{"id":22840,"date":"2018-02-15T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.journals.cambridge.org\/?p=22840"},"modified":"2018-02-16T14:15:07","modified_gmt":"2018-02-16T14:15:07","slug":"the-futures-of-global-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2018\/02\/15\/the-futures-of-global-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Futures of Global History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an extract from the article Discussion: the futures of global history<\/strong><\/a> by Richard Drayton and David Motadel published in Journal of Global History<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2018If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are citizen of nowhere\u2019, declared Theresa May in the autumn of 2016 to the Conservative Party conference, questioning the patriotism of those who still dared to question Brexit. Within a month, \u2018Make America great again\u2019 triumphed in the polls in the United States. From Erdogan\u2019s Turkey, to Putin\u2019s Russia, to Modi\u2019s India, a current of anti-globalization nationalisms is in full flow.<\/p>\n

The storm clouds are indeed dark. They seem even to cast their shadows on the world of historical scholarship, provoking the Princeton Latin American historian Jeremy Adelman to offer a lament about the academic field of global history.[1]<\/a> For Adelman, it seems, the relevance of the field was derived from \u2018globalization\u2019 and its recent Whiggish boosters, ergo: \u2018In our fevered present of Nation-X First, of resurgent ethno-nationalism, what\u2019s the point of recovering global pasts?\u2019 Contained in his rebuke of global history, and of its rootless cosmopolitan practitioners, is the idea that it sought to \u2018eclipse\u2019 national frames of enquiry. It was not the first time that such a jeremiad about global history had issued from the sages of Princeton\u2019s Dickinson Hall. In late 2013, David Bell, the distinguished historian of France, had shrugged in a notorious New Republic book review, that \u2018perhaps the \u201cglobal turn\u201d, for all of its insights and instruction, has hit a point of diminishing returns\u2019.[2]<\/a> \u2018Perhaps it is time\u2019, he mused, \u2018to turn back\u2019 to the \u2018small spaces\u2019.<\/p>\n

Adelman and Bell do put their fingers on many serious problems, and their swashbuckling essays provide a helpful basis for a reflection on the state of global history. But the claim that \u2018resurgent ethno-nationalism\u2019 in some way challenges the premises of global history is odd. Global historians have long noted that forms of ethnonational resistance to globalization were themselves responses to new kinds of global connections. All the fundamentalist upheavals and jihads of the last hundred years, to give one obvious example, arose in response to increasing connection.[3]<\/a> In any event, modern nationalisms, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both inside and outside Europe, were incubated within transnational and trans-imperial connections.[4]<\/a> It is not even a new story. The mercantilisms of early modern European states, and the subsequent fabrications of Louis XIV and Whig England, for example, responded to the new acceleration of European and global trade propelled by the silver of Potos\u00ed and the gold of the Caribbean and Africa.[5]<\/a> Anti-globalization is itself a phenomenon of globalization, and usually seeks to reconstitute the nation\u2019s place in the world rather than to retreat into a disconnected autarky. Trump\u2019s \u2018America first\u2019 and its international analogues are only the most recent incarnations of this reactionary dialectics.<\/p>\n

Even stranger is the idea, not confined to Adelman and Bell, that global history implies a rejection of the smaller scales of historical experience, in particular the nation. It is not merely that global historians are often keenly anchored in national history, or that much innovative recent work has operated at the level of micro-history, following the experience of the global in particular small places or through clusters of individuals. More crucially, national history has, from its origins, been in dialogue with however people have understood the cosmopolitan. We might usefully rediscover how history at the scales of the local, \u2018national\u2019, regional, and global has been entangled with the very origins of human study of the past. Such an enquiry might help us to better understand, beyond the vanities of polemic, where we are now and what might be the futures of global history.<\/p>\n

Continue reading the full article for free here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Jeremy Adelman, \u2018What is global history now?\u2019, Aeon<\/em>, 2 March 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> David Bell, \u2018This is what happens when historians overuse the idea of the network\u2019, New Republic<\/em>, 26 October 2013<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Nikki R. Keddie, \u2018The revolt of Islam, 1700 to 1993: comparative considerations and relations to imperialism\u2019, Comparative Studies in Society and History<\/em>, 36, 3, 1994, pp. 463\u201387; and, more detailed, the contributions in David Motadel, ed., Islam and the European empires<\/em>, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. For a brilliant more general account of this dialectic, see Cemil Aydin, The politics of anti-Westernism in Asia: visions of world order in pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought<\/em>, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Rebecca Karl, Staging the world: Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century<\/em>, Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2002; James Belich, Replenishing the earth: the settler revolution and the rise of the Angloworld, 1783\u20131939<\/em>, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; and Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the nation in imperial Germany<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, provide fascinating case studies of the emergence of national consciousness (and nationalism) as the result of global connections. Similarly, scholars have emphasized the importance of transnational and trans-imperial connections in the history of anti-imperial nationalism, see, for example, Jonathan Schneer, \u2018Anti-imperial London: the pan-African conference of 1900\u2019, in Felix Driver, ed., Imperial cities: landscape, display and identity<\/em>, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 254\u201367; Benedict Anderson, Under three flags: anarchism and the anti-colonial imagination<\/em>, London: Verso, 2005; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism<\/em>, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; Sugata Bose, A hundred horizons: the Indian ocean in the age of global empire<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Leslie James, George Padmore and decolonization from below, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; and Michael Goebel, Anti-colonial metropolis: interwar Paris and the seeds of Third World nationalism<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, \u2018Global history and the spatial turn: from the impact of area studies to the study of critical junctures of globalization\u2019, Journal of Global History<\/em>, 5, 1, 2010, pp. 149\u201370, discuss the phenomenon in more general terms.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Richard Drayton, \u2018Of empire and political economy\u2019, in Sophus Reinert and Pernille R\u00f8ge, eds., The political economy of empire in the early modern world<\/em>, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. vii\u2013xi; Pierre Vilar, A history of gold and money, 1450\u20131920<\/em>, New York: Verso, 1991; and Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Early economic thought in Spain, 1177\u20131740<\/em>, London: Allen and Unwin, 1978.<\/p>\n

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Main image: Drawings of Foreigners at Hirado, portraits of foreign merchants in Japan in the 17th century<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an extract from the article Discussion: the futures of global history by Richard Drayton and David Motadel published in Journal of Global History. \u2018If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are citizen of nowhere\u2019, declared Theresa May in the autumn of 2016 to the Conservative Party conference, questioning the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":22906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[327,839,328],"coauthors":[4050],"class_list":["post-22840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-humanities","tag-global-history","tag-journal-of-global-history","tag-world-history"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22840"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}