Rethinking Global History
Published on 21. November 2024
Book
Hardback
292 pages
978-1-009-44404-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'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, Juergen Osterhammel and Stefanie Gaenger 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 Universitaet BerlinMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
577 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-44404-0 (9781009444040)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Stefanie Gaenger | Juergen Osterhammel
Rethinking Global History
Book
11/2024
Cambridge University Press
€37.80
Shipment within 15-20 days
Persons
Stefanie Gaenger is Professor of Modern History at the Heidelberg University. She is the author of A Singular Remedy. Cinchona Across the Atlantic World, 1751-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Study of pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837-1911 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Juergen Osterhammel is Professor Emeritus of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. His books in English include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014). With Akira Iriye, he is the general editor of A History of the World (6 vols., Harvard University Press, 2012-24).
Content
Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; 1. Introduction: rethinking history, globally Stefanie Gaenger and Juergen Osterhammel; Part I. Forms of Inquiry and Argumentation: 2. Explanation: the limits of narrativism in global history Juergen 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 Margocsy; 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 Gaenger; 12. Centrisms: questions of privilege and perspective in global historical scholarship Dominic Sachsenmaier.