British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Writing the History of the Global

British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

21-22 May 2009

Divergence in Global History
Ken Pomeranz (University of California Irvine)

Divergences – most famously, but not exclusively, those between “the West and the rest”  -- raise many challenges for writers  of global history.  While most obviously related to comparisons, they can have a variety of relationships to the study of connections/disconnections. Some similarities must be identified to make divergence meaningful;  the relative importance of the two will often be highly subjective.  Unless significant re-convergence is impossible (a rare situation), emphasizing divergence  requires specifying a timeframe, which must be justified in other terms.  Dating divergences also requires that we choose among various possible significant moments: e.g. when a difference that later became important first appeared, when its effects first began to visibly outstrip countervailing influences, or when it became clear that there rapid re-convergence was unlikely. Here, too, no single choice is a priori optimal.   Nonetheless, we can identify a number of situations in which emphasizing divergence is essential to any useful world history;  it is particularly helpful as a complement to research and writing strategies which focus on the history of humanity as a species, and may minimize the significance of difference and conflict among groups.  Several strategies for dealing with these problems and formulating approaches to divergence which can shed light on both comparisons and connections are explored.