This chapter deals with various aspects of centrism in global historical scholarship. It firstly inquires whether as a research field, global history has developed distinct ways of defining narrative centres. Within an eye on longer academic transformations, it secondly contextualises the growing critiques of Eurocentrism in different parts of the world. On that basis, the chapter thirdly investigates various efforts overcome the long tradition of hegemonic perspectives that characterise different branches of global history as a research field. It then turns to the lived realities of academic historiography, considering it as a professional field that is comparable to other global professional realms. Doing this brings a very obvious inconsistency to the surface: our concepts have changed, our global thought has become decentred, and there has been a growing consensus when it comes to criticising Eurocentrism and other forms of hegemonic thinking. However, while this marks a great change in our disciplinary cultures, many of the hierarchies in the worldwide patterns of historiographical knowledge production that emerged during the nineteenth century are surprisingly intact today. This poses a particular problem to historical scholarship operating on a transregional and global level

Starting from the late nineteenth century, one can observe an increasing influence of concepts related to the idea of ‘society’ in China. In this period, ideas of ‘society’ and ‘the social’ tended to be future oriented all over the world. Moreover, they typically were tied to the experience of a fast-paced world characterized by painful historical ruptures, and China was no exception. This is not to say that all discourses surrounding the idea of society in this period were radically progressivist and iconoclastic. But even intellectual and political positions which may be loosely grouped under general markers such as ‘traditionalism’ emphasized the necessity of altering long-established patterns when reflecting upon society. Hence during the first decades of the twentieth century almost all significant interpretations of society defined the concept as a project, and the concept was semantically closely related to other ideas such as modernity, newness or change.

Visions of Society in China

In the early 1900s, most opinion-leading and decision-making circles in China shared the idea that it was necessary to find adequate social forms and political models in a rapidly changing environment. Since the concept of society was seen as a central part in an enormous transformation, it was debated in conjunction with a plethora of fundamental questions that were being raised about China and the future world at large.

Kaleidoscopic patterns

An entire cascade of further case studies could have added many facets to our picture of global history as a wider academic trend. For instance, it would certainly have been interesting to investigate more closely the scholarly communities in India where world historical thinking can be related to a myriad of contexts, ranging from political struggles over national identity to the rather complicated relationship between the local historians' guild and postcolonial theories in Western societies. Significant insights could also have been gained by looking more closely at various other academic realms in places ranging from Japan in the East to Argentina in the West, and from Australia in the South to Russia in the North. In each instance, transnational and world historical scholarship has certainly been characterized by complex interplays between global entanglements and local specificities. The latter includes factors ranging from particular sociocultural and political conditions to distinct academic structures, funding systems, forms of historical memory, and modes of global consciousness.

The primacy of the national past

Although global memory may not exist, there are certain aspects of the past that have transcended their original spatial confinements and entered historical consciousness in different parts of the world. Among the most well known and symbolically charged aspects of the human past are certainly the crimes and traumas of the Nazi era. In many countries, the atrocities committed during the Third Reich, particularly the shoa, occupy an important place in textbooks as well as in popular historical consciousness as they are transmitted and reinvoked on television, in newspapers, and other media. German fascism has also become an important subject of academic research and intellectual debate, even in regions such as East Asia or South Asia that were not directly affected by it. In many parts of the world there have been debates about the implications of the Nazi experience for notions of such fundamental concepts as modernity or Europe and its place in the world as well as – in some cases – human nature and God. The historical discourses surrounding the National Socialist past are certainly far from identical in different public spheres. However, this does not change the fact that important facets of the history of Nazism and its victims have been globalized in terms of their historical implications, connotations, and symbolism.

Change in academic landscapes

As the previous chapter has shown, American universities were closely connected with several transnational movements criticizing facets of university-based historiography. While it would be erroneous to assume that the rising problem-consciousness regarding Eurocentric visions disseminated from the United States to other parts of the world, American academia played a significant role as a transaction hub in the global flows of theories. At the same time, many related academic transformations at US institutions of higher learning were not only caused by international movements of scholars: also a chain of domestic developments contributed to their growing presence. Since the specific rhythms of change were quite cacophonous, it is possible to sketch only some of the main forces which during the past half century were relevant for the significant changes in historical scholarship practiced on US campuses.

Landscapes of a field

In recent years, most branches of historiography have witnessed a sharp increase in research operating with border-crossing perspectives. Hitherto unusual spatial concepts, be they transnational, transregional, or transcontinental in nature, have become more clearly visible in very different subfields of historiography, ranging from the complex landscapes of “cultural history” to the equally multifaceted environments of “economic history.” Certainly, not all these border-crossing perspectives are “new” in the sense that they were completely unthought-of a generation or more ago. But there has been a decisive change: what were once a few isolated trickles flowing through the landscapes of historiography have now grown into ever more visible currents. Microscopic and macroscopic research interests, which before played only a marginal role in historical scholarship, have now moved closer to the field's centers of attention.

Patterns of Chinese historiography prior to the mid-nineteenth century

In many Western societies, central currents of academic scholarship have long treated the main patterns of the European past as a largely autochthonous process. In particular, present cultures of historiography in Europe are often portrayed as outcomes of homegrown traditions and conceptual innovations. For Chinese scholars and public intellectuals, however, such professional negligence of global entanglements and influences from the outside world has no longer been possible for generations. In contrast to many popular notions of continued cultural solipsism in the East, forms of global consciousness have played much more central roles within the community of modern Chinese historians than among their peers in most Western academic systems. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been almost impossible to conceptualize Chinese history without paying attention to the wide spectrum of discontinuities and influences, which in some cases have been referred to as the “internationalization of China.” Even the most patriotic accounts of modern Chinese history cannot deny the massive impact of international powers and global transformations on the former Middle Kingdom, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Because the ensuing waves of changes also reconfigured China's institutions of higher learning and sociologies of knowledge, it is almost impossible to argue that Chinese historical scholarship in its present state is primarily the product of endogenous developments.

The question of traditions

The idea that in the future, global history may experience more sustained dialogues between scholars from different world regions leads to deeper theoretical challenges than may be apparent at first sight. Most importantly, there is the question of how to conceptualize “local” viewpoints in today's complex intellectual and academic landscapes. As I already argued in the introduction, plural approaches to global history cannot be simply based on celebrations of “otherness” or lip service to “authenticity.” While searching for greater levels of inclusivity, it is also necessary to consider the global condition of the field with all its networks, flows, and inequalities. After all, all over the world academic historiography has been at least partly the product of international power plays, worldwide transformations, and modern transfers. These translocal entanglements of modern historiography become particularly visible when we look at the field through global lenses and consider the epistemological as well as sociological changes that accompanied its spread to different parts of the world. Nevertheless, the globalization of university-based historiography did not lead to a standardization of scholarship all over the world.