The Mega-Historians
Randall Collins
Sociological Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1. (Spring, 1985), pp. 114-122.
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COLLINS
114
Dutch sociology,' The Netherlands]ournol o f S o c ~ o l o 14,
~ ~ ,
Zetterberg, H., Theoy and Verlficatlon In Soc~ology.Totowa:
1978, pp.135-155.
Bedminster press, 1965, 3rd edition. THE MEGA-HISTORIANS
RANDALL
COLLINS
of
U n ~ v e r s ~ y Calfornla, Riverside
Histon has become popular among many sociologists today, and it might be said we are living in
the Golden Age of historical sociology. Yet there is
something v e n ambivalent in relationship betlveen
sociology and history. Most of the classic sociologists-Weber,
Marx, Engels, Pareto-drew
their
materials primarily from history. Even the relatively
unhistorical Durkheim had a programmatic respect
for histon, declaring that for sociological science
history played the same role that the microscope
did for biological science (Lukes, 1973: 404). The
"microscope" is of course metaphorical (lvith no
overtones of micro and macro); Durkheim meant
that the conditions for social institutions could only
be demonstrated by comparing variations, and these
lvere revealed mainly by histor).. One could lvell
claim that history is the basis of classic sociological
theory.
Yet there is precisely an anti-theoretical theme
that emerges in much of the historical sociology of
todav. Theda Skocool's
(1979)
modern classic on
1
socid~revolutions contains the'declaration that her
findings are not generalizable, that there lvere only
three such revolutions and that there can never be
another one. Immanuel Wallerstein's massive architecture of the capitalist lvorld system, in his own
view. is n o t h i n ~more than a historicallv transiton.
phenomenon; Pheories about it or anything else, he
argues, are similarly historically situated and incapable of generalization (Wallerstein, 1983). Charles
Tilly (1981), in an "Exhortation" called "Sociology,
Meet Histon," tells us that sociologists should give
up the quest for timeless general laws and get their
hands dirty in the historical archives, in order to
come up with the particular processes of particular
historical eras
And these are the voices of our leading practitioners. When lve step into the rank and file of
today's historical sociology, the belief is all too frequent that sheer, massive, specialized historical detail
is the ideal, and that theoretical generalizations are
out. Nevertheless, I don't think this historicist viewpoint is difficult to refute. What makes Skocpol,
Wallerstein, and Tilly important to sociology is pre-
cisely the way in which their lvork rises to theoretical
payoffs. To put dolvn generalizations is disingenuous. W e have no way of knowing lvhat the whole
universe contains in time and space, but it is equally
clear that particulars cannot even be talked about
unless they are couched in terms of general concepts
and relationships. Generalized theory emerges wherever the patterns discerned in one place have some
transferability elsewhere. Skocpol's historicism is
already refuted by the fact that her own t h e o n is
an intellectual relative (i.e. variant and generalization) of Barrington Moore (1966), lvhich has also
had other intellectual progeny, such as the application to a completely different set of revolutions by
Jeffeq Paige (1975). Tilly is not merely the historical
sociologist of popular uprisings in a few centuries of
Europe, but the theorist of resource mobilization.
Whenever historical sociology is found fruitful in
these ways, it undermines its own historicism.
I am suggesting, then, that higtoricism is an ideology, and that its presence itself is explainable by
the sociology of intellectual life. Historicism is the
ideology of the specialized professional historian.
Historians welcome sociologists provided they are
lvilling to become historians: that is, work in the
archives, read eventhing in its native sources, and
above all avoid theoretical and especially comparative generalizations. That settled, the historian is
usually happy to admit the sociologist as yet another
specialist, concerned with this fairly new field of
social histon. For histor). is nothing if not a concatenation of specializations. Eventhing has its history: politics, intellectual life, science, art, literature,
economics, the family . . . eveythlng from archery
and baseball to yaks and zuccini-growing. And everything either has, or eventually will have, its historian.
This multitude of specialized materials has become
the salvation of the historical profession. Histor). is
the oldest of the social sciences, and during past
centuries historians have picked over their traditional materials on political and intellectual history
with increasingly fine-toothed combs. The sheer
numbers in the community of historians has forced
them to concentrate on smaller and smaller slices of
THE MEGA-HISTORIANS
time. Hence a pressure of intellectual demography
squeezes the more enterprising historians off to the
frontier lands of economic history, history of science,
history of technology, and so forth.
This is the Durkheimian process of size fostering
specialization. But there 1s a proviso that Durkhe~m
did not note: intellectual specialization is not necessarily a division of labor, and differentiation does
not promote concomitant integration. O n the contrary, among historians the prevalent ideology declares
that specialization alone is a good thing, and that
summaries, generalizations, ovenielvs, and above all
general theories are superficial and unprofessional.
There is a scorn of secondary sources-as
if historians themselves were not the authors of these same
secondary sources. There is the ritual glorification
of the dirt of the archives: in short, an ideology of
intellectual "manual labor." It might be called the
"trade-union" ideology of the specialized historian,
analogous to the Holly\vood union rules that prohibit anyone but a carpenter from picking up a
hammer on a movie set.
An amusing example is the behavior of Thomas
Kuhn. His Structure o f Sc~entlficRevolutions is orobablv
the greatest successjof socfal science in th; last 20
years. It must be our intellectual best-seller at more
than half a million copies, and his terms "paradigm,"
"normal science," and "revolutionary science" have
~ e n e t r a t e dm anvi disciolines.
Clearlv these are marks
L
of a general theory, not of a specialized treatment
of the Copernican Revolution in astronomy and the
phlogiston theory in chemistry. Yet Kuhn seems
n popularity, especially in theembarassed by h ~ 0s1%
oretical quarters. This makes sense only if we realize
that he has broken the meat taboo. countenened
the trade-union's fundamoental rule. AS if to redeem
himself before his fellow historians, Kuhn has repeatedly disowned the sociological implications of his
work (Restivo, 1983) and has returned instead to a
typical historian's project, the development of a
segment of relativity theory from 1904 to 1912
(Kuhn. 1978).
It is this historicist ideology, I am suggesting, that
has permeated among historical sociologists. Hanging around professional historians, they have picked
up the trade-union attitude, even though in practice
thev have to violate it if thev are to make a maior
success of their own. For here lve come to the
crunch: the very structure of intellectual life both
pushes the historian/sociologist into specialization,
at the same time that it dooms hirnlher to obscurity
if hr/she does not transcend specialization. The glorified dirt of the archives has its counterpart in the
phrase that historical work is "dry as dust," and
what the historical professional eulogizes as "rich"
details can often be translated to outsiders as a code
word meaning "boring." Thus lve have the paradox
that even epoch-making volumes like Wallerstein's
Modern World System receive the frequent complaint
that the reader is left buried in endless particulars,
while on the other side the specialists claim to be
115
dizzied bvJ the whirl-wind 1Dace across the boundaries
of their turfs.
One could of course reply that all intellectual
work seems boring or buried in tedious details to
those who d o not see what is at stake in it. Bvi the
same token, this implies that the specialist too must
have something at stake, some issue which is intellectual and not merely parochial. What I have said
of the problems of an historical sociologist rising
above obscurity applies to the historian as well.
There are dozens, or maybe hundreds, of specialties-politics, economics, literature, etc.-and each
of these is subdivided both into geographical and
temporal units, to as fine a focus as the field has
evolved. How then does a study in one of these
minute specialties attract any attention in the profession at large, much less convince non-historians that
here is something of which they ought to take notice?
In short, how does one become a great historian?
In analyzing this question, one comes to see that
historians' dislike of general theory is only part of
the issue. Theory is one way of rising above particulars, or of making one's own particular particulars
more important in the eyes of the intellectual world.
But there are other paths, and most of these are
more traditionally acceptable among historians. Let
us see, with an eye towards the way in lvhich these
subliminal ideals too may have percolated into historical sociology.
I . H~stoy-wrltlngas pohtlcs. Politics is not only the
traditional subiect of historians. Maior historians
have often chosen their subjects because of the political controversy involved. T h i s is one reason why
politicians, from Julius Caesar to Trotsky, Churchill,
and De Gaulle, have written history: history became
an extension of their own campaigning. Professional
n ~the
causes of World War 11. or
historians d e b a t i 0
more recently entering into the "revisionist" issue
of the origins of the Cold War, are themselves taking
part in the politics of their day. Here, eminence as
an historian is essentially the same as one's own
ability to popularize a political viewpoint. One can
easily think of names: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. lvriting
in the glow surrounding the New Deal, Richard
Hofstadter keeping alive the liberal tradition in the
1950s, Christopher Lasch achieving popularity with
the moods of the 1970s. Yet there is a lveakness in
this kind of history-writing. It produces topical flurries of interest, which tend to fade awav as contemporary politics moves onwards to new controversies.
Von Treitschke was a famous German historian of
Weber's day, but today his name survives only as a
synonym for blatant nationalism, much in the same
way that the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus
survives mainly (and very unfairly) in the term
"dunce."
2. H ~ s t o ~asv the Drama of Famous Events. Another
route to historical success is to ride on the fame of
one's subject. This is the reason why revolutions
have had so many eminent historians: why the French
116
COLLINS
Revolution h a s made the reputation of so many
historians in France, just as the English Revolution
has done for historians across the channel. The Civil
War seems to have operated this way, on a more
popularistic level, for American historians. But there
are two quandries here. One is that these "great
events" seem to be relatively few. They attract overcrowding, and the innovative and ambitious historian must find something beyond the sheer appeal
of the event itself to raise his or her own interpretation above the crowd. This implicitly requires some
other basis besides the appeal of the importance of
the event (although the historian lvho does succeed
in saying something new on the French Revolution
is assured of a large audience). The related problem
is why some events have this sort of "importance,"
lvhy they capture the intellectual imagination to the
degree that they do. T o answer this, one must go
beyond relying on the drama itself, to analyze its
significance. The wise historian weaves this theme
into the drama itself; tacitly, hdshe is going beyond
drama into theory.
3. H~sto;vas Aesthetics. Yet another way to historical
fame and fortune is by being an exceedingly good
writer. This means history as literature, in the broadest sense. The historian is a success not only through
a fine command of the language, but by conveying
the tragedy of personalities, the irony of events, the
color and mood of bygone eras. There are many
different lvays to write history in this mode, just as
there are numerous styles of literature. Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie is the great recent success at this
sort of history. A lvork like Carnlval In Romans is as
colorful and exciting as one might wish, just as the
Inquistor's records used in .tfonta~llouyield not only
the exotic but an x-rated entertainment. One could
well argue that the aesthetic mode is what distinguishes history as a discipline. After all, there is a
sociology of everything, just as there is a history, but
the intrinsic difference may be of exactly this sort
(though Richard Harvey Brown, 1977, has argued
that sociology's forms too are essentially aesthetic).
~
deals with particuLiterature, and a f o r t ~ o rhistory,
lars: it is the tragedy, or irony, or triumph of these
particular lives, the passing of this particular era,
never to come again, that gives history its special
poignancy .'
This may lvell be one essence of great history.
But I would dispute that it carries over into historical
sociology, and even that it covers most of what we
would consider to be "great history." For a good
deal of historians' work is not very aesthetic in form,
but heavy, factual, and also abstract and analytical
in its undertones. It has, in short, the kind of intellectual rather than aesthetic appeal which is listed
next.
4. Thesls H~stol;~.
This type of history is easy to
identify, because its leaders achieve eponymous fame.
The "Pirenne thesis" about the revival of trade in
Medieval Europe, Trevor-Roper's "gentry thesis" on
the English Revolution are typical examples, along
with Marc Bloch's thesis on the rise of feudalism,
Tocqueville's on the Old Regime, and Peter Laslett's
on the non-modernity of the "modem" family. There
are numerous instances of thesis history. Even sociologists have made their mark in this arena, as witness
the (rather simplistically interpreted) "Weber thesis" on capitalism, and the "Merton thesis" on Puritanism and science. Thesis history is a strong rival
to aesthetic history as the central mode of historiography, especially in the modern era of specialization. The thesis historian propagates a lvhole
industry of specialists, who set out to test, modify,
defend, or more likely discredit the thesis. If the
central organizational problem of making a career in
history is finding a specialized niche that no one else
has exploited, lvhile at the same time attracting
attention as to the value of what one as done, thesis
history solves this problem nicely. It matters not if
the thesis is right or lvrong, as long as it opens up
a host of specialized work to be done. The more
controversial and outrageous the thesis the better,
since it attracts more attention to any work which
serves to support or deny it.
Tilly's historicist pronouncements, as well as those
of other historical sociologists referred to above,
seem to come primarily out of this camp of the
historical lvorld. But thesis history shows the same
ambivalence about theory that characterizes the field
as a whole. O n the one hand, it is the stronghold of
the ultra-detailed technical scholar, which has escalated to an extraordinary degree with the methods
now employed especially in social and economic
history. But as commentators often point out, all
this detail can be boring. At least it is boring if one
doesn't see the development of the intellectual controversy that went before it. The weight of data
from the "new social history" dealing with household size in past centuries is ve? tedious, unless one
knows that it is ammunition in a polemic against the
once-prominent thesis that the industrial revolution
brought into being the nuclear family. But even
specialists who know these controversies can become
gored (e.g. Michael Gordon, 1983: 8, complaining
about the re~etitivenessof these familv researches
of the "Lasl&t school.") That is becauie thesis histon: marches onlvards. Its ori~inalimoetus tends to
be iegative: for example ~ a s l s attacking
t
the myth
of the modern nuclear family; then often comes a
second negation as the thesis itself is attacked by
commentators (such as in the huge critical literature
on the "Weber" and "Merton" theses). After a while
the interest of the debate lvears thin. To some extent
the life of a thesis is prolonged by perpetuating the
fame of the original error being disproven (parallel
to the way that functionalism was kept alive in
sociolopv
of the 1970s mainlv bv the attacks of its
0. opponents). But eventually an entire thesis industry
fades, and historians themselves declare they are
bored and lvant to move on to something else.
It will be recognized that thesis history is the
closest to social science of the types yet examined.
THE MEGA-HISTORIANS
But it refuses to go all the way. This is the reason
why a thesis industry finally ends up being rejected
in boredom. Though it flirts with theoretical generalizations, it pulls back in the end and contents
itself with having demonstrated whether or not a
pattern existed at a particular time. The "Laslett
thesis" on the non-modernity of the nuclear family
loses its interest, not because it is wrong, but because
it has been proven right too many times to still be
fresh. A science. however. does not lose its knowledge because it has become overvalidated: it moves
onwards from past accomplishments, driven by the
aim at theoretical generalization. Once we know
lvhen the nuclear family existed or did not exist, the
next step lvould be to push towards the scope of
comparisons that give us conditions for all the variations of the family: in other lvords, history of the
family turns into sociological theon, of the family.
But this runs up against the historians' trade-union
creed: hence the search for a new thesis of sufficient
particularity, and the building of a new industn of
followers to delve that lvell-delimited turf.
But the theoretical impulse is dangerously nearby.
Sometimes a telling admission escapes the lips of a
professional historian. Speaking of Edward Gibbon,
the relipious
historian Peter Brown remarks: "He
0 was always prepared to see in the Roman Empire a
paradigm of the universal dilemma of empires. Gibbon, 'the historian of the Roman Empire,' frequently
emerges as something more. He is a soc~olog~stof
emplre: and we must be prepared to meet hlm and learn
from hlm on that hlgh level." (Brown, 1982: 26; emphasis added.) Not the kind of thing most historians are
willing to say, but true enough to the underlying
logic of the intellectual situation.
2. The Grand Hlstor~ans.There is one more path to
historical eminence. It yields perhaps the highest
standing of all, though it also carries the most ambivalence for the historian's profession. The "grand
historians" of the past are the lvriters of the truly
big books, works of large scale treated with magisterial inclusiveness. The archetype is Gibbon, whose
Decline and Fall of the Roman Emplre has everything: a
large and dramatic theme, treated in a grand style,
and a thesis to boot. Herodotus, who lvrote the
histon of his lvorld up to his own days, occupies
this place for Greek historiography (along with the
merit having been the first), just as Livy did for
Rome. Such books also may have political overtones:
just as Gibbons's thesis on the corrosive effect of
Christianity was part of the liberal politics of his
day, and Livy part of the conservative romanticization of the Roman Republic in his time. In other
words, these histories are masterworks of inclusiveness, reaching out grandly not only in time and space
but also across all the dimensions of historiography.
Do such works survive into the modern era of
specialization? The professional structure of today
militates against it, and there is a tendency to concentrate on smaller and smaller slices of time and
space as well as of subject matter. One might think
117
that magisterial grand histories lvould be found only
in specialities, and especially frontier ones. The example
immediately comes to mind of Joseph Needham,
lvhose many-volumed (and unfinished) Sclence and
C ~ v ~ h z a t ~Ino nChlna has all the grand qualities, but is
also a pioneer effort in a field that had few practitioners before he entered it. Thus Needham can
afford, not only to be inclusive in his sweep across
all the sciences and techniques of thousands of years
of Chinese history, but to carry out an underlying
polemic against Western ethnocentrism, and promote a version of Marxism. Needham, too, can be
untrammeled by the historians' trade union, and
declare himself building up to a sociological explanation of the course of science in East versus West.
Despite current pressures for specialization, I would
claim that grand history continues to exist, and that
in fact it exists on an even grander scale than ever
before. There are two reasons for this. One is that
there is an underlying demand in histon, as in
sociology, for theory to give shape to myriad details,
and to raise historians to eminence even in an era
of specialists. The other reason is that the accomplishments of specialized historiography have made
possible grand history on a level that is technically
much more impressive than what has existed before.
Interestingly enough, all the serious efforts to \vrite
the history of the entire globe are products of the
20th century. Before the 19th century, too little was
known of areas outside of Europe (and vice versa).
Hegel writing in 1820 still resorted to formulae such
as the Orient is changeless, lacking in history. Marx
writing 40 years later was a little better off, but
Weber in the early years of the 20th century was a
quantum leap ahead in the scholarship he could draw
upon. If historical comparisons are crucial for understanding the determinants of social institutions, then
historical information on ecothe sheer amassinp0 of
nomics, religion, law, and politics lvas a necessary
precondition for the emergence of serious sociology.
It also affected the historians: it is in the early 20th
century that lve get the first full-scale treatments of
the shape of the world by Spengler and Toynbee.
As we get nearer the end of the 20th century, it
should not be surprising that grand histon has taken
still further steps. Spengler and Toynbee have by
now well-knolvn weaknesses, although one lvould
be foolish to question their erudition. Above all, they
were historians perhaps too eager to construct a
sociology, for whom it was t o o tempting to prematurely close the picture of world history on a
theory of cycles, cultural thematas (in the case of
Spengler), and challenges-and-responses (in the case
of Toynbee). Their works have been of course distasteful to the ideology of the specialized historian,
as well as out of fashion in their political tastes. But
the topic of world history has become even more
hthe accumulation of
accessible. not less. t h r o u0~ knowled~e.
As a result. lve have in our own davs
0 two of the most ambitious mega-historians of all:
Fernand Braudel and William McNeill.
COLLINS
BRAUDEL
Fernand Braudel is perhaps the archetypal historian of the 20th century, in every respect except
his alvesome scale. As inheritor of the trend-setting
Annales school and editor of Annales. he incomorates
L
an enormous amount of painstaking detail. His is
literally history from the ground up. His The .2led1terranean and the ~Med~terraneanWorld In the Age ofPh111p
// must contain the most extensive scene-setting of
any book ever written, beginning with 300 pages of
the geography of the Mediterrean and even the
history of the weather. But all this is to a purpose:
it is the material environment as lived in, as shaping
and being shaped by the human societies upon it.
Then hundreds of further pages as the geography is
set in motion: not for historical "events" (these come
much later on). but as the 1 lace ~vheretrade routes
of land and sea connect the population of countnside, town and city. Braudel lovingly evokes the sundrenched southern sea, the olive trees and the mule
caravans across the landscape. But it is not just his
obvious affection and enthusiasm for his material
that keeps the book going through the endless details.
Braudel builds up to a theme, an overview of the
pre-modern (or is it early modern?) economy. He
shows his innovative use of sources: diplomatic letters, the traditionalist historian's stock in trade, are
made to vield hitherto unnoticed information as to
the time it takes for communications around this
geographical space. Then enter population fluctuations, agricultural production, itinerant labor, the
flo~vsof precious metals and the great price inflation
of the 16th century.
Finally, almost as a genuflection to traditional
poltical history, we reach the events of the reign of
Philip 11. This is the height of the Spanish empire,
in Europe even more than in the Americas; the era
too of state bankruptcies, of the defeat of the Turks
in the Mediterranean and the shift in trade and
political power to the North. But Braudel speaks of
this deprecatingly as
"ll'hlstolre e'vinement~elle,the history of events: surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of
history carry on their strong backs. A history of
brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations, by definition
ultra-sensitive; the least tremor sets all the antennae quivering. But as such it is the most exciting
of all, the richest in human interest, and also the
most dangerous. W e must learn to distrust this
history lvith its still burning passions, as it was
felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose
lives \Yere as short and as short-sighted as ours
. . . A dangerous world, but one whose spells and
enchantments we shall have exorcised by making
sure first to chart those underlying currents, often
noiseless, whose direction can only be discerned
over long periods of time. Resounding events are
often onlv momentary outbursts, surface manifestationiof these larger movements and explic-
able only in terms of them." (Braudel, 1949/
1972:21, Preface to the First Edition).
The auote deserves to be enshrined over the desk
of every sociologist, for lve are subject to the same
temptations to trendy exaltations of momentary patterns of belief. But for Braudel it is an historian's
creed, the creed of the new style of historian who
has moved beyond traditional history. Braudel establishes the distinction bet~veenstructure and conluncture, bet~veenthe slow-moving undercurrents of la
longue dure'e, and the individual time of mere human
consciousness. This shift in the focus of time is not
Braudel's only innovation. For Braudel, the hero of
his story is not Philip 11, but the Mediterrean itself.
Braudel is at pains to show that it was a social and
economic unity; that the African and Middle-Eastern
world, the Turks as well as the Christians, shared
the same way of life and lvere subject to the same
vicissitudes of trade, money, and prices. Braudel
exemplifies the breakdown of Euro-centrism in
modern thought.' He also shifts the focus beyond
the nation-state, to the concept of a "world." It is
of course a metaphor, since the globe contains many
"~vorlds,"relatively autonomous economic/politicaV
social networks. In this respect, as in many others,
Braudel is the originator of concepts developed and
popularized by lmmanuel Wallerstein. It is no accident, I suppose, that the first volume of Wallerstein's
The .Vodern World System deals also with thc incipient
capitalism of the 16th century; it is Braudel's Mediterranean expanded to its limits.
In Braudel's later works, the connection with
Wallerstein becomes even clear. The .Med~terranean
took 25 years to write; Braudel's Cluhzat~onand
Capltal~m,I Tth-18th Centuries (1979/198 1) even longer.
And small wonder. It expands outwards in every
direction: adding several centuries onto the core of
the 16th \vhich he had already established; grandly
travelling along with the European sailing ships to
the ends of the globe, and incorporating a comparison of European economies with those of India,
China, and the Islamic \vorld; and pushing down
even more deeply into the details of the "material
life" of everyday for all those places. Here we find
the "Wallersteinian" concepts of core, periphery,
and semi-periphery (which Braudel calls the "intermediate zones"). Here too lve find the thesis that
capitalism always has a center, which migrates periodically, in a time of crisis and transformation of the
lvorld system.
Does this mean Wallerstein is no more than a
clone or popularizer of Braudel? No. For one thing,
Wallerstein is a sociologist, and whether he likes it
or not, a theorist. There also are substantive differences: notably that Wallerstein is a Marxist and
Braudel is not. Thus for Wallerstein, but not for
Braudel, the rise to dominance of European capitalist:; is due to the profitable exploitation of the
periphery by the core. For Braudel it all remains
rather mysterious. While acknowledging Waller-
THE MEGA
stein's originality, Braudel (1977: 83, 92-4; 1979,
Vol. 3: 380-461) believes that there has been more
than one great world economy: not just Europe, but
the Islamic world, India, and China in the Orient,
as well as Turkey and Russia in the West. And that
is only in his period 1400- 1800; Braudel also characterizes the E u r o ~ e a nMiddle Apes
and MediterC
ranean antiquity as world economies. This ignores
Wallerstein's theoretical distinction between "world
empires" in which political direction dominates economic extraction, and "world economies" in which
pluralism among states gives leverage for economic
autonomy. In Wallerstein's sense, only the modern
European case qualifies as the latter type. Nevertheless, Braudel ma?- have a point when he argues that
Europe rose to dominance not by exploiting an
economically backward periophery, but by achieving
military-based economic dominance over forms of
economy (even to some extent, of capitalism) which
were already highly developed in IndialIndonesia and
China. In fact this part of Braudel's work is one of
his more memorable achievements, when in brief
compass (1979: vol. 2, 93-1 12, 5 19-534; 1979, vol.
3, 417-460) he shows the remarkable extent t o
which markets, shops, fairs, promissary notes, maritime insurance. and networks of credit existed outd only in Japan, which we might
side Europe. ~ n not
have expected, but especially in Islam and Indiaplus-Indonesia, which we are used to regarding as
economically not in the running. Europe's lead, Braudel
(1977: 94) claims, seems more a matter of military
accident. a few crucial vovapes and battles of the
European explorers making the difference.
But this seems undertheorized. Braudel himself
also plays another tune, arguing that European
delelopments since the Middle Ages had inched
Europe away the baseline it shared with the rest of
the world, although the payoff did not happen until
after 1800. (Among Braudel's most remarkable citations are those wGch demonstrate this fact in estimates of the GNP per capita across several centuries
for India, China, and Japan against Europe: 1979,
Vol. 3: 460-61). Braudel's "theory" works with
three levels. First there is the plane of "material
life," the hard facts of population, geography, the
modes and implements of daily life. Braudel argues
that on this level the possibilities were limited, and
that populations could never get beyond a certain
level without putting pressure upon resources and
falling back through famine and disease. This makes
it all the more mvsterious how the world, led bv
Europe, eler broke out. Braudel does documen;,
and at considerable length and charm, how far back
into the past is rooted the slow rise of modern
technology. But technologies did not impell economic change; they waited a long time before the
economy was ready to exploit them (1979, Vol. 3:
489). O n the other hand, without them the rapid
takeoff, the change of small increments of quantity
into gaps of quality in the 1800s, would not ha\e
been possible (1977: 63; 1979, Vol. 3: 538-40).
1
0
Braudel never resolves this problem. What he
does offer is a neat distinction between two further
levels built above the material world: markets and
capitalism. For Braudel these are of fundamentally
different character. Late-medieval Europe was an
elaborate network of markets, which Braudel describes
in loving detail; the peddlars and local market-towns,
the fairs which served as centers for trade, the links
of transportation which connected it all together.
These were regular and transparent, and apart from
famine-induced scarcities, prices stayed at a level of
"fair exchange," under the watchful eyes of their
participations and the control of local officials. Braudel admires markets, in fact, which is one reason
why he does riot endorse Marxist t h e o y or a socialist
program. The fly in the ointment comes at the higher
level, when capitalism appears. This is the manipulation of finances that becomes possible in longdistance trade, bvhere buyers are severed from sellers
and both become subject to the profit-schemes of
the intermediaries (1977: 51-3, 62; 1979, Vol. 2:
329-405).
It is for this reason, I think, that Braudel makes
much of the point that a world economy always has
a city at its core. Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, New York: the successives waves of the modern
world have hinged on the dominance of these Lolaces
where the bouEes were, where the financial world
had its center. Wallerstein follows Braudel fairly
closely i r ~this respect, with the result that orthodox
Marxists have accused him of being a "Smithian"
(see Bergesen, 1984), placing the essence of capitalism in its market relations rather than its production
relations. Braudel is of course even more "~mithian,"
especially in his argument that markets per se are a
source of good and fairness, bvhile it is manipulators
of the market who are the source of its evil. Nevertheless, one may doubt much of the basic formulation. For one thing, Braudel establishes his point
about a world economy always having a core city
only for Europe; it would not work at all well, I
believe, for Braudel's other "world economies" of
antiquity and the Orient. He also hedges, admitting
that 4 Medieval Italian cities fought it out for preeminence (I 977: 98) before Venice finally pulled ahead.
One might argue that the notion of the "core" city
is mainly a literary device. Instead, the driving force
may well be conflict among the various manipulative
financial centers which Schumpeter once called "the
headquarters of capitalism." And these are not necessarily just cities; they can be states, too, manipulators of finance in their own right, as well as major
accumulators and burdens on the economy by their
o u n , especially military expenditure. On these points,
Wallerstein, as buried as his model tends to be in
historical description, is more promising because
more comprehensive sociologically.
In the end, neither Wallerstein nor Braudel has
any well-theorized explanation of why capitalism
emerged in Europe, but only a description of what
happened when it did take shape. In my opinion,
COLLINS
120
Weber still reigns supreme here, in his comparative
model of all the institutional sectors and their interarrangements that had to fall into place for the
capitalist takeoff. Wallerstein is closer to Weber, in
the place for geopolitical relations among states that
he at least implicitly admits into his model. Braudel,
on the other hand, is surprisingly obtuse about Weber.
The one shocker in his works is Braudel's apparent
belief that Weber is no more than the puritan ethic
thesis (1977: 65-67; 1979, Vol. 2: 505-6, 518),
together with an evolutionism extolling rational capitalism as a final stage of world histo? (1979, Vol.
3: 543). O h well, with all his accomplishments Braudel has earned the right to be occasionally only
human.
Where Braudel's weakness is his ability to glide
through difficult points on his beautiful style, William McNeill is more openly a theoretical historian.
Perhaps this is an American trait. Certainly McNeill
is stylistically flatter, more typically academic, without Braudel's poetic brilliance.' But in his own way
McNeill is a grander "Grand Historian" even than
Braudel. In some ways he is the most ambitious
historian of all. He is the author of unquestionably
the best book ever written on the history of the
entire world, and he has broadened the scope of
histon. so that it includes not onlv the material life
of the econom!, but the \ e n hlsion of other blologlcal organisms whose hlston moces along ~ ~
our OM n
McNelll's The Rlse o f rhe West ( 1963) s h o s~hou
far we have come in 20th c e n t u n historiography.
Previous efforts to capture the whole pattern were
always one-sided: Spengler's rested mainly on comparisons of high culture, Toynbee's on politics and
religion. McNeill's title is explicitly antagonistic to
Spengler's Decllne of rhe West. But it is not Eurocentric. It is onlv on the world scale that one can
see just what the European rise to dominance in
recent centuries really means. McNeill in his way
operates with a conception of the "world system"
that is broader than Wallerstein's (as well as preceding his by over a decade). It is not merely or
even mainly economic, but political. And it is not
something that always exists, but a geographical
relationship that comes into existence at various
times. After the initial rise of agrarian civilizations
in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Aegean,
there is the first "closure of the ecumene" during
1100-700 B.C. by the Assyrian Empire: the bringing
of these disparate and relatively autonomous civilizations into a relationship in which their fates were
hencefonvard determined from without. McNeill's
theme is thus the rise and fall of the importance of
"foreign affairs," at different times in histon and on
different scales.
McNeill puts into the center of attention those
factors-diffusion,
external relationships-which
J
both evolutionan and cyclical models of historical
change have always ignored or relegated to the status
of accidents. For McNeill, the very nature of world
history operates by diffusion. The Middle Eastern
innovations spread outwards to India, and eventually
produced "peripheral civilizations" as well in China
and Greece. Not only that, but civilization has always
created graduated zones around it, among which
relationships of trade, imitation, and predation have
held. Around the world of the ancient Middle East,
spread a "megalithic protocivilization" of the Stonehenge type, and a "high barbarism" of the Eurasian
steppe. Histon becomes increasingly an interaction
of different kinds of societies, made different precisely by the degree and rate of diffusion from elsewhere, and by the economies of predation and symbiosis that grow up between them. The formation
of empires (and hence foreign policies) among the
"Great Powers" of the core areas is but one level of
this world system dynamic. The Assyrians "closed
the ecumene" on a Near Eastern scale, while a
closure of greater scope developed 500 B.C.-200
A.D. as all Eurasia became linked: partly through
European m i l i t a ~expansion (the Hellenistic Empires
of Alexander and his successors), partly through the
transmission belt of pressures between China, India,
and Europe which made up the barbarian societies
of the steppes. The era of nomadic outbursts and
"barbarian conquests," ranging from the Huns and
the Germans through Arabs, Turks and Mongols,
ceases to be seen as mere historical "accident," and
tbecomes
h
part of a larger pattern of external relations
on the global scale.
One of McNeill's revelations is putting our familiar Western histon in perspective. The "Greek mirvlace for all our
acle" that has been the start in^
0 1
ethnocentric histories becomes something else: another
step in the "closure of the ecumene," and an outburst by rising populations in the zone of "high
barbarism" onto the stalemated geopolitics of the
civilizations inside them in the ring.4 The "rise of
the West" 2000 vears later. with the Eurovean
L
colonial expansion of modern times, is not an isolated pattern either. It followed similar expansions
of India into Indonesia and of Islam into both places.
One might well expect further such international
flows to shape the world of our own future.
McNeill's guiding perspective emerges as rather
like a geopolitical view of world histon. It is not
surprising that along with The Rue ofthe West McNeill
published a more specialized study of the geopolitics
of Europe's Sreppe Fronr~en(1964). This is something
like traditional history, but raised out of the level of
personalities, generals and tactics, and into a more
analytical focus on the determinative factors universally operating. To be sure, McNeill remains an
historian, and the theory remains more implicit than
explicit, within his recounting of the facts. But the
subject is the pattern, not the personalities and
events. In his latest book, The Punulr $Power, (1982)
described as a "belated footnote to The k s e of rhe
THE MEGA-HISTORIANS
West, " McNeill gives the history of arms and military
organization that resulted in European military dominance. Among the most interesting part of the work
is the treatment of ancient and medieval China. Far
from being militan. backward. China turns out to
have been~echnol~gically
much more advanced than
Europe; China pioneered "mechanized" warfare with
armies based on crossbows, a millenium before this
same weapon began the militan revolution of Medieval Europe. Chinese cannon and gunpowder, long
taken as a fateful accident when thev showed up in
Europe, emerge rather as products of a Chinese iron
industn that was far in advance of the rest of the
world. I must say that McNeill does not solve the
issues either of why China achieved this early preeminence, or why it lost it to its own remote barbarian
periphey. But the picture of a world in interaction,
on all levels, is reinforced once again, as in all of
McNeill's works.
McNeill's characteristic is to broaden histon to
include all the factors, and to give equal weight to
those which have usually been regarded as "accidental." W e have seen that demography has been
given a place; in Plagues and Peoples (1976) McNeill
explicitly theorizes what have been the biggest "accidents" of all. The Black Plague which devasted Europe
in 1348-50 is the most famous instance, but McNeill
shows there were numerous recurrences in subsequent centuries, as well as parallels in China. The
destruction of the Aztec and Inca empires by tiny
armies of European conquistadors had less to d o
with militan armaments than with spreading epidemics which decimated Amerindian populations.
In his most systematic book, McNeill theorizes these
phenomena by a picture of breeding populations of
microbes and the mammals that carnr them. There
is a peculiar symbiosis between predator and host:
for if a bacterial species is too effective at killing, it
will destroy its own ecological niche. Hence diseases
spread in patters as immunity builds up; the greatest
devastation occurs when hitherto isolated human
gene pools are suddenly exposed to transmission of
bacteria which had built up a stable equilibrium with
relatively immune populations elsewhere. Thus
McNeill closes the circle of explanation with his own
geopolitics of states: each "closure of the ecumene"
is also the provoker of epidemics. (There are perhaps
other sub-cycles operating, connected to demographic expansion beyond the carning capacity of
an agriculture economy; here Braudel's model would
supplement McNeill's.)
McNeill puts before us the prospects of an historical theory of life and health, including its most
fearsome forms. He invokes an image of microorganisms evolving along with the humans and other
animals that carry them: leading me, at least, to
subdued speculations about the future breeds of
viruses we are provoking by our biochemical warfare
in the form of antibodies. But here we come up
against one of McNeill's limitations. His materials
are always suggestive for a theorist, but his own
121
theorizing tends to come up short. Plagues and Peoples
ends on a particularistic note, with the history of
medical immunization in the last century which
ended the reign of cholera and other diseases of the
past.
AU McNeill's books are inconclusive in this way.His
Pursuit of Power does not draw out any geopolitical
principles, but ends on the "practical" note of contemporan issues. The danger of nuclear annihilation,
he says, can be overcome only by eliminating war,
e n with the establishment of
and that will h a1 1~ ~ onlv
a world empire. Is this just conventional liberal
wisdom, or does McNeill have a theoretical basis for
expecting this to happen? His several books are not
entirely coordinated on this point The h e of the
West (1963: 878-9) ends on an optimistic note: the
era in which we are living is a parallel to the warring
states of China, Greece, or Arabia, before the stability of cosmopolitan empires established respectively by the Han Dynasty, the Romans, and Islam.
The future he expects will be a world-wide cosmopolitanism, bearing the Western cultural imprint,
hence bureaucratic but justified by one of the "democratic political faiths." The Pursult of Power is more
wonied about nuclear annuation, but he still expects
that future centuries will look back with amazement
"at the reckless rivalries and restless creativity of
the millennium of upheaval, A.D. 100-2000" (1982:
386). That is because he idly expects there to emerge
a world government monopolizing force (or at least
heavy armanents), with life reverting to routine,
pursuit of private profit being put back in its cage,
and along with it cultural and technological creativity slowing down to the "leisurely pace of preindustrial, precommercial times." In his earlier book
McNeill extolled ourselves as living in parallel to the
times of Confucius, Demosthenes, and Mohammed;
in his later one, he looks forward to when this
dangerous era shall have passed.
On theoretical grounds, I remain unconvinced.
McNeill offers the parallel too quickly, without ponthe mono-causal implications of such a
d e r i ntfonvard
~
straig
repetition of patterns. A more
sophisticated theory would surely be multi-causal,
thus allowing for different and unexpected combinations. McNeill has evidence about many such elements, but he does not build the t h e o n . In Plagues
and Peoples, and again in the introduction to The
Pursult of Power, he describes histon as a two-sided
ecological interaction of human populations with
microparasites (diseases) and macroparasites (the
armed predation of the state). This is promising, but
he says v e n little in a theoretical vein about
"macroparasitism," in effect leaving it as a passing
metaphor. He does say that humanity, with its burgeoning population, is "in course of one of the most
massive and extraordinan ecological upheavals the
planet has ever known" (1976: 257). This does not
fit so well with the promised land of a peaceful
world empire.
McNeill, like Braudel, remains an historian at
122 COL
heart, even if their materials are implicitly full of
theory. W e should be grateful for their work, but
aware that their o w n questions cannot be answered
without a n explicit transformation into the realm of
theory. It remains for sociology t o c a r 7 away from
them what general truths w e can.
NOTES
1. The recent vogue of historiography inspired by struc- turalism and other anthropological culture intepreta- tion also seems to fit best under the rubric of aesthetic approaches. Though it has an ancestry in the study of mentahtb, a sort of historicizing of Durkheimian soci- ology, its method is far more that of intuiting (i.e. imagining) the cultural meanings of an epoch than following the Durkheimian path of explanation by sys- tematic comparison. Nor is this so new; invoking "the spirit of the age" is a venerable form of history-telling. The practitioner of "thick descriptionn who claims to divine the essence of a culture from its cockfights is not so different, after all, from the literary mode Henry Adams practiced when he took his niece on an imagi- nary tour of Medieval Europe in .Wont-Salnt-.M~chel and Chartres. 2. Braudel exemplifies 20th century historians in another respect as well. The historians of the 18th and 19th century were in love with classical antiquity; even in Weber's day, the great master was Eduard Meyer, historian of ancient Greece and Rome. The 20th cen- tury's favorite has become the "early modern" period, an arena in time that has become increasingly discov- ered to be the roots of all that comes later. The great game of historians has become pushing back the date when "modernity" begins, well behind the frontier of the French Revolution that for Marx was still cleansing away the "feudal rubbish of the Middle Ages. 3. Of course one must recognize that Braudel is of the old school of French intellectual life, writing with clarity and elegance: traits that have given way since World War I1 to an involuted style borrowed from German philosophy. 4. It comes as a shock to learn that the Greek victors over the Persians in the 400s and 300s B.C. were not a tiny band of stalwarts, but represented a population of some 3 millions, approximately equal to Persian demographic strength (McEvedy and Jones, 1978: 110, 152). More- over Greek population had been overflo\ving into colo- nial migrations for several hundred years previously. Demographic patterns call out for incorporation into a theoretical model of world history. For an important effort in this direction see the forthcoming work of Jack Goldstone, State Breakdown In the Earl,r .Modern World: a h'ew Sjnthes~s. REFERENCES
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