Universal Histories

Abstract

Universal history as an historiographical genre can trace its origins back to the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200–c. 114 B.C.E.), who interpreted the rise of the Roman Republic as the predominant Mediterranean power between 246 and 146 B.C.E. not as an isolated national event but as a world historical event, through which the individual histories of Rome and the territories it conquered were aligned as a single body (sômatoeidês) with a single goal (telos). Slightly later, Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 B.C.E.), the court historian of the early Han Dynasty, produced the first Chinese version of a universal history, a chronically and thematically organized account of the two millennia of China’s history from its (legendary) origins to Sima Qian’s own time. Considered abstractly, universal history seeks to account for the complexity of human history in a rational and systematic manner by assimilating individual historical events and phenomena to a general scheme or narrative. There are two fundamental aspects of this process (to which Olivier Pot and Maike Oergel refer in their essays below): the syntagmatic, which follows the chronological succession of events, and the paradigmatic, which identifies connections and patterns among events and thereby establishes the coherence of history as a whole. By virtue of this second aspect, universal history distinguishes itself from chronicle. The genre of universal history has its own history, however, and a principal aim of this special issue of I.H.R. is to explore some of the variety and complexity of that history. The contributors—including the late Maurice Olender, whose death on 27 October 2022 we profoundly regret and to whose memory we dedicate this issue—address questions of form and content, method and aims, explicit and implicit assumptions of selected universal histories. We focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because, during these centuries, the genre became a preoccupation of Western European historiography precisely as its practice became increasingly problematic, owing to such factors as religious conflict, secularism, scepticism about the universalist claims of reason, and, not least, increasing geographical knowledge and cultural encounters (especially with non-Western societies) through exploration, trade, and colonization. The assumption that history could be theorized holistically, as if from a privileged vantage point outside it, had to contend with expanding empirical evidence of the multiplicity of human languages, cultures, and customs. To an extent, historiographical challenges similar to those that instigated the Greek genre of universal history—the need, with Alexander the Great’s Eastern conquests and the subsequent Roman conquest of Greece, to explain new events, lands, and peoples—later threatened the genre’s continuation and prompted, among the figures examined in the following essays, a rethinking of its basic assumptions and methods. The recognition of human multiplicity simultaneously encouraged and frustrated the identification of principles capable of accounting uniformly for historical developments in