One of the very first things you will learn in History at undergraduate level is that there are many different sub-disciplines within the discipline of analysing History, and you will at some point need to focus and zoom in to certain topics in order to have a better argument. Therefore I will explain to you the different categories of historiography in multiple posts.
In this post, I will be focusing on Global History. So what actually is global history, how has it developed and what are some criticisms?
Global history:
- A catholic set of approaches which overlap with and nourish economic, cultural, political, etc. histories
- Doesn’t have to be history of ALL of the globe (although it can be), rather privileges connections and comparisons between places, nations, regions, continents, oceans, etc. over the study of places and peoples in isolation
- Maybe more of a disposition or set of perspectives than a type of history?
- A question of how we might move between scales – big and small – to understand peoples, societies, structures of the past
Its not really a new thing:
- Late 19thC Rankeans aimed towards a ‘universal history’ (with an imperative of western and Christian diffusionism)
- Early 20thC Annales big scale: histoire totale
- Environmental histories have always been inherently trans territorial and global
- Oceanic histories – e.g. trade, religious expansion, slavery, etc. – have crossed borders over centuries
- Two broad, entwined ways of doing global history are very old:
- Comparative approach: to understand events in one place through examining their similarities with and differences from how things happened somewhere else
- Connective approach: how history is made through the interactions of geographically (or temporarily) separate
Decolonisation as a driver:
- 1950s and 1960s liberation from European empires and demand for stories from ‘post-colonial’ places
- Most importantly, about decolonised peoples telling their ‘own’ stories to challenge white supremacist assumptions such as from HTR
- Also growth in western universities of ‘area studies’ to investigate Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, etc.
- This new work ‘enclaved’ in university history departments, where western histories remained dominant – and ongoing issues of white privilege were key in ‘world history’ writing – but appetite for ‘global stories’ grew from 1960s
1990s global turn – method:
- Influenced by wider societal fascination with seemingly accelerated globalisation in post-cold war, neoliberal world
- Reanimated interest in the ‘mega problem’ of the contemporary world: why are some societies so affluent and others so poor?
- Driven early on largely by economic and commodity histories, especially of pre-modern period and/or extended chronologies, a ‘restoration’ of older traditions of economic history on a big scale (Patrick O’Brien, a key pioneer)
- Diasporic and oceanic histories – movements of peoples, as well as goods – another engine room (e.g. work on trading diasporas or colonial labour movements)
1990s global turn – purpose:
- An attack on Eurocentrism, often by placing Europe and Asia in the same comparative frame
- A belief in, and search for, alternative and multiple origins of ‘modernity’ than those placed squarely in and from the west
- Plural ways of understanding the world, no longer ‘the west and the rest’, give agency to diversity of humanity, especially in context of decolonisation
- One might note a certain pointed allergy to ‘patriotic’ or nationalist histories that remained – and perhaps still remain – central to popular historical consumption
Backlash and criticism:
- Been labelled as superficial, intellectually lightweight, thin on methodological reflection, archival rigour, historical depth
- Swung too far against nation and locality, diminishing returns from big scale of thinking, got stale, need to return to the nation and the ‘small places’
- Becoming too hegemonic as people chose – even forced – to become ‘global historians’ in academy
- Term ‘global’ being undermined by inflated use, coming to describe very conventional types of scholarship merely repackaged as something fresh
- Populated by largely (white) monoglot historians
Drayton and Motadel fight back:
- Global history is intertwined with the histories of nation and local, individuals, outsiders, subalterns, and isolated places always there in global history, its actually about the entanglement of scales, not rejecting the ‘small’
- Has directly addressed immobility and resistances to flow, especially in recent years (e.g. of those working on the plantation or those who did not move but consumed the world through print, radio or commodities
- Has, more than most fields, rendered the marginalised and oppressed – slaves, the colonised – visible and centred their agency
- Global micro histories very much put individuals at centre, moreover, the inclination to concentrate on structures over people happens in national frames as much as in world histories