Global History is Local History
Paul Dukes urges the need to widen our vision of the past by adopting the perspective of world history.
‘Nobody needs much reminding that we live in violent and dangerous times: 130 wars with 32 million casualties since the end of the Second World War according to the Hudson Institute of New York, and 1 million times the power of Hiroshimas A-bomb at the ready for the war that would end all wars, and everything else, too. How have historians responded to this crisis, to Einstein's insistence in the fateful year of 1945 that human beings must change their mode of thinking? At least some of the work published in recent decades does indeed show the way forward, but not enough progress has been made in the right direction, and history as it is written or declaimed remains too often politics carried on by other means.
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