Henk Wesseling’s essay on Overseas History basically deconstructs traditional paradigms of history, which, according to the author have conventionally focused on ethnocentrism, militarism, and imperialism as a means of understanding history. However, in a non-colonial world, one which continues to increase its similarity of economic systems and de-emphasize national boundaries, history is more appropriately viewed from an economic perspective in modern times. As Huizinga wrote, “Our civilization is the first to have for its past the past of the world, our history is the first to be world history” (Wesseling 89). What this means is that American history is not a history based on us versus them, or, rather, one whose only history of “them” comes from “us”, as was typical with European history and the non-European peoples it chronicled.
Too often in history, history has been written only by the winners, i.e., the imperialist forces wrote their own history and the history of those they conquered. In fact, as Wesseling (74) argues, most colonial peoples were considered through Euro-centric perspectives, “Most historians see the Asiatic world through the eyes of the Dutch ruler: from the deck of the ship, the rampart of the fortress, the high gallery of the trading house.” The decline of colonialism and the emergence of America and capitalism as a dominant world economic system made a focus on national boundaries, ethnocentrism, and imperialism insignificant. All too often, histories focusing on these concepts were imposed upon nations who were considered to have a primitive at best history before European influence.
However, an increasingly global marketplace made up of independent nations created an interdependent relationship among nations that dissolved traditional historical perspectives. Instead, since the 16th century, all the necessary mechanism of capitalism were in pla
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