Featured Interviews

Mark Mazower discusses the experience of telling a personal narrative in a historical context, the struggles and opportunities presented by writing history with a focus on nations and people outside of the immediate center of power, and the importance of revisiting early twentieth-century political discussions in our current moment.

Holly Case (Brown University) presents seven interpretations of the many "questions" of the long nineteenth century—the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, and Tuberculosis Questions, among others.

What are the current challenges for teaching global history? What materials or techniques have proven effective? What are the pedagogical implications of these approaches? We've invited five academics, representing a variety of institutions around the world, to reflect upon their experiences in designing and delivering courses to undergraduate and graduate students in global history.

This is the second of a two-part interview with Vijay Prashad and Ewan Gibbs on the state of Marxist history today. This second part covers the role of the Marxist historian and the challenge of post-modernism.

This is the first of a two-part interview with Vijay Prashad and Ewan Gibbs on the state of Marxist history today. The second part covers the role of the Marxist historian and the challenge of post-modernism.

To further our understanding of the development of industrial capitalism over the past two centuries Greg Cushman claims, we need to write histories 'from below,' in two senses: first, we need to write histories that consider not just those who 'invented the steam engine', but those which trace the origins of the steam engine's parts (material and intellectual) wherever across the globe that leads us – often far beyond the 'Global North'. Second, we need to investigate our planetary history below the earth's surface. Lithospheric history Cushman calls it.

If we accept the GPS beacons embedded in our smartphones—or guided missiles—as the exponent of "progress," we risk overlooking how differently (and not just "better") GPS's relationship to territory and space is from those of earlier world-mapping technologies. After the Map seeks to provide, then, not just a technical history of different mapping tools over the twentieth century. It provides an analysis of how shifts in tools engendered shifts in what William Rankin dubs geo-epistemology: "not just what is known about the earth, but how it is known— and how it is used."

There was perhaps no more potent symbol of this world of ultra-connectivity than the Suez Canal, built in what was still Ottoman Egypt in 1869 and connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. The Canal increased world trade. It also soon became a vital strategic artery for the British Empire, since it made the "passage to India" via intermediary stations like Suez and Aden far shorter than the former trip around the Cape of Good Hope. So powerful was the imaginary of the Canal as one of the crucial changes of the epoch that, when Henry Morton Stanley finally located David Livingstone (of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871, the Canal was the first thing that came to Stanley's mind when Livingstone asked him what had changed in the world during his many years out of contact with the Western world. Yet as Dr. Valeska Huber, a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in London, shows in her recent book Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalization in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback 2015), the Suez Canal did not so much open as channel migration and globalization during this world of increasing trade and economic integration.

Since its publication in 2016, Sebastian Conrad’s What Is Global History? has been read and debated not only by historians of modern Europe but also by historians of different parts of the world and scholars in different disciplines. Who writes global history? How and for whom? And why now?

Academic trends can encourage collaboration among scholars from different parts of the world. A good example of this was the student conference on global history held in Istanbul last month, attended by students from 21 different universities. The fact the conference took place in Istanbul seemed particularly appropriate in the context of global history. Indeed, the city of Istanbul has long been a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious place, especially during the long periods when it was the capital of empires. The conference was organized by undergraduate students from Istanbul Sehir University on behalf of the History Department.