Analytical Concepts for Transcultural Settings (original) (raw)
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This seminar offers a cursory overview of recent approaches to global history. By discussing writings and research widely drawn upon by global historians, the seminar provides students with a toolkit for understanding better the last decades' turn away from nation-centered ways of seeing history, which have given way to histories focusing on the movements of people, goods, and ideas across boundaries and on how these movements have been determinants of historical change. The seminar situates global history within related fields, such as transnational history or imperial history. It is also designed to guide students in the exploration of their particular research interests to be followed during the second year of this MA.
On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely the conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. The central question was to what extent this fastchanging field required adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses in particular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yet reconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities. In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have been ordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles profiting from peripheral spaces, for example —and imposed by certain groups of people on others, resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenous peoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples or areas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where does globalization end?
Approaching (Global) History as a Discipline
Seminar Syllabus, 2020
Global history takes the connectedness of the world as its point of departure and therefore thrives on the diversity of disciplinary backgrounds of its practitioners. As a historically contingent academic field, global history is premised upon developments and critiques that arose when the discipline of history realized the challenges of global integration. This happened as a long and complex process, which makes finding your way into global history especially difficult for students who have not completed previous degrees in history. Therefore, this course is designed for those who feel they are new and maybe slightly uneasy with the "who is who" and "what is what" of history. Structured along a rough chronology, we will explore the history of history, from the likes of Ranke and Braudel to the cultural, linguistic and other important "turns" that reshaped the discipline and are the fundamental prehistory of global history. Along with this exploration of some of the main intellectual currents of history's history, the course will familiarize students with the practice of history and its heuristic methods.
Concepts and Sources of Global History
Global History has become a vibrant field of historical research in recent years. But what exactly distinguishes Global History, on a conceptual level, from other modes of historical inquiry? And what characterizes research in Global History on an empirical level? The aim of this fortnightly research colloquium is to provide a forum for young researches to discuss these questions in a collegial and non-competitive environment. The first half of the semester is devoted to discussing and comparing programmatic texts from the field of Global History. The second half of the semester will take on the form of workshops. Young scholars are invited to present source materials from their ongoing projects. The aim is to trigger mutual reflections on which particular approaches to Global History are suited for the respective research questions, and to examine how ‘the global’ can be uncovered in these source materials.
The article identifies an imbalance in the attention given to global history’s two fundamental objectives, the focus hitherto having fallen more on the study of cross-border connections than on the vaunted decentring of historiographical perspective. The example of the modern history of the prison serves to illustrate some basic problems faced by efforts to identify cross-border transfers and assess their historical significance for local, national or regional developments. The need for a decentring of historiographical perspectives is illustrated firstly by reference to the fact that, contrary to the established narrative, the globalization of the prison was a process characterized by a multiplicity of shifting centres. To help grasp such global processes it proposes the concept of a multiple “frame of references”. Secondly, the article emphasizes the importance to global historical research, alongside attention to transfers, of the comparative approach. Deploying the distinction between “hard” and “soft” versions of global history, it finally distinguishes between polycentric global history and global history still written from the standpoint of area history, only the former properly engaging with the globality of historical phenomena.
The Prospects of Global History: Personal Reflections of an Old Believer
International Review of Social History
Global history seems to be the history for our times. Huge syntheses such as the seven-volume Cambridge World History or the six-volume A History of the World suggest the field has come to fruition. Robert Moore, in his contribution to the book under review, The Prospect of Global History, is quite confident in this respect: if there is a single reason for “the rise of world history”, it is “the collapse of every alternative paradigm” (pp. 84–85). As early as 2012, the journal Itinerario published an interview with David Armitage with the title “Are We All Global Historians Now?” That may have been provocative but Armitage obliged by claiming “the hegemony of national historiography is over”.
Global History and International Relations
Carta Internacional
The Post-Cold War world order fueled discussions in the field of Humanities on theoretical and methodological resources in the very attempt to understand and explain the increasingly multi-polarized and complex international system. While considering the field of History — especially in its attempt to theoretically and methodologically cross borders — and while being active in the field of International Relations, we see possibilities of fruitful encounters between both areas of research, particularly when it comes to recent discussions on what came to be called in the 1990s “global history”. The article initially presents a conceptual definition of global history; then moves on to underpin its claim that History and IR areentangled disciplines that, despite different theoretical points of departure, not only share similar basic assumptions (state-centrism and the Western intellectual framework of thought) but also have been sharing similar intellectual preoccupations. In the third ...
Claiming histories beyond nations: Situating global history
Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2012
History is conventionally imagined and narrated in the context of the nation, relating its stories and shaped by its imaginaries. To the extent the latter are selectively re-encoded into seemingly wider scales or spaces of historical narration, projects such as global history may be said to be oxymorons. Historians in the post-colonial world have also long been aware of the
Journal of Global History
Notions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems th...