Conference Report: Looking Back and Forward—Developments, Challenges, and Visions for the Future of Global History (Queen’s University)
As we face a set of unknown changes to humanities scholarship and education that will inevitably unfold in the coming months, we are confronted with the meaning of Global History and the directions in which it will move. In March 2019, precisely one year before the global lockdown, four scholars reflected on how the field of global history developed over the course of their careers and imagined future directions. With special attention to how the roots of what we call global history today developed institutionally, our panelists discuss how graduate education in global history developed and what shape it might take in the future.
World History scholarship around the turn of the twenty-first century was written in the wake of post-Cold War neoliberal globalization in the 1990s, followed by the heightened surveillance of border regimes following 9/11 and the refashioning of earlier twentieth century white supremacist literature on “civilizations” into a late twentieth century context.[1] In the early 2000s, Global Historians challenged inward-looking European exceptionalism and supremacy with arguments about the great divergence that presented it as an accident, as the result of deliberate strategies of domination, and a by-product of silences about non-European voices in the historical discipline.[2] Others disintegrated civilization-centred rhetoric by emphasizing the interconnectedness of local histories, through the rise of global capitalism, Oceanic world histories, and new imperial history.[3] New avenues for comparison pushed historians to consider interconnectedness and entanglement in their readings of the intricacies of local factors.[4] Global intellectual histories demonstrated how even ideas about white supremacy and European exceptionalism were forged through the global connections of empire.[5] Scholars traced the complex webs of empires that interlocked colonial and metropolitan locales, in shifting relationships of production and consumption, conversation, exchange, and power brought global interconnectedness to light through empirical work.[6]
So, where did Global History stand in 2019? Self-proclaimed global historians put forward a methodology that captures the nuance of the interplay between macro and micro factors in historical inquiry. This includes a critical reimagining of units of analysis, including such as scale and time, and following the evidence trail of analytical research questions, even if they cross traditional geographical boundaries. This approach pays attention to how individuals and societies interact with others while situating these interactions, historical issues, and phenomena within broader contexts.[7] Global Historians are considerate of endogenous change but understand how local contexts inform and are informed by larger, potentially global processes. This methodology builds on the work of postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars, who already approached the nation with a critical lens.[8]
In recent years, some historians revisited hopes expressed at the turn of the most recent century. One hope was that global history methodology would eventually restructure history departments to reflect the widespread adoption of border-crossing and border-questioning methodologies. Jeremy Adelman noted that the optimism from the turn of the twenty-first century scholarship focusing on our connected past was met with the newest global rise of right-wing populism with the governments of Trump, Modi, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Putin, and others who characterized themselves as squarely against “globalism.”[9] Adelman’s critics, Richard Drayton and David Motadel, insisted that the empirical and border-crossing critique of methodological nationalism did not inspire the backlash to global history or globalization. Rather, they argue that this approach was more important than ever in combating the “myths of imperial and national pasts that underpin” right wing populism.[10] This leaves us in March 2019, when historians globally were unaware of the limitations that would arise one year later.
Participants: Amitava Chowdhury, Heather Streets-Salter, Julia McClure, and Joseph McQuade
Amitava Chowdhury is the co-director of the Global History Initiative at Queen’s University. He is a historian and historical archaeologist of agrarian labour regimes and colonial plantations in the British Caribbean and the Indian Ocean and is interested in the meaning and theory of Global History.
Julia McClure is a lecturer in late medieval and early modern global history at the University of Glasgow. She leads the Poverty Research Network and is the principal investigator of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project titled “Beyond Development: Local Visions of Global Poverty.” She is a specialist in global medieval and early modern studies. Her passed work has explored the Franciscan Order in colonial Latin America, and her current work explores broad themes of poverty, charity, and inequality.
Heather Streets-Salter is Professor of History and Director of World History Programs at Northeastern University. She is a historian of Britain and the British Empire, and of imperialism and colonialism more generally. She is also co-editor, with Erez Manela, of the Cambridge University Press series on Global and International History.
Joseph McQuade completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar in 2017. He is currently the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the NATO Association of Canada. He specializes in the international history of modern South Asia and the global history of terrorism.
AC: Amitava Chowdhury
HSS: Heather Streets-Salter
JMC: Julia McClure
JMQ: Joseph McQuade
Editors: Heena Mistry and Elyse Bell
This conversation, moderated by Amitava Chowdhury, was organized and hosted by Queen’s University’s Global History Initiative during the conference “Violence in a Connecting World” in March 2019. Panelists discuss developments in the past 35 years building the discipline of global history in North America and the UK, as well as current challenges and future directions in global history as a field of study. Two broad questions direct this discussion. The first centres on the current landscape of graduate studies in global history and the genealogies of today’s graduate programs in global history. The second round asks what the future of graduate studies in global history holds.
ROUND 1
The Genealogies and Current Shape of Global History in Graduate Studies
How have your experiences with the landscape and genealogies of global history, world history, and cognate fields that you have encountered globally shape how you understand the field of global history today?
JMC: We have entered a new crossroads in global history where questions about violence, poverty, and inequality are spearheading the future of global history. When I started my PhD in the University of Sheffield here in the UK, Global History was a minority subject. My first postdoc at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH), where I met Amitava, was a big step, geographically, across the Atlantic, and conceptually, into new methodologies. At that point, Global History was in its early days in the UK. After Harvard I went to the European University in Florence, where they were also developing Global History as part of their program.
When I moved back to the UK global history was in vogue. I started working at the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick, the first Global History centre in the UK. The centre uses material culture to look at the long history of global transcultural interactions. After Warwick, more Global History centres developed, including Oxford’s Centre for Global History, Exeter’s Centre for Global and Imperial History, and the Scottish Centre for Global History at the University of Dundee. While Global History offers opportunities for new analytical approaches, it is sometimes conflated with transnational and imperial history.
Universities are increasingly recognising that Global History can transform history curricula by offering new opportunities for decentering Europe and exploring our connected pasts. I moved to the University of Glasgow in 2017 where I have been developing Global History as part of the undergraduate and postgraduate programme. This was particularly important at a time when the university acknowledged that it had historically benefited from slavery and empire. It has become urgent that we uncover our connected pasts and to understand today’s ongoing inequalities as part of our connected histories.
This development of Global History within universities occurred as scholars questioned its meaning. When Amitava and I met at the WIGH in 2013, it was the first year of that program—and a very exciting time. Scholars from all over the world discussed new Global History projects as part of a graduate seminar. In one particular seminar we discussed a draft of Jürgen Osterhammel’s book on the transformation of the world, which was later published in 2014.[11] You really had a feeling that this discovery of the global past, of our interconnections, was the future of historical studies.
A few years later it seems we are doing Global History in a different global context. Jeremy Adelman articulated this in his controversial 2017 piece in Aeon Magazine, “What is global history now?”[12] In this, Adelman said that following the publication of Osterhammel’s book, The Transformation of the World, Angela Merkel invited Osterhammel to give a keynote speech at her birthday party. Even just a few years later, Adelman wrote, you would not be able to imagine a world leader inviting a global historian to give their insight into the global past. It seems like the world and the imagining of its global past—its shared past—has changed substantially in last few years with the rise of nativism and the ebbing of Europe’s cosmopolitan projects. These crises have had the politics of migration at their heart—of mobility and of who and what is allowed to move where. New global histories need to help us to understand not only our connected pasts but the associated frictions and resistances.
JMQ: I first started to look at Global History as a theoretical lens and a methodology during my master’s studies at Queen’s University under Amitava Chowdhury’s supervision. From there, I went to Cambridge, where what is framed as “global history” in North America is framed as “world history.” World History at Cambridge grew out of the much more traditional imperial history that predated the global moment of the 1990s.[13] The program has developed significantly since then, and there is an important distinction between world history as a teaching field and a research field.
In undergraduate courses, World History was often synonymous with non-European history. Non-western histories were global histories, whereas European histories still got to be European histories. It is important to view Global, World, or Transnational history as ways of thinking about history as opposed to geographical fields. You can have global histories of Europe and you can have global histories outside of Europe. You can, of course, also have non-global histories outside of Europe as well. On a research level, this is what you see from historians like the late C.A. Bayly, whose later work aimed to show how important it is to see regional histories in relation to global trends and processes.[14]
The other school of thought I encountered at Cambridge is that of global intellectual history. This, as it sounds, is about the global history of ideas, but it is also about challenging the Eurocentrism of traditional intellectual history as well. It looks at ideas, both their circulation and their production, within non-European locations, as well as the ways in which ideas inform each other and cross-pollinate within a global context.[15] Global intellectual history pays attention to locality as well. A good global intellectual history needs a global dimension, a focus on local particularities, and an understanding how those two scales operate in tandem with each other.
My current appointment is at the Asian Institute in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. The Munk School is an umbrella grouping within the University of Toronto comprising of different silos with their own thematic or regional specialty, all of which interact with each other and cross-pollinate. Within the Asian Institute, for example, are the Centre for South Asian Studies, the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, the Global Taiwan Studies Program, and several other regionally based research centres. Places like the Asian Institute provide robust area studies expertise that can come together and interact in productive ways without losing the focus on place.
But what does all of this mean for graduate students choosing their fields while keeping in mind the requirements of a shrinking job market? While graduate programs and dissertation committees are increasingly open to projects that do not take a clear nation-centred approach, the same is not necessarily true for job postings in history departments. From my perspective, graduate students should make sure that they have at least one of the following two specializations (and preferably both) to make themselves as competitive as possible: a strong grounding in a region-specific area of focus and a deep understanding of a transnational theme or process. Because there are so few job postings, there is a delicate balance between being broad enough to apply widely but specialized enough to have the robust research you will need to actually get the job. For example, if you look at transnational dimensions of human rights activism in Bolivia, you would want to be sure that you have a deep engagement with the history and historiography of Bolivia (and to some extent South America more broadly) but that you can also speak to historiographical debates taking place in the global history of human rights. Not only does this make for better scholarship, but it also positions you to apply for postings in South American history as well as in the history of human rights. The most important thing is to give some serious thought to where you situate yourself in relation to the broader research and teaching fields of your project, and then demonstrate that any global dimensions to your work add to your locally sited archives or specialization.
HSS: I came to world history accidentally. In 2003, I was at Washington State University when my Department Chair asked me to start a World History program. I was trained as a British empire historian, but I had to first figure out what world history was. My Department Chair sent me to the World History Association that year. There, all of the big names were still deeply involved, including Jerry Bentley, Patrick Manning, Ross Dunn, Kenneth Curtis, and others. I started thinking about what World History was and what a World History program might look like.
I visited Patrick Manning’s world history program at Northeastern University which he started in 1994. I did not want to simply replicate his world history program. His insight and support were extremely helpful, but my approach to world history differs from his in certain fundamental ways. Manning’s methodology was based on big questions, synthetic approaches, and comparative projects. But I was afraid that this kind of training would not get students jobs. Instead, I wanted my students to get regional training in at least one standard regional field, and also to begin to think about big questions in world history from the beginning of their graduate careers. So, students at Washington State’s World History program were encouraged to choose a field of specialty that was not a national field, but which could be recognized on the job market. The program I started at Washington State lasted from 2003 until 2011, when I came to Northeastern after Patrick Manning retired. I brought my model of both deep regional training and ideas of connectedness.
I primarily see World History as an approach. One of the most valuable components of graduate training in World History is the question of scale. One could go from tiny micro histories to huge scales in the same book. David Christian’s Maps of Time, for example, talks about 13 billion years.[16] World History is about trying to rethink questions of scale and chronology. In my world history methodologies class, we read some of the earlier works by William McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein with a very critical eye.[17] We read these works to see how things started out in the Euro-American academy in the middle of the twentieth century, and how the scholarship has shifted since then. So much great work has come out in the last 15 years, which their authors would not categorize as World History. I tend to include works that take up unique approaches to questions of scale and chronology.
I do wonder what will happen to a program like Northeastern’s, which only does World History. Now that so many people are taking these approaches to writing history, I wonder if we are going to write ourselves right out of a special niche. Hopefully the program will continue, but it is not as unique as it used to be. The number of programs that are taking these kinds of approaches is proliferating, not just in the USA, but in the rest of the world. It is no longer controversial to say you are doing World History, but it used to be—not even 15 years ago.
AC: When I started at Washington State in 2004—when the Northeastern centre was temporarily in abeyance—it was the only institution in the US that offered World History as a major doctoral field. Earlier, I had started out as an archaeologist in Mauritius, and while on the island, my future supervisor, Candice Goucher, who is an Africanist and a Caribbeanist, visited Mauritius, trying to forge academic collaborations. After some discussion, I decided to do my Ph.D. at Washington State under Candice’s supervision and did not apply to another school. In the beginning, I simply did not know what World History was, and before coursework commenced in fall 2004, my rudimentary understanding was that there was historical scholarship on North America and Europe, and whatever remained fell under the canopy of world history. My understanding of the field changed in a matter of days, but it remains the case that such an amateurish understanding of the scope of world history is still not rare.
During the early phase of my Ph.D. I realized, and indeed we were encouraged, to see the need to specialize in a regional field, and then cast the specific problematic under scrutiny in a global frame. I specialized on the Indian labour diaspora with a focus on the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Thus, it is true that I and most of my colleagues specialized in geographical and temporal frame and only later did we reframe our research questions in a global historical perspective.
Elsewhere, and perhaps a few years later, several doctoral dissertations were produced, particularly at Harvard and in Germany, that asked questions of integration and historical processes that were not necessarily rooted in any kind of regional specialization. These studies were doing deeply entrenched empirical work geared towards answering a processual question, rather than contributing to the knowledge of area studies. This attempt to free the historical processes from geographical containers formed the core of what increasingly became the norm for global historical scholarship in the past decade.
At Queen’s the graduate field that I supervise is called “Global, World, and Transnational History.” I do so because these overlapping fields have different life histories and trajectories and I think it is necessary for us to know how the field of Global History came into being and how it is related to its cognate fields. My students undergo some training on those classical works on World History in the twentieth century, with the hope that this background may help to contextualize their research questions in a more global perspective. While the field of World History as it developed in the twentieth century remains a matter of historiographical interest, the current state of the field is best captured by the recent perspective of global history.
ROUND 2
Visions for the Future of Global History
Drawing from your own research, the kind of work you have been doing, and the kind of initiatives you have been running, what is the future for global history, and by extension, the future for graduate studies in global history?
JMC: It was interesting to hear everyone’s different pathways to and perspectives on global history. I want to carry on from where I left off, thinking about where we are in the world today. Obviously, we are very conscious that we live in a highly unequal world. This awareness directs many of the questions I ask in my own research, which focuses on poverty. I was a medievalist working on the Franciscan movement, specifically, how it rejected property and rights, and became a global movement.[18] The Franciscan movement imagined the world in a very particular way and did indeed become a global movement. From that position I was able to think about how we can use the history of Europe and marginal groups within the history of Europe to continue the project that was started in postcolonial studies to provincialize Europe. For me, as a framework, global history has not been about doing, setting, or reintroducing this binary of west versus rest, or of thinking of the world as somewhere outside of Europe, but of using it as a critical lens for rethinking our assumptions about European history.
My own work is primarily concerned with the question of how we got to the system of inequality we have with us today. Thomas Piketty’s work has shown us that inequality is not going to decline—it will continue to rise. Yet our knowledge of this historical deus ex machina of what is producing the trend towards inequality is still very weakly understood. This is partly because a lot of analysis, even within global history, has focused on economics. I am interested in going beyond economic analysis and thinking about the roles of cultural institutions. In my own research, I am working on the moral economies of empires and how narratives legitimized the unequal distributions of resources.
When I launched a pre-honours course in global history at the University of Glasgow, I was keen to make sure that it had a long spread that included the middle ages, Europe, and other regions of the world, and that it gave you a way to think of the local, whatever that local is, as a potential subject for global history as a methodology. I have been very keen to use global history as a methodology to break down assumptions that global history is a narrative of “West versus rest,” as well as some of the meta narratives that come with chronological orderings of time, teleologies of progress, and the increase of global connections that come with the idea of globalization.
The future of global history is rooted in thinking about the locality that we are in—not just a spatial locality, but also a geopolitical locality that is deeply structured by inequalities. We need to ask how we arrived at this inequality. Some of the most important questions that have been missing are how inequality has been legitimated and why there has not been more moments of resistance. I am planning to make these salient questions of poverty and inequality central to the way in which the field of global history develops.[19]
AC: I liked the way you problematized the idea of the local, because the thought has been, at least intuitively outside academia, that there existed the local at first, and then all the local areas got slowly interconnected through processes of trade and human migration, and eventually, the local became connected with what then became a global whole. But anthropologists have been writing since the 1970s and 1990s saying that there comes a time when it is impossible to recognize what came first: whether the local precedes the global or whether the global process actually produces the local. Julia’s questions about structural inequality would define the meaning of the local, which is itself a global process that must be examined within a global backdrop. That is a particularly helpful theoretical direction to move forward, to problematize the relationship of the local and the global.
JMQ: There is a perception that we have a global moment in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War that continued through the securitized regimes of the global war on terror in the early 2000s. The idea that since 2008, and particularly since 2014, we have now retreated back from that and are moving back into the nation is pervasive. I think it is useful to take that kind of longue durée approach Amitava mentioned, because, in a lot of ways, it is ultimately false that we are returning to the nation in that the nation has always been there and the global has always been there in terms of that tension. That tension between the two—the nation and the global—is what makes both, in a way. If we are really trying to think about the future of global history, it is not as simple as the assumption that the rise of Brexit, Trump, and Modi means that the global moment is done now, and that we’re returning to a world of hard, bordered, nation-states. All of these recent trends are tied to global processes as well and still require a global frame of reference that is nonetheless attentive to the enduring power of nation-based forms of identity and belonging.[20]
The big challenges of the twenty-first century, issues that I have been pushed more towards through my work at the NATO Association, include climate change, the mass migrations and refugee crises caused by climate change, the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, and the impact that those will have in exacerbating existing global inequalities. AI specialists such as Kai-Fu Lee have warned that as early as 2040, more than 30% of jobs that currently exist will be able to be performed by simple AI algorithms.[21] If we think about what that will mean for human societies, and for the way people think about what it means to be human, as being detached from their labour power, which has been such a driving force through either Marxist or capitalist readings of global history, we are being presented with a series of problems that can really only be understood through a global lens.[22] You cannot approach any of these issues as just a local, regional, or national issue. Like it or not, that is really the future of where global history will need to go, just by virtue of the concerns that global historians will be dealing with in their own lives, and in the structure of the labour market and of academia. These kinds of practical dimensions will likely be driving historical inquiry.
AI specialists such as Kai-Fu Lee have warned that as early as 2040, more than 30% of jobs that currently exist will be able to be performed by simple AI algorithms. If we think about what that will mean for human societies, and for the way people think about what it means to be human, as being detached from their labour power, which has been such a driving force through either Marxist or capitalist readings of global history, we are being presented with a series of problems that can really only be understood through a global lens.
AC: Two things are very attractive from what you have just said. I teach a course on the Anthropocene, and one of our efforts has been to understand what it means to be human; what it means to be human today and what it means to be human in the next decade is vastly different from what it meant a century ago. Artificial intelligence is a promising direction, because it radically defines human agency in a different manner. On the other hand, I am less sure about your other point about the resurgence of returning to the nation. Not to disagree with the point that borders have become more rigid and state structures have become stricter. I am not quite sure that what we are now seeing is actually nationalism. What we called nationalism in 1919, and what we see in some parts of the world today, the new politics of the resurgence of populism, may not be quite the same thing. The recent emergence of what may on the surface seem to be ultranationalism has not been theorized properly. What we are witnessing today is a move towards strengthening the state structure, but it is also a move away from the nation. The current state of affairs is reminiscent of the twentieth century transnational nexus of ultranationalism, but at its core we might be dealing with a different beast.
HSS: I will start with an example of the kinds of work that I think can speak to our particular moment of the rigidity of borders and populism. One of our graduate students at Northeastern is working on global far right ideologies since 1945. What he clearly shows is that, although these movements seem very nationalistic and particular to the country that they are in, they move from one place to another via print media and are integrally connected by some of the same people. They end up looking like they are nationalistic but are really part of a global movement. The questions this project asks are ideal. I do not want students to be trained in the way that I was—a student of empire who did not read much about any other empire besides the British empire. One of the best things that World History can push students to do is read widely outside of their area of specialization and have a broader chronological scope. If students are not doing that, they have no idea what questions they may need to be asking. If you are a medievalist, think modern, if you are a modernist, think medieval. Breaking through many of the training boundaries and having a faculty that is willing to do that, and willing to be flexible, is my ideal. I guess I just wrote myself out of having that special program, because I would actually like to see all graduate education moving in that direction. This is a growing trend, and one that I think is positive.
AC: The nature of historical discipline, I think, for the last 200 years made the local and the national the default. We tend to ignore are our preconceived ideas of separate empire, separate nature, separate containers that we have imposed on reality, and tend to take these categories as natural, immutable, and as if they always existed. The field of global history, ultimately, is a critique of such uncritical acceptance of the order of things.
I first got into World History in 2004 with a course that Heather was teaching. It was a graduate course on World History theory and methodology, and then, when I first arrived at Queen’s, that was the title of the course that I started teaching. Very soon, I was asked to drop the word “theory,” because students were apparently afraid of it. The course then became “Approaches to World History.” My sense, at that time, was that many people who self-described as world historians were trying to do three things: One was to revivify connectedness or show interconnectedness where we did not know connections existed, and new kinds of empirical research brought out previously unseen connections. Alongside, we also wondered about the meaning of Eurocentrism and how historical practice is coloured by Eurocentrism insofar as the agentive properties of change are concerned. And third, it was also a critique of the units of analyses, moving away from the nation and other artificial containers and categories. Global history, then, is a critique of the organizing scheme that underlies all our narrative building, especially the older stories of progress that purportedly contributed towards human movement through time to a teleological end.
It has become apparent that historians in the 1920s were quite aware of the need to highlight interconnectivity and move away from Eurocentrism. Herbert Butterfield has whipped the Whiggish horse better than many of us could do, so all of that has been done.[24] The field of World History went through a transformation between 2004 to 2010, and what emerged from that transformation came to be henceforth labeled as global history. This transformation was in some sense an extension of postcolonial thought, but it also freed postcolonialism from its nationalist predilections. In my final analysis, the processes that brought about the nation-states in the nineteenth century also produced the new academic disciplines, including the modern pursuit of history.[25] This realization is at the core of a critique of methodological nationalism and thus the necessary first step for any meaningful project in global history.
Conclusion
One year after this conversation, the global lockdown would ground planes taking researchers to international archives, cause an economic crash that would curtail humanities research funding, and leave digital archives and libraries as the only way research could continue, for the time being. All panelists centered methodology over geographic scope when defining Global History. Reflecting on the development of the field, global history as it stands today is not only about challenging Eurocentrism, questioning teleologies, or showing interconnectedness. As a methodological approach, it interrogates scale and chronology, particularly local-global interactions and connections. We do not know where the future of global history lies in this new socially distant but electronically connected world. Not to mention the challenges facing the most recent generation of graduate students trained in global history entering the market.
Ideally, graduate students undertaking research using global history methodology would be trained to think critically about the units of analysis that define their scholarship and read beyond their specific geographic areas and time periods. Supervisors and history departments who encourage graduate students to undertake global historical research must also be prepared to support such graduate research through training, mentorship, and resources. This includes training students for the current realities of an academic job market, in which there are no standardized expectations of the faculty hired for “global history” job postings. Streets-Salter and McQuade point out the continued importance of developing a regional specialization that can be used as a starting point for reading more widely. This should be accompanied by training that helps develop an understanding of global or transnational themes and processes, as well as an understanding of how historians have imagined a Global History approach in the past.
Chowdhury and McQuade’s discussion of historical inquiry driven by events that historians are living through is a reminder that this was not new in 2020. Each panelist’s particular approach to global history is informed by their reading of the rise of nationalism, climate change, mass migration and refugee crises, and global inequality. All of these are problems that can only really be understood through a global lens and have their roots in a global past. McClure notes the urgency of uncovering our connected pasts in order to understand “today’s ongoing inequalities as part of our connected histories,” a statement that resonates perhaps even more today than it did a year ago.
[1] Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (New York: Routledge, 2006).
[2] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2001); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[3] "AHR Conversation: On Transnational History," American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1440-1464; Rainer F. Buschmann, "Oceans of World History: Delineating Aquacentric Notions in the Global Past," History Compass 2, no. 1 (2004).
[4] Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (2003): 39-44; Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review, no. 91 (2005): 62–90.
[5] Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900-1945,” American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (October 2004): 1140-1170; Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare.”
[6] Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Heather Streets-Salter, “The Local Was Global: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915,” Journal of World History 24, no. 3 (2013): 539–76.
[7] Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
[8] Angelika Epple, "The Global, the Transnational and the Subaltern: The Limits of History beyond the National Paradigm,” in Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, ed. Anna Amelina et al (New York: Routledge, 2012), 155-175.
[9] Jeremy Adelman, ‘What Is Global History Now?’, Aeon, 2 March 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment.
[10] Richard Drayton and David Motadel, "Discussion: The Futures of Global History," Journal of Global History 13 (2018): 1–21.
[11] Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
[12] Jeremy Adelman, "What Is Global History Now?," Aeon, 2 March 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment.
[13] For a critique, see Stephen Howe, The New Imperial Histories Reader (London; New York: Routledge, 2010).
[14] See for example, C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004).
[15] See Shruti Kapila, "Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
[16] David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, With a New Preface (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011).
[17] Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); William Hardy McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
[18] Julia McClure, The Franciscan Invention of the New World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), and “The Globalization of Franciscan Poverty,” Journal of World History 30, no. 3 (2019): 1-28.
[19] “Inequality: The Future of Global History, Round Table Discussion,” Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 3, no. 1 (2019): 53-81.
[20] Sophie-Jung H. Kim, Alastair McClure, and Joseph McQuade, “Making and Unmaking the Nation in World History: Introduction,” History Compass 15, no. 5 (2017).
[21] Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 2018).
[22] See also Noah Yuval Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Vintage, 2017).
[23] Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 2018).
[24] Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1931).
[25] Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).