Standing on the shores of continental Europe today, one might believe that the winds of history blow tirelessly out to sea. Indeed, few historical narratives have been as centrifugal as the global. Even the most provincial historian hears the call to pull up anchor and push beyond the waves toward distant horizons. So deep does this theme run that the basic assumption of a structural and ever-creeping global integration would seem increasingly baked into how we choose, periodize, and investigate all historical subjects. In the flash of an eye, once noble monographic subjects have become pitifully parochial, trips to archives are counted in continents instead of towns and series, and we have gone from carefully hiding to drowning in deep regret of our linguistic inadequacies. Neither air travel nor the internet was necessary to feed the long-distance ties of colorful characters of the past; familial networks spread fortune and misfortune across oceans; remote towns turned out to have hemispheric hinterlands. Histories of Europe have stumbled upon global interconnectedness earlier than expected, in surprising places, and through unlikely objects, and in so doing have emboldened us to state what now seems obvious: modern European history has always been global.

There is much truth here. Writing European history after the global turn would be more than ill-served by a reactionary skepticism, misplaced isolationism, belligerent nationalism, or an about-face rejection of the massive scientific gains achieved by grasping the full depth and reach of global connections. But questions remain. And these interrogations have only amplified as we see a shift in the structures, technologies, and modes of the globalization inherited from the post-Cold War world that fueled our most recent round of global history.Footnote ¹ Indeed, as Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel have highlighted, one of the most troubling dimensions of global history over the past three decades has been a tacit assumption “of increasing globalization, a continuous consolidation of the world’s economic as well as ecological, cultural, and social contexts.”Footnote ² Yet one might reasonably respond that the problem is not so much our unspoken consensus that there has been a generalized movement toward global integration over the last three hundred years, uncovered through complex histories that analyze processes, actors, and objects from a global perspective. By most measures, the implicit hypothesis of an underlying globalization since at least the eighteenth century seems incontestable. Rather, the challenge would seem to lie elsewhere. What if globalization has never been simply a subterranean structural force that historians are only now recognizing, but was also a phenomenon grasped by actors in the past?

David Motadel’s call in the introduction to this forum to gather perspective on the “global turn” thus has further implications from a historiographical point of view: as we reflect on our own assumptions about what the “global” means, we must also recognize that historical apprehensions of the global itself change over time.Footnote ³ Indeed, if we look back critically on the global histories of the last three to four decades, which have done so much to improve our understanding of modern Europe, we must also recognize that they have been part of just one, more recent and quite specific mode of global awareness in an already long history of European global historical and scientific consciousness. Though the term “globalization” may not have existed as such in previous periods, there was nonetheless a “global understanding” among historical actors.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, earlier mindfulness of global forces in turn contributed to shaping globalization as we know it. In other words, the point is not to contest whether global integration has steadily taken place and should be the subject of our global histories, but rather that these processes were observed by historical actors as well.

There are many lessons to be drawn from studying earlier perceptions of globalization. Among them is the (at first) contradictory observation that a continuity and even deepening in global interconnectedness did not systematically imply more open borders, increased interdependency, or growing cultural fluidity. Dis-integrating and downscaling modes of social organization were invented and reinvigorated in response to perceived global forces. There were conscious attempts to channel the fruits and accumulations of global processes based on an awareness of their potentially enriching and destabilizing impact. These attempts to take control of globalization did not stop it, but they did give it a specific shape in particular moments. This history must also be written.

As a point of departure, we may observe that historically one of the most important technologies designed to direct and shape globalization toward specific ends in Europe was the imperial nation-state. Coming to grips with how actors in the past conceived—and reconceived—the relationship between such scales as the nation, Europe, empire, and the world remains an essential task for historians of Europe after our latest global turn. For historical actors have consistently reinvested or refused modes of social coordination based on their own conceptions of how and for whom global integration should be ordered. It is therefore particularly problematic—but also very telling—that in the global histories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries some sub-global categories like towns or regions have been given pride of place while others, and specifically the nation, have consistently appeared anti-global, or at the very least in tension with structural processes of globalization. And yet, for certain periods the concepts of nation, nationalism, and empire may also be understood as formidable technologies for redirecting, reorienting, and reprioritizing the forces of globalization in order to serve specific European interests.

The first half of the nineteenth century in France offers a particularly interesting window onto this problem. Even if the final result of the nineteenth century was greater global integration, the path was hardly linear. The Napoleonic Wars, a growing nationalism across the continent, protectionism, the birth of the social sciences, new modes of imperial power, and a reinvention of democratic practices all shifted in profound ways how states understood their relationships to the global pressures inherited from the eighteenth century. While France remained nested in European and global networks, in many cases individuals and groups resisted what they perceived as threats wrought by the global connectivity of the previous century. One may even uncover new forms of retrenchment toward localism, nationalism, and imperial ambition in the service of the nation, through which actors sought to reshape, reorient, and re-hierarchize processes of global integration—as well as the terms they used to understand these movements. In the end, what emerged was a profoundly different conception of how France should be global.

There seems little doubt that the latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed a steady and impressive—both in scale and in depth—acceleration in hemispheric, oceanic, and even global economic integration.Footnote ⁵ From the expansion of global commodity markets,Footnote ⁶ threats to sovereignty,Footnote ⁷ new modes of war,Footnote ⁸ cross-border cultural practices,Footnote ⁹ and a “global underground”Footnote ¹⁰ that undermined the legitimacy of the state itself under Louis XVIFootnote ¹¹ to the internationalization of the banking sector,Footnote ¹² the rise of international trade,Footnote ¹³ and the massive expansion of bills of exchange, “the causes, internal dynamics, and consequences of the French Revolution all grew out of France’s increasing participation in processes of globalization.”Footnote ¹⁴ While historians have expressed some doubts about apprehending this period from a global perspective,Footnote ¹⁵ the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that at the very least the age of “Atlantic Revolutions”Footnote ¹⁶ and the collapse of the French monarchy marked a high point in a “primitive,” “proto,” “early,” or “first” globalization.Footnote ¹⁷

As Gänger and Osterhammel point out, the story of this first globalization’s legacy in the nineteenth century has overwhelmingly focused on continuity.Footnote ¹⁸ There is little doubt that the global connections that continued and even accelerated across the nineteenth century drew upon processes that began in the eighteenth.Footnote ¹⁹ The modes of eighteenth-century globalized commerce, for example, remained pertinent and greatly expanded in the nineteenth century, even as they were coupled with new technologies and forms of global empire. Nonetheless, it is important not to confuse continuities in structural social and economic processes with continuities in actors’ perceptions of the benefits, challenges, and even potential pitfalls of this globalization. From this perspective, it is significant that while historical works have accurately emphasized continuities in global integration between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most have tended to locate the major processes of this further globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ The early nineteenth century has certainly not been ignored. But far less attention has been paid to how actors of the period immediately following the French Revolution interpreted and reacted to the global integration they, too, considered at least partially responsible for the Revolution and the world it created.

Nineteenth-century global history has had its foils. And if there is one framework that has been identified as the global’s bungling but persistent rival, it is the nation. National histories have straightjacketed our methodologies within the strict confines of abstract borders, limited the very kinds of questions historians and social scientists may ask, and tacitly subjected the entire discipline to a mode of historical inquiry that prevents large portions of the human experience from finding a narrative.Footnote ²¹ Much has indeed been lost in the fetishization of the nation as the structural foundation of a “modern” history.Footnote ²² And yet, such consistent targeting of the nation as the anachronistic and irredentist foe is in many ways surprising when one considers the extent to which other scales—including objects, individuals, cities, continents, hemispheres, and empires—have not only been considered compatible with global histories, but even, in some cases, taken as the best ways to pursue them. It would also seem to be historically unwarranted: nations and nationalism, especially in Europe, took shape and in some cases reached an initial zenith at precisely the moment that new forms of globalization were emerging. Indeed, some early theorists of globalization, though they did not necessarily call it that, set their sights on a renewed nationalism that would supersede old modes of world organization—as did their most forceful critics. After all, the early socialist ideas that culminated in Karl Marx’s blanket condemnation of industrial capitalism sought to expose the triumphant, almost impenetrable bourgeois nationalism that was driving the early stages of global industrialization, stuffing the coffers of nation-states and naturalizing the very borders it was in some ways surpassing.

Marx was of course right. Less than two decades after Napoleon attempted perhaps the first great “decoupling” as he tried to consolidate the continental economy through the blockade against Britain, France was artificially drawing borders around its national economy at the same time that it expanded its European and global influence through empire. This should not be surprising: as imperial, transborder, and even global as they may have been, the core of Napoleon’s economic ambitions was always a reprioritization of the place of France on the continent and in the world. The economic nationalism and protectionism that followed the fall of the empire in the first half of the nineteenth century thrived on these experiments even as they consciously sought to nourish and profit from the expansion of a global economy. Just a few short years later, the German émigré Friedrich List traveled to the United States to study infrastructural development before heading to France to work alongside Adolphe Thiers on early plans for the same. Such globe-trotting certainly contributed to a new globalization of economic policy and expertise, but it did so in the service of a new economic nationalism. Eighteenth-century economic doctrines, List argued, “had only ever seen humanity and individuals, not nations.”Footnote ²³

Thiers’s commitment to tariffs, national consolidation of the economy, and France-first commercial policies was profound and highly influential.Footnote ²⁴ While he remained deeply attached to France’s imperial expansion across the Mediterranean and beyond, he also cultivated a veritable obsession with what we would today call “onshoring.” French dependence on foreign production was, he insisted, the consequence of the dangerous and ill-informed economic doctrines that had dominated the previous century. “It is a question of national interest,” Thiers declared of French industrial capacity, invoking “interests as diverse as national production, all interests that the government must heed, that it must reconcile if it can, but that it must protect from the incursions of others.”Footnote ²⁵ This national political economy was expressly designed to undermine the misguided forms of economic liberalization and international integration that had contributed to what he called the laissez-faire excesses of the French Revolution: “This is the fine argument of the ‘Laissez faire’ and the ‘Laissez passer’ … which has never done the world any good.”Footnote ²⁶

This new global political economy in which the nation came first was also shored up by a direct attack on the scientific assumptions that underpinned earlier modes of global integration. The social science that emerged in the nineteenth century did not predate globalism but was in fact a rejection of the kind of abstract global universalism that had animated scientific inquiry in the previous century—giving rise to a methodological nationalism with which social scientists still struggle today.Footnote ²⁷ In the field of historical production dominated by figures such as Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Edgar Quinet, the roman national provided a means of at once lifting France above regional identities and reprioritizing its place in a more integrated world. “France … possessed annals, but no history at all,” was Michelet’s damning assessment of his Enlightenment forebears.Footnote ²⁸ His Introduction à l’histoire universelle thus observed, in words that sound particularly familiar to us, that his contemporary world was “caught up in a hurricane, which moves so quickly that even the most surefooted experience a vertigo that weighs upon every chest.” As a result, his universal history, he insisted, “leaped off from far and high; explaining the history of France provides no small share of the history of the world.” This was true to such an extent that “this small book could also be called Introduction à l’histoire de la France; for it is in France that it concludes.”Footnote ²⁹

No matter what their historical understanding actually owed to the eighteenth century, Michelet and his nineteenth-century progenies tirelessly asserted that it was time for a new history of the world in which the French nation was the privileged scale of historical knowledge. A global France recognized the achievements of globalization past, but privileged the nation as the new vehicle for global integration. Michelet’s fusional relationship with France was not a denial of universality and world history so much as a refusal of the specific form he asserted these had taken in Enlightenment histories, from Adam Ferguson’s essay on civil society to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of the origins of inequality.Footnote ³⁰ He sought to reorient universal history, to re-hierarchize the scales through which such universality could be attained. For Michelet, like many of his contemporaries, universal history needed to be re-written, France first.

And Michelet was certainly not alone. Of course, global conceptions of history and processes of globalization existed before such appellations were assigned by social scientists. But it is precisely for this reason that the birth of the social sciences marks such an important moment in the contradictory processes of world-making. Their emergence in France was rooted in a critique of the “abstract” and “metaphysical” assumptions that figures like Auguste Comte saw at the core of Enlightenment philosophy. Comte scoffed at those foolish generations whose transcendent perspective prevented any concrete or precise grasp of the “the social” as such. The “society” Comte studied so scientifically was decidedly French. Methodological nationalism was not a sui generis invention, ignorant of eighteenth-century Europe’s pretensions to embody a universal humanity; it was to the contrary specifically geared to challenge such borderless conniving. The lessons and models it provided to the world stemmed from its intentional grounding in a national context. As Comte argued in the fourth volume of his Philosophie positive, the excesses of the French Revolution had been precisely the result of “the philosophical elaboration of this doctrine, which can be seen everywhere uniformly dominated by the strange metaphysical notion of a so-called state of nature, the primordial and invariable type of any social state.”Footnote ³¹ A similar movement can be seen in literary texts. Even as global references could be found throughout the fictions of the famed docteur es sciences sociales Honoré de Balzac, he also self-consciously presented his oeuvre as the inheritor of naturalists such as the Comte de Buffon, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Georges Cuvier. One of the more unexpected effects of the shift from the espèces zoologiques (zoological species) of his predecessors to the espèces sociales (social species) of the Comédie humaine was a nationalization of the very scientific categories he claimed to be inheriting: “If some scientists do not admit yet that Animality is transferred into Humanity by an immense current of life,” Balzac argued, “the grocer certainly becomes a peer of France.”Footnote ³² In this slippage from the universality of the animal world to the social profile of a member of France’s upper house, Balzac effectively nationalized a scientific project that had once been transversal.

As Balzac suggested, the challenge was also political. Having lit the lamp of Revolution and given voice to an undivided universalism, by the second decade of the nineteenth century the continent that had been briefly dominated and unified under one of the great inheritors of 1789 was once again splintered. On the heels of Napoleon’s First Empire, in 1815 the Treaty of Vienna established a hybrid system, in which a divided Europe reasserted itself along with a restored monarchy in France. The dreams of a new, unified Europe collapsed as quickly as they had become a reality.Footnote ³³ The disintegration of this first project of European integration had real consequences. The “statification” of French society was also a process of nationalization set against the backdrop of forces of globalization that had been so influential in the previous century.Footnote ³⁴ This statification was not neutral, but was shaped by the rival ideologies that animated the successive regimes of the first half of the nineteenth century in France. For all their focus on individual rights and their skepticism of certain forms of state intervention, liberals backed the colonial expansion that radically reshaped the contours of global trade. It is now widely recognized that despite—or indeed because of—his commitment to individual liberty in France, Alexis de Tocqueville supported imperial expansion into Algeria to strengthen the nation and reinforce its position in Europe and the world.Footnote ³⁵ The author who wrote of “democracy that fills the world” in the original manuscript of Democracy in America Footnote ³⁶ also extolled the positive consequences of an aggressive imperialism, arguing that it was only by engaging in heinous forms of imperial war that France would be able to consolidate its national pride and grandeur. Nineteenth-century liberalism proved to be particularly amenable to global systems founded on an uneven distribution of political and economic rights. Statification, imperialism, and globalization were all part of the same movement.

But even as these liberal ideals endured they confronted other political themes born in the French Revolution, most notably the notion of popular sovereignty. The fact that this was never scaled up to the world as a whole but took root in “nations” deeply impacted how globalization would be experienced and pursued. Certainly, the idea of constructing a demos on the scale of a state as large as France was already daunting. Even as democracy took root internationally across the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the idea that a meaningful mode of democratic organization could exist on a continental scale, much less a global one, struck many as absurd. The “self” in self-government was decidedly national. As a result, the uneasy equilibrium between sovereignty and globalization that existed under the monarchy in the second half of the eighteenth century was hardly stabilized in the post-Revolutionary period.Footnote ³⁷ Instead, the construction of a popular sovereignty became an inexhaustible source for feeding ideas about national character, a passion for equality within French borders, and a “practical” spirit within a rapidly globalizing context.

Republicanism was no doubt one of the paths through which popular sovereignty and an insurgent nationalism were joined most tightly with growing global pressures; indeed, such national affirmation in the face of international forces became a marker of the French Republic. The paradox was that this new investment in Republicanism was shared by other European and Atlantic states even as they denied the same opportunities for political engagement on their colonial peripheries. From this perspective, French Republicanism in the first half of the nineteenth century was also a force in dis-integrating, redirecting, and readjusting the processes of global integration that had structured the previous century. The revolts that spread across Europe in the 1830s and 1840s ironically contributed to these processes. While not nationalist in our contemporary sense, dyed-in-the-wool Republicans like Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, and François-Vincent Raspail were fighting for a more just France, the devolution of power to the French people, the interests of French workers, and a more just humanity. The push for electoral reform, the expansion of suffrage, the new correspondence committees, and calls for social regulation throughout the first half of the nineteenth century incrementally reinforced the weight of the national administration. While it was hoped that the French embrace of democratic socialism would inspire other nations, to exist at all it required, at some level, a reinvestment in French solidarity which had been sorely missing under the monarchies of Europe’s ancien régime.

The era of the First Empire and the decades that followed witnessed what might be called a deglobalizing globalization; that is, a moment when global integration certainly did not stop, but when the scales of belonging and those structuring global processes were perceived as contrary influences and acted upon in ways that created strong head-winds. These forces profoundly transformed global connections and reforged them at least partially around new national concerns. Teasing out the opposing and even regressive movements that hindered, shaped, and shifted processes of globalization is particularly important if we are to grasp the events of the first half of the nineteenth century and the global history of Europe more broadly. The outline above suggests just some of the ways that conceptions of the global in European history could be shaped by changing priorities, hierarchies, and prejudices. After the global turn, writing such European histories will require a profoundly reflexive approach to how the scales on which we conceive our political, social, and global interactions have been historically constructed. What we have come to see as global history—uncovering global connections and revealing hidden international and world networks—cannot be projected onto a becalmed ocean. The contrary winds that buffet the global historian’s craft blow onshore as often as they drive us toward distant horizons.