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 PERIODIZING WORLD HISTORY

WILLIAM A. GREEN

ABSTRACT

Periodization is rooted in historical theory. It reflects our priorities, our values, and
our understanding of the forces of continuity and change. Yet periodization is also
subject to practical constraints. For pedagogical reasons, world historians must seek
reasonable symmetry between major historical eras despite huge discrepancies in the
availability of historical data for separate time periods and for different areas of the
world.
Political issues arise in periodization. Should world history provide integrated treat-
ment of the evolution of civilization, focusing upon the most developed societies (chiefly
Eurasian)? Or should it provide equal time to cultures outside the evolutionary main-
stream (sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America)? If integration is to be pre-
ferred-as this article advocates-it is incumbent upon integrationists to provide some
overarching theory (or theories) of change to demonstrate how the destinies of the
world's peoples have been linked through the millennia.
Although the article attempts to demonstrate how comprehensive theories of change
can facilitate the formulation of world history periodization, it does not minimize the
difficulty of developing a universally operative organic theory of change. It examines
several theoretical orientations, but principal attention is given to world-systems analysis,
the most fully refined and well articulated body of theory currently commended as a
vehicle for structuring world history.
Acknowledging that no body of theory currently achieves a satisfactory universal
integration of world history and that this situation may prevail in the future, the author
recommends, for the present, an eclectic periodization of four epochs divided at roughly
1000 B.C.E., 400-600 C.E., and circa 1492.

Periodization is both the product and the begetter of theory. The organizing
principles upon which we write history, the priorities we assign to various aspects
of human endeavor, and the theories of change we adopt to explain the historical
process: all are represented in periodization. Once firmly established, periodiza-
tion exerts formidable, often subliminal, influence on the refinement and elabo-
ration of theory.
The ancient/medieval/modern formula currently in use had its origins in
Italian humanist thinking, but acceptance of this tripartite model did not be-
come universal until the nineteenth century. Since then, tripartite periodization
has gripped Western academe like a straitjacket, determining how we organize
departments of history, train graduate students, form professional societies,

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100 WILLIAM A. GREEN

and publish many of our best professional journals. It pervades our habits of
mind; it defines turf; it generates many of the abstractions that sustain profes-
sional discourse. It determines how we retain images and how we perceive the
beginning, middle, and ending of things. It is insidious, and it is sustained by
powerful vested interests as well as by sheer inertia.
Scholars who endeavor to formulate an acceptable periodization for world
history confront far fewer practical obstacles than those who would seek to
alter period frontiers in European history or in other established regional his-
tories. World historians encounter neither an entrenched scheme of epochal
divisions nor the dead weight of inertia. There is still a comparatively small
professional literatureself-consciously addressedto the global perspective.World
history has only recently emerged as a field of concentration in a few Ph.D.
programs. Consequently, there is not a large and well-established graduate
faculty committed by training and tradition to a particular mode of periodiza-
tion, nor are there commonly acknowledged chronological parameters-fields
of preparation for comprehensive examinations -that have imposed a standard
epochal division upon the field.
An important practical consideration in periodizing world history involves
audience. Our primary audience is university students (usually first- or second-
year undergraduates), and the chief vehicle for transmitting world history is
the textbook. For practical pedagogical reasons, we are compelled to seek rea-
sonable symmetry in our periodization, even though there are vast discrepancies
in the availability of historical data for different eras and for different regions
of the globe.
How we periodize world history will be influencedby our objectives in teaching
the subject. World historians attempt to explain how human societies have been
transformed from bands of hunters and gatherers to the types of people we
are today. Even today, in an age of space exploration, hunters and gatherers
survive in remote regions of the world. The organizational problems created
by such diversity of human experience have occasioned different strategic ap-
proaches to writing world history.
One approach provides an integrated mainstream treatment of world history.
Another emphasizes regional diversity. The integrated approach routinely fo-
cuses on the most developed and complex societies, their ups, their downs,
their interactions with one another, and their troubled encounters with less
complex peoples. This approach devotes paramount attention to Eurasia. Sub-
Saharan Africa, pre-Columbian America, and Australasia are less heralded
and, for long stretches of time, they pass largely unnoticed. Integrated main-
stream world history enables historians to employ common engines of change to
explain the historical process, thereby facilitating the identification of universal
epochal frontiers.
Regional strategy embraces more of the world's peoples for longer periods
of time whether those peoples functioned within the evolutionary mainstream
or at some distance from centers of civilization. Conceived as a congeries of

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 PERIODIZING WORLD HISTORY 101

regional histories, this approach to world history emphasizes intercultural un-

derstanding and carries less risk of offending political sensitivities. Those who
advocate a region-by-region approach are able to argue that for most of human
history, really significant interaction between major world civilizations was
limited and, for the most part, inconsequential. Because rates of change differ
from one region to another, the regional approach discourages the use of over-
arching theories of change that would facilitate the adoption of universal ep-
ochal frontiers.
The burden of proof in these matters rests with the integrationists. They
must demonstrate that, from an early time, the destinies of the world's peoples
(or at least some significant portion of the world's peoples) have been linked.
It must be shown that engines of change operating globally have been decisive
in propelling both the rate and the direction of change across diverse and distant
cultures. Unless integrationist theory is convincing on this question, a frag-
mented, region-by-region approach to writing (and to periodizing) world history
might be the most expedient approach.
In this regard, America presents the integrationist with a significant problem.
Major civilizations thrived in four regions of the Eastern Hemisphere several
thousand years before the rise of an equally complex civilization in America.
Lasting interactions between all the continents did not begin until after 1492.
There may have been common experiences within each of the hemispheres;
but, prior to 1492, history at its grandest level could only be hemispheric. A
completely integrated world history is only possible after the hemispheres were
in permanent contact. Unless one wishes to deny that pre-Columbian America
constitutes a significant component of the human experience, some degree of
fragmentation in writing and periodizing global history is inescapable.
Ideally, all periodizations should be rooted in disciplined concepts of conti-
nuity and change. Historical epochs should exhibit important long-term conti-
nuities, and moments of transition between epochs should involve the dissolu-
tion of old continuities and the forging of new ones. We must identify how
powerful historical forces interacted to generate particular forms of change at
particular velocities. To do this, we need a theory of change. A single general
theory may suffice if we are confident that the paramount forces governing
change in the social organism have been constant across the millennia. If the
paramount forces of change have varied from region to region or from one
age to another, no single theory will suffice. In that case, we must adjust our
theory to accommodate the changes we perceive in historical circumstances.
European history provides an example. A neo-Malthusian demographic model
has been adopted by numerous historians to explain developments during Eu-
rope's medieval period. The utility of the model declines steeply for the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries when rapid expansion of commerce, technology,
and industry raised per-capita productivity, thereby diminishing the menace
of repeated positive checks.
We cannot hope to be value-free in our formulation of theory. Our theories
reflect our priorities. Medieval writers assigned God a directing hand in history.

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102 WILLIAM A. GREEN

Their epochal divisions were drawn at dramatic moments of divine intervention.

Marx disdained concepts of divine intervention, insisting that human action
has always been driven by material forces. More than any other thinker, Marx
established priorities for the twentieth century. Other writers have developed
alternative theories of change (often in response to Marx), but all, or nearly
all, have agreed on the central importance of material forces.
Until now, the identification of period frontiers has generally taken two
forms. One focuses on a coincidence of forces, the other on a leading sector.
The coincidental approach identifies the convergence of numerous important
developments at a single moment in history. The circa 1500 C.E. watershed in
Western tripartite periodization rests largely on this type of observation. In
the decades around 1500 numerous important events converged: the Ptolemaic
perception of the universe was challenged, printing and gunpowder achieved
importance, Columbus reached America and DaGama sailed to India, Constan-
tinople fell to the Turks, Luther launched the Protestant Reformation, and the
monarchies of England, France, and Spain were consolidated. Taken together,
these happenings, it has been argued, dissolved old continuities and gave rise
to a new epoch in Western history.
The leading-sector approach concentrates on one overwhelming source of
change that exercises decisive pulling power on all others. Proponents of the
leading sector might argue that the discovery of the New World with its abun-
dant natural resources and its effect upon Old World understandings of the
cosmos was an event of such monumental proportions that it drew the whole
of Western society from one set of norms to another.
Both concepts identify major happenings. Both demand the application of
organic theories of change. Unless we adopt the view that significant historical
forces like those operating in the fifteenth century coincide randomly, we are
obliged to seek a theory of change that explains why and how such coincidences
occur. Similarly, we need an organic theory to explain how a leading sector
becomes leading and how it is related to the powerful forces that follow in its
wake. With such a theory we are like a person who wants to bake a cake but
lacks a recipe. This person might identify the ingredients of a cake and place
them together on the kitchen counter, but until a recipe is in hand that explains
what weight to give each ingredient, how and when to fold them together, and
at what temperature and for what length of time to bake them, he or she will
not have a cake.
Historians stand at the opposite end of a similar process. For historians, the
cake of history has already been made. The historian's task is to determine,
as best he or she can, the ingredients from which it is composed, their relative
weights, and the manner by which they were integrated. To make a cake, one
needs a recipe. To divine why and how history has evolved as it has, the historian
needs a theory of change. Theory does more than identify the ingredients of
historical problems. It explainsthe process which gives those ingredientsmeaning.
Explicit theories of change were not used in the establishment of Western tri-
partite periodization. For its inventors the mere recognition that numerous im-

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 PERIODIZING WORLD HISTORY 103
portant events convergedin time was consideredsufficient. In redefiningEuropean
periodization, organic theory would be essential. The principal models currently
in use among Western scholars -market-driven division-of-labor models, neo-
Malthusian demographic models, Marxian or world-systems models - are com-
patible with tripartite periodization and with its sixth- and sixteenth-century
epochal divides. Nevertheless, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, those
same models (except perhaps world systems) would commend the eleventh and
the eighteenth centuries much more emphatically than the sixteenth century as
decisive moments of transition in European history.I
Can theories of change assist us in periodizingworld history? Yes, if.... Yes,
if before the sixteenth century one (or both) of the hemispheres was functionally
interrelated to the extent that some common engine (or engines) of change
exerted an integrating and profoundly transforming influence upon leading
civilizations and their hinterlands. If so, how did each civilization internalize
and accommodate this common engine of change? How did this common engine
influence both the rate and the direction of change? Finally, how did it affect
the relative position of each of the major civilizations over time?
This is no small undertaking. Identifying shared experiences among the major
civilizations is not a problem. Demonstrating that a shared experience was the
paramount means by which the hemisphere and each civilization within it was
transformed is a problem. It is one thing to apply organic models to regional
civilizations where we have ongoing, well-documentedinteraction between major
historical actors (groups, institutions, individuals). It is another to apply organic
models where our knowledge of the interaction between historical actors (in
this case, whole civilizations) is limited and where there are few reliable data
on how differentcivilizations responded to and were affected by common stimuli
(for example, trade, disease, invasion). For the early millennia of world history,
available empirical evidence is insufficient to lend strong support to any general
theory of change. The most we can hope for is reasonable plausibility. Reason-
able plausibility is not an insignificant or insufficient goal. It is precisely what
is being sought by scholars in other areas of historical enquiry where theory
is critically important, such as psychohistory.
Where do world historians stand on periodization? What theoretical orienta-
tions have they employed? In the main, modern writers of world history texts
have adopted progressive, evolutionary, materialist theories of change. Their
theoretical orientation corresponds to that of the leading progressive and evolu-
tionary theorists of the nineteenth century. Both have embraced human history
from its origins to the present, trying to locate critical stages in humankind's
long transition from hunters and gatherers to modern world citizens. Both have
assumed that there are common and universal qualities to human nature and
that human nature inevitably generates social and cultural development. Both
have considered change to be gradual and constant; both have identified the

1. William A. Green, "Periodization in European and World History," Journal of WorldHistory

3 (1992), 13-53.

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104 WILLIAM A. GREEN

direction of change as evolving from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from

simple to complex; both have believed that, on balance, change has occasioned
betterment in the quality of human life (nineteenth-century scholars were boldly
confident of this; contemporary world historians make this case more subtly,
sometimes even apologetically). Both have asked the same kinds of questions:
how do people become civilized?
It is modern scholars' methods, not their concept of the problem, that chiefly
distinguishes contemporary world historians from Comte and Spencer. Nine-
teenth-century evolutionists placed highest priority on ethnographic evidence.
Because humans were thought to have a uniform nature and because most
change was considered to be immanent to society, all humans were thought to
have evolved along a single upward gradient. Each culture studied by anthropol-
ogists from the most primitive to the most sophisticated was thought to represent
a stage in the progressive evolution of the species. Modern world historians have
redirectedtheir emphasis from ethnographic to historical forms of evidence. We
are less disposed to uniformitarianism. Yet we persist in assuming that human
beings, by their common nature, respond to similar stimuli in similar ways.
On this premise, world historians continue to seek the unifying laws and regular-
ities that enable them to weave the histories of disparate civilizations together
in coherent, integrated fashion.2
As a rule, they differentiate past societies hierarchically on the basis of their
technologies and by the degree to which invention and innovation permitted
division of labor and social stratification. They perceive diffusion as the principal
mechanism by which technological progress was realized. It is a process by
which distinct civilizations dispersed their special skills, products, organization,
and culture outward into adjacent regions, just as pebbles tossed into still water
generate a concentric outward movement of ripples. The diffusion of advanced
products and modes of behavior compromised and seduced barbaric peoples
on the periphery of civilized regions. Converging cultural ripples emanating
from various distinct civilizations produced action and reaction, borrowing,
change, and adjustment between civilizations. War was one means of diffusion,
but trade was its principal vehicle.
Trade-driven division of labor theory, a modern derivative of the work of
Adam Smith, has consistently been used as a guide to explain the rate and
direction of change within civilizations. This "commercial"theory aids in deline-
ating interactions between civilized peoples and "barbarians,"and it provides
insight into the manner in which contacts, great or small, among leading civiliza-
tions promoted interregional borrowings and thereby stimulated social transfor-
mation across cultural frontiers. Though widely employed, this theory has not,
in its classic form, been used to embrace all the peoples of a region or all the

2. For a brief comprehensive analysis of theories of progress, see Kenneth E. Bock, "Theories
of Progress and Evolution," in Sociology and History: Theory and Research, ed. WernerJ. Cahnman
and Alvin Boskoff (Glencoe, Ill., 1964), 21-41.

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 PERIODIZING WORLD HISTORY 105
civilizations of a hemisphere within a single integrated historical process. An
elaboration upon it-namely, world-systems theory-attempts to do that.
Commercial theory has provided material groundwork for a periodization
based on spiritualand intellectualbreakthroughs.Having noted the rapid growth
of commerce in the first millennium B.C.E., Karl Jaspers determined that vig-
orous material development generated intellectual breakthroughs in four re-
gions of high civilization. Jaspers called this the axial age, defining the break-
throughs as transcendental, a search for immortality and salvation. The four
breakthroughs were monotheism among Jews, rational philosophy in Greece,
Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism and Jainism in India.3
Marshall G. S. Hodgson adopted Jaspers'sformulation, advocating a periodi-
zation that divided world history into two unequal compartments: an agrarian
age, 7000 B.C.E. to about 1800 C.E., and a technical age since 1800. The late
agrarian age was subdivided into three epochs: preaxial (3000-800 B.C.E.),
axial (800 B.C.E.-200 B.C.E.), and postaxial (200 B.C.E.-1800 C.E.). Rising
prosperity, accelerated by interregional commerce, provided a fertile intellectual
climate for these breakthroughs, Hodgson contended. In the amalgam of Judaic
monotheism and Greco-Roman philosophy, Christianity took root. From this
triad emerged Islam. Apart from these two "secondary-stage revolutions," few
profound religious and philosophical revolutions have arisen since the first
millennium B.C.E.4
These axial age "breakthroughs" provoke questions about the relationship
between material forces and cultural values. Did one promote the other, either
directly or indirectly? Were the four transcendental breakthroughs linked in
any discernible way? Do they provide evidence of interregional integration
across the hemisphere? Or, were these breakthroughs distinct phenomena, con-
nected only to the extent that they emerged in societies that possessed a literary
tradition and some measure of material comfort and social stratification?
These questions were addressed by two separate groups of scholars. Both
concluded that transcendental breakthroughs were not the product of direct
diffusion of ideas from one civilization to another.5 Chinese civilization was
quite insulated; transformations in India were a derivative of local conditions
and culture. Both Greeks and Jews were influenced by Mesopotamian and
Egyptian cultures, but the different nature of their societies and the distinct
character of their breakthroughs precludes the likelihood that they had a linked
experience. Two great civilizations of the age did not have transcendental break-
throughs: Egypt and Assyria. The scholars who participated in these studies

3. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, transl. M. Bullock (New Haven, 1953), 1-21.
4. Hodgson observed that spiritual and intellectual advances since the axial age have, in the
main, arisen inside the cultural traditions laid down in that period. See Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974),
I, 48-53, 105-120.
5. Benjamin I. Schwartz (among others who wrote on the theme), "Wisdom, Revelation, and
Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B .C. ," Daedalus 104 (1975); The Origins andDiversity
of Axial Age Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Albany, 1986).

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106 WILLIAM A. GREEN

agreed that high material development was a necessary, if not sufficient, requisite
for a breakthrough, but the only shared impulse of all axial age movements was
"the strain toward transcendence."6Hodgson died in 1968, leaving unfinished a
world history that may have adopted the axial age as a pivot of world periodiza-
tion. Subsequent world historians have not pursued his insight.
In 1978 Geoffrey Barraclough observed that "Marxism is the only coherent
theory of the evolution of man in society, and in that sense the only philosophy
of history, which exercises a demonstrable influence over the minds of historians
today."7 The appeal of Marxism has declined precipitously in recent years.
World-systems theory has usurped its influence. The most noted practitioner
of world-systems theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, has used it to achieve a tightly
integrated analysis of the Atlantic basin over the last five centuries. World
systems theory, while neo-Marxist in origin, is a complex elaboration upon
trade-driven division of labor theory. It is progressive, evolutionary, and materi-
alist. Although Wallerstein himself questions the utility of the model for pre-
1460 world history, others strongly advocate its adoption as a means of inte-
grating regional histories of the Eastern hemisphere in a single historical process.
Janet Abu-Lughod has described a world system centered in the Middle East
during the thirteenth century.8 William McNeill encourages use of the world
system as an overarching ecumenical process as early as 1700 B.C.E.9 Andre
Gunder Frank and Barry Gills recommend world-systems analysis as the frame-
work for Afro-Eurasian history beginning at least as early as 2700 B.C.E.10
Frank is the most explicit, if most extreme, theoretician for premodern appli-
cation of the world-systems approach. He discards traditional categories of
analysis, challenges standard notions of periodization, and presents a new para-
digm for the study of world history. For the last 5000 years - possibly more,
writes Frank - a world system has operated across Afro-Eurasia based upon
the transfer of economic surplus between regions. Those transfers integrated
regional modes of exploitation and accumulation into an overarching, interpen-
etrating, competitive order. A universal drive for capital accumulation was
the primary motor of change across the hemisphere. Each region possessed a
hegemonic center connected to a dependent peripheryand to a distant hinterland
with which it interacted. The consistent outward reach of these regional systems
generated increased interregional economic exchange and competition. Shifting

6. Benjamin I. Schwartz, "The Age of Transcendence,"Daedalus 104 (1975), 3; S. N. Eisenstadt,

"The Axial Age Breakthroughs-Their Characteristics and Origins," in Eisenstadt, ed., Origins
and Diversity, 2.
7. Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History (New York, 1979), 164.
8. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350
(New York, 1989).
9. William H. McNeill, "The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years," Journal of World
History 1 (1990), 1-21.
10. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, "The Cumulation of Accumulation: Theses and
Research Agenda for 5000 Years of World System History," Dialectical Anthropology 15 (1990),
19-42; Frank, "A Theoretical Introduction to World System History," Review 13 (1990), 155-248;
Frank, "A Plea for World System History," Journal of World History 2 (1991), 1-28.

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 PERIODIZING WORLD HISTORY 107

technological advantage, among other forces, enabled first one, then another,
of the great regional civilizations to exert superhegemony over others.
Frank and Gills offer a simple model to demonstrate how exchanges of surplus
linked not just the elites of separate regions, but the whole economic, political,
social, and ideological character of their societies. When the elite of B acquired
surplus extracted by the elite of A (whatever the mode of extraction may have
been), that surplus linked the two societies'"processes of surplus management,
their structures of exploitation and oppression by class and gender, and their
institutions of the state and the economy."" If B subsequently exchanged part
of that surplus to C, then not only were B and C systemically linked in the
same "over-arching system of accumulation," but so too were A and C. For
Frank, modes of accumulation, not modes of production, are central. His
readers (particularlythe Marxists among them) are implored to abandon notions
of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and the transitions between them as being
useless impediments to a correct world vision.12
The Afro-Eurasian world system described by Frank and Gills experienced
alternating cycles of expanding and contracting accumulation. These cycles,
hemispheric in scope, were generally four to five centuries long; each had an
up A phase (expanding accumulation) followed by a down B phase (contracting
accumulation), and each of these phases usually occupied about two centuries.
The establishment of regional hegemonies occurred during A phases, sometimes
producing a system-wide superhegemon. Periods of contraction (weakening
and instability) were often punctuated by invasions from the hinterland, as,
for example, the Barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire or the Mongol
invasions across Asia. The concept of tying B phases to barbarian implosions
seems reasonable, and in some times and in some places it is confirmed by
evidence. For some scholars, however, accepting the idea of A phases and B
phases operating across a whole hemisphere two thousand years B.C.E. requires
a leap of faith. In any case, it can be demonstrated that major implosions from
the hinterland between 1700 B.C.E. and 1300 C.E. have not always synchro-
nized tightly with Frank's B phases.
Since Frank believes an integrated world system was in place several millennia
before Europeans expanded to the New World, for him the rise of the West
was just one of many hegemonic shifts within the world system. He is therefore
loath to focus undue weight on 1492 or to commend Wallerstein's association
of Europe's discovery and exploitation of America with the breakthrough to
capitalism. Whether European capitalism originated with the exploitation of
the New World-which Frank questions-is not a decisive issue.
Will world-systems theory provide manageable and coherent periodization
for world history? It is too early to know. No one has written a comprehensive
world history using world-systems theory as the integrating concept. Skeptics

11. Frank and Gills, "The Cumulation of Accumulation," 27.

12. Andre Gunder Frank, "Transitional Ideological Modes: Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism,"
Critique of Anthropology 11 (1991), 171-188.

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108 WILLIAM A. GREEN

would argue, with good reason, that the overarchingtheoretical work of scholars
like Frank exceeds our current capacity to synthesize critical information from
various regional histories. We simply do not know how universal world-systems
history will play out, what continuities and discontinuities will command highest
attention. Although world-systems theory and related approaches include sev-
eral distinguished adherents, debate on the matter is just beginning. This is a
time for asking questions that will inform the debate.
One can concede the logic of Frank's point that exchanges of surplus between
A, B, and C may have linked the three parties in one overarching system of
accumulation. What needs answering is how important, in relation to all other
forces at work in archaic and ancient societies, such exchanges were. What was
the relative value of foreign as opposed to domestic exchange in these societies?
What proportion of aggregate annual income was represented by interregional
exchange? To what extent were interregional exchanges conducted in strategic
supplies, raw materials, or other goods that may have affected the defense
capabilities of hegemonic elites, whether those supplies were used to facilitate
the maintenance of order at home or to protect territorial frontiers? What
evidence do we have that the interregional exchange of surplus altered cultural
habits, value systems, and religious orientations in significant ways? It may be
rememberedthat scholars who explored relationships between material develop-
ment and axial age transcendental breakthroughs found no consistent correla-
tion between the scale of interregional commercial contacts and the achievement
of transcendental religious or intellectual breakthroughs.
We know that people living in different cultures often respond differently to
economic stimuli and that people of the same culture respond differently at
different times. 13Max Weber demonstrated in his ProtestantEthic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (1904-1905) how, over time, economic orientations changed sig-
nificantly within Europe. The strong materialist bias of our time often prompts
us to ascribe powerful economic motives to historical actors whose chief incen-
tives were not materialist. This is true of two giant figures of European overseas
expansion. The contemporarybiographerof Prince Henry the Navigator, Zurara,
was explicit on the matter. Although Henry was not immune to material inter-
ests, his obsession with discovery was overwhelmingly driven by religious mo-
tives. 14Pauline Moffitt Watts makes a similar point in evaluating the cosmolog-
ical orientation of Christopher Columbus.15

13. For example, in his Economic Theory of the Feudal System (1962) Witold Kula demonstrated
that early modern Polish aristocrats were poor representatives of "economic man," at least as
defined by classical economists. They did not relentlessly pursue profits; they sought steady, if
comfortable, income. When grain prices fell, they squeezed the peasants; when prices rose, they
relaxed the squeeze. Similar examples abound among subsistence or near-subsistence peoples in
precolonial Africa.
14. J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement 1450-
1650 (Berkeley, 1963), 35-36; Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York, 1985), 161-162.
15. Pauline Moffitt Watts, "Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher
Columbus's Enterprise of the Indies," American Historical Review 90 (1985), 73-102.

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 PERIODIZING WORLD HISTORY 109
Whatever reservations one might have about the capacity of the center-periph-
ery-hinterlandmodel to provide an integrated explanation of historical develop-
ment, we are well advised to study world-systems theory for suggestions on
the timing of important transitions -the ebb and flow of A and B phases and
the rise of particular hegemons or superhegemons. Although Frank identifies
A and B phases, his work is not helpful to those who seek a pragmatically
manageable periodization. Unless I misconstrue his arguments, Frank sees five
thousand years of world-system history as a comprehensive whole. Even though
hegemonic power shifted from one locus to another, there have been no rents
in the historical fabric, no wrenching transitions. In the twentieth century, he
argues, hegemony has shifted from Europe to America to Japan. To presume
that a date like 1492 should represent a global watershed is, for Frank, an
unacceptably Eurocentric notion.
William McNeill does not fully endorse world-systems theory, although he
finds its aspirations praiseworthy. He sees a Middle Eastern world system devel-
oping around 1700 B.C.E. After 1000 B.C.E., he would merge Greek, Middle
Eastern, and Indian societies into one expansive Middle Eastern "greatsociety."
China would join this world system around 100 B.C.E. with the opening of
caravan trade to Syria. Lethal diseases spread along the expanded trade routes
producing severe demographic decline in both the Mediterranean and Chinese
spheres in the third century C.E. The recovery that began in the sixth century
was accelerated by the rise of Islam. Superhegemony passed from the Islamic
regions to China around 1000 A.D. and to Europe after 1500.16 1 am not certain
how these observations translate into formal periodization, if indeed that is
McNeill's intention. One might presume something like the following: segment
one, to 1700 B.C.E.; segment two, from 1700 B.C.E. to circa 300/600 C.E.;
segment three, circa 300/600 to 1500; segment four, since 1500.
McNeill has shown us that epidemic disease has had a powerful impact on
world history, notably in the demographic declines of Chinese and Mediterra-
nean civilizations after the second century A.D., in the formation of a single
hemispheric disease pool by about 1000 A.D., in the eruptions of bubonic
plague in the sixth and fourteenth centuries, and in the devastation of native
Americans after 1492. Still, it is hard to see how one could employ disease as
the central driving force in human affairs, although disease must serve as a
major factor in any episodic construction of period frontiers.
The issue of disease does provoke some doubt about the extent to which
interregional exchange via the world system had integrated the Eastern hemi-
sphere before the second century B.C.E. If the spread of lethal disease across
trade routes from the Pacific to the Mediterranean at the end of the second
century occasioned significant demographic decline at both ends of the system,
why, it must be asked, were these catastrophic effects so long delayed? If an
"overarching"and truly "interpenetrating"world system had existed for a mil-

16. McNeill, "The Rise After 25 Years," 12-18.

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110 WILLIAMA. GREEN

lennium or two, is it not probable that these destructive biological effects,

occasioned as they were by interregional contacts, would have been experi-
enced earlier?
Beside world-systemstheory, there are several avenues of approach that might,
in time, provide an overarching theoretical foundation for world history. One,
perhaps the most compelling of them all, is ecological. It would involve interpre-
ting human experience in the context of a universal ecosystem in which people
have been involved in complex patterns of interdependence with all other forms
of life, animal and vegetable."7Some scholars have suggested gender relations
as a basis for the organization of world history courses, if not for the structuring
of comprehensive texts. Neither of these orientations currently commands the
attention given to world systems. In fact, no general theory of change being
employed by world historians today is as fully refined or as well articulated as
world-systems theory. It is a powerful explanatory tool. Nevertheless, numerous
problems have to be resolved in the theory; numerous questions must be an-
swered. The jury remains out.
In the meantime, we must go on writing and teaching world history, updating
texts and reorganizing syllabi. We have to make choices about coverage and
about periodization. There is a strong possibility that neither world-systems
theory, nor ecological theory, nor any other theory will provide a satisfactory
framework for all of world history. If, in the end, we are obliged to accept
some degree of fragmentation in our presentation of world history, should we
not go a further step and concede to a decidedly regional approach, giving
roughly equal attention to all regions of the globe? This would gratify cultural
relativists and those who resent the minimal attention usually' given to sub-
Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America. Here, the response should be a
practical and purely sensible one. It makes no more sense endlessly to disas-
semble our subject than it does to erect unities where they may not exist. Some
people, some places, some institutions, and some belief systems are more en-
during, more significant, more universal, and more influential to the whole
human experience than others. They demand primary attention. The balance
being struck by most writers of world history seems to me a correct one. Peoples
who functioned at great distance from the mainstream should not be ignored;
neither should they serve as major elements in the presentation or periodization
of world history.
Although we may lack an overarching and integrating theoretical framework
for periodizing world history, we still have the practical need, as authors and
teachers, to separate six millennia of human experience in chronological com-
partments having some measure of coherence. For the moment, we are com-
pelled to exercise arbitrary eclectic judgments on global periodization, not un-
like the writers and teachers whose judgments about European history gradually
produced Western tripartite periodization. This would be regretable. It is not

17. An early attempt at such history is Clive Pointing's A Green History of the World: The
Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York, 1991).

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 PERIODIZING WORLD HISTORY III

disastrous. It involves our seeking a practical solution to an inescapable peda-

gogical problem. Most world historians have personal preferences on periodiza-
tion. Few of these preferences are lodged in systematic theory, yet many of
them are highly similar even though similarities may arise for different reasons.
I too have a preferred formulation which, I readily admit, is highly eclectic
and not the product of an overarching and systematic theory of change. It has
four parts, and I proffer it humbly. Like Hodgson, I would have a long early
sweep, from 3000 B.C.E. to roughly 1000/800 B.C.E. My second period, 1000/
800 B.C.E to 400/600 C.E., would extend through the several regional efflo-
rescences of this era to the demographic crises and the barbarian implosions
that disturbed both the East and West, roughly 400/600 A.D. The third age,
emphasizing exceptional Islamic and Chinese achievement, would taper to-
ward 1492.
To me, 1492 is a commanding moment of global transition for many material
and cosmological reasons, none being more compelling than the biological and
ecological ones studied by Alfred Crosby. Charges of Eurocentrism do not
trouble me. There is no necessary connection between Eurocentrism and the
adoption of a world history watershed at 1492. Had the Pacific been less formi-
dable and had the Chinese managed to discover America in 1492, we would
be just as likely to advance that date as a major global watershed. In any case,
too many contemporary Western scholars are obsessed about Eurocentrism.
Eurocentrism takes many forms. It is ironic that some of the most dedicated
historical materialists, scholars like Andre Gunder Frank, are quick to condemn
Eurocentrism in others. Barraclough considered such sturdy materialism to be
a decidedly Western (one might say, European) orientation to the past. He
wondered whether world history written from an Asian perspective would not
be substantially less materialist. I do as well.

Holy Cross College

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