10 ESP 2 (for History Students)

expansions of Habsburg Spain, Mughal India, and Russia. Only recently

have scholars systematically traced silver flows from mines in Peru, Mexico
and Japan to markets in Europe, South Asia, and especially China. In this
work, historians have found that some historical patterns can be explained
better through global linkages than through localized case studies.
Expanding the scale of analysis helps locate interconnections that explain the
patterns. This path takes an "internal" route to world history.
The other path to world history is "external." This one involves the
emergence of immense quantities of new information about change over time
from outside the traditional bounds of history. For example, in recent
decades we have learned much about environmental changes, the history of
disease, and the stages of human evolution. The disciplines of linguistics,
archaeology, and chemistry have revealed important historical information.
As this information has worked its way into history, the boundaries of
historical studies have expanded. Environmental scientists began giving
historical interpretation to their findings, and some historians responded by
studying changes in the environment. As specialists in various fields have
developed global insights into change over time, their work has been
instrumental in fostering the incorporation of previously excluded fields of
study into history.
The events and thought
involved in each of the two
expanding channels to world
history—the internal historians'
path and the external scientific-
cultural path—have helped fuel
the growth and define the
character of world history. Historians now examine old and new topics,
using old and new approaches to discover many new