History of the World Part II

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Mel Brooks returns with a new Hulu series over 40 years in the making, "History of the World Part II." The eight half-hour episodes offer more comedy sketches that span ancient and modern times, from the Old Testament to the French Revolution. Brooks is joined by a huge cast of contemporary comedians, led by Nick Kroll, Ike Barinholtz and Wanda Sykes, among others. But is the show worth your time?

The earliest sketch depicts cavemen, who are awestruck by their own magnificence. Other intermediate skits reenact the giving of the Ten Commandments, the Last Supper and a sword-and-sandal epic. Other vignettes show Moses receiving the tablets of the Torah, a madcap Rome under Emperor Nero and his wife Nympho, and Madame Defarge fomenting revolution in France.

By the 20th century, historians had developed a number of different approaches to world history. Fernand Braudel's magisterial La Mediterranee et le monde a l'epoque de Philippe II (1949; The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) had an environmental component that made it distinctively world historical.

More recently, the scholarly movement known as subaltern history has challenged the possibility of a master narrative of world history. Instead, subaltern scholars see a postmodern world with a congeries of national and tribal histories that lack conventional narrative closures. This approach differs from Marxism, which saw a teleological path to the kingdom of necessity for all humanity. But it may provide more of a sense of global interconnectedness than the exaltation of nationalism that was so fashionable in 19th-century historiography.