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 political cultures 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.
Global history : approaches and new directions / Maxine Berg -- pt. I Interpretations : ideas and the making of global history -- Problems in global history / David Washbrook -- Reflections on doing global history / Jan De Vries -- Notes on some discontents in the historical narrative / Jean-Frédéric Schaub -- pt. II Approaches : methods and methodologies in global history -- Comparison in global history / Prasannan Parthasarathi -- Regions and global history / R. Bin Wong -- Institutions for writing the economic history of the global / Jan Luiten Van Zanden -- pt. III Shaping global history -- Writing about divergences in global history : some implications for scale, methods, aims, and categories / Kenneth Pomeranz -- The European miracle in global history : an East Asian perspective / Kaoru Sugihara -- pt. IV Knowledge and global history -- Technology and innovation in global history and in the history of the global / Dagmar Schäfer -- The art of global comparisons / Craig Clunas -- Global objects : contention and entanglement / Glenn Adamson and Giorgio Riello -- pt. V Round table -- Panel discussion : ways forward and major challenges -- Globe and empire / John Darwin -- Africa and global history / Megan Vaughan -- Writing the history of the global and the state / Peer Vries -- Identity in global history : a reflection / Sufumi So and Billy Kee-Long So.