DOMINIC SACHSENMAIER
First Steps
Writing on the question of why and how I became a world historian comes to me as a rather unusual task. While I feel quite at home with putting my own viewpoints to paper, I have hardly ever written about myself, at least not in any kind of public forum. I must admit that the idea of sharing some aspects of my intellectual and professional development makes me feel somewhat worried about sounding too self-important and pompous. It is maybe for this reason that now even the term “world historian” sounds quite aggrandizing to my ears, and definitely too honorific to befit a person like myself who, after all, can look back at hardly a decade of postdoctoral academic work. When asked about my own field, I usually reply that I work on world history, global history, or transnational history. I use this variety of terms since I believe that their meanings significantly overlap with one another, particularly if we consider how scholars use them today.1 Yet in no case would I ever come to confer upon myself the title of a “global historian” or a “world historian” – which, however, does not mean that I am not fairly pleased when others identify me as such.
In that sense, my following essay will mainly describe how I became involved with world-historical scholarship and what have become my key interests and agendas in this field. If I look back at my own family background, not much would point to a life between different continents and an interest in world-historical connections. Born and raised in a family with partly French roots in southwestern Germany, my childhood and teenage years were not “global” in any regard. Certainly, like many families, my kin included distant relatives in America, as well as long-deceased paradise birds like the professor of mathematics who was married to an opera singer and translated Chinese works into German as a pastime. But I never met them, and as so often it was hard to tell truth from fiction in our family history. All the relatives and friends I knew personally were European, and – since the Iron Curtain still divided the continent – Western European, for that matter. The same scopes characterized my high school education: there was not a single instant when I was exposed to anything that would remotely resemble “world history.” Rather, our instruction was quite literally Eurocentric – except for some homeopathic dosages of the US experience, the rest of the world remained blank in our history curriculum. The same was true for other high school subjects as well, if one disregards a few lessons on the “underdeveloped world” in our geography class.
Within such an environment, it is small wonder that after school, as a rather passionate reader of history books and what I considered to be “world literature,” my intellectual horizons reached from Dostoevsky in the east to Steinbeck in the west. Anything else – China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, and many other parts of the world – just seemed too remote to even try to approach them. Nevertheless, in hindsight it may be possible to identify some factors in my early life that may have contributed to my later interest in exploring transnational and global connections. For example, many of the people round me in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s (my childhood and teenage years) professed to be highly critical of German and any other kind of nationalism. My parents, many of my teachers, and other influential figures in my early intellectual development belonged to the so-called generation of “68ers.” Named after the student protests during that year, they distanced themselves sharply from their parents, whom they blamed for the atrocities of the Nazi past. Of course, it is a complex question how genuine this declared antinationalism actually was and how much it was embedded in truly transnational visions and political intentions. Still, the dominant climate of opinion in my particular surroundings made it highly unlikely that one would accept and assert the nation as the main frame of one’s identities and intellectual interests.
In addition, for anyone with at least a slight interest in history and politics, developments during the late 1980s necessarily heightened the degree of transnational awareness, even perhaps global consciousness. There were, on the one hand, long-term transformations such as the deepening of European integration, which – at least in my memory – were then far more closely tied to the idea of historical reconciliation than is characteristic of the European Union today. There were also the growing peace and environmentalist movements that sought to alert the public to those key issues of global concern. But it was especially the momentous changes around the year of 1989 which seemed to make the world too small for me to be merely interested in Europe. After all, the year not only saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of many Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, but also the election of F.W. de Klerk, which marked the beginning of the end of the apartheid system in South Africa, while student movements in China came to a sudden stop on Tiananmen Square. These experiences, as well as the ensuing debates surrounding new concepts such as “globalization,” fostered my desire to learn, think, and interact on much larger geographical scales than the environment in which I had lived before. I was then an ambulance driver in Cologne, doing mandatory civil service (in lieu of joining the army), and that was when I started developing thoughts of embarking upon cross-civilizational research.
Nevertheless, I first decided to deepen my understanding of European traditions and so enrolled as an undergraduate student in ancient history, medieval history, and classics at the universities of St Andrews (UK) and Freiburg (Germany). Two years later, I had an opportunity to widen my focus: I received a scholarship to spend one year at the Mandarin Training Center of Shi-Ta University in Taipei/Taiwan. This intensive language program, targeted at students outside of Chinese studies, enabled me to reach a decent proficiency in modern spoken as well as written Chinese within 12 months. Since my scholarship covered private tutorials as well, I was even able to start learning classical Chinese. All this was a good basis from which I could further develop my skills in the Chinese language.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this year in Taiwan changed my life. What had been a young man’s distant dream about global interactions now evolved into a more palpable set of possibilities. Upon my return to Freiburg University, I decided to change my undergraduate major to early modern/modern history and to add Sinology as a minor to my portfolio. Given my changed base of experience, I grew more conscious of the problems surrounding an educational system in which “history” was treated as largely equivalent to European history, and research on other parts of the world was usually relegated to small so-called “orchid” fields such as Sinology or Japanology. As some of my later professional agendas started taking shape, I became increasingly convinced that, in the future, transcultural and global historical work could prosper only if one worked to change academic structures as well.
In 1996, I was accepted into the Freiburg PhD program, with Wolfgang Reinhard, a historian of early modern Europe and European expansion, as my main supervisor. For my dissertation project I intended to draw on my familiarity with European and Chinese history as well as my language skills in modern and classical Chinese, Latin, German, French, and English. I was particularly attracted to the history of Sino-European cultural relations during the seventeenth century, a time that appeared to me to be far less fully framed by European supremacy than later periods, despite an overall global historical context of colonial expansionism and religious intolerance. More concretely, I became convinced that many aspects of the interaction between Chinese scholars and Jesuit missionaries (who chose to seek an accommodation with Confucian teachings) warranted further investigation.
Searching for an adequate dissertation topic, I followed a lead offered by David Mungello (now at Baylor University) and decided to focus my attention on Zhu Zongyuan, a low-level scholar who spent most of his life (1616–1660) in the Chinese province of Zhejiang and who had never been the subject of a detailed research project. As a member of the local elite, Zhu Zongyuan did not belong to the highest echelons of Chinese Catholicism, on which most previous research had focused. For this reason, I believed that his works provided important additional insights into the complex, multilayered history of Christianity in seventeenth-century China. As a Confucian-educated member of the provincial scholar-official class, Zhu’s life and belief system were also rather close to the world of Chinese popular and folk religions. Yet, at the same time, his writings contain learned discussions of such diverse subjects as Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, European philosophy, science, and magic. From the beginning of my dissertation work, I was determined to produce more than a conventional intellectual biography of Zhu Zongyuan. I did not want to follow the most obvious methodological route and merely relate his oeuvre to the Christian literature of the Ming-Qing transition period. Rather, I was resolved to situate Zhu’s work within the larger, partly transcultural intellectual, social, and political contexts of his time. Such a project, however, required analysis of both European and Chinese source materials.
For my dissertation research I traveled to places in China, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, all enabled by generous support from the German National Academic Foundation. Most notably, I spent two years as a visiting PhD student and teaching fellow at the Harvard-Yenching Institute and one semester at Nanjing University in China. Parts of my dissertation and the resulting book (Sachsenmaier 2001) apply a combination of semantic and historical perspectives to investigate Zhu’s presentation of various European religious contents and philosophical concepts to the Chinese reader.2 The book also explores different sociopolitical constraints that shaped the translation of Christianity from one cultural context into another. Further, I examine how Zhu Zongyuan approached the question of cultural belonging and political allegiance in his philosophical musings. For instance, I discuss Zhu’s unique and rather extensive writings in response to Chinese criticism of Christianity based on its foreign origins. I first situate these writings against a background of changing modes of regional and global consciousness within elite circles during the early seventeenth century. For example, the European colonization of the Philippines and Taiwan was a key factor underpinning growing concerns that Christianity and its missionaries were the precursors to a larger threat. In his writings, Zhu Zongyuan addressed such concerns by applying different lines of reasoning. Most notably, he sought to deconstruct the notion of a territorially bounded China by arguing that the inner core of the “Middle Kingdom” needed to be understood in civilizational, ethical, and universal terms. Given such daring statements, I also closely investigated Zhu’s efforts to maneuver between the political expectations of the Chinese state and the Catholic Church – expectations which could become acutely problematic, even at the level of symbolic performances such as rites and liturgy.
Indubitably the scope of my book did not attempt a truly global perspective in a strict sense of that term, since it focused almost exclusively on a segment of specifically Sino-European interactions. Nevertheless, I see research projects such as this one as ascribable to “world history,” since otherwise this field would have to be monopolized by large-scale narratives and global interpretations. Books for a general audience and textbooks of this kind, which necessarily rely on secondary literature, are an important aspect of world-historical writing. Yet I believe that at the same time the field needs to cultivate a diverse research landscape, particularly if it wants to further gain recognition from other historians. To do so, however, detailed world-historical research also needs to be based on primary source work and hence be grounded in specific areas of regional and linguistic expertise. (See Weinstein, this volume.) In that manner, world-historical research projects cannot possibly cover all parts of the world equally; rather, they need to focus on specific case studies that focus most closely on certain countries or world regions. According to this definition, world-historical research would be differentiated from other historical work by using several case studies to bring different parts of the world into an overarching perspective.
In this sense I see world history, global history, and transnational history as a research trend aiming at critical reconsideration of those conceptions of space that have been foundational to modern academic historiography. After all, much university-based historiography has been largely structured around regional or national expertise. In this division, the histories of China and India, for example, have been primarily studied as separate from the European experience, just as there has been a big gap between academic expertise on Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Now, with Oceanic history and many other branches of world history, case studies focus on their linkages and comparisons, areas that previous scholarship had long relegated to the background or margins. Certainly, the segmentation of territoriality in the historians’ workshop varied between different fields of inquiry. For example, for an expert of the European Middle Ages, explorations of intra-European interactions were certainly not revolutionary, yet until recently investigations of historical dynamics between Islam and Christendom were hardly present in the field. By contrast, the action radius of many historians working on the modern period tended to be framed by the concept of the nation-state (Wigen and Lewis 1997; and Berger 2007). I regard it as an important development in current sociologies of knowledge that a growing number of historians are trained in different parts of the world, which will allow them to transgress institutional and linguistic boundaries in their future work.
A Growing Identification with Global History and World History
The question of whether my dissertation could be categorized as “world history” or under any other field designation was virtually absent from my mind while I was a graduate student. I was interested in my topic and only recognized that it was somewhat unusual to work on both Chinese and European materials. Actually at that time a number of Europeanists and Sinologists cautioned me that I might not be able to find a job if my research agenda fell between the cracks of regionally defined fields such as European history and Chinese studies. Yet I decided not to let fears about the future and overly strategic professional thinking narrow my intellectual pursuits. As my later appointments at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Duke University showed, academia did in fact start becoming more interested in young scholars like myself who crossed such boundaries in their own work. In this sense I was fortunate that my somewhat nonchalant attitude towards my own field happened to intersect with an opening process at history departments, at least in the United States and some other countries.
It was only after I had received my PhD that I became increasingly drawn to world and global history as dynamic existing fields of scholarship that I needed to further understand and explore. After a brief venture into business consulting, I returned to the academic world in late 2001, first as a postdoctoral research scholar at Harvard University. In the Boston area a wide range of scholars such as Bruce Mazlish, Akira Iriye, Charles Maier, William Kirby, Peter Perdue, and Patrick Manning were working on transnational and global historical issues. The vibrant intellectual atmosphere in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with its lecture series, conferences, research seminars, and graduate student circles greatly encouraged, and funneled, my interest in the potentials and future of world history. In addition, the presence of scholars from all over the world helped me gain further insight into the commonalities and differences in university-based historiography all over the world. I grew increasingly convinced that it would take a new generation of detailed scholarship and theoretical debate to rethink many earlier assumptions about the past of nations, civilizations, and continents.
During these years, I became actively involved in scholarly communities in the United States, Germany, and East Asia through publications, talks, and conference projects. I observed that in these three parts of the world, there was a growing interest in global and transnational historiography, which faced similar constraints imposed by the disciplinary cultures and institutional parameters of existing historiography. More importantly, I came to realize that while many scholars developed an interest in exploring history from transnational or even global angles, their approaches were far from identical. Obviously, there was not one homogeneous “global history” emerging, and in spite of all the global academic entanglements, the research landscapes of the field in China, Germany, and the United States remained shaped by a variety of local factors.
Seen against this background, it struck me as particularly unfortunate that many theoretical and practical contributions to global history written in English tended to ignore related scholarly trends in other languages. Problems such as the fact that the particular patterns and rhythms of global historical research in many corners of the world differed from each other were plainly undertheorized. I became convinced that, particularly in Western academia, the growing importance of global and world history was a movement more characterized by an increasing interest in scholarshipabout the world rather than scholarship in the world. This struck me as problematic, since a research field exploring new zones of interaction should necessarily reflect upon the nature and implications of plural perspectives emanating from different parts of the world. At the same time, I was aware of the fact that local differences between historiographical practices could certainly not be explained by exoticizing non-Western approaches. I grew convinced that any attempt to map out the global landscapes of the field would necessitate the consideration of factors ranging from global commonalities in modern academic historiography to hierarchies in the international sociologies of knowledge.
All these questions pointed to a massive theoretical endeavor, a book-length study offering detailed, historically informed and politically aware assessments of scholarship in different parts of the world. I began working systematically on this project during my time as an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the following years, my research took me to various locations in the United States, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Various fellowships and research grants provided me with the time and resources to read studies from a wide variety of fields, collect materials, talk to scholars in many different countries and world regions, and to think carefully through some conceptual problems related to this topic.
This research resulted in my book Global Perspectives on Global History: Paths in China, Germany, and the United States, which was published in 2011. This work combines globally oriented chapters with separate case studies on global historical scholarship in the United States, Germany, and Mainland China. It proceeds from the idea that it would be intellectually incomplete to reflect upon the directions of global or world history without considering the current professional, social, and political landscapes of academic historiography. Within this framework, I emphasize that, ironically, the worldwide spread of national historiography during the modern age needs to be understood as a necessary precondition of today’s border-crossing trends. Subsequently I delineate some key features of historiography as a global professional field that is characterized not only by similarities, but also by significant hierarchies between world regions and languages. It is not my goal, however, to demonstrate that the inequalities in the international academic system have remained frozen in time. Particularly during the past few decades, many developments such as new forms of intellectual migration and political decolonization have contributed to increasingly critical attitudes to both Eurocentric and nation-centered visions of the past, and they have done so in many different parts of the world.
My three case studies on the United States, Germany, and China not only discuss developments within university-based historiography but also, I hope, shed light on relevant forces in other academic fields, as well as in society at large. Looking for more general characteristics of what I define as a global and transnational trend in historical scholarship, I investigate a broad spectrum of research fields ranging from economic history to cultural history and from gender studies to colonial history. For all three countries, I also illuminate the significant epistemological and structural changes within established fields such as international history. As I show, it would be wrong to assume that the centers of gravity of global historical research have converged around the same questions and paradigms all over the world. My case studies demonstrate that while everywhere world-historical scholarship is fragmented into various subfields and engaged in intense transnational networks of exchanges, its conceptual fabrics and underlying forms of historical consciousness remain seasoned by national or regional contingencies. These range from institutional settings and the availability of funding to political influences, modes of memory, the nature of publicly discussed themes, and the overall intellectual climate. In that sense historiography never developed into an academic discipline that would – analogous to the natural sciences – come to work with a largely identical spectrum of methodological schools all over the world.
Yet this book is not only intended as a theoretical elaboration of the basic idea that local factors will continue to influence global historical visions, despite methodological diversity and intensifying international academic connections. I seek to make another intervention: to assert that it hardly suffices to think globally about history while leaving intact the national divisions and hierarchies that continue to characterize the international environments of historiography. If we take seriously the quest for multiple perspectives and global concerns, it is necessary to expand our current forms of transnational academic collaboration while also developing new forms of cooperation. In other words, I am convinced that conceptual changes are insufficient for world history if they are not accompanied by structural transformations. In fact, some aspects of the now-global institution of “universities” as they emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be ill-equipped to support some of the intellectual tasks that global and transnational historians choose to take on. After all, from the nineteenth century, universities were first and foremost local communities and firmly grounded within specific nation-states. In the past, academic structures have provided rather limited opportunities to engage in sustained academic dialogues across different world regions – which has limited the outcome of international collaborative efforts to the occasional collective volume, published as simple collections of standalone, separate papers. In the future, global historical theorizing will depend on intensifying forms of transnational scholarly cooperation, which reach beyond the collaboration patterns that have thus far constituted the bulk of transnational projects (cf. Wallerstein et al. 1996: esp. 94–105).
Engaged in a Field
Since I am convinced that, to paraphrase the Ming dynasty thinker Wang Yangming, thinking and acting need to be one in today’s world-historical scholarship, I have sought to contribute my share to building these new structures of transregional cooperation. This has involved fundraising, grant proposal writing and, most of all, many intercontinental flights as well as sleepless nights in hotels around the world. From an early point in my academic career, I initiated or co-organized dialogue forums between Chinese and European historians on themes ranging from “multiple modernities” to the global and local dimensions of social history.3 Furthermore, I have been eager to experiment with rather uncommon modes of scholarly interaction. For example, together with Sebastian Conrad (Berlin), I chaired a transatlantic research network on “Conceptions of World Order (ca. 1880–1935): Global Historical Perspectives,” which gave nine young historians with different regional expertise the opportunity to collaborate closely with each other in a series of five international workshops and conferences. This project was funded by the German National Research Foundation from 2003 to 2007, and the network jointly published a book whose chapters, we hope, are more closely attuned to each other than in a standard edited volume (Conrad and Sachsenmaier 2007).
More recently, I initiated with Sven Beckert a joint Harvard/Duke project entitled “Global History, Globally”. The inaugural conference, which took place in 2008, brought together leading practitioners of global and world history from every continent. The group has since met two more times, and it is our objective to develop this project into a more sustained global forum to debate worldwide dynamics in the field of historiography and, what is more, to discuss current global issues from historically informed perspectives. Furthermore, we are planning several publications, starting with an edited volume, in which historians based in very different parts of the world discuss important challenges, themes, and problems surrounding the future of world-historical scholarship. We hope that our project will be able to make at least some contributions to widening the geographical parameters of the academic communities in which world-historical research and related debates take place. Other projects such as the Korea-based “Flying University”4 or the “Global Economic History Network”5 have been working in a similar direction. (See Lim, this volume.)
At the level of education, I have tried to make a modest contribution to the small but growing landscapes of academic exchange networks and transnational graduate programs in world history and adjacent fields. For instance, together with Matthias Middell (Leipzig) I established a faculty and graduate student exchange program in global studies/global history between the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later Duke, and Erasmus Mundus, a European consortium of universities consisting of the London School of Economics, the University of Vienna, the University of Wroclaw, and the University of Leipzig. (See Naumann, this volume.)
I find it extremely gratifying to witness students getting their first intercontinental experiences through such programs. It reminds me very much of my own experience as an undergraduate student in Taiwan, which as noted above, set my life onto a completely different path. I am convinced that world history, as a globally concerned endeavor, needs to train a future generation of scholars who have lived in different parts of the world and acquired transregional skills, competences, and bases of personal experience. I believe this will greatly strengthen the social carriers on which future transnational collaboration and dialogues in the field need to depend. In the long run, I hope that a group of intellectually open, globally aware, yet locally sensitive young scholars may act as a counterforce to some of the polarizing political as well as cultural tendencies of our time. As I personally find it difficult to believe in abstract visions of an alternative world order, I place my own hopes and energies on the growth of individuals who have the educational background and personal horizon to respond to the continued presence of stereotypes and the hardening of identities, which we currently observe in many parts of the world. And if any field of study can serve as an academic contributor to such ideals, it should be world history – more specifically a particular form of world history, which has left behind its legacy of national biases and Eurocentrism.
This may not be a fully elaborated utopian vision, but I hope it differentiates me from the cynical critic who fails to act according to his or her own values. Of course, I am not naive enough to trust that increasing levels of intellectual migration necessarily translate into higher levels of tolerance and mutual understanding. I am well aware that the growth of academic connections also opens up significant problem zones.6 There is the possibility that new hierarchies of knowledge or competing forms of cultural imperialism will replicate the patterns of marginalization and exclusion in new forms and at different levels. While some areas, for example privileged universities in the West and East Asia, may strengthen their ties, others may become even less connected. Despite the growing modes of transnational cooperation, in other words, world historians are still far from producing a scholarly community which closes opportunity gaps between the peripheries and the centers of our global academic landscapes. There is also the danger that many countries and regions will be primarily represented by a thin veneer of globally connected scholars who are too detached from their academic home communities to serve as bridge builders between local and translocal debates surrounding the study of world history.
Certainly we cannot naively regard the deepening of transnational academic contacts as a panacea. Yet without expanding current forms of transnational academic cooperation and developing new ones, the field will not be able to adequately consider such crucial problems as, for instance, the inequalities in the worldwide sociologies of knowledge. Concerned thinkers have problematized these from a variety of angles and through a wide spectrum of terminological options.7 If we take the quest for multiperspectivity and professional self-reflexivity seriously, it hardly suffices to raise challenging questions regarding historiography while leaving intact the national divisions and transnational hierarchies that have long discouraged a spirit of shared concern between different academic systems.
Recently I have spent much of my time working on wide-ranging theoretical issues and institution-building, and yet I have not lost my joy of “doing history” in the most immediate and most rewarding sense. While I have spent long hours on high-flying theoretical issues, I have never abandoned primary source work, even temporarily. Most importantly, I have cultivated global historical perspectives on political cultures in China and Central Europe in the aftermath of the Great War as an additional research field, which may eventually evolve into my third major book project. Based on archival work conducted over the past few years, I intend to investigate themes such as the transnationalization of ideologies, and cross-cultural critiques of progressivism, during the early 1920s. In this context, I am particularly interested in tracing the global intellectual milieus, transnational political movements, and interconnected camps of opinion that connected many seemingly separate groups of Chinese and European thinkers. This is particularly striking in the case of so-called “conservative” or traditionalist circles, who, as I intend to show, were in many cases sharing ideas across national and even continental boundaries.
My teaching does not always revolve around my ideas regarding the future possibilities and necessities of world history. It does, however, in graduate teaching, for example in a seminar I taught under the heading “Readings in Global Connections”. (See Getz, this volume.) In this course I put an emphasis on theories of global history in China and the West, and I encouraged my students to take both sets of perspectives equally into consideration when forming their own judgments. I gave this course a transnational structure by entangling it with parallel graduate seminars at Fudan University (China) and the University of Leipzig (Germany). For three weeks, students from all three locations engaged in online chat-room discussions about such controversial topics as imperialism or the notion of multiple modernities. These debates proved reliably lively and stimulating, and have encouraged me to continue with experiments of this kind. In the future, I may tie this specific class format to one of the transnational graduate exchange programs that I am building, which means that after a semester of online communication, students will see each other in person during a summer workshop or a comparable meeting.
In all courses that I have taught thus far, I adhere to my understanding of world history as a field that needs to remain grounded on regional expertise and an appreciation of local contingencies. I habitually teach on world-historical themes by transcending national or continental boundaries rather than assembling them along a global storyline. Given my own expertise, in many courses I draw particular connections between Western and Chinese experiences, mainly by applying global historical perspectives to both world regions. This leads me to problematize holistic images of “China,” “Europe,” or the “West.” For example, I taught an undergraduate seminar on “Images of the West in Chinese Politics, Literature, and the Media,” which covers the time period from the seventeenth century to the present. Furthermore, I have designed lecture courses on topics such as “Modern Political Thought in China and Europe,” which covers the period from the eighteenth century to the present. In this class I emphasize that – due to the importance of interactions and multilateral influences – much local history is impossible to understand without relating it to other parts of the world and global dynamics in general. For example, I discuss the transmission channels for the global spread of nationalism as a modern ideology while at the same time outlining the differences between its various Chinese and European manifestations.
Teaching on entanglements between Europe and China helps students break through the multifarious unquestioned assumptions and stereotypes about “self” and “other” that still characterize many worldviews. By shedding light on shared or entangled historical transformations that were experienced by parts of Europe and China, for example, I try to avoid exoticizing the latter while still allowing sensitivity to historical difference. As in my own research, so in my teaching, a major goal is to demonstrate that in the present age we can only convincingly address questions of cultural diversity if we include the dense networks of exchanges and other global dynamics into the picture. I see it as one of my principal pedagogical tasks to help students discover the complexity behind our visions and interpretations of the past. Above all, this requires teaching young students to question and relativize their own standpoints and develop more nuanced images of other societies. I am convinced that such skills are of crucial importance for the future. And here, I think, world history and world historians have much to give.
Notes
1 For a longer discussion of possible definitions of these and other field designations, see Sachsenmaier (2011: ch. 2).
2 An updated and extended English version of Sachsenmaier (2001) will be published by the University of Hawai’i Press.
3 One resulting publication was Sachsenmaier et al. (2002).
4 At http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=174403 (accessed Mar. 2012).
5 The network involved cooperation between several universities and organized various international conferences as well as other scholarly exchanges. See http://www2.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/GEHN/Home.aspx (accessed Mar. 2012).
6 For academic networks in general, see Charle et al. (2004).
7 Important concepts are, for example, the ideas of a world-systemic geoculture, “coloniality of power,” “subalterneity,” “hegemony,” or, more plainly, “the theft of history.” See, for example, Mignolo (2000); Chakrabarty (2000); Mudimb (1988); and Goody (2007).
References
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