Writing the History of the Global Challenges for the Twenty-First Century

by Berg, Maxine

• ISBN13: 9780197265321
• ISBN10: 0197265324
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-03-14
• Publisher: British Academy

Summary

The early part of the twenty-first century has witnessed a profound turn in history writing and museum culture towards global and world history. Historians and curators are rapidly changing what they do: no longer satisfied with traditional national histories and area studies, they are pursuing histories of subjects affected by environmental change, migration, slavery, trade and travel. They face challenges of writing about individuals and families in the world, and of politicalcultures and ideas that have transformed as they have moved between different regions of the world. They are 'going beyond borders' and pursuing wider concepts of connectedness and of cosmopolitanism as these have developed in social theory. Where has all this come from, and where is it taking us as historians? Writing The History of the Global brings together a number of the major historians now entering the field and re-thinking the way they write their histories. We read the reflections of China experts, historians of India and Japan, of Latin America, Africa and Europe on their past writing, and the new directions in which global history is taking them. It shows the rapid advances in the field from early and inspiring accountsof encounters between East and West, of the wealth and poverty of nations and the crisis of empires, to new thinking on global material cultures, on composite zones and East Asian development paths.It presents historians at a crossroads: enjoying the great excitement of moving out of national borders and reconnecting parts of the world once studied separately, but also facing the huge challenge of new methodologies of comparison, collaboration and interdisciplinarity and the problems of rapidly disappearing tools of foreign languages.

Author Biography

Maxine Berg is Professor of History at the University of Warwick.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Global History Approaches, Maxine Berg
Part 1. Interpretations: Ideas and the Making of Global History
2. Problems in Global History, David Washbrook
3. Reflections on Doing Global History, Jan de Vries
4. Global History: A Note on Some Discontents in the Historical Narrative, Jean-Frederic Schaub
Part 2. Approaches: Methods and Methodologies in Global History
5. Comparison in Global History, Prasannan Parthasarathi
6. Regions and Global History, R.Bin Wong
7. Institutions for Writing the Economic History of the Global, Jan Luiten Van Zanden
Part 3. Shaping Global History
8. Writing about Divergences in Global History: Some Implications for Scale, Methods, Aims and Categories, Ken Pomeranz
9. The European Miracle in Global History: An East Asian Perspective, Kaoru Sugihara
Part 4. Knowledge and Global History
10. Technology & Innovation in Global History and in the History of the Global, Dagmar Schafer
11. The Art of Global Comparisons, Craig Clunas
12. Global Objects: Contention and Entanglement, Glenn Adamson and Giorgio Riello
Part 5. Round Table
13. Globe and Empire, John Darwin
14. Africa and Global History, Megan Vaughan
15. Writing the History of the Global, Peer Vries
16. Identity in Global History: A Reflection, Sujumi So and Billy Kee Long So