Global Historiography Research Articles

Макробий в англоязычных исследованиях

The article examines the principal English-language studies of the last century focused on exploring the personality of Macrobius (5th century) and his works — Saturnalia (Saturnalia [ed. Willis, 1963]), Commentary on the 'Dream of Scipio' (Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis [ed. Willis, 1963]), and On the differences and similarities of Greek and Latin verbs (De verborum graeci et latini differentiis vel societatibus excerpta [ed. De Paolis, 1990]), written for educational purposes and representing a compendium of Greek knowledge. Interest in Macrobius's creative legacy notably intensified towards the end of the 19th century, a trend linked to the release of critical editions of Macrobian texts and their subsequent translations into French. In particular, the study analyzes the research of Thomas Whittaker (Macrobius; or philosophy, science and letters in the year 400; published in 1923), William Harris Stahl (Macrobius, Commentary on the ‘Dream of Scipio’, published in 1952), Alan Cameron (The date and identity of Macrobius [published in 1966] and Macrobius, Avienus, and Avianus [published in 1967]), Herman De Ley (Macrobius and Numenius. A study of Macrobius, ‘In Somn.’ I, c. 12; published in 1972), Stephen Gersh (Middle platonism and neoplatonism, the Latin tradition; published in 1986), Roger A. Pack (A medieval critic of Macrobius’ cosmometrics; published in 1981), Alison Peden (Science and philosophy in Wales at the time of the Norman conquest: a Macrobius manuscript from Llabadarn; published in 1981), among others. It highlights the primary issues that researchers have focused on when studying Macrobius's literary legacy, identifies the challenges in analyzing his works, and acknowledges the contribution of English-speaking scholars to the global historiography.

Międzykulturowa interwencja. Dawid Rogacz rozmawia z Q. Edwardem Wangiem

In this interview conducted at the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Po-znan, Q. Edward Wang (Professor of History at Rowan University in the US and Changjiang Professor of History at Beijing University in China) addresses the main problems in global and comparative historiography. Elaborating upon the background and impact of his scientific con-tributions, Prof. Wang discusses the modernization of Chinese historical writing, the challenges of comparative historiography, the status of historical studies today, and the future of historical theory. In addition, he refers to his recent studies in culinary history as instances of a new model of global historiography.

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES OF ARCHAEOLOGY

This article is an attempt to understand the ongoing processes of global archaeology during the last two decades. The aim of this article is to identify the most talked-about concepts of the recent period. The article is intended as a retrospective, subjective reflection from the viewpoint of Latvian archaeologist on the latest period of global historiography, seeking to answer the following question: What key concepts are trending in the global archaeological thought, and do they resonate in Latvian archaeology? The author offers a critical view suggesting that the contemporary archaeological thought differs from the previous periods with pluralism, deep specialization and diversity of ideas as well as pronounced discursive radicalization in the form of unexpected criticism of capitalism in the Western intellectual world. The attempts to politicize the discipline is problematized. In the end, it is concluded that the theoretical framework of Latvian archaeology is more conservative than contemporary global archaeology. Even if some new ideas are adapted, it is still not possible to talk about Latvian archaeologist as a public figure, a social or political activist.

Decentering European History from the Margins

Abstract The article considers the global historiography of Europe from two angles. First it outlines the difficulties, both historical and epistemological, that Europe poses as an object of study, especially after the historiographical transformations prompted by the events of 1989, the rise of postcolonial studies, the growing critique of Eurocentrism, and, most recently, the “global turn.” The conceptions of Europe that emerge from these currents have often been based on a rather homogenized vision of the continent, centered on the great nation-states of western Europe and their imperial policies. They also perpetuate, even as they criticize it, the legacy of a conception of modernity that positions Europe as both its historical center and the agent of its expansion on a global scale. The second part of the paper proposes to limit the blind spots inherent in this kind of vision by shifting our gaze to the eastern and Balkan margins of Europe, where the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires intersected over the “long” nineteenth century. This change of perspective displaces the history of Europe’s connection to modernity, revealing the great diversity of local actors, the importance of multicultural and pluriethnic societies, and the particular role of transnational populations such as Jews, who, while negotiating their own relationship to a European modernity, escaped the grip of national movements.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Go (Away) West!

Go (Away) West!

THE TOWN AND THE SEA. PETROVSK AT THE CASPIAN SEA

The article attempts to demonstrate the transformation of the Russian military fortification Petrovskoe at the coast of the Caspian Sea into the large industrial center of the Dagestan region in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries, as well as to examine the role of the seaport in its economic development. Since 40s of the 19th century, the fort Petrovskoe was a transit point for cargo, transported by sea from Astrakhan for the Russian army, which was involved in war in Dagestan. The author considers the development of sea trade between Astrakhan, Baku and Petrovsk after the latter received the status of a city. The role of Petrovsk in the international trade in the Caspian Sea is shown. As new sources, we introduced data from the Statistical Committee of the Dagestan Region from the Central State Archives of the Republic of Dagestan, as well as materials from the collections of the State Historical Archives of the Republic of Azerbaijan. When writing the article, the author involved works of domestic and global historiography. The methodological basis of the article is the principle of historicism, which presupposes the study of any phenomenon in specific historical conditions and connections, as well as taking into account the decisive role of economic foundations for the development of society. The article reveals the development of Petrovsk and its seaport in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries, when Dagestan was integrated into the economic life of the Empire. Archival materials, published sources and historical literature were used when writing the paper. The author highlights that in the following third of the 19th century, sailing ships were replaced by steamships in the Caspian Sea. The place, occupied by the Petrovsky port among the ports of Russia in the Caspian is demonstrated. The article considers the goods brought to Petrovsk by sea and exported from it. The foundation of the textile factory “Caspian Manufactory” in Petrovsk in 1899 became possible thanks to the port. The construction of the Vladikavkaz railway intensified its role in the 90s of the 19th century. The author comes to the conclusion that the city of Petrovsk and its port played an important role in the process of integration of Dagestan into the economic space of the Russian Empire, and in the emergence of capitalist relations in the region.

Yugocentrism and the Study of the Non-Aligned Movement

There has been a renewed scholarly interest in recent years concerning the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This text addresses some of the challenges posed by focusing on NAM through a lens of Yugocentrism that is reliant on socialist Yugoslav sources alone. To reinsert socialist Yugoslavia into a global historiography, one needs to perform a double movement: The first part concerns bringing Yugoslavia back into global social relations; the second part concerns decentring its positionality and ensuring that other sites of analysis and struggle, and the relations between them, are taken into consideration. Seeing NAM as a prefigurative, multi-nodal, networked community rather than a traditional international organization suggests that privileging one node at the expense of others will lead to a distorted and incomplete analysis. This paper addresses the complex relationship between the Bandung Afro-Asian conference of April 1955 and the Belgrade NAM summit of September 1961. NAM and the G-77 are also studied as overlapping groupings in terms of membership and objectives. The paper contributes to the development of a critical decolonial historiography of the Cold War period that addresses the need for multi-sited, para-sited, and meta-historiographies by going beyond Yugocentrism whilst still retaining a nuanced concern with global Yugoslavia across different conjunctures.

The Marketplaces of Global Historiography

The Marketplaces of Global Historiography

The political economy of informal dog breeding businesses in Harare’s high-density suburbs, Zimbabwe, 1990-2019.

This paper examines the emergence of informal dog breeding businesses in Zimbabwe’s high-density suburbs between 1990 and 2019. It uses the dog breeding practices of the working-classes and informal workers as an entry point into the global dog historiography that overly focuses on the dog breeding practices of the ruling classes and of the middle classes in Western Europe and in North America. It, thus, provides an animal-sensitive assessment of the Zimbabwean crisis drawing from archival sources, newspapers and from digital ethnography. It argues that the dog breeding practices of the working-classes and informal workers in Harare’s high-density suburbs avails a global south dog history that is not overly influenced by Western Kennel Club rules and breeding standards. The paper also focuses on the various types of dogs that gained popularity at different times owing to Zimbabwe’s changing political-economy during the period under review. Informal dog breeders bred different dog breeds at different times in reaction to the fashionable trends to solve evolving urban security needs as a result of changing urban sub-cultures. These informal dog breeding businesses created strong downstream and upstream business ventures that enabled successful dog breeders to attain breadwinner statuses during the Zimbabwean crisis. It concludes by showing that human-dog relations changed during the Zimbabwean crisis in Harare’s high-density suburbs.

Daniel Woolf, A Concise History of History. Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2019

Article Daniel Woolf, A Concise History of History. Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2019 was published on August 1, 2021 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 313, issue 1).

Brokering science, blaming culture: The US-South Korea ecological survey in the Demilitarized Zone, 1963-8.

This paper examines the planning, execution, and closure of the US-Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of U.S. foreign assistance. Working closely with the NAS, U.S. conservationists used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecosystem ecology to developing countries. In this context, by way of the NAS's Pacific Science Board, two countries' biologists initiated the preliminary cooperative project in the DMZ in 1966. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The U.S. side attributed the cooperation failure to Korean culture while the Korean side criticized the unequal structure of their cooperation. Joining the global historiography of Cold War scientific collaboration, this paper pays particular attention to the intermediaries of the collaborative project and their rivalry. It argues that political struggles revolving around the position of go-betweens - as what I call knowledge brokers - on the recipient side provoked contestation between American and Korean scientists. The contention between the two sides played out in the collaboration coming to an end, albeit partially. Throughout this analysis, this study suggests paying more serious attention to the politics of scientific exchange among actors on the recipient side as an outset from which to analyze the heterogeneity of the Korean side without losing sight of their active role in the building process of American hegemony.

RUSSIAN-TURKISH WAR 1877-1878 IN IRANIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE XIX CENTURY AND MODERN IRANIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The conflict between the Russian and Turkish in 1877-1878, though formed on the pretext of Russia's support for Christian nations under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, was actually part of the great scheme that European governments had begun to break up the Ottoman Empire and resolve the Eastern Question. The goals of these powers for world domination, that would sometimes results in wars among themselves, were mainly focused on expanding the territorial realm and winning economic gains. These goals were followed under the disguise of gaining freedom for Christians and securing independence for non-Turkish nations. The scientific and technological impairment of the Ottoman Empire compared to the European countries, accompanied by internal rivalries and frequent overthrow of the rulers, were some of the main weaknesses of the Ottoman state causing their demise. In the meantime, Russia was in pursue of its policy of territorial expansion and seeking access to warm waters. Russia's main objective was to obtain access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Having control over the Straits of Bosporus and Dardanelles that were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire would have connected Russia to the center of world trade in the Mediterranean and would have freed Russia from its land blockages and frozen ports. The causality, the start, and the ramifications of these wars have been reflected in the Iranian historiography of that era. Mohammad Hassan Khan Etemad al-Saltanah, a great historian of the Nasereddin Shah Qajar Age (1848-1898), using the reports of Iranian officials in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and two books of Montazame Nasseri and Merat al-Boldan that were translations of selected articles from the French and Ottoman newspapers have recorded this important historical event. The reasons for Iranian attention to this historical event forms part of the modern and global historiography of Iran, in which attention to the developments in the Ottoman Empire plays an important role in Iran's acquaintance with modern civilization.

От Восток/Запад к глобальной историографии

The article considers the historiographical situation in the world science, the exhaustion of the heuristic potential of the traditional East/West binary opposition and the displacement of its new West / Rest. The formation of «global historiography» is traced, its cultural and historical prerequisites in the origin of the discipline «general history» in Russia are revealed. At the same time, the initial assumptions of the anti-globalist trend in modern historiography, associated with the search for national identity, are revealed. It is noted the appeal of conservative Russian thought to the Byzantine heritage, to the spiritual potential of Asian societies.

Scientific Conference “Economical History of Antiquity in Global Historiography” (Moscow, January 30–31, 2020)

Scientific Conference “Economical History of Antiquity in Global Historiography” (Moscow, January 30–31, 2020)

Lenin on Global History and the Global Historiography on Lenin

Lenin on Global History and the Global Historiography on Lenin

The Climate of Conflict: Politico-environmental Press Coverage and the Eruption of the Mexican Revolution, 1907–1911

Abstract This article combines the insights of historical climatology and analysis of press coverage to reexamine the agrarian origins of the Mexican Revolution from 1907 to 1911. Using a collection of hundreds of articles from dozens of newspapers, contemporary meteorological and agricultural bulletins, government correspondence, secondary works, and recent historical climatological data, I argue that environmental dynamics and political processes were intertwined in the four years preceding the revolution. Specifically, I contend that politico-environmental press coverage of drought and frost based on incomplete or misleading regional climatic information strongly influenced the government's relief measures and thereby exacerbated the acute economic and political crises that led to the ouster of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. By analyzing these understudied climate-society dynamics surrounding the Mexican Revolution, the article's aim is to expand understanding of the significance of these dynamics as well as to incorporate the Mexican case into the global historiography on climate and rebellion.

Book Review

Book Review

La mondialisation de la Révolution française (vers 1930-1960): Origines et éclipse d’un paradigme historiographique

RésumésCet article entend proposer une nouvelle lecture des origines de l’historiographie mondiale de la Révolution française. De fait, alors que la thèse de Robert Palmer et de Jacques Godechot situe la « révolution transatlantique » dans les années 1950, ce changement de paradigme fut en réalité préparé par les débats qui avaient animé la France de l’entre-deux-guerres. Les historiens français ont commencé à prendre ce « tournant global » en 1936, l’année de la création de l’Institut international d’histoire de la Révolution française (Iihrf). L’objectif de ses membres fondateurs, Philippe Sagnac et Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, était de faire de l’historiographie de 1789 un instrument qui permette de développer les relations internationales dans une période de grande fragilité diplomatique. L’Iihrfjoua un rôle de précurseur dans l’étude de la Révolution en vertu de sa dimension interdisciplinaire et de l’étendue géographique et chronologique de ses travaux. Cela dit, l’Institut demeurait profondément lié aux intérêts géopolitiques français et à l’idée d’une supériorité culturelle, elle-même indissociable du concept de « civilisation ». Fermé à cause de l’Occupation, l’Iihrfdéménagea à New York, inaugurant un chapitre particulièrement remarquable des échanges intellectuels franco-américains. Après la guerre, non seulement l’institution n’avait plus de raison d’être diplomatique, mais son projet intellectuel fut très vite éclipsé par le défi de la décolonisation et par la montée en force de nouvelles approches de l’histoire mondiale. L’évolution et la disparition finale de l’Iihrfsoulèvent des questions intéressantes sur trois points, qui traverseront de part en part cet article : le sens de 1789 en tant que repère politique ; les différentes méthodologies des histoires « internationale », « mondiale » et « atlantique » ; la reconfiguration des paradigmes de la recherche historique à l’aube de la guerre froide.

Considering citizenship in imperial Chinese history

ABSTRACTThis article problematizes the meaning and use of ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’ in the global historiography of citizenship. It argues that if in pre-twentieth-century European history citizens have also been subjects, in imperial Chinese history subjects have also been citizens. This argument is laid out in three steps. The first step, which has typically been disregarded in prior discussions on the topic, establishes that membership in some form of political community was articulated through political metaphors and illustrates this on the basis of the body metaphor. Whether and how the people’s membership in the polity also constitutes them as citizens is then addressed through an overview of the rules that govern the reciprocity between those groups constituting the polity and, finally, through a discussion of the types of action open to commoners to shape especially local governance.