Abstract
Area-studies scholarship is revolutionary in a reformist sort of way. It is not fundamentally distinctive in its analysis: instead, it is the application of the established sort of academic work to regions beyond the established terrains of study. The move to establish parallel disciplines and equal standards for scholarship on for each area of the world did, however, conflict directly with the inequalities of the age of imperial, colonial, and racially discriminatory scholarship. The rise of area-studies scholarship thus brought about an intellectual decolonization and democratization paralleling, in some measure, the contemporary transformations in global politics. In addition, and precisely because the area-studies scholars were organizing their fields at a time of methodological innovation, they were able to take advantage of some new approaches more readily than their colleagues focusing on Europe and North America, and thus make up for more of their deficit.
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Notes
Ravi Arvind Palat gives particular emphasis to the Cold-War origins of area studies scholarship. Palat, “Fragmented Visions: Excavating the Future of Area Studies in a Post-American World,” in Neil L. Waters, ed., Beyond the Area Studies Wars: Toward a New International Studies (Hanover, N.H., 2000), 64–66.
Michael Adas has become one of the leading advocates and practitioners of comparative approaches to world history. Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, 1979).
Research during the 1960s, for instance, located Arabic-language documents written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the courts of the kingdoms of Gonja and Asante in modern Ghana—held in the royal library of Denmark. Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge, 1975), 347–348.
On the Middle East, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1965);
Lewis, Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East (New York, 1973);
Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982); and Said 1978.
On Russia and Eastern Europe, see Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954);
Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York, 1999);
Pipes, Communism: A History (New York, 2001).
On East Asia, see John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953);
Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954);
John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer, China: Tradition and Transformation (Boston, 1978).
E. Williams [1944]; Frank 1966; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975).
For bibliographic surveys on slavery, see Joseph C. Miller, Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900–1991 (Millwood, N.H., 1993),
and Patrick Manning, “Introduction,” in Manning, ed., Slave Trades, 1500–1800: Globalization of Forced Labour (Aldershot, U.K., 1996), xv–xxxiv.
Parsons and Smelser 1956; Almond and Coleman 1960; David E. Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton, 1961);
Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton, 1963).
Colin Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” Perspectives (September 1998), 1, 22–25.
Apter 1961; Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago, 1965); Halpern 1963;
Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, 1963).
But see Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise of Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1960);
and James Smoot Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, 1958).
Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969).
Jan Vansina, Living with Africa (Madison, 1994).
As in other fields of study, interdisciplinary work in African history has tended to focus on recent centuries. For an example of work on earlier times with particular strength on ethnology and linguistics, respectively, see Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society 800–1500 (Philadelphia, 1985); Ehret 1998.
On colonial politics, see Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (Oxford, 1964);
on slavery studies, see Serge Daget, ed., De la traite à l’esclavage, 2 vols. (Nantes, 1988);
on the African diaspora, see Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1983);
on links of African and Middle East studies, see John O. Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Boulder, 1982);
and Lidwein Kapteijns, Mahdist faith and Sudanic tradition: the history of the Masalit Sultanate, 1870–1930 (London, 1985).
Iliffe 1987; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (New York, 1992); Manning 1990;
Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 9 vols. (Berkeley, 1983–1996). While the Garvey movement in the United States has been the center of previous interpretations of the movement, the African and West Indian series in the collection shows these regions to be central rather than peripheral to the overall story and will surely lead to a redefinition of the movement’s history.
At Stanford, such a course emerged in 1984, with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a stage in that institution’s long debate over requirements in Western Civilization and the non-Western world. This course may have been influential in the evolution of David Abernethy’s view of European empires. James Lance and Richard Roberts, “‘The World Outside the West’ Course Sequence at Stanford University,” Perspectives (March 1991), 18, 22–24; Abernethy 2000; Allardyce 1982.
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© 2003 Patrick Manning
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Manning, P. (2003). Area Studies. In: Navigating World History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973856_8
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