Global History

We held the second of our workshops on the definition of global history on March 21st and 22nd in Dundee. The first, last June, was on finance, and this one was on communication. When we were setting these up I thought what would emerge would be a set of objects and categories that had a "global", that is to say universal, history. This expectation has not been fulfilled and a much more unexpected, and to my mind interesting, set of ideas about global history has begun to crystallize for me from our discussions.

The version of global history that seems to me to be emerging is characterized by a benign tension between two poles. The first is an insistence that a global history can't simply be a general history. This disposition is skeptical about every particular instance of global history, because it is suspicious of abstraction away from experience. However it insists that global context is absolutely necessary for the understanding of phenomena like democracy, empire or capitalism. Underlying this move is a kind of neo-transcendental argument (most explicitly deployed by Andrew Sartori in his version of global intellectual history). This asserts that since global phenomena (like the state or science) exist then there must be conditions of globality which have been and are being fulfilled. This kind of argument, that avoids prematurely defining the empirical conditions of globality, seems much more promising than defining global history in terms of trade, empire or any other phenomenon.

The second pole follows on form work done in the last decade by Anthony Hopkins and Patrick O'Brien. This is an insistence that global history is local history. The point of global history is not to identify structures with world-spanning effect. In some ways that would be too easy. The point is to convincingly argue why global context counts in particular places for particular reasons. Global is not some teleology toward which societies develop; it is more like a technique or a repertoire that a society can mobilize (with more or less success). Sophus Reinert's work on emulation is a really powerful example of how a specific text translated into a variety of contexts to very different ends. The really tough work to be done will be to explain how globally significant ideas and contexts generate radically different outcomes in different contexts. Difference, rather than identity, seems to be the them of the work that we will be doing.