global history

national history domination

National histories predominate in school curriculums. University history departments around mid-20th century still dominated by national histories, histories of the west.

origins of global history

Decolonisation pushes back at European empires and generates dozens of new nation-states in Asia and Africa.

• World enters stage of 'globalisation' - increase in movement and circulation of people, things, money across borders and growing connection across places.

• Growing awareness of global history.

global history idea of connection

Thinking about Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution in global terms - new enlightenment era terms of knowledge (free trade, comparative religion) were inseparable to enlightenment era voyages which gave Europeans idea that they were living in an interconnected world.

• Sebastian Conrad argues that connection not sufficient, eg global diffusion of Karl Marx. Marx's writings moved beyond European context originally written to other nations eg Vietnam, China in mid 19th to early 20th century. Was the conditions in Vietnam which made these texts important, eg capitalist relations.

global history idea of causality

need to identify what caused connections to become important.

• Causality itself has to be understood in global perspective.

• Study commodities and how they integrate/connect many places.

• People and things that did not travel are also appropriate subjects for global history. Inability to move can be considered result of global processes.

disadvantages of global history

• Resource intensive, often requires lots of travelling.

• Question of passport privilege.

• Anglocentrism of today's global history.

• Digitization reduces need for travel, but are digitization initiatives actually globally representative?

• Eg German state of Hesse has digitized more newspapers than the entire Arabic-Speaking world.

conrad view of world history

Usually follow a macro agenda.

• Are world histories of specific topics eg empire, state-formation, sugar, tea.

• Main focus in older world histories was different trajectories of civilisations.

• Eurocentric bias a common feature of world histories.

conrad features of global history

takes the best of what traditional world history has to offer and combining it with a sensitivity for more flexible and fluid dimensions of historical change.

• Focus on transfers and interactions - mobility of goods, migration, transfer of ideas, all processes which help produce the globalised world in which we live.

• Experiment with alternative notions of space - dont take political or cultural units ie empires, civilisations, as their points of departure but rather pose analytical questions.

conrad focuses of global history

• Are inherently relational - a historical unit does not develop in isolation but can only be understood through its interactions with others.

• Forms part of the larger 'spatial turn' - pay particular attention to the way individuals and societies interact with others.

• Often self-reflective on the issue of Eurocentrism - defining feature which sets it apart from older variants of world history writing.

• Focus on large forms of structured transformation and integration sets global history apart from other approaches.

conrad competing narratives

World history, postcolonialism, multiple modernity and global history cannot be separated, but overlap.

• Eg human rights - standard world history perspective would argue that the rights of man have a European genealogy, have global reach from French Revolution.

• Global history of human rights focus on emergence of human rights as a global discourse.

  • Historians have placed emphasis less on the French Revolution and more on the appropriation and universalisation of a language of rights in Haiti a few years later, when exploring global scope of human rights.

david, richard, singaravelou global history specificities

One of the specificities of global history lies in its emphasis on connections and interactions across borders:

• Need to focus on the circulation of people, ideas, and goods between regions.

• Historiographies that can be described as global allow us to better understand the genealogy of inequalities between the different regions of the planet.

david, richard, singaravelou conditions of global history

• Political - historiographies have flourished in liberal democracies, whereas authoritarian regimes focus on promotion a national narrative, which leads dissenting historians to address different research agendas.

• Economic situation - writing global history almost a luxury for researchers in the richest countries.

• In order to address these inequalities, collaborations between researchers from all across the world are essential.

david, richard, singaravelou status of global history in academic world

Pakistan - still a developing and nascent subfield. What passes off for global history is often international history that is more concerned with history of other regions/countries than it is with question of connections and flows that exceed and cut across national borders.

• History still geared around questions that are of national importance - creating a nationalised history a pressing educational task for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh

• United States - dynamic field of historical study in US, small but growing place within curriculum, animated research. Articles within the field are sought after by historical journals, major academic publishers have begun to publish series of books dedicated to research in the field.

• In Chile/Latin America - people state they are working on global history but we can question whether it actually is global history or rather connected, transnational etc history. Are not many courses on global history.

david, richard, singaravelou conditions to research global history

Latin America - difficult conditions since dependent on possibility of going to foreign archives, digital archives still very limited.

• Africa - very difficult conditions, often nearly impossible to secure funding for a global research project.

• Even within the United States, significant disparities exist between elite universities with extraordinary resources and other institutions where scholars are burdened by heavy teaching loads and a lack of research funding.

cooper meaning of global in relation to africa

Implication of 'global' is that a single system of connection has penetrated the entire globe.

• Historical depth and interconnections and focus on what the structures and limits of connecting mechanisms are all missing in discussions of globalization.

• The very notion of Africa has been shaped for centuries by linkages within the continent and across oceans and deserts - the Atlantic slave trade, the movement of pilgrims, religious networks, cultural and economic conditions.

• To study Africa is to appreciate the long-term importance of the exercise of power across space, but also the limitations of such power.

cooper opposition to globalisation

globalization is not a useful analytical category:

• Scholars who use it analytically risk being trapped in the structures they wish to analyse.

• That global should be contrasted with local only underscores the inadequacy of current analytical tools to analyse anything in between - eg networks, social fields, diasporas that have specific boundaries and mechanisms.

• Globalization treated as a self-propelled process that just happens - masks the specific institutional mechanisms eg military, corporate power, which drive connections.

cooper solution to globalisation being inadequate

Advocates for a more discerning vocabulary - focusing on networks, social fields, and diasporas to analyse the specific mechanisms and inherent limits of cross-border processes without assuming they are universal in scale.

karl nationalism in china

During 19th/20th centuries, certain central concepts came to constitute a discourse of nationalism in China:

• China's situation at the turn of the 20th century was conceptually linked to the world around it.

• Particularly linked to emergent nationalist and anticolonial movements in the non-Euro-American world of the time.

• These linkages were ultimately ephemeral, but it was a growing Chinese sense of identification with the non-Euro-American world at the turn of the century that initially made the modern world visible as a structured totality.

karl on why chinese nationalism a global thing

Concept-formation was created by newly articulated relationships between global and national space, between revolutionary process and imperialist/nationalist ideology, and between ethnicity, citizenship, and nationality.

• Karl focuses on historical formation of a non-Euro-American consciousness of globality from the Chinese perspective.

• The formation of Chinese nationalism can only appear as part of a global historical problematic - a theoretical entity which must be grasped in a different way from the traditional representational or philosophical one.

drayton, motadel critics of global history

Critics of global history argue it neglects national history and the small spaces of the past:

• David Bell argues that specific locales like Revolutionary Paris act as "laboratories of change" whose internal radicalization cannot be explained by global backgrounds alone.

• Jeremy Adelman warns against over-claiming the power of "connection," noting that global interactions can lead to "detachment, aversion, [and] withdrawal" rather than just integration and concord.

drayton, motadel opposing critics of global history

Global history is intertwined with the histories of the national and local, individuals, subalterns, and small and isolated places.

• Global micro-history - is a growing field that uses individuals and families as lenses to understand global phenomena.

• Eg Natalie Zemon-Davis examined the "odyssey" of Leo Africanus, a 16th-century Berber geographer who moved between different cultural worlds.

• Should study how even "rooted" or "isolated" actors—those who do not move—are profoundly shaped by global influences, such as the flow of commodities like tobacco or silver.

drayton, motadel on global history being important in political age

modern nationalisms are themselves a product of global connections and responses to globalization. Fundamentalist movements and jihads of the last century were reactions to increased connectivity rather than retreats into isolation.

• Global history is a political necessity in an age of populist nationalism.

• Serves to challenge false memories of national grandeur that underpin xenophobic politics.

• By mapping the past from the perspective of "humanity as a whole," global history aims to foster international citizenship and a sense of shared global destiny in the face of challenges like global warming and pandemics.

drayton, motadel limitations of global history

remains institutionally 'small and weak' within the broader discipline of history:

• National history remains the dominant form of historical inquiry worldwide - vast majority of university professorships, academic journals, and popular bestseller lists are still dedicated to national narratives rather than global ones.

• Extra-European history often remains at the margins of history departments, where national and European history continue to hold central positions.

• Resource and accessibility barriers.

• Lack of specialized representation.