Previous Research

My Making Sense of World History integrates the various research and teaching experiences I have pursued in my career. [See my Publications]

History of Technology

I co-authored two editions of Technology and American Society: A History with Gary Cross for Prentice-Hall. The third edition was published by Routledge in 2018. I draw on this book most obviously in discussions of technology in later chapters of my World History, but it informs discussions of technology throughout the book. The best way to learn a craft is to do it (especially collaboratively), and my experience of drafting two editions of a successful history textbook prepares me to write this much larger text.

Economic History

My The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution informs chapter 24 on Industrial Revolutions. My Technological Innovation and the Great Depression informs chapter 29 on the Great Depression and Postwar Golden Age. I draw on published articles for discussions of the Newfoundland fishery (chapter 19) and seigneurial tenure in Quebec (chapter 26). But my familiarity with economic history is important throughout the book. Though political history inevitably receives more attention, I give economic history as much attention as cultural or social history. I am particularly proud of discussions of economic growth in agricultural societies, and how exactly Malthusian mechanisms operated -- and related discussions of how we can measure economic performance.

In researching and teaching economic history (and history of technology) I became aware of how evolutionary analysis can usefully guide historical analysis. I thus devote part of chapter 1 and also later chapters of World History to a discussion of how evolutionary analysis can be applied to institutions, culture, technology and science, and art. Evolutionary analysis is then employed unobtrusively in dozens of places in later chapters. Note that evolutionary analysis provides a set of questions to ask -- about selection environments and transmission mechanisms -- rather than a set of prescribed answers. Note also that evolutionary analysis guides us to appreciate how the technologies or institutions or art forms or cultural attitudes and practices of any society build -- generally quite slowly -- on what has gone before. it thus aids the task of lending coherence to world history.

In my research on the Industrial Revolution I discussed the challenges faced by the first factory owners -- and how improvements in transport infrastructure allowed them to address these challenges. In teaching European Economic History I employed Avner Grief's analysis of the challenges facing merchants during the Commercial Revolution, and how institutional changes alleviated these. I was thus inspired to identify the challenges -- political, economic, cultural, social -- that were faced by some 20 different types of human agent -- rulers, soldiers, priests, voters -- when these first appear in World History. I then discuss how these challenges are addressed (or not) in different times and places.

Over the years I explored methodological issues in economic history in three separate articles (most recently "A growth agenda for economic history," 2015). These variously urged attention to interdisciplinary linkages, theoretical and methodological flexibility, emphasis on careful comparisons across time and place, flowcharts, appreciation of the complexity of historical processes, and an emphasis on explanation rather than theory testing. These methodological considerations have also guided World History.

I might also note that economic historians tend to specialize less in terms of time and place than other types of historian. I performed archival research in two languages in four countries. My books and articles addressed Europe and North America across three centuries. Comparisons were often drawn with other continents. This was even more the case in my teaching where I often sought out works that compared Europe and Asia, or Canada and Argentina and Australia. And my economic history was always a very interdisciplinary economic history which engaged with the political and cultural and social (I would hardly have become a scholar of interdisciplinarity otherwise!). All authors of world history texts need to engage with times and places and themes beyond their own research focus. The breadth of my research and teaching in economic history prepared me well for the task.

Interdisciplinary Studies

The final sections of chapter 1 of World History discuss how a handful of interdisciplinary strategies are employed throughout the book in order to address historical controversies. We thus not only "teach the conflicts" but seek to transcend these. These interdisciplinary strategies also allow us to steer a middle course between the "modernist" and "postmodernist" approaches to studying history.

As a scholar of interdisciplinarity I have long advocated the use of flowcharts to illustrate how the phenomena studied by different disciplines interact in particular situations. (And I had used one flowchart in my Industrial Revolution book and another later in my analysis of economic growth; both are reprised in World History). I was thus inspired to illustrate World History with over 30 flowchart diagrams.

In my textbooks in Interdisciplinary Studies (Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory 3rd ed. co-authored with Allen Repko, and Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies 2nd ed. with Allen Repko and Michelle Buchberger) we often employ in-text Boxes to address topics that are related to the main subject of a chapter but take the topic in new directions. Such Boxes are common in texts in most fields but seem rare in History. But in my World History they serve several purposes. They allow us to discuss the history of rubber or clocks or scurvy in one place when these arise in the text, and carry these histories beyond the time limits of one chapter. Such Boxes provide important illustrations of how events and decisions in quite different times and places are linked. Boxes also allow a concentrated discussion of issues that arise in many places such as Malthusian mechanisms or the role of cities.

Knowledge Organization

As a scholar of interdisciplinarity, aware that the way we organize our libraries and other information resources serves as a barrier to interdisciplinary scholarship, I became interested in the field of knowledge organization. I have in the last decades published several articles and a couple of books in the field, and developed my own classification system.

What themes should be addressed in World History? Though a world history text must be somewhat selective, the field as a whole should embrace all phenomena investigated by social scientists and humanists, and some of the phenomena addressed by natural scientists. I had in many works developed a classification of the main phenomena and sub-phenomena addressed by scholars. I use this classification in chapter 1 of World History to discuss the themes that will be addressed in the book -- and how information about other themes can readily be integrated into this narrative. Students are often urged in the questions following later chapters to reflect on other themes.

In my research in Knowledge Organization I have stressed that most scholarly research addresses how one phenomenon influences another. I was thus guided to stress in World History the interactions among themes -- political, economic, cultural, social, and so on. The flowcharts mentioned above turn out to be a particularly useful device here: State formation is an effect in early diagrams but an influence on other phenomena in later diagrams. Students hopefully gain an appreciation that world history involves a cumulative set of thematic interactions across time and place. But of course themes only interact through people: Our treatment of the challenges facing different historical actors allows us to keep humans at the forefront of our history while addressing thematic interactions.

Integrating These Various Fields

The spark for Making Sense of World History came from complaints from teachers and students of World History that it is hard to achieve coherence in such a course. Students may be excited to learn about Babylonians and Aztecs and Polynesians but struggle to see the relationship among different histories. My goal was to apply a set of organizing devices -- evolutionary analysis, flowcharts, comparisons of the challenges and responses facing actors, in-text Boxes, and explicit discussions of the relationships among chapters -- to the subject matter of world history. These each serve in distinct but complementary ways to connect the material on different times and places. They facilitate both comparisons across time and place and recognition of how changes in one time period build on what had happened before. Yet collectively they absorb only a small fraction of textual space: The bulk of the text in World History is historical narrative. We can provide coherence without interrupting narrative flow.

There is one final element of integration. My research in both Interdisciplinary Studies and Knowledge Organization has been designed to facilitate the solution or alleviation of public policy challenges. Shortly after I published my book on the Industrial Revolution I was invited to publish an article on the policy implications of my analysis in Transportation Quarterly. I closed my book on the Great Depression with some reflections on whether it might happen again and on the sorts of public policies that should be pursued in a future economic crisis. And we finished our history of technology texts with some reflections on the likely future course of innovation. As I read widely in World History, I discovered that many world historians believe that lessons can be drawn from the past. I was thus emboldened to devote a chapter at the end of World History to drawing lessons. This chapter also pursues evolutionary analysis and engages with interactions among themes -- I argue that this is a much better way to draw lessons than to seek simplistic analogies. The challenges facing various types of human actor are reviewed and suggestions made for how these might be addressed.