Mexican lesbians, 1688 and all that

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The travel writers may be running out of gimmicks ("Across the Gobi Desert on a Pogo Stick "; " The Quest for my Patagonian Grandmother's Pyjamas", and so on), but the historians are only just beginning.

A few years ago, the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto published a world history of the last millennium, based on the idea of a "galactic museum-keeper", a supremely objective observer from the far-distant future who would put everything in perspective. The history of the world is, it seems, just too unmanageable a subject to handle without the help of some guidance-giving gimmick.

John Wills, a professor at the University of Southern California, has also written a work of "global history", based on a more modest but more gimmicky idea: leaving out 99.9 per cent of the last millennium, he offers a survey of what was happening here, there and everywhere, from China to Peru, in one particular year. Or rather, a scrap-book, not a survey - his aim is not to be systematic, but to pick out anecdotes and portraits, from private life as well as high politics, thereby sampling the sheer variety of human experience worldwide at one particular time.

Calling this a gimmick does not mean that there is anything cheap or shoddy about this work. Wills writes beau-tifully; he has a gift for atmospheric but unpretentious scene-setting, and for the lucid explanation of complex background issues. He is particularly good in his own special field, East Asian history, but no less illuminating on Russia, Latin America or France.

The human characters presented here form an extraordinary collection: a mystical lesbian nun in Mexico, a Greek adventurer inviting French troops into Thailand, an elderly German botanist going blind in Indonesia, and the West Country buccaneer William Dampier observing Aborigines on the northern Australian coast - to say nothing of the ambitious young Peter the Great in Russia, or canny, hard-headed William of Orange, making his play for the English crown.

But what does it all add up to? Professor Wills is curiously coy when it comes to drawing overall conclusions. In one of the very few sentences in the book where he pulls his threads together, he refers to the world of 1688 and "its empires, its scientific breakthroughs and largely traditional technology, its rootedness in the past and earnestness for conciliation and secular improvement, the long continuities and sudden upheavals of European dynastic politics ..." All of which may be true, but would do just as well for 1588, 1788 or any year in between.

Readers who hope for general conclusions will have to formulate them for themselves. The most obvious lesson, as with any work of "global history", is that the sort of history we learned at school turns out to have been terribly narrow and "Euro-centric". Why limit your field of study to Dead White European Men, when you could be learning about dead Chinese Emperors or Mexican lesbians?

But the most fascinating thing about this book is that it contains another, very different, lesson, which casual readers may never even pause to think about. The best way to reach this hidden truth is to ask this simple question: what makes the "world history" of 1688 the history of a single world?

It's obvious that in 2001 Indonesians and Americans live in the same human world: they can see one another on CNN. And it's obvious that in, say, the 7th century AD the people of Java and Massachusetts were not living in the same world, except in the purely geographical sense: either of those populations might have been living on the moon for all the difference it made to the other one.

The reason why this book works - an unstated reason, but a powerful one - is that by the late-17th century we begin to see the emergence of a global system, even a global society. And what was it that made that happen? The extraordinary vitality (technological, political and financial) of western Europe. Without the sailors, traders, missionaries and scientists of Spain, France, England and Holland, this book could never have been written: most of the documents would not exist, and the few stories that could be told about the far corners of the earth would have nothing to connect them. Like it or not, "global history" has to be Eurocentric after all.