An article that isn't very memorable

 *** SECTION ADDED, AUGUST 1, 2015:

I think I fired off the following post to hastily. I took the time to actually read/skim the paper in question, and its really not too bad! In fact, I think it does a good job in synthesizing quite a bit of material on state formation in Postclassic Mesoamerica. So I have posted the paper in case anyone is interested.

I'll leave the post unchanged below. I think it points out an issue about scholarship and publishing that doesn't get discussed too much: the emotional side. I am emotionally invested in my research and publishing. I am a scholar. This is what I do, and I have strong emotions connected with my publications. Most of these are positive. But sometimes when there are unpleasant experiences associated with writing or producing a written work, I end up with a vague negative feeling about that work. In the present case, an unpleasant experience with the edited volume (which tapped into long-standing resentments about how Old World scholars ignore the New World), led me to almost forget about a paper I wrote just a couple of years ago. Hence the post below.

Having a strong emotional investment in one's research is usually a positive thing. It spurs one on, keeps one interested and working, even when rewards are small and obstacles are large. But such emotion can also be a negative force, if a scholar gets so strongly invested in a particular idea or interpretation, a pet theory, that he or she is willing to cut corners and even commit academic fraud to support the notion. Just see the blog Retraction Watch for some of the fraud that goes on in the sciences. So as scholars we need to be constantly vigilant to not let our biases or emotions get in the way of our scholarship.  Well, enough rambling. Here is the initial post:


*** ORIGINAL POST, FROM JULY 29, 2015:
.      We've all seen papers that don't seem interesting or useful. They look boring and superfluous, and you don't want to read them. I have better things to do!  I just came across such a paper, a book chapter saved as a pdf on my server. I looked at it and tried to figure out why this was published and why I should care. The odd thing is, I am the author! I read the title of the paper and thought, "Yes, this is something I might have written." So I paged through and tried to remember writing this paper. I figured it must be 10 or 15 years old, and that's why I had forgotten. But then I looked it up in my  Endnote file, and found that it was published in 2015! Oh yes, now I recall.

Here is the paper:

Smith, Michael E.
2015    Mesoamerican State Formation in the Postclassic Period. In Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conquest, 500 CE - 1500 CE, edited by Benjamin Kedar and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, pp. 598-624. Cambridge History of the World, vol. 5. Cambridge University Press, New York.

I tend to black out negative experiences. I don't remember them as well as more positive experiences, and I think this is probably a normal psychological strategy. When I was invited to contribute to this work, I was honored, because historian William McNeil was involved. He is a big shot in the field of world history, and the author of one of my favorite books of comparative history, Plagues and Peoples. The volumes are organized by time period. Each volume has one or more prominent editors, and each sponsored a conference to get the authors together. Norman Yoffee edited an earlier volume, which had a bunch of chapters on early cities. He had good authors (many archaeologists), and he did some innovative things with his conference and volume structure. I am jealous of the authors in that volume!

I was not familiar with most of the authors in my volume, all historians. But when paper drafts were circulated, I was appalled. A number of the chapters were syntheses of themes that were supposed to cover the entire world for the target period (topics like education, migrations, demography, gender, courtly culture, and the like). The authors were European historians who either ignored the New World entirely, or else wrote mostly about the Old World with some bad coverage of the New World thrown in. (This seems par for the course in many textbooks in "global history" or "world history") One paper draft had silly, inaccurate, and demeaning descriptions of a New World culture, and the main cited sources were elementary school curriculum materials posted online! I am still astounded that a professional scholar could even think that such a source was acceptable for a publication (particularly when there is in fact a published literature on the topic in question among New World societies in that time period).

I fired off a letter of complaint to the editors, and threatened to withdraw my paper if they couldn't do better than that. Perhaps I should have followed through. When I was invited to their conference, in a nice foreign city I wanted to visit, I turned down the invitation. These were not people I wanted to hang out with. I went ahead with my chapter, and then the book came out I saw that at least the worst problems in the comparative chapters had been fixed. I guess I had my chapter scanned (it turns out it was only a month or so ago), and now I am wondering if it is worth posting online with my other publications.

I should probably read the paper and decide whether to post it or not. My hope is that the chapter is not too bad, and that my negative associations have to do with the volume itself, with the early chapter drafts I saw, with my reservations about "world history," (see prior posts here,   here,   and here) and with my jealousy for not being in Norm Yoffee's volume. Maybe it will turn out to be a memorable paper after all.

"Global history" that leaves out half of the globe

One would think that a work that claims to be "global" in scope would cover the entire world. So what should we make of the new book, A Companion to Global Historical Thought, that leaves out half of the globe? Is this ignorance, oversight, condescension, or what? Here is the citation:

A Companion to Global Historical Thought (2014, edited by Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori; Wiley Blackwell.


I haven't seen the actual book, just the table of contents and one chapter that an author had posted online. The first section, "Premodern historical thought," reviews history and historical thought in a variety of early traditions, from India to China to the Ottoman empire. So where is the New World? I checked the publisher's website, and found this blurb. I had to add two and a half words to avoid lying (I wouldn't want to post something blatantly incorrect, would I?):

A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an in-depth overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, across part of the world, directly addressing the issues of historical thought in a semi-globalized context.  FROM THE PUBLISHERS WEBSITE

If the editors are willing to devote eight chapters to these various regional traditions of "premodern historical thought," one would think they might have been able to skip one of the TWO chapters on India to include at least one chapter on the ancient New World.

Did ancient New World cultures have historical traditions before the arrival of European conquerors? of course they did. Most likely every distinct culture (and there were literally thousands in the New World prior to Columbus) had a historical tradition. But there are at least four regions where these indigenous traditions are sufficiently well known (with surviving oral and written accounts) and sufficiently analyzed by rigorous scholars, to warrant inclusion alongside early Japan, China, and India.

(1) Central Mexico

The Aztecs had a rich tradition of political and social history, and the scholarly bibliography runs into the hundreds of works. Here are four important ones:

• Boone, Elizabeth H.  (2000)  Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. University of Texas Press, Austin.
• Gillespie, Susan D.  (1989)  The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexica History. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
• Navarette Linares, Federico  (2011)  Los orígenes de los pueblos indígenas del Valle de México: Los altépetl y sus historias. Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.
• Nicholson, H. B.  (1971)  Pre-Hispanic Central Mexican Historiography. In Investigaciones contemporáneas sobre la historia de México, pp. 38-81. El Colegio de México and University of Texas Press, Mexico City and Austin.

Or check out some of my own works on the topic:

• Smith, Michael E.  (1984)  The Aztlan Migrations of the Nahuatl Chronicles: Myth or History? Ethnohistory 31:153-186.
• Smith, Michael E.  (1992)  Rhythms of Change in Postclassic Central Mexico: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Braudellian Model. In Annales, Archaeology, and Ethnohistory, edited by A. Bernard Knapp, pp. 51-74. Cambridge University Press, New York

(2) Oaxaca

Both the Mixtec and Zapotec speaking polities of Oaxaca maintained painted books and carved stone records of their histories. Many of these have survived, and they have been rigorously analyzed by scholars. A few examples:

• Jansen, Maarten E.R.G.N. and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jinénez  (2011)  The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscrirpts: Time, Agency and Memory in Ancient Mexico. Brill, Leiden.
• Oudijk, Michel R.  (2000)  Historiography of the Bènizàa: The Postclassic and Early Colonial Periods (1000-1600 A.D.). CNWS Publications vol. 84. Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, Universiteit Leiden, Leiden.
• Urcid, Javier  (2001)  Zapotec Hieroglyphic Writing. Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology vol. 34. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.

(3) The Maya area

The historical traditions of the Classic-period Maya were recorded in stone (and probably in painted books that have not survived), and the traditions of their conquest-era descendants were recorded in painted hieroglyphic books and maintained in oral tradition:

• Houston, Stephen D.  (1993)  Hieroglyphs and History at Dos Pilas: Dynastic Politics of the Classic Maya. University of Texas Press, Austin.
• Roys, Ralph L.  (1967)  The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman
• Schele, Linda and Peter Mathews  (1998)  The Code of Kings: The Language of Seven Sacred Maya Temples and Tombs. Simon and Schuster, New York.

(4) The Inca

Historical traditions are less well preserved in cultures that lacked full writing systems, but Inca professional historians kept track of history and the accounts were taken down in writing soon after the Spanish conquest:

• Covey, R. Alan  (2006)  Chronology, Succession, and Sovereignty: The Politics of Inka Historiography and Its Modern Interpretation. Comparative Studies in Society and History 48:169-199.
• Julien, Catherine  (2000)  Reading Inca History. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

So, if history did exist as a self-conscious domain of discourse in New World societies, and if many texts have survived, and if historical traditions have been ably analyzed by scholars for decades, then why were they left out of this book? To repeat, was this due to ignorance, oversight, condescension, or what?

More drive-by history: world history as television

I watched the second and final installment of Niall Ferguson's TV show, "Civilization" last night. (See my post on the first installment here). He covered three of his "killer applications" that explain why western civilization is so much better than the rest of the world.

1. Medicine.  A main point in this section was that imperialism (French imperialism in west Africa) isn't so bad, because some medical advances were made by imperialist physicians in Senegal. At the end of the show, Ferguson decries the fact that "empire" has become a "dirty word." He is frustrated by the fact that people just ignore the great benefits of empires and imperialism. This is so blatant that I can't even think of a clever response!

2. Consumerism.  Blue jeans caused the Prague spring in 1968, and they also caused the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Blue jeans later caused the fall of the Berlin wall. And the Chinese are the worst-dressed people in the world.

3. Work. There was actually a nice piece on Max Weber and his theory of how Protestantism furthers capitalism. But any insights were offset by explanations like this: Why is church attendance higher in the U.S. than in Europe? Because state monopolies are inefficient.

The field of "world history" has been gaining influence in the past decade. There are now textbooks, journals, and lots of publications. It is good to see historians expanding their horizons in two ways: (1) seeking connections and contacts among widely separated regions; and (2) making comparisons among regions (sometimes even including such bizarre places for historians as Pre-Columbian America). From the perspectives of anthropology and archaeology, these two approaches are pretty pedestrian, but when historians--who command large amounts of very important regional data--take them up, this is a very positive development for scientific scholarship on the past. But books and TV shows like Ferguson's Civilization set back progress in this area. The superficial nature of the ideas, the many very wrong-headed notions, and the glitzy production, all make world history look like prime-time television - in both style and substance.

I hope serious proponents of world history fight back.

Niall Ferguson: Drive-By History

I watched the first installment of Niall Ferguson's TV series, "Civilization: The West and the Rest,"tonight. Much of it was entertaining, and there were many insights. But overall I found it a superficial and simplistic triumphal history. How did the West come to dominate the East? Ferguson attributes the West's victory to six factors (he calls them "killer applications;" it's not clear why he uses a software metaphor): competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic. Well, this certainly is not a rigorous comparative study. Where did these factors come from? What theoretical model generated this set of six?

David Bronwich published an eloquent, understated, and highly critical review of Ferguson's book of the same name in the New York Review of Books (December 8, 2011) On the six factors, he states, "These make an absurd catalog. It is like saying that the ingedients of a statesman are an Oxford degree, principles, a beard, sociability, and ownership of a sports car."

I have to admit that my attention started to wane after an hour. I was getting tired of hearing how backward the Ottomans were in compared with the Europeans. I picked up my phone and started playing a game, but then my ears pricked up when Ferguson started comparing Spanish and British colonization of the New World. He claims at the outset that "Britain won" this competition. Well, Spain got far richer off its colonies than Britain ever did, and Spain held onto its colonies longer than Britain. So just how did Britain win? What Ferguson meant was that the United States would later develop into a much better society than modern Latin America. I don't think he used the word "better," but that is the clear message of this segment.

Ferguson focused on an important comparison--that colonial development in North America involved many small property owners, whereas Latin America had far fewer, larger, landowners. OK, that is certainly a major difference between the two areas. But how and why did these to different property systems get started? We are told the systems originated because the two sets of European colonists simply made different decisions in the two areas. The British decided to have a small property system, and the Spaniards decided to have big estates. What is completely lacking is the context of this distinction. Key factors that are ignored include demography (the very different size and density of native societies in the two areas; the numbers of natives who survived vs. the.numbers of colonists), the indigenous political structure at time of conquest (states and empires in Latin America, vs. tribal societies in North America), and the nature of the resources in the two areas (mining vs. agriculture, and their labor and organizational requirements).

Thus Ferguson did identify a crucial distinction between two areas, but by completely ignoring the context, he fails to show how and why that distinction originated and developed. His explanation is superficial and misleading.

Ferguson is a respected historian with a number of solid empirical studies to his name. Why did he step down from scholarship to produce a popular book and TV show based on some rather silly ideas? Could publicity and royalties have anything to do with this? Is the image of a nineteenth century capitalist on the cover significant? People may gripe about Jared Diamond's works, but they are based on solid scholarship that relies on work by experts, interpreted in a new fashion. If the TV show is indicative of the book (and the reviews suggest that it is), then Ferguson is not anywhere near Diamond's level of scholarship.

This is drive-by history, a quick and superficial look at the issues. If you want to find about about how and why China and Europe diverged, try reading Ian Morris's far superior book, Why the West Rules (for Now).