KATJA NAUMANN (Translated by Anne Berg)
World and global history can undoubtedly look back on a long tradition in European scholarship. Europe and European historians figure prominently in the accounts of the ancient and early modern periods. However, they increasingly disappear in the descriptions of the decades after World War II and contemporary trends. A perfunctory glance at the footnotes of recently published works reveals the predominance of North American authors. With considerable self-confidence, American scholars refashion the historiography of contemporary topics and developments. In fact, it seems that the world as written by Europeans is relegated to a prehistory of sorts. European contributions are rarely discussed after the 1960s and more often function as a negative foil against which twenty-first century scholars map global processes of the past in a new key. Curiously, perhaps, this phenomenon is not limited to North American authors. Even some European historians, such as R.I. Moore (1997), dutifully replicate the pervasive habit of their transatlantic compeers when sketching the development of the field.
Yet at the same time, historians on the European side of the Atlantic have engaged in lively debates on, and diverse practices of, world history, a selection of which I will review in the first part of this chapter. This renewed interest in world historical approaches, paralleled by similar trends elsewhere (Sachsenmaier 2011), ought to be understood in the context of a more general attentiveness to global developments after the implosion of the Cold War world order. In the years after 1989–1991, a politically integrated Europe constituted a new actor on the stage of international relations. Scholarly perspectives shifted in parallel with the rapid increase of global entanglements and new interdependencies. Just as events of the mid-nineteenth century, the fin de siècle, and again World War II pressed historians of the day to understand their changing world in its historicity, the 1990s similarly directed European writers’ attention toward global processes and developments. Apparently, and perhaps not surprisingly, world historical writing is contingent upon cycles of global transformations; it reacts to changes in cultural connections and global configurations. As a result historians have not only radically rethought world history over the past two decades, but the field itself has undergone a thoroughgoing institutionalization in academia, a development I will discuss in the second part of this chapter. Obviously, intellectual developments are often concurrent with, and in any case related to, social processes. To underscore these interactions and to highlight the parallels between cognitive innovations and institutional changes, these developments are discussed in the two separate parts of this chapter.
Meanwhile, historians across Europe are widening their perspectives and writing history that crosses regional, national and continental boundaries. It is worth stressing that the manifold if equally novel approaches they employ hardly constitute one version of world history. In their multiplicity, these histories neither produce an epistemological, methodological or thematic consensus, let alone because some scholars base their writings on a critical reflection on their Europeanness while others do not address their own perspective and position, nor do they differ recognizably from approaches prominent in other world regions. Owing to the heterogeneity of European societies and their equally different historiographical traditions, an identifiably European history is unlikely to develop. In fact, such uniformity would only gratuitously narrow current research trends, which benefit from multifarious cooperation with scholars from other parts of the world. Fortunately, plurality prevails in both approach and perspective (O’Brien 2006).
Nonetheless, certain general trends characterize the disciplinary developments of recent years. The reasons are at least twofold. For one, scholars discuss world historical problems in a wider European context: that is they trace historical developments more readily across national and linguistic boundaries. Without doubt English has been in use as a lingua franca. Recently, however, due to a rising interest in world historical explorations in France, and to a lesser extent in Spain, it has become more common to read contributions in French and Spanish. This definitely leads to a more differentiated debate since semantic and conceptual subtleties come to the fore. Multilingualism has a long tradition on the European side of the Atlantic. Nowadays it follows the rule, especially at congresses, that everyone chooses from among the main languages the one they prefer, and if translation is necessary it is provided from the audience. This is not surprising considering the transnationality of European debates. From the almost 200 conferences and workshops in the field that took place between 2008 and 2010, only 6 saw participants from only one country. In half of them, scholars of between 6 and 23 nationalities joined in the exchange (Middell and Naumann 2010). Publications that include several languages are still the exception, but they can well be expected to become more popular. Secondly, the European Union’s crucial financial sponsorship of academic work in the arts and sciences, and especially its priority to reposition Europe in the world, has provided clear incentives to universities to encourage globally oriented studies.
Characteristic of recent world history writing in Europe is the vehement renunciation of Eurocentrism. Whereas much of the historiography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries postulated Europe’s superiority, nowadays scholars no longer view Europe as a model, trailblazer or benchmark for non-Western societies. Instead historians who are historicizing global and transnational pasts (and less so the mainstream of the profession) agree that Europe was hardly an immutable instigator of world history. They concede that non-Western cultures developed according to their own principles and thus decisively affected European development. It is equally beyond dispute now that global dynamics cannot be grasped by linear or teleological narratives. Instead, postcolonial and poststructural approaches are rapidly replacing philosophies of history that postulated the unity of the world. As Michael Geyer and Charles Bright explain:
humanity no longer comes into being through “thought.” Rather, humanity gains existence in a multiplicity of discrete economic, social, cultural, and political activities. In the past such humanity has been the dream of sages and philosophers and, not to be forgotten, of gods, but now it has become the daily work of human beings. This world needs its imagination. (1995: 1060)
In this vein, a consensus focuses around a shared commitment to ground the myriad processes of global integration and cultural cross-fertilizations empirically, and to trace their effects on the history of numerous places simultaneously.
Still, important differences remain even in the abounding rejections of the universalism characteristic of earlier approaches to world history. While Margrit Pernau and Corinne Pernet, to name only two, attempt to defy Eurocentrism by glossing over the history of Europe in favor of the pasts of non-Europeans, historians such as Hans Heinrich Nolte and Peter Feldebauer follow more closely in the footsteps of Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. (See Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume.) Rejecting monocentric perspectives, they focus on the multiple polarities of past and present world orders, precisely because they understand world history as histories of interactions. However, both strategies run the risk of reemploying dated concepts of space that remain impervious to the so-called spatial turn. Moreover, both approaches tend to rely on comparative methods and diffusionist theories reminiscent of equally dated conventions. (See Adas, this volume.) More recently, historians point to the potential pitfalls of comparison and insist that cross-cultural encounters necessarily alter civilizations on either side of the postulated divide. Hence, spirited debates about alternatives to diffusionist and comparative approaches are rife. In my view, this dialogue constitutes one of the most intellectually stimulating challenges of current world-historical practice in Europe. Hence, these debates will lie at the center of my discussion of this rediscovered, and newly reinvigorated, field, although I will discuss neither the numerous world historical syntheses nor the voluminous specialized research of the past few years.
I should say that I do not aim for comprehensiveness in the examples I give, an impossible task in any case. “Coverage” and the related question of which parts of Europe to include are thus of less concern in this chapter: Russia is mentioned only briefly, Turkey omitted, and the West is considered only as far as Spain.
Toward a New Consensus
This new European world history reconstructs intricate intercultural entanglements, global exchange processes and a wide range of social phenomena across national and geographic boundaries. In doing so, it traces connections between historical actors from diverging cultures as a function and cause of change over time. It emerged from three epistemological criticisms that took shape within Europe and later crystallized into different conceptual approaches.
In the mid-1980s Espagne and Werner explained the complex relationships between different societies in terms of “cultural transfer” (transferts culturels). They challenged the dominant notion according to which cross-cultural exchange reproduces hegemonic constellations (Espagne and Werner 1988; Espagne 1999). Instead of studying encounters as unidirectional imprints of one culture’s ideas and practices onto another, cultural transfer studies foreground interactions. To make this argument Michel Espagne contended: “To transfer is not to transport.” Instead he likened cultural transfer to a metamorphosis, and argued that “the term cannot by any means be reduced to the poor and very banal question of cultural exchange.” He further insists: “It is not so much the circulation of cultural goods as the reinterpretation that is in question” (Espagne 2011). Historians now carefully outline the roles of concrete historical agents in the active appropriation and adaptation of goods, ideas, knowledge and customs, whereas these same agents figured merely as passive recipients in earlier diffusionist models. Cultural transfer studies, moreover, sharpen our awareness of the pitfalls of comparing ostensibly discrete objects. These objects are themselves constructed and hardly possess the stable and separate identities that comparisons invariably postulate, in particular when civilizations are classified along a hierarchical continuum of cultural progress. Imposing a comparative framework necessarily obstructs other contextual references that might obscure the mutual constituency and interconnectedness of the compared entities (Middell 2000).1 Cultural transfer studies focus instead on the respective interfaces between different cultures and place reciprocal encounters in precisely these larger contexts. In particular, they unpack the complicated processes of integration that take place in a multipolar world. As a result, the historiography of cultural transfers relativizes above all the notion of the center. Thus it becomes possible to recognize cross-cultural relations as the cause for historical change, as the motor for dynamic, large-scale integration. (See chapters by Fernández-Armesto and by Zhang, this volume.) The majority of studies reconstructing the transfer of ideas, people, and goods now demonstrate that different cultures developed as a result of intricate relations with precisely those aspects, people, and places they consciously excluded. The demarcation of regional difference is an essential part of forging national coherence. In other words, both national differentiation and internal coherence are the result of intricate relationships and exchanges that are not marginal, but lie at the center of these developments.
Sociologists, and then human geographers, came to view the category of space, second only to time, as a socially produced and continuously changing construct rather than an immutable constant (Lefebvre 1974; Foucault 1986; Harvey 2001). Contrary to common assertions of the compression and dwindling significance of space and time as a result of modern mass communication, close scrutiny has revealed that location and spatial organization continue to acutely impact the experience of social reality. As a result of the reconceptualization of space and its relation to time as prefigured in the spatial turn of the 1990s, historians in Europe have generally accepted the premise that spatial relations are socially produced: whether drawing political boundaries, controlling (im)migration, developing new markets or managing the flows of goods and capital, social agents construct spatial realities (Döring and Thielmann 2008). Recognizing that the nation-state had grown to dominate political organizations only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians investigated the conditions under which particular forms of spatial organization crystallized and thrived. Claims regarding the ostensibly universal trajectory of development from the imperial to the national state were the first to collapse. More recently, historians have argued that spatialization needs to be understood in its multitudinous varieties, since even dominant locations have always existed in tension with competing spatial allegiances (Revel 1996). At any rate, scholars no longer postulate spatial organizations as fixed or linear. Since space is not an empty vessel to contain social reality, spatial relations can hardly be grasped as part of a predefined hierarchical progression from local to global. Instead, spatial organization is the result of interlocking, and mutually constitutive, social relations. Accordingly, nationalization and nation-state formation must appear as a reaction to global constellations, as McKeown reiterates in his contribution to this volume.
The two approaches already discussed experienced a dynamic boost with the advent of a third perspective, one that more radically challenged established patterns of thought. In the context of decolonization, scholars began to systematically investigate the trajectory and meaning of European power. Beginning with the colonial period, Shalini Randeria, Andreas Eckert and others scrutinized European hegemony, calling into question the validity of polarizing analyses (dividing the world into Orient and Occident) along with modernization theories in general. They thus leveled sustained criticism at Western epistemologies and corresponding research practices (Randeria and Eckert 2009). Subaltern and postcolonial scholars strove to come to terms with historically existing Eurocentrism, and attempted to overcome its contemporary variants. On the one hand, their work bears out the structural inequalities that have characterized Europe’s relations to other world regions. On the other hand, precisely because they seek to emphasize agency and subaltern voices, scholars such as Sebastian Conrad and Ulrike Freitag draw attention to the impact colonial encounters had on European metropoles. As postcolonial analyses highlighted interdependencies germane to any cultural contact and documented the myriad interactions between colonial power and its subjects, they clearly positioned themselves against diffusionist models (Blaut 1993). Thus they provided a critical impulse for historians to probe more deeply into the complicated transfers between Western and non-Western societies and opened a way to study more general global developments in light of cross-cultural relations.
Together, the notion of cultural transfers, the realization that spatial organization is socially constructed, and the insights facilitated by postcolonial studies anchor recent European contributions to world history. These shifts redirect historical questions toward interactions between different cultures and social groupings. Linear, let alone teleological, narratives appear increasingly problematic. Instead, postcolonial and poststructural approaches have rapidly gained ground and replaced the historical philosophies that postulated the unity of a globe.2 In contrast, these newer approaches empirically demonstrate concrete connections and cross-cultural imbrications to understand historical processes that affect various places simultaneously. Recognizing processes of exchange and interaction to be central to historical developments, historians now widely accept the interdependency of nation-state building, regionalization, and globalization (David et al. 2007). Nonetheless, scholars continue to ponder the advantages of differentiating between world and global history on the one hand and transnational approaches on the other (Revue d’Histoire 2007). While the boundaries separating the various subcategories of a burgeoning field remain somewhat fluid, debates about descriptors and delimitations are avid.
Transnational history offers a particularly illustrative example in this respect. While Kiran Klaus Patel, for example, scrutinizes transnational connections for the modern period and is thus able to offer a more nuanced view of the concrete national histories in question, Michael Geyer argues that reconstructing the crossing of national boundaries is an essential step in decentering the nation-state and foregrounding specific transnational processes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Patel 2005; Geyer 2012). Taken from a different angle: in the cases of Spain, France and Great Britain, where national histories are deeply, directly and obviously linked to imperial pasts, historians readily investigate the impact of non-Western regions on the metropole. The same holds true for countries in which nation-building and colonial expansion were inextricably linked, as in Germany and Italy (Stuchtey and Fuchs 2003). Meanwhile, the transnational history of East/Central Europe continues to foreground inter-European entanglements and exchange processes with immediate national neighbors. Only recently, and rather hesitantly, have European historians started to account for Central Europe’s imperial pasts (Hadler and Mesenhöller 2007; Kasianov and Ther 2009).3
The disputes over the definition of transnational history are more complicated still. Philipp Ther, among others, insists on a clear distinction between the history of diplomatic relations and transnational history. In contrast, scholars such as Pierre-Yves Saunier make a compelling argument for studying state actors and nonstate actors simultaneously, to avoid reifying the problematic separation of political and diplomatic history from social and cultural experiences (Iriye and Saunier 2009). Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (2010) address transnational history primarily as a history of comparison, whereas Eric Vanhaute (2009) pleads for the meticulous integration of multiple approaches, including world-system theory, comparison, and transfers. In light of this, it is hardly surprising that the wealth of perspectives on transnational history is mirrored by a similar multitude of approaches to world and global histories. From a bird’s-eye view, these various approaches acquire different contours as they oscillate between two ideal types: relatively rigorous distinctions between world history, global history and transnational history contrast with more fluid conceptualizations of the field. One example of each pole will serve to outline the spectrum of approaches.
Jürgen Osterhammel insists on a clear distinction between transnational, world-historical, and global approaches. Transnational history, Osterhammel suggests, is primarily concerned with inter-European relationships and their transatlantic connections. Moreover, transnational history generally examines shorter time periods and is less concerned with universal patterns of connectivity. Notwithstanding its careful attention to historical multiplicity, world history (Weltgeschichte), in contrast, aims specifically to explicate such general tendencies. Hence, or so Osterhammel argues, it examines developments over the longue durée and across much larger regions as it privileges transcultural relations. He then conceives global history (Globalgeschichte) in much narrower terms: as an approach that historicizes global entanglements. Thus it examines developments that originated in the middle of the nineteenth century, and which still characterize the interconnectedness of the world today. Osterhammel carefully distinguishes global history, then, from the history of globalization. While the former in his view explores the contacts and interactions between various global networks, the history of globalization suggests a master narrative chronicling the continuous intensification of exchange and interdependencies (Osterhammel 2001; 2005).
Unlike Osterhammel, Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert, and Ulrike Freitag – perhaps representative of a more integrative approach – stress the common elements between world, global, and transnational histories. Whether they are inspired by world-system theory, analyze different civilizations, insist on multiple modernities, write the history of globalization, or build on postcolonial studies, they reject modernization theory and seek to reconstruct “modernity” as a fully relational category; after all, they are specialists in non-European history. Moreover, they insist, world and global history no longer postulates a universal past, no longer means a teleological view of historical development, and no longer attempts to represent the world in its spatial and temporal totality. Because this new world history is primarily interested in recording a multiplicity of interactions and exchange, it resituates national histories in complex global contexts (Conrad et al. 2007). But even among those who conceive the field of world and global history in such fluid terms, debates remain: for example, the precise onset of globalization remains contested (Grandner et al. 2005). Such disputes notwithstanding, historians taking a more integrative perspective generally view the various methods, approaches and foci as essentially compatible. Further, they concern themselves only peripherally with the question of whether there is much intellectual gain in excluding the history of globalization from the field of global history.
This conceptual debate is by no means restricted to German-speaking contexts. For example Michael Geyer (Chicago), Michael Espagne (Paris) and Matthias Middell (Leipzig) collaborate in integrating the argument concerning the emergence of a “global condition” in the middle of the nineteenth century with the study of cultural transfers and the analysis of processes of territorialization. In focusing on spaces of globalization they give the conceptual debate – and the writing of transnational and global history – another twist (Mann and Naumann 2010).
Is this new European world history characterized by a multiplicity of approaches distinctive to the European region, or by ways that are emblematic of the discipline more generally? Are the contours of world history, for that matter, defined by the personal motivations, thematic preferences and temporal foci that also underwrite, say, social, cultural or regional history? There is no doubt that individual and departmental considerations play a role as well, but more pressing conceptual issues are at stake.
First, in delineating a field of world history, European historians insert themselves into the debates on world history and global development currently perceived as dominated by US-based historians. Very recently, for example, historians in France have begun to stake out their position in the field vis-à-vis North American historiography and to debate the extent to which American scholars’ predominance can be seen as part and parcel of a wider imperialist project (Maurel 2009; Grosser 2011). In the United States, of course, world history’s attempts to emancipate the modern era from its European roots has long been oriented toward presenting an alternative history of Western civilization. As early as the 1880s, in fact, the first president of the American Historical Association, Andrew White (1886), argued for a decidedly American perspective, insisting that the history of the world “must be rewritten from an American point of view … to help build up a new civilization.” Throughout two world wars, a similar ideological landscape inspired historians to theorize the “rise of the West” as a result of the cultural affinity (if not identity) between Western Europe and the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, the processes of decolonization in Asia and Africa shifted the focus of historians in the United States to other parts of the world. During the Cold War the so-called Third World became especially relevant to the geopolitical interests of the United States (Levine 1996). In response, and alongside Europe’s dwindling potential to disturb the emerging US hegemony, scholars of world history criticized the discipline’s unremitting Eurocentrism and redirected their gaze toward the pasts of non-European peoples and societies, being shaped by very different trajectories of the study of world regions in European academia.
Within Europe, by contrast, historians attempted simultaneously both to provincialize the history of the continent, by engaging with extra-European developments, and to recast the history of the world without relapsing into traditional narratives of superiorities and exceptions (Sonderwege). Exemplary in this regard is the research network “Tensions of Europe” at Eindhoven University of Technology. Focusing on infrastructure and technological innovation, historians there recast the history of European integration from circa 1850 to today, exploring the impact of cultural transfer from former colonies (and the United States) on the development of a uniquely European set of outlooks and behaviors (van der Vleuten and Kaijser 2006; Schot 2007; Badenoch and Fickers 2010). The group of researchers known as “Homo Europeaus” stresses even more vehemently the importance of external developments for the crystallization of a European identity (von Hirschhausen and Patel 2010). Even historians of premodern Europe insist that a global perspective is indispensable (Drews and Oesterle 2008 and others). To put this more bluntly: On the one side of the Atlantic historians search for the world by circumventing Europe, on the other side of the Atlantic, Europe’s provincialization (as Chakrabarty 2000 put it) holds the key to understanding the world.
Obviously, location affects point of view. Societies negotiate the effects of globalization in different ways. Depending on where they find themselves in the matrix of global power structures, they formulate specific answers in the attempt to explain the ways in which the precise set of entanglements developed in the first place. Accordingly, European historiography of the world reviews exchanges and connections of particular significance for societies in Europe. And here topics that are of little (or no) significance to US-based historians figure centrally – be they the integration of the Baltic states, intercultural encounters in the Mediterranean, West European relations with Russia, or interactions between Central Europe and its southeastern neighbors.
Similarly diverging perspectives negotiate the constitution of today’s globalized world, and (world-)political interests undeniably leave their mark. For, as historians order societies as part of global networks, they attribute significance and inescapably structure the scope of political action in the present. In the words of Arif Dirlik, “World history, then, is inevitably about world-making” (2003: 92).4 What is presented as “the world” in world histories always bears an undeniable connection to the societies for whom they are written. Taken to extremes, ideas about an effective world order after 1989–1991, or even after 9/11, almost appear naturally different in Europe than in the United States.
Secondly, and very practically, Europe-based historians who are trained in European or Western history bargain with their colleagues in area studies over limited departmental resources and thereby negotiate the parameters of world historical programs. Such intradisciplinary repositioning extends beyond resource distribution, however. The standing of world history largely depends on its grounding in empirical knowledge, and hence its integrity is contingent on the expertise provided by area studies scholars. Questions about the feasibility of developing and deploying overarching and transcultural conceptual categories lie at the heart of such intra-disciplinary discord and negotiation (Pernau 2007). Such questions of course have analogues in the professionally complicated position of world/global historians in North American historical circles, and in other world regions too. (See Pomeranz and Segal, this volume.)
Thirdly, the different approaches produce diverging narratives of modern integration that contrast with previously universalist accounts. World histories analyze the extent of globalization today as the outcome of processes and interactions that developed over centuries if not millennia. Global histories, in contrast, generally postulate a caesura, whether they place the development of new entanglements in the 1500s or locate it in the nineteenth century. In yet another vein, the new global history, in Europe as elsewhere, largely restricts its scope to the past century (Middell 2005). Debates over periodization are more than ritualized bickering: the structuring of time is, in fact, a central concern. (See Bright and Geyer, this volume.) Choosing a particular timeframe will determine which cast of historical actors occupies center stage, and can redefine their sphere of action.5Among others, Andrea Komlosy has pointed out the challenge of correlating local, regional, national, and worldwide chronologies in global interpretations. After all, different spaces each have their own time, as do cross-cultural interactions. While the stability, quantity and quality of intraregional and long-distance contacts guides the periodization of global history, a chronology of worldwide integration must remain sensitive to the particular temporality of individual spaces and their social organization (Komlosy 2005).
The plurality in approach and perspective of world historical studies sketched above is mirrored in the equally complex research praxis of European world historians. (See Weinstein, this volume.) To describe these in merely a few sentences risks conjuring a map in which white spots markedly outnumber concrete places, names, and publications. Nevertheless, by way of sketching world histories of European origin, I will briefly introduce four dominant practices.
Particularly in the realm of economic history, global approaches can look back on a long tradition both on the Continent and in the British Isles, and they are well represented in institutional contexts. Largely thanks to the efforts of Patrick O’Brien, the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics has since the mid-1990s developed as a center for the study of world economic processes. The Global Economic History Network, established there in 2003, now encompasses nearly 50 researchers from the British Isles, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Turkey. Together with colleagues from the United States, India and Japan, they have begun to outline a global history of economic processes that utilizes resources and findings from many disciplines. For example, Gareth Austin and Peer Vries have taken up and carried on the debates over divergent economic developments in Europe and Asia instigated and vigorously pursued by Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Andre Gunder Frank in the United States. Austin, based in Geneva, differentiates between land-, labor-, and capital-based industrialization and postulates these as distinct types observable only in global comparison. In Vienna, Vries redirects the focus to China and demonstrates that the development of industrialization is intimately connected to the organization of statehood. In Amsterdam, meanwhile, a research colloquium under the direction of Marjolein ’t Hart explores the interface between economic and political history, suggesting that global power dynamics reflect the compounding coexistence of fiscal and military efficiencies (Sugihara and Austin 2011; Vries 2003).
The rather hesitant European ventures into world political history correspond to a more general disciplinary trend, if one ignores for a moment studies on international organization and diplomacy. (See Northrop, final chapter in this volume.) Innovations here mainly focus on two subject areas. First, the key term “world order” invites divergent and often conflicting interpretations of global relationships and the mechanisms of their implementations (Conrad and Sachsenmaier 2008). On the other hand, historians have also begun to outline a political history of globalization. Sebastian Conrad, who works in Berlin, understands the formation of the German Empire in this way as a reaction to global integration. He suggests that increasing transnational connections between 1880 and 1914 did not obliterate national differences but rather made them ever more salient (Conrad 2006). Matthias Middell and Ulf Engel, both from Leipzig, also explore the interrelation between nationalization and globalization, but integrate it into a general history of sovereignty (one sensitive to cultural and economic organization) that focuses on its spatialization. In other words, they foreground processes of de- and reterritorialization. Middell and Engel join others to argue that the worldwide correlation of economic, cultural, social and political spaces emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, thereafter challenging existing territorialization within a nation-state framework. Since then, a balance has had to be found between preserving sovereignty, on the one hand, and autonomy, on the other, as national demarcation of power and identity had to be reconciled with global entanglements and interactions. Sometimes this dialectic produces stable territorial entities, while at other times, the same dialectic accounts for their dissolution. When established patterns of territorialization lose their effectiveness, crises ensue. Furthermore, when these crises solidify, they pose a structural challenge to the world order. Middell and Engel describe these phenomena as “critical junctures of globalisation” (Engel and Middell 2010).
For quite some time, a global perspective has also informed social history – itself a longstanding field in European scholarship. While labor and labor conditions still stand at the center of social historical approaches, world history has contributed to a rejuvenation of the subfield. The changed focus of the International Conference of Labour and Social History, founded in Vienna in 1964, is a compelling example. Since the end of the 1990s, explicitly comparative and transnational projects have dominated the conference program. Around the same time, Marcel van Linden opened the Amsterdam-based International Institute of Social History (IISH), a center for the study of labor history, in relation to world historical questions, and conceptualized a research program for a global history of work. Two thematic emphases are now particularly prevalent. First, research in “global labor history” focuses on international manifestations of organized labor reform movements, the history of labor in the global South, and global transformations of working conditions in their plurality. In cooperation with the Institute of Social and Economic History at the University of Vienna, historians study, for example, the myriad types of work (Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500–2000). The history of migrants and migration is also a key arena of research, as are global flows of goods and commodity chains.6 Secondly, “global economic history” also focuses on a previously ignored topic in world history: the story of price and wage developments (van Zanden n.d.). As in Amsterdam, historians explore the scope of free and unfree labor ranging from slavery, indentured labor and sharecropping to free wage labor and self-employment. Similarly, labor migration and commodity chains provide a useful lens for global historical entanglements across state boundaries (Stanziani 2008; Pries 2001). Most recently, several European universities have focused on the history of slavery, such as the exemplary Institute for the Study of Slavery at Nottingham University. New globally oriented questions concerning the history of labor are also a central focus of the International Research Center for Work and Human Life Cycles in Global History, founded at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2009. Finally, Eric Vanhaute and his research team in Ghent explore the complicated global contexts of agricultural labor (Vanhaute 2008).
Again following more general trends of the discipline, cultural history now figures centrally in world-historical studies within Europe. Since the mid-1990s, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the École Nationale Supérieure in Paris has been home to Michel Espagne and his research team, whose work grounds the general theory of cultural transfer in empirical studies. Their work concentrates on the transnational complexities of the humanities and the circulation of discourses on art and literature, as well as the places and actors central to these exchange processes. Whereas intra-European cultural relations constituted the original focus of this work, historians now increasingly trace connections to non-European societies. Furthermore, in 2008 a group of researchers from Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Edinburgh, Florence and Zurich launched a study of “actors of cultural globalization, 1860–1930.” In contrast to most globalization studies, they concentrate on social actors, whether individuals or collectives. One of their core questions is how these actors articulated notions of difference and structured the globalization process, which in turn defined and limited their room to maneuver. To cite a final example of current practice, Dan Diner’s work recasts the transnational history of East European Jews as a central dimension of historical developments. His work emphasizes mobility as a long-term characteristic of Jewish history and carefully outlines the globally relevant particularities of the region (i.e. Eastern Europe), which remains a blind spot in most world histories (Diner 1999).
Taken together, European scholars interested in history on a global scale place historical actors center stage, work in a poststructuralist framework, employ a constructionist understanding of space, and emphasize connections, transfer, and intercultural exchange from a perspective shaped by postcolonial studies. To the extent that these positions are not driving the field in other regions, world history writing in Europe has its own shape.7
Carving Out an Institutional Home
These newer studies on transfer and exchange processes owe their existence in large part to the methodological and theoretical debates reviewed above. However, their disciplinary impact would have been much smaller without the wide-ranging institutional changes which opened academia to world-historical perspectives in European research and teaching – to an extent unparalleled even in the United States. Had I been asked to sketch the institutional landscape of world history in Europe at the beginning of the 1990s, it would not have been possible to foreground the work of more than a few individuals and even fewer places. In 1991, an international conference on Conceptualizing Global History (Mazlish and Buultjens 1993) and the Verein für Geschichte des Weltsystems (Association for the History of the World System) (founded in 1992) were the lone contenders for institutional representation. Apart from these, I would have had to stress the resurgence of questions and approaches related to historicizing the nation. Today, in contrast, the countless programs of academic study, research centers, networks and forums on world-historical problems and issues constitute a dense web within Europe. A fully detailed map of the proliferating institutionalization of world history, which lies beyond the scope of this chapter, would underscore the previously established multifariousness of approaches, methods and questions. Instead, here I will provide only a snapshot of the dramatic developments that have marked the past decade.
The institutionalization of world history in academic structures proceeded along two main paths. Of these, the establishment of new research centers and university institutes clearly predominates. The somewhat unhurried expansion of area studies within existing history departments initially opened the field to a younger generation of historians, who in turn introduced world-historical questions to the history classroom. Despite the fact that the traditional focus on national history has been called into question, and scholars now increasingly explore transnational connections to extra-European world regions, the overall transformation of institutionalized history departments proceeds more sluggishly. The replacement of existing professorships with world historians, as happened recently at the ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich), at Leiden University, at Salzburg University and in Bamberg, Bremen and Vienna, remains the exception. Even the integration of extra-European expertise is far from universal at this level (Sachsenmaier 2010). Slightly more room to maneuver exists in mid-level academic positions, but since tenure-track positions remain the exception in Europe (they play a significant role only in Great Britain and Scandinavia), mid- and entry-level jobs present younger historians with only limited, and at times fragile, opportunities. Therefore, the following discussion focuses on the more dominant path of integrating world-historical practice into academia through the rapid proliferation of new institutions.
At least two factors underpin this institutional development. First, the newly created institutional landscape reflects the changed interest of financial sponsors. National research foundations, such as the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft) in Germany or the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) in France, and the European Union even more powerfully, increasingly urge and foster projects that integrate global perspectives into the disciplines comprising the social sciences and humanities.8 Secondly, the model prevalent in the United States, and which also existed in the socialist countries, namely a twofold structure of national and world history within individual history departments, did not take hold in a West European context, nor is it presently even discussed as an option.
Thus the newly founded institutions distinguish themselves through their interdisciplinarity. The Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick and the Centre for Transnational History at St Andrews University are illustrative cases, with, further, the cluster of excellence on “Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows,” at Heidelberg University, the “Laboratoires d’Excellence: Transferts Matériels et Culturels, Traduction, Interfaces,” at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, as well as the research group around Martti Koskenniemi at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki.
Institutional change was often a first response to the growing number of scholars working on non-European topics and collaborating with colleagues in area studies. The School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the more recently established Department of History and Area Studies at Aarhus University, and the Center for Area Studies at the University of Leipzig have also played a prominent role in shaping world-historical questions and research agendas. Much less common are initiatives that originate in the social sciences and explore global phenomena in historical detail, but Roskilde University is a noteworthy exception here.
Such generalizations cannot easily be extended to East and Central Europe, where area studies are much less prominently represented in university structures than in former colonizers such as Great Britain or France. (See Sinha, this volume.) Accordingly, postcolonial perspectives have suggested themselves with less urgency, and comparative approaches remain more prominent in East and Central Europe. Nevertheless, studies foregrounding multi-ethnic experiences, overlapping developments, and the often fluid ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities and boundaries occupy a central role in the historiography of these regions, even if scholars rarely present themselves as engaged in world or global history (Antohi et al. 2007). Historians in the East and Central European countries have rediscovered their own world-historical traditions, reading these older works through a new lens, and expanding on them with a refined theoretical apparatus (Sosnowska 2004). The global dimensions of East and Central European pasts have inspired countless new studies, primarily in the following four fields.
First, Jewish history, particularly well grounded in Polish institutions, perforce crosses political boundaries. Secondly, the study of minorities and their diasporas requires a broader perspective, exemplified by the attempt of scholars at the Research Institute of Ethnic and National Minorities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest to trace the migrations of Slovaks, Romanians, and Roma. Similarly, the International Center for the Problems of Minorities and Intercultural Relations (IMIR) in Sofia as well as the Center for Transylvanian Studies and the Center for Population Studies in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca are committed to developing a more comprehensive narrative that explains the multicultural history of this area (Brunnbauer 2004). Thirdly, diplomatic history is experiencing its own revival, for example at the Teleki László Institute in Budapest, where scholars analyze the place of Hungary in international and global processes. Lastly, Balkan Studies has recently developed into a new field that explores numerous transnational and global problems, and that ultimately also revisits the question of “Europeanness,” in light of the region’s history as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Even though disciplinary traditions and foci are different in East-Central Europe, and though they focus less often on extra-European developments, the trajectories of institutional development and change are remarkably similar. Scholars at newly founded institutions and research centers are just as likely now to pursue globally focused projects. The establishment of numerous new universities after the implosion of socialism in 1989 (of which the Central European University in Budapest is certainly the best known) played a decisive role. But, as in Western Europe, new venues for the practice of world history also extend outside academia, not least as a result of the creation of the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia.
Again different is the situation in Russia, which has its own long tradition in world history writing. This is despite the fact that relatively little recent attention has been paid to it within Russian university departments. There has, however, been a vigorous research program within the Academy of Sciences, especially the Institute of World History.
Similarities notwithstanding, the institutionalization of world history, its relationship to related disciplines and approaches, its internal alignment, its inclusion in curricula, and its resources undoubtedly vary from place to place. In some locations the newly established venues prove immensely successful, whereas elsewhere their efforts have collapsed after only short periods of time. This continuous renewal of diversity is characteristic for the field of world history in Europe. In the United States, in contrast, world history has established itself successfully in a handful of institutions. As discussed by Heather Streets-Salter in this volume, however, PhD programs in world history remain the exception, and other scholars, such as Patrick Manning, have expressed pessimism about the field’s institutional standing.
In Europe, world and global history has recently become a booming subfield of the discipline, one that depends on the work of young academics and accordingly is particularly notable in current patterns of graduate education. Since the mid-1990s, structured doctoral programs have become the norm in Germany, for example, and no fewer than seven graduate programs explicitly explore global and transnational issues where historians, area-studies scholars and exponents of the social sciences engage in fruitful exchange.9 Central European University awards doctoral degrees in comparative Central, East, and Southeast European history. Moreover the program ENGLOBE (Enlightenment and Global History) boasts nine cooperating universities in Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France, Poland, and Germany. In addition, several programs offer master’s degrees in world history, for example the Erasmus Mundus Program, “Global Studies: A European Perspective,” which is a cooperative venture between the universities of Leipzig, Vienna, Roskilde, and Wroclaw, along with the London School of Economics and partner universities in Canada, China, India, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Lastly, one should also mention the program in Modern Global History at the Jacobs-University Bremen in this context. (For developments in primary and secondary education, see Schissler and Nuhoglu Soysal 2005.)
Research groups and networks, often with an international and interinstitutional character, are of particular relevance for the debate over methods and thematic approaches. They continue earlier efforts to compose collectively authored world histories (like thePropyläen Weltgeschichte, edited by Walter Goetz, 1931–1933, or the several editions of the History of Mankind, edited by UNESCO). In doing so they extend, and offer homage to, one sort of perspective inherent within globally oriented historiography. Furthermore they stand in contrast to the recent wave of syntheses written by single authors (for example, works by Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel), which offer thought-provoking interpretations but are inevitably based on a narrower scope of empirical and literary evidence.
In addition to previously mentioned groupings, historians based in Göttingen, Basel, Münster and Bonn organized a working group in 2006 that focused on premodern transcultural history (so far, historians have only just begun to produce syntheses that cross established epochal boundaries for the history of world markets and transcontinental trade). (See chapters by Levi, by Yoffee, and by Liu, this volume.) Two years later, historians Bo Strath and Hagen Schulz-Forberg founded the Nordic Global History Network, to which area studies scholars and historians from the universities of Aarhus, Helsinki, Malmš and Roskilde contribute. Together they direct their attention to discourses of modernization and seek to compare global upheavals. Likewise, they examine the circulation of categories, terms and conceptual models between different cultures.
Every other year since 2006, the European Social Science History Conference provides a forum for more general exchanges and regular contact between the practitioners of world history: part of its program is organized by the Network of World History. The European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH), established in 2002, orchestrates a European Congress on World and Global History. Since 2005 this triennial congress has brought together 200–300 scholars from the social sciences and humanities to discuss projects in transnational and global history. ENIUGH’s primary purpose is to facilitate efficient cooperation and multilingual communication between scholars within Europe. It also provides an opportunity to connect with colleagues from other world regions. Seeking to transcend the Eurocentric, teleological and universalist assumptions characteristic of previous approaches, ENIUGH encourages the continued provincialization of Europe from a global perspective. It promotes research in world, global, comparative and transnational history by publishing articles, book reviews, conference announcements, and shorter debates about methods and theoretical approaches. The network edits two peer-reviewed journals, the paper-based Comparativ: A Journal of Global History and Comparative Studies and the electronic geschichte.transnational. Counting the Journal of Global History (based in London, and founded in 2007) and the Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, Europe now boasts four major scholarly journals devoted to the study of a global past.
This proliferation continues in other arenas. Numerous book series – six based in Vienna alone – provide ample opportunity for scholars to publish their own research and keep abreast of their colleagues’ work. For example, the series “Expansion, Interaktion, Akkulturation” expands on world-system theory and positions itself against the traditional emphasis that postulated a world-system dominated by the West. The series moreover calls into question diffusionist models that reduce the complexity of cultural contacts to a simple inequality, and seeks to critically reexamine Europe’s own place in the world. The same publisher produces the series Weltregionen, focused on the intensification of global relations, while Mittelmeerstudien (Magnus Verlag) mirrors the growing interest in European regions that have principally shaped intercultural exchange.
Again through ENIUGH, which is a founding member of the wider international Network of Global and World History Organizations (NOGWHISTO), world historians in Europe have the opportunity to cooperate with the full range of non-European institutions in the field. NOGWHISTO, which has been approved as an international organization affiliated with the Comité International des Sciences Historiques, provides a formal space for cooperation and exchange among members of the World History Association (WHA), the Asian Association of World History (AAWH), the African Network in Global History/Réseau Africain d’Histoire Mondiale (ANGH/RAHM) and ENIUGH.
In light of these continuously expanding institutional as well as intellectual topographies, there can be no doubt that world and global history is a dynamic and institutionally grounded field of research in Europe. The existing diversity, in the arena of world history praxis and institutionalization, should be seen as a sign of success rather than fragility. The selective examples provided in this chapter attest to the energy and enthusiasm of a field whose raison d’être now lies beyond contestation. Calling for an inclusion of the recent work of European world historians in accounts of the field, I certainly do not intend to reassert the dominance of a previous center. Turning a blind eye to it and its new shape, however, would itself only serve to assert a new center, a move that would be rather anachronistic in today’s multipolar world.
Notes
The author would like to thank the working group on “Global History” at the Global and European Studies Institute of the University of Leipzig for their critical comments and supportive discussions.
1 The heated debates on the pitfalls and benefits of comparative approaches are outlined by Kaelbe and Schriewer (2003) and Haupt and Kocka (2010). The empirical evidence further underscores the reductionist implications of traditional comparative approaches and promotes a sustained dialogue about the fundamental incompatibility of historical comparison with cultural transfer studies (Espagne 1994).
2 For an excellent example of the break with metaphysical models of interpretation, in favor of empirically grounded world historical practice, see Tortarolo (2000).
3 The imperial history of Russia has also entered research agendas, in Russia itself and in other European historiographies. Consider especially the journal Ab Imperio, founded in 2000 in Kazan (Tatarstan), and for an overview see Aust (forthcoming).
4 Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Ian Tregenza (2008) illustrate the extent to which Australian emancipation from Great Britain influenced the development of Australian world history and its attempt to strengthen Australia’s geopolitical position. Jerry Bentley (2005) has sketched the political import of global approaches in the United States, and Hartmut Bergenthum (2004) has highlighted the nexus of world-historical approaches to the German Empire and its colonial expansionism prior to World War I.
5 Marshall Hodgson’s critique of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West illustrates this: “McNeill displays a persistent Western bias, despite his very sincere attempt to get beyond it … This lack is reflected … most significantly in his choice of the time of demarcating modern from pre-modern. The choice of 1500 instead of 1600 as the round number here is disastrous. It causes him … to treat Portuguese expeditions not as one more venture within an essentially agrarianate-level historical complex, which was rather readily contained in the course of the 16th century by other peoples in the Indian Ocean …” (Hodgson 2002: 92).
6 See in particular the contribution to the book series Studies in Global Social History (Brill) issued since 2008 by Marcel van der Linden. For the research program at Amsterdam consult van der Linden (2002).
7 One telling example: the approach of big history, prominent in North America, is hardly followed in Europe (excepting a few scholars such as Fred Spier, represented in this volume). In the same vein, European approaches to periodization generally concentrate on shorter periods, finding shifts and changes in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; world histories written in the US tend to stress a transformation around the year 1500. And finally, while historiography – in the sense of the history of the historical discipline – is a well-established subfield within Europe, and analyses of world history writing have thus also become a subject of this branch, such professional self-reflection is less widespread elsewhere.
8 The Seventh Framework Program for Research and Technological Development of the European Union for 2007–2013, equipped with 50 billion euros, serves as a telling example since it places the sponsorship of the humanities under the heading Europe in the World. For the impact of the European Commission (through its funding schemes) on higher education in Europe, see Batory and Lindstrom (2011).
9 Graduate students pursue world historical questions in Bielefeld (Weltgesellschaft – Die Herstellung und Repräsentation von Globalität), in Leipzig (Bruchzonen der Globalisierung), in Gießen (Transnationale Medienereignisse von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart), in Rostock (Kulturkontact und Wissenschaftsdiskurs), in Mainz and Hildesheim (Transnationale Soziale Unterstützung), in Frankfurt (Oder) (Transnationale Räume), and in Greifswald (Baltic Borderlands: Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region).
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