African and Global Historiography: Toward Reciprocal Integration?

There was a danger that the substantive content of discussions in “world history” would turn out to be largely limited to wider reflections on European or Western exceptionalism. This risk has been reduced as global history has become more prolific and diverse in its inspirations and output, and more dedicated to a more geographically polycentric view of sources of change. This paper is intended to take this process further.

            The first part of the paper notes that the new global economic historiography emphasises the decisiveness of the early modern period, and the nineteenth century, in the origin of the extreme economic differences between major world regions that has characterised the last century and more. For Africanists, this presents an invitation to re-focus our attention on the pre-colonial era: which, after major pioneering studies in the 1960s-80s, has been sorely neglected in the last generation of research (the Atlantic slave trade excepted). If we take up this challenge, the result will be to include Africa more effectively and appropriately within the revised pictures of global economic history that are now emerging.

But historiographical integration should be two-way. This will require a revolution in the way in which African history is treated by scholars specialising on other parts of the world. Specifically, it is necessary to insist that the comparisons we make between Africa (or parts of Africa) and other parts of the world genuinely reciprocal, in Kenneth Pomeranz’s sense. I have elaborated this latter theme in a recent article in African Studies Review (December, 2007); for the AHA meeting I will offer some further specific examples of ideas from the historiography of Africa which may be worth exploring in the context of other regions.