Historiography of the Other: Global History and the Indigenous Pasts of Taiwan

This volume gathers a selection of the papers presented at the conference of the Association of European Historians of Latin America (Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos, AHILA) held in 2014. The conference tackled multiple questions concerning the ‘global turn’ in historiography, such as the impacts of current globalisation and global history on historiography and the place of national histories in these contexts. More specifically, the volume also aims to focus the relations between Europe and Latin America in the production of global historical knowledge. The volume is arranged in four sections, each of them with four, five, two and three chapters, respectively. The first section, ‘History in Uncertain Times’, opens with a lecture by Reinhart Koselleck on the 50th anniversary of its delivery (1970) on ‘What History Is Still Good For’ and is followed by three pieces pointing in three different directions. In ‘Clio: The Names of History’, François Hartog concludes that we transitioned from a Eurocentric History, with capital H, to multiple histories, with lower-case h, which no longer are being drafted in Europe alone. Karl Schlögel explores space after the ‘spatial turn’ highlighting the tension between the narrative structure that privileges diachronic time and the global perspectives that focus on synchronicity. Finally, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht ponders on the contemporary meaning of ‘Universal Literature’ stressing the tension between the local focus of literary works and their global reverberations. The second section, titled ‘Approaches to History in Times of Globalization’, is more coherent than the first one as its four first chapters gravitate towards the concept of globalisation. In ‘Globalization and Global History’, George Zeidan Araújo points towards the pitfalls of Global History such as superficiality and under-conceptualisation, as well as its blurred demarcation from world, transnational and international history. Fábio Franzini focuses on the experiences of Brazilian historians' engagements in historiographical discussions as the necessary backdrop for understanding the challenge of their handling of the global turn. In the longest (more than double the average length) and most informative chapter of the volume Juan Andrés Bresciano provides the most clear, analytic and systematic mapping of the emerging field Global History and some of its cognate fields, such as World History, the History of Globalization and the World System Approach. In commending this chapter, I admit my bias, as Bresciano's classification is surprisingly similar to my own. The last two chapters in this section diverge from the historiographical focus of the previous ones. Lizette Mora offers a theoretical piece (which may have been better placed in the next section) on multiplicity in historiography as a symptom of global capitalism and Luis Ferla touches on a few aspects of digital humanities. In the third section, dedicated to ‘Globalization, Philosophy, History, and Anthropology’, Francine Iegelski confronts the historiographical projects of Koselleck and Hartog with the anthropology of Viveiros de Castro and Lévi-Strauss, as well as the concept of modernity with indigenist perspectives. Federico Navarrete Linares outlines three procedures to articulate an indigenous ‘cosmohistory’ that defies the Western linear ‘monohistory’. In connecting with the works of Koselleck and Hartog, these two chapters provide the volume with a degree of coherence, which otherwise is less apparent. The final section on ‘Global History in Movement’ presents the works of Stefan Rinke and the volume editors, Ingrid Simson and Guillermo Zermeño Padilla. Rinke explores the relationship between Area Studies and Global History by advancing the idea of Latin American history as a bridge between the two. Simson advances another idea: incorporating fictional components into the historical narrative, given that this is all history can provide, namely, a narrative. Finally, Zermeño Padilla summarises some aspects of the collective research project on Iberconcepts, the uses of the same political concepts such as libertad, nación and pueblo in the Spanish-speaking world, as a case in point of global simultaneity. The time lag between the celebration of a conference and the publication of its papers is always a drawback as many assertions made in 2014 may be dated, as is the case here, for instance, on the clarity with which the field of Global History has been defined so far. The volume offers more diversity of perspective than a cohesive horizon. Its diversity includes multidisciplinarity, thematic variety, and the geographical spread of its authors across parts of the Atlantic basin. These are some of the merits that make it a welcomed addition to the ongoing multi-perspectival takes on Global History and the relationship between contemporary globalisation and historiography.

Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum

Reviewed by: Circulations in the Global History of Art ed. by Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel Anne Ring Petersen Circulations in the Global History of Art. Edited by thomas dacosta kaufmann, catherine dossin, and béatrice joyeux-prunel. New York: Routledge, 2016. 247pp. $109.95 (cloth), $90.02 (ebook). Historical interest in cultural circulation and exchange has increased in the 2000s. In recent years, this interest in the “globalization” of cultures has also spread to the specialized field of art history, which has seen a proliferation of writings on “world art history,” “global art history,” and the worldwide spread of the discipline of art history itself. In this emerging field of comparative historical studies in the visual arts, the volume Circulations in the Global History of Art stands out with its determined rejection of the nation as the privileged unit of analysis and its cogent emphasis on processes and connections among cultures. As the title suggests, the book’s leading concept is “circulation.” The introduction by editors Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, all leading scholars of global art history, provides a substantial account of the historical background of the recent explorations of circulation in global art history. The book brings together the work of historians and art historians from the United States, France, Germany, and Poland, thus presenting a broad range of Western approaches. It includes specialized case studies of different periods, regions, and objects, and covers a variety of methodological and historiographical issues related to circulation and globalization. In his illuminating discussion of the historiography pertaining to global and world art history, Kaufmann traces how much of the early methodology for the study of intercultural artistic circulation was rooted in the discipline of history, specifically German Historicism of the nineteenth century and the work of the French Annales School in the twentieth century. The book also links the two disciplines by including chapters by three historians who have contributed significantly to the development of new approaches to history in the context of a postcolonial, globalized world, such as Entangled or Global History and Transnational History: Michel Espagne, Serge Gruzinski, and Christophe Charle. The subsequent chapters demonstrate how circulatory approaches may help us revise the usual frames and tropes of (art) historical narratives. Even if the authors take most of their empirical examples from the histories of the fine and applied arts, their revisionist approaches may also inspire historians working with (visual) historical documents and intercultural comparative perspectives in other fields, because the contributors all insist on the inseparable bond between theory and [End Page 172] methodological self-reflection, on the one hand, and the practice of historical analysis, on the other. The strong emphasis on history in this book is a much-needed anti-dote to the pervasive presentism in global art studies, which holds that we live in the first truly global age—a presentism that is partly explained by the fact that much current debate relates to contemporary art. Kaufmann rightly insists on globalizing moments before circa 1800 and on the fact that art has always depended on trade, markets, and conquest for dissemination of objects over distances and for cultural transfer, appropriation, and assimilation in other geopolitical contexts. As Espagne observes in his impressive historical overview, there are many important examples of this, such as the Silk Road, the Portuguese spice route, and Constantinople as a commercial “contact zone” between Turkey and Europe, Christian and Muslim cultures. One of the principal causes of globalization before circa 1800 is of course colonization. In his illuminating chapter on the worldwide diffusion of art and culture from Spain, Portugal, and, to a lesser extent, Italy between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity, Gruzinski convincingly argues that the idea of “Western” art was born in translation, so to speak. The notions of “Western” art, philosopy, and culture were products of colonial encounters with other cultures, suggests Gruzinski: “A ‘Western’ art began to beat out a path for itself, starting from the workshops opened in Mexico, Lima, Quito, Gao, and Nagasaki” (p. 51). In other words, “Western” art emerged with the distribution and adaptation of European cultural products and...

Human societies have always depended upon minerals. Even a cursory glance at any world history textbook reveals the centrality of minerals—and thus mining—in forging human cultures in antiquity. The stone age, the bronze age, the iron age—each of these complex periods are, in part, defined by the increasing human engagement with the minerals used to characterize them. In the history of the United States, mineral extraction has also been fundamental to the nature and evolution of the nation, as well as its colonial and Indigenous pasts. It was present in Native American societies prior to European contact, accelerated with European colonization, became foundational with the advent of the industrial revolution, was renegotiated with the rise of the environmental movement, and has influenced the United States’ relationship with many parts of the world. As these developments have unfolded, mining and mineral use have radically altered the natural world and profoundly shaped people’s relationships with the environment and with one another.

The history of globalisation is anything but a no-frills affair that moves smoothly along a clear-cut, unidirectional path of development and eventually leads to seamless global integration. Consequently, scholarship in the social sciences increasingly argued against equating the history of globalisation processes and transcultural entanglements with the master narrative of the gradual homogenisation of the world. A strong common ground these concepts share is the objective of transcending the national as an analytical category and replacing it by focusing on interaction and flows, transfers, and exchanges as the core categories in the study of history. Examining the shifting patterns of global connections has, therefore, become the main challenge for all those who seek to understand the past, the present, and the future of modern societies. And this challenge includes finding a place for the nation state—a form of social organisation that no longer seem to fit into the new analytical framework despite its obvious historical and current significance. Against this background, the introductory chapter argues that the authors assembled in the volume suggest another reading of the role and significance of the nation state in the development of the modern world. The studies presented here argue that looking at the nation state from the perspective of global entanglements gives way to its interpretation as a dynamic and multi-layered structure that partakes in globalisation processes and plays different and at times even contradictory roles at the same time. Accordingly, it is not the nation state that ceases to exist, due to increasing processes of global exchange, but a certain perspective on the nation state which can no longer be upheld.

The telematic debate on the theme “Global History and Global Policies” has provided historians from different historiographic traditions and distant countries – Piero Bevilacqua, Guillermo Castro, Ranjan Chakrabarti, Gabriella Corona, Kobus du Pisani, John McNeill, Donald Worster – with an opportunity to compare views on the different interpretive paradigms of global environmental history. A wide range of subjects was covered: the definition of the discipline’s field of research, themes, and chronological scope; the relationship between global and local; the role of the West in history and historiography; the perspective of the dominated; the discipline’s role in policy making; and its relationship with the natural sciences. The discussion has yielded a rich harvest of reflections on global environmental history as a paradigm for the interpretation of the past and a cultural and political instrument for action in the present. Important indications have emerged as regards the research paths a global environmental historian can follow to contribute to this field of studies.

ABSTRACTThis paper examines some of the ways in which Indigenous and Western archaeological chronologies are being negotiated and entwined in Oceania. Indigenous pasts are often known through oral traditions, genealogies and ancestral landscapes; these are vital pasts populated by the ancestors. The archaeological past is often interpreted through taphonomy, stratigraphy and direct dating techniques. There are tensions and intersections between these perspectives, and research partnerships between archaeologists and Indigenous communities must negotiate how to build chronologies and narrate the past. Drawing on case studies from our research in Australia and Papua New Guinea, we discuss how these seemingly different ways of knowing the past can be brought into productive conversation and how these understandings are transforming today. We argue that incorporating diverse temporalities for ancestral places can generate richer historical narratives of value to communities and researchers.

Beyond introducing the subject matter and critically surveying the state of scholarship, this introduction offers a substantial theoretical and methodological elucidation of the book’s approach that is also relevant for readers not strictly interested in the specialized subject. Combining perspectives from religious studies, global history, South Asian studies, and the study of esotericism, the foundations of global religious history are discussed both in abstraction and in light of the source material. This especially considers historiographical challenges such as (post)colonialism, Eurocentrism, and orientalism, as well as issues such as the blurry meaning of “global connections” and differentiations between the global, regional, and local. Leading themes such as the contested meaning of tradition, revival, reform, and modernity are scrutinized, as are the relationship and meanings of religion, science, esotericism, and nationalism that remain the subject of scholarly debate. Global religious history makes proposals for resolving such debates by eliding disciplinary boundaries.

Oil Palm: A Global History

Since the world began, man has contrived a great variety of forms of social organization. There have been hunting and fishing societies, caste and feudal societies, capitalist and socialist societies, communal societies and communistic ones. Some forms of social organization have flowered briefly only to die. Others have survived over extensive periods of time, sometimes in substantially their original form and other times in drastically modified form. No form of social organization of the past has proven immortal and no present form, it is suspected, will prove so either. The origin and evolution of forms of social organization has been given, in one way and another, a lot of attention by sociologists. It was a major theme in the now classic literature of sociology and almost every major figure of the past-Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, Sombart, Comte-touched on it to a large degree. And, of course, questions pertaining to social organization are perhaps the major ones being addressed by contemporary social theorists. But despite all of the work which has been done, we seem to be still missing at the conceptual level an agreed upon way to order forms of social organization, and at the theoretical level an agreed upon accounting of the conditions governing the life cycle of old and giving rise to new forms of social organization. Indeed, not only are we missing a satisfactory general theory but we experience considerable difficulty in gaining consensus around explanations of the origin of particular forms of social organization; witness e.g. the continuing debate about the sources of Western capitalism. This paper has no pretensions of trying to provide any comprehensive answer to major outstanding questions about the birth and life cycle of social organizations. It is concerned, however, to advance a perspective from which such questions might be freshly addressed. At this juncture, the perspective is presented on highly speculative grounds. The intent is to see whether these speculations strike a sufficiently responsive chord to warrant further effort to build upon, to extend, and eventually to subject them to empirical test.

Considering the “Hidden” Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History Robert B. Bain (bio) The popularity of a high school course often masks the challenges students and teachers face in learning its content. Such, I think, is the case with world history. While it is the fastest growing subject of the secondary social studies curriculum (by 2005 over 75% of secondary students graduated having taken a course in world history, an increase of more than 125% in the last thirty years1) world history poses distinctive and often unacknowledged challenges to both teachers and students. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Teachers Concept Map Using Multiple Scales and Multiple Connections Source: Lauren McArthur Harris, “Building Coherence in World History: A Study of Instructional Tools and Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge.” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008), 304. One challenge is the amount of content. How can teachers and students learn all that “stuff ”? However, a much greater issue in my view is how world history teachers and students learn to manage what Thomas Holt has called “the levels problem,” the complicated relationship between “behavioral explanations sited at the individual level of human experience and those at the level of society and social forces.” The historian’s task, according to Holt, is “to simultaneously grasp the manifestations of the very large and abstract structures and the transformations of the world in the small details of life.”2 Michael Adas agrees, arguing that world history must “infuse the contextual analysis of world systems and structures and aggregate socioeconomic transformations with serious attention to ideas, human agency, and contingency.”3 Or, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie imaginatively put it, world history requires teachers and students to be both parachutists and truffle hunters.4 Without question, the intellectual capacity to move strategically among temporal and spatial scales is useful, if not outright necessary for both world history teachers and students. A parachute and a nose for history’s truffles are required to make sense of all the events and changes that teachers and students encounter in studying the world’s history. Yet years of teaching experience and a small but instructive body of research on “historical thinking” have convinced me that levels thinking does not come naturally.5 Consider a thought experiment that I along with colleagues have used in workshops with hundreds of history teachers over the past ten years. We ask teachers to construct three- to five-minute histories of the United States, of Western civilization, and of the world. With only a few exceptions, the results are strikingly similar. Teachers tackle the first two challenges quickly, producing common stories with remarkably similar key events: Native American societies, European settlement and colonization, War for Independence, Constitutional Convention, Civil War and Reconstruction, westward expansion and industrialism, World Wars, Depression and New Deal, Cold War, and civil rights movement. Likewise, teachers develop a familiar tale of the growth of Western civilization, marked by common turning points and events: River Valley civilizations, classical Greece and Rome, Dark and Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, nation-states, exploration, democratic revolutions, industrialism, imperialism, World and Cold Wars. But when teachers try to write a brief history of the world, they seem to hit a wall. Few jump into the task right away, and most struggle with where to begin, what to include, and how to order what they include. Some attempt to tell multiple, parallel histories of India, China, and Europe. Still others use European periodization schemes (Middle Ages, Renaissance) situating different civilizations, such as China or India, against a European backdrop. Most teachers report feeling bogged down with details, unsure about what to include, what to leave out, and how things are connected to one another. What, if any, big pictures are available to teachers as they take up the task of constructing world history courses? Even a rough chronology of major events provides teachers a structure within which they might place historical details. The absence of such a frame—as is seemingly the case in world history— likely forces teachers to focus on disconnected facts or serial regional or civilizational stories. Now I am not calling for a grand world historical narrative of...

Reviewed by: Writing World History, 1800-2000 Kevin Reilly Writing World History, 1800-2000. Edited by Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 367 + viii pp. $99.00. One would think that a volume with the title Writing World History, 1800-2000 would reveal a level of thinking about world history that stretched back further than normally thought. Here we might expect, if not the "New World History," at least useful discussions of figures such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, G.W. F. Hegel perhaps, and certainly some attention to Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Fernand Braudel, Geoffrey Barraclough, and other pioneers. In that expectation, the reader would not be disappointed. There are frequent discussions of these and other predecessors that remind us that our subdiscipline [End Page 106] is not entirely new. We meet here discussions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Weltgeschichte, histoire universale, and histoire générale that extend the provenance and purview of world history. This is a strength of the volume. The fourteen essays gathered here originated as papers presented at a conference sponsored by the German Historical Institute of London in 2000. The goal of the conference was to explore various traditions of world history throughout the world during the last two hundred years. Like most published conference proceedings, the essays are of uneven value, however. There are contributions that will definitely interest world historians, notably those by Jerry Bentley, Patrick O'Brien, and Michael Adas, but many of the essays will disappoint, in part because they were not written by world historians. Two of the first (and best) focus on "mapping the subject." In an opening essay on "World History and Grand Narrative," Jerry Bentley offers world historians a narrative model based on the "three realities" of rising population, technological expansion, and increasing levels of global interaction. This framework, Bentley argues, "permits historians to move beyond the cultural distinctions, exclusive identities, local knowledge, and experiences of individual societies" (mainly nations) that have directed historical writing since Leopold von Ranke (p. 63). Alternatively, Patrick O'Brien argues for a model of world history that concentrates on material progress and economic interaction. His useful survey of the literature of material metanarratives finds a host of Smithian, Marxist, and Weberian approaches "untenable" or "redundant," but sees "the Great Divergence" between Western Europe and East Asia still requiring explanation. In a different vein, Michael Adas's essay explores the paradox in U.S. culture of American exceptionalism and global mission. How does a society imagine itself as both unique and a model for the world? Whatever the answer, the pondering of this paradox led some historians in the 1960s and 1970s, Adas suggests, to recognize that features of American history that were distinctive but by no means exceptional —settler colonization, frontiers, slavery, migrations, mobility, racism, industrialization, and imperialism—could be useful comparative categories for the study of world history. The role of American and European protocols of knowledge in shaping world history writing is precisely the problem for Arif Dirlik and Vinay Lal in essays that seem at times to question the possibility of any nonhegemonic history at all. "What is world history for?" Dirlik asks, and he has difficulty finding anything beyond the Eurocentric ordering of the world that first gave it rise. Similarly, Lal wonders if [End Page 107] history and writing inevitably undermine "the counter-hegemomic tendencies" of Indian folklore and oral traditions (p. 288). The rest of the essays explore cultural, often national, traditions or limitations in the writing of world history. The most useful of these for world historians is probably Lutz Raphael's essay on Henri Berr, the French propensity for multivolume universal histories, the comparative work of the French Annales school, and Fernand Braudel. The choice of scholars who are largely specialists in national histories and cultures for so many of the essays creates some repetitions, imbalances, and slow spots. The essays on Russia and China separately grapple with the Marxist paradigm, for instance. In some cases, where there is little or no tradition of world history writing, the authors variously attempt to explain why, fill in the gap, or discuss cultural ideas of others. Two essays...

��� The history of Latin America has been instrumental to the rise of world history as a research field. Some of the seminal works of world history have highlighted Latin American‐centered events, from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples to Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange. The region has also provided important subject matter for groundbreaking studies on topics that have become the bread and butter of global historians: diasporas, transnational movements, and the rise of global capitalism. It might seem, then, that the relationship between Latin American history and world history has been a close one and that the two fields have informed each other more than they have developed in isolation. Yet the reality is both more complex and more troubling. In the main paradigms of world history, Latin America has been placed not in the foreground, but off to the side, inhabiting a space that is not so much insignificant as it is simply strange. Many comparative analyses have cast the region as a contrast to patterns of change that in turn take on the character of historical models. Together, the trends produce a tendency to view the continent as “odd region out”— home to anomalous processes and perpetually out of sync with global historical periodization. Curiously, emphasis on the region’s oddities is perhaps most muted in the historiography of the precolumbian period. Here, though we might expect exceptionalism to attach itself to representations of Aztec and Incan Empires as, at the very least, technologically different from their counterparts in other world regions, historians and anthropologists have instead operated largely within a comparative framework that emphasizes shared structures of symbolic practices, social hierarchies, and agricultural regimes.1 The treatment of later

This study investigated how students make sense of historical significance in world history. Using qualitative, task-based interviews, I interviewed 40 secondary students who had taken world history courses. Findings indicated that students thought that it is important to learn how current globalized societies have developed. Students also tried to understand different ideologies, values, or customs over the world by learning world history. Furthermore, they hoped to learn historical lessons in world history, particularly from historical narratives of overcoming the hardship. Finally, students tried to emphasize the greatness of Korean history and culture by comparing and contrasting between Korean and world history. These findings suggest that students are under conflicts of different kinds of identities between global citizenship and national citizenship. Although they recognized that they have to improve tolerance toward differences, their patriotic ideas toward Korean history were conflicted with this recognition, and students’ national identity limited their multifaceted understandings of world history topics. Therefore, I conclude that history education in Korea needs to purse democratic citizenship education in order to overcome narrow-minded national identity, and world history must help students think of various perspectives from others that counter patriotic narratives in Korean history.

For some time now, historians have been venturing well beyond the spatial and methodological enclosures of nation-states that had long defined the modern discipline, writing more history that is variously described as international, transnational, transregional, global, or world history.1 This essay sets out to examine one aspect of the turn away from methodological nationalism—which is the assumption that the nation-state is the natural frame for the study of history—an aspect that has often been described as the emergence of a “new international history.”2 The term “international history” has had a rather complicated history in the U.S. historical profession, where it has been rather uncommon and, when used, has carried meanings that have often been broad and imprecise.3 More common in usage have been terms that seemed to carry meanings that were better specified: diplomatic history, the history of foreign relations, or occasionally, the history of international relations.4 But while the genealogy of the “new international history” is rooted in these historiographical traditions, it has gone beyond them in some important ways. The essay begins by tracing this genealogy and surveying the longstanding debates over crisis and renewal in the field of diplomatic/international history, and then traces the various strands of the new international history as it has emerged in the past twenty years or so. In its second part, it outlines a proposal for redefining and refocusing the field of international history as the history of “international society,” with that term understood to describe not simply an arena for where state actors interact but rather a historical subject in its own right, one that comprises actors and institutions of numerous types, both state and non-state, and invites scholarship that employs a diverse array of methodological approaches. The essay concludes with a discussion of the advantages, possible pitfalls, and methodological challenges that are involved in writing the history of international society. It draws its examples primarily from the literature on the history of the United States in the world, but the conceptual frame it lays out should prove useful, too, to scholars of international history that is centered elsewhere, or nowhere in particular.