Patrick Manning

• Doctor of Philosophy, History, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1969
• Professor Emeritus at University of Pittsburgh

The first volume of The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World traces the emergence of modern economic growth in eighteenth century Britain and its spread across the globe. Focusing on the period from 1700 to 1870, a team of leading experts in economic history offer a series of regional studies from around the world, as well as thematic ana...

Seshat: Global History Databank, established in 2011, was initiated by an ever-growing team of social scientists and humanities scholars to test theories about the evolution of complex societies (Francois et al. 2016; Turchin et al. 2015). Seshat reflects both what is known about global history (within certain practical constraints, discussed below...

This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Ind...

Africa is commonly marginalized in global social studies, whether of present or past. This chapter makes the case for the substantial importance of Africa through a systematic comparison with Eurasia. It documents the large area and the relatively dense population of Africa, in past and present, as compared with Eurasia and with the Americas. The e...

This article addresses the task of building world-historical data resources. The group that has formed, Big Data in Human History, is a collaboration of several social science research groups using advanced information technology to document the characteristics of human society at multiple scales from the present back to early human times. The arti...

The Beginnings of a World History of Modern Migration: The Lucassens’s Volume on Globalising Migration History - Volume 62 Issue 3 - Patrick Manning

Manning treats humanity as an open, world-encompassing system which has now grown to become a major influence on the larger system of the earth itself. Analysis focuses on the mechanisms of social evolution, governed by conscious construction of social structures. The systemic story is told through four major epochs: (1) formation and expansion of...

Published data on silver flows and stocks, gathered in volumes published by Moneta, provide a basis for initial steps in documenting flows of silver production and commerce from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. Collection and publication of comprehensive data on silver flows will generate the first comprehensive study of flows of a com...

This essay calls for historians’ leadership in assembling social-science scholarship to clarify the global social crisis of inequality. Its critique of economists’ focus on income and wealth calls for study of inequality in the social, cultural, health, and climate arenas. It links the crisis of social inequality to that of environmental degradatio...

This article presents methods and results in the application of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis to a problem in missing data. The data used here are from The Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TASTD), 2010 version, available online. Of the currently known 35,000 slaving voyages, original data on the size of the cargo of captives exist for...

The issues of inequality today propagate the dilemmas of the past and add new questions and difficulties. Social dynamics driven by inequality may have a dramatic impact on development of human societies. Social instability may cause significant degradation of human wellbeing, involving civil unrest and slowing down social progress. The importance...

This article reviews the character of the world-historical literature from the shared standpoint of Africans and people of the African diaspora. The world-historical literature has achieved strengths in comprehensiveness, disciplinary specialization, and coherence—as well as in its balance of multiple perspectives and its development of “the world...

This study presents methods for projecting population and migration over time in cases were empirical data are missing or undependable. The methods are useful for cases in which the researcher has details of population size and structure for a limited period of time (most obviously, the end point), with scattered evidence on other times. It enables...

At its simplest, this essay provides a narrative of migration in Asia since the arrival of Homo sapiens some 70,000 years ago. More fully, it presents the case for conducting long-term, world-historical interpretation for Asia with attention to multiple perspectives, which has become increasingly central to global historical analysis. Following an...

New and comprehensive estimates of African population, at regional and continental levels, suggest that from the seventeenth to the twentieth century the continent’s population was much larger in size yet growing at a slower rate than previously thought. In a project that is nearing completion, Scott Nickleach and I, with the assistance of Yun Zhan...

Cette contribution vise à identifier des influences de l'idéologie sur l'histoire écrite de l'Afrique moderne, afin de mieux écrire l'histoire et de mieux critiquer l'histoire écrite. L'importance des distinctions nationales des classes sociales à l'égard de l'établissement de point de vue, et donc de l'idéologie, est soulignée ainsi que le rôle de...

Ce modèle concerne l'impact, au XVIIIe siècle de la traite transatlantique et transsaharienne des esclaves sur la composition et la croissance des populations africaines. L'Afrique est divisée en deux régions exportatrices: la Côte, qui alimente le marché du Nouveau Monde avec des esclaves, en majorité masculine; et l'Intérieur, qui fournit des esc...

Big Data in History introduces the project to create a world-historical archive, tracing the last four centuries of historical dynamics and change. Chapters address the archive's overall plan, how to interpret the past through a global archive, the missions of gathering records, linking local data into global patterns, and exploring the results.

African history and world history each became substantial fields of historical study in the aftermath of the Second World War. African history organized rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, an era dominated by modernization-thinking. World history developed slowly until the 1990s, then quickly expanded and generated institutional homes in a time of glob...

Interdisciplinary cooperation and collaboration have proven to be desirable yet difficult goals to achieve in social science research. The nuanced differences among the domains, frameworks, assumptions, and methods of the various fields of study that comprise such research often hinder attempts to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue that is both m...

This article conveys the vision of a world-historical dataset, constructed in order to provide data on human social affairs at the global level over the past several centuries. The construction of this dataset will allow the routine application of tools developed for analyzing “Big Data” to global, historical analysis. The work is conducted by the...

We welcome readers to the initial issue of JWHI. The journal is part of a broader mission to promote the collection, publication, review, and analysis of world-historical data. It focuses on collaborative discussion across numerous disciplines, in order to bring together the best scholarly minds in the creation of Big Data in history. Its audien...

New techniques in climatology have provided increasingly detailed information on levels and ranges of temperature and moisture at many times in the past. Data come not only from polar cores but from glaciers, caves, lake sediments, and oceanic sediments, so that we have climatological details for many areas of the earth’s surface. In addition, seve...

Dramatic changes of the present suggest to some that we need not worry about the past. But these same changes have revealed important new knowledge about the past and have convinced leading researchers that we are still governed by past processes. Continental drift, genetic change, and social history each show our tight connection to the past. This...

A global historical archive, once created, must be analyzed appropriately. One side of such analysis requires specific techniques of computation and representation to implement analyses. Another side of it requires an appropriate conceptualization of society at the global level, sound application of social science theory, and alternation among mult...

CHIA seeks to stimulate broad and active participation in the collaborative work of building a global historical data resource. To do so, CHIA must carry out the best practices in design, project administration, decentralization, project review, and innovation — and do so across disciplines, institutions, continents, and language groups. The balanc...

Just as knowledge of the past is important to current policy, so also is past practice in data collection important to guiding the work of CHIA. This chapter reviews the past 70 years of work in developing social science datasets, and also the parallel development of modeling in climate and genetics. The narratives of creation of archives and analy...

Historical data, often of great value, lie widely dispersed and in inconsistent forms — previously inaccessible and unreadable. Digitization projects have begun to process historical data, and CHIA provides a way to coordinate this work. Print resources such as the British Parliamentary Papers and archival records from Lisbon, Rome, and Beijing awa...

The CHIA project, still in its early stages, already includes some 25 activities in infrastructure building and data collection. The task of coordinating these collaborative projects becomes more complex with time, but success in collection of data, development of applications to assist in data collection, and even the early interpretive results of...

This book makes the case for expanding the worldwide historical archive now under development through the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA). The opening chapter emphasizes that the time has come for using available technology to create a coherent record of human social change in recent centuries, so as to link patterns of...

This chapter centers on the two key steps prior to analyzing data at the global level: ‘harmonizing’ datasets to prepare them for linkage to one another and ‘aggregation’ to create files of steadily expanded scale, up to global levels in space, time, and topic. Objectives include creating comparable units in time and place, for instance by presenti...

This fully revised and updated second edition of Migration in World History traces the connections among regions brought about by the movement of people, diseases, crops, technology and ideas.

To facilitate study of long-term economic change in African context, this research note lists and describes major existing datasets on Atlantic slave trade, general commerce, national accounts, and demography.

A PROVOCATIVE TOUR THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA - The African Diaspora and the Disciplines. Edited by OlaniyanTejumola and SweetJames H.. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. x+363. $75, hardback (ISBN 978-0-253-35464-8); $27.95, paperback (ISBN 978-0-253-22191-9). - Volume 52 Issue 2 - PATRICK MANNING

This overview emphasizes the gradual incorporation of migration history into the broader field of migration studies. Written for university students, it also raises issues for researchers, as it notes the benefits of comparing and contrasting a wide range of migratory experiences and analytical frameworks. This volume gives principal emphasis to lo...

This article analyses the patterns and dynamics of the global social insurance movement since the 1880s through the framework of . It argues that two principal models of social insurance diffused around the world throughout the twentieth century. It contends that global forces conveyed basic ideas while national forces determined the timing and spe...

Title: The African Diaspora and Modernity” Abstract (164 words): The field of African studies has made extraordinary advances in the last half century, and the African diaspora has become one of the best-studied human dispersions. The African population is over one-eighth of the human total, and adding the diaspora, black people are well over one...

Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standards) moved to nearly every habitable place on the globe. We are their descendants. The Africans never stopped migrating, but they began to do so with parti...

Families, while usually thought of in local terms, also have their global dimension: some families stretch around the world, while families anywhere are affected by worldwide declines in mortality. This study addresses the local and global changes brought to family structures by migration. Through comparisons of five pairs of regions from the early...

I enrolled in the graduate program in History at the University of Wisconsin in January 1957, intending to major in East Asian History. When I met with the Department Chair, he informed me that the professor with that specialty would be on leave for the spring semester. He said that he would assign me to Prof. Phillip Curtin because "he was the onl...

Patrick Manning is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of several works on world history and African history, including Migration in World History (Routledge, 2004). 1. Patrick Manning, "Migration Simulation," www.worldhistorynetwork.org/migrationsim. This simulation portrays three migra...

This volume provides an introductory review of issues in migration, focusing especially on the late twentieth century. The subtitle, "a global view," is shared in ten other volumes in a series on current social issues, including teen violence, child abuse, and women's rights. The nature of the global view, however, is restricted to a scattering of...

Information on historical linguistics can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of early migrations of Homo sapiens within Africa and throughout the world. This essay summarizes the distribution of language groups around the world and applies basic techniques for analyzing the paths of migration associated with language evolution. Th...

Africa Today 52.3 (2006) 120-121 Latin America generally, and Brazil in particular, are increasingly recognizing their African heritage. In contemporary affairs, a consensus is moving toward recognizing the social place of, and the discrimination against, Latin Americans of African ancestry. Similarly, the Lusophone countries in Africa are recogniz...

Studies of world history overlap substantially in their content and analysis with studies set at national, local and other levels. World history is more, however, than the accumulation of local and national knowledge, for it addresses patterns at a larger scale that may not be observable or explicable at more localized levels, and it addresses the...

In 2002, Dirk Hoerder published his magnum opus, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002). In this book, Hoerder describes and analyses, with an unusual breadth of scope, the origins, causes, and extent of human migration around the globe from the eleventh century onward to the present day, paying particular...

Electronic resources, especially the World Wide Web, present important advantages for gendered analysis of the African Diaspora. For topics ranging from patterns of enslavement to current educational issues, this review emphasises the possibilities for crossing regional and linguistic boundaries in gender studies through use of the Internet. With c...

Journal of World History 15.2 (2004) 243-246 In a book that is intended for use by undergraduates yet conveys much in the way of new research results and new interpretation, Ehret defines four major civilizations of Africa according to the four major language groups of African peoples. He shows each of these to have undergone growth and transformat...

Research in African Literatures 35.4 (2004) 172-173 This paperback edition of an important study linking French and African history is a welcome appearance. It provides the best available review of French thinking about race and slavery as it developed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and surveys the application of French ideas in West...

Patrick Manning is professor of history and African-American Studies at Northeastern University. His most recent book is Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

R ECENT studies addressing the ‘African diaspora’ have sought to provide global context for the experience of people of African descent. The two books under review – each a major contribution to studies of the African diaspora – provide an opportunity to take stock of the emerging genre of historical and cultural studies of which they are a part. T...

Revolutionary movements in China and Cuba gained worldwide attention for their attempts to restructure education in the light of new social values. China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and Cuba's Revolutionary Offensive (1968-1970), while developed separately, experimented with remarkably similar programs of integration of workwith study that la...

World history has expanded dramatically in recent years, primarily as a teaching field, and increasingly as a research field. Growing numbers of teachers and Ph.Ds in history are required to teach the subject. They must be current on topics from human evolution to industrial development in Song-dynasty China to today's disease patterns - and then l...

The field of world history continues its spontaneous and somewhat disorderly expansion.1 Should this laissez-faire approach of scholars continue, it will probably allow more such incremental growth and a gradual clarification of the specific contributions that can come from a global approach to history. My experience, however, is that a purposeful...

The legacy of the nineteenth century opened new possibilities and new needs for the interpretation of history. The growth of universities led to expanded studies of the past. In industrializing countries, new presses and broader readership helped create a market for popular histories. The overlapping of multiple transformations—broader communicatio...