The Margins of World History

Johannes Fabian, in his acclaimed work Time and the Other, made a succinct argument about the transition from sacred (Judeo-Christian) time to universal, secular time dating to the period of the Renaissance and maritime travel across the world (3). Fabian showed how natural history was a starting point for the appearance of heathen, non-Western intruders on to the stage of history from outside of the frame of civilizational time, noting also how the distinction between natural and historical time was often blurred in the stories of the Iberian conquest of the New World. For example, both Bartolomé de las Casas in his La Historia de las Indias (1552) and José de Acosta in his Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1590) treated indigenes essentially as timeless. This rendition of primitive peoples as at the threshold of nature and history has been an integral kernel of the foundational myth of the appearance of Europeans as the appearance of world history writ large, earmarked through the motifs of contact and conquest. The most iconic form of this plot is the arrival of history in the form of a ship at an island “divided from humanity”—to quote Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 59). As Marshall Sahlins wrote provocatively in Islands of History, the “irruption of Captain Cook from beyond the horizon” was an unprecedented event for the natives of Hawaii, who received this occurrence within the rudiments of their own cultural universe with its schema of the past, the future, gods, and ancestors, all enshrined in the ritual acts of the Makahiki, for which Cook was allegedly dismembered (146). Sahlins might have also implied that Cook’s arrival, death, and deification, while seemingly unable to transform the structures of temporality among the native islanders, not only immortalized Cook’s voyage and his ghastly death in the annals of empire but also brought King Kalaniopuu and his unknown subjects into the limelight of world history. As Gananath Obeyesekere pointed out in his rejoinder to Sahlins, the idea of historical contingency is intrinsically inimical to the demands of structural analysis, and as I argue later in this essay, it also poses similar difficulties for the temporal structures that underpin both global and planetary histories writ large or small (55).

The idea that most people in the world namelessly crowd the margins of history, or do not belong to history at all, was front and center in anthropologist Eric Wolf’s magisterial and sprawling account of the effects of global capital on the diversity of human culture, Europe and the People Without History, where he suggested that the dominant narratives of Europe’s political and economic triumph ultimately eclipsed the history of the rest of the world. Wolf argued that the “history of European expansion interdigitates with the histories of the people that it encompassed” (xx). “Europe” here was simply a “shorthand” for the rise and spread of capitalism, with imperialism its closest handmaiden. The rest was the inexorable history of capital reinforced through an overarching ideology dominating the underlying structure of human experience.1 This mutuality of structure and causation set up Wolf’s combative teleology. Some critics saw in his approach an echo of Immanuel Wallerstein’s mapping of the cores and peripheries of world history, but Wolf’s idea of the forward movement of history was more nuanced, with greater latitudes given to human ideation and agency, especially what he championed as the “hidden” or submerged facets of historical experience far away from the theater of European dominance. For Wolf, some of the smallest identifiable cross-sections of the human historical experience—such as life in a small Alpine village—can be articulated through the study of their dialectical relationship to society at large and their interactions that generated “an ongoing transformation over time, which subjects the narrower unit to even more comprehensive process of integration, or synthesis” (Cole and Wolf, 3–4).2 The primacy of integration rather than differentiation as the outcome of change over time in the long march of capital underscores my working definition of temporal convergence in this essay. Wolf illustrated this through the example of how capital speeds up history, such as in the manufacturing towns of England during the height of the industrial revolution that witnessed “a qualitative change unsurpassed in scale and speed” (276).

Towards a Theory of Convergence

The velocity of global economic transformation, one could argue, was not just a postulate advanced by world systems theorists, it was in many ways a defining characteristic of accounts of globalization and the late capitalist order. Emmanuel Wallerstein in 1980 wanted to examine the “historical life” of the world economy in its entirety along with the speed of its transition (117–118). This was also the decade that David Harvey formulated his well-known theory of time-space compression, emblematic of the late industrial world order. Harvey argued that the history of capital was “characterized by speed-up in the pace of life” along with the collapse of spatial distance, essential features of what he described as the twin compression of time and space (240). Such emphases on the momenta generated by capital clearly harkened back to Marx, but the speeding up of history itself in the wake of irreversible social and economic transformations had a further, twofold implication. It was not only the pace of history that had quickened during the last great spurt of industrial capital, but the very experience of history itself. In other words, not only was a given duration of history seen as more crowded with events unfolding at an increasing pace but endowed with a qualitative shift in the very experience of historical time.

There is no doubt that progress and speed became synonymous with political and economic change early in the twentieth century. “History progresses at the speed of its weapons system,” the theorist of architecture Paul Virilio remarked in 1968 (90). Speed was not only the ultimate objective in technology and war, he argued, but at a certain point in history it also became a synonym for modernity itself.3 During the same period, W. W. Rostow formulated his idea of a revolution of industry and a radical change in methods of production propelling economically backward nation-states towards a “take-off” into a clear horizon of sustainable economic growth (7).

The idea of speed itself as a universal signal of historical change—a unique gift of the long industrial revolution with its machines revolutionizing the time of travel and arming European empires for the seizure of distant corners of the world—was not new. Gandhi in South Africa, who opposed the rapid expansion of railways and thought that by hastening market forces they increased the virulence of famines in British India, discovered Thomas Taylor’s The Fallacy of Speed, which he saw as indispensable reading.4 Speed, the object of modern technology, Taylor had written, was the nefarious gift of industrial society that “militates against leisure,” disrupting traditional rhythms of life (63). Industrial progress had regimented work and leisure through precise, standardized timekeeping, and thanks to clock-time, “speed, urgency, contingency and simultaneity” had become, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the new and universal milestones of modernity.5

There are two points worth considering in this account of speeded-up, universal time. The first is the durational horizon within which historical periodization operates. In this case we have considered two spans of time, one generally nested within the other: the rise and spread of global capitalism and the expansion of European empires. The second is the experiential aspect of such duration and its purported effect on the human condition, which we might describe as a form of epochal reckoning, characterized by the emergence of a significant object rather than any one sequence of events. This is the effect described by Reinhart Koselleck as the “temporalization of history,” which he associated with the “peculiar form of acceleration that characterizes modernity itself” (5). This second-order historical reckoning does not quite align with the ways in which the movement and patterns of history have been traditionally conceived, especially pace Braudel, as event, cycle, or the longue durée—measured in seriatim fashion (27). If second-order derivatives of temporality implicitly admit the possibility of societies with unlike experiences of speeded-up time, with different horizons of futurity and therefore divergent possibilities in the way their collective pasts have been imagined and lived, they rarely seem to surface in the demiurgic accounts of the shared fate of humanity. Narratives of global capital, thus, while implicating at least two registers of time have, in effect, obscured their distinction, just as the internal differentia of capitalist development, as Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably argued, have been negotiated and contained within the overall structure of global capital (2001, 48). As we shall see below, the threats of climate change, global warming, and the sixth extinction are all based on similar and commensurate forms of retrospection, urging similar long-unfolding histories destined to arrive at presumptive warnings about the future. Looked at another way, such visions of new, urgent, dystopic, and collective time are premised on a form of chronopolitics that allows these claims on history in the first place.

Planetary Time

It would be too simplistic to suggest that recent versions of global or planetary disorders have simply replaced the destructive telos of empire and global capital with the new apprehensions of environmental devastation and post-apocalyptic survival. However, there is a disturbing sense of familiarity in new dystopic projections of the current climatic crisis and their attempts to speak for the common human experience. This conspicuous alignment between natural and human destiny is particularly noteworthy in the quantum leap of temporal scale evident in current incarnations of planetary history.

The Big History project, pioneered by historian David Christian and sponsored by the founder of Microsoft and philanthropist Bill Gates, announced that it wants to reach out to children in every classroom in North America and take them on a journey through time over the course of 13.8 billion years. This “big picture,” their website declared in 2016, “is the attempt to understand, in a unified way, the history of Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity.”6 This is much more than a colorful, panoramic retelling of human history for schoolchildren but is, in fact, a forceful example of the tectonic shift that has taken place in our thinking about global history in a planetary timeframe, clearly visible now in public discourse and across academia. In this version of a bold new future, human history is dwarfed by an inanimate and overarching dimension of time seemingly in sync with a cosmic metronome that renders the old distinction between historical and natural time largely inconsequential. This approach has been most clearly articulated by Fred Spier who argues that Big History must be “top-down” to recognize the general patterns of history, which is essentially a progression of the complexity of life on our planet. Only through such an “explanatory scheme” can we distinguish necessity from chance and regularity from the chaotic happenstance of events (42–43).

Big History is seemingly perched on the vista of a singular, all-encompassing chronometric revolution. Christian predicted a few years ago that in fifty years’ time a new universal history will transcend all disciplinary boundaries, lift the artificial barrier between the study of nature and society, and “blur the borderline between history and the natural sciences,” leading to the discovery of new “law-like patterns of change” (7). Big History, indeed has found a place in contemporary popular culture. The experimental musician and public intellectual Brian Eno and members of The Long Now Foundation, for example, happily embrace a similar manifesto of grand synchrony, proclaiming their mission as a duty to “nudge civilization toward making long-term thinking automatic and common.”7 The recipe for “long term thinking” has also been taken up by scholars of computational technology and cyberspace. There is a similar, if not related, interest in the radical approximation of time as a digital construct, outlined subtly and elegantly in George Dyson’s magisterial survey of the history of computers, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Digital time, Dyson argues, is racing away from the human experience so quickly because it is no longer based on the idea of clock-time but the sequence of bits and order codes that only keep track of events in a program (300).

A corresponding formulation surfaces in the singular, climatic timekeeping of the Anthropocene, which is no longer confined to debates among geologists and historians. In its original incarnation, as proposed by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and adopted by the Nobel prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen, this was based on the idea of a recalculation of geological time, resetting the earth’s clock to a point from which human activities began to exert an irreversible impact on the environment. In their celebrated essay on the Anthropocene, Crutzen and Stoermer quoted, among other nineteenth-century visionaries, New England polymath G. P. Marsh and the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani (17). In his outline of the Anthropozoic era—a term from which the idea of the Anthropocene draws its legitimacy—in his essay “First Period of the Anthropozoic Era,” Stoppani had marveled at the “creation of man” that had introduced into nature and the physical world “a new telluric force that for its strength and universality does not pale in the face of the greatest forces of the globe” (quoted in Turpin and Federighi, 36). What was remarkable in the commencement of this new era for Stoppani was not the cumulative weight of geological or environmental change but a singular transformation whose origins lay “in man’s intellect, in his intruding and powerful will” which had left deep footprints of the species on the planet and laid the foundations of its eventual domination (quoted in Turpin and Federighi, 37). Invoking Stoppani’s ideas of human artifice and destiny, Crutzen and Stoermer argued that that the history of the Anthropocene began during the latter part of the eighteenth century, because it was likely triggered by the advent of the industrial revolution in England. This critical mutuality between history and geology in the early definitions of climate crisis shows that global and planetary versions of time have never been too far apart. If the threat to the survival of the species, as Joanna Zylinska has pointed out, can only be grasped on a planetary scale, then the history of endangered humanity must also be told in planetary time (13).

Catastrophic Time

Rachel Carson, in her prophetic 1960s tour de force Silent Spring, decrying the magnitude of the human assault on the environment, offered two opposing frames of time: “It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth” she wrote, and “eons of time” for the development and diversification of life until it attained a “state of balance with its surroundings” (6). It was not the determinate momentum of natural evolution but the “impetuous and heedless pace of man” that had brought forth an unprecedented imbalance: “Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time” (6). That human civilization is simply running out of time has now become the common refrain in almost every account of the Anthropocene. Thom Hartmann, for instance, in his widely acclaimed The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, writes that when industrializing nations turned to the exploitation of coal and other fossil fuels, making forests into cropland to support an exponential growth of population, they were quite unwittingly frittering away the planet’s reserve of ancient vegetal matter, which essentially represents its store of solar power. It was, according to Hartmann, a “critical moment in human history” when humans started depleting their “sunlight savings” (12).

A similar inventory of lost time is the staple of biologists who study the loss of species habitat and the sixth extinction. Mark Lynas, laying out successive models of a future planet from one to six degrees of global warming, calculates that even if we could stop all carbon emissions tomorrow, global temperatures will rise rapidly for the next thirty years in the range of half to one degree centigrade because of the thermal trajectory humans have thrust on the earth by dumping carbon into the atmosphere (275). Unchecked carbon dioxide levels will propel us beyond a tipping point, towards “the ultimate mass extinction apocalypse of six degrees” (276). In a similar vein, Norman MacLeod argues that only a fateful combination of factors can trigger species extinction, such as volcanic eruption, sea-level change, ocean oxygen levels, and global temperature rise. Human activity in the future, MacLeod warns, might let loose a “perfect storm” of environmental contingencies, ushering in the disappearance of more than half of the planet’s species in the next 100 to 1,000 years—a frighteningly precise timescale keeping in view the Big Five extinctions on record (105).

The planet seems stranded in anticipation of its final catastrophe—a condition author Amitav Ghosh has diagnosed gloomily as a collective “derangement . . . enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but towards our self-annihilation” (111). Such jeremiads hark back to one of the most studied episodes in geology, the meteorite that struck during the Cretaceous-Paleogene divide—first brought to light in the early 1980s by the father and son team of L. W. Alvarez and F. W. Alvarez, pioneers of the theory of catastrophism (1135–1141). The Alvarez hypothesis, that long and stable durations of floral and faunal orders of the planet earth were punctuated by frenetic intervals of extinction, became a foundational element in the chronology of climate change. Great extinctions thus also became the milestones of geological timescale, and fossil records an archive of the planet’s volatile past. Habitat fragmentation, new speciation, and the explosion of refugia from the breakdown of once-stable marine and terrestrial ecosystems, are now an essential part of the non-human antecedence of the Anthropocene. It is quite remarkable that the discovery of iridium deposits in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and musings on the impact of an extraterrestrial bolide dating back to the Cretaceous, still exert such an influence on the idea of geological time.

Catastrophism has challenged the core principles of geological gradualism and uniformitarianism—long-held ideas about the stability of environmental and ecological systems measured through events and stages of the geological past.8 Projections of the greenhouse effect and climate disaster not only pose existential questions about the viability of a certain kind of human life on the planet, but also the discipline of history as a forensic exercise, symptomatic of what Amelia Moore has fittingly called the new “ecological anxiety disorder” (1–3). If historians continue to view the passages of global history from the egotistic point of view of their own species, Derek Ager warns in his book on catastrophism, then long before the actual planetary apocalypse, our progeny will only see the devastation of the biome on which our habitat depends (xi). The Anthropocene view of the planet in perpetual crisis, as Jeremy Davies has noticed, brings to the fore the politics and moral urgency of “deep time” (22–23). We are caught somehow between the two geological intervals of the Holocene and the Anthropocene (5–6). In proclaiming the death of one epoch and the birth of another, Davies suggests that we have remained quixotically mired in our lifeways, without having reset our geohistorical clocks to the timescale of our dying epoch. In the end, the crisis of capitalist modernity, and its failure to address the destruction of the planet’s habitability, are therefore simply parts of a larger, all-encompassing “geological phenomenon” (192). The dystopia of the Anthropocene with its specter of mass death, accelerated by human folly and inaction, as Srinivas Aravamudan, has pointed out, brings with it the return of a catachronic, “theological grasp of time” (8), portending an end for all human endeavor on this planet, vindicated by the prospect of a final geophysical apocalypse replacing the Cold War era doomsday scenario of a nuclear holocaust (9–10). A point-of-no-return in a foreseeable future thus threatens to eviscerate all timescales of anthropocentric history.

Neo-Malthusian Time

The Anthropocene realignment of geodesical and historical time is reminiscent of an earlier era of world histories that emphasized the tandem of evolutionary change and technological predestination, narrated through the story of how human adaptation breached the barriers of biology and environment. A couple of decades ago, the geographer and biologist Jared Diamond in his New York Times bestseller The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal declared that the biological record of hominine behavior is an unfailing predictor of the subsequent directions of human history, and that the adaptive triggers that led homo sapiens to dominate its closest relatives (primates and other hominids) also contains the clues to why and how one group of humans, namely the Eurasians, came to dominate others (1992, 217). It was environmental selection, the unique combination of geography and species habitat, that endowed them with immunity to disease and put them on the path toward better agriculture and superior military technology with which they fed and defended larger populations (1992, 236).

Diamond pushed this thesis of natural outcome more forcefully in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, where he recast human history at par with “recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology and climatology” (1997, 32). In a sweeping narrative, sidestepping the issue of human intentionality, he explained the inevitable triumph of certain Afro-Asiatic societies and the eventual dominance of the haves over the have-nots of the world as the result of the selective response of human societies to biology, climate, and the environment. This was a revolution that took place along a cosmic scale, where smallpox and guns were the more likely agents of history than missionaries or dictators. Diamond showed how a history of the singular, hominine bid for terrestrial dominance no longer needed to be tethered to debates over the impact of human endeavor or choice and thus, by implication, of secondary phenomena such as colonialism, imperialism, or, for that matter, the rise and transformation of global capital. Diamond’s schemata of evolutionary and civilizational time thus help us set the context for the reassertion of a certain mode of historical narration that harks back to the Enlightenment, where the crucible of human history can be laid out in the form of a priori conditions and calculable outcomes. As Hayden White pointed out, Enlightenment thinkers saw nature and natural processes as eminently reasonable and believed that early human society ultimately mimicked the rationality of nature itself (63–64). In such a view, the meaningful evolution of human society began, in fact, with an all-out fight over resources as humans expanded their domain by overstepping the bounds of habitat and learning how to buck the natural limits placed on survival and reproduction. The idea of progress as inimical to the laws of nature was, thus, key to the thinking of Malthus, who distinguished between the natural and the social by focusing on the concentration of human needs.

Malthus understood that there was a built-in limit placed on the growth of human population, and the “ordinariness” of such increase was directly related to the “means of subsistence” (20). Subsistence for Malthus was a function of agriculture and industry, and not oriented toward the present-day limits of ecological sustainability. Nevertheless, it can be argued that Malthus’s original outline of an exponential growth of population resulting in a corresponding decline in resources has now taken on a new relevance. A Malthusian graph of time is premised on a finite duration in which an expanding population begins to deplete the resources that sustain it. A similar timeline appears in the ecological point-of-no-return in the Anthropocene where populations are back at the mercy of natural forces beyond their control. These are essentially neo-Malthusian projections of the environment as a finite reserve.

A “back to the limits” apprehension of the future, Gareth Hardin points out, urges a renewed emphasis on “laws of nature” that humanity must obey or perish (294–298). The unchecked momentum of global capital compounds the inequities of environmental crisis, as critics like Martinez-Alier warn; it also accelerates the “use of time,” precipitating an absolute value placed on the duration in which such forces could be possibly contained (viii, 53). One could thus calculate the declining ecological surplus as a ratio of the time taken by capital to reproduce itself and the time required for the renewal of basic natural resources for the survival of the human species. Such a compression of the temporal horizon is also key to Jason Moore’s forceful argument about the decline of the global ecological surplus as a differential between the time of the generation of capital and the regeneration of natural resources, urged by global capitalism’s “dystopian drive towards temporal instantaneity” (97). While such neo-Malthusian specters of ecological stasis advance timelines that are not exactly like those advanced by theorists of species-dominance such as Diamond, or proponents of Big History like Christian and Spier, they continue to foster the idea of a singular, transhuman, inexorable march of time converging on an apocalyptic end.

The Return of Epochal Time

None of these versions of planetary time are entirely radical or original, and theories of spatial and temporal convergence, as I have laid out, have long-established genealogies. Colonial and postcolonial studies in the 1990s, World Systems approaches in the 1980s, Dependency Theory and the cliometrics of the Annales School in the 1970s have all shared a fundamental premise that certain key epochs in history transformed the world in similar and comparable ways towards a common, discernible end. I have also argued that some of these assumptions about the convergence of colonialism, capitalism, and modernity reifying a singular and universal frame of historical time persist in the current debates around the history of the Anthropocene. One would suspect that new pronouncements of planetary time are subject to the same assumptions and problems. As Donna Haraway sums it aptly in her critique of the reigning concepts of the Anthropocene and its spinoff, the Capitalocene, both are saddled with the “trappings of Modernity, Progress and History” (13). If indeed, as Haraway has impugned, the geohistorical epoch of the Anthropocene turns out to be an “offspring of colonizing and imperial histories,” then which versions of temporal reckoning lie behind its claims on the history of humanity itself? To confront this question, it is important for us to reconsider the distinction between global and planetary histories, however interconnected they appear to be. As Sebastian Conrad points out, the so called “global turn” in historiography was primarily an attempt to combat two fundamental flaws, first Eurocentrism and second the domineering lens of the nation-state—the two key “birth defects” of world history (3). Taking a cue from Conrad’s formulation, I would argue that we have arrived at a critical moment in history where climate itself, rather than progress or civilization, occupies the center of the temporal world-order, and climatic events like floods, fires, and extinctions become the new milestones of history.

The irreversible, anthropogenic transformation of the planet and the new preternatural horizons of the human existence, as Zoltán Simon suggests, point inevitably towards the advent of epochal time (2). Tied intimately to the notion of humanity itself as a collective geological entity, such temporality betokens the critical sedimentation of an unprecedented moral-political imaginary riddled with paradoxes of human folly and redemption.9 To what extent are these demiurgic, convergent renditions of time reincarnations of older global and planetary histories? Are our present day notions of history as an extension of human biology a radical departure or simply a reworking of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ideas of species-being and historical-being?10 In this specific sense, has the Anthropocene already acquired the status of an overarching chronotope of the twenty-first century—exerting its paradigmatic weight on both causality and affect, Zeitgeist and context, indeed, the essential verisimilitude of global-historical time?11 Perhaps it is too early to pronounce on such a question. This much is clear however, that as the existential threat of climate change becomes part of an enduring certainty of life on the planet, leading to new forms of political acceptance—what Haraway characterizes as “sublime despair”—old frontiers of human and natural history are breached for good, as are distinctions between human and non-human temporalities (4).12

The Projection of Time as History

As new forms of historical periodization emerge in the wake of the Anthropocene which are responsive to the exigencies of species-time, ecological entropy, and irreversible carbon emission, so do corresponding versions of chronopolitics. As both Vaclav Smil (4) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021, 34) have argued, this kind of periodization undermines the Enlightenment temporality of scientific progress and modernization and threatens to install in its place a countertemporality of irreparable environmental devastation. At the same time, such timekeeping also hypostatizes the idea of a universal human precariat, even while new and glaring demographic and geographical inequities of climate change become apparent. And thus, the chronicling of the differentia of experiential time becomes even more urgent as we are pulled in the direction of a singular frame of climatic time. As Anthony Giddens pointed out, one critical aspect of the modern, global condition was the detachment or “disembedding” of time from its ties to demotic and local forms of habit and practice, while at the same time precipitating a desideratum of abstract, homogenized space (20). The Anthropocene is poised, perhaps, to exert a similar effect on both the scale and commensurability of climate change as lived experience.

And yet, how can the inescapable diversity of our climatic predicament be captured within a singular map of time? The circuitous relationship between chronology, periodization, and temporality is particularly instructive in this context. History as a form of enactment animates dates and periods in its attempt to reconjure the lived reality of time itself.13 Thus, for example, we get the “long” nineteenth century, whose effect is calculated to last much more than a mere hundred years, or even a term like “post-colonial” which must be miraculously elastic in the way it can denote an indeterminate passage of time within the penumbra of the imperial disengagement and decolonization. To illustrate this point further, we can track how the syntax of historical periodization permeates ecological life-stories of the planet. John Lovelock, for instance, in his well-known biography of the earth as a purposeful, self-regulating organism—a living entity with a sentient ecology that he reclaimed as Gaia—schematized the succession of geological epochs, naming them after familiar periods of European history (27, 37). For Lovelock, life began with the first bacteria of the Archean during the ancient period of earth’s history, transitioning in the Proterozoic to an atmosphere dominated by oxygenated air, which he called the “Middle Ages.” This was followed by the Phanerozoic (in the Cambrian period), beginning 600 million years ago to present day, which he described as the “Modern Times” of the planet.14

Old habits of periodization, in a profound sense, thus continue to shape the outlines of world history, much like the way in which cartographic projections of the world shape human geography perpetuating, as Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis pointed out in the Myth of Continents, an enduring and “pernicious” meta-geographical determinism resulting in a myopic view of the world where Europe and North America occupy a disproportionately large share of the world map (10). Such visual projections have not only helped shore up the classical, civilizational, and diffusionist views of human history, but persisted in subsequent incarnations of global history and its visual apparatus of continents and hemispheres, along with their corresponding cores and peripheries. Like critical geographers who struggle to reconcile alternative maps of the inhabited world to the continental mappa mundi, historians too face similar trouble reconciling the temporalities of global modernity and the chronological maps of world history.

Here Marshall Hodgson’s brilliant if problematic attempt to write a global history of Islam provides a telling example of the paradoxical relation between chronology and temporal scale. A significant aspect of Hodgson’s reevaluation of global modernity was his insistence that, in terms of historical time, the discontinuities that mark the unfolding of western history were far more striking than their continuity. In his most well-known three-volume study, Venture of Islam, Hodgson essentially argued that the rising curve of time that connects ancient Greece to the Renaissance, and thence to modernity, is in fact an optical illusion. He dubbed it insolently as the “Jim Crow projection” (5–8). According to Hodgson, much of intra-European history took place in relative isolation and insignificance, at the margins of the center of world history in mainland Asia. The Renaissance did not inaugurate what we call modernity, rather it finally enabled European culture to catch up with the major civilizations of the world (48). The most important leaps in human ingenuity and invention happened elsewhere—quite unplanned—and subsequently spread through the countries of Europe: gunpowder, firearms, the compass, the sternpost rudder, the zero, decimal notation, and the university, et cetera. In his alternative projection, Hodgson reapportioned Europe to a lesser geographical significance, reducing its continental status to a regional, peninsular role.

In this attempt to rehabilitate the history of Islam at par and in direct relationship with the history of the West, Hodgson broke rank with his preceptor McNeill (Rise of the West, 1963) and others, and sought to demonstrate that modernity was a truly world historical process, as opposed to the diffusion of cultural experiments rooted in Europe. I invoke Hodgson’s invective against the paradigm of occidental ascendency because it raises two fundamental historiographical problems of that are key to the temporalization of history discussed here. First, by invoking the ancient Greek idea of the “habitable world” (oikumene) he questioned the foundational premise of civilizational progress as the mainspring of history, and second, he grappled with the critical problem of geographical scale. If a singular geographical image of the world cannot be taken for granted, Hodgson argued, then we must repudiate Mercator’s flattened surfaces of the globe with latitudes and meridians centered around Western Europe, which systematically distort the spatial contours of the southern hemisphere. It was no surprise to Hodgson that in contemporary maps Europe was given approximately the same square area as India, or the countries roughly grouped under Southeast Asia. Yet, Europe was a continent, India a subcontinent and Southeast Asia neither. Anticipating Wigen and Lewis, Hodgson essentially argued that it was the correlate drawn between geographical spaces and temporal frames that determined a particular paradigm of history. By proposing that the size of the European peninsula and the size of its history were incommensurate, he had introduced the quandary of scale in the problematic relationship between geography, chronology, and historical time. I would argue that the Anthropocene projections of time effect a similar scalar inequity, where dominant timelines of global transformation such as industrial capitalism, fossil fuel extraction, or the greenhouse effect, having originated in Europe, are now at the center of all planetary maps of time.

Conclusion

There is no denying that the Anthropocene debate has quickened the appetite for deep history (not just Big History) as both practice and metaphor, pitting the planetary against the global and accentuating the fundamental incompatibilities of a universal temporal scale. Proponents of deep history such as Shryock and Smail have argued that a deep historical framing of time is in fact a repudiation of older, dominant narratives of history as progressive, cumulative, directional, weighted toward ineluctable patterns of social hierarchy, economic disparity, and political inequity, and that the coordinates of the historical experience must include discrepancies of scale (248). Thus, occurrences such as demographic surges or quantum explosions in the extractive capacity of capital, as exemplified in the advent of the industrial revolution, are scalar “leaps” in time wherein the tide of deep history inundates the status quo of shallow history.

In a recent study, Dipesh Chakrabarty describes our new awareness of Anthropocene time as a precipitous fall into the “abyss of deep history” as much as a terrestrial chasm, where traditional demarcations between geological and human measurements of time collapse (2021, 32). The new lineaments of Anthropocene time, Chakrabarty argues, cannot be addressed from within the temporal horizon of human experiences and expectations (89). What kind of force might such a radical externality wield on the shape of our planet’s past? Chakrabarty’s musings on the dystopia of the Anthropocene and the autonomy of geoclimatic time seem to invite the Heideggerian contention that our temporal awareness rests on how we imagine a possible future as part of the condition of our being. It is a possibility not of our own making, rather, one into which we are “thrown.”15 In this sense, pace Heidegger, the crisis of the Anthropocene as an era cannot be apprehended directly in habited, historical time.16 At the same time, any singular history of the Anthropocene can only be understood from within particular historical contexts through which it is manifested.17 This mutual incommensurability of temporal registers, I would argue, is an important reminder of the pitfalls of planetary history premised on the perils of humanity writ large, which, as Bonneuil and Fressoz have diagnosed, is part of the inescapable anthropocentrism that lies at the heart of all Anthropocene discourse (65).

Contrary to the premise that the advent of deep, planetary time is inevitably poised to unravel the post-Enlightenment affirmation of history as the onward march of humanity in time, I have argued in this essay that in fact stratigraphic and humanistic accounts of climate change have often converged in earlier framings of world history and are converging again. If, as Hayden White once diagnosed, the overarching narrative structures of history-writing rely on key literary tropes, the drift from literary to geological modes of narrating the past and future of the planet signals a new geomancy of tragic, earthbound time. This permeability, increasingly visible across disciplines, is perhaps an early profile of Anthropocene time curated by historians in the company of climatologists and geologists, who must also reconsider the stakes of their discipline. In the geological turn, we are thus witnessing a return of history as thaumaturgy. Collective suicide and mass extinction as retribution for the collective moral failure of our geopolitical order, as imagined by writers such as Amitav Ghosh, assign a harsh finitude of anthropocentric time. In such projections, the clocks of human and planetary history seem to be in curious alignment, leaving little room for variance or chance.

And yet, just as the effects of human presence were not fully anticipated in the long Holocene, the Anthropocene, too, cannot be tied to a future that is entirely predictable. Here, one cannot but agree with Aravamudan that the Anthropocene is also a rhetorical gambit, “an impure designation that is neither scientific description nor humanist construction” (24). If Anthropocene histories simply reinforce the extant temporal structures of world and global history at the expense of the unexpected, unruly, and divergent reckonings of time produced by the breakdown of the natural order, then the pronouncements of the timekeepers of our planetary future deserve serious scrutiny. While acknowledging that the embrace of singular, Anthropocene time remains a key to the future of the struggle for collective, environmental justice, we must also try and disabuse the scalar tyranny that it threatens to wield on the multiverse temporalities that are critical to the existential crisis of climate change, and the pluripotent, incommensurate, and antinomian accounts of historical time that they demand.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on an invited address presented at the annual talk hosted jointly by the departments of history at Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; and University of California, Davis on July 6, 2019, and a paper presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Harvard University, March 19, 2016. I thank Kären Wigen, Kathleen Davis, Rohan D’Souza, and Kavita Philip for conversations that have contributed immensely to the conceptualization and arguments presented. I am also grateful to the editors of Cultural Critique and the two anonymous reviewers of this essay for their comments. Finally, a big note of thanks to my UC Davis colleagues Elizabeth Freeman, Tobias Menely, Simon Sadler, Julia Simon, and James Smith for their invaluable support and feedback.

Sudipta Sen, Professor of History and Middle East / South Asia Studies, University of California, Davis, is the author of Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2018) and coeditor (with May Joseph) of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge, UK 2022).

Notes

1. For a further explication of this idea see Schneider (4).

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2. This argument is fleshed out in The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley. I do not have an argument here against the idea that smaller compasses of history and their experience of historical time cannot escape the force of large-scale and anonymous forces of change, rather, I am interested in the inconsistent particularities of such experience.

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3. For this important point, I am beholden to Readhead.

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4. This is discussed in Parel.

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5. The implication of these notions of temporal acceleration has been analyzed by Alexis McCrossen in the context of the United States in the nineteenth century (17).

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6. The current Big History Association homepage (https://www.ibhanet.org) says that their project “tries to understand the integrated history of the cosmos, earth, life, and humanity.” The original pronouncement from 2016 is summarized in Kocka (11).

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7. “Long Now Foundation,” Daily Omnivore, May 11, 2011, https://thedailyomnivore.net/2011/05/11/long-now-foundation.

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8. On this, see Rampino.

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9. My observations here follow Lauren Rickards’s study of the poetics and politics of Anthropocene discourse (2, 7).

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10. I am indebted here to Niklas Bender’s account of the conflux of biological and historical time through the nineteenth century (194).

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11. I am paraphrasing here some of Hayden White’s discussion. See White (241–242).

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12. For a succinct discussion of the irreconcilability of human and non-human scales of time see Bensaude-Vincent.

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13. The idea of history as a form of enactment comes from Collingwood.

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14. Note that the term Cambrian derives from the Latinized Roman word for Wales (Cymru).

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15. Heidegger invokes the idea of thrownness as the condition of Being in Being and Time (241), which Dasein must reckon with and accept.

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16. Heidegger raises the possibility that the historical nature of being is premised on the denial of its historical understanding of the world (41–42).

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17. My reading here is mediated by Gadamer’s reading of the Heideggerian concept of “thrown projection” (gevorfener Entwurf) or an active perception of the world. See Gadamer (264). For such ideas and their implications in the context of historical temporality, I have learned much from Russell West-Pavlov’s excellent discussion in Temporalities (71–72).

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