A Plea for Global Comparison: Redefining Dynasty

Global history thrives, but its footing remains insecure. Historians rightly question narratives based narrowly on a single country, region or continent, yet their move to the global level raises problems. No scholar can master all the languages relevant for global research, and therefore the integration of primary sources remains a formidable challenge. There is no wholly satisfying solution for the tension between this key requirement of the historical discipline and the widely shared impulse to move to a global scope. Two dominant competing paradigms for global history, comparative history and connected history, have dealt with the challenge in very different ways, the first by concentrating on large-scale processes and secondary literature, the second by zooming in on individual experiences and primary sources. No middle way has developed between their clashing perspectives, and this helps to explain why both paradigms have lost much of their initial dynamism. The global comparison of dynasties that I present in this article suggests one way to overcome the current methodological impasse: a resolute combination of overarching questions defined by a global perspective and the voices of historical actors in specific cases. Global history written in the comparative mode has tended to ignore the voices of historical actors, and it has failed to provide the fine-grained contextual detail of microhistory. The "divergence debate', the currently dominant paradigm of global comparison, accumulates statistics and presents models of economic, political and military development. Leading authors from Kenneth Pomeranz to Philip Hoffman deal with structures and multitudes rather than with individuals, and often found their assumptions on secondary literature. The same holds true to a lesser extent for other powerful comparative studies with a global sweep, such as Victor Lieberman's majestic long-term view of the Eurasian land mass and its maritime fringes, or Jack Goldstone's and Theda Skocpol's older comparisons of revolution and state breakdown. These authors construct ecological, political and demographic models, but leave no room for actors, ideas and political contingency.