Introduction: Anti-eurocentrism and decolonisation in the History of Mankind

When the idea to write a history of mankind under the auspices of the United Nations Special Agency for Science, Education and Culture (UNESCO) was first aired in 1944, the topic of decolonisation did not feature prominently in the discussions.Footnote ¹ The situation had changed significantly when Volume VI of the UNESCO History of Mankind (HoM) — a volume devoted to the history of the twentieth century — was published two decades later. The first paragraph portrays the “history of the first half of the twentieth century” as a “revolutionary shift in power reflected in […] two events”: “In 1899 the British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous lines: ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden — ye dare not stoop to less.’ In 1957 the African state of Ghana took its seat at the United Nations along with eighty other nations of the world.”Footnote ² Decolonisation had become the central narrative arc of the last volume of the history.

The end of formal empire as a legitimate form of rule shaped the UNESCO-authorised world history in more profound ways than what is apparent in the printed volume covering the twentieth century. It also challenged how the history of earlier periods was to be organised and presented. Moreover, some contributors to the project speculated that fundamental methodological assumptions in history writing needed to change considering decolonisation. When a great rupture occurs, the vision of past must change as well, to paraphrase John Smail as quoted in the introduction to this special issue.Footnote ³

In this article we analyse how the mid-century wave of independence changed the HoM. In hindsight a trajectory can be identified from decolonisation as a marginal concern to a new situation where decolonisation as political process and epistemological agenda influenced the HoM-project with respect to its political aims, organisational structure, the selection of authors, and the narrative of world history it presented. As such it is a clear story of how the end of empire altered how world history has been conceptualised and written.

Yet, the HoM-project also demonstrates that decolonisation as political and intellectual agenda covered a range of positions. As Jansen and Osterhammel point out “the thinking of the decolonization era reaches a level of polyphony that makes the reduction to a few standard tropes nearly impossible.”Footnote ⁴ This is also true when we zoom in on the HoM-project which in the apt phrase of Aranova was “Big History”; a project involving hundreds of authors, numerous editors, bureaucrats and diplomats — not to mention translators, publishers, and distributors.Footnote ⁵

Existing scholarship on the HoM-project has examined its troubled publication process and demonstrated how key figures — Julian Huxley, Joseph Needham, Lucien Febvre among others — brought different ideas and priorities into the venture.Footnote ⁶ These early protagonists considered developments in science and technology central to world history, which the HoM was to reflect in content and moral message. They also believed that the focus of the HoM should be to help to unite rather than divide peoples and nations. It was a history designed to contribute to UNESCO’s overarching mission “to foster peace in the minds of men” and which reflected the ideas of “one-worldism” prevalent among the scientists, intellectuals and diplomats who ran UNESCO during its founding decade.Footnote ⁷

It was also an express motivation for the HoM to challenge eurocentrism in world history. However, this agenda was subject to reservations, conflicting interpretations, and intense debate within the project. For example, Needham was more concerned than Huxley, that the history should go beyond a eurocentric focus. Needham’s explicit anti-eurocentrism stemmed both from his unorthodox Marxist leanings as well as his studies of the history of science and technology in China. For Needham, science and progress were not an exclusively western prerogative and he regarded the development of science as an “ecumenical enterprise rooted in cultural, scientific and technological interchanges between East and West.”Footnote ⁸ Needham and those he influenced were keen to see this reflected in the UNESCO history. Challenging eurocentrism was also an agenda for Febvre, a co-founder of the Annales school. His argument was based on distinct epistemological assumptions according to which exchange between civilisations and regions were central to historical change. This view challenged ideas of European exceptionalism and served, Febvre believed, to foster international understanding in the present.Footnote ⁹

Challenging eurocentrism in World History was thus a central — if controversial and contested — agenda in the HoM from the outset. However, the political process of independence which altered the membership of UNESCO also shifted the balance in what it meant to challenge eurocentrism. A key analytical ambition in this article, therefore, is to explore and pinpoint the connections between anti-eurocentrism and decolonisation as intellectual agendas in the HoM-project and published volumes.

A substantial literature has documented the impact of decolonisation across all of UNESCOs sectors.Footnote ¹⁰ Previous studies of the HoM, most importantly by Duedahl, Betts, Aranova, Allardyce and Naumann, have also already highlighted the questions of decolonisation as a source of tension.Footnote ¹¹ In this article we aim to go deeper by focussing only on this question across a selection of the volumes and on the agency of individual author-editors and contributors. In the following four sections we discuss Volumes III, IV, V, and VI in more detail.Footnote ¹² Each of the four volumes highlight specific variations of how decolonisation impacted the HoM and on the relations between anti-eurocentrism and decolonisation. However, we devote more attention to Volume VI — and in this case draw more extensively on archival sources — to discuss in detail the extent to which this volume parted with the narratives of the volumes covering earlier centuries and why the author-editors constructed such a different narrative.

Volume III: A balance sheet of civilisation with “Eurasian” entries only

Published in 1965, Volume III covered The Great Medieval Civilizations (CE 400-1300). Editorship was in the hands of French historian Gaston Wiet, a French-Russian art historian and expert on East Asia Vadime Elisseeff, French medievalist Phillipe Wolff and Jean Naudou, a French historian of South-East Asia.Footnote ¹³ The volume was divided into three parts with the first two parts covering “Eurasia” including “Mediterranean Africa.” Its third part was devoted to what the editors termed “the other worlds” of Oceania, Africa and the Americas because “these regions had developed separately from Eurasia.”Footnote ¹⁴ The international commission appointed one author to write each of the “other worlds” sections, while the editors wrote the chapters on Eurasia comprising 840 pages of 984 pages in total.

The parts of the volume dedicated to Eurasia were divided into two sections: “Historical background” and “Cultural achievements.” The latter included subsections on technological development and learning, religion and philosophy, and scientific thought and artistic expressions. Eurasian civilisations — Chinese, Indian, Arab, and European being the main units — and their interactions were then presented across these fixed themes. Its structure was repeated in the separate third part, allotted to the “other worlds” before “the age of discovery.”Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, the most significant geographical divide was between “Eurasia” and the rest of the world defined by their status as undiscovered from a Eurasian point of view.

In “other worlds,” the chapter on “Black Africa” was written by French medievalist and Africanist Jean Devisse. He held a doctorate from the Sorbonne where he worked as an assistant professor until the mid-1950s when he took up a position in the history faculty at University of Dakar, established during the final years of the Fourth Republic. The university quickly became a hub in colonial resistance culminating in Senegalese independence in 1960.Footnote ¹⁶ Devisse stayed in Dakar across the independence divide and was involved in the establishment of a library and archive on the history of the Sahel. He also collaborated with archaeologists to establish a field station in Mauritania, on the presumed site of the ancient town of Awdaghos on the trans-Saharan caravan route. Devisse returned to Paris in 1964 where he taught African history at two Paris universities and began his association with UNESCO. According to his obituary (written by a former student and friend) he had become a “fully committed Africanist”:

These views were evident in his contribution to the HoM. Devisse began by emphasising that “Africa, like all continents, had a history” and explained how a myth of African backwardness and cultural stalemate had been created by writers of antiquity and religious historians who had been followed uncritically by Western scholars. They had cemented the idea that “no organized civilization could have existed in black Africa before the whites from Rome, Byzantium or the Moslem world sowed its seeds.”Footnote ¹⁸ This had produced a conviction that “black Africa was no more than the tardy and attenuated expression of the civilizations which had very slowly penetrated it.”Footnote ¹⁹ This view “was contradicted by everything,” Devisse explained, and the rest of his 50-page chapter discussed African cultural and scientific development across the continent and its connections to other parts of the globe, particularly the Indian Ocean region. The chapter concluded that “Africa’s contribution to the cultural history of humanity is consequently essential and irreplaceable, for the future as well as the past.”Footnote ²⁰

Yet, despite this assessment the history of the “other worlds” was not integrated in Volume III’s overarching narrative of mankind’s cultural and scientific development. The editors simply wrote off the regions outside Eurasia in their concluding chapter which they presented as a balance sheet of contributions to world civilisation:

The editors then assessed the contributions of Arab, Indian, Chinese, and European civilisations to world civilisation. If there was an agenda to decentre Europe, then this was replaced by a narrative of world history with “Eurasian civilisations” being the sole engines of historical transformation. This conclusion — and its language of necessity — is striking because other parts of the volume had argued at length the exact opposite.

Volume III sheds light on anti-eurocentrism and decolonisation as evolving institutional and epistemological agendas in the HoM-project. When the idea to write a history of mankind’s cultural and scientific achievements first came up, protagonists like Huxley envisioned a history which — at least as far as the modern period was concerned — focused on the West because in his view modern science was a Western achievement.Footnote ²² Against this background “the Eurasian balance sheet” of Volume III reads anti-eurocentric and appears to be more in line with Needham’s ideas as it accorded agency beyond Europe in the historical development of science and culture. Indeed, the volume cited generously Needham’s conclusions concerning the advanced development of science in China. Yet, on closer reading important differences stand out. The organisation of the volume into civilisations did not lend itself easily to Needham’s “ecumenical” interpretation of the development of science and culture or to Febvrean ideas of exchanges as the driver of historical change. The editors simply concluded that to understand “Europe’s awakening” after 1300 (and by implication its dominance in the ensuing centuries) “we must turn to the factors proper to Europe itself.”Footnote ²³ As we shall see the theme of “Europe’s awakening” would also structure the narrative in Volume IV and sit uneasily with the agenda to challenge eurocentrism.

Volume III exemplifies how divergent ideas about anti-eurocentrism relegated other parts of the world to the margins. All four editors were experts on either Europe or Asia and the “Eurasian” chapters comprised 840 pages out of 984 pages in total which left less than 150 pages to the rest of the world combined. Devisse’s articulate account of African contributions to mankind’s development was present in the volume but also completely discarded when the balance sheet of the period was drawn.

Yet, while Devisse’s ideas were marginalised in the HoM, they found space in UNESCOs General History of Africa-project inaugurated in 1964 with Devisse as rapporteur and prolific contributor.Footnote ²⁴ The General History of Africa was born explicitly to decolonise history by exploring how African peoples had shaped the history of the continent and the wider world.Footnote ²⁵ The HoM had clearly been unable to accommodate the changing perceptions of Africa’s place in the world — past, present and future — which gained traction during the years around independence.

Volume IV: The [European] foundations of the modern world

Published in 1969, Volume IV covered the period 1300-1775. Author-editor was Louis Gottschalk, Professor of European History at University of Chicago who was assisted by two associate editors, historian of Asia Earl H. Pritchard, and medievalist Loren MacKinney.Footnote ²⁶ The volume was twelve years in the making, eight years longer than initially planned. Besides the author-editors six US-based historians participated in writing the first draft which was then circulated to several hundred experts worldwide for feedback and review. A revised manuscript that was then commented upon by a group of French scholars presided over by Sorbonne Professor Roland Mousnier. Key comments from this group were included in the volume as endnotes, occasionally accompanied by replies from Gottschalk and his associates.Footnote ²⁷

Volume IV largely mirrored Volume III in terms of chapter structure and topics. It began with a chapter on the political, social and economic background of the period aiming to integrate all parts of the world. The rest of the 1100-pages volume was structured in chapters according to topics such as religion, theology, political thought, literary communication, arts, science, technology, and education. Each topic was then divided into different civilisations or cultures. For example, chapter XII “Visual arts and music (1300-1775)” contained sub-sections on 1) “Fine arts in Europe,” 2) “Arts in Islam,” 3) “Hindu and Buddhist Art,” 4) “Arts in China, Vietnam, and Korea,” 5) “Arts in Japan,” and 6) “Arts outside Eurasia.”

Writing the volume for the period 1300-1700 was bound to pose several challenges for the author-editors charged with the task to produce an UN-backed history committed to non-eurocentrism and written during the period of decolonisation. Indeed, as historian Gilbert Allardyce has shown, the question of eurocentrism was a main reason why the publication of Volume IV was fraught with controversy and severe delays even by HoM-standards. Gottschalk initially wanted the volume to be titled The European Age to account for “the age of discovery,” “the scientific revolution,” and “the enlightenment.” The bureau of UNESCO’s HoM-committee rejected this title arguing that it clashed with the principles of a history that should show the contributions of different civilisations and not privilege one area or civilisation. Gottschalk, who had been member of the group appointed by UNESCO in 1951 to write the history, was also committed to the tenets of the UNESCO-project with its non-hierarchical approach to cultures and civilisations.Footnote ²⁸ A riverine metaphor used by the author-editors in Volume IV described different civilisations as tributaries to the widening river of world civilisation.Footnote ²⁹ This conceptualisation underscored unity in diversity but also left plenty room for competing interpretations on the importance of the contributions of different cultures.

Indeed, the narrative of Volume IV oscillated between “growing interdependence” and the “rise of Europe” as the hallmark of the period. The volume performed a delicate balancing act or perhaps rather attempted to unify contradictory principles and objectives. During the editorial process, Gottschalk and his team faced criticism from both sides: some commentators and commission members argued that the volume was too focused on Europe, while others argued it failed to sufficiently acknowledge Europe’s special role and contributions.Footnote ³⁰ The Mousnier-group was in the latter camp. In a central comment that was included in the published volume, Mousnier asked: “Could anyone have felt injured if the authors had emphasised the preponderant role played by Europe in the constitution of modern science, in the religious, philosophical and political movement?”Footnote ³¹ In response to the criticism, Gottschalk explained in a private letter to Mousnier that adding more on the west was possible only at the expense of the east and would “only invite more criticisms from Asians who have already been more severe in their criticism of volume 4 than you.”Footnote ³²

The volume had specific limitations regarding non-eurocentrism. Two key issues proved particularly challenging. Firstly, the birth of modern science: It presented the so-called scientific revolution, starting in the sixteenth century, as a unique and self-contained European achievement. This narrative focused on figures like Copernicus, Newton, and Linnaeus, and institutions of higher learning in Europe. The chapter on science, written by George A. Foote, a US historian of science specialising in nineteenth century Britain, dedicated only three out of its 90 pages to science outside Western Europe.Footnote ³³ As member of the Mousnier-group George Canguilhem — known today as one of the founders of the field of “historical epistemology” — commented on the chapter. While Canguilhem did not question the European origin of science, he focused on the extent to which the chapter had included sufficiently the interpretation of Alexandre Koyre and his followers who saw the scientific revolution as a revolution in ideas and mathematics rather than in experimental practices and scientific instruments.Footnote ³⁴ Thanks to the editorial notes both influential interpretations were included but neither challenged the overarching view that the birth of modern science was a European achievement. The volume concluded that while the history of art “constitutes perhaps the best example our period affords of Mankind’s trend (often unconscious: often resisted, if conscious) towards a cosmopolitan culture. The oneness of science did not equally provide room for diversity.”Footnote ³⁵

It is unsurprising that the HoM described the advent of modern science as a Western phenomenon. It would take a later generation of historians to critically examine and deconstruct the category of Western science.Footnote ³⁶ However, given the central place science held in the HoM, the treatment of science as a purely Western achievement posed a significant limitation on the stated goals of challenging eurocentrism and illustrating how all cultures contributed to the creation of the modern world.

The second major issue was its handling of European colonialism. One perceptive contemporary reviewer of the volume, professor of history Niels Steensgaard, remarked that there was no index entry for colonialism or slavery. He also noted that students of his in Copenhagen might well be interested to find out what UNESCO had to say about those things but such students would be disappointed to find that the explanations looked like something from outdated school textbooks from the professor’s own childhood.Footnote ³⁷ The HoM certainly extended every effort to reconcile the violence and racism of colonialism with the overarching narrative of growing connectedness and the rise of world consciousness as for example in the conclusion of Volume IV:

In reviews and retrospective assessments of Volume IV, the consensus regarding eurocentrism has been that the author-editors and their collaborators produced a book committed to the UNESCO ideology in the sense that the narrative emphasised contact over conflict, interconnection over hierarchy, and geographical breadth over regional specifics. This was also the stance the author-editors took in response to criticism from the Mousnier group, who argued that the volume did not adequately acknowledge Europe’s special role in world history during these centuries. However, the volume nonetheless clearly maintained a strong focus on Europe. This is reflected in the distribution of pages dedicated to different regions’contributions to world development. The chapter on arts for example devoted in total three pages to “Art outside Eurasia” and the chapter on science included even less discussion of areas beyond Western Europe. Moreover, the fact that the volume prioritised Europe on several key points makes it even more striking that it was criticised for not adequately acknowledging the “preponderant role played by Europe” in the birth of the modern world.

Volume V: The Contradictory philosophy of Charles Morazé

The fifth volume was edited by the French historian Charles Morazé, who belonged to the second generation of the Annales school. Morazé became one of the editors of the journal in 1946, which by then was called Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. However, as author-editor, Morazé was only the second choice. He replaced the Peruvian historian, and former Minister of Education, Jorge Basadre, who, in 1955 “dropped out for lack of means to consult European archives and libraries,” demonstrating the material and practical difficulties, when trying to decentre Europe in the production of such a history.Footnote ³⁹

A cursory reading of the volume foregrounds Morazé’s eurocentric thinking, particularly when analysing what was included in the volume and how the chapters were arranged. The volume maintained a strict division of “the West and the rest.” The first two parts covered the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and technical developments, barely mentioning any developments outside Europe and the United States. Part three on social, cultural, and religious aspects specifically tackled European institutions, literature, and music. The chapter on philosophy focussed on British empiricism and Kant. This was followed by a few chapters on European societies outside the Western European core: “The Russian Empire,” “The United States of America,” “Latin America,” and finally “Western Civilization in South Africa and Australia.” It was only in part four, ominously named “European Empires, Technical and Scientific Progress, Culture Conflicts,” where the rest of the world was discussed in six chapters, tackling “The Moslem World,” “The British in India,” South-East Asia, Japan, and China, and finally “Africa and Oceania: Contacts with European Civilization.” The last-mentioned chapter mixing Africa and Oceania seemed so out of place that a Soviet reviewer observed that “one doubts […] whether it was necessary to pre[s]ent the history of Africa and Oceania together.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Ironically, even the introduction to part four written by Morazé engaged only with European thinking about the rest of the world, or the lack thereof, without mentioning anything about these regions or peoples themselves.

That said, it would be too easy to see this exclusively as the mistake of Morazé. The Commission overseeing the production of the volumes had been unhappy with Morazé’s original plans and wanted to see a stronger representation of the rest of the world beyond Europe, but through which narrative the rest of the world would be incorporated was not settled. Huxley argued that a “major feature of the 19th century had been the spread of colonialism, or what he would term the ‘expansion of Europe,’ and insufficient attention appeared to have been paid to that important development in the re-planning of Volume V.” Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, the Indian vice-president of the commission, diplomatically agreed with Huxley, saying that “he thought it particularly important that due attention should be given to the impact of colonialism on the countries which had been subject to colonial domination” — arguably a quite different emphasis than that implied by the “expansion of Europe.”Footnote ⁴¹ While the changes which Morazé incorporated in reaction to that might seem too minimal to us to qualify this volume as overcoming eurocentrism, to some contemporaries of Morazé, they were already too radical. Asa Briggs, one of the two consultants who reviewed the volume and prepared the endnotes with diverging views, exclaimed:

The way Morazé places the world outside of Europe to the general narrative of the nineteenth century is rooted in his general historical theory. He outlined his ideas in the book The Logic of History, published in 1967. In the book he suggested that there are four types of civilisations:

Morazé, unlike some other authors of the HoM, was clearly not averse to hierarchies of civilisation or highlighting Europe’s particular contribution.

However unlike in other volumes of the HoM, Morazé decided to compile contributions, rather than integrating them into an overall whole. The table of contents lists a vast variety of authors, particularly for the non-European parts often changing from section to section. In the introduction to the volume, he legitimised his decision, arguing that “it seemed to me that all the divergences experienced and noted should themselves become the subject of the work.” This, he believed to be even more true for chapters discussing places outside of Europe, because “is it not true that, by speaking of them in accordance with the methods and the styles of Western inspiration, we prevent ourselves from learning how they know and remember their past?” While some of these chapters were written by European “experts,” others were written by authors discussing their own regions; the section on Latin America was written by a Chilean and a Brazilian, the “Muslim world” by an Iranian-French historian, who however lived in France since he was a child, South East Asia was discussed by a Vietnamese-French economist, and Japan was divided between several Japanese authors.Footnote ⁴⁵ Morazé continued his discussion of why he selected these authors:

What Morazé thus suggested, was the existence of parallel epistemologies. These alternative epistemologies might not qualify in his understanding as scientific, but he saw them as valid and valuable, nonetheless. While the hierarchisation of knowledges which Morazé subscribed to is clearly eurocentric, the fact that the chapters stand side by side and this hierarchisation is only marked by the author’s preface undercuts that hierarchisation. The respective chapters are structurally in the volume not presented as sources or viewpoints, but as equal to the other chapters. Arguably, it is this idea, in the possibly most eurocentric volume of the HoM, which points most radically towards epistemological decolonisation or decolonisation of knowledge.

Volume VI: Decolonisation as a process and a structure

The sixth volume was edited by three author-editors: the Indian diplomat and historian Sardar K.M. Panikkar and the Dutch historian Jan Romein under the leadership of the American academic Caroline Ware — also one of only two female author-editors in the overall project. The three editors formed the most international team among all the volumes and brought together an interesting mixture of expertise. However, Ware and her team were only the second choice. The commission had originally given the editorship of the volume to the Indian historian Kuruvila Zachariah, who however had to step down in 1954 due to health reasons. He died a year later.

Panikkar was an author, translator, and historian. But he was probably most notable as a diplomat. He was sent by Nehru as ambassador to Paris from 1956-59 to facilitate his participation in the HoM. His autobiography reads like a novel set in the high politics of the decolonisation era. Panikkar met figures like Chiang Kai-shek, Mao and Gamal Abd-al-Nasser.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the same time, Panikkar wrote a long list of books, mostly engaging with Indian history, making him an important expert in the field.

The second editor, Romein, was a Marxist cultural historian and former student of Huizinga. He referred to himself as a representative of “theoretical history,” a term which he elaborated in a 1948 article to mean history of historiography.Footnote ⁴⁸ Central for his selection was probably the breadth of his publications. He wrote his PhD on Dostoyevsky in Western Criticism, published a book on Byzantium, wrote on the Medieval Netherlands, but also on colonialism and nationalism in Asia.

The group was led by Caroline Ware. Her background was unusual, in that she had not written any grand histories covering centuries or vast geographies. Rather, her most important publications were on New England cotton industries and workers in these industries. She also wrote about race and the position of Afro-Americans in US society and politics. Ware’s academic interests were reflected in her politics, where she engaged in activism for consumer protection, gender equality, worker’s and civil rights. More than her own research, it was likely her successful editing of The Cultural Approach to History,Footnote ⁴⁹ and her work with the US government and the Pan-American Union, which got her the invitation to edit the sixth volume of the HoM. She was proposed by the General Editor of the HoM, who advertised her to the commission, saying that “she works like a horse.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Having focussed mostly on local histories, Ware did not immediately think that she would be up to the job.Footnote ⁵¹ This initial understanding, that she did not already know everything which she needed to know, shaped her work plan. She spent three months traveling once around the world, meeting UNESCO representatives and university professors, trying to gain a better understanding of world history and cultures, but importantly, also building networks with local academics. Instead of travelling to the editorial meeting in Paris directly, she travelled from the US via Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey. Ware managed a tight schedule of meetings, often meeting with groups and having three or four meetings per day, taking detailed notes in-between. While discussions with economists and social scientists, as well as politicians and practitioners, were often more technical, her discussions with other historians explored on one hand the history of the specific place, and on the other, how these historians viewed the twentieth century. For example, meeting Cyril Northrop Parkinson,Footnote ⁵² head of the history department at the University of Malaya in Singapore, he explained that “the great event of the 20th Century in this part of the world is the rise of Asia.”Footnote ⁵³

The trip helped the editors to broaden the content in the volume, but more importantly also the representation, in terms of how this content was produced. Besides gaining personal insights, the networks Ware built allowed her to commission articles on a wide variety of topics from authors in a long list of countries. These articles generated the material on topics such as Arabic literature, Gandhian thought, or the Westernisation of Iraq.

But the inclusion of different histories always had to find its limits. Ware observed in 1961: “There is no region, no country, no field of knowledge or endeavor that has not been slighted, some more seriously than others, yet we have overrun our allotted space.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For example, when the volumes were sent for review to experts and UNESCO delegations in member states, the Koreans observed in October 1959 that “it is lamentable that the History, judging from the volume in question, seems to have been influenced by the age-long evil of China/India/Japan-centred oriental history.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, for the Koreans, considering that both Japan and China had previously extended their control over Korea as imperial powers, only including these powers in the narrative could hardly be perceived as decolonising. The marginalisation of certain histories was even truer for Africa, where, although mentioned in the first paragraph, African independence played hardly any role. With the cut-off for Volume VI in 1960, the African year of independence remained outside of the scope of the history.

Ware’s background also impacted her approach to the content of the volume. Her participation in the Afro-American and women’s civil rights movements shaped her interest in emancipation and connected to that decolonisation. Ware recounted in an article in the UNESCO Journal of World History in which she reflected on the challenges of producing the volumes, how the author-editors were criticised by members of the commission for the use of “dignity of man.” This dignity was surely more delimited in the twentieth century than the nineteenth. To this, Ware observed: “Perhaps we should have said ‘women’ instead of ‘man’, or ‘workers’ or ‘peasants’ or ‘Negroes’ or ‘natives’.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The three author-editors faced the challenge of writing the history of an incomplete century “in the midst of events.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The editors even felt forced to update their text during the final editing, as they had originally planned to stop before 1955, but developments from Stalin’s death to the invention of the Polio vaccine forced them to reconsider. But the twentieth century posed an even bigger challenge for the HoM-project, framed as it was by a narrative of peace, connections and one-worldism. From the view of most contemporary observers, the twentieth century was defined by the world wars and the cold war. Avoiding this focus on conflict demanded a different master-narrative, which is outlined in the first chapter of the volume “The Shift in World Power.” The editors mention the world wars, but only as one explanatory factor for the decline of imperialism and the proliferation of nationalist movements.

Panikkar had made this point already in his text “An Indian View of Europe,” where he observed that “the two great wars of the 20^th century cast serious doubts on the moral values which Europe claimed to represent.” He asked: “For how could it be pretended that Italy and Germany do not represent Europe while France and Britain do? Is not communism a part of the European tradition as much as liberalism is?” The section is immediately followed by a critique of eurocentrism, which Panikkar connected to a “narrowness of spirit” and “a condescending approach.”Footnote ⁵⁸

This is the context for the choice of a narrative arc from Kipling’s White Man’s Burden to Nkrumah, combining the decentring of Europe in the wake of World War II with a focus on the restitution of dignity for those previously “forgotten people” — using Ware’s term.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, this remained a narrative of progress, but not in the vein of how the HoM had initially been conceptualised. The editors observed this in the conclusion, where they stated that “the concept of automatic evolutionary progress [was] destroyed by the events of the first half of the twentieth century.” However, “outside western Europe the idea of progress remained as living a concept as it had ever been.”Footnote ⁶⁰ They were then not questioning the idea of progress per se, but rather the role of Europe as its singular driving force which had been so dominant in the structure of the preceding volumes of the HoM.

Another challenge of the volume revolved around the tension, between the universalisation of modernity which is inherent to the HoM-project and the need of countries to make their past productive for their present — an issue particularly important to Panikkar. As Tarasankar Banerjee observed, Panikkar’s history-writing was always with an eye towards a “living interest in the destiny of men and nations.”Footnote ⁶¹ He understood history as connected to the present and historiography as a tool to shape the future. Ware also highlighted this concern in her Journal or World History essay, where she wrote: “To many newly self-governing or developing peoples, their history is of vital importance, for the rediscovery of their past has been an integral part of the discovery of themselves.”Footnote ⁶² Ware pointed here to the same notion, which in the special issue we describe as epistemological sovereignty. But unlike in specific national projects of history-making, in the HoM this clashed with the project’s aims as a global history. The futurity of a unified world civilisation conflicted with the futurity of individual nation states.

The authors engage this tension in part three of the volume, titled “The Self-Image and Aspirations of the Peoples of the World.” Of the three chapters in that part, the first deals with ideologies including liberalism, Marxism-Leninism, and nationalism, and the third discusses “Drives for Individual Freedom and Human Dignity” regarding labour, farmers, gender, race and caste. The second chapter called “Drives for Cultural Integrity and Recognition” includes a discussion of the “Renaissance of Ancient Cultures.” That way the chapter balanced the universalist ideas of UNESCO — with reference to liberalism and Marxism-Leninism — and local and national concerns — with reference to cultural integrity.

Unlike Volume V, the editors attempted to create a coherent whole. Of the 33 chapters, six were partially or fully drafted by other authors. Moreover, for 21 chapters the introduction mentioned articles, published in the Journal of World History and other commissioned memoranda, which contributed important material for the final volume. However, in all cases the author-editors reworked these drafts where necessary. That also means, that unlike in Volume V, there was no attempt to have authors from discussed countries speak directly. Rather, as Ware suggested, they attempted to “let the views and aspirations of the world’s people come through, and to see the people of the world as they see themselves, in actuality and in the projection of their hopes.”Footnote ⁶³ The author-editors aimed to present one coherent and objective discussion, still clearly rooted in a positivist understanding.Footnote ⁶⁴

Volume VI then was marked by a decentring of Europe in how the narrative was built, how issues were discussed, but also whose opinions were consulted, while maintaining both a positivist understanding of history and a narrative of progress. It made concessions to the need of newly-independent states to make their pasts productive for their presents, without however accepting that this would bring in a multiplicity of equally valid epistemologies. The volume also remained confined in UNESCO’s structure of being “descriptive, neutral, objective, acceptable to everybody.” But as the French professor Raymond Aron, one of UNESCO’s scientific consultants remarked, a history of the twentieth century “can only be problematic, interpretative, sociological, philosophical, unacceptable to some people.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Consequently, while centring decolonisation, the volume still had to sanitise imperialism’s inherent violence and injustice.