GLOBAL/UNIVERSAL HISTORY: A WARNING

From our friends over at the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas comes Disha Karnad Jani's reply to TPF Trustee Jeremy Adelman's essay. Jani writes:

In reading this version of global history through Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, I have tried to suggest that we make ourselves unhelpfully vulnerable as historians when we drive the stakes of our narratives into shifting sands. I am not suggesting here that global historians did not, or do not, see the complications or limitations of the approach. As I noted above, there are many ways to write global history, and hindsight will always see blind spots and stumbling blocks more clearly than those who were writing histories even a short while ago. I have been concerned here with a very specific feature of this field: a mission to write a story of the past shaped by an occluded and willfully blind cohesion. Orienting an historical approach around an assumption about the future "progress" of the world does little more than make us prone to hasty retreat as soon as that future is jeopardized by the caprice of the "real world." In Buck-Morss and in Adelman's essay, I read a warning. If a single, redeeming, and final world-historical force ever calls out to you, either plug your ears with wax or tie yourself to the mast, because there are other, more distant calls the siren song is doubtless drowning out.