I

Global social history can draw on a plethora of scholarly approaches that have been devised in the fields of social history, global history, and area-studies history over the past decades. Among them are the theoretical works of the 1970s and 1980s, such as world-system theory or studies on social imperialism which explored how aristocratic and bourgeois elites used imperial propaganda in order to ease social tensions and to integrate the working classes into emerging national communities.Footnote ¹⁶ Some of these studies took into account global interactions; however, they ultimately lost much of their appeal because of their Eurocentric and rather functionalist orientation, and have therefore been of less interest to scholars of global history in recent years.

Scholars in area studies, for their part, examined relations between particular social groups in specific regional contexts. In most cases, their findings were considered spatially specific, as they framed their work in ways that only occasionally related to social historical developments in other parts of the world. One prominent example is the long-time interest of Africanists in the history of the African ‘elites’, without explicitly comparing these ‘elites’ to the middle classes in other parts of the Global South, not to mention the middle classes of the Western world.Footnote ¹⁷ There are exceptions, of course. The most notable is subaltern studies, which, although initially growing out of scholarship on colonial South Asia, has been successfully adapted for the examination of social relations in other parts of the world.Footnote ¹⁸ The approach of subaltern studies is particularly well suited for an examination of different forms of inequality in a globalized world, due both to its scepticism to imperialism and postcolonial nationalism, and to its attention to epistemological questions.

Global social history can build on these (and other) research traditions and integrate them into a larger analytical framework. What is more, it can tie in with recent initiatives from the fields of sociology, history, and international relations that have suggested global historical sociology as a shared trajectory to investigate the global dynamics that enable the emergence, reproduction, and breakdown of social orders.Footnote ¹⁹ Still, if global social history is to become a distinct approach to the study of the human past, we need to think about a definition. What is global social history, and how does it differ from, and complement, other approaches of social and global history? A useful starting point can be found in the classic approaches of global history as both the historical study of the world’s past through comparison – which allows us to see similarities (and convergences over time) and differences (and divergences over time) in different parts of the world – and also the study of connections (globalization) and disconnections (pre- and deglobalization) across the world.

Within this framework, we are particularly interested in convergences and divergences – what Sebastian Conrad called ‘structured transformations on a global level’ – over time.Footnote ²⁰ Global social history can reveal how particular social groups shaped and were shaped by global transformations. Moreover, it can explore how particular social groups – be they merchants, scholars, or elites of tribal societies – established global networks and thus influenced or initiated processes of globalization. In turn, global social history will help us to understand how social structures in different parts of the world were affected by processes of globalization; it will investigate the extent to which social groups and social milieus were produced by global entanglements and the extent to which these groups and milieus had to adapt to globalization in order to maintain their status within their societies.

A conjuncture of social transformation with an increase of global connections can certainly be observed after the seventeenth century, with the emergence of a capitalist world economy, the impact of colonial plantation goods on European and North American consumer markets, the closer symbiosis between metropolitan capital and the ambitions of imperial governments, and the increasing importance of overseas inventories and inventions for scholarly knowledge. These processes accelerated and became ever more important after the dual revolution of the eighteenth century. The global social transformations of the modern period are closely linked to the expansion of Europe. Yet, non-European societies and social actors were by no means mere bystanders or victims of European imperialism, despite the violence of colonial rule. Some of them successfully adapted to European hegemony and pursued political and economic goals of their own. Time and again, non-European actors also played crucial roles in processes of globalization, as has been shown for instance in the case of the interaction between European and Asian businessmen across the Indian Ocean, the role of tribal societies in the caravan trade in Central Asia or West Africa, or the establishment of trade links across North America.Footnote ²¹

Studying the influence of global connections on the emergence and transformation of classes and social milieus is compatible with the works of both global and social historians who share an interest in the ways in which specific social structures were shaped by human interactions. Even though the nature of such entanglements is often only vaguely defined, there seems to be a consensus among scholars that interconnectivity is the raison d’être of global historical studies and that the ever-growing density of long-distance interconnections – both through face-to-face encounters and by acts of communication – can be considered evidence of the emergence of a globalized world.Footnote ²² A similar interest in human interaction can be observed in social history. Over more than half a century, social historians have now studied the ways in which affiliation to a particular class was, at least partly, an outcome of the self-fashioning and strategic behaviour of social actors. In his seminal study on The making of the English working class, E. P. Thompson pointed out that ‘The working class made itself as much as it was made.’Footnote ²³ Similarly, Georg Simmel argued that social theory should focus on processes of Vergesellschaftung (communalization or social integration), as he considered social order to be neither static nor the function of specific income structures but a process-related issue and the result of social interaction.Footnote ²⁴

Global historians have presented various examples that highlight the role of global interconnection for both the emergence and the transformation of particular social groups. In their contribution to this special issue, Eric Vanhaute and Claudia Bernardi examine how rural peripheries in the Global South were transformed by the increased commodification of agriculture after the mid-nineteenth century; this global enclosure, as agrarian historians called it, was the result of the influx of metropolitan capital on the one hand and the establishment of imperial tax regimes and land rights on the other. This transformation of the countryside through the commodification of land and labour went along with the spread of capitalist social relations, including privatized credit and the private ownership of land. The momentous process of remaking peasants into cultivators and eventually consumers of commodities was supported by the spread of a variety of labour regimes, such as sharecropping, family yeoman farming, and proletarian agricultural labour.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, scholars of global labour history have explored the interconnection of labour regimes in different parts of the world. Forced and ‘voluntary’ forms of migration – such as transatlantic slavery, the Asian coolie trade, and, after the mid-nineteenth century, the emigration of millions of European poor to the Americas and Australia – resulted in the emergence of new labour communities in different parts of the world.Footnote ²⁶ Even if they often lacked class consciousness, these labour communities were distinct social groups, sharing similar conditions of life that were influenced by the emergence of the capitalist world economy and the breakthrough of industrial production.

Likewise, studies on the history of monarchy have revealed how, in the age of empire, both European and non-European rulers were compelled to reconsider their social position in the face of an ever more globalized world, which was increasingly coming under European dominance. Non-European monarchs such as the Persian shahs or the king of Hawai‘i attempted to resist the expansion of the Western powers by establishing links to European monarchies, as David Motadel’s contribution points out. European sovereigns, for their part, not only encountered differences in terms of culture and skin colour when face to face with their non-European counterparts but also detected remarkable social similarities between them. All over the world, societies were organized hierarchically, with chiefs, emperors and empresses, and kings and queens on top.Footnote ²⁷ Of course, there was also remarkable social, cultural, and political diversity among princes and aristocracies worldwide. Africanists, for instance, have discussed whether the term ‘chiefdom’ should be distinguished from that of ‘kingdom’ and how both of these terms relate to the concept of the ‘state’ – thus cautioning against the uncritical adaption of such terms as universal concepts.Footnote ²⁸ In his contribution on early modern courts, Jeroen Duindam looks at differences in the status, recruitment, and legitimation of monarchies in different parts of the world. These differences were exaggerated, for example, in orientalist discourse, from Machiavelli to Montesquieu, whereas travellers recognized the familiar elite styles and readily used European terminology to describe distant aristocratic elites. Moreover, he argues that the urgency of the reforms which European courts faced after the 1750s were almost unparalleled. The Sattelzeit, indeed, can be seen as the defining moment of the great divergence in terms of the relation between aristocratic rulers and the societies in which they were living.

While all of these social formations – peasants, workers, and aristocrats – existed long before the intensifications of global interaction during the long nineteenth century, the bourgeois middle classes were a social group that emerged precisely in that period and came into being, at least partially, as a product of globalization and colonialism.Footnote ²⁹ As the global historical examination of the rise of the middle classes is exceptionally well suited for discussing the opportunities and risks of global social history, we will look at it in more detail.

For a long time, social historians were convinced that there were no social formations beyond the North Atlantic world that could be compared to the European or North American bourgeoisies and middle classes.Footnote ³⁰ Recent scholarship, however, has identified the emergence of social formations that can be compared to the Euro-American middle class in places as different as China, India, Peru, Egypt, and Ethiopia.Footnote ³¹ However, a fundamental challenge is the creation of a definition of middle class that is applicable worldwide. In contrast to the aristocracy or the working class, the bourgeois middle class could neither be characterized by well-defined privileges acquired by birth or particular political interest, nor be distinguished clearly from other social groups by their socio-economic status. This problem was discussed among social historians of Europe during the twentieth century and has now grown even more acute with the examination of middle classes in the non-Western world.

European social historians presented a pragmatic solution to the dilemma. They pointed out that affiliation to this social group depended not least on the acceptance of a specific moral–cultural canon and a certain way of living.Footnote ³² This conception has proved to be suitable for global histories of the middle classes as well. Middling sorts throughout the non-Western world shared much with the Western middle classes in terms of their cultural orientation.Footnote ³³ The middle classes that emerged throughout the long nineteenth century were intrinsically linked to globalization. In fact, they were in many ways the product of global entanglements. This is certainly true for the middle classes in Europe’s colonies, often educated in missionary schools or Western local schools. Looking at the emergence of the Indian middle classes as an exemplary case, scholars have demonstrated that this group developed their hegemony within local society from a position of colonial subalternity. Moreover, historians have claimed that the social identity of these groups often relied on an imitation of Western archetypes; Partha Chatterjee famously spoke about a ‘derivative discourse’.Footnote ³⁴

This notion has recently been challenged. Sanjay Joshi argues that the emergence of an Indian middle class cannot be reduced to an adoption of Western models.Footnote ³⁵ Such a notion, in his eyes, disregards the agency of this social group and does not take into account the fact that their self-fashioning relied on vernacular notions of political and social organization. Similar processes can be observed across the non-Western world. Accordingly, the emergence of non-Western middle classes can be interpreted as a hybrid mix of local traditions and influences from abroad.

A similar case can be made for the European middle classes, as recent works have shown that their cultural canopy had, in fact, a global span.Footnote ³⁶ Business elites, which were an integral part of the European bourgeoisie, were generally part of global economic networks.Footnote ³⁷ What is more, bourgeois culture relied on the consumption of commodities imported from colonial possessions, such as sugar, tea, cocoa, coffee, and silk, and often involved the observation of exotic plants and animals by visiting zoological and botanical gardens.Footnote ³⁸ European middle classes also regularly compared the stage of development that Western civilization had reached to that of allegedly ‘primitive’ societies on the colonial fringes.Footnote ³⁹

The rise of the middle classes in different parts of the world can thus be seen as a consequence of global entanglements rather than as a diffusion of a European bourgeois lifestyle all over the world. This exchange process, however, did not take place on a level playing field, but in the context of Western dominance and imperialism. Time and time again, colonial middle classes saw their ideals of political freedom and their aspirations to be part of a global process of modernization undermined by imperial hubris and racism. And whereas colonial middle classes generally took the European middle classes as a yardstick, this was obviously not the case the other way round.

The recent interest in non-Western middle classes is instructive as, for a long time, scholars in area studies and anticolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon considered the non-Western bourgeoisies as collaborators with European imperialists and as sycophants merely interested in their own gain.Footnote ⁴⁰ Following the disillusionment with the elites in the Global South after decolonization, scholars in subaltern studies and postcolonial theory began to focus on the peasantry in order to devise new approaches that could challenge Eurocentric models of development and historical research. As a consequence, in works of South Asian, African, and South American social history, peasants and subaltern groups became talismanic in the search for a new political subject. In contrast, the new interest of area-studies scholars in the emergence of colonial middle classes is connected to the debates about the emergence of ‘new middle classes’ in the Global South after the end of the Cold War.Footnote ⁴¹ Still, it is worth noting that these studies are generally rather sceptical of the liberal claim that the rise of the middle classes in regions such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America is evidence for the fact that these parts of the world would finally develop according to the ‘Western’ model. As these examples reveal, however, it is worth paying attention to historiographical trends and considering the reasons for the prominence of particular social groups (and the neglecting of other groups) in historical studies at certain times (and in certain historical contexts).

Taken together, recent research in labour history and studies of groups such as the aristocracy, the peasantry, or the middle classes have provided ample evidence that show that these social groups shaped, and were considerably shaped by, global entanglements. To be sure, all of these groups were also influenced by local, national, and regional conditions and power struggles, and the relation between local conditions and global influences has to be examined in each and every case by meticulous research.

The relation between global and local conditions in particular has been addressed in several publications.Footnote ⁴² Scholars have, for example, shown much interest in nodes of global entanglement, such as port cities.Footnote ⁴³ A global historical account may reveal that such localities were characterized by specific processes of stratification that influenced both the social order in the respective city and worldwide social structures. In his contribution, Michael Goebel examines the close interrelation between urbanization and the emergence of middle classes across the world in the long nineteenth century and argues that social history is indispensable for a better understanding of globalization. Such an approach could also be used to explore whether conflicts and frictions between particular social groups are specific to particular regions of the planet, or whether they can be compared to similar processes in other parts of the world. For instance, bourgeois civilizing missions which aimed at the education of urban and rural subaltern classes and their integration within modern society can be found in cities as far apart as London, Bombay, and Aleppo.Footnote ⁴⁴ And entrenched aristocratic elites had to react to the social transformations of the long nineteenth century, in particular to the rise of the middle classes, in regions as different as the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Germany.Footnote ⁴⁵ It might be worthwhile analysing both the similarities and the differences between societal developments that took place in different parts of the globe and to explore whether they can be integrated into an overarching conceptual framework of global social history.

A further trajectory concerns the ways in which social history might be linked to the history of political territorialization. From works on social imperialism to subaltern studies, scholarship has shown how imperialism could affect social stratification in different parts of the world; and, vice versa, imperial politics could arguably also be shaped by particular social groups. Theories of imperialism brought forward by writers such as John A. Hobson, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin argued that imperial expansion was motivated by the ambitions of capitalist entrepreneurs to open up new overseas markets.Footnote ⁴⁶ For the British empire, a similar argument has been put forth by Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins in their ‘Gentlemanly capitalism’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, social history has also been used to study the formation of nation-states. Scholars famously argued that, in Europe, nationalism had been stabilized by culture, including invented traditions that helped integrate different social groups into a national community.Footnote ⁴⁸ Likewise, the rise of anticolonial nationalism in the Global South may be examined within a social historical framework. Ranajit Guha, for instance, cautions against the elitism that characterized the nationalist historiography of a country such as India after independence and maintains that the struggle against colonial rule and the establishment of Indian nationalist consciousness did not result from middle-class agency alone. Rather, we have to take into account the contribution of ‘the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is, the people’.Footnote ⁴⁹ A similar claim has been made for anticolonial mobilization in sub-Saharan Africa after the Second World War. This mobilization relied on both the activities of Western-educated elites (that is, the middle classes) and the agitation of the rural population. Elizabeth Schmidt has thus argued that anticolonial nationalism should be considered a conjunction between top-down and bottom-up processes.Footnote ⁵⁰ Global social history studies could adopt this approach as a methodological tool for the comparative examination of national mobilization in both the Global North and the Global South.

II

A global history of the emergence of social groups, classes, and milieus can certainly not merely adopt the concepts of social theory that were established for the examination of Western societies. Rather, the concepts will have to be adapted to be applicable for the analysis of the modern globalized world characterized by imperialism, racism, and global interdependencies. Scholars of global labour history, for instance, have had to acknowledge that basic concepts of conventional labour history, which assumed the prevalence of paid labour, have not been sufficient to explore global economic connections.Footnote ⁵¹ Often, it turned out, industrial labour in the Global North relied on unfree labour conditions in the Global South.Footnote ⁵² Likewise, idealistic presumptions of international workers’ solidarity were thwarted by the fact that established labour forces in particular areas often vehemently opposed the influx of foreign workers and supported xenophobic policies.Footnote ⁵³

In a similar vein, the idea that middle classes are proponents of liberalism and social modernization stands in stark contradiction to the fact that the European middle classes emerged as a distinct social group in the age of empire, supported the colonial enterprise, with its regimes of economic exploitation, authoritarian rule, and civilizing missions, and closed their eyes to imperial violence.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such acts of discrimination and repression can be considered the dark side of the ideology of modernity and of the bourgeois quest for universal equality and progress. In particular, colonialism discloses the inherent contradictions of the bourgeois project, as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler pointed out, because colonial racism stood in obvious contrast to the ideal of universal equality of all humans.Footnote ⁵⁵

These examples show that the introduction of concepts that have their origin in Euro-American social theory to global history comes with several challenges. However, the fact that global historical studies may point out biases in the ways in which particular social groups, such as the middle classes, or processes, such as labour relations, were conceptualized in social theory is one of the field’s strengths. As a consequence, a reconfiguration of social categories is required in order to making them meaningful tools for the study of the worlds of the Global South on the one hand, and for examining processes of globalization on the other.Footnote ⁵⁶ There are a number of further challenges that a global social history has to take into account, however. First, there is the problem of terminology. It should be obvious that sociological–historical concepts of western European origin, such as the bourgeoisie or the middle class, cannot always be smoothly applied to non-European history. After all, one important epistemological problem of comparisons is that of selectively looking for analogies while overlooking important differences between Western and non-Western societies. There is also the risk that the application of Western models to non-Western societies results in seeing the history of most of the world in terms of a deficiency: for example, in terms of a lack of the right social classes. Yet completely renouncing global comparisons for this reason would reinforce the othering of non-Western societies and possibly even exoticize them further. Without the adoption of common terms, cross-regional comparisons would be rendered impossible, which is why such terms can be considered as ‘both inadequate and indispensable’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty famously put it.Footnote ⁵⁷

Second, there is an implicit teleology in many global historical works, and particularly in macro-historical and macro-sociological studies, such as world-system theory. Much of this research tends to assume that globalization is an inevitable process. Frederick Cooper rightly warned about such a teleological bias and argued that historians must be open to discrepancies, asynchronies, and dead ends in global entanglements.Footnote ⁵⁸ What is more, global social history will have to be cautious of any idealistic narratives of class consciousness and identity, and attentive to discrepancies and ambiguities in regard to processes of stratification and social conflicts from the local to the global level.

Third, not all historical actors can be fitted into categories of class established in Euro-American social theory. For this reason, global social history cannot content itself with applying the classic triads of social theory – working class, bourgeoisie, and aristocracy – at a global level. Even for the examination of European societies, this scheme proves to be insufficient. There has been a long debate, for instance among Marxist theorists, on how to integrate agriculture and the rural population into the analysis of industrial-capitalist societies.Footnote ⁵⁹ There are numerous other groups that do not seem to fit into such a class system at all, among them the European lumpenproletariat, travellers, vagabonds, and bandits.Footnote ⁶⁰

The existence of groups that elude a conventional class order obviously becomes even more of a challenge for global historians. Francesca Fuoli’s article in this issue offers a global historical examination of banditry and points to the social transformations that made for the emergence of bandits as a social group. Another interesting example is that of tribal societies. Of course, the very term ‘tribal societies’ is not unproblematic as it encompasses very different groups living in different parts of the world, from tribes in the North American plains to Central Highlands clans in Afghanistan, and from nomadic peoples in the Sahara to the tribes of the Brazilian rainforest. As Elisabeth Leake’s contribution shows, the term was coined in the nineteenth century in order to designate non-sedentary peoples who, in the eyes of European officials and scholars, lived at a rather primitive stage of culture and adhered to archaic customs. A global historical account of such tribal societies, however, may reveal that, despite their differences, there could also be some similarities between how they were integrated in global networks or reacted to European expansion.

Historians have demonstrated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, tribal societies were by no means stagnant or merely inward-looking. In fact, many of these societies took an active part in global interactions. Scholars have thus challenged the idea of early modern and modern Afghanistan as a country characterized by isolation, violence, and divisive tribalism. Many Afghans, not just elites, were connected to the wider world as entrepreneurs, traders, scholars, pilgrims, or soldiers, and were thus important agents of globalization.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, Pekka Hämäläinen has pointed out that North American tribal communities such as the Lakota were not hapless victims of European expansion but could use the rivalries between different European powers on their continent to stabilize their political power well into the second part of the nineteenth century, and successfully integrated European merchants who were looking for goods in the American interior into their own trading networks, for instance in the fur trade.Footnote ⁶²

Other communities that do not easily fit into a Western class system include groups as diverse as the bureaucrats of the imperial Chinese state, Buddhist monks, and savants and healers who relied on vernacular traditions rather than on the global circulation of goods and ideas. The fact that not all historical actors participated in global exchanges, however, is not an argument against a global social history. Rather, it is a reminder that our conceptual approaches should be used primarily in a heuristic manner and always need to be adapted to and challenged by the empirical evidence.

Another challenge to global social history is the integration of race, religion, and gender into the analysis of class relations. Feminist historians, for instance, have pointed to the importance of gender relations in the emergence of particular classes, such as the working class or the bourgeoisie, and for the everyday life experience of their members.Footnote ⁶³ In aristocratic rule, hereditary bloodlines were often considered more important than gender, which is why, throughout history, female monarchs could assume political power.Footnote ⁶⁴ Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have claimed that gender and class always operate together, and thus that, ultimately, gender history needs to be an integral part of any social history, without exception.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is to some extent also true for global social history; indeed, global social history offers the opportunity for more pronounced analyses of gender relations in global history, the omission of which has been repeatedly criticized over the last few years.Footnote ⁶⁶

For a long time, relations between class and ethnicity have received relatively little attention within social history, which may in part be explained by the fact that social history was originally developed in the field of European history. Still, the works of historians who have paid attention to this relationship, such as David Cannadine’s study of the aristocratic elites within the British empire, suggest that the intersection of ethnicity and class is essential for understanding global class relations.Footnote ⁶⁷ In a global environment, specific social milieus could enable individuals of different ethnic origins to merge. That said, colonial historians have also pointed to the conflicts between white and non-white members of the same classes in the Global South. On the other hand, white subalterns – such as jobless seamen, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes – living in colonial dependencies were a constant nuisance for colonial governments, as they undermined the notion of white supremacy that was one of the pillars of imperial rule.Footnote ⁶⁸

Religion is another factor that has to be considered an integral part of global social history. There is a growing body of social histories that take religion seriously and demonstrate the importance of religion in class formation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Historians have thereby also shown that social milieus could allow members of different religious communities to mingle, highlighting the potential integrative function of social collectives. The most prominent example is the acculturation of Jews into western Europe’s bourgeois middle classes in the long nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ A global social history might offer a comprehensive look at the importance of religion in class formation around the world. Moreover, it would allow us to study the impact of shared religion or religious differences on the interactions between members of specific social groups. Muslim bourgeois middle-class migrants, for example, were often able to acculturate within the social milieus of Europe’s metropolitan middle classes relatively seamlessly.Footnote ⁷¹ Similar interactions within social groups – and across religious boundaries – can be observed around the world.

Finally, there has been a growing interest in the intersection of race, religion, gender, and class within the structures of societies. This has been the case, for instance, in both American and colonial history. Here, discrimination against women of colour has been the focus of feminist research for a long time.Footnote ⁷² Another topic concerns the use of xenophobia by economic elites in order to divide and control labour communities of different ethnic backgrounds.Footnote ⁷³ As imperial racism structured worldwide interactions to a considerable extent, particularly after the eighteenth century, a global social history will need to take into account this intersectionality, as Merry Wiesner-Hanks points out in her contribution.Footnote ⁷⁴ Global social historians might intervene in these debates by pointing out that, even in the age of empire, a shared class background could be the basis for the interaction of social actors of different religions and ethnicities from different parts of the world. Global social history allows us to compare the ways in which race, religion, and gender structured social stratification and identities in different regions.

III

A challenge to global social history is the lack of an overarching framework. Conventional social history could use the nation-state as a historiographical laboratory to study the relation between economic development and social stratification. A world society – an entity comparable to national and imperial societies – would be difficult to conceptualize as there are no institutions, associations, or political parties on a global level that could be compared to those established within distinct states. Nevertheless, it might be worthwhile to consider whether particular concepts of global social integration could be adopted for such an approach, not in the hope of constructing an all-inclusive theory but in order to describe more precisely what we mean by global entanglements, to determine which processes underpinned the establishment of global structures, and to discuss how they influenced local societies.

A first option is world-system analysis.Footnote ⁷⁵ The main argument of this approach – the idea that the emergence of a capitalist world-system was the result of an integration of ever larger parts of the world into a European core – has been refined in recent scholarship. Research of the past two decades has recognized that the global economy has by no means been dominated by Europe since the early modern period. On the contrary, we have to acknowledge a remarkable equivalence between European and Asian economies until the late eighteenth century, and to consider the impact of non-European actors, such as Asian and Middle Eastern merchants, on the emergence of modern capitalism.Footnote ⁷⁶ Nevertheless, an adapted version of world-system analysis could be used as an analytical framework to study the appearance and transformation of particular social groups, such as the bourgeoisie or the working classes, around the world after the eighteenth century. An example of such an approach is Sven Beckert’s Empire of cotton. Even though Beckert refers to Wallerstein’s theory only in passing, his study is an exemplary case of how the examination of class relations can – and must – be linked to the analysis of global capitalism. His work demonstrates how, among others, the global cotton economy shaped agricultural labour, and can be seen as the primary reason for the emergence of industrial capitalism and a metropolitan working class. As a consequence, it can be connected to the transformation of labour regimes across the globe, and is one of the reasons for the development of class society. Furthermore, Beckert’s book looks at the emergence of a global bourgeoisie of merchants and bankers, a group that is described as a ‘cosmopolitan community’ and a ‘social class’ that ‘often had closer connections to people far away than to people in their home cities or immediate hinterlands’.Footnote ⁷⁷

It is striking that businessmen, from European metropoles to colonial peripheries, shared specific cultural traits that allowed them to establish vast networks. In world trade, European and American merchant houses were regularly on a par with Chinese, Indian, or Arab merchants with whom they liaised when doing business outside the North Atlantic region. As Christof Dejung argues in his contribution to this issue, Western and non-Western businessmen adopted similar business practices and were part of a similar mercantile culture, which is why they can be described as joint members of a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁷⁸ Recent research in the field of global labour history shows how the interaction of members of this capitalist class was accompanied by, and in fact relied on, the reorganization of labour across the world after the late eighteenth century. These examples show that social history can – and perhaps has to – be written from a global perspective – or, to put it differently, that global history should be an integral part of social history.

A second approach that may help us to examine the history of social structures from a global perspective is world society theory (also referred to as world polity theory).Footnote ⁷⁹ This looks at modern societies as communities that are structured by acts of communication. It stipulates that a worldwide sphere of communication emerged with the advent of the modern period, and that processes on the local and national level were influenced – if not determined – by global developments. Critics have pointed out various flaws of this approach. It is unspecific about the impact of inequality – both within local societies and between particular world regions – on the global web of communicative interaction that is world society. Moreover, there is the question of whether or not this worldwide entity really can be considered a ‘society’, given that, on the global level, there is no authority that could govern social processes to a similar extent as state politics did, and still does, within nation-states. Nevertheless, the theory allows us to explore the structuring effects that the intensification of communication had on a global level after the early nineteenth century.

Some studies in global intellectual history, for instance, have explored the transregional movement of ideas and their transformation across borders and cultures.Footnote ⁸⁰ A social historical perspective of such processes could reveal how, after the late eighteenth century, such intellectual entanglements resulted in the creation of global social networks, whose members used the social capital gained from such interactions to maintain their social status. As Stefanie Gänger argues in her contribution, these networks were often set up by members of the educated middle classes who came from different parts of the world. On the other hand, the rise of educated middle classes as distinct social groups arguably resulted from, or at least was shaped by, their participation in global flows of ideas in the long nineteenth century. Membership of scientific societies and the exchange of ideas in scholarly publications and at international conferences resulted in a global republic of letters in which, at least in theory, geographical origin was of minor importance.Footnote ⁸¹ Nonetheless, non-European scholars often found that they could only hope to be noticed in metropolitan centres of knowledge if they had mastered Western languages and academic conventions. Furthermore, only particular aspects of non-European knowledge were integrated into Western scholarship, and often this knowledge was transformed to comply with the disciplinary standards of metropolitan scholars. The global world of ideas was therefore characterized by processes of both inclusion and exclusion.

Another case where communication led to the development of social networks on a global scale was the sphere of politics. The social consciousness of the workers of the labour movement, for instance, resulted not least from the group’s claim to internationalism and the notion that the overcoming of capitalism could only succeed as a worldwide endeavour.Footnote ⁸² Several studies have lately pointed out that cities such as London, Paris, and Mexico City functioned as meeting-points where revolutionaries exchanged ideas and influenced each other.Footnote ⁸³ Moreover, middle-class intellectuals similarly relied on the worldwide exchange of ideas in order to promote political projects. Notably, the resistance against colonial rule led to the emergence of cosmopolitan thought zones, which allowed intellectuals from different parts of the world to create an anti-imperial repertoire of ideas.Footnote ⁸⁴ Likewise, research on the emergence of a global civil society in the interwar years can be related to the global history of the middle classes in a much more explicit manner than has been the case to date, as many of the ‘literati, campaigners, and reformers’ who ‘established associations, committees, and leagues, … founded printing presses, schools, and universities, and established newspapers, magazines, and learned journals, regarding the periodical press as a vehicle of civic life’ can indeed be ranked among the educated middle classes.Footnote ⁸⁵ European and non-European middle classes could have had more shared political interest than has long been assumed; even in the colonial period, they were able to collaborate, with the aim of realizing common cultural, economic, and political projects.

Macro-sociological models such as world-system analysis or world-society theory can be used as heuristic models to structure research questions and enrich our debate about definitions of globalization. Whereas world-system analysis focuses on both the establishment and the effects of global capitalism, world-society theory focuses on the growth of worldwide networks of information. These two processes did not involve the same social groups, nor did they inevitably take place simultaneously. These different theories also involve different – material or cultural – notions of class formation. Yet, they do not necessarily contradict each other, as cultural, social, and economic capital may each be converted into one of the others, as Pierre Bourdieu famously observed.Footnote ⁸⁶

What is more, works that aim to explore global entanglements from a social historical perspective need to acknowledge that not all parts of the world were affected in a similar way by the structural transformations that are addressed by world-system analysis and world-society theory. The field of intellectual history, for instance, needs to take into account the fact that various communities throughout the world had vernacular forms of knowledge that differed from the metropolitan worldview which had become hegemonic in the nineteenth century. Such deviations from metropolitan knowledge can be found in both the Western and the non-Western world.Footnote ⁸⁷ As mentioned before, such ambiguity calls for a cautious adaption of any overarching theoretical framework.Footnote ⁸⁸ Then again, pointing out that such diverse groups did exist in different parts of the world, and that they may have shared similar traits, is certainly one of the main assets of global social history as a distinct approach.

IV

Global history offers a wide range of approaches to the study of the emergence of social groups and milieus in the modern era. By comparison, a global social history can enable us to examine the extent to which particular social groups and milieus shaped, and were shaped by, worldwide interaction. It can be neither a ready-made model for the analysis of globalization nor a vehicle to universalize Western concepts of social theory. Rather, it is a research agenda that aims to include a distinct social history component into global history. As pointed out in this introduction, it can tie in with a plethora of established research fields, such as global intellectual history, the history of colonialism and anticolonialism, and the history of capitalism, to name but a few.

It is time for such a reassessment of social structures in a world historical framework. Global social history has the potential to explore how social stratification and global integration were interlinked in the past, and it may also shed new light on social transformations in our contemporary world. As many observers have noted, the processes of globalization over the past three decades have had a profound effect on social cohesion in many countries. Liberals have had, and still have, to come to terms with the fact that globalization is not seen as a win–win by everyone, but must accept that many people in Western societies – in the American Rust Belt, the deindustrialized north of England, or the rural areas of France or eastern Germany – consider themselves losers of globalization. Dani Rodrik famously suggested the existence of a ‘globalization trilemma’, noting that only two of the three phenomena – democracy, the nation-state, and globalization – can be realized at the same time.Footnote ⁸⁹ For their part, scholars such as Thomas Piketty and Joel Kotkin have claimed that the deregulation of global capitalism and the establishment of monopolies in the globalized technology sector actually increased the economic disparity between the richest one per cent and the rest of society.Footnote ⁹⁰ Matters are complicated by the fact that globalization has arguably had quite different consequences in different parts of the world over the past thirty years. While it has resulted in the decline of middle-class aspirations and a crisis of liberalism in many Western countries, in the Global South it has led to a remarkable rise in incomes and the emergence of new middle classes, as Branko Milanović has noted.Footnote ⁹¹ What unifies all of the social transformations mentioned, though, is the fact that they have all been intrinsically linked to recent processes of globalization.

While there are obviously numerous differences between these developments and processes of globalization in past centuries, overall they might provide an incentive to take a closer look at the intersection of global integration and social stratification in the past. Global social history has the potential to break new ground for historical research. The contributions of this special issue will explore a wide range of examples of how a distinct social historical approach may offer new insights into global history. They will, we hope, be an inspiration for further research in the field.