Muslims*. In seventh grade, the Middle Ages are taught, primarily from a Middle Eastern point of view, followed by *History of the Arab and Islamic civilization* in eighth grade, and modern and contemporary Arab history in ninth grade. Tenth graders study a history of the modern and contemporary world. From the first grade, however, students annually study aspects of Muslim and Christian history in Palestine, as well as Palestinian culture, heritage, and history, in national and civics classes (*tarbiyya waṭaniyya* and *tarbiyya madaniyya*).31

Instead of the modern *longue durée*, the field of Palestinian history has developed primarily as a burgeoning conglomeration of microhistories focused on subsets of the population or regions of Palestine, or of particular events and short-term phenomena. Most research has not straddled political regimes, which changed rapidly in historical Palestine over the course of the twentieth century, from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate, to Israeli, Egyptian, and Jordanian rules, then to Israeli and, finally, Israeli and Palestinian governments. Long-term research requires polyglotism: knowledge of Arabic, Ottoman and modern Turkish, English, and Hebrew.32 Additionally, research in the main repositories of remaining documents requires multi-country travel to Turkey, England, Israel, the Palestinian Authority territories, and Jordan, which creates budget strains, logistical difficulties, and right-of-access issues for researchers.33 These difficulties of researching modern Palestine history have made it difficult to trace continuities across regime change and have likely contributed to the according periodisation of Palestinian history.

### The Periodisation of Palestinian Modern History

Although the periodisation scheme of modern Palestinian history has not been the subject of sustained discourse, a study of relevant historical literature permits the observation that it has coalesced into the following recognised periods: the Ottoman period, until 1917;34 the British Mandate period from 1918–1948; the Nakba—generally, the events of 1947 to 1949, also sometimes viewed as an ongoing period since 1947/8; dispersal and chaos 1948–1967; geographical reunification of historical Palestine under Israeli rule and the coalescence of a Palestinian political and armed liberation movement outside historical Palestine, 1967–87; the first Intifada and Oslo years, during which the focus of Palestinian history returned to the territories of historical Palestine occupied by Israel in 1967 and to Palestinians living there, 1987–2000; and, since the collapse of the Oslo peace process, what has come to be called the post-Oslo period, for lack of a coherent theme or emerging direction. The official Palestinian position has remained committed to the idea of negotiations with Israel for its recognition of a Palestinian state based on the principle of an exchange of land for peace.

In evaluating the usefulness of this periodisation we must analyse the narrative that emerges from these building blocks. What *Zeitgeist* do these periods reveal, and what do they say about the nature of change from one period to the next? How does this scheme reflect Palestinian agency, priorities, and values? What does it define as important in Palestinian history? Analysing the accepted periodisation, one notes firstly that these many short historical periods reflect, from the vantage point of the present, a long century of frequent, significant ruptures, highlighting regime change following wars and uprisings—World War I, the 1948 war, the 1967 war, and the first Intifada. Secondly, while, this periodisation highlights the primacy of politics and non-indigenous governance in Palestinian history, it does not, for example, distinguish qualitatively between the Ottomans and the British, or name, in what would be a parallel fashion, the Israelis. The common theme is foreign domination. Similarly, while the characterisation of the years 1947–1967 expresses what happened to Palestinians, the characterisations of the preceding periods and "the post-Oslo period" exclude Palestinians as either subjects or objects of history. Thirdly, and related to this, Palestinian helplessness and victimhood is implicit in this framework through the absence of their agency as defining factors during periods of their history for most of the twentieth century and into the current one.

One central historiographical discussion of Palestinian studies in past decades has been a debate on the most suitable framework for analysing Zionism, Israel, and the character of Israel's past and present relationship with the indigenous Palestinian population. The suggestion of a colonial-settler paradigm is not new, and it is not relevant

34 The Ottomans conquered *Bilad al-Sham*, including Palestine, in 1516/17, but this date is considered irrelevant to Palestinian national history because it predates national consciousness.

to discuss its appropriateness here. That has been done elsewhere.35 Rather, I wish to remark upon the significant attention given to this debate in order to draw attention to the significant neglect of an equally reported, related framework question—what is the most suitable periodisation scheme for studying Palestinian history? Before addressing the possibility of alternatives to accepted periodisation, it is pertinent to first address the matter of why this question has been widely neglected. I will do so by pointing to the periodisation scheme's utility. First, the current periodisation is not historically inaccurate; war and regime change are often used as markers of historical periods. Secondly, the obstacles mentioned above to conducting historical research on Palestine lend themselves to the temporal divisions in place. Thirdly, we may consider the underlying message of the current periodisation. It is commonplace that periodisation is teleological; it needs to explain how we arrived at the present, but where have the Palestinians arrived at? Until recently, independence was the only foreseeable national outcome sought for and by Palestinians. With progress toward statehood the measuring stick by which historians have retrospectively analysed the overall trajectory of Palestinian history, the theme of that trajectory necessarily appears either as failure and incapability or, at best, the naïve, powerless fighting of an impossible struggle against the powerful, colonial settler and their allies. As such, paradoxically, the current, colonised historical periodisation ignores Palestinian agency across much of Palestinian history. This is distinct from the historiography, which does not do this, and which is appropriately both appreciative and critical. In contrast, the periodisation scheme builds the framework of a narrative that one may argue highlights—in the absence of agency—Palestinian patience and steadfastness in a struggle against a series of all-powerful occupying aggressors. These themes of *ṣabr* and *ṣumūd* continue to be important cultural motifs. I do not intend to suggest with this observation that the promotion of these values is conscious in the periodisation. Generally, however, one may surmise that these three, broad efficacious qualities of the current periodisation have probably contributed to the lack of attention the temporal divisioning of Palestinian history has received.

35 To begin with, Fayez A. Sayegh, *Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,* Palestine Monographs 1 (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1965) and Maxime Rodinson, "Israël, fait colonial?," *Les Temps modernes* 253 (1967): 17–88. This extended essay was translated into English several years later as: *Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?*, trans. David Thorstad (New York: Monad Press, 1973). Lorenzo Veracini has written extensively on this subject, beginning with his *Israel and Settler Society* (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006) and, most recently, "Israel-Palestine through a settler-colonial studies lens," *Interventions* (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1547213. Many articles in *Settler Colonial Studies*, founded in 2011 and quarterly publishing peer-reviewed academic research, focus on Palestine/Israel. Reflective of the widespread nature of the controversy this paradigm has prompted see, for example, Arnon Degani, "Israel is a Settler Colonial State—and that's OK," *Haaretz*, September 13, 2016, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premiumisrael-is-a-settler-colonial-state-and-that-s-ok-1.5433405, accessed July 31, 2022.

# By Way of Conclusion: New-Old Thoughts on Time and Periodisation

Time has its own history. Firstly, one may recall that in the Ottoman Empire, to which Palestine belonged, from at least the late-fifteenth through the late-nineteenth centuries, that the day was divided into two periods of twelve hours, with the length of each 'hour' varying in length with the season.36 Globally, time was universalised only at the beginning of the long twentieth century.37 Universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar for secular affairs took decades longer, and its efficacy for dividing and regulating the passage of time remains contested today.38 Furthermore, we can consider that some physicists now believe that time has two dimensions, a theory that appears to be able to resolve the paradox of existent phenomena, such as dark matter and dark energy, which one-dimensional models of time cannot explain.39 A century ago, Hermann Minkowski's *chronotopical* four-dimension model was revolutionary. Minkowski recognised time, "spacetime," as a degree of freedom of direction like the three widely accepted spatial dimensions.40 'The present,' of course, is all that exists

in simultaneity, irrespective of the space it occupies or one's ability to perceive it. This simultaneity is, however, relative. Any object or point in three dimensions of space will appear differently to an observer depending upon their position along the fourth dimension, "spacetime." This experience of space relative to time posits time as curved, not straight. Metaphorically, historians may infer from these premises that time—as well as our experience of it—bends to history, not history to time. Minkowski's turnof-the-century theory may have influenced historian Joseph Ward Swain's inquiry into "What is history?," also published almost a century ago, in *The Journal of Philosophy*:

History, then, is not a science as physics and chemistry are; except in a few superficial details, the historian is a scientist neither in purpose nor method: his purpose is to make a certain view of the world prevail, his method is to tell history in such a way that this philosophy will seem to be immanent in it.41

If this is a profound and fruitful philosophy, much of value will surely result. This is what is meant by the statement that while he deals with the past, the historian is creating the future. Finally, it would also follow, that from these considerations no history will ever be final, that, as was said, history will never 'stay put.' Each age requires a philosophy of its own … Each age must create its own past as it creates its own present and future.42

With an acute, 'general' awareness today of the constructed and intertwined, collective and simultaneously personal natures of not only identity and history but also of memory and time, it is appropriate that historians critically re-evaluate the meaningfulness of the fairly harmonious marriage between historiography and a rigidly constructed notion of chronological time, that carried us through most of the twentieth century. In no case is this more essential than with the case of unsettled histories, many themselves the result of twentieth-century events. Unsettled histories may be said to have discernible beginnings and subsequent stages, but no perceptible ending, and thus no obvious middle. One may ask, how can Palestinian national history—or that of any stateless nation—be said to have transitioned from one historical period to a next if each period ends with the same failure to achieve the goal of statehood that drives national history? We may attempt to examine, as Khalidi did in *The Iron Cage*, the various circumstances and reasons in each period that may have contributed uniquely

41 Joseph W. Swain, "What is history?—V," *The Journal of Philosophy* 20, no.13 (June 21, 1923): 348.

42 Swain, "What is history?" (see note 41), 349.

to renewal of this failure.43 But any measure of 'progress,' the grander meaning of any one political failure-victory or the cumulative effect of them all, will remain elusive until the goal of statehood is either renounced or achieved. The ultimate outcome and, thus, the significance of present and past national action for effecting that outcome, a national political solution, is still speculative. This is a conundrum of the historiography of stateless nations.

On the other hand, history is not only or always about progress. It explains development, which is not unidirectional. Swain reminds us that history, like the experience of time and like periodisation, is relative. So how, from the point of view of today, is it most meaningful to periodise Palestinian national history? What is clear or, hopefully, what has become clear in this chapter is that the current periodisation scheme—or *chronologics*—has outlived its usefulness. It accounts only partially for the breadth of national history and ascribes negligible agency to its supposed subjects of history. I argue that logically, since periodisation is a construct, it is merely a convention of convenience to order it linearly. With events of the Palestinian past continuing to be experienced consciously as present, notably among them the Nakba, suitable periodisation might reflect their long lives. Further, Palestinian history is transnational. It cannot easily be confined within one narrative thread. A comprehensive periodisation of the nation's history conceivably could comprise multiple, overlapping periods of various lengths of nationally experienced time: the apparent glacial slowness of refugee times; the ongoing and also changing nature of a long Nakba; the evolvement of the Palestinian community with Israeli citizenship; and, more universally, generational spirits and trajectories. In sum, if the main function of periodization is to sensibly order historical narrative, then it is not calendar time but, rather, historical events and phenomena and our understanding of them and their enduring significance across time to which periodization owes its primary allegiance. These are not revelatory arguments about the nature of time; it is an observation that the periodization of history has thus far followed a convention of time which, we generally acknowledge today, the human experience of time and history does not and, therefore, this is a suggestion that it need not.

Beshara Doumani and Alex Winder have recently noted, discussing the structure of Palestinian commemorative politics, that a history that highlights "destruction, loss, and colonial machinations" incarcerates that history in a discursive iron cage.44 I believe the same can be said of its periodisation. More broadly, I would argue that the histories of stateless nations cannot be periodised effectively with the same methodology

43 Khalidi is explicit that his project is as much about past as present (ix) and posits the question whether it is best, or if "are we perhaps too obsessed" with the idea of state at the center of the national historical narrative of the nation (xiii).

44 Beshara Doumani and Alex Winder, "1948 and Its Shadows," *Introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies*, 48, no.1 (Autumn 2018): 8.

of periodisation utilised for histories of states. While states rely on their histories to instill identity and bolster allegiance, history books and their teaching in state schools are just two of the tools at a state's disposal to teach the nation and reinforce its existence and belonging to it. Stateless nations lack many institutions and props of state and often lack geographical unity. Their national identity and legitimacy are rooted in the past. History is the primary weapon of the weak, nevertheless. The telling of it as well as its organisation and ordering needs to unify its many trajectories under an umbrella of inclusion, one wide enough to encompass the nation and, as Swain said, to convincingly write its future.

# Section II

CHRONOLOGICS Contested Ways of Thinking Time

# Chronologics An Introduction

#### Barbara Mittler , Thomas Maissen , Pierre Monnet

This section of the book presents contrasting approaches to world history, beginning with Michael Geyer's analysis of the unknown and prescient work of Marshall G.S. Hodgson who, since the 1940s, had attempted to "recast, quite literally, the sense or 'experience' of space and time," thus to create a "post-Western," and truly "global timescale."1 This section illustrates how different actors at different times developed and advocated their specific ways of conceiving space-time, the *chronotope*, or, to put it another way, how they formed and formulated their individual *chronologics.* It upholds, with Heather Ferguson and Özen N. Dolcerocca, an awareness of the internal logics of periodisations, following Sanjay Subrahmanyam in reflecting on periodisation as a problem of investigation, not just *about* the past, but *in* the past.2

These essays argue that conflicting logics of revelation and history, sacred and secular, the anecdotal local and the generalisable global, born out of shifting sociospatial identities, in turn shape different types of *chronotopes* (i.e. specific narratives of timespace). Investigating these, including variant projects of meaning-making that construct or reinforce particular power formations through the manipulation of time, we can avoid discourses that both oppose and exclude Other times and histories. Instead of simply assuming that Jack Goody's "Theft of History" is a given, this section makes visible the often heated negotiations accompanying attempts to define time through relationality.

The authors in this section consider emblematic moments and their historicised narration: zooming in and out on specific *chronoscales*—from the planetary world, to nation, to the minority (religious) group; also considering different *chronoscapes*  (bringing to the fore multiple temporalities and their technologies of power)—in Europe, the Middle East and India. They contemplate how, each and individually, specific emblematic moments and their epochal force is recounted, while sometimes grappling with given *chronotypes* and/or *(Euro)chronologies*. The individual chapters cover a variety of sources, from school textbooks to literature, to journalistic, historical and religious writings, encyclopedias and universal histories.

# 7. The Time of World History Essaying Marshall G.S. Hodgson's Work on Islamicate Societies and Afro-Eurasian World History

Michael Geyer

Working with time, indeed moulding time, is key to all narratives that link the past with the present and future, but for world history, time is of the essence. It imposes a sequential order on a field of study that transcends any single (experienced) past. For the same reason, moulding world-historical time is a uniquely difficult task. Curiously, globalisation, the quickly tightening imbrication of the world's societies, governments, and economies, and their increasing interaction, has only increased that difficulty.

On the surface, we might expect globalising processes to make it easier to develop a unified timescale, in which all the world's histories are neatly lined up. Social scientific theories of 'modernisation,' which bend time in the prism of world empires, have advanced this concept, but they have come and gone along with these empires' expectations and pretensions. World historians have chosen a different course. In the first half of the twentieth century, a new generation of 'global' world historians followed neither the European tradition of universalist "world pictures" (Heidegger) nor social science theories of modernisation.1 They conceived the time of world history not as linear time, progressing toward a wholly modern world (Hegel or Spencer), but as the cyclical time of the rise, flowering and decline of ever multiplying civilisations (Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin). They discovered time as a spatial and temporal discontinuum and, as a result, were confronted with a surfeit of times (*chronoscapes*) and an ungodly scramble to order them. How many civilisations can you fit onto a

1 Paul Costello, *World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism* (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 41–55.

Geyer, Michael. 2022. "The Time of World History. Essaying Marshall G.S. Hodgson's Work on Islamicate Societies and Afro-Eurasian World History." In Chronologics. Periodisation in a Global Context, edited by Barbara Mittler, Thomas Maissen and Pierre Monnet, 141–171. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.607.c15137

global timescale? Would something like 'Quantum History' be necessary, perhaps not to solve the riddle but to ask the right questions about time?2

The diversification and subjectivisation of the study of history with its relentless multiplication of world-wide subjects did the rest. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, both linear and cyclical conceptions of world-time have been not so much debunked (though that has happened as well), as dismissed as imperial anachronisms or examples of the dead end of historicism. The study of time has emerged as a sub-discipline in history, while historical time has become something of a do-it-yourself kit for the historian in every corner of the world. What is left is the empty time of chronology that imposes order and may even create a "climate of history," but has yet to structure world-historical narratives.3 Of course, such narratives may no longer matter, if on the one hand we believe the *collapsologues*, who hold that human time will disappear soon enough, together with the entire species,4 or if on the other hand we believe evolutionists like Yuval Harari, that *Homo sapiens* are mutating into *Homo deus*, who have infinite time at their fingertips and, hence, live in past, present and future simultaneously.5 Science fiction has developed some rather intriguing narratives for what happens when human beings have time at their disposal.6

In the meantime, though, we ordinary historians face the conundrum of world history in a global age with its standard global time and its surfeit of the world's narratives, which articulate the manifold human experiences of time and the diverse ways of shaping it within the limits of space-bound societies and cultures.7 This is the condition of world history in a global age and has been so for well over a century. Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1922–1968) stands out among twentieth-century world historians for making this "global condition" (his words), the starting point for his inquiries into world history.8 He argued that global times necessitated a radical reconceptualisation of all world history and, indeed, a re-orientation of the craft of the historian. It is the

former, his reordering of world history, the study of world time and its narrative(s), that is the subject of this essay.

The fact that Hodgson is not well known among European and Western historians reflects the conundrum of world history that he attempted to solve. He is still, even half a century after his death, a highly regarded historian of Islam and the Islamicate world. His posthumously published three-volume *The Venture of Islam* is only now being replaced by a new generation of studies.9 But he is not known beyond his field, and in his field he is not known as a historian of Islam in world history, because that's not the way *The Venture of Islam* is read.10 If he is not well known as a world and global historian, this is due, in part, to the forgetfulness of historians who overlook the fact that he staked his career on developing the concept of interregional history as world history with a spatial focus on Afro-Eurasia.11 Academics prefer to reinvent the wheel rather than using their internet skills to access what is readily accessible.12

It is true that Hodgson's main work on world and global history is not well served in the one anthology that presents him as a world historian.13 This is less the fault of the anthology than of the fact that much of Hodgson's world historical work was left in an unfinished state when he died unexpectedly in 1968. However, while the work is unfinished, there exist two complete manuscripts that deserve more than cursory attention. Hodgson reworked an astoundingly rebellious early text from 1946, titled "The Problems of Interregional History," into a mature, though unedited and, in some sections, repetitive manuscript, "The Unity of World History: An Essay on Medieval and Modern Eurasia," which he picked up again twenty years later, in 1966/68, when he thought that *The Venture of Islam* was finally done.14 As a text, "The Unity of World

History" emerged in tandem with *The Venture of Islam*. 15 In fact, Hodgson worried that his treatment of Islam would be misunderstood if "The Unity of World History" were not published first.16

It may well be, as William McNeill generously acknowledged at Hodgson's Memorial in 1968, that Hodgson could have become the world historian of record if he had not died prematurely, and we might want to think of McNeill's conversion from a European to a global world historian as being affected by Hodgson's work.17 It might also have been easier for Hodgson if he had not had to struggle, as chair of the illustrious Committee on Social Thought (1965–1968) at the University of Chicago, with died-in-the-wool eurocentrics like the sociologist Edward Shils, the writer Saul Bellow or the philosopher Hannah Arendt, or with the new turn in anthropology away from human anthropology (civilisation studies), as articulated by Clifford Geertz and his Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations.18 There was quite a cast of characters to contend with at the University of Chicago.

But I have come to a different, ironic, though not at all amusing conclusion. Despite auspicious starts, Hodgson's studies in world history remained unfinished, because he saw the need for a radically new world history for a global, yet distinctly post-imperial and post-colonial age—a history dedicated to the deep past of human histories starting with the recognition of the global present and its surfeit of historical times—and he was never able to fully come to terms with this idea. Hodgson nevertheless attempted to solve key questions of world history that we still have not solved, despite considerable advances, and his insights remain startlingly innovative

G. S. Hodgson, "The Unity of World History: An Essay on Medieval and Modern Eurasia," n.d., 388 pages, Hodgson Papers, Box 14, Folder 14 and Box 15, Folders 1–6.

(and uniquely rebellious), even where they are incomplete or lead to dead ends. One of these problems was the time of world history.

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The starting point for Hodgson's world historical considerations was his furious rejection of "the westward distortion in history,"19 a stance that is typically associated with the much later work of Edward Said or Dipesh Chakrabarty.20 Perhaps the reason for the neglect of Hodgson's contribution is that he thought that in order to provincialise the West, Europeans and Americans would have to learn more world history rather than less. They (and everyone else) would have to confront and come to terms with the world's pasts, in which "Europe was never essentially at the center of world history before 1700 AD" and was rapidly moving out of the centre once again in the present time.21 Provincialising Europe's world-historical imagination entailed a double movement: the liberation of world histories held captive by Europe's imperial imagination, and the expansion of the horizon of a hopelessly parochial United States that had adopted the European imagination while remaining provincial at heart.

Hodgson's missionary zeal emerged from the entry into war by the United States in 1941. At the time, he was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, majoring in Economics, but within a year he had developed his first program for world history, conceived as an antidote to war.22 As a radical Quaker and civil rights activist, he fought for non-discrimination in student housing at Colorado. As a conscientious objector and anti-war activist, he was interned from 1943 to 1945 in Civilian Public Service Camp #59 in Elkton in Oregon.23 In 1945–46, he completed his service as an orderly in a mental health hospital in Concord, NH, before entering the University of Chicago as a graduate student. These internment camps for conscientious objectors

19 Hodgson, "Hemispheric Inter-regional History" (see note 11), 715–723, here 21–22. See also Hodgson, "World History: Toning Down its 'Western Accent,'" *UNESCO Courier* 7, no.7 (1954): 24–25.

were hothouses for all kinds of radical theory, direct action, and nonviolent resistance.24 They were also the source of religious and poetic revivals. For Hodgson, his time as internee was a period of unique creativity, in which he developed the outlines of a world history that he hoped would develop in tandem with the mobilisation of worldwide nonviolent resistance against war and oppression, racism, colonialism, and "white supremacy."25 The latter term stands out, but it appears less surprising if we consider that Hodgson was born and raised in Richmond, Indiana, the home of a sizeable Quaker Community, but also of the largest Ku Klux Klan organisation in the United States.26 Like many pacifists and civil rights advocates in the United States at the time, Hodgson was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's writings and in Gandhi's spirit he set out to write world history, not as an academic exercise, but as an act of nonviolent resistance.27

World history, Hodgson, argued was less the answer to the calamity of the present war than to the prospect of future wars. To that end, world history had to recast, quite literally, the sense or experience of space and time—the *chronotope*. 28 Thus, in an outline for a potential book, in 1945 Hodgson fiercely insisted "THERE IS NO ORIENT."29 The Eurasian world is not divided into two halves. The fiction of an Orient, he wrote, was part of a vast deception by the Western mind that had permeated all academic disciplines. It had infected world history, which did not deserve its name ("because the books are essentially still only histories of the West"),30 geography, Oriental Studies, cultural values (literature and art), world politics, and (Christian) religion. In order

to write a world history appropriate for the age, a radical transformation of "outlook" was needed—that is, an epistemic revolution, or as he put it in 1942, a "revolution in mental health."31 World history needed a revolution in the way the world's pasts were seen and experienced (viewed through the prism of the global presence) that would have the same lifeworld-transforming, experiential impact as the industrial revolution. Therefore, the goal of world history was to re-order the sense of space and time in the present world. World history was the tool with which to initiate an epistemic revolution. It became, for Hodgson, in itself an act of nonviolent resistance.

A first general argument about the necessity of changing the "world outlook" was published in 1944 in a Quaker journal for social studies teachers, with the dateline "Camp Elkton."32 It advised the teachers to start by changing words and phrases, which even if used with critical intent left the wrong mental map. Thus, it was wrong to elevate the European peninsula into a continent, if the same was not done for India as well. It was wrong to juxtapose East and West as complementary halves of world civilisation, because for one thing there was much more East than West, and for another the East was not a single entity, but a plurality of civilisations. Most importantly, it was wrong to say that Europe was at centre stage of history, not only because most people lived east of the Indus, but because most of world history had happened there. "It is more reasonable to say that Europe 'was isolated from the main stream of history' than to say that *India* was."33 His particular ire was directed against the idea of the Roman Empire as the centre of the world (which finds an intriguing parallel in his downgrading of the British Empire in his later writing). "Stop talking" about the "known world," he enjoins, in reference to Europe; "stop talking" about Rome's being "mistress of the civilized world"; "stop talking" about the fall of the Roman Empire, because only the western provinces had collapsed; stop talking about the "dark ages," when there was light in Alexandria, Constantinople, and Baghdad, not to speak of India and China.34 We see here the inchoate sense of another (world) history, but Hodgson had as yet no conception of what kind of history that might be.

History for Hodgson was not the only battleground against Occidentalism as an epistemic regime. Because the distorting "outlook" was entrenched in all aspects of life, his proselytising temper could flare up over large and small things. Thus, he fought mightily against the use of the Mercator projection as "spiritual poison."35 By the same token, he engaged with great brio in a correspondence with the national Esperanto organisation to change the spelling and phonetics of Esperanto in order

31 Note, 22 December 1942: "The next revolution is a revolution in mental health fully comparable to the industrial revolution." Hodgson Papers, Box 11, Folder 1.

to accommodate non-European usage.36 He also had some rather heated altercations with fellow Arabic teachers, because he thought (Western) grammarians had made the Arabic grammar used for teaching unnecessarily difficult.37 He remained a fierce and frequently cantankerous critic of Occidentalism and Orientalism in all spheres of life, believing the professional, the political and the religious spheres intersected. In any case, advancing an understanding and an appreciation of Islam among his (Christian) co-religionists was as important as his civic engagement in the fight against housing segregation and a part and parcel of his general "life-orientation."38 Life-orientation was Hodgson's own preferred term for religion.

In the same spirit, Hodgson rejected the Christian calendar as a measure of time and experimented with replacing the Julian and Gregorian calendars.39 Rather than settle with merely replacing the nomenclature (BCE/CE), he wanted the impossible, that is, to erase the year zero and develop an entirely new "stereoscopic numerical system" in its stead.40 The details of his scheme are difficult to fathom, but the intent is clear. As world historian, he hoped to develop a post-Western, global timescale. The question then was what scale it should use. That is, should it be a decimal scale, or should it be a scale based on twelve?41 What measure should be used? Should it be a human, anthropocentric scale or, more narrowly, a civilisation scale (using the advent of agriculture, cities, and literate society as points of departure)? Or should it be a natural history scale (the equivalent of what would become the Anthropocene)? Nothing came of this endeavour. Hodgson eventually settled on the Common Era notation. But his exertions go to show that his quest to undo the "Western outlook" was thorough and comprehensive.

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None of these efforts, however, provided answers to the question of what kind of world history might replace centered world histories, either Orientalist or, in reverse, Occidentalist. Indeed, was History the right approach to making sense of the past, present and future of the world? Although by 1946 he had chosen History as his field of study, there always remained a glimmer of doubt, as to whether it was the right means of overcoming "the spiritual poison" of both Orientalism and Occidentalism. Two alternatives are worth our attention, because they impinge on the question of time in world history.

The first one emerged as a result of Hodgson's confrontation with the vastness of the human past, which took the form of elaborate chronologies. These may appear to serve a purely auxiliary function in orienting the uninformed reader, as for example, in *The Venture of Islam*, but Hodgson persisted throughout his academic career in marking events by time and place, recording timelines, and establishing the chronologies of regional cultures and entire civilisations. Hodgson's chronologies acquired meaning in 1943 when he discovered the *History of the Prophets and Kings*, by the Persian scholar (Muhammad Ibn Jarir) al-Tabari (839–923 CE).42 Other interpreters considered the work rather tedious, but Hodgson admired its thoroughness and epic quality. Like al-Tabari, he came to think of the (world) historian as an annalist, as the recorder of great deeds (and great suffering), which in this case meant world-defining deeds. He called such an exploration of world-defining human action "epic history."43 The Atlantic slave trade, he thought, was among the events that ought to be written as "epic history."44

As an annalist, he used space-based regional timescales to challenge and ultimately reject the cyclical scheme used by Toynbee.45 He used them also to avoid the trap of Western universalists, who saw world history as a line of progression ending in a global West with the larger part of the world peeling off into darkness, their civilisational timelines cut off, as if they had ceased to exist. Hodgson, as an annalist, asked why it was that the Far East and the Middle East, as well as Indian Ocean Islamic societies, although humiliated and prostrate at present, remained discrete cultural regions with their own distinct life-orientations. In a way, Hodgson here sounds like Fernand Braudel (whom he eventually read in 1964).46 However, Hodgson's environmental space was far deeper than the one conceived by Braudel and his Mediterranean Sea was the Indian Ocean. Space, moreover, was for him not a geographic, but a geo-cultural formation. But these implications emerged later. His initial, annalist impulse was to give each geo-cultural region its chronology.

The question of History as prose narrative was the crux of the second alternative. Off in the internment camp, thrown together with poets and literati, reading his way through a good bit of world literature, cultural anthropology, and the canonical

texts of the world's major religions, Hodgson wondered whether world history, and certainly world history in a global age, should be a time-based narrative at all. Wasn't the very insistence on a historical *chronologics* just another "westward distortion"? Was History the right genre for narrating the world's pasts in a global present? Was it the right medium for breaking the Western epistemic mould? Most of the world had not written 'world history' to explain the world's pasts. As it happens, graduate school sobered up Hodgson, and the academic environment, into which he entered only reluctantly, did the rest. But his "dream" of composing a very different, untimely and timeless story of the world remained.47 The world's pasts, he concluded, deserved poetry. The proper mediator was not the historian, but the prophet. To shatter the Western episteme, a prophetic voice was needed. This was indeed "wild historical theorizing"—far beyond the work of thinkers he listed under this rubric.48

While working on a first outline of world history, his *chronotopical* "Problems of Interregional History," he also penned what he called Puranas, imitating the substance and the verse structure of the Sanskrit originals and transposing these ancient texts into his own creation history of the world's civilisations.49 These constituted a record of the world's pasts as *res gestae* of the founders of civilisations. The fact that they were written in verse signalled the elevated nature of the text (as well as his juvenile fascination with the sublime). At their core, these were creation stories that presented the genealogies, the lives and the works of eminent civilisation bearers—foremost prophets, less so kings—from the Eurasian-African hemisphere. "The most impressive genre in visional writing is the world myth."50

Where Hodgson got all of this from is unclear, but his reasoning, while for the most part implicit, is transparent. A new world, a global world and a world at war, needed a new world myth as a foundation suitable for a global age—and this foundation was to be made from the texts and textures of the world's traditions. His choice of Puranas was a juvenile fixation, but it made clear that he felt compelled to step out of familiar worlds into unfamiliar ones. If the in-gathering of the world's traditions was the purpose of world history, the goal was to create a founding narrative for a global world, in which these traditions were to be preserved and yet transcended in

creation stories that emerged from a worldwide (nonviolent) mobilisation for a global age—against the oppressive reality of the prevailing "Western outlook."51

Hodgson's dream of a narrative of the world beyond *chronologics* matters in our context, even though Hodgson himself realised that he was striving for the impossible. Two points are worth making. First, chronological histories and prose narratives were the Western standard for writing history and world history. It follows that to provincialise Europe would entail considering other genres of writing, narrating, and experiencing the world's pasts. In this sense, the turn against chronological prose history was part and parcel of Hodgson's anti-Orientalist project. That this effort may well be considered Orientalising in itself and, perhaps more to the point, sacrilegious, is no small matter, but this debate, which would have to explore Hodgson's religiosity and his sense of the sacred, will have to wait for another occasion. What matters is the imaginative drive that recognised the time- and space-bound nature of prose-chronological narratives. Second, for Hodgson myth-history, wisdom literature, and epic poetry were viable, if untimely alternative genres for world history.52 He recognised that the *Zeitgeist* in general and academic thought in particular were not amenable to time-transcendent epic poetry and wisdom literature. But contrary to his colleague William McNeill, whose anti-myth-history looks suspiciously like a response to Hodgson,53 he firmly believed that these histories, while in abeyance in his time, would by necessity return. They would not have to take the form of Puranas, but they would have to be foundational thought for a global world.

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Hodgson became a historian rather than an epic poet. As mentioned, his world historical oeuvre consists of two manuscripts, "The Problems of Interregional History" (1946) and "The Unity of World History: An Essay on Medieval and Modern Eurasia" (1968). The earlier text is the more breathtaking and groundbreaking, but also the more juvenile. It is a think-piece, essaying world history, with the architecture of thought just barely worked out. The later text, by contrast, is more circumspect and

comprehensive. But it is also a preliminary first draft, whose published, theoretical appendix (part D), confuses readers even more charitable than Chris Bayly.54 The manuscript also exhibits weaknesses in interpreting modern times, which scholars of Islam have noted and mostly attribute to the *déformation professionelle* of a premodern historian. Despite its many infelicities that make it unsuitable for publication, the text nevertheless suggests significant advances in thinking about world history. It also points glaringly to the difficulties Hodgson faced, and historians still face today, in approaching world history in a global age. Hodgson defines these difficulties perceptively, even if he cannot find more than tentative ways out of them.

In a nutshell, Hodgson argues: the problem of world history in a global age is that "globality" as a dynamic, worldwide force destroys the very foundations of time and space, on which "world history"—in actual fact: the world picture(s) of all cultures, including the (pre-modern and modern) Western world picture—have been built. Globality obliterates an Afro-Eurasian interregional configuration, which created geo-cultural (world-)histories as a written tradition long before the modern Europeans took hold of them. It is the very makeup of human society, its life-orientations and life-worlds and their epistemic certainties which are being undone by the conditions of the global age. Hence, world history—creating meaningful narratives of time and space—is both an episteme-breaking and an episteme-building exercise, inasmuch as the human pasts within a natural world continue to be the source and the anchor of life-orientation.

 "The Problems of Interregional History" is both a manifesto for a nonviolent revolution of the mind and a blueprint for a world history, in which all regions of the world find their world-historical place and time. Its main goal is to shake off the "westward distortion" of world history. It does so in part by making sense of how modern Occidentalism came about and how it differs from other parochial worldviews (and histories) and in part by developing a framework that could replace it—and, perhaps, even point to a future beyond Western hegemony and white supremacy. This future took shape in World War II, which Hodgson saw less as a war over the division of the world between competing great powers, than as a war of liberation of Eurasia's civilisations. Where others saw Empire, he saw the end of Western hegemony within a rapidly globalising world of regions in the process of becoming their own modern selves. Indeed, the West, in order to keep pace, was also transforming itself into yet another post-European West.

54 The published last section of the 1968 manuscript, apart from containing unnoted emendations, is also the most obscure section of a four-part, book-length study. Hodgson, *Rethinking World History (see note 13);* Christopher A. Bayly, "Hodgson, Islam, and World History in the Modern Age," in *Islam and World History*, ed. Burke and Mankin, 38–52.

Hodgson concluded that to understand this process world history was needed, but it would have to be a world history that accounted for and reverberated with the voices of the worldwide multitudes directly and indirectly entrapped by the war. If the present provided the heuristic jolt for thinking of the world as an interlinked configuration, his religious commitments gave this present a lived historicity that stretched over millennia. This was historicity, though not quite what François Hartog meant by the term.55 It was the deep past as (re-)experienced past that is "not yet dead," or so he surmised.56

Hodgson's contribution to world history in "The Problems of Interregional History" consisted mainly of two interventions. First, he posited the world of world history as an "interregional field." For world history to make sense as 'history' (as opposed to epic poetry or the annals of kings and prophets), he posited that it be understood as the history of an "interregional field." He gave this field a spatial dimension, defining it as the Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene,57 or "Ecumenical Zone," which he somewhat confusingly also called the "eastern hemisphere," in contradistinction to the "western hemisphere" of the Americas.58 His notion of the Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene was never quite fixed. Indeed, the Oikoumene, as "interregional field," was meant to be a dynamic, mobile, and evolving spatial entity. Especially in these earliest versions, he used the concept of "civilisations" sparingly and more loosely than his superiors at Chicago (Robert Redfield, Milton Singer) and world historians such as Toynbee or Sorokin.59 He thought of them as multitudes of small and large societies clustered within the penumbra of common life-orientation(s) with at least a certain familiarity among them. Even in the presence of an imperial core, Hodgson privileged expansive bonds of belief and literacy, as well as commerce, over city walls and boundaries. In a perspective suggested in 1946 and more fully developed in the 1968 "Unity of World History," his main actors were not kings and courts, but urban literate society (against the background of rural toiling masses). The study of bounded existence was the proper subject of local and regional histories.

In as much as power gained interregional significance, it was a "social power," that is, the technologies/capacities for the mobilisation of people and resources. *Techne* proved adaptable across interregional space.

Hodgson's civilisations were both spatial (regional) and mobile and, hence, always open-ended. As in the *Annales*, here interregional space provided a deep continuum in fluctuating life-worlds and power-assemblies. Space, however, was not a telluric substrate, or *Raum*, in the sense of German geopolitics. Much as geography and geology mattered, the space of world history was the Ecumenical Zone, defined as an "interregional configuration." This term referred, first of all, to the assemblage of regional clusters of (urban, literate) societies; and, second, to their linkages, mutual interactions and reciprocal influences. At the time he wrote, such terms (which have resurfaced today) were commonly associated with the concept of 'diffusion' in social anthropology (but also in Toynbee), and later adapted by William McNeill.60 Hodgson, however, was what we might call a systems-thinker. He thought of the "interregional configuration" as a lived totality, in which there was ample room for regional and local development and turnover, but in which over time, the entire hemisphere—what he later called the "oikoumenic configuration"—evolved. The evolution of this hemispheric configuration—how it was shaped by its parts and in turn shaped them—was the proper subject of world history. Much later, in 1965, he would write to the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith:

I am convinced of the importance of seeing not only various particular interrelationships at different places in world history, but the effect of the total historical context of the hemisphere at any given time. The diffusionists have gradually been helping historians to see interrelations within "historical" times, and this is all to the good. But historians themselves need to see how the historical complex, which was the citied zone of the eastern hemisphere, had its own continuous evolution as a whole, to determine the character of the several sorts of cultural diffusion which went on within that historical complex.61

There was a price to pay for this emphasis on lived and connected time/space. Hodgson readily acknowledged that there were non-ecumenical civilisations, as in the Americas (the western hemisphere) or in Sub-Saharan Africa, but he judged them not sufficiently

60 Hodgson letter to William McNeill about his "Rise of the West," May 9, 1964: "I find it too diffusionistic; my own approach would be more contextualistic." Hodgson Papers, Box 2, Folder 5.

61 Hodgson Letter to Cantwell Smith, December 27, 1965, Hodgson Papers, Box 6, Folder 5.

connected to the Ecumenical Zone as the site of world-historical development.62 He recognised that these non-ecumenical civilisations were settled, urban, and literate communities, and as such subjects of and for a history of humankind. But due to their disconnectedness they were not an intrinsic part of the Oikoumene as the main site of world history before the dawn of the global age. It must also be said, however, that he never quite knew what to do with them.

If his first *chronotopical* intervention defined the space of world history as an interrelated field of regions, his second intervention defined the time of world history (a new *chronologics*). Hodgson, like Gellner and Polanyi and others, was a 'trinitarian.'63 He followed a scheme favored by cultural anthropologists, which distinguished a pre-ecumenical (pre-agrarian, hunter and gatherer) world from an ecumenical (urban, literate, statist, resource-extracting and maximising) time lasting some three to four thousand years before collapsing in the age of global modernity (or rather, global modernities), which remade time and place and life-orientations in all parts of the world.

Hodgson argued that the long Eurasian Middle Age did not begin and end simply with local or regional events but with wholesale, worldwide structural transformations affecting all aspects of life:64 the way material, social, and spiritual life is organised and articulated; the way human society mobilises human capacities (physical and intellectual) and uses natural resources; and the way (clusters of) human societies form and interact. The evolution of agriculture-based, urban, literate, state-centric life and its eventual articulation in universal religions created an enduring "interregional configuration," extending from China to the Mediterranean, which was only disrupted in the collapse and remaking of time, space, and life-worlds under conditions of globality. These conditions are relatively recent and their formation is still fully in progress. While he contended that globality was a worldwide event, in which multiple modernities arose simultaneously, he was unequivocal that it was not simply a more intense, expansive, and complex interregional configuration, but spelled the end of the more than three thousand years of the Oikoumene. "[T]he individual regions [of the Ecumenical Zone] have ceased to be the semi-autonomous groupings they were; and have at once disintegrated internally, such unity among their component nations as existed tending to disappear."65 The regional configuration of middle-period Eurasia

65 PIH, p.117.

had broken down, and previous regions (like East Asia, the West) were giving way to a mix of smaller contiguous areas (clusters of nation states) and transregional "global conditions."66

In "The Unity of World History," to which we will turn momentarily, Hodgson expanded and elaborated these initial insights regarding the Eurasian Middle Age and the transformation of the world in a global age. The most striking contribution in the earlier text, however, consisted in locating the entire syndrome of the West and its distortions within the configuration of the Ecumenical Zone. This move pierced the notion of Western Civilisation as the universalising civilisation ("the scheme of Orient-Greece-Rome-Dark Ages-Crusades-Renaissance-Modern Times") and dismissed the "Ancient-Medieval-Modern scheme" of Western world-historical time.67 More than that, it made the West's self-interpretation as world historical actor, setting the time of world history, into an integral aspect of the world-historical time and space of the entire Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene. In a nutshell, Hodgson saw Western bluster as revenge for more than three thousand years of marginality at the far-western edge of the Ecumenical Zone of urban cultured life.

The crux of Europe's place in world history, according to Hodgson, was its exocentric geopolitical and geo-cultural position in the Ecumenical Zone. Europe—not unlike China—had come to see itself as the centre of the world. Neither was in fact in the centre. Instead, they were at the outer edges of the Eurasian configuration, though with a crucial difference. Subsequent Chinas—in shorthand: Chinese civilisation—were the core of an expanding territorial and maritime region and as such an energetic, configuration-defining part of the Ecumenical Zone, while Europe, by contrast, came into being as the far-western "frontier" both of the Near East and North Africa and thus of the Ecumenical Zone as a whole. The far-western frontier was literally exocentric, in that it had no head. Greece, in this rendition, was looking eastward, reaching the height of its power in Anatolia/Persia, the Near East and Egypt in the Hellenistic Age and under early (Anatolian) Christendom.68 Rome was a westward leap at the edge of this world and the wider Ecumenical Zone. It established a far western (along with a northern) frontier, but Rome's site of social power was the East. The choice of Constantinople as the seat of power was a late realisation of this

reality. Hodgson followed Gibbon in this respect, but went even further:69 "Byzantine Greeks should [be seen as] a continuation of Periclean Greeks …. [but] for us it is rather the Merovingians who are the heirs of Pericles." Constantinople partook in the Eurasian oikoumene, but Europe did so only marginally and in developmental leaps, which were typical for frontier zones. The far-western development into Europe coincided with the "shifting frontiers" of the Far West and "the special accidents of this frontier."70

European periodisation reflected the accidents of this shifting frontier, first to Rome, then to Gaul and the Germanic Empires, with the Crusades (and the discovery of the splendors of the Ecumenical Zone) being the springboard for the (European) High Middle Ages and finally the impetus for the formation of Europe into a fullfledged expansive region. As Hodgson wrote in 1946: "The Ancient-Medieval-Modern scheme [of European history] simply symbolizes the westward pattern of history based on the following of a shifting frontier. Especially before we get west of the Adriatic it is confusing enough for local history, but applied to world history, and made the basis of our theories of historical development, it is … pseudo-history."71 According to him, the classic-medieval-modern schema" is a temporal fiction of continuity at a moving and discontinuous frontier. It also is a spatial fiction in that it evokes a regional self-sufficiency that was only achieved in modern times.

Western history, then, is frontier history and its periodisation, with its ruptures and renewals, reflects frontier existence at the margins of the Afro-Eurasian Ecumenical Zone. This observation led to three conclusions, which were to shape Hodgson's world history. First, a more appropriate periodisation would have to come from within core regions of the Ecumenical Zone rather than the European margin. Second, although humbling and even humiliating to the European mind, Europe as a frontier in ecumenical times resembled other frontiers, such as Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Russia and the Balkans, the Sudan, and the Horn of Africa, although not China, India, or the Middle East.72

Third, these pointed suggestions led inexorably to the question of why this margin made it and others did not. The frontier position of the Far West, Hodgson's argument continued, was a disadvantage that nevertheless created unique opportunities. Its exocentric position made it possible to invent the flexible, mobile, and transformative society Europe was to become (Christian, to be sure, but breaking apart the Niceno-Constantinopolitan unity of Christendom) and shaped the self-image it would choose.73 Its exocentric position, while making Europe a marginal actor in the Ecumenical Zone, had its developmental advantages. The nature of this privilege and its eventual advantage enabled Europeans to benefit from Ecumenical Zone development (as an effect of the Crusades, among other things), while escaping the ossification of civilisational traditions. In addition, Europe was propelled forward and outward by the internal fragmentation—itself an indication of frontier existence—ultimately expressed in its nationalism. Moreover, the need to reinvent itself with continually shifting foci enabled the leap beyond the ecumenical configuration and, ultimately, beyond its own previous, geo-cultural identity. Finally, while expansion was typical for all civilisational clusters, Europe had an open sea and an entire new hemisphere into which to expand. All ecumenical regions expanded, but Europe in the end proved to be the most mobile force, and interregional mobility proved to be the crucial social power in world history.

Hodgson's approach encourages historians to separate three crucial turning points in European history: the evolution from a dependent (and, in terms of the Far West, marginal) frontier to a self-sustaining region; the insertion of the region into the core areas of the Ecumenical Zone (in the Indian Ocean); and the overthrow of the Ecumenical Zone by supplanting the geo-culture of multiple regions. He thus marks the outlines of European periodisation on a world-historical timescale, which allows for meaningful comparisons across the Eurasian field. He had long held that comparison had to be liberated from the Western hubris that compared the incomparable, such as France and India, a nation and a (sub-)continent, a frontier and a core region.74

In order to conceptualise his world history, Hodgson had to resolve two problems. First, how to capture regional, temporal, and overall development within the Oikoumene as a three-thousand-year configuration and how to deal with the intangible reality of the

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it came to be dominated by Islamic societies (but only at the cost of the self-transformation of Islam, a much-contested argument). Walter Scheidel, *Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity*, Princeton Economic History of the Western World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

73 PIH, p.98.

74 See "Interregional Relationships and Comparisons, 1957" and "Comparison of Cultures and Civilizations, 1957–1964," Hodgson Papers, Box 1, Folders 3 and 4, respectively.

ecumenical configuration as totality. (By contrast, Toynbee and later McNeill rejected such Germanic intangibles.) Second, how to approach the two great metamorphoses, the one that ushered in and the other that came to replace the Oikoumene. The issue here was to explain the separate yet connected emergence of literate urban societies across Afro-Eurasia on the one hand, and on the other Europe's emergence from its frontier position to become a revolutionising global force.

Hodgson was able to articulate, but never quite to resolve these issues. He did, however, put them on the table in his published work (for which he should be recognized), and he pursued them in his unpublished work. He published on interregional history in a series of (somewhat repetitive) essays, working off his programmatic 1954 essay, "Hemispheric Inter-regional History as an Approach to World History," which caught the attention of Lucien Febvre.75 He started a working group on "Problems in the Development and Interrelations of the Eurasian Civilizations," in the context of a Ford Foundation-funded seminar on "Comparison of Cultures and Civilizations" (1957–1964).76 This moment coincided with his abandoning his "dream" of world history as epic poem. But then he turned to Islam and sharpened his ideas on the Oikoumene in his work on Islam in World History.77 It was probably between 1966 and 1968 that he turned his full attention back to world history, while still struggling with *The Venture of Islam* and starting a new teaching project on the history of world religions.78 Shortly before his untimely death, an application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship offered an opportunity to consolidate his life-long notetaking on world history.79

The Guggenheim essay was based on the preliminary draft of the manuscript entitled, "The Unity of World History."80 Divided into four parts that convey an overall idea of his intent, it begins with a discussion of "The World as an Interregional Field: Problems in Envisaging Mankind as a Historical Whole" (Part A), in which he defends his focus

on the Eurasian Oikoumene. The second and main part, on "The Common History of Eurasia: In What Ways Ancient and Medieval Times Form a Historical Unity" (Part B), explores the rise and fall as well as the internal dynamics of the Eurasian Oikoumene. The third part, on "The Division of the Modern World" (Part C), concerns the shift "from oikoumenic to global times." The fourth part (Part D), minus two sub-chapters and its programmatic title, "The Unity of Historical Study: Interregional Studies as the Core of Historical Studies," has been published.81 In this last part, Hodgson sets out his methodology and argues that to be relevant in the modern world the discipline of history had to reinvent itself as the study of interregional contacts and contexts. As a free-standing theory piece, this published section makes little sense, although it occasionally serves as a useful quarry for citations and as a source for the appreciation and critique of a somewhat mysterious scholar. It is only, however, in the context of the entire manuscript, that is, the unfinished, unpublished parts, that it can suggest the direction in which his grand project of world history in a global age might have developed.

The theme of this world history, and the reason world history also holds the key to Hodgson's history of Islamic civilisation, is most concisely set down in his application to the Guggenheim Foundation, in March 1968, shortly before his death:

I plan to do a study of the unity of world history […] . More than with abstract principles of historical development or with parallelisms among the great civilizations or even with their mutual influences (though on these matters I shall have something to say), I will be concerned with *the developing interregional configuration of interrelated events, especially in the last three millennia* in the eastern hemisphere: that is, how developments within the several major cultural regions, given the particular position and role of those regions in the Afro-Eurasian historical complex at any given time, affected overall Afro-Eurasian and world historical circumstances; and how these overall circumstances in turn affected the development of the several regions […]. [T]he heart of my study will be the *Afro-Eurasian historical configuration of pre-Modern citied time* among the primary regions of the Afro-Eurasian citied zone: the zone of citied life from Europe to China. *A constitutive theme will be the common level of social power that held, at any given time, among the primary regions of the Afro-Eurasian citied zone*; how these regions were always roughly on par with each other despite *the persistent and substantial rise of that common level over the millennia*. In this light then I will assess the role of the various frontier areas, north, south, east and west (such as the Occident proper was for most of the period).82

82 *My italics*. Guggenheim Application. The citations are on pp.1 and 3 of the project description.

81 It is part III in Hodgson, *Rethinking World History* (see note 13).

Hodgson always understood that this was a narrow-gauge world history and not a study of humankind, *Homo sapiens*, and surely not natural history, which happens on a yet grander scale.83 Hodgson was fascinated by the possibility of these histories but thought of them as beyond his reach.84 He settled on oikoumenic times: "The whole history of urban literate peoples in the Eastern Hemisphere, down at least till modern times, appears as a single episode within a much vaster [human] context, which is to be thought of as equally historical and episodic."85

Oikoumenic times were also beyond the conceptual scope of what he considered the unity of world history proper. For world history to come into existence it needed the invention of narrated time, that is, histories in the widest sense. Hodgson made this invention one of the key features of urban, literate life. These histories developed from much older chronological technologies, a development that amounted to the invention of time itself. The crucial cultural advance was the articulation of a sense of historicity, the human place in time, which is to say, a narrated past and a projected future (as observed from the vantage point of the present at any particular moment in time). If the work of the Deuteronomist in the Hebrew Bible was a good example of the narrated past (though not the only one, and in view of Chinese and Indian developments, not the most significant), the kerygmatic message of Islam was the most powerful case for the projected future. These new narratives of time were linked to state-formation. Hodgson used the second century BCE Chinese scholar, Sima Qian, as a key witness for this connection.86 In order for societies to enter world history, that is, the oikoumenic age, they needed techniques of space/time and narrative (i.e., the *chronotope*), as well as scripted time. In short, they literally needed *chronologics*, that is, a science of time, institutions to record it, narratives to articulate and make sense of it, and genres of writing and telling. These were the constitutive "social power" of what Hodgson called the Classical Age, which made the world imaginable and communicable.87 Having dismissed the European scheme of classic antiquity (see above: Hodgson's frontier thesis), he was now free to reset his periodisation. This Classic Age resembles Karl Jaspers's notion of the axial age, but it differs in two respects: first, in terms of what Hodgson sees as a thousand-year evolutionary pattern, in its impact on the formation of distinct clusters of regional cultures; and second, more importantly, in the rise of religion—or "life-orientation," as Hodgson preferred to call it—the

84 "History of the Human World," 1954–1955, Hodgson Papers, Box 6, Folder 17.

83 "Requirements for and outlines of a History of the Human World," 3 July 1955, Hodgson Papers. Box 6, Folder 17. See also "Notes on role of historical and critical studies, environmental studies," n.d., Hodgson Papers, Box 10, Folder 19.

85 UWH, Part A, p.25.

popular, trans-ethnic force that superseded empire. The sense of narrated, reflexive time was the cultural artifact of all urban, lettered societies.

In addition to the onset of narrated time, a second feature defined this *chronotope* of some three thousand years. World history proper took shape with the emergence of the shared, because communicable, space and time of Afro-Eurasian citied and lettered societies. The emergence of an African-Eurasian space of interaction and mutual influence, and the acts involved in stitching it together, created the world of oikoumenic world history. Geography separated, human activity integrated. Creativity and connectivity in evolving civilisational clusters or life-orientations, together with their self-representations and communication as narrated time, generated and shaped an oikoumenic *chronologic*. Space contained time (with differing chronologies from locality to locality and region to region), but innovative "social powers"—"technologies" of social advancement in the widest sense, from ascetic techniques or mathematics, or the compass and gun powder, to improvements in agriculture and metallurgy—were adapted across the spatial barriers imposed by land and sea. There was no innovation in any part of the Oikoumene that would not eventually find its way into all other parts and adapt to local and regional circumstances. The task of modern world historians was to record, narrate, and explain the effect of this interregionality.

As we have seen, Hodgson argued that it would not suffice to historicise regional clusters of societies and explore their interconnection. He did not dismiss this kind of history but thought of it as a cosmopolitan history that, as such, was local and regional (and not world-historical). There was a dire need for a "history beyond the nation state," as Jürgen Osterhammel would eventually call it, but world history it was not.88 The most prominent model for interregional history at the time was provided by social anthropologists, who by insisting on multiple centres of diffusion had made possible the "recognition of the independent historical dignity of other societies than the Occidental."89 This was an advance over previous world histories, but diffusion and mimesis did not, in Hodgson's view, suffice in a world of interregional connection, in which each cluster of societies integrated impulses from outside. Although cultural regions developed separately as recognisable "civilisations," such interregionality meant that all clusters of urban, literate societies developed in tandem over time. It was wrong to argue that civilisations came and went, if in fact civilisational clusters, while fluid in time and space, persisted throughout the oikoumenic age.

89 UWH, Part A, p. 25. This strand is picked up by Chris Hann, "After Ideocracy and Civil Society: Gellner, Polanyi and the New Peripheralization of Central Europe," *Thesis Eleven* 128, no.1 (2015): 41–55; Hann, "Long Live Eurasian Civ!" (see note 12); Jóhann Páll Árnason and C.M. Hann, eds., *Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian Explorations*, SUNY series, Pangaea II (Albany: State University of New York, 2018).

88 Jürgen Osterhammel, *Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaates: Studien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich* (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).

Therefore, civilisational separateness and longevity, as well as interregional diffusion, made sense only in the context of an overall unity of space and time, which he called a "configuration." Contrary to social anthropologists (and more recently, evolutionists), this unity was not some academic abstraction. As a totality, it was intangible for contemporaries, but its effects across space made it real and thus legible to historians. Hodgson's main contention was that Eurasia-Africa is best understood as an overarching, world-history-defining, inhabited zone of literate, urban clusters of societies. He conceived of the zone, as a whole, as a configuration that developed together with its clustered parts, though was at no time subsumed under any one of them. In terms of technique, this is easy enough to understand. Exchange would ultimately transport any kind of innovation (mechanical, spiritual, social, or economic) across the entire space. What was carried across regions encompassed a wide variety of tangibles and intangibles that affected all aspects of life. Hodgson quite conventionally pointed to the "trade routes of the Southern Seas" (Indian Ocean) and the "trade routes of Mid-Eurasia" (the Silk Road) as "highway[s] for the passage of religious and political ideas as well as goods."90 But while much was unknown about exchange, for Hodgson this was known and knowable history, even if it broke through Western distortions and allowed for the reconstruction of a "historical world radically different from the Occidental image."91 Hodgson's problems started when he asked what to do with all this connectivity—what kind of world history this radically different world image would produce. And how he would deal with the "oikoumenic configuration" as a totality.

His solution, modelled on the 1946 essay, emerged tentatively and was published first in his 1954 essay, "Hemispheric Inter-regional History as an Approach to World History," and vetted in the 1957 faculty seminar. Regional civilisational clusters were connected in a history of separate, but interconnected habitations; so far so good. But regional/civilisational developments were also inseparable from the overall development of the entire hemisphere. It is the overall, 'configurational' development of the Oikoumene at large that concerned Hodgson, because it is in this overall development that the chronologic of world history could be found. That is, the "eastern hemisphere," although divided into separate clusters of settled urban and literate habitations, formed a single, dynamically evolving *chronotope*. 92 The basic proposition was as follows:

92 Chapter II: "The Eurasian Oikoumene as a Historical Complex: Its Evolution as Heart of the Interregional Historical Framework," UWH, Part A, 32–69. In this case *chronotope* does not refer to the space/time invoked by a given narrative (typically associated with Mikhail Bakhtin), but to the unit of space/time that has the power to explain social development on a world scale.

 [T]he major Eurasian civilizations can be considered as regions within a single historical configuration. Seen from this angle, the societies studied in the civilizational courses and by the specialists in the various areas tend to lose their independent, self-contained characters and become, rather, interrelated and interdependent parts of a single, inclusive region [Eurasian-African zone] with an overall pattern of historical development.93

Citied and lettered societies were not, in other words, "a multiplicity of essentially discrete societies" at the mercy of historians who squeezed them into a world historical schema. They were connected, but connectivity as such, as recognized by Toynbee, as well as McNeill, was only part of the story. What world history studied is "how developments within the several major cultural regions, given the particular position and role of those regions in the Afro-Eurasian historical complex at any given time, affected overall Afro-Eurasian and world-historical circumstances; and how these circumstances in turn affected the development of the several regions."94 This formulation became the core contention of Hodgson's world history and the key presupposition for his thinking about world historical time and world historical narrative. Hodgson was a contextualist rather than a diffusionist.