Review of: Feminisms: A Global History

General Labour History of Africa: Workers, Employers and Governments, 20th–21st Century

Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project

The history of labour in a period of "globalization". A proposal of Global labour history. The paper deals with "Global labour history", a historiographical approach developed since the end of the 1980s at the International Institute of Social History (Iish) in Amsterdam, that has gradually become a global network. Its particular response to the crisis of labour and social history and its reconceptualization of the theory, methodology and themes of labour history are discussed. The article concludes addressing the place of "Global labour history" within the broader field of "Global history".

Framing the history of globalization is also instrumental in specifying the singularities of world history and global history that, in effect, remain almost undistinguished. The relationship between the two can be understood sometimes as one of synonymity, for example, as Michael Adas states in his Essays on Global and Comparative History, part of a larger series by the American Historical Association also entitled Essays on Global and Comparative History, “a new global or world history” is emerging.1 Sometimes it appears as an attempt at nominal differentiation. For instance, in the United States it seems that the name global history aims to differentiate itself from world history and its association with the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum or introductory survey courses. In Germany, particularly in the former DDR, world history nomination is avoided due to its unwanted association with past official Marxist historiography. However, beyond nominal considerations, the singularity of world history and global history is not yet specified.

Reviewed by: A History of the World in the Twentieth Century Amnon G. Finkelstein A History of the World in the Twentieth Century. J. A. S. Grenville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 973. $39.95. In this handsomely produced book J. A. S. Grenville tries to cover the history of the entire world during an eventful and volatile century. Indeed a difficult task, especially given the fact that, during the twentieth century, modernity and modernization manifested themselves tragically as continuity, stagnation, crisis, and change. If we accept R. G. Collingwood’s claim that “science is finding things out and in that sense history is a science,” then what type of scientific method is needed for the purpose of writing the history of the world during the twentieth century? 1 Bertrand Russell once suggested that we distinguish between two essential stages of scientific research: evidence gathering and inference to a law. 2 We shall start from the second stage. As far as inferring his evidence to a law, Grenville states modestly that he has “put forward no startling new theories or hypotheses about world history” (xviii). At the same time he notes that as opposed to all previous accounts, which have concentrated on the effects of population growth, increasing literacy, and technological revolutions, his contribution is in considering [End Page 144] the role of nationalism because “the abiding strength of nationalism from the nineteenth century right through the twentieth has generally been underestimated by Western historians” (10). Hence, according to him, “if we ignore the fact that our world in the twentieth century is a world of nations we leave out of account one of the mainsprings of historical change in this century,” because “what a writer of world history cannot do without seriously distorting its understanding is simply to ignore and discard national frontiers and national influences beyond a country’s frontiers” (xvii). Clearly, instead of startling new theories, Grenville prefers to revive not the analytical use of nationalism, but rather Political Realism. Once we analyze more closely the actual nature of the relations among nations, he adds, “we come back to questions of national power” (xvii–xviii). Unfortunately, Grenville does not attempt to develop further his proposed juxtaposition between nationalism and power. Nationalism, which transmits a sense of action in the name of a point of reference (national identity), enables people to identify themselves as a collective and to act upon it. National identity implicates itself profoundly in questions of power. This conclusion may not be readily apparent if we identify power as coercive military forces. 3 However, if we remember Hannah Arendt’s definition of power, namely, that it derives from the ability of people to act in concert, then society’s self-definition, its willingness to use force in order either to enforce or to resist cultural, political, and economic dominance, becomes extremely important to study. 4 Instead, Grenville’s use of “power” underscores the reduction of the term to the status of “system currency” by Political Realists. 5 The Realist use of the term “power” as an analytical tool provides us with a tradition that reproduces a methodological boundary beyond which historical analysis should not venture. 6 The methodological boundary and the conceptual rationality of the Realist notion of “power” have already been surmounted, first by historians, then by sociologists, and finally by international-relations theorists. As for the first stage of scientific research, evidence gathering, Grenville overlooks several important contributions made by scholars on twentieth-century world history. 7 He ignores the fact that most of these accounts address the influence of nationalism, and his own version of several aspects, events, and processes is at times inaccurate, at times partial, at times apologetic, but most of the time Eurocentric. 8 A number of examples: his account of the Arab-Israeli conflict is inaccurate. 9 His claim that Israel astonished the world after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49 with its hopeless position is anachronistic. The historiography of the conflict recognizes the Israeli forces’ superiority in arms and manpower during this war. 10 His account of the Cold War is partial at best. This is due primarily to the lack of paradigmatic...

In-depth study of the history of Central Asia and Eurasia from antiquity to the present day should become one of the most important tasks of world history in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The IV-VII centuries were recorded in the history of Eurasia and Europe as the era of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was a turning point in world history, the foundation of which was laid by the Hunnish tribal union moving from the depths of Central Asia to the western parts of the European continent. Studying and teaching the history of the Huns in terms of the interrelation between world and national history is of great theoretical and practical significance for university education. Additionally, in the history of Europe and Eurasia, world history specialists should start a systematic study of the long-standing problems of the Turkic world history of this period. First of all, it is the history of the Avarian Kaganate of the VI-VIII centuries, the Turkic speaking Avars, who came from the Eurasian steppes to the Huns’ former settlements in Pannonia. There is a need for an objective exposition of the history of the West and the East during the period of the Crusades. Historians should also study the history of the Golden Horde, which originally was part of the great Mongol Empire, in detail. In this regard, this article is an attempt to define the major issues of Eurasian history which are considered to be problems of world history too.

Patrick Manning, in his book Navigating World History, suggests that world history “has the potential to become a scholarly nexus linking many fields of study” that will enable historians to escape the “national paradigm that continues to constrain most studies in humanities and social sciences.” This article will test Manning’s proposal in the developing field of environmental history by examining the topics of panels and papers selected for the annual conferences of the American Society of Environmental Historians in the years following the 2003 publication of Navigating World History. Environmental history has evolved to enlarge its lens of analysis to span both borders and time frames. Born with a strong interdisciplinary base and shaped by works that straddle world and environmental history, the field has had a natural affinity with world history. Increasingly, research topics have served to blur the line between environmental and world history.

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...

Understandings of religion have been fundamentally transformed since the nineteenth century. The respective contradictions, ambiguities, continuities, and ruptures can be most comprehensively grasped when viewed against the background of global entanglements. For this purpose, the approach of global religious history proposes a range of theoretical and methodological tools. Its theoretical repertoire is largely informed by a critical engagement with poststructuralist epistemology and postcolonial perspectives embedded in a consistent genealogical approach. At the outset, it aims at bridging divisions, including those between postcolonial and global history, between disciplines such as religious studies and history, as well as between different area studies. This implies a theoretically robust reflexion of the question of what global entanglements mean in global religious history, along with the question of how to distinguish global religious history from approaches usually qualified by the prefix trans as, for example, in “transregional.” In this introduction, we offer an in-depth discussion of the theoretical foundations and methodological implications of global religious history.

Is the history of the modern world the history of Europe writ large? Or is it possible to situate the history of modernity as a world historical process apart from its origins in Western Europe? In this posthumous collection of essays, Marshall G. S. Hodgson challenges adherents of both Eurocentrism and multiculturalism to rethink the place of Europe in world history. He argues that the line that connects Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance to modern times is an optical illusion, and that a global and Asia-centred history can better locate the European experience in the shared histories of humanity. Hodgson then shifts the historical focus and in a parallel move seeks to locate the history of Islamic civilisation in a world historical framework. In so doing he concludes that there is but one history - global history - and that all partial or privileged accounts must necessarily be resituated in a world historical context. The book also includes an introduction by the editor, Edmund Burke, contextualising Hodgson's work in world history and Islamic history.

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

Foreword Henry Rousso 1. Who Controls the Past? Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones Part 1: What Is Post-Truth?: Theoretical Considerations 2. as Crisis of Trust and Critical Source Assessment Jedrzej Czerep 3. and Consequences Adam Chmielewski 4. The Condition and Social Distribution of Knowledge: On Some Dilemmas with Uses Rafal Pawel Wierzchoslawski Part 2: Case Studies of 5. Pinkersonian History, Ideology, and Postmodernism Adrian Wesolowski 6. Denying the Stolen Generations: What Happens to Indigenous History in a World? Benjamin T. Jones 7. The Oldest Post-Truth?: The Rise of Antisemitism in America and Beyond Gerald J. Steinacher 8. and the Construction of Representations of the Past: The Theory of the Two Demons and the Case of Argentina Daniel Feierstein 9. The Environment: Indian Politics and History Education Basabi Khan Banerjee and Georg Stoeber 10. Business as Usual: Feminist History in a World Alana Piper and Ana Stevenson 11. I'm Not Even Making That Up: Myths About Moriori and Denials of Indigeneity in New Zealand Andre Brett Part 3: The Truth About Post-Truth: Evaluation and Response 12. Trump, Fascism, and Historians in the Era Ben Mercer 13. Decolonising Historiography in South Africa: Reflecting on Post-Truth Relevance 25 Years Since Mandela June Bam-Hutchison 14. Museums as Critical Spaces for Alterity in a World Andrea Gallardo Ocampo and Miguel A. Hijar-Chiapa 15. Academic Activism in the Age of How Do Genocide Scholars Respond to Denial? Marius Gudonis 16. Essence of History and Ways to Respond Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones

This article explores the evolving discourse surrounding global history. While historians initially embraced global history as essential for comprehending a globalised world, recent debates have questioned its desirability and feasibility. The author examines the intersection of global history with intellectual history, discussing the establishment of dedicated publications—such as the journal Global Intellectual History—and evaluating the three heuristic approaches proposed in the volume edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori in 2013 (universalist interpretations, comparativist perspectives, and investigations into networks and interactions across space). The author highlights challenges such as translatability and the dominance of English-language scholarship. The article concludes with a call for a critical examination of the ‘global’ as a concept, acknowledging the need for reflectivity, collaborative efforts, and a nuanced understanding of historical contexts in shaping the future of global history. Image Caption: David d’Angers, plaster cast for the bronze bas-relief commissioned by the municipality of Strasbourg for the monument of Gutenberg in Gutenberg Square (1840), Angers, David d’Angers Gallery, inventory no. MBA 842.7, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0. Jean Pierre Dalbéra) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Statue_of_Johannes_Gutenberg_on_Place_Gutenberg_in_Strasbourg#/media/File:La_diffusion_des_id%C3%A9es_en_Asie_(!)_gr%C3%A2ce_%C3%A0_l'imprimerie_par_David_d'Angers_(Angers)_(15095158141).jpg

This introduction relates the current options of a global history in music to ‘its various pasts’ in the last half-century: the respective efforts of comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, post-colonial studies, globalisation theory, and sound studies. Of these disciplines and research orientations, comparative musicology has carried the stigma of later rejection (more with regard to its historical thinking than to its psychological and cognitive enquiries), but representatives such as Robert Lachmann were able to connect local studies with profound critical questions about global history. Ethnographic methods have since changed, but there is not a general tendency to exoticise or de-historicise peoples, as can be shown with reference to ethnographic studies of African music. Rather, this research emphasises performance, and the situatedness and contingency of ethnographic knowledge. While modern ethnographic research aims to be participatory, it raises questions of agency and entitlement that are foregrounded in post-colonial studies. One of the contradictions these studies have revealed arises between the need to withdraw from universalist historical schemes designed by the West towards local knowledge and the need to ‘de-centre’ the West by invoking global histories from other sides. Many challenges remain here, especially when it comes to the political goals of re-balancing history. Theories of globalisation have led music research in divergent directions; opinions are still divided over the problem of what drives globalisations in music or what they are supposed to drive. ‘Frictions’ (Anna Tsing) may certainly be observed between conceptions of Western music as it globalises. Sound studies, in turn, seem to offer alternatives to a metropolitan concept of music itself, but nevertheless encourage returns to institutional histories. The author concludes by taking up Philip Bohlman’s formula of a ‘global moment’ of today, which requires its own dialogic approaches and queries, as we continue to work on – and within – a global history of music.

This introduction outlines the contributions of Global Religious History, or Global History of Religion, to the issue of religious comparison. First, it argues for religious comparison as an integral part of religious studies that should not be abandoned but revised. Second, it addresses the larger framework of debates in religious studies and global history, arguing for the value of Global Religious History in avoiding Eurocentrism, but also tendencies within the postcolonial spectrum that mirror Eurocentric shortcomings. What is often perceived as a crisis in religious studies is understood here as an ongoing process of reflection and refinement that allows us to contextualize both the object of study and its researcher. Finally, this outline presents concrete elements that can inform revised approaches to religious comparison, including a genealogical method, entanglement and decentered historiography, and translingual practice. This allows us to expand our scope not only geographically, but also temporally.