Abstract
In most history departments on the European continent Europe is History while the history of other regions only can be described as “area studies.” This paper investigates the long-term origins of these attitudes, since Humanism and the Enlightenment, down to Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries forms of history writing. It finally suggests to overcome area studies and decentralise social sciences.
 
 Image Caption: Giovanni Maria Cassini, Globo terrestre, in Nuovo atlante geografico universale delineato sulle ultime osservazioni (Rome, 1790). © 2000 by Cartography Associates, under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence.
Highlights
In 1949, Fernand Braudel proposed a view of the Mediterranean in which part of the Muslim World appeared integral to Europe
At the very moment when, after the Second World War, Europe was reflecting on its unity and the idea of pan-European institutions was first conceived, Braudel did not think of Europe as stretching only from the northern Mediterranean shores of the North Sea
He emphasized the unity of the Mediterranean Sea and the structural compenetration of Muslim and Christian societies with their respective values, despite the multiple conflicts that had opposed them over the centuries
Summary
The identification of sources, and general philosophies of history have been major historical expressions of the idea of Europe, as well as an important venue for thinking about the way “Europe” refers to and interacts with other, distinct worlds. Reflexivity, and philological analysis of some European sources discussing “China” are bound together in a new variation of “global history,” as it is presented, which seeks to counter the postures of both Chakrabarty and scholars active in area studies. The danger of this approach, is to go back to conventional Eurocentrism under a new garb. All these attitudes together would have a major impact after the collapse of the Soviet Union on the building of the European Union in the age of globalization
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