REVISITING THE PRESENT

A history of the world, when cogent, holds substantive significance for how the reader is to revisit the present. Furthermore, while a good approach to describing the past may seek to avoid outright predictions, it cannot help but insinuate lines of development into the future.

The discussions I had with Professor Wang Gungwu generally did not go into details specific to each of the regions we touched on. The originality of his ideas certainly reignited my childhood interest in humanity's past. In the months following the completion of the manuscript, I found myself searching red-eyed for history books to deepen my understanding of the issues he brought to my attention and to satisfy the curiosity he so recently reawakened. I now appreciate more than ever how great an impact the past — when properly explained — has on our take on current circumstances.

To summarize, the dialogues revolved around several key points of knowledge. The main argument is that a major actor has often been missing from most understandings of world history, whose impact on human history this side of the Ice Age has been enormous. This is Central Asia, of course, with its particular type of dynamism found in its sustained steppe-based societies.

Civilizational histories have most often been written separately, by largely unconnected peoples found at the Eurasian peripheries, and so it is not strange that they do not always complement each other as narratives. It is through bold perspectives like Professor Wang's, that younger scholars like me are reminded that the parts are not unrelated at all. In fact they are dynamically linked, even if not always in a direct and obvious fashion. Before the global age, global histories were not really possible for want of an empirically global perspective. Even in recent times, most attempts at a global history have been either ideologically or ethnocentrically constructed. By revolving mankind's political history around Central Asian innovativeness and expansionism, Professor Wang weaves a dynamic tapestry upon which events over millennia are easily followed. The didactic power of this approach, to my mind, is simply stunning. The principle of Occam's razor — which prefers the scientific approach that assumes the least complexity — has been well applied by him.