The “History of Mankind” Revisited: Universalist Paradigms in Historiography

In 1947, at the second session of the General Conference of UNESCO, a resolution was adopted that recommended the drafting of a ‘History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind’. The project, which was organized by an international commission created as an autonomous association under contract with UNESCO, started in 1952. When it was completed in 1968, a six-volume history had been published in six different languages. More than 130 scholars from approximately 45 nations contributed. Their motivation was to enhance the understanding of the mutual interdependence of peoples and cultures as well as of their contributions to a common heritage. In the early years, scholars from the USSR and the Soviet-dominated bloc were excluded; however, by the mid 1950s – thus, at the height of the Cold War – scholarly pressure on the commission increased so much that historians from those regions were included, too. The negotiations surrounding  their integration  as well as the  cooperation that evolved  offer  insight into the competition that arose between different  historical interpretations, each of which was based on universalist ideas about the human past. The fact that almost every scholar  involved  was confronted with other,  often contradictory, perspectives and positions clearly demonstrates how difficult it was to transfer one’s view to other cultural and political contexts. Simultaneously, the UNESCO history project can be understood as an effort to produce an interpretation of the world’s history that could be shared globally despite the many differences its narrators struggled with.