All heaven and earth
PANKAJ MISHRA selects books that take a wider view of history
One of 2016’s most astonishing developments was the rapid fragmentation of national narratives and proliferation of sub-nationalisms, from Scotland to Hong Kong.
National founding myths faced strong challenges from minorities at the same time that hardliners vended souped-up fables of ancestral origins. The impact of such turmoil on conventional national histories is undeniable. The necessity for a global history has never been more urgent.
Its scope is still being defined, however, and many issues have yet to be settled. I can’t think of a more useful guide to them than Sebastian Conrad’s What is
Global History? (Princeton). This short, stimulating book sets out the challenges facing historians more used to working within the boundaries of an individual nation-state.
With its account of a worldwide obliteration of imperial records, Ian Cobain’s The History
Thieves (Portobello Books) reveals how much skulduggery has gone into feel-good notions about the British empire. Archives that could have illuminated the violence and racism of modern imperialism were systematically destroyed or hidden, creating space for fantasies of imperial benevolence and splendid isolation that are still central in British society.
Global history will remain an academic exercise if it does not dismantle present-day modes of thought. South Asia today is roiled by Hindu fanatics demanding emancipation from centuries of Muslim ‘slavery’, and Islamic fundamentalists insisting on their superiority over Hindu ‘weaklings’. In this version of history, Hindus and Muslims were locked into mutual hostility from the eighth century onwards by some exceptionally brutal invaders of India from the west. Closely reading a 13th-century text, and locating its Persian provenance, Manan Ahmed Asif gives a very different picture of the arrival of Islam in India in A Book of
Conquest (Harvard). Tonio Andrade offers fresh insights into the perennially interesting ‘great divergence’ between Europe and Asia in The
Gunpowder Age (Princeton). Part of a larger ongoing assessment of China’s strengths and weaknesses before its ‘century of humiliation’ by western powers, it makes us appreciate the complex factors behind the emergence of Chinese military and economic power.
The necessity for a global history has never been more urgent