Periodization Research Paper

This sample Periodization Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. Free research papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality research paper on history topics at affordable price please use custom research paper writing services.

History writing, which tries to construct a coherent account of all human societies, requires a structure; periodization, dividing the past into distinct eras, is one technique historians use to create that structure. The technique, however, long involved labeling—the Dark Ages, for instance, or the Renaissance—and thus implied judgments as to the superiority or inferiority of different types of society or different eras of human history.

The past is fluid, complex, and continuous, so any attempt to divide it into neat chronological chunks is bound to be artificial. Nevertheless, history writing, like storytelling, requires a structure, and organizing the past according to distinct eras—a process historians call periodization—can help create one. Periodization always does violence to the complex reality of the past, and even the most careful and most honest attempts at dividing up the past involve some distortion. Any scheme must compromise between the often-contradictory demands of clarity, coherence, accuracy, and honesty.

The challenge of finding an appropriate scheme of periodization is particularly complex in world history, which tries to construct a coherent account of the history of all human societies. This article discusses the particular problems that periodization raises in world history, some traditional approaches to periodization, and the compromise solutions that have been adopted as a framework for the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.

Problems of Periodization

The task of breaking the past into manageable, labeled, chunks of time raises several sorts of problems. We can classify them as theoretical, organizational, and ethical.

Theoretical Problems

Periodization poses theoretical problems because any chronological scheme highlights some aspects of the past and obscures others. While a historian of gender might look for eras in which the relative status and power of women and men changed (the granting of suffrage to women, perhaps, or the emergence of patriarchal social relations in early agrarian societies), a historian of war might be more interested in technological changes that transformed military conflict (such as the use of gunpowder or the appearance of the first organized armies), while a historian of religion might look to the appearance of the so-called universal religions in the first millennium BCE. Different questions highlight different aspects of the past and generate different periodizations. To choose a periodization is to make some critical judgments about what is and what is not most important in human history. By focusing on a particular region, era, or topic, historians can avoid some of these challenges, but in world history, periodization requires judgments as to the most important changes across all societies on earth. Is there sufficient consensus among historians as to what those changes are? At present, the answer is probably no.

Organizational Problems

Periodization also poses severe organizational challenges. How can we find labels that can do justice to many different regions and societies, each with its own distinctive historical trajectory? The problem is peculiarly acute in world history because while neighboring regions or states may evolve in closely related ways, societies separated by large distances may often seem to have little in common. The modern history profession emerged in Europe, and many well-established schemes of periodization were designed to make sense of European history. This is true, for example, of the traditional division into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Such labels make little sense outside of Europe, but they are so well established that they sometimes get used nevertheless. Similarly, Chinese historians have long used dynastic labels to provide a framework for historical writing, but these, too, are labels that mean little elsewhere. Is it possible to find labels that make sense for Africa as well as for the whole of Eurasia, the Americas, and the Pacific? On this question, too, there is currently no consensus among historians.

Ethical Problems

Periodization also poses ethical problems because it can so easily imply value judgments. School texts on European history have commonly used such labels as “ Dark Ages,” “Middle Ages,” “Renaissance,” “Scientific Revolution,” and “Age of the Democratic Revolution.” When used of entire historical periods, such labels were by no means neutral. They were generally used with the clear understanding that the Dark Ages were backward, that the Middle Ages were transitional, and that real progress towards modernity began with the Renaissance. Such schemes carry value judgments about different regions as well as different eras, because they implicitly compare the differing levels of “progress” of different regions. Until recently, it was commonly argued that while Western societies had modernized, many other societies were stuck in earlier historical eras or stages and needed to catch up. Is it possible to construct a system of periodization that avoids imposing the values of one period or region on another?

No system of periodization can satisfy all these different demands. Like historical writing in general, schemes of periodization reflect the biases and judgments of the era that produced them. They also reflect the questions being asked and the scale on which those questions are posed. This means that no single scheme will be appropriate for the many different scales on which historians can and do write about the past.

Schemes of Periodization

The simplest approach to periodization—one that is present in many creation stories—divides the past into two great eras. These can be thought of as the era of creation and the era of today (as in some Australian Aboriginal accounts), or the eras before and after “the fall” (as in the Genesis story in the Judaeo-Christian- Islamic tradition). Dualistic periodizations offer a powerful way of contrasting the present and the past, either to praise or condemn the contemporary era. Traces of such periodizations survive, even today, in dichotomous schemes such as those of modernization theory, with its stark contrasting of so-called modern and traditional societies.

But most schemes of periodization are more complex, dividing human history into several major eras, each with subdivisions of its own. Dynastic histories weave their accounts of the past using the reign dates of major kings and emperors as their frame. Such accounts are present in Chinese dynastic histories and in the chronologies of Maya historiography. Dynastic histories often imply a cyclical view of the past, in which each era (like each ruler) passes through periods of strength and weakness. Historical accounts conceived within a more linear view of the past often take as their main framework a series of distinct eras, all of which may be seen as part of a larger, universal trajectory. Writing in the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod described five great ages of history, beginning with a golden age, in which humans were contented and godlike, and passing through several stages of decline—the ages of silver, bronze, and heroes—and finally to the era of his own day, which Hesiod characterized as one of violence and stupidity.

Patterns of rise and fall have reappeared in more recent writings, such as in the work of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) or Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975). Marxian historiography offered a combination of cyclical and linear chronologies, beginning with an era of simple perfection (the era of primitive communism), which was followed by stages characterized by increasing productivity and increasing inequality and exploitation. But the Marxist scheme culminated in a future that would resolve these contradictions by combining high productivity with a return to the egalitarianism of the first era.

Most modern attempts at large, synoptic histories have preferred schemes that are fundamentally linear. Such schemes have been greatly influenced by the work of archaeologists and anthropologists, for whom the problem of constructing a periodization covering the whole of human history was often more urgent than it was for historians, who normally focused on shorter periods of time. Because archaeologists, unlike historians, deal mainly with material artifacts, it was natural for them to construct their periodizations around aspects of material culture. The nineteenth-century Danish archaeologists Christian Thomsen (1788–1865) and Jens Worsaae (1821–1885) constructed a scheme comprising three ages—a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age—that still has some influence within the study of prehistory. In the twentieth century, V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) built on the Marxist insight that particular technologies imply distinctive lifeways and social structures to argue that the major turning points in human prehistory were the appearance of agriculture (the “Neolithic Revolution”) and the appearance of cities and states (the “Urban Revolution”). Nineteenth-century anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) and Edward Tylor (1832–1917) offered parallel schemes in which different eras were distinguished by different social structures in a progressive movement from “savagery” to “barbarism” to “civilization.”

In the late twentieth century, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists became increasingly sensitive to the dangers of using schemes that imply easy value judgments. So, while most modern schemes of periodization retain a sense of directionality in history, they usually resist the assumption that directionality implies either progress or decline. On the other hand, most modern schemes of periodization at the largest scales still rely primarily on a combination of technological and sociological factors to distinguish between different eras. This is a tradition with roots going back to the earliest written histories. The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, which dates from the third millennium BCE, recognizes, in the contrast between the urban warrior hero Gilgamesh and his great friend Enkidu, who came from the wild lands beyond the city, that different technologies imply different ways of living, different systems of ethics, and different types of political and social action. Karl Marx (1818–1883) formalized this insight within the notion of a mode of production. The best justification for such an approach to the challenge of periodization is that fundamental technologies shape so many other aspects of human history, including living standards, demography, gender relations, political structures, and the pace and nature of historical change.

A Periodization for World History as a Whole

The scheme that follows is intended to provide a loose framework for discussing world history at the largest scales. It offers a three-part periodization for human history as a whole, with subordinate periodizations within each of those major periods, which may vary from region to region. This nested structure is, inevitably, an imperfect compromise between various different goals, but it reflects a broad consensus within contemporary writings on world history. At lower levels of generality, articles in this encyclopedia will adopt more specific periodizations that are appropriate for particular questions or regions.

Of the three major eras, the first is by far the longest, lasting for more than 95 percent of the time that humans have lived on Earth, while the modern era is the shortest, lasting just 260 years. On the other hand, populations were small in the foraging era, so that, measured by the number of human lives lived, the agrarian and modern eras loom larger. Perhaps 12 percent of the roughly 100 billion humans who have ever lived, lived during the foraging era, while 68 percent lived in the agrarian era and 20 percent in the modern era. Increasing life expectancies in the modern era mean that, measured by human years lived, the modern era looms even larger, accounting for almost 30 percent of all human years lived, while the agrarian era may have accounted for just over 60 percent and the foraging era for just under 10 percent.

This periodization tackles the central theoretical challenge of world history by taking as its framework three fundamental technological changes. These are the emergence of the first distinctively human societies, all of which relied on foraging for survival, the emergence of agriculture and of societies that depended mainly on agricultural production, and the emergence of modern, industrial societies. This scheme handles the organizational aspects of all periodization systems moderately well in its first and third eras. Before 10,000 years ago, it is reasonable to argue that all human societies relied on technologies that can be described, loosely, as forms of foraging, so that some useful generalizations can be made about all human societies. But it is also true that foraging societies survived in many parts of the world until modern times, so if we are to define this first era more precisely, we might say that it is the era in which all human societies depended on foraging for their survival. In the modern era, too, it is relatively easy to offer a global scheme of periodization because all parts of the world became interconnected and all have been subject to some of the same forces and influences. So we can define the modern era as the era in which the profound technological changes of the last two or three centuries transformed societies throughout the world. The secondary periodization within this era reflects a loose (but by no means universal) consensus on some of the most important transitions within the modern era.

The organizational challenge is most intractable in the agrarian era, from about 10,000 BP to about 250 BP. In this, the era that provides the subject matter for most historical writing, the world was at its most diverse, and no single label can adequately capture that diversity. For most of this era, the histories of Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, and the Pacific world played out in completely separate arenas. While in parts of Eurasia, agricultural societies emerged as early as 10,000 years ago, in Africa and the Americas, all societies relied on foraging for several thousand years more, and in Australia agricultural societies did not exist until the modern era. The best way of defining this era, therefore, is to describe it as the era in which agriculture first began to have a significant impact on human societies in some parts of the world. But the huge differences in timing mean it is vital to opt for flexible subordinate periodizations within this large era. The scheme we have adopted implies the recognition of four broad phases in the history of agrarian societies. These phases occurred at different times in different regions. In the first, there existed agricultural communities, but no true cities and states. In the second, there existed cities and early forms of states and empires. The third phase is distinguished by the emergence of larger and more interconnected systems of cities and states. The fourth phase is defined retrospectively by the understanding that, between 1000 and 1750, the world was on the verge of a transition more revolutionary than any that had occurred in any previous era of human history.

The best way of solving the ethical problems posed by any scheme of periodization is simply to take great care with language and labeling. The labels used here are intended to imply no judgments as to the superiority or inferiority of different types of society or different eras of human history. On the other hand, this periodization clearly does imply a trajectory of some kind. On the largest scales, there can be little doubt that there is directionality to human history. Foraging, agrarian, and modern societies have not appeared in a chronologically random jumble, but in a clear sequence. And that sequence has an underlying logic that reflects changing human relations with the environment. On large chronological scales, human technologies have changed so as to yield increasing amounts of energy, food, and other resources, which allowed human populations to increase. This, in turn, has given rise to larger and more complex communities, whose technologies and sheer numbers have given them many advantages whenever they came into contact with smaller communities with less productive technologies. There is a shape to human history, and that is precisely why a periodization scheme of some kind is so necessary.

Bibliography:

Bentley, J. H. (1996). Cross-cultural interaction and periodization in world history. American Historical Review, 101, 749–756.
Dunn, R. E. (Ed.). (2000). The new world history: A teacher’s companion. Boston & New York: Bedford.
Green, W. A. (1992). Periodization in European and world history. In Journal of World History, 3(1), 13–53.
Livi-Bacci, M. (1992). A concise history of world population. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Stearns, P. N. (1987). Periodization in world history teaching: Identifying the big changes. The History Teacher, 20, 561–580.

See also:

Free research papers are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can use our professional writing services to order a custom research paper on political science and get your high quality paper at affordable price.