Decentering European History from the Margins

Abstract

Abstract The article considers the global historiography of Europe from two angles. First it outlines the difficulties, both historical and epistemological, that Europe poses as an object of study, especially after the historiographical transformations prompted by the events of 1989, the rise of postcolonial studies, the growing critique of Eurocentrism, and, most recently, the “global turn.” The conceptions of Europe that emerge from these currents have often been based on a rather homogenized vision of the continent, centered on the great nation-states of western Europe and their imperial policies. They also perpetuate, even as they criticize it, the legacy of a conception of modernity that positions Europe as both its historical center and the agent of its expansion on a global scale. The second part of the paper proposes to limit the blind spots inherent in this kind of vision by shifting our gaze to the eastern and Balkan margins of Europe, where the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires intersected over the “long” nineteenth century. This change of perspective displaces the history of Europe’s connection to modernity, revealing the great diversity of local actors, the importance of multicultural and pluriethnic societies, and the particular role of transnational populations such as Jews, who, while negotiating their own relationship to a European modernity, escaped the grip of national movements.