Sombart’s history of capitalism and contemporary world, global and transnational history: Similarities and differences

Abstract

With the great wave of global integration in economy, society and culture, historiography began to acknowledge the importance of interpreting the past at the highest - world level. Under the influence of numerous historians (primarily in the United States and Western Europe) during the 19th century, and to a much greater extent after 1945, rather innovative directions of world, global and transnational history were created trying to overcome contradictions and a narrow interpretation of the history of international relations, national states and local communities. These focused both on local identities and on states as key factors in the past. In the search for phenomena that permeated world societies, historians, under the influence of other social sciences, began to recognize capitalism as par excellence supranational, that is, a world phenomenon. Although it may seem that the interest in capitalism as a building block of global history (that is, the world system as Immanuel Wallerstein said) is more recent and under the influence of the post-Cold War era, the world-historical significance of this phenomenon was first recognized by authors from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Among them, the German economist, sociologist and historian Werner Sombart (1863-1941) has a special place, since he devoted several decades of his career to the study of this phenomenon.