| Abstrakt: |
Universal history as an historiographical genre can trace its origins back to the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200-c. 114 B.C.E.), who interpreted the rise of the Roman Republic as the predominant Mediterranean power between 246 and 146 B.C.E. not as an isolated national event but as a world historical event, through which the individual histories of Rome and the territories it conquered were aligned as a single body ( I sômatoeidês i ) with a single goal ( I telos i ). Emphatically rejecting teleological and deterministic accounts of history as unwarranted fictions, as attempts to substitute orderly mental constructs for a multifarious and fragmented empirical reality, Volney took a more radical, indeed suspicious, view of historiographical constructivism than d'Aubigné and Herder had. Slightly later, Sima Qian (c. 145-c. 86 B.C.E.), the court historian of the early Han Dynasty, produced the first Chinese version of a universal history, a chronically and thematically organized account of the two millennia of China's history from its (legendary) origins to Sima Qian's own time. The genre of universal history has its own history, however, and a principal aim of this special issue of I I.H.R. i is to explore some of the variety and complexity of that history. [Extracted from the article] |
