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The New Global Past

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The New Global Past Università di Napoli Federico II A. A. 2020-2021 Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche Scuola delle Scienze Umane e Sociali Master’s degree in International Relations THE NEW GLOBAL PAST An Introduction to the Global History of the Contemporary Age (Prof. Teodoro Tagliaferri) 1 Contents Part One. The New Global Past: A First Attempt at Conceptualization I. Introduction §1. World History, Global History, Contemporary History, and the Beginnings of the Global Age §2. Twentieth-Century Inspirations and False Starts §3. The Post-Cold War Thrust towards Professionalization $4. The Categorical Cluster in Outline: A Preliminary Glossary II. A Synoptic Overview of the Field of Study §1. World History Stoops to Conquer: the Global Point of View §2. The Global Past, (A): The Transregional and Transcultural Scales and Dimensions of Human History §3. The Global Past, (B): The «Human Community» and (or) the Long-Term History of Globalization §4. «Large-Scale Empirical Narratives» §5. «Dynamic Interactions» III. An Introductory Case Study: Contemporary India in the Perspective of the New Global History §1. The Reinterpretation of the Origins of British Colonialism §2. Hindu Civilization in the “Orientalist” Representation of James Mill IV. Dynamic Interactions between Multiple Regional Modernities at the Roots of the Long Imperial Century 2 §1. Christopher Bayly’s General Approach to Global History in The Birth of the Modern World §2. The Interactive Emergence of the British Domination in Afro-Eurasia in Bayly’s Imperial Meridian §3. The World Historical Impact of «British Nationalism» in the Age of Revolutions V. On the Utility of World History for Public Life §1. «Differentiated Commonalities» and Contemporary «Pammixia» §2. The Ethics and Politics of the New World History: Pluralist Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship §3. A Global Past for a Common Future Part Two. Variations, Integrations, Applications 1. Reconceptualizing the Expansion of Europe §1. Overcoming Eurocentrism: the First Step §2. The Expansion of Europe in the Perspective of the New Global History 2. Eurasia from the Multiple Expansions of the Early Modern Period to the 18th- and 19th-Centuries Crisis of the Old World Civilizational Balance §1. Eurasia as the Center of Modern and Contemporary History §2. Eurasia’s Multiple Expansions during the «Age of Discovery» §3. Eurasia in the Period of the «Early Modern Equilibrium» §4. The Eurasian Revolution: The Geopolitical Dimension 3 3. Expansion, Crisis and Renewal: the British Empire after the First World War in the Perspective of Global History 4. World War Two in the Mediterranean in the Perspective of Global History Part Three. Old Global Pasts 1. Legitimizing Imperial Authority: Greater Britain and India in the Global Historical Vision of John R. Seeley §1. Elements of Continuity in the Liberal Imperialist Tradition §2. Historians’ Legitimating Task §3. The Republic of Humanity §4. History as Political Prophecy §5. Europe’s Manifest Destiny §6. From the Country-State to the World-State §7. England’s Providential Mission in Asia §8. Unintended Consequences? Towards the United States of India 2. The Republic of Humanity: John R. Seeley and the Religious Sources of British Imperial Universalism 3. Eric Hobsbawm: The Last of the Universal Historians? 4 Part One The New Global Past A First Attempt at Conceptualization 5 I. Introduction 1. World History, Global History, Contemporary History, and the Beginnings of the Global Age The following chapters are based on my lecture notes for a course in Global History of the Contemporary Age delivered in English to the students for a Master’s degree in International Relations at the University of Naples Federico II, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, in the academic years 2018/2019, 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, with some substantial additions from materials collected for two series of seminars addressing The New Global Past. Historiographical Background, Methodological Issues, General Outlines, which I gave in the academic years 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 to first year students of the Doctorate in Global History & Governance, born in 2018 from a convention between the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the Federico II University, and then merged in the Scuola Superiore Meridionale of Naples. Both kinds of lessons ultimately responded to the mandatory institutional purpose of introducing their culturally varied postgraduate audiences (among whom Italians, Germans, Ukrainians, Rumanians, Magyars, Polish, Turkish, Latvians, British, Americans, Pakistanis, and a sizeable handful of Erasmus students) to the disciplinary field of Global History and its complex historiographical background, which here in Naples I teach also, in Italian, to the students for two other Master’s degrees – Relazioni Internazionali e Analisi di Scenario and Scienze Storiche –, offered respectively by the departments of Scienze Politiche and Studi Umanistici1. 1 As Storia Globale dell’Età Contemporanea at Scienze Politiche and Storia Globale at Studi Umanistici. At Studi Umanistici, to the students for the Master’s degree in Scienze Storiche, I teach a course in Storia della Storiografia Contemporanea too, after having taught for quite a long period, until ten years ago or so, Storia della Filosofia at the then Facoltà di 6 I deliberately chose to pursue this aim by sharply focusing, at the price of obvious omissions and simplifications, on a specific conceptualization of its subject-matter – the «new global past» alluded to in the title – which has clearly been emerging, in my view, over the past thirty or forty years in international historiography within the context of a coeval revival and renewal of World History. In order to avoid as much as possible unprofitable terminological disquisitions, when employing the two expressions – “World History” and “Global History” – I will very roughly follow the authoritative precedent set in 1990 in the prospectus of the «Journal of World History», which was written for its inaugural number by Jerry Bentley, the founder and first editor of the review until his untimely death in 2012. Bentley described the «official journal of the World Historical Association», an affiliated to the American Historical Association founded in 1982, as aiming to provide «A New Forum for Global History»2. We may pragmatically agree, therefore, on reserving the first expression to indicate, in the main, how an influential branch of its professional practitioners have grown accustomed to refer to the academic discipline of World History, and Global History to indicate both the discipline, as it sometimes is alternatively named in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the particular object of knowledge to which the academic world and global historians devote their work. The important thing to stress, however, is that, for the epistemological reasons given later, “World History” and “Global History” may be nowadays legitimately used as referring to the same thing when seen, respectively and reciprocally, a parte subjecti and a parte objecti. This elastic, nonbinding terminological distinction reveals itself useful also because not all those professional scholars who write on global history are necessarily World or Global Historians too. The several courses of Global History I teach at Naples, being all aimed to students for an Italian “Laurea Magistrale”, differ substantially, both in their aims Lettere e Filosofia of the Federico II. I give these personal details, unimportant in themselves, in order to provide the reader with a clue to my own individual approach to Global History. 2 Infra, II, §1 7 and their contents, from a course of Contemporary History for a Bachelor’s degree, if only because they presuppose that the students should have already acquired some basic knowledge of its fundamental outlines. In an important sense, however, their subject-matter is the same as that of the more general and elementary course I teach to the students for a “Laurea Triennale” in Scienze Politiche: the contemporary age. This means to me that, whatever epoch-making caesura one adopts as its beginning (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Congress of Vienna, the Seven Years War of the middle of the eighteenth century ecc.), the period covered by the teacher organically includes the present. Both study and teaching of Contemporary History include the present, at least logically and virtually, in the dual sense that 1) the present forms a part of it and 2) a pragmatic, problem-oriented understanding of the circumstances in which we all are called to act as citizens should be the ultimate goal pursued by the discipline. Contemporary History, as I believe, when true to its professional calling, is never about a non-existent “past in itself”, to be studied “for its own sake”. Contemporary History is about the present as seen from the perspective of its becoming what it is for us; it deals with that past in which the world around us, our collective and political present, reveals itself grounded and recognizes its roots. If it is so, in defining the subject-matter of contemporary history, which will vary according to the value-choices of each one of us, a teacher is preliminarily bound to clarify to himself as well as his fellow-students what is the present that he selects, among the many possible, as the starting point of his Herodotean round trip into the past – that present of which he is interested to investigate the extremely complex genealogy, being careful not to incur the two historian’s capital sins of anachronism and teleologism. Both in my global history and more basic contemporary history courses I regard as the explicandum the globalized society of our time and make the attempt to lead my students into an exploration of some significant aspects, at least, of its making and background. The global past which is being studied by the today’s World 8 Historians appears to me peculiarly well fit to cast light on the fundamental challenges confronting globalized humanity in the post-post-Cold War (and now post-Covid 19) era.
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