Global Dimensions of European History Conference Report (Sept 2016) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Prospect of Global History
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2016
Originating in a 2012 conference at the University of Oxford on 'New Directions in Global History,' The Prospect of Global History inaugurates 'a new series in global history.' While not exactly a manifesto, its tone is programmatic. The most conspicuous feature of this collection of eleven essays (including a robust 'Introduction' and an 'Afterword') is the unapologetically deep chronological coverage, which spans antiquity and the 'Middle Ages,' alongside the early modern and modern eras. The inclusion of the premodern within the remit of global history is not unprecedented, but remains unusual enough to cause, by itself, a reassessment of current methodological and geographical perspectives. This volume is addressed to two constituencies, that is, to both global historians and historians of premodern societies, and invites them to engage with each another's work. The editors' effort, in the 'Introduction,' to offer a typology of approaches to global history results in a schematic grid, within which the volume's essays fit comfortably. The first approach they identify is the 'history of globalization', characterized by distinct 'vectors of connectivity'-diffusion, outreach, dispersal, expansion, attraction, nodality. The second approach is 'comparative history,' including histories of 'divergence.' The third approach is a history of 'connectedness,' mobility, networks, and nodal points. (John Darwin's 'Afterword' recombines most elements to offer a slightly different typology.
Europe's Links to Classical Antiquity and the World
thememorybank.co.uk, 2023
The empirical focus of this essay comes from two amateur projects aimed at blowing up nationalist history: the "blackness" of the first British; and the Norman conquest of England and the crusades that soon followed. Both topics, even in the sketchy manner they are presented here, are unknown to the reading public. **** We live in an interconnected world where inequality is often expressed as a claim to be exclusive and superior made by religions, nationalities, ethnicities, races and so on. Either humanity will make a viable world society in this century or there won’t be a 22nd. A major obstacle to this is an approach to history that puts one group so much into the foreground as to marginalize all the rest. Britain, Europe and the Mediterranean were always part of the larger world, as we are now. **** The kind of nationalist history promoted by Brexit and the US Republicans prevents citizens of the two Anglo empires from understanding the world they live in. Somehow—and academic specialization may be an obstacle to this—we must develop more inclusive narratives that tell our shared history as it is, not as it is currently supposed to be.
ABSTRACT Through the prism of objects and material culture, the workshop intends to highlight broad patterns of transregional circulation of people and goods crossing the borders of the Ottoman, Venetian, Russian and Habsburg Empires. The papers will present and discuss a wide variety of unpublished textual and visual sources related to luxury consumption, fashion and dress codes; diplomatic and political exchanges; dowry contracts and travel journals. New light is shed on networks of agents, merchants and diplomats negotiating the self-fashioning of local elites whose identities are shaped by linguistic, cultural and religious practices. The workshop aims at rethinking broader interpretive categories and challenges issues of Ottomanization and Westernization, as well as linear processes of modernization and change.
European History and Early Modern Globalization (History Workshop Journal, 2017)
[In lieu of an abstract, here's the opening of the essay:] Feeling ostracized from society and persecuted for his beliefs, the great and troubled philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau took many long walks through the Swiss countryside where he lived later in life. On a hike in 1765, he searched for solace in the remote mountains and valleys west of Lake Neuchâtel. Passing through dense black pines and fallen beech trees, he entered an isolated area that felt like another world. Rousseau bounded over boulders, lay down on his stomach to peer over precipices, and watched hawks and osprey fly above. He observed the plants around him and collected specimens of toothwort, club moss, laserwort and sowbread. Sitting down in a clearing, his mind wandered as he lost himself in his surroundings. As he recounted in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, it was just at this moment – immediately after deciding that he was like a new Columbus discovering an unknown land – that he heard a familiar clanking. The sound repeated and became louder. Investigating, he pushed through a thicket of brush to find that a mere twenty feet from where he had been sitting in wild contemplation was a stocking mill. Rousseau’s tale captures a well-known concern of European writers at the time, while also opening up a small window onto a less-known historical vista. Like the Romantic authors who would succeed him, Rousseau explored the paradox of progress and the tension that resulted from the longing to be at one with nature in a quickly developing Europe on the eve of industrialization. But Rousseau’s stocking mill was not simply a case of town invading country. It was also a case of distant forces of production, trade, and consumption beginning to remodel the landscape and the ways of life in even the most inland and remote corners of Europe. The anecdote reflects the way that realms of existence and zones of activity once thought distinct and distant were beginning to collide and intertwine in unexpected ways in the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s reverie about this remote and pastoral landscape is not only a sign of the Romanticism to come. If placed in the right context, we can see that it is also a sign of the early modern globalization that began in the seventeenth century. ... (a long review essay of Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground) https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbx015/3066161/European-History-and-Early-Modern-Globalization?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Setting the Starting Line of Global History: The Case for 1400
2016
Recent decades have seen a move away from traditional narratives of the “rise of the West” in History courses and publications, and toward a “Global History” paradigm. This paper provides an overview of this shift and the issues at stake before making the case for ca. 1400 as a good chronological starting point for Global History courses and textbooks. Starting the narrative here provides a crucial fifteenth-century context of nomadic empires and crusading religious ecumenes, which not only enriches understanding of the more extensive global connections to follow, but also opens the narrative of globalization at a moment when it was by no means obvious or inevitable that Europe would come to dominate the globe.
The contributions to this volume are united by a common interest in the practices that shaped 'science' in the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the ones bred by the emulation, competition, and conflict that encounters across the globe between different cultural and political entities generated. What it attempts is not simply another contribution to the relatively recent but already respectable tradition of 'science and empire.' Rather than adding further nuance to our understanding of the routes in which the negotiations of knowledge between metropolises and provinces ultimately tended to determine the course of Europe's rise to world hegemony, or of the local dimension of western knowledge production, the volume takes a 'decentered' look at early modern empires. There are various ways in which such a 'decentering' approach is carried out in the individual contributions. All the chapters deal with European empires, but the angle from which this is pursued has been marked out by the lessons drawn from the non-Eurocentric studies referred to below. This focus is the result of both a contingency and of a state of the art: the contingency derives from the fact that most of the contributors are specialists of European empires; but, on the other side, we may acknowledge with regard to the period under consideration that historiography is still highly unbalanced. This is true not only if we compare European and non-European empires, but also if we pay attention to Europe itself, where the divide between the western and the eastern part of the continent has been overstressed by the 'great divergence' between western and eastern historiographies throughout the twentieth century. To some extent, this is one of the novelties of the volume: it builds upon an unconventional geographical set of cases, embracing the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, as well as China.
2006
It is with a great deal of pride and pleasure that we are publishing the fifth publication of the Athens Institute for Education and Research in the field of historical studies. It is a collection of essays from the Institute’s Third International Conference on European History, held in Athens on December 28 and 30, 2005. For the last three years, the inclusion of an annual history conference in December has filled a lacuna in the conference and publication activities of the Athens Institute. While some would consider history to be a superfluous discipline without application to the present and future, we at the Athens Institute consider it essential to knowledge and understanding in the social sciences, education, the media, and the humanities. Consciously and unconsciously we scholars in other disciplines often use past experiences as frames of reference for the study of current and future trends in our investigations of state, society, economy and culture. Historians dare to continue the research of past developments, not only recording events and trends, but also interpreting and reinterpreting them using both traditional and innovative methodologies. Good historians, like good social scientists, conduct their research in the philosophical search for the truth. While the passage of time and the accumulation of events often make this search elusive, historians nevertheless persevere in asking basic questions such as: What really happened? What significance did it have? How should we view the past? In pursuing these and other questions in studying the broad flows or narrow rivulets of history, historians are conducting an important service not only to other scholars but also to humankind in general. They are providing us with a collective memory. Just as an individual who loses his memory is lost, so too communities, societies, nations, and humankind would be lost without a memory; that is, a collective view of the past, which historians provide. All knowledge can be used for good or ill. History, at its worst, can be misused to whip up national, class or ethnic animosities, to foster chauvinism and racism, or to further specific ideologies. At its best, however, history can serve as both an unbiased tapestry of the past, in which we can view the successes and failures of our ancestors and thus gain an understanding of our present condition. Most historians do not believe that their discipline can be used to make specific decisions or policies for the present or future. Instead, they believe that history provides broad counsel on the past experiences of human states, societies, economies and cultures which can be applied in the present only with the understanding of human behaviour. The past cannot be reduced down to formulae or maxims. The scholars who have presented papers at this conference and have contributed essays to this volume provide us with a multifaceted mosaic of ancient and modern history of this, the European continent. They include studies of culture such as architecture, art, drama, literature, and philosophy. They also include investigations into the political, social and economic events and trends of the European past. In organizing our third historical conference and publishing its third collection of historical studies, the Athens Institute for Education and Research had the help of a number of groups and individuals. As director of the institute, I wish to thank the Athens Cultural Centre of the Municipality of Athens for co-organizing the conference and providing its venue. Gratitude must also go to the General Secretariat for the Olympic Games of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and to the Greek National Tourist Organization for their kind sponsorship of the event. I also wish thank the Scientific and Organizing Committee of the Conference, consisting of scholars from Greece, the United Kingdom and the United States for their efforts in making this conference a success. I also wish to thank the regular and volunteer staff of the Athens Institute for Education and Research for their hours of hard work in the preparation, the implementation, and the subsequent work of our first historical conference. And finally, I would like to thank Professor Nicholas Pappas, for agreeing to edit and prepare this present volume for publication.