The New Global History was written by Jerry Bentley, a professor at the University of Hawaii. Since its publication in 2000, The New Global History: Inheritance and Exchange of Civilizations has been widely welcomed and has become a teaching reference for thousands of universities in the United States. Recently, this book has been translated and published by Peking University Publishing House.

author

Jerry Bentley, a professor at the University of Hawaii and editor-in-chief of World History, an American magazine, is the most important representative of today's global historical view.

Herbert Ziegler is an associate professor at the University of Hawaii and a book review editor of World History magazine.

brief introduction

The reason why the new global history is named new is that the global historical view it embodies is different from the early stage of global history development. In the 1960s, with the increasingly obvious trend of global integration, Eurocentrism since19th century has been criticized by more and more historians, who hope to understand the whole world beyond the boundaries of countries and regions. Therefore, the global view of history has become a new way to observe the world, and Stavri Anoos's A General History of the World and W H McNeill's A History of the World are the worlds that embody this global view of history. But at that time, their criticism of Eurocentrism was incomplete, and the historical view of European civilization had not been completely subverted. From the 1970s to the present, in the past 40 years, global history has made remarkable achievements, and a number of influential world history textbooks have been published one after another, such as World History by Fernand Al mesto, World History by Jackson Spielberg and World Civilization: Global Experience by Peter stearns, all of which are representative works. More importantly, during these forty years, western global historians have clearly deepened their understanding of the history and culture of the non-western world. Although they admit that it is difficult to jump out of their own limitations, they still try to completely transcend Eurocentrism in the process of compiling world history and establish a "universal historical discourse system" and "globalized history itself". This is an innovation compared with Stavri, Anoos and McNeill's incomplete global historical view.

The second is because of its brand-new global perspective. In the new global history, all areas with human activities on five continents are included in the narrative of seven different stages. Each part is divided into special chapters to describe the development of Africa (including sub-Saharan Africa). Oceania is relatively small and isolated, but Bentley thinks that Oceania can reflect the history of the whole world in a microscopic and clear way, so he is very concerned about immigration, cultural exchanges, the relationship between human beings and society and the natural environment, and the consequences and influences brought about by cultural exchanges. Before the arrival of Europeans, the United States also adopted this method. While discussing the huge empire of Central America, we did not ignore the development of different societies in North America. This is in sharp contrast to the views of Stavri and Anoos that human history is "almost equal to the history of Eurasian civilization". In other words, he completely subverted Eurocentrism with a mentality of treating different cultures equally.

The third is because the focus of the new global history is new. Since 1980s, the direction of global history has gradually focused on the relationship between different regions. Bentley first put forward the proposition of cross-cultural interaction, pointing out that different societies or cultures exist independently as a community in any case, but independence does not mean closure, and the independence of different cultures and the communication between different cultures coexist. So in The New Global History, Bentley wrote two themes, one is inheritance, and the other is communication and collision. His focus is not to describe the rise and fall of various civilizations, but to explain the interaction between different civilizations and the transformation of various civilizations in the process of interaction. He believes that the general trend of cultural communication is that the core culture spreads outward from the center of civilization, but the diffusion is quite slow, and the original core culture will continue to integrate new cultural factors in the process of diffusion. In addition, the general trend of the global movement is manifested in three mutually causal and influential factors: population growth, continuous progress and spread of technology, and increasingly close communication between different societies, while Stavri and Anous pay more attention to the progress and spread of technology. From these viewpoints, we can also see his transcendence over Stavri, Anoos and others. In The New Global History, Bentley also pays special attention to some topics in the process of interaction, such as immigration, social development, commerce, imperialism, biological exchange and cultural integration. These topics have increasingly become the common concern of global historians, and have also had an impact on domestic academic research in recent years.

How to build a world history system has always been a hot topic in the world history circle of China. In 1980s, Mr. Wu Yuxi pointed out that the lack of research on the horizontal relationship between different parts of the world was a weak link in the discipline of world history in China. Therefore, he advocated taking the world as a whole and studying world history from a macro perspective, and personally compiled the General History of the World. After that, domestic scholars have done a lot of work in this field, but the progress in global history seems to be small. I hope that the new global history can provide reference for the compilation of our domestic world history.