Thinking globally about history
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Chinese-American Mobilities: Interview with Charlotte Brooks
Interviews | December 6, 2020

Chinese-American Mobilities: Interview with Charlotte Brooks

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought mobility to a halt. Suddenly, we live in a world largely undefined by the physical exchange of people (if not goods and ideas) across borders. And while this moment of stasis has prompted its fair share of socio-economic and political anxiety, it has also provided an opportune moment to reflect upon some of the movements that have shaped international relations in the recent past. To this end, Charlotte Brooks’s 2019 book American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1900-1949 carries a vital message. By focusing on stories of immigration that have been obscured by the overarching narrative of the United States as a beacon for inbound migrants, Brooks’s text explores a part of American history that has been pushed to the physical and conceptual margins. At the same time, she draws out a collection of figures whose lives speak to the human-centric linkages that bound China and the United States together at a time when they appeared to be very much apart.

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Justice in the New World: An Interview with Brian Owensby and Richard Ross
Interviews | October 6, 2020

Justice in the New World: An Interview with Brian Owensby and Richard Ross

In what ways did both settlers and natives understand or partly understand or misunderstand the other side’s legal commitments while learning about them? Framed against the ongoing problematic of intelligibility, legal historians Professors Brian Owensby and Richard Ross's edited volume Justice in a New World analyses two sets of comparisons: one between settlers and natives, and the other between a British and Iberian America.

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Boys on America’s Imperial Frontier: An Interview with Mischa Honeck
Interviews | September 3, 2020

Boys on America’s Imperial Frontier: An Interview with Mischa Honeck

"The Boy Scouts were an organization that sought to discipline and control young people as much as they wanted to also animate and liberate them from what they identified as corrosive influences on young manhood. Because of that, there’s plenty of interesting commentary on what young people did and what they supposedly thought within scouting. This is not specific to the Boy Scouts of America—I think this is true for almost all of the major youth organizations of the twentieth century. That also compelled me to reconsider what it means to recover the voice of the child, because sometimes adult-authored sources contain the fingerprints of young actors as well. They also reflect things that young people did and can serve as a lens that can help approach young people as subjects within certain fields of academia." Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier is the World: Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (2017) takes a much-needed look at the role of children in the construction of the United States’s imperial identity. Through a detailed analysis of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), he interrogates the interlinking impulses of youth, nationalism, and power in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Liberalism in Pre-revolutionary Russia: An interview with Susanna Rabow-Edling
Interviews | August 5, 2020

Liberalism in Pre-revolutionary Russia: An interview with Susanna Rabow-Edling

"I wanted to question the contrast between East and West, according to which Russian nationalism is conservative and ethnic, whereas Western nationalism is seen as civil and liberal, hence good. I found that this view of Western nationalism has been questioned a lot while the view on Russian nationalism had not been questioned as much. This contributes to an essentialist view of Russian culture as fundamentally different from Western culture." In Liberalism in Pre-revolutionary Russia: State, Nation, Empire (Routledge, 2018), Susanna Rabow-Edling looks at the history of liberal nationalism in the Russian Empire, covering the period between the Decembrist revolt in 1825 and the October Revolution in 1917. She examines liberal tendencies in the Empire and how they are intertwined with notions of nation and empire.

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Thinking Through Water: An Interview with Sunil S. Amrith
Interviews | June 22, 2020

Thinking Through Water: An Interview with Sunil S. Amrith

In his latest book, Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith shows how “the schemes of empire builders, the visions of freedom fighters, the designs of engineers—and the cumulative, dispersed actions of hundreds of millions of people across generations—have transformed Asia’s waters over the past two hundred years.” It testifies to the dreams that societies have often pinned to water, as well as its unwieldy and turbulent nature. In his account of “the struggle for water” and control over the Asian monsoon, we come to understand how climate change exacerbates a problem both already in-progress and connected to histories of “reckless development and galloping inequality.”

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Global Ukrainian Studies in the Making: An Interview with Serhii Plokhy
Interviews | March 12, 2020

Global Ukrainian Studies in the Making: An Interview with Serhii Plokhy

It is only in the past decade that Ukrainian history has begun to be researched in the context of international or global history. The American historian Serhii Plokhy, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, is a prominent exponent of this approach. Plokhy's research interests include the early modern history of Ukraine, twentieth-century international history, and intellectual history. We spoke with Serhii Plokhy about the integration of Ukrainian history into global history, the colonial status of Ukraine, and environmental history.  

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Unexpected Guests? The Soviet Union and the History of Global Capitalism: An Interview with Oscar Sanchez-Sibony
Interviews | February 13, 2020

Unexpected Guests? The Soviet Union and the History of Global Capitalism: An Interview with Oscar Sanchez-Sibony

Capitalism versus Communism. To many, the latter half of the twentieth history was deeply shaped by the confrontation between these two ideological and socioeconomic systems. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, capitalism's triumph was credited to its valorization of money and protection of markets, among other factors; and, as the story continues, Communists failed, in part, because they suppressed markets and globalization. Yet, how much of this historical picture holds true?

 

 

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Youth, God, and Empire: Interview With Dr. Joy Schulz
Interviews | January 22, 2020

Youth, God, and Empire: Interview With Dr. Joy Schulz

Emphasizing the centrality of American missionary children in the domination of the Hawaiian Islands during the second half of nineteenth century, Dr. Joy Schulz's analysis exposes the potency of youth power through a series of chapters that trace the development of these young evangelists into colonizers and revolutionaries. In the process, she draws attention to the complexities born at the intersections of childhood and empire and underscores the capacity of children to record their own histories in ways that may complement or complicate adult ambitions.

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Seleucid Global? Time and Empire in the Hellenistic Near East: An Interview with Paul J. Kosmin
Interviews | December 9, 2019

Seleucid Global? Time and Empire in the Hellenistic Near East: An Interview with Paul J. Kosmin

Kosmin's work is part of a recent historiographical move to reevaluate the familiar narrative of the Seleucid Empire as a sprawling, dysfunctional, Oriental empire. His most recent book, Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire, explores the time of this empire, which he argues was radically new and can be characterized as linear, empty, and homogeneous. This new technology of time drew the empire's subjects into one commensurable temporal framework. Such commensurable time, in turn, provoked various rediscoveries of indigenous pasts within a new scheme of Seleucid time and historicality. This generated a sense of temporal incommensurability between Seleucid and indigenous times and between past, present, and future—and it played into and gave shape to an atmosphere of pan-imperial revolt.

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'It's Not Rocket Science': Nuclear Disasters in and beyond the Soviet Union—An Interview with Kate Brown
Interviews | November 8, 2019

'It's Not Rocket Science': Nuclear Disasters in and beyond the Soviet Union—An Interview with Kate Brown

"About 50 deaths." This was the long-standing consensus held by scientists and worldwide audiences on the death toll caused by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. "Was this really so?" asked Kate Brown, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as she started to investigate the oft-overlooked social and environmental hazards in the communities affected by the world's infamous nuclear catastrophe. Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, departs from the consensus and has sparked a global discussion on both the contemporary consequences and history of nuclear energy exploitation in and beyond the former Soviet Union.

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The Institution of International Order: An Interview with Simon Jackson and Alanna O'Malley
Interviews | October 16, 2019

The Institution of International Order: An Interview with Simon Jackson and Alanna O'Malley

With some people becoming increasingly concerned about the attacks on the liberal international order and others questioning whether such a thing actually exists or has ever existed, the publication of The Institution of International Order: from the League of Nations to the United Nations in 2018 is a timely and welcome intervention. This edited volume sheds light on the historical dimensions of internationalism, by examining the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN) from the 1920s to the 1970s. Not only does it connect scholarship historicizing internationalism, but it also explicitly decenters the history of internationalism by bringing in people, organizations, and places not generally associated with the levers of international order.

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Cossacks and Columbus: An Interview with Yaroslav Hrytsak
Interviews | September 5, 2019

Cossacks and Columbus: An Interview with Yaroslav Hrytsak

Yaroslav Hrytsak is one of the preeminent Ukrainian historians and public intellectuals, an expert in the modern history of Ukraine, as well as nationalism and nationhood in Eastern Europe more generally. We spoke to him about global history, his upcoming book on short Ukrainian history, and the next generation of historians in Ukraine. Prof. Hrytsak suggests global history may help us to understand the nature of political and cultural encounters in the Ukrainian lands, beginning from the Cossack period (XVI-XVIII centuries).

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Thinking Global in Turkey: An Interview with Trustee Selçuk Esenbel
Interviews | May 30, 2019

Thinking Global in Turkey: An Interview with Trustee Selçuk Esenbel

Prof. Selçuk Esenbel is one of the trustees of the Toynbee Prize Foundation and a leading historian in Turkey. Prof. Esenbel has contributed greatly to the development of global history in Turkey, specifically in relation to Japanese and wider Eurasian history. We sat down with Esenbel in Istanbul to talk about the state of global history in Turkey today and her recent book, Japan on the Silk Road: Encounters and Perspectives of Politics and Culture in Eurasia (Brill's Japanese Studies Library, 2017).

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From Istanbul to Tokyo: An Interview with Eric Tagliacozzo
Interviews | April 24, 2019

From Istanbul to Tokyo: An Interview with Eric Tagliacozzo

In examining the annual movement of pilgrims from the opposite ends of the Indian Ocean, Prof. Eric Tagliacozzo taps in to a process that has been taking place for more than five hundred years: first by sail, then by steam, then by air. Connections between Southeast Asia and the Middle East do not center solely on Islam. They are part of a far more complex network of trade, movement, and cross-cultural exchange. These connections between Southeast Asia and the Middle East are part of a far wider set of connections between peoples along the entire Indian Ocean littoral from eastern Africa to the South China Sea. We talked with Tagliacozzo about his previous works and his contributions to scholarship on the Indian Ocean world as well as transnational and global history. We spoke about his days as a 22-year old college student interviewing spice traders from Japan to East Africa. Our discussion ranged from illicit trade in rhinoceros horns to itinerant peoples' methods of resistance to colonial rule. And we discussed how, often, those two things were one-and-the-same.

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