Rethinking Global History
Rethinking Global History
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
- An accessible introduction to the field of global history
- Provides a comprehensive survey of recent literature in multiple languages
- Engages fundamental concepts underpinning global history, such as scale, explanation, comparison, teleology and temporality
- This title is also available as open access
Reviews & endorsements
‘In this book a group of well-known practitioners provide a multifaceted analysis of the concepts, methods, and issues that will define future scholarship in Global History. If this branch of history is here to stay, then historians should embrace the full conceptual rearmament here discussed to write histories worthy of the problems affecting today's world.’ Giorgio Riello, European University Institute and the University of Warwick
‘What a timely intervention! As global history is coming of age, and as the world around us changes, our methods and approaches will have to develop as well. As the talk of de-globalization proliferates, Jürgen Osterhammel and Stefanie Gänger have assembled a group of first-class historians to rethink global history for our times. Fresh, insightful, stimulating.’ Sebastian Conrad, Professor of Global History, Freie Universität Berlin
‘… a superb collection examining global history as a subfield within the historical profession.… Recommended.’ S. Morillo, CHOICE
Product details
November 2024Adobe eBook Reader
9781009443999
0 pages
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of illustrations
- 1. Introduction: rethinking history, globally Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel
- Part I. Forms of Inquiry and Argumentation:
- 2. Explanation: the limits of narrativism in global history Jürgen Osterhammel
- 3. Comparison: its use and misuse in social and economic history Alessandro Stanziani
- 4. Time: temporality in global history Christina Brauner
- 5. Quantification: measuring connections and comparative development in global history Pim De Zwart
- Part II. Concepts and Metaphors:
- 6. The global and the earthy: taking the planet seriously as a global historian Sujit Sivasundaram
- 7. Openness and closure: spheres and other metaphors of boundedness in global history Valeska Huber
- 8. Scales: from shipworms to the globe and back Daniel Margócsy
- Part III. Configurations and Telos:
- 9. Tacit directionality: processes, teleology, and contingency in global history Jan C. Jansen
- 10. Distance: a problem in global history Jeremy Adelman
- 11. Materiality: global history and the material world Stefanie Gänger
- 12. Centrisms: questions of privilege and perspective in global historical scholarship Dominic Sachsenmaier.
