A Brief Introduction

Summary

In a world where in principle more than enough information is available, one needs a good reason to publish yet another book. Some explanation of why we wrote this one is not superfluous. The conviction that this could become a useful book is an outcome of Peer's experience in teaching global history. He has done so at several universities for more than twenty years with a focus on the early modern period and on economic history. Students as a rule looked interested and often even enthusiastic. But what always struck him, even with the interested and enthusiastic students, was that they were quite fond of discussing big topics like the Great Divergence, the modern-world system, globalisation, the impact of slavery and so on and so forth, but were often almost completely ignorant of the most basic facts concerning the societies that were being discussed. What was their (relative) size? How many people were living there? At what age did those people marry, or die? What were their main sources of energy? What did they eat? How did they provide for their sustenance? How intense were those intercontinental contacts that global historians like to focus upon? How many people actually migrated from one continent to another? How many people were enslaved in Africa and transported to the Americas? How large were the bullion flows from the Americas that speak so much to the imagination and where did they go? How long did it take to travel by ship from Amsterdam to the New World or to Canton or Batavia? How big was intercontinental trade as compared to the GDP of the trading nations involved? By far the majority of the answers he got when asking such basic questions at the beginning of class were wrong, many of them very wrong. Most students had no or only a fairly distorted idea of ordinary life in pre-industrial societies. Actually, so he found out, you cannot really blame them. It is anything but easy to find the relevant information. It is very often simply not there in the numerous introductions to or syntheses of global history. Apparently, it is assumed that students and other people interested in global history no longer need to be informed about such ‘trivialities’.