In the 2020s, it seems more obvious than ever that globalisation has a halting and reversible course. After a pandemic which had socially and culturally isolating effects, and as the geopolitics of superpower rivalry becomes manifest in what some see as a return to a Cold War, the mantra of connection giving rise to a world of utopian possibility and cosmopolitan oneness seems to have evaporated. If so, how should global history be characterised today?

In extant defences of the field, from one direction, everything, it is said, could have a global history. Such a claim sets its stall in opposition to the boundedness of national history and civilisational history before it.Footnote ¹ This definition of global history continues to be politically important. From another direction, defenders argue that global history is as old as scholarship itself.Footnote ² For intellectually cogent reasons, this view casts global history as a global practice rather than one which originated in early modern Europe, or even in the late-twentieth-century era of decolonisation or within the corridors of the American academe.Footnote ³ This allows a response to the view that global history is imperialist or even telescopic with respect to the conditions of the Global South. Most would agree that global history involves attention to connection and comparison, divergence and integration, and transfer and exchange. But it also involves attention to disconnection and anomaly, disintegration and theft, and differentiation and mistranslation. In the midst of critiques of the field as obsessed with frictionless mobility, this second cluster of terms and other concepts which are similar have become more salient.Footnote ⁴ To make matters even more confusing, alongside the resonant power of the ‘global’ a series of other terms are arranged, including ‘world’, ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’.

In such a context of definitions and redefinitions, and a flourishing of so many mesmerising concepts, it would be unwise to offer one statement about what global history is. In order to interrogate the nature of this word – ‘global’ – I proceed by considering it as a mode of cartography. There are different ways of identifying the operative cartographic models. First, relationality is central to ‘global’ historiographical mapping: this includes, for instance, the relation between subjects and the world, the relation between objects and modes of consumption and collection, the relation between commodities and trading systems, and the relation between local traditions and universal ideologies of domination, homogenisation or differentiation. Second, a mapping impulse is evident in the scalar preoccupations of the field and in discussions about the ways to move from the small to the big, the micro to the macro, and to layer different scales in explanations of the past.Footnote ⁵ Words such as ‘network’, ‘flow’ or ‘web’ bear out the need to model and map. Third, there is both a move towards detachment, to seeing the world from above, and a keenness to fill in geographical gaps in the search for completeness, and these are both characteristic of a cartographic impulse.

Historians describe modelling, of which mapping is one example, as central to knowledge-making. As a way of tabulating phenomena into a digestible and understandable form, modelling is compatible with the quest to theorise phenomena.Footnote ⁶ Effective models can be non-linguistic means of summarising knowledge; models can generate disciplinary languages around them. They can play important roles in training practitioners in the field. They can support engagements with publics and funders. Models can become crucial where knowledge meets government, for instance around war or trade.

If this is the case for the widest category of models as they are used in geostrategy, physics or economics, it is also true of the way the word ‘global’, as a model, operates in history. Meanwhile maps are a particular class of models that represent and redefine territory. If so, global history is also linked with a cartographic impulse in attempting to reterritorialise the human past. Meanwhile, the modelled logics of global history have been driven in part by the way theoretical paradigms have weighed down on this sub-discipline of history in order to make sense of the totality of history: this runs from Enlightenment science and orientalism to world-systems theory. It is a long-standing and often structuralist story.

This chapter has a set of discrete objectives. In its first section, it links the creation of the ‘globe’ as a model or map to the history of History. It also highlights how the elision of nature and the delimitation of subject areas were significant elements in the emergence of modern historiography. Both aspects were key to the emergence of the global historian as a modeller. The chapter then moves into a particular case study of mapping and historicism, namely the island of Taprobane. It does this with a view to reading beneath these intellectual impulses to the materiality of a particular and evolving island space. In other words, it makes room again for nature by claiming that signs of the Earth’s materiality are evident in the long historical narrations of Taprobane. The third section shifts into methodological reflections on current preoccupations in historical writing around environmental history, agricultural history, oceanic history, animal history and the history of medicine, and the extent to which they engage both the global and the Earth as matter. The chapter concludes with some views on the debate around the Anthropocene. In this way, the survey of historiography runs from the origins of humanist history to debates on posthumanism.

As a provocation, this argument moves from the globe as artifice in global history, a taken-for-granted signifier, to what lies beyond that sensibility: the Earth as a fissured, crusted, summited, atmospheric and terraqueous platform. In broad terms, it takes up Dipesh Chakrabarty’s invocation: ‘The global is a humanocentric construction; the planet, or the Earth system, decentres the human.’Footnote ⁷ Critically, however, this analysis is not a call for a history determined by nature, nor should it be simplified as a call to replace the global with the Earthy. It is an exploration of a more multi-disciplinary and materially aware global history, in tune with that advocated elsewhere, which can include the Earth itself as a vital agent.Footnote ⁸

Throughout, in order to illustrate points, the chapter uses literature with a focus on South Asia to moor the argument in a historiography which engages the world outside the West.

The Global, the Natural, the Human and the Origins of Modern History

The planet we inhabit is not globular: it is an oblate spheroid. I recently joked in print that global history should be renamed oblate spheroidic history.Footnote ⁹ Such a proposal is useful at least simply to generate critical reflection on the taken-for-grantedness of this artificial concept, the ‘global’, in our thought and scholarship.

The production of the globe as object has a rich historiography, though often a Eurocentric one, linked to the Copernican Revolution and the use of the globe as a signifier of political and economic power in Europe.Footnote ¹⁰ One influential view is that the theorising of the planet as rotund and the emergence of the modern were interrelated; but another view would be that the casting of pre-moderns as flat Earthers was itself a modern exaggeration.Footnote ¹¹ Rather than sketching a teleology around modernity, it may be useful to follow Jerry Brotton, who writes:

The globe spread with empires and with programmes of power and diplomatic exchange and slipped from the hands of elite patrons and monarchs to publics as the forms of its representation also changed. Indeed, it is a heavily represented idea and the frequency and varied modes of its representation have been the key to its taken-for-grantedness. To see it as quintessentially European is to forget the rich strands of counter-thought around the globe in other regions of the world.

For instance, when the globe was introduced into India in the late sixteenth century, as Sumathi Ramaswamy highlights, Mughal emperors were depicted with a globe in thirty or so images in the decades that followed. She astutely analyses this visual genre as indicative of an ‘assertion of difference and defiance’ rather than a simple mimicry of European meanings of increasing imperial reach. The globe may be cast as an icon, a replacement for sacred relics in the West. Yet in South Asia, gods and globes co-mingle to this day, suggesting that the routes through which the globe has become a common symbol are multiple rather than singular.Footnote ¹³ A narrative of the role of a singular Renaissance, Enlightenment, imperial programme or indeed of the rise of European science must be avoided if we are to track the origins of the globe as object.

Another way of tracing the rise of the globe as signifier is to see it as linked to the consolidation of astronomical science. Simon Schaffer has paid attention to the relations between astronomy, orientalism and empire in South Asia.Footnote ¹⁴ In this story the British East India Company’s astronomers were calibrating both rational science and rational religion. Hindu Puranic astronomy in the nineteenth century, caricatured for its commitment to flat Earth, milky oceans and moon-eating dragons, was seen as the degenerated version of a previously superior knowledge of the stars and the Earth. It was the same logic that framed orientalist engagement with Hinduism, which itself was seen to have declined into priestcraft. What was needed, then, was for Newtonian men of science to resuscitate it, and for that task it was necessary to find Newtonian science in the Vedas. In other words, astronomical and religious studies were interconnected with the disciplinary foundations of history. As astronomers interrogated Indian historical texts, they would in turn sanctify and purify both true science and religion. The making of astronomical knowledge relied on being able to travel across times and places, but even as astronomy was made secure as a modern discipline its subject became clearer. The Earth and the heavens were separated from each other as intellectual subjects.

It is worth switching more directly to the history of History. In the European history of history, in place of a universal account which was tied to a Judeo-Christian narrative there arose a sense of the unity and connectedness of humankind which was natural. This unity and connectedness was first thought to be civilisational and then evolutionary.Footnote ¹⁵ This natural ordering was then debated and even disputed as senses of race and racism as well as gender, language and climate started to structure knowledge in the modern era from stadial theory to eugenics. These debates became the province of the new sciences. While nature had been seen as timeless and eternal prior to 1800, the rise of new scientific disciplines of empiricism, including geology or comparative anatomy, tied in turn to sprawling enterprises of data collecting that increasingly stretched to all corners of the planet, generating newer senses of the changes of nature and humans in time. Concomitantly, the modelling of the globe was an act of statistical manipulation, tied to longitude and latitude but reaching into the air as well as into the water and underground. It also depended on this data collecting and facilitated trade.

It was in this ferment that modern historiography was born. If the new disciplines of science had taken over the subject of nature, the heavens, as well as of long time, the definition of history changed in response to that. The nineteenth century’s Western historicism began with Europe and was no longer generally a universal history of humankind. Indeed, non-European history was cast into a series of other new disciplines outside the strict confines of history per se. With the rise of new empires and nations, which needed historical tellings, it was also necessary to delimit the specialisations of modern historians. Of course, this story looks rather different if the perspective we take shifts from Europe to the writing of history in other regions of the world, but there too the modern saw a delimiting of subject area and a separation of the terrain of memory and so-called ‘myth’ or ‘religion’ from history. In other words, history everywhere, by the nineteenth century, was much narrower on many counts. It was also increasingly human-centred.

In the South Asian world, for instance, there was a rich set of diverse histories in the early modern era, including dynastic narrations and traditions connected to all kinds of lineages, running across gods, humans, demons and the natural world. Kumkum Chatterjee skilfully explored these histories in Bengal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and into the period of the advent of British colonialism and the impact of orientalist historiography.Footnote ¹⁶ Of relevance here is the fact that they had long and often cyclical or otherwise shaped senses of time and wide geographies; they blurred the factual and the fictional and they stretched across Sanskrit as well as Persian traditions in addition to various regional vernaculars. They could take verse form. They had a sense of authority, expertise and function. This means, following Chatterjee, that British and European histories in India should not be seen as the first to be scientific and rational, despite the centrality of such latter histories to conceptions of nationalism, literacy and middle-class sensibility in India by the end of the nineteenth century. Relatedly and for Sri Lanka, I have argued that its palm-leaf manuscript histories held their popular power and resonance into the era of printed-colonial histories.Footnote ¹⁷ It is not that palm-leaf gave way to print. Rather, history came to be defined by printed and supposedly ‘empirical’ narrations; palm-leaf texts were cast outside the discipline.

It is useful to consider today’s global history as a mode of modelling and mapping which reaches beyond this historiographical drawing of the curtains of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet in contesting the delimited foundations of modern historiography, which global historians aim to do, it is also necessary to challenge the disciplinary specialisms which generated a separation between the right subject of history and the right subject of science.

Behind Map and Model: The Changeable Earth

Working from the premise that mapping, modelling and global history are interrelated, some alternative fragments of cartography of the wider world will be followed to see what lies beneath this relation and whether it is possible to work towards nature.

A good site for me to focus attention on is the gigantically proportioned island of ‘Taprobane’, which is often said to come from Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia. The cartographic rendition of this island, said to be today’s Sri Lanka, occupies approximately twelve times the extent of present-day Sri Lanka.Footnote ¹⁸ This late-fourteenth- or early-fifteenth-century version is from the British Library, and arrived there through the collections of the eighteenth-century classical and musical scholar Charles Burney (Figure 5.1).Footnote ¹⁹ The reason for the exaggerated cartographic rendition continues to confound recent historians: did Ptolemy mistake a part of India as belonging to the island of present-day Sri Lanka? One response to the problem is that Ptolemy inherited this idea of Taprobane from sailors arriving in Alexandria, who knew the coast of west India well but not the island of Sri Lanka and especially the island’s eastern coast, which could only be reached after going around the island.Footnote ²⁰ Much more recently, after the tsunami of 2004, accounts of the gigantic Taprobane, including this map, were utilised on the island to tell stories of the resizing of Sri Lanka by repeated tidal waves, as part of the gods’ judgement for bad government today.

Figure 5.1 Map labelled ‘Taprobana insula’, with the lowest horizontal line representing the equator. British Library, Burney 111 f1v.

British Library.

In Sebastian Münster’s Latin translation and amplification of Ptolemy’s Geographia, from 1540, there appears a further version of the map of ‘Taprobane’ (Figure 5.2). In Münster’s hand, the island is marked with mountains, rivers and cities. The equator – that marker of the globe – is shown running through the island. Alongside the map appears a ferocious tusked elephant as ornamentation, derived from the sketches of mapmaker Giacomo Gastaldi, who also produced his version of Ptolemy’s Geographia. The elephant’s angry eyes and serpentine trunk immediately attract the reader’s attention. The way in which this elephant is depicted is in keeping with earlier European mapping traditions which sometimes represent elephants as looking like wild boars with trumpet-like trunks.Footnote ²¹ Ludovico di Varthema, who visited Lanka, is then cited. The island, we are told, ‘exports elephants that are larger and nobler than those found elsewhere’.Footnote ²² Taprobane becomes known here for its anomalous natural history; its unusual elephants make a stand on the map. The description from Varthema continues: ‘Its yield of the long pepper is likewise richer, indeed wonderful in its abundance.’Footnote ²³ Soon the map was edited once again, and the elephant was made less fierce (Figure 5.3). Even while tracing the reverberations of Ptolemy’s ‘Taprobane’ like this, one important caveat is that the idea, together with the knowledge of sailors and merchants from across the Indian Ocean, fed into the work of Arab and Islamic cosmographers. Moroccan-born and Sicily-based Muhammad al-Idrisi showed Lanka like this in the twelfth century. This image is a later reproduction. (Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.2 Tabula Asiae XII; hand-coloured map by Sebastian Münster, c.1552. From Ptolemy’s Geographia universalis, 1540 ed., rev. & ed. by Sebastian Münster. Sri Lanka is labelled ‘Taprobana’ on the map, a name which was given to Sumatra on maps in later editions of the Geographia. MIT.

Figure 5.3 Tabula Asiae XII; hand-coloured engraved map, copied from Sebastian Münster, in Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino, by Giuseppe Rosaccio, 1599.

Stanford University Libraries. Public Domain.

Figure 5.4 Muhammad al-Idrisi’s map of Sarandib, reproduced from R. L. Brohier and J. H. O Paulusz, Land, Maps and Surveys (Ceylon Government Press: Colombo, 1951), Vol. 2, Plate 1A.

Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

Rather than scrutinising this genealogy of a map of the island of Sri Lanka for accuracy and verisimilitude, across Europe, West Asia and South Asia, what if we track it for an alternative cartographic aesthetic? Such an aesthetic may be connected to the physicality of the Earth. In the rendition of ‘Taprobane’, Sri Lanka is a fabulous island with a magnetic power at the centre of the Indian Ocean. One could argue that this appeal is what gave rise to its gigantic sizing and its conception as a site of human origin, even as it was later cast as a possible location for the Garden of Eden. These maps attest to how information about pepper and elephants travelled more easily and accurately than information about the boundaries and limits of the island.

The history of tsunamis is another way to interrogate this map to show that behind this cartographic impulse is an engagement with the changeable Earth. ‘Taprobane’ may be ‘cross-contextualised’ against various Indigenous palm-leaf narrations of past tidal waves on the island, which once again point to how mappers across cultures struggled to historicise this piece of Earth. Orientalist accounts of the island’s submersion borrowed heavily from what travellers were told by Indigenous peoples.

Most clearly, the elite chronicles of the Mahavamsa, the Thupavamsa and the Rajavaliya provide a context for appreciating often retold tales of past tidal waves and resizing of the island. The Mahavamsa, a Buddhist chronicle written in the sixth, thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, is today the most cherished nationalist source of Sri Lankan history.Footnote ²⁴ The account of how the sea encroached on the kingdom based in Kelaniya, during the reign of Kalanitissa, illustrates the genre perfectly.Footnote ²⁵ The reader is told of the foolishness of Kalanitissa’s brother, Ayya-Uttika, who sleeps with the queen, and therefore rouses the wrath of his brother. Having fled Kalanitissa’s kingdom, Ayya-Uttika sends a man disguised as a Buddhist priest with a secret letter to the queen. This is discovered by the king, who slays the man and throws him into the sea. The author of the Mahavamsa presents this as a fitful deed of anger unsuitable for a monarch. After all, the priest and his attendant were innocent; it was the king’s brother who was guilty. The Mahavamsa continues: ‘Wroth at this the sea-gods made the sea overflow the land.’Footnote ²⁶ Another chronicle, the seventeenth century Rajavaliya, records: ‘on account of the wickedness of Kelanitissa, 100,000 seaport towns, 970 fishers’ villages, and 470 villages of pearl-fishers making altogether eleven-twelfths of Lanka, were submerged by the great sea’.Footnote ²⁷

This story draws on a rich pre-colonial and oral historical consciousness which itself was cartographic. For instance, Charles Pridham, a mid-nineteenth-century colonial and orientalist British historian, in writing of the flood in the reign of Kalanitissa, does not mention the Mahavamsa; he notes that his account of the flooding emerges from ‘Singalese topographical works’ such as the ‘Kadaimpota and Lanka-Wistric’.Footnote ²⁸ Pridham refers here to a set of sources that were far more accessible than the elite chronicles and which were kept safe by village elders and recited at public ceremonies. The kadaim pot and vitti pot did not attract as much attention from the orientalist translators of the nineteenth century, who were critical in popularising texts such as the Mahavamsa, yet they reveal how accounts of flooding and changes to the land were transmitted in the indigenous historical memory and in geographical texts on palm-leaf.Footnote ²⁹ The account of the fate of Kalanitissa’s kingdom seems to have been something of a staple in this set of texts.Footnote ³⁰ One of them retells the story thus:

This cross-contextualisation of sources on the geographical shape, size and casting of the island of what is now Sri Lanka and was once Taprobane is an attempt to think beyond the rise of the European map and, indeed, the globe. For the globe’s artificiality and detachment as an object makes it often bypass the Earth; in symmetry, history can do so too, and the challenge for global history is to ensure it does not. These Sri Lankan sources – from all perspectives, orientalist as well as Indigenous – are trying to come to terms with how to simultaneously map and historicise a changeable island. In a place where there were tidal waves and where there has recently been a tsunami, in a site where there are elephants and pepper, how is it possible to chart the size of an island and its past?

Reconsidering global history, viewed in light of the geographical construction and stabilisation of Sri Lanka, may be about engaging with what lies beneath and behind the mapping impulse. In the case of Lanka/Taprobane/Ceylon, this is the vexed materiality of an island which is always becoming and which is set in a watery terrain beyond human control. It is about waves, animals and peoples as world-makers. These might be the building blocks of an Earthy historiography, a historical literature that accepts the instability of the ground on which history happens. Such a history will respond to the elision of nature and the delimitation of subject area which were at the heart of the origins of modern historiography, and, indeed, Enlightened sensibilities about what counts as a good source. It will also contend with the artificiality of the global.

The Natural in Recent Historiography

In what follows, in order to assess the state of present rather than long passed historiography, I turn to environmental history, agricultural history, the history of oceans, animal histories and the history of medicine. In taking late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first century historiography into view, it is worth emphasising that nature has not been absent, even if it has arguably never been dominant. Each of these fields has been interlinked with global history, and increasingly so. What might a further conversation between the two sides yield if we move from the global to the Earthy?

Environmental history, like global history, is traditionally said to have been born in the USA, yet it too can be said to be as old as scholarship itself.Footnote ³² Early environmental histories often proceeded on the basis of natural determinism. Theorists such as Alexander von Humboldt or Pierre Poivre played critical roles in the origins of this field in responding to the changes in nature that they witnessed in colonial territories.Footnote ³³ Meanwhile, later men of science, including Charles Darwin, were curious about transformations of nature in time and history. One might follow the global environmental historian, Alfred Crosby, in tracking a demarcation of subject areas as key to why environmental history was seen, in the nineteenth century, to rightly belong with science, rather than in historiography narrowly construed: ‘[Historians] were trained to specialise, to devote their lives to the minute study of small patches of history; environmental historians must be generalists because environmental changes are rarely affairs of days, weeks or even years and are often only discernable regionally, even continentally.’Footnote ³⁴ Environmental history’s entry into historiography came via geography. By the era of decolonisation, with fears of nuclear catastrophe and pollution, and with a visual image of the Earth as an object viewed from space motivating it, environmental history went global.

Among the debates in the field is how to write ‘nature-centred’ rather than ‘anthro-centric’ histories.Footnote ³⁵ Yet this relies on a distinction between humans and nature which itself is increasingly disputed. Additionally, the question assumes that nature has been untouched, whereas many scholars highlight the creation of what is wild – ‘wilderness’, for instance – through human engagement with nature over centuries. Epidemics, floods and fires have redirected historical energy towards the environment, and this in turn raises a second perennial question about the agency of nature. But here too, a recourse to assembly and co-constitution is one of the preferred routes rather than a strict prescription of robust agency to the non-human or the separation of humans from their environments.

The environmental crisis frames environmental history, but scholars continue to push against a presumed teleology that leads into the present moment, through turning points and transitions caused by empires, modernisation, states or developmentalist projects. There is indeed a danger in seeing the pre-colonial era as one of ecological harmony, but also a danger of erasing the violent scalar environmental changes generated by European empires, their wars and their plantation systems. More broadly, key concerns in global history, such as capitalism, industrialisation, inequality, divergence and marketisation, have all generated significant environmental history literatures.Footnote ³⁶ Yet in many standard global history text books, the environment can go missing and become an afterthought. C. A. Bayly’s last book was critiqued for this reason.Footnote ³⁷ This is despite the fact that some key practitioners – such as William H. McNeill – were pioneers in both fields. A fundamental conversation between environmental history and global history has long been in prospect.Footnote ³⁸

Now that the problematic dichotomy of human/nature is being overcome it may be possible for global historians too to take soil, air and water, among other elements, more seriously as part of the story and to begin with these subjects. Agricultural history used to be the purview of economic historians interested in demography and trade. In the context of South Asian history, it drew further strength from subaltern studies and from the foregrounding of the marginal peasant. Subaltern studies scholars illustrated how peasant politics had ramifications for wide political ideologies as well as for governance. But the turn to culture as well as to globalisation saw a move away from these interests and, indeed, the rural peasant. In this context, recent work, for instance by Neeladri Bhattacharya, has reconsidered the status of the agrarian frontier, not simply as one of social stratification or of economic inequality, but also as one generated by knowledge, culture and the law. Indeed, it is the very normalisation of the status of agriculture as rural and peasant-based which needs critiquing.Footnote ³⁹ Just as much as in other areas where the historiographies of the global and the agrarian have met – for instance, around plantation complexes or the genetic manipulation of nature – it is important for this new mode of writing about the agrarian not to take categories for granted.Footnote ⁴⁰ The older structuralist perspectives, often supercharged by the schema of Marxism, have given way to radical alternatives which are more critical about singular understandings of what constitutes nature as opposed to the human, and also what constitutes the local and the global.

Turning again to South Asian history, there are several examples of works which look beyond such dichotomies. Debjani Bhattacharyya has focused on tides and recast the history of Calcutta in a deltaic and moveable geography as a result.Footnote ⁴¹ Sunil Amrith has written a history of South Asia as a history of water and rivers, while Sudipta Sen has used the river Ganges to organise a long history of Indic civilisation.Footnote ⁴² Rohan D’Souza has argued for the role of floods as a ‘biological pulse’ in eastern deltaic India, since it is made up of ‘soil and water admixtures rather than neatly separated into distinct domains of land and river flow’.Footnote ⁴³

One of the weaknesses of environmental history is that it has often-times, and certainly in its twentieth-century incarnations, been determinedly terra-centric and connected to questions, for instance, of land use, agriculture and demography. In this mode it can fold back into national history. The splurge of recent work in oceanic history arose partly in response and it has had an increasingly visible place in what is considered global history today. After all, oceans necessarily cross areas, regions and nations. Oceanic history also relocates long-standing maritime and naval history to an environmental landscape of shipwreck and weather events or of whales, seals and other creatures. Here, too, the lineage of the sub-discipline is a matter of debate: on the one hand, it is traced to the Annales school and the formative influence of Fernand Braudel, yet the argument is made that Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean histories have much longer genealogies beyond both Mediterranean and Atlantic studies.Footnote ⁴⁴ The encounter between oceanic and global history is now beginning to burst the boundaries of artificial schemas – for instance, the ‘Atlantic system of slavery’ or the ‘Indian ocean trading world’ – to yield intra-oceanic histories as well as the histories of straits, basins and bays and a rich set of diverse geographies beyond whole ocean studies. The World Ocean itself is becoming a subject of historical narration.

This augurs well for a history of the sea which is no longer constrained by human epistemologies and geographical classifications but which is, in the sense of this chapter, more Earthy and less modelled. Oceanic histories are also taking the movement of natural things more seriously, from molluscs to salmon, and the underwater itself is emerging as a site of history. Migration is being cast within, for instance, the monsoon; the hajj pilgrimage is being understood within the material conditions of travel; labour is being interrogated with respect to knowledge of nature and the tragic experience of the sea journey.Footnote ⁴⁵ Both oceanic and environmental history by default centre large geographical zones and work beyond human understandings and classifications of nature. Animal history, the next historiographical focus point, can have the same geographic range but it intensively studies and problematises species boundaries more than geographic or political ones.

The study of animals in history arose out of work on agrarian history before taking off amid the enthusiasm for cultural history at the end of the last century. However, cultural histories of animals were often about human representations and attitudes to animals; they were regularly focused around European zoos and exhibitions.Footnote ⁴⁶ In contrast, recent work in animal studies has benefitted from the methodological foundations of postcolonial history and global history and their attention to marginal agents, for at the heart of animal history is a desire to be inclusive about historical subjectivity. Recent historians have highlighted the role played by capitalism; ideas of class, race and gender; scientific knowledge and empires in organising the category of the animal. Jonathan Saha, in new work on Burma/Myanmar at the rim of British India, for instance, claims both that ‘empire was always an interspecies phenomenon’ and that ‘species was a category that was articulated with race, class and gender’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The challenge for animal historians is the same as that for environmental historians: not to lose sight of the human in focusing on animals. Rather, an agenda that demonstrates how modes of hierarchy, ideology and politics are crystallised around the policing and articulation of the boundary between the human and the non-human is more compelling.

Indeed, if an Earthy perspective is adopted, the next step is to place the human/non-human collective within a broader environmental and material context. The zoonotic disease of Covid-19 is a case in point. In addition to intensive contact between humans and animals and new styles of meat consumption in East Asia, the wildlife frontier of China is likely also to have played a role in the origins of the recent pandemic. It is now thought that Covid-19 also arose due to rapidly changing uses of land and the march of deforestation.Footnote ⁴⁸ If so, one needs to bring land, life and unseen viruses together rather than working solely at the intersection of the human and the animal. The history of medicine seems uniquely placed to respond to such an agenda and will surely see a resurgence in the next decades.

Though it has traditionally been concerned with histories of state-making, institutionalisation, the social context of ideas of disease, the history of the body and the relations between patients and doctors, the history of medicine is showing signs of placing the triad of disease, medicine and the body into a more complex dialectic. Vernacular traditions and indigenous ideas of medicine have increasingly come into focus and have done so amidst the rise of a desire for alternative therapies and, more problematically, a nationalist authorisation of culturally particular traditions of cure. Turning once again to a historiography which begins with South Asia, Projit Mukharji’s work comes to the history of Ayurveda from the technologies and material objects used to practice it and how these in turn changed views of the body and the meaning of modernity.Footnote ⁴⁹ Rohan Deb Roy, in writing a history of malaria, also follows a route which is more materially aware, in being acutely conscious of the shifting significations of cinchona, quinine, fever and the body and their sprawling transnational creation.Footnote ⁵⁰

What each of these five approaches demonstrates is the already vibrant conversations afoot which include both nature and materiality within global history. An Earthy perspective would be one that builds on each of these avenues and others, such as the history of energy, waste or technology. It would contest the historiographical and historical reasons for the elision of nature from mainstream history and take up the promise of global history as a method which bursts various boundaries. These boundaries should of course carry on being geographical, political, agentic and cultural. But they may also now include the boundaries of human/non-human, seen/unseen, underwater/overwater, overground/underground and other such divisions in global understanding which are not in keeping with the way the Earth works.

This is not to call for an erasure of the global, but rather to say that the makings of the global depend in turn not only on the local, but also on all those material and natural contexts which are often at the sidelines of global historiography. Such contexts can also involve a range of different scales, from oceans to airs or from insects to tigers. Such an approach would generate a more robustly multicentred set of subjects, objects and geographies for global history. In one possible path forward one might imagine that features such as waves, earthquakes or tides; garbage pits, oil spills and fire-storms; islands, oases and deltas could be used to organise histories around specific material features and planetary events without needing a naturally deterministic framework of explanation.

On the Anthropocene

There is an important debate that is worth addressing in closing these reflections about an Earthy historiography. Is the call for a global history attuned to seas and mountains, waves and rivers, and viruses and bacteria, a history of the environmental present? And, if so, is it worth casting it under the contested label, first proposed in 2000, of the ‘Anthropocene’?Footnote ⁵¹

I have consciously not engaged with the ‘Anthropocene’ thus far because the ‘Anthropocene’ itself is a universalising concept that takes the uniformity of the planet for granted. It may easily be critiqued for many of the same reasons set out here against the global. Additionally, it rests on a teleology and assumes a very narrow view of periodisation, through the assumption that environmental transformation can be precisely dated to a particular era. It is in many ways a nostalgic concept, casting everything prior to the era when humans became ‘geological agents’ into a sustainable prehistory. Meanwhile, it assumes a global convergence in extinction, the growth of cities and population, farming and agriculture or deforestation. It also rests on a geohistorical framework. Pratik Chakrabarti’s recent work, based out of South Asia, is useful here in showing how the debate over the Anthropocene arises out of the longer disciplinary history of geology, a discipline which naturalised and lengthened historical time.Footnote ⁵² In this sense the Anthropocene still inherits the problems of disciplinary specialism highlighted earlier rather than contesting them. It can easily see a wholesale ceding, once again, of the ground of historical scholarship to science.

The concept of the Anthropocene has also been critiqued for erasing histories of racism, enslavement and dispossession, and there has been a call for a ‘Billion Black Anthropocenes’.Footnote ⁵³ The alternative terms of the ‘Capitalocene’ or the ‘Plantationocene’ are proposed to foreground capital’s role in creating an abstracted nature and the exploitation of unfree labour as a racialised commodity via imperial systems in the multispecies assembly of the plantation.Footnote ⁵⁴ A concomitant debate which runs through these three terms – ‘Anthropocene’, ‘Capitalocene’, ‘Plantationocene’ – along with others which include ‘Technocene’ or ‘Chthulucene’, is whether or not the human/non-human binary should be bridged or not in new material approaches such as those discussed in this chapter.Footnote ⁵⁵ For all these reasons, the sketch of an Earthy historiography that I present here does not fit within the conception of the ‘Anthropocene’. Rather, it is an invitation towards plurality and assembly and a multiplicity of scales, forces and periodisations as constitutive of historical change.

One aspect of the debate about the ‘Anthropocene’ that calls for attention is temporality. Making the concept of the global more Earthy is fundamentally about its terrain and materiality, but what about the temporalities of history? A less human-centred view of time would require attention to the long-term. Indeed, the drawing of the curtains of modern historiography allowed time itself to be compressed, even as the sciences were expanding time.Footnote ⁵⁶ But it may be the case that we should no longer approach temporality as a linear scale: this was part and parcel of the rolling out of the humanist and Enlightened history across the world. More cyclical views of temporality may be in order in a historiography attuned to the terrain of the Earth; attention to the rise and fall of life forms, or indeed to processes of descent, kinship and evolution, could frame quite distinct modes of historical writing. Indigenous peoples continue to practice modes of genealogy which orient pasts and futures in different ways to professional historians.Footnote ⁵⁷ Meanwhile, deep history and attention to changes in the Earth’s temperature or pollution levels could also provide interesting routes towards alternative modes of periodisation to those determined by calendrical systems. In all these ways, it may be necessary to be more ‘pluri-temporal’ in historical writing.

The environmental crisis that we are living through is undeniable, and it is therefore understandable that a concept such as the ‘Anthropocene’ is needed to do urgent scholarly work. To take one thread within this moment, we are living in an age of mass extinction. Yet even with such a claim, philosophical debates have arisen about how to define the concept of extinction and how to come to terms with programmes of de-extinction which are already afoot, as well as techniques of rewilding.Footnote ⁵⁸ New technologies, encompassing frozen arks of specimens, are opening up a middle ground between the categories of ‘endangered’ and ‘extinct’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Historians of extinction are conducting work which usefully links the horrific account of violence against Indigenous peoples with that against non-human species: programmes of genocide were linked in history across the human/non-human dichotomy, especially when they occurred in the midst of settlement colonisation. To overstate the teleological march of extinction is to prevent the possibilities of resistance, persistence and return by targeted species. It takes the crisis narrative at face value, without presenting a more nuanced story with the chance of a future encompassing diverse peoples and life forms. It minimises the agentic status of nature and the dominated.

Conclusion

This chapter started out from the premise that the Earth is a material space rather than a modelled globular entity. At the same time, the production of the globe as object and history as discipline can be jointly interrogated as endeavours that have had the tendency to detach the human from the materiality of the planet and its life forms; the origins of modern historiography saw an elision of nature. Precisely for this reason, however, human attempts at mapping may be re-read and peeled back. Working with ‘Taprobane’ was an attempt to read the genealogy of mapping differently – to show how Indigenous as well as colonial authors, cartographers and historians were wrestling with the question of how to size, historicise and represent a changeable island in the midst of the ocean and over the long term. Maps can be read not only for detachment and ornamentation, but also for clues to the materiality of the Earth bursting through.

And it is in this spirit that a proposal is made here for an Earthy historiography – a more materially aware global history which can move across many scales and boundaries without reducing itself to a new series of classifications or singularities. It may not be a purist post-human history, but rather one which places the human within a series of other assemblies. It would open up the possibility of a future which is more conscious of materiality yet not solely determined by a crisis narrative or by modes of reductionism. To quote Donna Haraway: ‘I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman-ist: we are all compost not posthuman.’Footnote ⁶⁰

As early as 1986, the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg pointed to the impossibility of forming a general philosophical notion of the world.Footnote ¹ Since then, conceptualising the globe as a whole has proved to be a challenge in many disciplines.Footnote ² Even terms and metaphors that are less ambitious and all-encompassing and that refer to specific global processes or aspects of globality are often inadequate. This is particularly true when it comes to capturing the tension between openness and closure that characterises many, if not all, global processes: Global phenomena – from migration and mobility to labour and capitalism – can only be understood with clear reference to unevenness and inequality and to processes of exclusion as well as inclusion. Yet the language of globality still prioritises openness and fluidity at the expense of metaphors pointing to limits and boundaries.

This terminological and conceptual conundrum is not surprising at a time when unequivocally positive narratives of growing global interconnectedness have begun to fray and a fixed sense of globality has been called into question.Footnote ³ What Michael Geyer and Charles Bright referred to simply as a ‘condition of globality’ in the mid-1990s is now in need of further specification.Footnote ⁴ As a result, the vocabulary that has helped global history come of age, ranging from connection to integration and from flows to circulation, is now considered problematic by many historians, whether or not they employ an explicitly global history perspective.Footnote ⁵

At the same time, few would deny that our specific moment in time – conflict-laden and crisis-ridden as it may be – is also specifically ‘global’. Many of the core experiences of the present age – military conflict and the ensuing refugee movements, the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, the extinction of species and even the resurgence of populism and nationalism – are phenomena that cannot be understood within the framework of the nation-state, despite the fact that they are deeply divisive. As a result, we need figures of thought that can capture a globality that is profoundly marked by division and tension. This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts.

When addressing this recent unease with the vocabulary of global history, historians often resort to antonyms. They set disconnection against connection, disentanglement against entanglement, disintegration against integration or, on the most general level, deglobalisation against globalisation. This chapter searches for a figure of thought that can challenge the existing languages of the global more effectively than simply pairing each of the established terms with its opposite.

To this end, the chapter traces the history and analytic potential of a term that does not come with its opposite in tow but instead captures openness and closure in a single frame: the sphere. The Greek word sphaira and the Latin word sphaera have taken on a plethora of meanings over time, expanding from ‘globular body or figure’ to ‘(the) globe conceived as appropriate to a particular planet, hence (one’s or its) province or domain’.Footnote ⁶ Within this semantic family, we find terms that relate to the Earth as a whole and its globular form – words like atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, geosphere and hydrosphere. Spheres can also refer to the ‘place, position, or station in society; an aggregate of persons of a certain rank or standing’.Footnote ⁷ Beyond the Earth-based vocabulary, we therefore encounter expressions ranging broadly from the spheres of the brain to spheres of political influence, spheres of law and public and private spheres.

What these expressions have in common is that they highlight the bounded or closed nature of global phenomena rather than implying openness and expansion. Closure, in the way it is used in this chapter, has the advantage of connecting geographical and geopolitical considerations with ideas of social differentiation and hierarchy. Social closure as an established sociological concept dates back to Max Weber.Footnote ⁸ Yet, while global historians have reflected extensively on geographical entities, social boundary-making has been neglected. In its different figurations, the sphere often unites both geographical and social facets of closure.

Besides offering historians the potential to reflect more systematically on processes of closure, there is a further reason why spheres might provide a way out of the current terminological impasse in global history. As a figure of thought that draws attention to boundaries and limits, spheres can help to counter the prevailing view that globalisation leads to formlessness and fluidity, and instead show that global processes often take quite firm and exclusive forms marked by territorial, political and social boundaries and partitions. Even in regions marked by extensive communication networks, such as the ‘Muslim world’, for example, ideas often did not circulate freely. They reached urban populations more frequently than rural populations, men more frequently than women and speakers of majority languages sooner than speakers of minority languages.Footnote ⁹ Admittedly, the boundaries thus created were not impermeable, but were marked by varying degrees of porosity, allowing some people and groups to cross while excluding others.

Instead of simply postulating what ought to be done or prescribing an entirely new language for global history, this chapter explores in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spheres can be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. A first example is the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. A second case concerns the idea of multiple global spheres that are at the same time limited to varying degrees. Here, the chapter takes its central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

Openness and Closure in Global History

Many global historians have been attracted to words that allude to openness and fluidity. Three commonly employed terms evoke openness as a central characteristic of global processes: ‘connection’, ‘circulation’ and ‘integration’. The most widely used of these is undoubtedly ‘connection’. However vaguely defined, connections are ubiquitous, from Christopher Bayly’s subtitle of The Birth of the Modern World (‘Global Connections and Comparisons’) to the ever-expanding field of connectivity studies, featuring topics ranging from human migration to the mobility of objects and ideas.Footnote ¹⁰ Given the variety of phenomena related to connection and connectivity, some authors are careful to clarify that ‘connectivity is never seamless or entirely smooth and is always interrupted, often in unnoticed ways’.Footnote ¹¹ Yet despite such efforts at differentiation, the word ‘connection’, or ‘connectivity’ for that matter, itself suggests openness rather than closure as a central driving force of global processes. The term has therefore turned into an easy target for the critics of global history.Footnote ¹²

Linked to connection, the terms ‘circulation’ and ‘flow’ are part of more metaphorically expansive semantic fields and figure regularly in global history writing.Footnote ¹³ In her critique of the languages of fluidity, Stefanie Gänger has discussed the specific role of openness and closure in this domain. There are many examples in which this language is prevalent: for instance, in reference to the circulation of goods, people and capital, or the circulation of information. Whereas circulation typically evokes closed systems such as the body or the Earth, it also implies effortless movement within such systems, without impediment and hindrance. What is more, the rhetoric of ‘everything flows’ can disguise social differentiation, hierarchisation and inequality as central markers of global processes.Footnote ¹⁴

A more analytic concept that has frequently been placed at the core of a global history perspective is integration. Sebastian Conrad has argued that global history ‘ultimately rests’ on the notion of integration.Footnote ¹⁵ Integration is applied to a variety of often interrelated fields, including political integration (in the case of expansive empires), economic integration (for instance into capitalist markets) and social integration (for example relating to an emerging global bourgeoisie). Integration differs qualitatively from connection in its reference to causality and explanation. It is also a concept that invites more nuanced usage than the relatively vague term ‘connection’. Yet while integration can be extended to include notions of hierarchy, forced incorporation and unevenness, it still hints at the centripetal and the inclusive. Despite its more analytic focus, integration therefore also implies processes of opening rather than closure as a central characteristic of global developments, and it carries the danger of relegating those who are not ‘integrated’ to the margins of historical narratives.

As these brief discussions reveal, terms such as ‘connection’, ‘circulation’ and ‘integration’ all come with their own challenges; what they share is their tilt towards the openness end of the spectrum. Even when they are carefully qualified and differentiated, their everyday associations prevent them from adequately representing the hierarchical, conflictual and uneven nature of many, if not all, global phenomena. It is often only through their negation – in terms such as ‘disconnection’ and ‘disintegration’ – that they are able to capture processes of closure. The inevitable effect of this is that developments associated with openness are perceived as more ‘global’ than those associated with closure.

This shortcoming of a vocabulary of closure in global history is indicative of a deeper problem. Despite early calls for scepticism – for instance, by Roland Robertson and Arif Dirlik – much of the initial globalisation literature of the 1990s followed a similar path of prioritising openness.Footnote ¹⁶ More recently, sociologists like Hartmut Rosa and Andreas Reckwitz have accentuated the fluidity that has resulted from global developments, such as the accelerating change in media technologies, dissolving family structures and weakening social ties.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet even if unintentionally, this depiction of the global as formless and fuzzy can serve to veil the rock-hard exclusions produced by many global processes.

Regardless of long-standing debates, the dilemma of capturing globality while at the same time disclosing globality’s always limited, bounded and exclusionary nature therefore remains unresolved. The first and most common response to this dilemma is to couple a word with its antonym, as noted earlier. The relationship between the two terms may either work sequentially, with phases of globalisation being followed by phases of deglobalisation, or synchronously, with processes of connection and disconnection occurring simultaneously. In both cases, however, the term and its negation are still understood as separate. However, the processes these opposites refer to are often closely intertwined, as phenomena such as global capitalism and its reliance on forced labour clearly reveal. Binaries tend to obscure the fact that openness for some leads to closure for others, and that both are equally related to globality.

Other attempts to move beyond this impasse have entailed searching for different metaphors and concepts altogether. Two metaphors of the global that have gained prominence in recent years are noteworthy in this context. In her ‘ethnography of global connection’, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing uses the term ‘friction’ to address many of the aforementioned problems.Footnote ¹⁸ For her, the global is not marked by smoothness and interchange but by resistance and dissent, pointing to the conflictual nature of globality. Tsing’s approach has resonated widely throughout the social sciences, illustrating the need for a more nuanced metaphorical language of the global which includes processes of chafing and erasure.Footnote ¹⁹

The metaphor of friction may go some way towards considering disruptions and interferences as essential facets of the global. In Tsing’s view, the global appears characterised less by seamless flows and connections than by often violent processes of eradication and conflict. Yet referring to friction and similar metaphors still tends to depict global processes as fuzzy and undefined, and thus to disguise more solidified power structures and entrenched inequalities.

World-making has become another widely employed term to capture alternative visions in globalist thought and imagination. Duncan Bell has begun to discuss how concepts of world-making in fact point to the limits of worlds rather than to an all-encompassing vision.Footnote ²⁰ Exploring internationalism after empire, Adom Getachew has analysed how anticolonial thinkers and politicians such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and George Padmore advocated for the creation of a new postcolonial world. She shows that for them, world-making was as central a project as nation-building, which is frequently emphasised in the scholarship on postcolonial orders.Footnote ²¹ While the notion of world-making highlights diverse and competing understandings of globality and international orders, authors who use it as their key concept have only just begun to explore what the limits of these worlds were and how they can be understood analytically. Although they offer more satisfying conceptions of the global than the binary constructions mentioned earlier, concepts such as ‘friction’ and ‘world-making’ do not address in a sufficiently concrete manner questions of closure, boundaries and limits, or, more generally, the importance of rigid forms and structures in global processes.

Reflections on the globe as a sphere, or as composed of several distinct spheres, build on the literature around friction and world-making but probe conceptions of closure and boundary-making more explicitly. They allow historians to foreground in what manner worlds are limited, revealing how the experience of globality that Geyer and Bright took for granted is often exclusionary and based on race, class and gender inequalities and on unequal access to natural and other resources such as information or the freedom to move. When we use the figure of thought of the sphere, globality does not appear as formless and diffuse, but rather as marked by often fairly stark forms of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter goes on to show that, by using the concept of the sphere and adjacent expressions, historical actors were already thinking about globality as a phenomenon uniting openness and closure long before scholars began doing so.

Given the capaciousness of the term, it is not surprising that the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk allowed his trilogy on spheres (consisting of three separate volumes on bubbles, globes and foams) to be sprawling and associative, ultimately filling more than 2,500 pages.Footnote ²² His ‘spherology’ presents a wealth of material on how globes and other round objects of various kinds figure in world history. In this way, it allows for plentiful associations and vantage points.Footnote ²³ If Sloterdijk’s abundance of material makes for fascinating (if time-consuming) reading, the gist of his argument is more difficult to pin down. Yet the image of the sphere – with its subfields of bubbles, globes and foams – is very fitting for a reflection on how to rethink global history, pointing to questions of global forms and their boundaries, as well as their more ephemeral or permanent features.Footnote ²⁴

Unlike comparison and scale, the sphere might not immediately spring to mind as a figure of thought that historians can use to respond to the current critique of global history. This apparent challenge is at the same time an opportunity: to explore in a more experimental way whether spheres might offer an alternative to the binary solutions that have been prominent so far. Rather than providing an exercise in theorising the global, this chapter contextualises spheres and their boundaries to highlight co-constitutive processes of opening and closing. The examples illustrate how, over the course of the twentieth century, various historical actors have perceived globality as closed and limited rather than open and expansive.

As an unusual figure of thought to denote the global, the sphere can serve to give conceptions of closure a firmer place in global history. Ranging from the shutting of geographic borders to processes of social stratification and the constraints and hierarchies of the international political system, from the restriction of opportunities to the limitation of access to resources and freedoms, closure has taken centre stage in many disciplines other than history.Footnote ²⁵ Spheres and their boundedness can help us to move our thinking about boundary-making from the geographical terms often prevalent in global history to boundaries in the social realm.

More specifically, thinking about the global in terms of spheres leads us in two separate and distinct directions. First, the sphere can refer to the circumscribed nature of the globe as a whole and its finite resources. In this discourse, the sphere appears as an underlying figure of imagination that amalgamates visions of globality and humanity. This notion of the sphere most often surfaces in closed-world discourses, linking the interrelatedness of humanity as a whole with the limits of humanity’s habitat: the Earth. Second, the term can refer to more narrowly circumscribed domains, such as political, economic, social and communicational spheres. In this understanding, spheres are global but at the same time exclusionary, often restricted to a particular region or to a specific segment of the global population. Whereas political spheres are demarcated by geographical boundaries, public spheres are often demarcated by social boundaries.

As the following explorations show, both versions of global spheres – the more inclusive world as sphere, and the more exclusive world of many spheres – run counter to conceptions of the global that stress formlessness and fluidity. They are oriented instead toward ideas of boundary-work and boundary-making.Footnote ²⁶ Spheres can grow and shrink, expand and contract, but they are usually unambiguously demarcated. In tracing spherical ideas in globalist imaginations and testing the sphere as an alternative metaphor of the global, I turn to different examples that illustrate the inclusive as well as exclusive nature of spheres and explore how spheres might contribute to solving the dilemmas of global history.

Inclusion: The World as Sphere

The most obvious use of the term ‘sphere’ in global history relates to the sphericity of the globe as a whole. Where and at what point in history can the emergence of this radically inclusive sphericity – or, in less abstract terms, the idea of a finite and fragile world in which humans share a single destiny – be located? The idea of a shrinking globe (or time–space compression, to use Harvey’s well-worn phrase) came of age during the infrastructure and transport revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continuing into the interwar period and the Second World War.Footnote ²⁷ Closed-world discourses took centre stage in the decades after the war, when fears of environmental degradation, nuclear annihilation and rapid population growth converged in the emergence of international organisations and protest movements focused on the fragility of the globe.

Conceptualising the globe as a closed sphere has of course a longer history predating the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁸ The sphere was used in geography starting in the fifth century BC and found its way into many cosmologies.Footnote ²⁹ The ‘discovery’ of the Americas further boosted spherical thinking. Yet the idea of clearly demarcated celestial and terrestrial spheres was also present in various contexts beyond European expansionism, from the Middle Ages onwards.Footnote ³⁰ Even if a more fully illustrated history of spheres in various cultures lies beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to note the plurality of views and conceptions in specific contexts and cultures.

Beyond physical spheres, it was the emergence of a specifically planetary consciousness that linked geographical conceptions with the idea of humanity as a whole.Footnote ³¹ As a figure of thought, the sphere captured the idea that the entire globe could potentially be settled by humans and that humanity was inextricably interlinked. The image of the globe as a sphere thus intimately connected geographical and social thinking. In the closed-world discourses of the twentieth century, humanity emerged as intimately conjoined on an increasingly crowded and imperilled planet. Even if these discourses did not always employ the term ‘sphere’ explicitly, they related to an idea formulated by Immanuel Kant: ‘the spherical surface of the earth unites all the places on its surface; for if its surface were an unbounded plane, men could be so dispersed on it that they would not come into any community with one another, and community would not then be a necessary result of their existence on the earth’.Footnote ³² In this vision, humanity – however narrowly Kant himself defined it – appeared fundamentally tied together.Footnote ³³

Moving to the twentieth century, perceptions of closure assumed a central role. The period around 1900 has often been interpreted as a time of exploration and radical openness that made new infrastructural opportunities available to many.Footnote ³⁴ Yet even if some historical actors displayed unbridled optimism about the new communication infrastructures, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should not be understood purely as a moment of expansion and growth. In this period, violent European expansionism was accompanied by perceptions of closure rather than openness. What is often depicted as an age of boundless opportunities for global entrepreneurs was also a time of growing insecurity, in which efforts were made to shield certain parts of the globe from others and to protect imperial enterprises from their growing vulnerability.

What is more, while opportunities were increasing for some, they were disappearing for others. The new sense of openness – for instance, in the ‘circulation of ideas’ that many global intellectual historians have been drawn to in recent years – was accompanied by processes of social closure and increasing inequality.Footnote ³⁵ The forced sedentarisation of nomadic populations is emblematic of larger processes of openness and closure in this period: nomadic groups became less mobile and more tightly controlled as the world was partitioned into fields of political and economic influence. Openness and closure were thus intimately intertwined at a time when the world seemed to be growing smaller for some but was becoming less accessible for others.Footnote ³⁶

In the interwar period, closed-world discourses flourished.Footnote ³⁷ Echoing the words of Immanuel Kant, Raymond Pearl, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University, clearly expressed the idea of the globe as human habitat in 1927: ‘All populations of organisms live in universes with definite limits. The absolute size of the universe might be small, as in the case of the test-tube … or it may be as large as earth, most of which could conceivably be inhabited, on a pinch, by man.’Footnote ³⁸ What Pearl called a universe might also be called a sphere. His notion connected planetary thinking with reflections on humanity as an interconnected whole sharing a common destiny.

The conception of the globe and its population as dependent on each other for their very survival gained new force and urgency in the decades after the Second World War. In the second half of the twentieth century, this gave way to a claustrophobic sense of forced inclusion. Preoccupations with the threat of nuclear destruction and concerns about environmental degradation in the Anthropocene produced a sense of close interconnectedness in an inescapably bounded and limited world. Two examples illustrate this important shift in perceptions that occurred in the period. The space age provided images that allowed human beings to see the Earth from the outside. Photographs such as those in the iconic Blue Marble series produced by the 1972 Apollo 17 mission conveyed the fragility and ‘sphericity’ of the globe in the truest sense of the word to a wider public.Footnote ³⁹ Beyond the space age and its new iconography, numbers conveyed the idea of an inescapable global sphere just as urgently as images. The increase in the Earth’s population from about 1.6 billion to more than 6 billion over the course of the previous century exacerbated perceptions of the globe as fragile and in need of protection.Footnote ⁴⁰ A controversial 1968 bestseller by Paul Ehrlich coined the term ‘population bomb’, relating to a range of interventionist measures in different parts of the world.Footnote ⁴¹ The global ‘tipping point’ was a central metaphor of this work, with Paul Ehrlich asking in a characteristically technocratic manner: ‘What is the optimum number of human beings that the earth can support?’Footnote ⁴²

Many authors from the 1960s expressed the distinct sense that just as the world was growing smaller with the creation of new infrastructures and modes of communication, the Earth was also becoming more fragile and threatened.Footnote ⁴³ Diverse voices joined in this closed-world discourse of a claustrophobic and finite globe and the future of human life on it. Their works show how the globe and its inhabitants can be analysed within a single, unified framework and thereby illustrate how the sphere can be deployed as a figure of thought. Three examples from a broad sample may be sufficient here to provide an overview of the different perspectives prevalent during this time. In a 1964 publication entitled One World or None?, Ossip K. Flechtheim, a professor of political science in West Berlin from 1952 to 1974, reflected on the growth of global population and the fundamental threat he believed it posed to humankind. Referring to the Holocaust and the Second World War, he stressed humanity’s tragic recent history and the even greater catastrophe that might lie ahead, for the first time imperilling all of humankind.Footnote ⁴⁴

In The Oneness of Mankind, published one year after Flechtheim’s book, Indian economist Radhakamal Mukerjee also shifted easily from reflection on the physical world to thinking about humanity in its more metaphysical sense. Calling the twentieth century ‘the age of mankind’ and pointing out how science, technology and economic integration had rendered the Earth ever smaller and more closely knit, he focused on universalism, humanism, solidarity and oneness: ‘both rich and poor nations belong to the brotherhood of the human race in the small, intractable planet which they by concerted enterprise have to make into a habitable home for each of them to live with decency, dignity and freedom’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Mukerjee tightly coupled the future of the planet with conceptions of humanity and life on Earth.

American development economist Barbara Ward took up the same idea of a crowded and inescapable planet that occupied Mukerjee. In 1966 she coined the phrase ‘Spaceship Earth’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In her later work Only One Earth (1972), she illustrated how environmental activism was connected with thinking in terms of a united humanity: ‘the careful husbandry of the Earth is the sine qua non for the survival of the human species, and for the creation of decent ways of life for all the people of the world’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even if these three visions of radical inclusion did not account clearly for who actually made up humanity in any more than the most abstract terms and also risked obfuscating social distinctions for the sake of stressing the unity of humankind, they all shared the urgent sense of a claustrophobic spherical nature of the globe from which there was no escape.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Club of Rome and the Brundtland Commission were more overtly discussing the limits of the world’s resources and related questions of global justice, there were many further examples of how and where one-world and one-humanity thinking coalesced.Footnote ⁴⁸ Postcolonial leaders such as Indira Gandhi expressed in powerful terms how nature and the use of natural resources needed to be rethought as global commons belonging to all of humanity.Footnote ⁴⁹ If the global sphere could be described as claustrophobic and as a site of fierce battles over the distribution of resources, the sense of one world also produced new perspectives on global justice and solidarity.

This short survey of spherical thinking demonstrates how in the second half of the twentieth century many actors moved from a vague sense of threat to outright fears for survival, clearly pointing to closure rather than openness as the dominant feeling associated with global processes. What is more, for authors such as Flechtheim, Mukerjee and Ward, ‘the world’ increasingly meant not all places everywhere but all people everywhere, evoking crowdedness and inescapability and thus amalgamating geographical and social thinking. Even if the sphere might have been a spatial metaphor to start with, the examples highlighted here show how global histories that centre on the sphericity of the Earth can shift our analytic perspectives and research designs from space and the geographic scales that have long dominated global history to humanity and human populations.Footnote ⁵⁰

Exclusion: One World, Many Spheres

Do we really inhabit one world, or just our own limited spheres of the world? And how are the boundaries of these spheres defined, guarded and – at least potentially – broken? During the Covid-19 pandemic, conceptions of hermetically sealed spaces experienced a strange and unexpected renaissance, endowing us with a new arsenal of expressions that includes ‘bubbles’ and ‘inner circles’. New Zealand’s slogan ‘stay in your bubble’ was taken up by other countries and used in public health campaigns worldwide, encouraging people to limit their interactions to clearly restricted spheres. At the same time, new digital communication technologies united individuals across large distances, yet again, often within clearly delineated and pre-selected spheres. Both the accelerating development of new media practices and the slogans mentioned herein echo Sloterdijk’s distinction of spherical thinking into globes, bubbles and foams.

Lived experiences of closure, as in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, are mirrored in the broader use of the word ‘sphere’ in the social sciences. The terminology of spheres is often used (along with synonyms such as ‘universe’ or simply ‘world’) to denote clearly demarcated geographical spheres of influence or specific social configurations – for instance, gender spheres, or public and private spheres. In many cases, these differently bounded spheres overlap. The social sciences often use the term ‘spheres’ in reference to exclusionary bubbles, which can stretch around the world but still leave out many. In contrast to the closed-world discourses surveyed earlier, which tend to omit social differentiation, thinking in terms of spheres in the plural highlights exclusion and boundary-making. When exploring how the language of spheres is used in global history writing, it is therefore important to consider multi-spherical approaches alongside closed-world thinking.

Most notably, the term ‘spheres of influence’ became prevalent in the late nineteenth century, a moment some global historians have described as one of extraordinary expansion and openness. While this sense of openness was often accompanied by a sense of planetary closure as depicted earlier, the partitioning of the world into clearly defined spheres of influence is a further factor that reveals this period as deeply divisive, but no less global for that matter. Since then, the concept of spheres of influence – sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping – has become a convenient analytic device in fields such as political science, economics and law.Footnote ⁵¹

When thinking about spheres, geopolitical spheres of influence might still be the first point of reference. The field of international relations has also displayed a renewed interest in spheres of influence.Footnote ⁵² Missionary or colonial spheres of influence intentionally created separations and boundaries. Legal treaties and doctrines such as the Treaty of Tordesillas or the Monroe Doctrine clearly marked out and defined spheres of influence. Other more loosely defined concepts such as the Sinosphere, the Buddhosphere and the Islamosphere point to a central dilemma of spherical thinking: are spheres of influence distinctly delineated, or do they fray and dissolve around the edges? How can we define where one sphere of influence ends and the other begins?

Rather than dwelling on the geopolitical use of spheres of influence, the remainder of this chapter highlights another, more explicitly social, concept that includes the term ‘sphere’. Located at the intersection of political theory and communication studies, public spheres represent a further common usage of spheres that has made its way into the vocabulary of the social sciences and humanities. In most cases, it is used in reference to Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere from the 1960s.Footnote ⁵³ According to Habermas, public spheres are stages for the exchange of rational arguments marked by a certain degree of institutionalisation, distinguishing them from the more flexibly used term of ‘publics’.

More recently, debates on multiple public spheres have also entered global history. Scholars have sought to answer the question of how public spheres (or less firmly institutionalised publics) could expand beyond nation-states by exploring infrastructures and media but also markets and attention economies.Footnote ⁵⁴ Current debates in communication studies concerning fragmented publics, filter bubbles and echo chambers further highlight the need to look beyond the more normative conceptualisations of public spheres to focus on the boundaries and limits of communication.Footnote ⁵⁵ Global communication history is an area of research that can be rethought within the framework of spheres, drawing attention to accessibility and inaccessibility as central parameters of analysis.Footnote ⁵⁶ Much like the more abstract term ‘integration’, the concept of public spheres might imply openness at first sight. Yet access to public spheres is limited by a number of factors, making them fertile ground for probing how openness and closure can be linked more effectively.

No public sphere has ever covered the entire planet. Instead, spheres are always exclusive and exclusionary affairs, allowing access and entry to some but not to others. This is most obvious in relation to the geographies of specific public spheres. Yet, in an age of communication technologies spanning the globe, their exclusionary nature is often rooted not so much in geographical limitation as in social differentiation.Footnote ⁵⁷ The investigation of public spheres and their geographical and social reach can therefore help uncover the making and breaking of social boundaries through communicative practices.

The most obvious parameters limiting access to public spheres are the familiar structures of race, class and gender. Recent scholarship has employed global social classes as a lens through which to view inclusion and exclusion in the development of separate spheres, with public spheres frequently mapping onto social structures.Footnote ⁵⁸ This has been fuelled by new research on global classes and their networks, most notably the global bourgeoisie – a class that might have been global while at the same time sporting clear limitations of access.Footnote ⁵⁹ Global gender histories might be even more interesting for exploring the limits and boundaries of public spheres. Since the dichotomy between public and private spheres is traditionally reflected in a dichotomy between male and female roles and activities, the shifting boundaries of global public spheres are especially evident in relation to gender. In many societies, gender roles have long been cemented in ‘separate spheres’ ideologies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Over the course of the last century, however, emancipating concepts such as the ‘new woman’ or the ‘modern girl’ surfaced around the world.Footnote ⁶¹ These concepts correlated with new patterns of consumption and built on the promise that women could challenge ‘traditional’ gender roles and burst into public spheres that were formerly reserved for men. Yet this liberating process also led to the emergence of new female global public spheres that were reserved for a select group – for instance, upper-middle-class women. So instead of collapsing boundaries, they ended up creating new ones.

While the project of tracing the idea of the ‘new woman’ around the world was originally based quite heavily on research on consumption and marketing, scholars working on the role of newspapers and women’s magazines in the development of female public spheres have demonstrated that new communication media played a key role in the formation of global public spheres.Footnote ⁶² Su Lin Lewis has shown how the use of categories such as the ‘new woman’ and the ‘modern girl’ in the Asian port cities of Singapore and Rangoon not only depended on new patterns of consumption – for instance, the adoption of new styles of fashion and cuisines and behaviour – but also on the circulation of print media and access to common languages.Footnote ⁶³ Lewis’s research on the development of global female public spheres highlights the sharply drawn boundaries between male and female forms of political engagement and social practice even within these globalised contexts. Female spheres can be global but still remain restricted and exclusive. The ‘new woman’ and ‘modern girl’ are thus prime examples of how openness and closure are intertwined.

Research on global public spheres has focused not only on how access is determined by categories of race, class and gender, but also on the role of access to technologies and media in a broader sense. Beyond those classic categories of exclusion, these include ‘technologies of the intellect’, such as language and literacy, but also factors such as the ability to handle new technologies or age as an excluding factor.Footnote ⁶⁴ The question of ‘who is in and who is out?’ therefore becomes even more salient if we move beyond an analysis of consumption or of conventional media histories.

Participation in global female public spheres, for instance, depended on particular skills, most notably literacy, which has become a condition for entry to many public spheres. More generally speaking, the word ‘public’ itself has often been coupled with qualifying adjectives such as ‘educated’ public, ‘informed’ public and ‘reading’ public, pointing to the crucial boundary between a global literate public and populations that could not read or write – historically, the larger part of the global population. In the nineteenth century, mass schooling became an important objective of many modernising states, yet the majority of the global female population over fifteen years of age was still not literate and therefore remained firmly excluded from public spheres defined by print. In the twentieth century, comprehensive literacy campaigns were conducted in countries including the Soviet Union, Turkey and Cuba. International organisations, above all UNESCO, have aimed to increase literacy and provide ‘education for all’. Many of these campaigns have been targeted at women. At the same time, female literacy rates still remain far below those of their male counterparts.

Global yet exclusive public spheres were also circumscribed by language barriers. Often, membership rested on knowledge of ecumenical languages such as English.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet global English also faced linguistic competitors. Chinese, Arabic and Persian language communities illustrate how global public spheres are expanding, while simultaneously remaining exclusive to those who share a common language. This point is driven home by the frequent reference to language spheres such as the Anglosphere or the Sinosphere as ‘worlds’ – for instance, in H. G. Wells’s expression ‘the English-speaking world’, but also the ‘Francophone world’ and the ‘Persianate world’.Footnote ⁶⁶

As these brief examples show, when historical actors or historians say ‘world’, they are often referring to a clearly demarcated global sphere. Highlighting the boundedness and social differentiation that comes with conceptions of ‘world’ or ‘globe’ might sound obvious. And it might go without saying that historical actors navigate specific and clearly circumscribed spheres rather than the planet as a whole. Yet, historians frequently reproduce the selective worldviews of their historical actors or bring their own limited frame of reference to the field rather than challenging these perspectives. At the same time, a global history perspective should ideally have the potential to spell out these limitations and boundaries and make them more visible, rather than obscuring or hiding them.

Boundaries and Limits in the Language of Global History

Instead of advocating a new language of spheres (akin to Arjun Appadurai’s language of ‘scapes’, which has rightly been criticised as being overly schematic), the aim of this chapter is to explore how the sphere as a figure of thought permits historians to rethink openness and closure in global history.Footnote ⁶⁷ Of course, the sphere is not an overall remedy: focusing on boundaries too rigorously might in fact hide the internal structures and networks that fill the sphere. At the same time, the various ways in which historical actors referred to global spheres reviewed earlier – the globe as sphere, spheres of influence, private and public spheres – offer alternative conceptualisations of the world and its limitations. They draw attention to boundaries and boundary-making and to difference and differentiation, complementing the familiar vocabulary of connection and circulation.Footnote ⁶⁸

Rather than prescribing a new language, this chapter points to several occasions where the sphere emerges as a global concept, allowing us to show how openness and closure are intertwined in contemporary reflections on globality. Through visiting instances of radical inclusion and radical exclusion, it helps to contextualise (rather than theorise) the global. Most importantly, this chapter has hinted at an ambivalence regarding the nature of boundaries and their permeability in global history. Spheres are necessarily bounded, even if these boundaries may be more solid or more ephemeral and therefore can vary in their porosity. This holds true both for the globe as a sphere characterised by radical inclusivity and for the more exclusive multiple global spheres delimited by class, gender, media systems and skills that are described in the last part of this chapter.

In this experimental think piece, I have been particularly interested in exploring the boundaries that define these spheres. A sphere is more permanent than a bubble, which can easily burst. But is a sphere impenetrable and hermetically sealed, as in the depictions of a closed world? Or is it porous and permeable, at least for some? Can one belong to several spheres, and can one leave them at will? And how are the limits of different spheres set and guarded? When thinking about spheres, we have to pay attention to the qualities of the membranes in which they are enclosed. Such reflections on the nature of boundaries invite contemplations on stability and fragility, porosity and impermeability, rather than resorting to a language of fluidity and formlessness as central features of globality. Boundaries can dissolve and solidify as a result of global phenomena such as pandemics or wars. Consequently, thinking about global spheres calls for a more systematic exploration of boundaries and limits, borders and frontiers, as a central semantic field of global history.

Of course, there is a sprawling literature on two-dimensional borderlands in global history.Footnote ⁶⁹ This literature has gone a long way towards exploring processes of openness and closure in the literal sense. Yet a large part of this literature refers to geographical boundaries such as the borders of nation-states, continents and seascapes. These works are therefore, not surprisingly, mainly concerned with spatial conceptions of the global.

In contrast to such two-dimensional conceptions, spheres are more frequently bounded by divisions that have nothing to do with geography. Such divisions can take the forms of glass ceilings, cell membranes and elastic skins. In this sense, spheres are related as much to the sociological literature on social closure as they are to geographical conceptions of spatial expansion and retraction. Connecting the spatial and the social in global history more closely and drawing attention to the social depth of global processes therefore adds an important third dimension. Spheres can lead us to reflect more openly on the question of the universe or cosmos inhabited by a historical actor and the limits thereof – geographically, but above all socially and communicatively. Closure emerges as a flexible category: processes of closure can be territorial, but they can also relate to phenomena of social differentiation. The three-dimensional nature of spheres and their boundaries therefore points towards new and more inclusive ways of thinking about global borders and limits.

There are many examples of non-geographical boundary-work that will come to mind beyond those emphasised in this chapter. Recently, historians have been drawn to the porosities between the spheres of humans and the worlds of animals.Footnote ⁷⁰ Others have conceptualised borders as semi-permeable membranes, for instance in relation to mobility and migration, where creating opportunities for some means limiting them for others. A typology of boundaries beyond the geographical allows historians to reach out to neighbouring disciplines but also to more distant fields of research, such as the biosciences, information technology and linguistics.Footnote ⁷¹

Thinking about spheres and related metaphors broadens our view beyond binaries such as connection and disconnection or integration and disintegration and calls for a more explicit examination of how ideas of the global in themselves can lead to exclusive and exclusionary notions. This chapter moves beyond equating the global with openness, connection and integration and instead addresses the role of closure, boundaries and limits in global history in a wider sense, placing inequality and differentiation at the centre. In this manner, it returns from a softer and more metaphorical language to a harder language emphasising structures and constraints, ideally without losing the interlopers and trespassers that have long fascinated global historians. In this way, the slightly unwieldy concept of spheres allows for two shifts which can prove central to global history in the long run. First, it challenges practitioners of global history to reveal how openness and closure are amalgamated in specific global processes, moving beyond the metaphorical, symbolic and somewhat indeterminate language that has characterised attempts to rethink global processes beyond connection and integration. And, second, it emphatically calls for a move from geographical units (and their deconstruction) to the analysis of social units in order to reveal global inequalities and hierarchies more clearly than is often the case.

Let me start with one of the less widely cited masterpieces of global history: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters from 1989. Written by a highly erudite writer at the moment when microhistory was asserting its challenge to global histories well beyond its original Italian context, A History of the World offered a shrewd and penetrating critique of the dichotomy between the micro–macro distinction that preoccupied scholars during those years. While professional historians argued with each other about whether to focus on large-scale societal transformations or on the experiences of individuals and small communities, Barnes sidestepped these debates by reimagining the history of the world from the perspective of animals. In the first chapter of Barnes’s book, a woodworm tells the story of Noah’s Ark, the first historical event to put a brake on globalisation. And from the perspective of the woodworm, the accounts of humans, familiar to us from the Old Testament, are put into serious doubt. The narrator writes: ‘Now, I realize that accounts differ. Your species has its much repeated version, which still charms even sceptics; while the animals have a compendium of sentimental myths.’Footnote ²

According to the woodworm, God is almost absent from the story of the Flood because he operates at a scale that is barely perceptible from below and, more generally, because things rarely go according to divine plans foisted upon the Earth from above. Human agency is also dislodged when viewed from below. The woodworm presents Noah as an incompetent leader who barely makes it through the calamities, losing much of the crew on the way. In contrast, the woodworm becomes a real agent of its own fate. It was not meant to be on the Ark (or, to be more precise, in the Ark): “I was a stowaway. I too survived; I escaped.” Like the microhistorians of the period, Barnes resists the danger of telling stories from above. The connection to microhistory is probably not coincidental, and not only because the worm is also featured prominently in the title of Carlo Ginzburg’s seminal The Cheese and the Worms.Footnote ³ Echoing Ginzburg’s work, a later chapter of Barnes’s book uses the narrative frame of an early modern trial to recover the forgotten voices of those who were put on trial, except that the accused happen in this case to be a number of insects. Yet A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters goes further than most microhistorians. While Barnes never trivialises the importance of recounting stories of human suffering, he does insist on acknowledging animals as agents and subjects of history.

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters did not appear in a vacuum. Barnes was inspired by the work of Italo Calvino, the prolific writer and translator who introduced the term microstoria into Italian.Footnote ⁴ Like A History of the World, Calvino’s Cosmicomics offered a whirlwind history of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the late twentieth century from the perspective of a narrator who was at once a sub-atomic particle, a variety of prehistoric animals and a human being. Like Barnes’s book, Calvino’s work challenged historians to include in their accounts agents that cannot be classified as human.Footnote ⁵ The late 1980s and early 1990s, when Barnes’s book appeared, also saw the heyday of a post-modernist interest in replaying and recontextualising historical processes, as well as an important wave of works in art, literature and humanistic scholarship that put animals and the environment at the centre of interest, questioning the necessary centrality of humans in stories about our globe. The epitome of this interest is Mark Dion’s Scala naturae (and his whole oeuvre), which critically reconstitutes and puts under erasure the Enlightenment’s hierarchical understandings of nature (see Figure 7.1). Available in several variants, the Scala naturae presents us with a staircase or ladder (the literal meaning of scale, datable back to the fifteenth century), which organises natural organisms on ten different levels, with a bust of the great comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier on top. In this work, Dion emphasises the visual appeal and moral dangers inherent in hierarchical, human-centred models of the universe that do not fully acknowledge the various, alternative forms of life the Earth is replete with. Like Barnes, Dion puts all sorts of lifeforms in conversation with the work of humans to ponder how our globe is full of agents that could have a story to tell, and how, at the same time, these animals ‘are emblematic of the different types of human driven extinction causes – overharvesting, habitat loss, intentional extermination, over collecting of eggs or specimens and poaching’, too.Footnote ⁶ For Dion, the history of human globalisation is the history of the deglobalisation of many animal and plant species by human agents.

Figure 7.1 Mark Dion. Scala Naturae, 1994. Painted wooden structure, artifacts, plant specimens, taxidermy specimens and bust, 297.2 x 100 x 238.1 cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

I began this review of the current historiography of scale with literature and art to highlight alternatives to the human-centred approaches of history and the other social sciences. The works of Barnes and Dion reveal to us scales of existence that historians rarely engage with: for example, those of worms, microscopic viruses or nuclear particles. While the concept of scale could be used to explore how history can be written from the sub-atomic level to the level of galaxies, historians who engage with the concept of scale use this engagement primarily to stake out their claims to one, two or three levels of observation at the most. The first half of the chapter will review the human-centred debates on micro- and macrohistory that have dominated discussions in recent decades. The second half will challenge this historiography first from the perspective of geography, and then return to animal and environmental studies to plead for a historical understanding of scale that incorporates concerns about globalisation, environmental transformation and non-human agencies.

Scale in History

Scale is a word with many meanings, ranging from the step of a ladder to the ratio between the distance measured on a map and the distance measured on the ground. In this chapter, and in the larger historical literature, scale often refers to the idea that, like a nested sphere, humans, society and the world are organised in a hierarchical manner, with distinct levels of action, such as the level of the individual, the urban, the national, the supranational and the global.Footnote ⁷ The idea of scale sometimes simply refers to the historian’s chosen focus of observation – for example, that they study the English Civil War as it played out in the county of Kent. Alternatively, historians may use the concept of scale because they believe that it is a useful explanatory tool to understand how society and the world are organised. In this chapter, I adopt this concept of scale because it is heuristically useful when it comes to describing complex hierarchies with some regular patterns of behaviour. As I later discuss in more detail, human geographers make a convincing case that scale-based conceptual frameworks are especially helpful in understanding the functioning of unequal power structures.

For historians, at each level of the scale, interactions between actors are governed by a separate set of rules.Footnote ⁸ In addition, the hierarchical nature of scale often means that events at higher levels can directly influence actions on the lower rungs of the hierarchy – for example, decisions made by a national government have a role in shaping urban policies and the lives of individuals. Curiously, the scholarship that engages with the concept of scale has focused less on how bottom-up processes may be explained in such a hierarchical order: for example, how individuals or cities may influence events and actions at the national or global level. After a discussion of the emergence of the historical debates on scale, the bulk of this chapter will be devoted to reconceptualising scale by taking seriously the issue of bottom-up organisation and action, and to exploring how the concept of scale can help historians move beyond the dichotomy of the micro and the macro.

As Deborah Coen has argued, the modern concept of scale emerged in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹ By then, the early modern concept of the scala naturae, a variant of the idea of a chain of being that reached from the lowly worm to God up in heaven, had been put out of use.Footnote ¹⁰ The advent of deep time – that is, the discovery of Earth’s long geological past – dispelled the belief in the divine and the eternal order of fixed species, opening the door to a variety of proto-evolutionary theories. The old hierarchical understanding of nature was replaced by a new, complex, yet equally orderly understanding of the global environment as proposed by Alexander von Humboldt, whose work partly relied on indigenous helpers, mining professionals and colonial Latin American scholars.Footnote ¹¹ Scale turned from a concept of vertical hierarchy to a descriptor of spatial differentiation. Humboldt’s global vision emphasised universal laws that ensured broad regional similarities across the globe, while not neglecting to explore how small regions could diverge from each other based on their local microclimates. As Coen posits, however, it was in the multilingual, multinational and multiregional Habsburg Empire that the concept of scale developed even further and achieved its fullest expression, as Habsburg scientists began to provide models of the complex reasons why local regions in the Karst had drastically different weather patterns from other regions nearby. Unlike Humboldt, these geographers partially dispensed with a global vision of climate and environment because climate patterns at lower levels of observation tended to depend on their own, more local sets of laws. At different scales, phenomena on Earth depended on different sets of rules.

The historians who came after the geographical revolution freely acknowledged their debt to this tradition in their understanding of the different scales of historical action, even if they reintroduced the concept of vertical hierarchy to their discussions. The Annales school’s self-proclaimed break with histoire événementielle, and Braudel’s focus on the putatively more important medium and longue durée developments of history, owed much to the lessons they had learned from the geography of the years around 1900.Footnote ¹² As Braudel programmatically explained, ‘I would freely declare that the Tableau de la géographie de la France, published in 1903, just before Ernest Lavisse’s great history of France, is a major work not only of geography but also in the canon of the French school of history.’Footnote ¹³

A social and economic historian who adhered fairly strongly to environmental determinism, Braudel acknowledged three different levels of historical action, each with its own specific sets of laws and regularities. At the top level, the geographic landscape provided the environmental constraints for human activity while, one level below, cyclical economic patterns and social movements paved the way for the emergence of modern society. Even further below that scale, the history of events revealed the activities of individual humans that, frankly, did not amount to much. The achievements of a single person could never be more than the foam on top of a single wave in a vast ocean. For Braudel, even the French Revolution was a blip in human history, barely worth the attention of a real scholar. Talking of his colleague Ernest Labrousse in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Braudel could barely contain his shock that Labrousse focused his attention on explaining the causes of the French Revolution, a diversion from more important developments in long history.Footnote ¹⁴ This was because Braudel emphatically believed that the direction of influence primarily flowed in one direction. While geography shaped the economy and society, and all these influenced the lives of individuals, individuals could make little difference to economics and society, and society could influence the shape of the land only to a limited degree. Braudel’s world was not one in which humans could easily induce climate change on a global scale.Footnote ¹⁵

Braudel’s views had important repercussions that went well beyond the borders of France. The Annales school strongly shaped the development of the discipline in Italy, Latin America, Eastern Europe and even in the Anglo-American world. To give one famous example, the tripartite structure of Lawrence Stone’s influential Causes of the English Revolution owes much to the model of the Annales school, though without the emphasis on geography.Footnote ¹⁶ Stone proposed that causation could be distributed between the socio-economic preconditions of change that accumulated over a good hundred years, the precipitates of the two decades before 1640 and the triggers that made the event an actuality as opposed to a probability. Unlike Braudel, Stone eventually acknowledged that socio-economic structures were not unaffected by changes at the level of the individual, and some of his articles proposed a more multidirectional flow of influence between socio-economic, cultural and narrative approaches:

While Stone’s interest in social history never waned, the late 1970s also saw the emergence of revisionist historians of the English Civil War who challenged the primacy of preconditions of change over triggers, arguing that there was little that was pre-determined about the Civil War until it finally happened.Footnote ¹⁸ And, within the broader discipline, the coming of microhistory, developed first in Italy as a reaction to the dominance of the Annales school, refocused attention back on the histories of individuals.

Never united, microhistorians took a variety of contradictory approaches to the question of scale. For many, the essence of microhistory was to uncover the voices of those who fell through the sieves of official statistics and quantitative data. Some scholars simply turned their back on history written on a large scale and used the experiences of individuals to show how the historiography of larger societal structures failed to reveal how events on the global or national scale played out on the ground. This preference for recovering lost voices did not always imply the rejection of the importance of larger societal structures, however. Carlo Ginzburg, for instance, used his Cheese and the Worms not only to give voice to the Italian miller Menocchio, an exceptional individual, but also to examine how the coming of the printed book interacted with the longue durée history of Eurasian popular culture. The Cheese and the Worms used the figure of Menocchio to tell a large-scale story of the socio-political emergence of confessionalisation that obliterated the popular culture that our miller was coming from. For Ginzburg, the story of Menocchio could be interpreted at both levels and did not invalidate the macro-level narratives of societal change. Importantly, some other Italian microhistorians went even further, using fine-grained studies to point out how macro-level phenomena could be described as the result of individuals organising themselves into larger hierarchical groups. These microhistorians did not take larger societal structures as given in advance. Instead, they explained how these hierarchical structures emerged thanks to the self-organisation of individuals into networked groups.Footnote ¹⁹

Inspired partly by the influential writings of Fredrik Barth, Edoardo Grendi claimed that microhistory’s aim was to ‘reconstruct the evolution and dynamics of social comportments’, and Giovanni Levi even argued that a focus on Catholic cultural structures could explain the formation of modern Italian-style states.Footnote ²⁰ Such proposals found resonance on the other side of the Atlantic as well. If Grendi relied on Barth, the sociologist and historian Charles Tilly suggested that the reconciliation of micro- and macrohistory must be performed by relational realism, ‘which concentrates on connections that concatenate, aggregate and disaggregate readily, form organisational structures at the same time as they shape individual behaviour’.Footnote ²¹ To some, the solution of aggregating individuals into social groups through the study of relational networks seemed an acceptable way of bringing together micro- and macrohistorians. Yet significant differences remained as macrohistorians accused microhistorians of using outdated models of the state and other concepts, while microhistorians challenged the actual commitment of macrohistorians to understanding microstructures.

Viewed from a French perspective, the culminating theoretical statement on the encounter between micro- and macrohistory was Jacques Revel’s edited volume Jeux d’échelles, which brought together a number of historians and anthropologists to reconcile the Annales’s approach with the attacks of the Italians.Footnote ²² For Revel, microhistory’s major benefit was to defamiliarise the historical structures that the Annales school had taken for granted, but it did not do away with these structures in the end.Footnote ²³ Both approaches provided an interesting perspective on history, and neither had epistemological primacy over the other. The level of the individual was by no means more empirical or more concrete than the level of societal interactions. The best historical move was to oscillate constantly and playfully between the two levels of analysis. In the process, Revel chose to ignore the more serious challenges of microhistorians who called into question the validity of standard categories of social and economic history. It also remained unclear whether the microscopic and the macroscopic perspectives provided views on the same reality, or whether they were fundamentally irreconcilable. As Revel noted, some microhistorians, such as Sabina Loriga, explicitly modelled their writing on Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the iconic film showing how the same event could be told from different, contradictory perspectives without a resolution.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently, Revel had very little to say on how events at one level could have repercussions on events at another level. The jeux d’échelles shed new light on history, but they did not imply that there would necessarily be well-defined interactions between the micro and the macro.

Despite the breath of fresh air that microhistorians brought to the discipline, their programmatic statements on the issue of scale remained trapped in the terminology and framework set by the Annales school. Unlike the physical geographers of climate around 1900, and unlike contemporary literary authors, microhistorians kept on understanding scale as an organisational feature limited to humans alone. Ginzburg, for instance, considered worms only to the degree that people turned them into a cosmological metaphor, and never treated them as independent agents of history. As a result, microhistorians reduced scale to a simple binary dichotomy between the micro and the macro – a dichotomy that has persisted in the discipline ever since.Footnote ²⁵ To some degree, the rise of transnational history, in its different guises from connected and entangled histories to histoires croisées and histories of circulation and mobilities, has seemed to confirm that networks offer a way out of the dichotomy of micro- and macrohistory.Footnote ²⁶ Here was an attempt that aimed to break free from the focus on partially restricted locales to cover large distances on the globe. Some versions of transnational history were simply a sub-genre of world history that integrated into its macroanalysis structures that were supranational or bypassed national boundaries, such as international organisations. Yet an important segment of this literature focused on individuals or small groups of people whose travels across the world revealed how distant places may have an unexpectedly strong influence on each other. While some transnational microhistorians continued to focus on Italy, others devoted themselves to giving voice to the subaltern and the dispossessed in other places on the globe as well. They helpfully recentred the historiography by bringing to life the experiences and connections of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic or Indian migrants in China and beyond.Footnote ²⁷

When it comes to the issue of scale, the literature on global microhistory has tended not to use network theory to analyse how structures at different scales may interact with each other. Instead, the aim is either to see how seemingly local events are actually influenced by complex global forces, as proposed by proponents of glocalism, or to explain how individuals are able to bypass urban and state-level structures and operate at multiple locales at the same times.Footnote ²⁸ Such studies have made it clear that the level of the individual is not seamlessly nested in the meso- and macro-level scales of city and nation, and have proposed alternative social systems that structure the formation of communities. Yet it often remains rather opaque how traditional macro-level concepts could be reconciled with these new, alternative social structures. For instance, Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann claim both that histoire croisée emphasises the ‘inextricable interlinking’ of the micro and the macro and that ‘the notion of the scale does not refer to the micro or macro but to the different spaces in which the constitutive interactions of the process being analysed are inscribed’, leaving it unclear whether one should discard the concepts of the micro or the macro.Footnote ²⁹

In less programmatic statements, the concept of the transnational has served to reveal alternatives to state- and city-based explanations that are already well-established historical categories. In The Familiarity of Strangers, for instance, Francesca Trivellato showed how the Sephardic diaspora of Livorno relied partly on the urban and state structures of the early modern Mediterranean, and partly on networks based on kinship and religion that connected different parts of the Mediterranean.Footnote ³⁰ Yet even Trivellato’s account of the Sephardic diaspora did not quite explain how interpersonal relationships aggregate into urban and state structures, let alone discuss how shipworms, or the seeds of plague and other infectious diseases, shaped maritime trading networks in the Mediterranean. The Familiarity of Strangers instead often offered top-down explanations of how the Livorno authorities posed constraints on the lives of Sephardic Jews within their walls, implying a simple model in which macrostructures shape but do not determine actions at the individual level. As Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel wrote in 2011, the same issues that prompted the editing of Jeux d’échelles twenty years earlier are also present in debates about transnational histories. These authors argued that one could not simply discard the nation-state, and that the transnational is simply a spatially extended variant of the microhistorians’ idea of the local individual. Transnational history did not help decide whether it was possible to reconcile the perspectives presented by different scales and if there were ways to explore how they interacted.Footnote ³¹

From today’s vantage point, there is widespread agreement that, for a fruitful global history, it would be crucial to finally understand how the interplay of different scales of analysis unfolds in practice, or at least in theory. In a recent special issue of Past and Present, John-Paul Ghobrial writes that the literature ‘could do more to explain exactly how one should play the jeux d’échelles’, but he does not actually offer an answer, and Jan de Vries’s contribution to the special issue confirms that, at least from the perspective of some social and economic historians, the dichotomy may be irresolvable.Footnote ³² As de Vries damningly writes, ‘microhistories do not, and are not intended to, aggregate to macro-level and global histories. There is no path, no methodology, no theoretical framework in the current repertoire of the microhistorian to make this move possible.’Footnote ³³

De Vries’s argument hinges on his assumption that macrohistory is successful because of its alliance with the social sciences, and therefore the only microhistory that could aggregate to larger-level explanations is the controlled case study that reveals comparative differences. For de Vries, of course, the social sciences primarily mean economics and quantitative sociology. Yet, as we have seen, the first wave of microhistories was inspired by another social science: the anthropology of Fredrik Barth. Similarly, Tilly used ‘relational realism’ precisely to offer an alternative explanation for how microphenomena may aggregate to macrostructures without resorting to quantitative comparative research.Footnote ³⁴ Curiously, microhistorians today rarely acknowledge this anthropological inspiration; even more curiously, the historical debate on global history and the problem of scale mostly ignores the parallel debates on scale that have been prevalent in the disciplines of science studies and geography.Footnote ³⁵ If, in the middle of the twentieth century, Braudel was enthusiastic about a somewhat outdated version of geography, his enthusiasm has disappeared from the discipline completely.

Flat Ontologies and Scale Jumping

If scale means that, at different levels of analysis, agents can act according to different sets of laws, the basic question is how actions at one level could affect agents at another level. In the classic formulation of the concept of scale, with its nested hierarchies, the answer is that developments at a higher rank of hierarchy can affect events at a lower rank of the scale in a top-down manner, but not vice versa. Yet once the concept of nested hierarchies is at least partially abandoned, the solution to this issue becomes much less clear. If the actions of nation-states are governed by the rules of political economy at the macro level, for instance, can individuals affect how states develop or change?

In recent years, human geographers have proposed answering this fundamental question in the affirmative by emphasising the importance of bottom-up organisation and action. Microhistorians were interested in marginalised individuals who were nonetheless able to escape the constraints of such oppressive structures as the state without necessarily challenging it outright. Geographers are instead interested in revolutionary individuals and other agents who can change macrostructures such as the national state or global economy. They propose two alternative analytical approaches to accomplish this goal. First, the argument for flat ontologies posits that all macro-level phenomena can ultimately be described using only individual agents who form networks. Second, the argument for scale jumping argues that certain shape-shifting agents are able to ‘make the leap’ from one level of analysis to another, and thus affect outcomes both at the micro and the macro level.

In recent decades, geography has undergone a development that is not dissimilar to the transformation of the historical discipline.Footnote ³⁶ Human geography has become detached, to some degree, from physical geography and, ever since Henri Lefebvre’s groundbreaking work, geographers carefully distinguish ‘the social space [that is] a social product’ from the concept of physical space.Footnote ³⁷ As a result, human geographers also refer to scale primarily to describe the hierarchical organisation of social life, with nature and non-human agents taking the role of epiphenomena. Yet the similarities with historical discourse go deeper and show parallel developments over the past forty years. Inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein, the geographer Peter Taylor conceptualised scale as a nested hierarchy with the global level as the more powerful in 1982, but the recent literature has moved away from this angle and towards interpretations that are not unlike the radicalised versions of the Barthian solutions offered by Italian microhistorians.Footnote ³⁸ In a series of articles, Sally Marston has argued that, once the nested hierarchies of scales are rejected, scalar explanations become inferior versions of Deleuzian rhizomatic networks and therefore the concept of scale should be abolished.Footnote ³⁹ If all agents are able to act upon all other agents (the individual on the state, and the state on the individual) and there is no pre-established hierarchy, the illusion of scale is the result of scholars mistaking certain powerful network nodes for reified and unproblematic entities. Unlike strong versions of Deleuzian network theory, Marston nonetheless points out that not all networks need to be about endless openness, flows and fluxes. There are blockages and spatial structures that give shape to the world, just as it is impossible to write a transnational history of circulation without presupposing certain nation-states or other entities between which circulation takes place. A great advantage of Marston’s approach is to emphasise that a focus on scale can serve to highlight socio-economic hierarchies that overshadow alternative systems of inequalities (e.g. those based on gender).Footnote ⁴⁰ A network-based analysis is better able to handle complex systems of inequalities where class, race, gender and other factors interact with each other.

Flat ontology leaves slightly unclear how unequal power structures can emerge within networks where all agents are similar at the outset.Footnote ⁴¹ For this reason, other geographers have been less enthusiastic about abandoning the concept of scale, which immediately foregrounds the structural role of inequality. These geographers have maintained the idea that partially nested hierarchies play a significant role in the organisation of society and in shaping the interaction of humans with their environments.Footnote ⁴² Scholars inspired by Marx, such as Neil Brenner and Neil Smith, agree that scale is a social construct, but this does not make it any less real. Scale is a useful explanatory tool because it provides a clearer understanding of unequal power structures than the somewhat vague concepts of blockages and spatial structures. While in principle somewhat malleable, scale structures can also be rigid and path-dependent, and a scale-based analysis can therefore explain why the nation-state or global economy have survived across several centuries.Footnote ⁴³ Building on Brenner and Smith, Erik Swyngedouw has importantly argued that scales can be reconfigured at each new stage of history, with certain levels gaining particular significance in certain historical situations.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Swyngedouw claims, for instance, the rise of capitalism was a key event in the emergence of the global as a separate level where power could be concentrated, with other levels (e.g. the national) losing some significance at the same time.Footnote ⁴⁵ Following Neil Smith’s earlier work, Swyngedouw suggests that power struggles and political upheavals play out in the construction of new scales that attempt to constrain certain actors to act at only one level of action. Much work and organisation are needed for other actors to become able to ‘jump scales’ and effect change.

From the late 1980s onwards, Smith was one of the major theorists of scale in geography. Just like Swyngedouw, Smith claimed that scales were powerful but unstable constructions ‘produced as part of the social and cultural, economic and political landscapes of contemporary capitalism and patriarchy’. As malleable political constructs, different scales of action, though hierarchically organised, were nonetheless inherently connected, which led Smith to the realisation that ‘the importance of “jumping scales” lies precisely in this active social and political connectedness of apparently different scales, their deliberate confusion and abrogation’.Footnote ⁴⁶ If capital structured hierarchies in such a way that those without power were pushed to a less privileged level of action, these dispossessed agents could nonetheless use a variety of jumping strategies to regain their agency and power at a level of high importance.Footnote ⁴⁷ Bottom-up organisation was difficult but not impossible. To give an example, Smith brought up the New York artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s political project of the Homeless Vehicle. The Homeless Vehicle was a mobile unit that combined a shopping cart with an upper, sheltered compartment for sleeping and also included a washbasin for daily ablutions. Through its rocketlike design, it stood out from the urban environment where it was exhibited and put into action. It made visible at the urban level those masses of homeless people that the politicians of gentrification wanted to render invisible.

Following Smith, Swyngedouw has similarly reinterpreted the history of late-twentieth-century globalisation as an issue of scale jumping. In Swyngedouw’s version, the contemporary network flows that Marston has studied are therefore not simply an ahistorical given.Footnote ⁴⁸ They are the result of the post-Bretton Woods era in which the welfare state is hollowed out and global markets increasingly operate at the local and individual level. It is this recent historical process that Swyngedouw calls ‘glocalisation’. For Swyngedouw, glocalisation is not the microhistorical study of global forces, it is the result of global markets’ late-twentieth-century reorganisation of scales. It offers an example of market forces jumping scales from the global to the local without passing through the national.

While Swyngedouw’s and Smith’s arguments and examples come from a determinedly Marxist interpretation of history, their claims about the construction of scale resonate with the points made by the French social theorist Bruno Latour. While Actor–Network theory has often been associated with flat ontologies, Latour was clear that his aim was to deconstruct, but not to do away with, modern hierarchical structures. Throughout Latour’s work, his double aim was not only to explain how ‘we have never been modern’, but also how the rise of Western science brought in unequal power structures and developments between societies.Footnote ⁴⁹ Actor–Network theory relies on associations in networks to explain unequal development and the establishment of hierarchies of power.Footnote ⁵⁰ The difference between Marxist geographers and Latour is that Latour focuses primarily on how micro-level agents build up higher-level networks, while Smith and Swyngedouw privilege capital over micro-level agents in their explanations of the emergence of scalar hierarchies. Yet even when one acknowledges this important difference, scale jumping nonetheless finds its counterpart in Actor–Network theory and its concept of immutable mobiles. At least for the early Latour, powerful networks gained their potency from the paper tools of scalable immutable mobiles, such as maps and diagrams, that allowed modern scientists to jump scales with ease.Footnote ⁵¹ Immutable mobiles reduced the globe to the level of the individual scientist and made it possible to recreate the world in one centre of accumulation, such as the city of Paris. As Latour explained, scale models were at once scientific facts and religious fetishes (a ‘factish’), as they came with the promise that their manipulation in a small laboratory could effect changes at a larger level, across the globe, leading to Western domination in modernity. More recently, John Tresch has offered a decentred, and less triumphalist, version of the factish in his studies of cosmograms across history, investigating how different societies built themselves reduced, and often hierarchical, models of the cosmos to understand and manipulate it at a reduced scale.Footnote ⁵² Tresch’s cosmograms are at once a powerful example of how people use a variety of tools to jump scales, and they also reveal how agents other than twenty-first-century historians and geographers develop complex theories about scale and levels of action.

For historians, the geographers’ perspective on scale has a number of significant advantages. First of all, it points out that scale is a political construct and, as a result, it is because of historical struggles that certain levels on the scale, such as the global, gain particular importance at particular moments. Consequently, there is no foundational and transhistorical level of analysis that reveals the true workings of society; moreover, neither the local nor the global are necessary, transhistorical givens. Similarly, it is also entirely possible that neither a traditional micro- or macro-level analysis is the best tool for understanding all historical events, as there may be other scales of action that are rendered invisible by capital or the archival practices of political powers.

Second, the concept of scale jumping offers historians a tool that is better equipped than Revel’s jeux d’échelles to explain how individuals can act on the macro-level on certain occasions. Smith’s ideas allow us to focus on how, once established, the different scales at which agents operate can be connected – the major issue faced by both micro- and macrohistorians both before and after the transnational turn. A categorisation of different strategies of scale jumping, from the artwork of the Homeless Vehicle through Latourian factishes to cosmograms, may well be the best tool to help historians of the local and historians of the global join forces. Here, for lack of space, I will only offer a few such strategies from historical writings to explain how scale jumping can be used to describe the kinds of work that need to be done for entities to occupy positions of power at a variety of levels.

While scale jumping is a relatively new concept, the phenomenon itself has long been known to writers of history and historical anthropology. These historians also acknowledged that scale jumping is not always a strategy of resistance: it can also be a tool for assuming power. Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic The King’s Two Bodies is only the most prominent example of the legal and religious work that enables an individual human to become the state.Footnote ⁵³ As Kantorowicz explained, modern kingship emerged from the Christological literature that attempted to explain how Christ united two natures in one person and how, after Christ’s ascension to heaven, Christ was present on Earth both in the host and in the church. The secularised concept of kingship discussed in similar terms how to distinguish and unite the individual person and the state-level role they play in the body of the king, only to fall apart during the English Civil War when parliamentary forces fought the king in the name of the King. It was at this moment that Thomas Hobbes appeared on the scene, offering his own analysis of how ‘a multitude of persons natural are united by covenants into one person civil or body politic’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Once the traditional concept of the king was truly dead, a new legal system needed to be established to make states out of people. Importantly, the double nature of kingship was not only a Western idea, as Marshall Sahlins’s Islands of History showed for the Pacific. As Sahlins explained in terms of structural anthropology, in the Fijian case the levels of the individual, the state and the divine are united through their ‘hierarchical encompassment in the projects of kingship’. The divine king as an individual expresses the general will and ‘every day, the king recreates the world’.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Sahlins himself explicitly acknowledged, his interest in kings was not a revival of the ‘great-man theory of history’, but lay rather in understanding how microhistorical actions map onto the canvas of macrohistory.Footnote ⁵⁶ As such, it was one more example of scale jumping.

It would be rash to assert, though, that only kings have the ability to move across scales from the individual to the national level in actual history. As Kantorowicz explained, his inspiration for The King’s Two Bodies came from the realisation that the Benedictine monastic order was an “Inc.” – an incorporated business organisation in the legal landscape of the United States.Footnote ⁵⁷ The formation of corporations, from medieval guilds to twenty-first-century multinational companies, is a prominent example of efforts aimed at making entities visible at ever larger scales. Arguably, an important strand of the Italian microhistorians’ studies of labour organisation, often inspired by E. P. Thompson, can be similarly described as attempts to see how individual workers can come together and form a union and how they come to make a class.Footnote ⁵⁸ And, in a similar manner, a major focus of contemporary geographers of scale is understanding twentieth-century labour movements and early twenty-first-century urban protests.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet, if we pay heed to Kantorowicz’s point, we need to remember that the aggregation of people into agents at the macro level cannot be exclusively described by the laws of Barthian networks; we also need to pay close attention to the legal and scalar solution of incorporation that constructs a political body out of a multitude.

Back to the Worms

As the previous examples have suggested, scholars and historical actors have proposed many ingenious solutions to the problem of shifting from one level of historical action to another, and many more examples could be adduced before the list is exhausted. By way of conclusion, I would like to extend our discussion of jumping scales by considering it at levels that transcend the entrenched micro–macro dichotomy of the discipline and reach out to the less visible scales at which politics and nature operate. The aim is to avoid the limitations of the post-Braudelian focus of both micro- and macrohistorians on those levels of analysis that prioritise humans, answering Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent call to open up history to radically new approaches.Footnote ⁶⁰ This section is an attempt to understand how the social spaces historians and geographers have explored interact with the physical space of the environment that humans share with plants, animals and lower lifeforms. The plea for extending our understanding of scale by considering levels that contain microscopic entities, insects or trees is to understand how human individuals and social action shape and are shaped by their engagement with nature.Footnote ⁶¹ Twenty years ago, Timothy Mitchell famously asked the question: ‘Can the mosquito speak?’ Inspired by Marxian analysis, Mitchell argued that one could not understand Egyptian history without examining how colonial technology brought in both political and natural disasters.Footnote ⁶² Historians have only selectively engaged with Mitchell’s approach, but the 2020 pandemic has provided ample evidence that the history of globalisation cannot be written without considering the role of viruses, bacteria and other vectors of disease. And while this chapter has focused primarily on the realm of the living, the geographical concept of scale can also help incorporate in its analysis a variety of tangible and intangible material agents, from mineral resources and oceans to radio waves and nuclear or cosmic radiation.Footnote ⁶³

I started my chapter with Mark Dion’s ladders because they are a considered exploration of how scales are political constructs even at levels that include only non-human agents at first sight. The point is not simply that the ‘Great Chain of Being’ is a human construct of the Renaissance world picture, but rather the environmentalist realisation that human activities, including the development of taxonomical classification, have been actively transforming nature and the Earth for many centuries, if not millennia, and that anthropogenic global warming is only the latest act by which humanity attempts to reshape the Earth with problematic consequences.Footnote ⁶⁴ That is why at its lowest rungs Dion’s Scala naturae contains human artefacts made from natural materials, such as the wooden wheel, reminding us of the hidden presence of humans at all levels of natural organisation. While the bust of Cuvier is at the top of Dion’s sculpture, the point is that humans can walk down the ladder and affect lifeforms on every step. This is the reason for Dion’s fascination with debris, as manifested in his cupboards of the Tate Thames Dig, which used the framing device of early-twentieth-century geological cabinets to exhibit the results of his excavations of the detritus of plastic, ropes, bones and shells from the banks of the Thames in London.Footnote ⁶⁵ From Dion’s perspective, historians’ focus on the scale of the human or the state obscures the interactions between humans, animals and plant life that is happening at other levels. While for Braudel the human could affect changes at the level of the environment only with much difficulty, for Dion (and for ecocriticism) the human is a crucial agent in the construction of the environment as we know it. Like Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle, Scala naturae is an effort to challenge and resist the political structures, this time to prevent global environmental disaster. As Dion writes: ‘My taxonomies often frustrate expectations and assumptions one may have about the nature and function of display. The point of this irritation and challenge to convention is to question the status of its objectivity and power. The authority of taxonomy is fragile, as was clearly understood by a number of Surrealists.’Footnote ⁶⁶

While Dion’s Scala naturae focuses on the role of humans in environmental disaster, Barnes’s ventriloquising history of the woodworm offers a poignant reminder about the agency of animals and other lifeforms when considering the interactions of the political and the natural, coming from the same decade that produced Latour’s Pasteurization of France, which brought non-human actants to the fore in science studies.Footnote ⁶⁷ Barnes’s choice of the woodworm (or shipworm) is particularly relevant for historians of globalisation because shipworms posed the major infrastructural problem for European navies from Columbus to the coming of ironclad ships in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁸ Shipworms entered the hulls of seafaring ships through barely visible holes and, once they were in the wood in sufficient numbers, they hollowed out the hull until it fell into pieces and the ship sank. While standard histories of the maritime expansion of Europe have tended to focus on naval battles and wars as the major obstacle for globalisation, a focus on scales below the level of humans reveals how lowly creatures, such as the shipworm, could multiply, jump from one plank to another, from one ship to another and from one scale to another, to shape and limit the circulation of humans and the vessels that carried them across the globe.

Like humans, shipworms travelled and propagated across the globe in the early modern period, in no small part thanks to the intensification of maritime contact across all the oceans. As these parasites migrated from one place to another, they caused epidemics of timber in a variety of novel and unexpected locations. As they quickly multiplied in these new places, they were able to jump scale, destroying the wooden infrastructures of ports to an alarming degree, thereby keeping globalisation at bay. The history of the early modern age of explorations is, at least in part, the history of the highly expensive and expansive infrastructural solutions that navies across the Earth developed to deal with the worm across the seas.

For shipworms, the 1730s were one particularly successful moment when they came to jump scale in the Netherlands. During these years, shipworms moved from the hulls of ships and decided to settle in the timber piles of the dikes of the Netherlands, causing the wood to rot and leaving the Low Lands especially prone to flooding. A worm that used to be the concern of the navy suddenly became an agent at the level of the nation and the state, together with the dikes that it attacked. News writers, natural philosophers and ministers across the country rushed to find an explanation for why shipworms were now so dangerous and how dikes could be rebuilt using new materials.Footnote ⁶⁹ During the following decades, the Netherlands spent huge amounts of money and labour to repair dikes and keep the country safe. It was through these particularly significant actions that dikes became one of the symbols of Dutch nationhood.

As Abraham Zeeman’s print from 1731 reveals, contemporaries already realised that the problem of shipworms was a problem of scale (see Figure 7.2). This print shows artificially magnified images of the shipworm against the background of dikes and minuscule human observers. To accurately picture the danger of shipworms, the artist needed to adjust his representational scale. Zeeman used the optical illusion of art to accurately depict the scale effects of worms upon coast-based societies. And, like Zeeman, historians can tell similar stories of scale jumping across all levels only if they expand the standard toolkits of micro- and macrohistory with the help of geography, environmental studies and science studies, as well as with the creative inspiration of artists and writers. How else could global history survive in an era marked by pandemics and climate change? And, as I put the finishing touches to this chapter in March 2024, I also need to ask: how else could global history survive in an era that is marked again by the dangers that the explosive fission of nuclei, controlled by totalitarian leaders, pose to societies across the Earth?

Figure 7.2 Abraham Zeeman. Paalwormen die de dijkbeschoeiingen aantasten, 1731–3. Etching. 14.5 x 17.9 cm. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-83.674.

Public Domain.