Global Historians Research Articles

1. INDIA IN A WORLD: DILEMMAS OF SOVEREIGNTY

ABSTRACTAzfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam prompts a consideration not only of the histories of Islam and early modern connected histories of Central and South Asia, but also of current debates about local and global history‐writing. Moin's work intersects with a strand of comparative world history—following Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels—but also engages strands of historical anthropology, bringing to light a range of compelling stakes for global historians, historians of South Asia, and scholars of nationalism alike. Though Moin's work pushes the boundaries of connected histories centered on South Asia, his focus on a trans‐regional millennial science avoids questions of the local within new global histories.

Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time by Susan Stanford Friedman

Reviewed by: Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time by Susan Stanford Friedman Matthew Eatough Susan Stanford Friedman. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. xii + 451 pp. Susan Stanford Friedman’s name has become synonymous with the move to broaden modernist studies’ spatial and temporal borders, and Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time is her most sustained statement yet on the promises and pitfalls of the global turn in modernist studies. Part manifesto, part definitional excursus, and part cultural history, the volume asks readers to consider how modernism’s global turn has revolutionized the field of modernist studies. What periodizing concepts, geographic scales, and aesthetic criteria, Friedman wonders, allow us to see modernism on a truly global scale? And to what extent do such new lenses challenge our conventional understandings of what it means to be modernist? Friedman’s answer to these questions can be summed up in a simple yet bold claim: modernism is “the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity” (x) and can be found in any time and place where “transformational rupture and rapid change” occur (ix). From this deceptively straightforward premise, Friedman makes a case for radically expanding modernist studies’ field of focus. Rather than identify the term “modernism” with a particular style that first emerged in early twentieth-century Europe, Friedman insists we should instead see modernism as a general label for any and all “innovative representational forms” (11). Such a move would open up the field of modernism to not only those so-called late postcolonial modernisms that have helped to globalize the discipline in recent years but also to art and literature from well before the period of high modernism. Indeed, Friedman suggests that for modernism to be truly “planetary,” we need to be able to recognize how the more familiar modernism of early twentieth-century Europe is anticipated by a number of other modernist projects—for example, the art and literature of Tang dynasty China, the Islamic Abbasid caliphate, and the Mongol empire, among others. Friedman’s project hinges on two radical interventions. First, Friedman joins her name to a long list of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists who theorize modernity as a “multiple, polycentric” phenomenon (10). In contrast to the classical definition of modernity, which identifies this term with the contemporaneous rise of capitalism, secularism, imperialism, and the nation-state in post-1500 Europe, such thinkers point out that many non-Western cultures have exhibited characteristics similar to those found in Western modernity. This is a line of thinking Friedman explores in chapters 3 and 4 of her book, [End Page 172] which survey a number of non-Western modernities: the Islamic and Sinocentric world-systems that dominated global commerce prior to the rise of the West, the imperial state-building efforts of the Chinese Tang and Song dynasties, and the cultural mixings brought about by the spread of the Mongol empire. These examples suggest to Friedman that modernity has never been the sole possession of the West and that any identification of the West with modernity is a purely “ideological” move that attempts to transform a particular culture into a universal model (93). Friedman then uses this historical narrative to draw an even more provocative conclusion: if modernity is a plural phenomenon that erupts in multiple times and places across human history, couldn’t modernism itself be treated in a similar fashion? Just as global historians provincialize European modernity by reimagining it as one modernity among many, could we not reimagine “’high’ or ‘avant-garde’ modernism as one articulation of a particularly situated modernism—an important modernism but not the measure by which all others are judged and to which all others must be compared” (70)? It should be emphasized that Friedman’s use of the word “modernism” here is at odds with the more familiar use of the term in modernist studies, where it traditionally functions as a label for a specific cultural period or literary style. What Friedman appears to be most interested in examining in Planetary Modernisms is the cultural capital that has accrued to the term, such that modernism has often been idealized as the epitome of “modern” art and...

How Five Empires Shaped The World And How this Process Shaped Those Empires

Alexander Semyonov discusses the recently published book Imperial Visions: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World, by Krishan Kumar, within the broader context of ongoing historiographic debates on global and imperial history, empires as regimes for managing diversity, ruptures and transformations in histories of empire, comparisons between and entanglement of imperial histories, methodological nationalism, and nationalism and collapse of empires. Semyonov contends that Imperial Visions relates to recent developments in the field of global history, provides an important corrective to the view of global historians that empires are primarily political formations, and strengthens the argument of constructivists in the field of global history, such as that of Sebastian Conrad on global history as an approach and the processes of "world making." The most innovative contribution by Imperial Visions to the growing literature on empires is its systematic development of a constructivist approach to empire through ideas and ideologies of imperial mission and entanglement of imperial and national power claims. The article engages the findings by Kumar with what Semyonov calls the growing consensus on "imperial pragmatism" (which stresses governing and practices in the experience of empire) and tests Kumar's conclusions against the existing historical studies of subjectivity and functioning of universalist visions in the context of imperial diversity and hybridity. Semyonov also finds a serious tension in the book between the constructivist approach to empire through imperial ideologies and visions and the structuralist and essentialist view of the "imperial people."

Discovering How to Describe the World Then and Now: A Review Article

The three books under review offer the opportunity to consider attempts to write the history of the wider world from the Renaissance to the present day. Although they are vastly different in focus: from a selection of travel narratives and histories; volumes from a multi-authored reference work to the study of a single street; what they all have in common is their comparative methodology and their extended engagement with non-European cultures. The review endorses Christopher Bayly’s contention that we are all global historians now, only some of us don’t know it. To misquote Benedetto Croce: ‘all history is contemporary (but also comparative) history’.

Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, La pièce et le geste. Artisans, marchands et savoir technique à Londres au xviiie siècle

In her magnificent new study Liliane Hilaire-Perez propounds the paradoxical argument that a Smithian, qualitative, organic and product-oriented rationality was the keystone of eighteenth-century British success in manufacturing. Finely argued and richly documented, La piece et le geste will be welcomed by historians of Europe and global historians as a stimulating and convincing contribution to rethinking the genealogies of industrial society. Historians of technology will further welcome La...

Gibbon on Islam

Abstract A strand in current scholarship examines early Islam and the Caliphate against a late antique backdrop of Sasanid–Roman tension, dogmatic strife in the Church, and the maturation of rabbinic Judaism. Gibbon long ago insisted that there had been more than one road out of Antiquity, leading not just to the formation of Latin Christendom— the Papacy, German Empire and Italian Renaissance—but also to Greek Christendom and the rise of Islam. Yet this aspect of Decline and Fall remains unappreciated, especially in John Pocock’s monumental Barbarism and Religion . The present article traces the origins of Gibbon’s eastward turn in his reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Arabists, historians and travellers, and in his decision to follow East Roman history down to 1453. Not only Voltaire but also the Universal History (London, 1736–66) encouraged Gibbon to look beyond Europe and its Christian narrative, while attitudes to Islam had softened in the decades around 1700 as a consequence of greater familiarity with its literature and the weakening of theological prejudice. Gibbon achieved a powerful, empathetic portrait of Muḥammad as a political leader as well as a prophet. His account of the Muslim empires from their Medinan origins to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople offers revealing comparisons with ancient Iran and Rome. Although his Classical Greek and Roman criterion of cultural and historical value forced him to conclude that Islam too was, in the end, tyranny and imposture, nevertheless the weight that Gibbon accorded to the Muslim world anticipates the more inclusive methods of global historians in our day.

A Transnational World?

The essay seeks to explore the implications of transnational and global history for comparative historical sociology, especially in light of notions of entangled history, postcolonial critiques, theories of the ‘Global South,’ and new interpretations of empire. It offers an assessment of the implications of the transnational turn for comparative history, arguing that, despite some of the claims made, this should largely be seen as a shift rather than a turn and as a corrective rather than a fundamentally new paradigm. Following from a discussion of some of the issues that have arisen from the transnational turn, in particular with respect to the work of a new generation of global historians, such as Bayly, Osterhammel and Pomeranz, the essay then considers the different contribution of comparative historical sociology, including civilizational analysis, as in the work of Eisenstadt and Arnason. The argument is advanced that while comparative historical sociology is today in crisis as a result of being overtaken by developments within transnational and global history, it offers much promise. The two fields cannot be entirely separated, but comparative historical sociology has a strong tradition of comparative analysis that is different from historiographical analysis and which remains undeveloped. The specificity of the sociological dimension is urgently in need of renewal. It is argued that this largely resides in an interpretative approach to social inquiry. However, this has not yet been fully exploited in relation to transnationalism.

Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and Local in Seventeenth-Century English History

This forum discusses the utility of ‘corporate constitutionalism’ as a category of historical analysis. Corporate constitutionalism privileges the constitutional activities of international trading corporations to understand the cross-cultural dynamics at work in European expansion. William A Pettigrew sets out the possibilities of corporate constitutionalism in the first essay which defines the concept, makes the case for viewing trading corporations as constitutional entities at home and abroad, signals some possible interpretive benefits for historians of empire, corporate historians, global historians, and constitutional historians, before offering an illustrative case study about the Royal African Company. Leading thinkers in international history (David Armitage), legal history (Paul Halliday), constitutional theory (Vicki Hsueh), and corporate history (Thomas Leng and Philip J Stern) offer their reflections on the possibilities of this new approach to the international activities of trading corporations. Although the Forum focuses on seventeenth century English trading corporations, it proposes to start a discussion about the utility of corporate constitutionalism for other European corporations and for periods both before and after the seventeenth century.

Geopolitics and Its Discontents

Alfred J. Rieber, Strugglefor the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War. 652 pp., maps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-1107043091. $95.00. Alfred J. Rieber has taken on an ambitious and heroic task: to tell the history of Eurasia from its over the last 500 years. He deserves credit for even attempting this feat, since no one has tried it before. His ultimate goal is to explain the massive dislocation caused by the wars of the 20th century. Unlike so many other historians of the 20th century, he takes a longue duree view. As he claims in the introduction, The great crises of the twentieth century--the two world wars and the Cold War--had common origins in a complex historical process I call the struggle over the Eurasian borderlands (1). He covers the Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, Iranian, and Chinese empires in sweeping chapters of synthesis, based on secondary scholarship in English, German, and Russian. We certainly need such comparative syntheses, as many historians share his discomfort with an exclusive focus on a single nation-state or empire. But the enterprise raises many knotty methodological questions, and it has produced a wide variety of different approaches. Some writers, from the comparative empire tradition, have expanded their scope from Europe to cover all major empires, past and present. (1) Others have outlined a general theory of social change, aiming to show that many regions of the world fit into one general scheme. (2) At the other end of the scale, a local study of a single place on a border can generate implications about much broader processes. (3) Rieber's approach primarily relies on parallel political narratives of each of the major borderlands, mainly those bordering the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Introductory chapters outline imperial institutions and ideologies in the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Iranian, and Qing empires. Then, following a circle around the Russian and Habsburg lands, he narrates the rise of imperial power in the Baltic, the Balkans, the Danube, the Pontic steppe, the Caucasian isthmus, Trans-Caspia, and Inner Asia. Chapters 4 and 5, the most interesting ones, describe encounters and crises on each of these frontiers. final chapter follows periods of decline and crisis in the same empires leading up through the end of World War I. On the one hand, I do have a personal bias toward the study of frontiers, and I share Rieber's admiration for the pioneering work of Owen Lattimore. Historians of Russia who have investigated the Central Eurasian frontiers have also contributed a great deal to this field. (4) His chapters describing cross-border encounters take a productive step forward in looking beyond the borders of empires and nation-states to discover interactions, large-scale processes, and individual experiences. On the other hand, I find Rieber's mainly political framework disappointing. Historians concerned about transcending nation-state boundaries have argued for new methods of conceptualizing spatial and temporal boundaries. Transnational historians promote the use of multiple archives and multilingual research, and a focus on social actors below the level of decision-making elites. (5) Global historians track the movements of commodities, people, cultures, and technologies across an increasingly interconnected world from the early modern era to the present day. (6) Environmental and economic historians now recognize the impact of processes that span large regions regardless of political and geographic limitations. Despite the large number of cases, and the breadth of its scale, Rieber's approach fails to break new ground. Charles Tilly, the historian and sociologist, once described the advantages and costs of traditional history as a discipline. He listed six features that distinguished history from other organized inquiries: it insisted on time and place as fundamental principles of variation; its practitioners divided their subfield by time and place; it anchored most of its dominant questions in national politics; it kept blurred lines between professionals and amateurs; it relied heavily on documentary evidence, focused on the literate world; and it emphasized narrative practices that focus on the attitudes and motivations of crucial actors. …

Gellner, science and globalization

Cognition, or scientific knowledge, is the fulcrum of Gellner’s philosophy of history. Science, for Gellner, is central to understanding the rise of the West and also to his defence of Enlightenment rationality against postmodernism and other forms of relativism. This way of thinking has recently been challenged, first, by global historians who locate the ‘great divergence’ in the 19th century rather than earlier, and second, by those who assign to the Enlightenment a pernicious role and argue that rationality and scientific knowledge are inextricably bound to particular social contexts, for good or ill. Gellner’s ideas can be defended against these challenges, but this requires, first, distinguishing between rationality and science and, second, tracing the course of science and technology outside of the West. Once this defence is in place, Gellner’s ideas about the relation between cognition on one side and production and coercion can also be re-examined: here, too, his account requires revision since the idea that rationality ‘trumps’ the other two orders needs to be specified on the ground: in everyday life, for example, scientific knowledge is rather remote, and so often does not supersede other social dynamics. This also relates to other tensions in the relation between science, technology and everyday life: as Gellner noted, technology yields rubber as well as iron cages, but consumer technologies are now in some respects on a path towards unsustainable growth. Separating this problem from cognition is a further task. These refinements to Gellner’s ideas provide a basis for rethinking the connection he makes between liberalism and modern cognition.

Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire

The turn towards Global history shows no sign of abating. It seems that across the discipline, historians are becoming increasingly interested in understanding the past on a planetary scale. Prominent Imperial historians, in particular, have been among the most fervent advocates of Global history. So close are the concerns of some Imperial history—particularly British Imperial history—to those of Global history, that it is getting harder to disentangle the two. Despite this we argue that, whilst both fields are overlapping and heterogeneous, historians should reflect more explicitly on the methodological differences that exist between them. In the process we point out some lessons that Global historians might learn from Imperial historians, and viceversa. We argue for “connected histories of empire” that seek to uncover links that operated across the formal borders of imperial formations and that deploy novel spatial frameworks. Such an approach would draw on the diverse methodologies developed by Imperial and Global historians who seek to write both “comparative” and “connected” histories. We point the way towards histories that are more than imperial, but less than global.

The Limits of Demobilization: Global Perspectives on the Aftermath of the Great War

One hundred years ago, the European powers plunged into a soon-to-be global conflict that has been aptly described as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth-century. Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the wider world experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, this verdict seems more than justified: estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and 10 million dead combatants and between five and six million killed civilians – excluding the hundreds of thousands of men who were permanently disfigured or mentally traumatized. The body of scholarship devoted to this first ‘total war’ in history is appropriately large, but its coverage uneven: while the political events and diplomatic entanglements that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, the developments on the Western Front or the Paris Peace Treaties have received sustained attention ever since the end of that war, Eastern European and global historians have only more recently begun to explore the full economic, political and cultural consequences of the First World War. Even less attention – with the exception of Germany and

Reclaiming Ground: Japan’s Great Convergence

Japan scholars relegated to the shadows, haunting the debate like hungry ghosts with no ground to stand on. Not only intellectually but also institutionally, The Great Divergence unintentionally helped obscure Japan from view because it appeared in 2001 just as the juggernaut of Chinese economic dominance rose above the horizon. University administrators, history departments, and global historians writing, as most do, from that perspective of Europe seemed to have found an ‘Asia’ sufficient to their wants, and many desired no other. Even though Japan remained the second and then the third largest economy in the world during the first decade of the twenty-first century, its historical and theoretical importance ebbed. In considering the rise of modern prosperity, it no longer seemed essential to think about Japan. At times Japan even appeared to be written out of world history and global consciousness. In these embattled circumstances, when Ian J. Miller organized a panel exploring Japan’s Great Convergence for the March 2013 Association of Asian Studies meeting, the room was packed. The papers given that day showcased the work of the three contributors to this forum. Inquiring into Japan’s development over three centuries and in three different ways, Federico Marcon, Ian J. Miller, and Robert Stolz in conversation with Brett Walker and myself laid the grounds for a new history of Japan’s convergence as opposed to China’s divergence. The idea was not entirely novel. For instance, Patrick K. O’Brien, analyzing Pomeranz’s achievement in 2010, briefly acknowledges ‘the convergence of Japan’ as opposed to China, India, and Southeast Asia. 4 Brett Walker had written of ijin naru shuren (the great convergence) 1 See, for instance, Manning, ‘AHR Forum’, and O’Brien, ‘Metanarratives in Global Histories of

From Poison to Carcinogen: Towards a Global History of Concerns about Benzene

Abstract Benzene's history resembles that of many another substance discovered, industrially exploited, and then increasingly regulated across the world over the last two centuries of the chemical industry's development. This paper connects the evolving patterns of its production, use, and oversight through the twentieth century to a certain transformation in the understanding of its effects on human health. Early on, when only some of benzene's health effects were known, it came to be regulated as a 'poison'. But then benzene emerged as one of a handful of widely used substances known to cause cancer in the second half of the twentieth century. During this period standards for proving carcinogenicity were undergoing change and being debated within the international community. At the same time, support strengthened for a more restrictive and precautionary approach to benzene, at least in many parts of the world. It became the first chemically defined hazard in the post-WWII period to receive its own 'convention', or recommendation for national legislation, from the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1971. The changing concerns about benzene's effects on the human body in four locations - Europe, the United States, China, and Mexico - suggest some implications for a more genuinely transnational and global history of worries about environmental chemicals. Similarly, this article demonstrates that global environmental historians need to pay more attention to health and medical history; that the 'global' passage from poison to carcinogen has only been partial; and that this narrative has faltered especially in developing or partly developed parts of the world.

Maritime Worlds and Global History: Comparing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean through Barcelona and Bombay

AbstractWhile Indian Ocean and Mediterranean cities are usually examined separately, this essay presents a comparison of the port cities of Bombay and Barcelona between around 1850 and 1920 to assess the usefulness of the maritime worlds model of oceanic historians and the world‐system model of global historians. By tracing the many similarities in the urban, economic, and infrastructural development of two largely unconnected ports, the comparative exercise highlights areas of variability and distinctiveness that become clearer when viewed against a world‐system common background. A case is then made that it is in the cultural arena that historians will find answers to the variability of outcomes that have emerged from what otherwise appears to be the uniform character of modern global history.

Academic History and the Future of the Past

Marianne Rostgaard and Martin Ottovay Jorgensen Academic History and the Future of the Past Contesting the Current Paradigm of Global Governance and Western Temporal and Spatial Epistemologies through Memories and International History From Below by Example of the UN Peacekeeping Operation in the Gaza Strip, 1956-1967. An outline of a new way of writing International History is presented in the article in form of a post-colonial reading of the Cold War United Nations peacekeeping operation in the Gaza Strip from 1956 to 1967. Asking questions that challenge the established narrative, of who has the right to speak and with what authority, the primary aim of this article is to move towards an alternative understanding of the peacekeeping paradigm of the United Nations as a performative dimension of the current paradigm of global governance from the ground up. It will be done, as suggested by the two global historians Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, in a way intended to “shatter the silences surrounding global practices, by tracking them, describing them, and presenting them historically and (…) to facilitate public cultures as free and equal marketplace of communication among the many voices of different histories and memories” (Geyer and Bright, 1995, pp. 1058-1059). This will allow us to begin not only to privilege other ways of relating to time, space and history, but also as called for by the literary postcolonial Madina Tlostanova and the semiotician Walter Mignolo in “Global coloniality and the decolonial option” allow us to shift from postcolonial to decolonial.

Are We All Global Historians Now? An Interview with David Armitage

Are We All Global Historians Now? An Interview with David Armitage

Beyond Divergence: Rethinking the Economic History of India

The interest of global historians in the non-western world tends to be driven by a desire to explain growing international economic inequality between 1800 and 2000. A preoccupation with the question, when the third world fell behind, results in a neglect of important characteristics of the economic history of the third world itself. A theory of international inequality can explain neither the recent economic resurgence in the economies of Asia and Africa, nor the highly uneven pattern of transformation within the larger nations like India. The paper suggests, with the Indian example, how these issues might be brought back into the discourse.

Temporalities and Periodization in Deep History: Technology, Gender, and Benchmarks of "Human Development"

For historians, questions about what to call particular eras and how to conceptualize the temporal dynamics of change become particularly acute as we take on revisionist projects, such as writing and teaching feminist history, examining chronologically deep history, or placing history in a material as well as a social environment and in a global perspective. Temporal frameworks influence historical research even when it is located within a very limited time frame; temporalities and periodizations operate more explicitly in the teaching of survey courses. The particular periodization problems we focus on here emerged from teaching premodern world history with a focus on family and household dynamics. In trying to connect research on the domestic group as a site of world history with a historical narrative that begins with the emergence of human society and draws on evidence from around the globe, we were struck again and again by the problematic perspectives embedded in conventional periodizations. New directions in archaeological scholarship offer global historians insights and approaches with which to inform their temporal frameworks.

Global History: Opportunities, Dangers, Recent Trends

In contrast to national historical approaches, global history responds to the cultural and intellectual needs of communities, societies and cultures are increasingly interconnected. Global history is an appropriate way of looking to “our past”, in an era of accelerated globalization, helping to “de-provincialize” the discipline. For historians of Europe, global history approaches offer a useful ground for embedding, relativizing and enriching their views and perspectives, even when they continue to work as historians of Europe and do not contemplate to become global historians. As many examples show, global history is emerging as a field in which new forms of cooperation between history and the neighbouring disciplines, particularly the social sciences, can be practiced in new ways. Global history revives the interest in comprehensive structures and large-scale processes; it enhances the analytical power of history as a discipline. It also raises several problems which are not yet resolved. Very different types of discourses and studies are usually lumped together under the heading of “global history”, four of them are here considered.