Advantages And Disadvantages Of Contemporary History

Bruce Mazlish, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in his book World History: Ideologies, Structures, Identities, mentions about three concepts of history: Ecumenical History also known as Universal History, World History and Global History. This paper is going to examine these concepts by comparing them and pointing out the uses and disadvantages of each one. Ecumenical History or Universal History mentions that there is only one story for all human beings. This story either based on religous belief, a God designed plan or secular accounts from reason and science. The Ecumenical History is a story, which has some prophetices regarding either judgment, conflict or dialect lead to an inevitabe
For instance, Jerry Bentley considers the industrial revolution should be studied in the concept of world history. In addition, William McNeill apply it to civilizations (Mazlish 1998, 44). The disadvantage of studying world history is quite similar to ecumenical history while some historians such as McNeill do not understand the modern world. Global history concept is most suitable to study the global processes, systems,networks, those phenomena are hard to comprehent if be studied in national or regional scale. Mazlish mentions some of phenomena that fix to the global history concept including the domination of multinational corporations in today's economics, enviromental problem (Mazlish1998, 47). The disadvantage of global history is that it is difficult to definded when the globalization really started and global history should be studied. The author mentions that the globalizaton may happened by the 1990s, the 1950s or 1970s or even sooner but at those time, due to of limitations, historians had not studied the global history concept (Mazlish 1998, 49). Confusing in defining the starting point may make historians miss some past events that should have been studied in global history