Preliminary Contributions of H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History: Elements of Social Evolutionary History and Contemporary World History

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the book The Outline of History, published in 1919 by the English writer H.G. Wells, as representative of a historical writing genre, defined by Doris S. Goldstein as social evolutionary history. This genre had its first manifestations in the late nineteenth century, after the repercussion of Darwinian theories on some historical works, but gained more precise contours in the first decades of the twentieth century with Wells's book, the most representative of the so-called social evolutionary history. These early manifestations were retaken in new approaches in the second half of the twentieth century with the emergence of World History, corroborated by scientific discoveries in various fields of natural sciences and better grounded in their aspirations to articulate elements of evolutionary biology in the analysis of the historical process. Finally, we suggest that in Wells’s The Outline of History some elements that articulate World History are already present, such as the choice for a cosmic temporal scale associated with historical temporality itself and the criticism of national borders as artificial conventions, which hinder the development of a broader historical rationale regarding global issues.