Time and Global History

The experience of massive globalization in the past two decades has provoked an epistemological crisis for historians. No longer is it possible to write histories of one part of the world as though the rest of the world did not exist. The challenge is how to do this without writing histories so dense as to be unmanageable. The essay proposes using an alternative conception of time, one based on moment rather than duration. Drawing on selected insights from Buddhist philosophy, the author suggests that, rather than reproducing timeline narratives that confirm existing identities, historians access the multiplicity and indeterminacy of actual experience in the past by suspending the flow of time and examining the world through 'keyholes'. In addition to enlarging our sense of the complexity of the past, this philosophy of time encourages narratives that accentuate a tolerance of diversity and a compassion for its failures.