From Universal History to Transregional Perspectives: The Challenge of the Cultural and Spatial Turn to World and Global History in the 1970s and Today

Abstract

The article reconstructs the development of global history since the crisis of universal history in the 1970s, which under the weight of poststructuralist arguments had almost brought world history writing to a standstill. In contrast, the new approach, now labelled global history, which had taken up many of the suggestions of the cultural and spatial turn and coincided with the social interest in global connectivity, developed into an extraordinarily attractive form of historiography. Since the mid-2010s, however, criticism has been on the rise again, pointing to an inherent ideological globalism and a problematic narrowing towards an Anglo-Saxon model of globalization. However, this is countered by new approaches that once again recall the fruitful dialogue with cultural history, political geography, and area studies.