CROMOHS Vol 21 (2017–2018) Full Issue View or download the full issue PDF Table of Contents From Comparative to Global History: Assessing Relational Approaches to the Past Ed. by Giovanni Tarantino Foreword PDF Giovanni Tarantino Entanglements, Political Communication, PDF and Shared Temporal Layers Margrit Pernau and Luc Wodzicki 1-17 Disciplinarity and Forgetfulness: PDF On the Older Historiography of Global Connections Henning Trüper 18-29 Forum Circulation of People, Circulation of Objects, across South Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries ed. by Giulia Calvi Introduction PDF Giulia Calvi 30-35 ‘This is their profession:’ Greek Merchants in Transylvania PDF at the End of the Seventeenth Century Maria Pakucs 36-54 Healing, Translating, Collecting. Doctor Michelangelo Tilli PDF across the Ottoman Empire (1683-85) Giulia Calvi 55-69 Greek as Ottoman? Greek Language, Ottoman Empire PDF and the Danubian Principalities Michał Wasiucionek 70-89 ‘Le Coquin Grec’ vs. ‘le Véritable François.’ Being a Foreigner PDF in the Danubian Principalities, Eighteenth Century Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu 90-105 Iordache Filipescu, the ‘Last Great Boyar’ of Wallachia and His Heritage: A World PDF of Power, Influence and Goods Nicoleta Roman 106-122 Historians and Their Craft Interview with Sanjay Subrahmanyam PDF Daniel Barbu 123-132 Global Intellectual History: Some Reflections on Recent Publications PDF Ann Thomson 133-138 Reviews and Critical Notes Belich, J., J. Darwin, M. Frenz, C. Wickham, eds, The Prospect of Global PDF History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 Serena Ferente 139-142 Calasso, Giovanna and Giuliano Lancioni, eds, Dār al-islām/dār al-ḥarb. PDF Territories, People, Identities, Leiden-Boston: Brill 2017 Caterina Bori 143-149 Cohen-Hanegbi, Naama and Piroska Nagy, eds. Pleasure in the Middle PDF Ages, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers 2018 Catherine Rose Hailstone 150-152 Gerritsen, Anne and Giorgio Riello, eds, The Global Lives of Things: The PDF Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, London and New York: Routledge, 2016 Raffaella Sarti 153-158 Gruzinski, Serge, L’Histoire, pour quoi faire?, Paris: Fayard, 2015 PDF Marco Meriggi 159-163 Jordan Gschwend, Annemarie and K. J. P. Lowe, eds, The Global City. PDF On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon, London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2015 Zoltán Biedermann 164-168 Knobler, Adam, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration, PDF Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2017 Marco Volpato 169-172 Pernau, Margrit et al., Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth- PDF Century Asia and Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 Susan Broomhall 173-178 Prestel, Joseph Ben, Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in PDF Berlin and Cairo, 1860–1910, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 From Comparative to Global History: Assessing Relational Approaches to the Past Foreword GIOVANNI TARANTINO Università degli Studi di Firenze In 1928, Marc Bloch made what proved to be an influential statement when he said that the practice of comparing societies distant in space and time, described rather disparagingly as ‘comparative method in the grand manner,’ may serve some ends but is too imprecise to be of any great use ‘from the scientific point of view.’ Decades later William H. Sewell, Jr. objected that ‘mere temporal and spatial proximity does not assure similarity, and some societies which are very remote from one another are surely more alike, at least in ways that are crucial for some explanatory problems, than some neighboring societies.’ Themes such as ‘global history,’ ‘Transfergeschichte,’ ‘circulation,’ and ‘connection’ all hold an undoubted appeal in the present age. It has been pointed out though that all too often the history of the world, especially when it is based to a large degree on (mostly English) secondary literature, has ended up being fashioned into a flat narrative of ‘the rise of the West and the Westernization of the rest.’ For Sanjay Subrahmanyam, an alternative to the ‘grand narrative of modernization’ would be for historians not simply to adopt a different scale, but to take a step sideways, finding a different vantage point and employing a decentring technique to identify previously hidden or unseen connections among places and cultures. More recent comparative endeavours have seen scholars engaging more and more with what Serge Gruzinski has described as the ‘alchemy of hybridization,’ and the ‘intensity of circulation ... that reveals mixed landscapes.’ Entangled histories (Espagne, Kocka, Werner, Zimmermann) have explored ‘mutual influencing,’ ‘reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions,’ and the intertwined ‘processes of constituting one another.’ Further efforts to restore cultural comparison to the centre of scholarship have included the ‘cognitive science of religion,’ ‘World Literature,’ and ‘World Philology’. Finally, but no less importantly, historians of emotions have begun to investigate and to problematize the transcultural translatability of emotions. The contributors to this issue of CROMOHS (21/2017-2018) offer a critical historiographical survey and discussion, accompanied by exemplary case studies, of the Cromohs (Cyber Review of Modern Historiography), ISSN 1123-7023, 21/2017-2018 © Firenze University Press GIOVANNI TARANTINO various approaches to comparative early modern history that have been theorized and practiced over the past two decades. These range from transcultural and translation studies to global and connected histories. The aim is to unravel, review, and compare the possibilities and limitations of this plurality of relational approaches and methods. Has a change of scale been taking place, or a shift in perspective instead? What are the consequences of pursuing a practice of synchronic or diachronic comparison? How can researchers working with languages, concepts, and categories that are not part of their sphere of socialization deal with the inescapable challenges of reflexivity that these pose? The issue opens with two stimulating theoretical essays, respectively by Margrit Pernau & Luc Wodzicki and by Henning Trüper. It also includes a themed section, edited by Giulia Calvi, focussing on the circulation of people and objects across South Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire between the 17th and the 19th century. Finally, it features Daniel Barbu’s compelling interview with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Ann Thomson’s reflections on recent publications in Global Intellectual History. The publication of issue 21/2017-2018 of CROMOHS marks the start of a new season in the life of the journal, under the joint editorship of Daniel Barbu (Historiography of Religious Studies, CNRS Paris), Caterina Bori (History of Pre- Modern Islam and Muslim Civilisation), Giovanni Tarantino (Early Modern Intellectual History, University of Florence) and Paola von Wyss-Giacosa (Visual Anthropology and Material Culture Studies, University of Zurich). As of the next issue, CROMOHS will resume its customary annual publication. Entanglements, Political Communication, and Shared Temporal Layers MARGRIT PERNAU & LUC WODZICKI Max Planck Institute for Human Development / Freie Universität Berlin Encounters and entanglements are at the core of global historians’ work at three levels. Firstly, unlike specialists of regional or national histories, global historians are dependent on collaborative investigations that bring together scholars from different fields, who are likely to have different regional and linguistic skills, often coming from different academic traditions. This requires organizing communication in a way that overcomes historical power cleavages between regions, or at the very least refuses to reinforce them. Secondly, encounters and entanglements are at the core of the problems that interest global historians and which they endeavor to understand and endow with meaning, whether explicitly or implicitly through the analytical concepts and categories they use. If goods and ideas move and actors encounter one another, this raises the question of how such entities communicate across linguistic and regional differences. Thirdly, therefore, global historians need to attend to the ways in which historical actors simultaneously provide the raw material of encounters and related communication—and furnish their own interpretation, which structures the encounter. All three levels come together in the writing of global history. In this article we aim to show how historical actors referred to an earlier textual tradition, and thereby interpreted and created possibilities for transcultural political communication. We argue that these strategies and interpretations form part of the historical encounter, and need to be acknowledged by historians in order to understand how communication works. How is this approach related to present debates in global history, and contributing to them? Global history writing has been a self-reflexive endeavor from its inception; historians have been well aware of the influence of their own life experiences on the way they have sought to transcend national boundaries in their research. Right from the beginning, global historians have been engaged in writing the history of their own discipline. They traced their genealogy to the foundational texts of Marc Bloch, who underlined the value of a comparative approach both in order to test causalities and to allow for the defamiliarization of known facts and developments.1 While the first aspect led to large sociological projects that sought to