Recommended Readings

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Weber A., Gommans J. “’You turn a page and Then there is suddenly Something on a turtle’ - An Interview with Jürgen Osterhammel”, Itinerario, vol. XXXV, issue 3, 2011

"Entretien avec Jürgen Osterhammel", Revue d'histoire du XIX siècle, vol. 46, 2013/1, pp. 137-141

Van Ittersum M., Gottmann F., Mostert T., “Writing Global History and Its Challenges—A Workshop with Jürgen Osterhammel and Geoffrey Parker », Itinerario, Vol. 40, No. 3, 357–376. 2016

Portinaro P.P., “Per la storia della globailizzazione. Il contributo di Jürgen Osterhammel.”, Archivio Storico Italiano, Disp. II, 2017, pp. 361-394

Osterhammel J., ”Debating Global History”, May 2018

“You turn a page and then there is suddenly something on a turtle” An Interview with Jürgen Osterhammel

BY ANDREAS WEBER AND JOS GOMMANS

On 1 September 2011 Jürgen Osterhammel, professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Konstanz, and his wife, the historian and sinologist Sabine Dabringhaus (University of Freiburg), visited Leiden to participate in a conference on “Forms of Dynastic Power in Late Imperial China and Early Modern Europe.” The conference marked the start of a new comparative research program on “Eurasian Empires: Integration Processes and Identity Formation.” After discussing the aims and objectives of the new program in a highly stimulat- ing roundtable with the fresh researchers, Itinerario (Andreas Weber and Jos Gommans) used the opportunity to have a talk with Jürgen Osterhammel about his career and the making of his recent masterpiece Die Verwandlung der Welt (The Transformation of the World). This monograph is a painstaking and thought- provoking attempt to write a global history of the nineteenth century. In more than 1,500 pages, Osterhammel offers a kaleidoscopic view on topics such as cities, frontiers, empires and nation states, nomads, music, science, religion, work, revolutions and living standards. Reviewers have praised the book for its thoroughness and innovative methodology, and an English translation will appear in the course of 2013. Already dazzling in itself, it is “just” the latest addition of an awe-inspiring œuvre of one of the leading historians in Europe.

First things first: why and how you decided to become a historian? Was there some kind of “natural road” in your family that paved the way? No, there was no natural road, quite to the contrary. I was born in 1952 in a small town in the Bergisches Land (Rhineland) in the northwest of Germany, which is part of the country well known for people like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Habermas. Nothing prepared me for becoming a historian. My immediate family had a strong natural science emphasis. My father was a physicist; he did not prevent me from

Itinerario volume XXXV, issue 3, 2011 doi:10.1017/S0165115312000034

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studying humanities but also did not think it would be the best of all possible ways. The inspiration probably came from attending a very good school, a public school (Gymnasium) where in the late 1960s questions especially of politics and recent history played an important role. My original impulse of doing history as an academic subject was very much related to contemporary concerns. And in a way it still is. I still consider myself as a historian who in whatever he does tries to address questions which are relevant for today. Being born in 1952, to what extent was this present-minded agenda inspired by the generation of the roaring sixties and seventies, which aimed to reform society. Were you ever a political “activist” yourself? My school was not in the Bergisches Land, but in Hanau, a city in the state of Hesse. That is important because in the 1968 period, when I was 16, obviously the intellectual hothouse after Berlin was Frankfurt. Hanau was quite close to Frankfurt and sometimes I managed to go there. I even played with the idea of going to Frankfurt to study philosophy and sociology with Theodor W. Adorno. He was a man mastering the entire literary and philosophical tradition, also a brilliant pianist and composer himself, and of course an anti-capitalist radical—that is an interesting tension. I might have done that but unfortunately he died in August 1969, which was one year before I took my A-levels (Abitur). So the chance was missed and I decided to study at the university in Marburg. This means that you fostered a strong and serious interest in philosophy at a rather young age. To what extent this was special at that time? Many young people were interested in philosophy at that time. I can’t really reconstruct the exact origins of that. A couple of friends and I, we all claimed a broad range of authors, and in the German language and literature classes read excerpts from Hegel and Nietzsche and a lot of the dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht, who was re-emerging as an important author at that time. Philosophers were much more in the public eyes than they are today. That was the time when you opened Der Spiegel, a weekly political magazine, and you found interviews with philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Marxist visionary Ernst Bloch and the great men of the Frankfurt school, Adorno, Max Horkheimer and the young Jürgen Habermas. So it was in a way natural to get acquainted with their ideas and texts which were made available in the famous rainbow-coloured books in Edition Suhrkamp in its original shape, with a loose paper flap. A real treasure. These little books were my early food for intellectual nourishment.

So at that time you were not really at the frontline of the new intellectual movement? No, I was too young for being an active rebel, and at my school in Hanau there were no sharp confrontations between conservative teachers and the wider revolutionary world. The school was quite progressive and contemporary history played an enormous role. I read, as part of a regular school education, Hannah Arendt, another important author for me. When I was seventeen or eighteen I worked my way through Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (first published in English as The Origins of Totalitarism) and a couple of other social science classics. We read for instance Ralf Dahrendorf, so it was not only just Marxism and the Frankfurt

School. I always had an interest in contemporary history and a direct engagement with questions of National Socialism and the recent German past, which was a generational experience elsewhere as well. Those were themes openly discussed in a way that a young person easily felt encouraged to study history and politics. To what extent Germany was special at that time? Didn’t the Cold War and the division between East and West Germany have a huge impact? Yes, definitely so, because of two factors. There was, on the one hand, the need to reconsider the past and move against attempts to cover it up and not face its horrors. I still remember the tremendous shock caused by Peter Weiss’s drama Die Ermittlung, based on documents from the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-5). And, on the other hand, there was of course, the divide between East and West, resulting, among other things, in two competing historiographies. A burning issue at the time, more important to my generation than the division of Germany, was the Vietnam War. We were really concerned as young people about things going on in Vietnam. And at the same time in 1968, we were intrigued by the Cultural Revolution in China that, just in 1968, was moving into its hottest phase. So you decided to study in Marburg. How was the academic environment there? The environment was that of a quintessential university town. There are these old style university towns, only a few of them are left in Germany. When I was a student, there were still dueling fraternities (schlagende Verbindungen). You did not meet those people frequently (most of them were law students) but they had special inns and you saw them on the street with their peculiar outfits; they were remnants from a different age. More characteristically, this was an age of an enormous expansion in the student population. It was not unusual having large lecture halls with 300 or 400 students attending one lecture. How was history taught in Marburg? History was a fairly conservative field in Marburg. On my very first day in mid- October 1970 there was a huge public debate—in the main auditorium in front of around one thousand students—pitting the right-wing Ernst Nolte who was at that time a professor at Marburg (he later left for the Freie Universität in Berlin) against Wolfgang Abendroth, a veteran socialist jurist and political scientist who had suf- fered severe persecution during the Nazi period, a Bildungsbürger of the radical Left. Nolte and Abendroth had a vehement public debate about National Socialism and its legacy. It was an event with great rhetoric and a scandal at the end when Abendroth walked out. That kind of political polarisation between history and the social sciences was quite symptomatic for the situation in Marburg. History was a conservative discipline also in a methodological sense with the fresh impulses coming from the Bielefeld School of social history making little headway among the teachers of history. As I studied both political science (and also some sociology and philosophy) and history, I moved in different worlds without really committing myself deeply to any of them. This was still very much a German debate. At some point you left Germany and developed an interest in China. How did that happen? It is quite difficult to reconstruct how that came about. Part of the story was a revul- sion against a kind of narrow Germano-centrism. Really everything was German,

the whole curriculum was German, not for nationalistic reasons, but because it had always been that way. My early irritation with the Vietnam War led me to an interest in the Third World. In the early 1970s, people like Dieter Senghaas from the University of Bremen—he was quite influential at that time—published books on dependencia and the economics and politics of poverty and underdevelopment. We also read radical economists such as Paul A. Baran and, a little later, Immanuel Wallerstein. For a historian, the development of the Soviet Union held a special interest, and even more so the attempts of the People’s Republic of China (especially in the 1950s) to jump across historical periods, ages and stadia towards an industrial future. At some point I thought I had made a mistake in choosing my subjects and that I should learn another language in addition to the languages you learn at school; and it should be a challenge. So I took up Chinese and did that as a sort of side- line subject. I accumulated a modest knowledge of Chinese, and by the end of my studies in 1976, when I passed my Staatsexamen (roughly equivalent to a master’s), I was able to get the gist of a modern Chinese text, admittedly with the help of a dictionary. That didn’t really qualify me for being a sinologist. At one point I considered moving entirely into Chinese studies, but then my interests were too broad—you may say, too superficial—to be confined in one particular kind of area studies.

Was this an acceptable road for academic historians at that time in Germany? No. It was quite impossible to work on China, and also on Japan or on Arabic countries within the discipline of history. Only a handful of universities offered lecture courses on the history of Asia or on decolonisation. Despite the new methodological approaches and theories of the Bielefeld School, German historical studies in the early 1970s were dominated by a strong fixation on Germany and on the development of industrial modernity in the Atlantic West. And that was mirrored in the composition of history departments. There were very few history departments at that time—perhaps Hamburg was the most important one—where you had chairs or at least lectureships for non-European or even non-Western history. Only Latin American history enjoyed a high reputation, being considered less “exotic” than Asian or African history. How did you find a job after your study years in Marburg? I completed my studies in Marburg and then I was looking for, not a job, but for a post-MA opportunity. Fortunately I was a scholarship-holder of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation), a highly valuable institution which, at that time, supported less than 0.5 per cent of the student body considered to be the best ones. They leave you incredible leeway, even changing your subject, doing what you want as long as you give them good reasons. They allowed me to go to the London School of Economics for one year after gradua- tion. And I went there with all those more or less contradictory ideas in my head about history and politics. Tell us more … I came to London with the idea that I should forget all German subjects, should do something else, and should continue with China. So I went to LSE’s department of

international history. I also discovered the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) which I used quite a lot. At LSE I was registered as a research-fee student, which meant you neither had any obligations nor studied for a degree; you just spent a year there, doing whatever you wanted. I went to many lectures—by luminaries like the historian James Joll or the polymath Ernest Gellner —and at the fairly advanced age of 25, I met my first teacher in an emphatic sense. He was Ian Nish, professor of international history and a great expert on the history of Japanese foreign relations. Perhaps next to Akira Iriye at Harvard the greatest non-Japanese authority in the field. He was and still is—he is 85 now—a great and good man, and he took this wayward German student under his wing. I went to his very small classes (mostly three or four students) and got almost personal tuition in diplomatic history. Later on, in his 60s, Ian Nish became a much more general historian but at that time he was an excellent specialist in diplomatic history. And that is what I learnt from him: diplomatic history. So I am a trained diplomatic historian; I am not ashamed to say that after doing all sorts of other histories, and one might detect traces of it in my latest book because there is a chapter in Die Verwandlung der Welt on the international system, international politics and war—somewhat unusual for global historians these days. This is a legacy of my brief and intense training at the LSE in the late 1970s.

Meanwhile, what happened to your research—was there a PhD topic in your mind already? My PhD topic was a combination of my two most important historical interests at the time. That was first of all the development of China in the twentieth century, and secondly imperial Britain. I never warmed to Japan, which was Ian’s subject. He probably never understood why I didn’t care to learn Japanese, but he was gener- ous and supported my developing orientation. So I tried to bring together my old interest in China, especially for the pre-1949 Republican period (which one has to study in order to understand what happened later) and my newly-acquired interest in Britain’s international position and in particular the British Empire.

So the British connection of your research was born in London? Yes, very much so. And I think that was, looking at those origins from the vantage point of today, a good starting point. China as that quintessentially closed (of course that is a cliché) civilisation with its enormous continuity, and on the other hand, the British Empire, waterborne and scattered all over the world. I intuitively found that to be a fascinating tension. From that I developed a PhD topic on the question what happened to British imperialism in the Far East after the British had lost their dominant position in China after the First World War. Despite the rise of China’s nationalism, British business was going strong in the 1920s and 1930s without being much effected by the political turmoil in the country. My question was very simple: how did the big British firms in Shanghai and elsewhere manage to safe- guard and even extend their economic interests and their physical establishment of wharves, factories, coal mines, and whatever else, on the territory of the Chinese Republic in an age of emerging nationalism and the erosion of Britain’s power to control events in China?

Was that still a politically inspired research question connected to your fearly years at the Gymnasium and Marburg? No, my political engagement was quite weak at that time. There was perhaps a tenuous link through Marxist interpretations of Chinese history, especially a peculiar attempt to explain China’s “special path” in modern history. The idea was that before “socialism” was victorious in 1949, there had been neither a purely “feudal” nor a “bourgeois” stage. Rather, China was a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial country,” and when capitalism came, it assumed the characteristic form of “bureaucratic capitalism,” especially under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s [Jiang Jieshi] Guomindang during the Nanjing period 1927-37. I wasn’t empirically convinced, but found that an intriguing idea and wondered: what is “bureaucratic capitalism”? In a different way, this question continues to be relevant today. The main result of my thesis was to have shown in great detail how the big British companies such as BAT or Butterfield & Swire operated quite independent- ly from British politics on the spot in China and how they dovetailed with the poli- cies of the Guomindang for opening China to foreign capital. So in a way this is the pre-history of the opening up of China for foreign business that occurred on a far grander scale after 1978. The Guomindang started a precursor of that policy in the 1930s in conjunction with Western business interests and with only the tenuous involvement of the government in London and of British diplomats and consuls in China. In a way, it was business imperialism after political imperialism. And I developed a model to explain that. The book was published under very difficult circumstances in Germany. No historical series accepted it because China was anathema to any decent history series; so it was published in a small sinological series. But then, to my utter surprise, it won the attention (and this was probably the great turning point in my professional advancement) of the famous Paul Kennedy at Yale, who reviewed it very favourably in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and alerted the readers of the journal to an article sum- marising the book that I had just published in China Quarterly. That article was fairly successful; one of the younger scholars later to use the model was actually Frans- Paul van der Putten of Leiden University and editor of Itinerario.

Did you ever consider leaving Germany for good to extend you career somewhere else? Not really. The Kennedy review was an enormous encouragement. When I applied for a research fellowship at the German Historical Institute in London, I got it and went back to London in 1982. My boss at the Institute was Wolfgang J. Mommsen who, at a fairly late stage of my academic education, became my second genuine “teacher.” He had no regional stake in China but was generally interested in imperialism and a comparative approach. In Germany there had been for a short while a broad concern with imperialism. Hans-Ulrich Wehler had published his book Bismarck und der Imperialismus in 1969. A couple of other books, especially on the German colonial empire, appeared during the following years. Within that generation of historians studying imperialism Wolfgang Mommsen was the only one with an almost universal perspective. He was also the person who introduced foreign theories of imperialism to Germany. He was a friend of Ronald Robinson

whom I met several times, of David Fieldhouse and of many others of that seminal generation of historians. He brought many of them to the Institute. Immediately after I joined the Institute in 1982 we had a big conference called “Imperialism and After.” The volume emerging from it was later published in English.1 It is still a very good collection. Robinson was there, Fieldhouse, the economic historian Paul Bairoch from Geneva; many of those prominent in the field; from the German side, among others, the best-known historian of modern India on the European continent, Dietmar Rothermund, who held a chair at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, founded in 1962. Also present was Rudolf von Albertini, a scholar who was instrumental in establishing non-European or non-Western historical studies in the German-speaking countries, perhaps comparable to Henk Wesseling in the Netherlands. He was Swiss and had been a professor of modern European history at Heidelberg before moving to Zurich in 1967. Albertini inspired a whole generation of talented PhD candidates, and he established a series of monographs on “colonial and overseas history” where much of the most important work in German has been published up to the present day. But to answer your original question: for my generation, leaving Germany in pur- suit of a career elsewhere in Europe or in the United States was far less of an option than it has been for younger colleagues in recent years. I never received an offer, and I never considered becoming an academic emigrant.

After your second stay in London, you got a position as reader for political science at the University of Freiburg. Could you include non-European subjects in your teaching by that time? Within certain limits I could include non-European subjects. I offered courses on international relations, colonialism, theories of imperialism, China, etc. But my main duty was political theory. Anyway, I maintained my old interest in China. And at some point, I can’t remember why and when, I decided to write a synthesis of the integration of China into the modern world system—a non-Wallersteinian synthesis that would include political but also economic aspects and in a sense even vaguely cultural aspects. That was my earliest book of synthesis. Since then I have found it always quite helpful to have a broadly conceived book to follow upon a research monograph. So, almost a decade after my PhD thesis I wrote the book China und die Weltgesellschaft (China and the World Society), covering the period from the eighteenth century onwards. It wasn’t meant to lead to anything because I had not the intention of a “Habilitation” at the time. I just wrote this manuscript and I gave it to a history professor at Freiburg, Ernst Schulin (my teacher number three), and he passed it on, without telling me, to Beck Publishers in Munich. One day I received a letter from the history editor at Beck’s expressing his interest in the manuscript. How long would it take to finish the book? Would I be interested in a contract? I was. The book came out in 1989. C.H. Beck have been my principal publishers ever since. They also published my study of European attitudes towards Asia during the eighteenth century (Die Entzauberung Asiens, 1998), a personal favorite among my books, meant as a contribution to the debate about historical “oriental- ism” triggered by Edward Said. It was possible under the rules of Freiburg University to submit a published book in application for a Habilitation, in Germany still an unavoidable stepping-stone

towards becoming a professor. Thus, I obtained a venia legendi [permission for lecturing] for modern and contemporary history. And then I was lucky again. The Open University in Hagen had just established a professorship for non-European history. I got that job and I spent the next six years writing study materials across a broad range of non-European topics. That allowed me to read a lot since I didn’t have physically present students; it was almost like being in a vacuum. I was left with plenty of time on my hands to acquire a broad knowledge of colonialism and imperialism, something that stands me in good stead nowadays, as a teacher of “general” history at the University of Konstanz.

Would you say that the German approach to this topic, the history of European expansion, was in any way different at that time to the more maritime historiographies in Britain, France and Holland? In Germany, there was a fairly strong interest in the continental empires—the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire and the Tsarist Empire. A superb book on an obvious, but much-neglected topic had been written by Dietrich Geyer. Geyer was the intellectual giant among German historians of Eastern Europe. His Der rus- sische Imperialismus of 1977 is still a classic study to be read alongside Andreas Kappeler’s great Russland als Vielvölkerreich (1992).2 Geyer successfully trans- posed ideas and concepts of Wehler’s Bielefeld School into a Russian context. A power in his own right was and is Wolfgang Reinhard, a professor of early modern history at the University of Freiburg. Reinhard never belonged to any “school”; in a sense, he created his own. His magnificent four-volume work on the history of the European expansion (1983-90), for mysterious reasons never translated into English, remains internationally unrivaled.3 Reinhard blends the maritime with the continental dimension. Long before the onset of post-colonialism, he was much more sensitive towards culture than all the other German and Swiss historians mentioned before. Whereas the Wehlers, Mommsens, and Geyers hardly ever cared for anything earlier than “High Imperialism,” Reinhard, who is also a world authority on early modern Italy, the Papacy and the evolution of the state, always bears the long- term sweep of history in mind. His scope of vision is unique, while certainly not being “typically German.”

Let us now switch to your recently published book Die Verwandlung der Welt (The Transformation of the World). What struck us most was the architecture of the book. Could you tell us how the book’s idea and fabric emerged? The general answer is that it is a NIAS [Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, in Wassenaar] book. I spent a full year there thinking about the architecture of it. There is actually an intriguing story in the background. I came to NIAS with the intention of doing a comparative history of European overseas empires in the nineteenth century. Upon arrival, I knocked at the door of Henk Wesseling, the rector of NIAS at that time. After a pleasant chat, Henk said: “I just sent off my book on the nineteenth-century European empires to the publishers.” I protested, as politely as possible, “What, that’s my subject!” And that serene master merely said: “Don’t worry!” So what can you do in such a situation? There were just two options: either to go several steps backwards and do a research monograph, or to hazard a Flucht nach

vorn [take the bull by the horns] and attempt something even grander with empires being just a facet of a comprehensive portrait of an age. I decided for the latter option. So I spent my time at NIAS considering many alternatives of the contents and construction of the book. Peer Vries, now at the University of Vienna and one of the sharpest minds in comparative history, was a fellow at the same time, and we had frequent conversations. He doesn’t agree entirely with the book as I later wrote it. For very good reasons he prefers a more problem-oriented historiography, but we are still on the best of terms. After returning from Wassenaar to the mundane duties of a German professor, I shelved the project. In 2004, Chris Bayly’s masterpiece The Birth of the Modern World appeared out of the blue and, for some time, seemed to have killed off my own venture. But I overcame the “Bayly shock” and managed to write the bulk of my manuscript in 2006 and 2007. An invitation from the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation to spend a sabbatical year in Munich made possible the completion of the book.

So Die Verwandlung der Welt didn’t follow an existing paradigm? No, and I was lucky in not having to comply with a series template. I had nurtured many minor obsessions with things which should somehow be included, for instance animals and opera. This is one of the reasons why even people in search of scholarly entertainment like the book. You turn a page and then there is suddenly something on a turtle. You cannot devise such ornaments of the “architecture” at the very beginning. They crop up spontaneously when you are sitting in front of the screen. Several features of the overall design had to be corrected during the process of writing. For example, the division between the long “panoramic” chapters and the shorter “thematic” chapters was a fairly late invention. It is the result of a change of gear required for straightforward practical reasons. If I had continued in the original epical manner, the book would have run into two or three volumes. Therefore, I pulled the emergency brake and developed a kind of more concise écriture, dis- pensing with much of the illustrative materials I had collected. There was also a certain influence from my university. Things I learned from my colleagues in the department of history and sociology at Konstanz include the importance of communication, memory, and the media. The very first chapter is soaked with those issues. Other things had to be corrected in the course of writing. Thus I never wanted to write a chapter on religion, an especially demanding subject. But then I came to the conclusion that, for systematic reasons, such a chapter would be indispensable. A few people seem to have found it worth reading.

Where would you yourself situate the book in the field world history? It is in many different respects a middle-of-the-road or compromise book. What I mean is that it is neither a “synthesis” nor an “analysis,” but both at the same time. Books like this one and also Chris Bayly’s Birth of Modern World are analytical syntheses. We cannot have enough of them. Someone else should write another global history of the nineteenth century. A middle-of-the-road book is also one that includes all kinds of concepts and theorems without committing itself to any grand theory, be it Marxism, or world-system theory, or post-colonialism. My approach is deliberately eclectic. And third, the book is middle of the road in that the barriers

between the usual compartments of history are lowered. The greatest personal joy in writing was in combining so many different approaches to history.

Your book is very successful in the German book market. How did people in Germany respond to the book? Did you write it with a particular audience in mind? The most amazing thing is that even today I get emails and letters from all kinds of people pointing out mistakes or making comments. My most contentious reader is a retired military officer who has sent me a thirty-page list of errata, most of them justified. The later editions from edition number four onwards are much improved. No, I didn’t have a particular audience in mind. I am optimistic enough to imagine students who tackle such a big “think book” even though much of it is unlikely to be useful for their exams. And of course it is gratifying that there is a general audience interested in such a broad, but in no way racy, narrative. I defend the position that a historian should communicate with a broader audience without letting his standards slip.

What is your next project? After having co-edited, with the much-admired American historian Fritz Stern, an anthology of historiography, I haven’t got any plans ready to present to the public. But two things are already clear. The new book will focus on the twentieth century and people will play an important role in it. At the moment I am groping for ways— I always need much time for that—for coming closer to individuals than in my previous work. Certainly not a biography, but something with a clearly articulated biographical touch.

Notes 1 Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities. London: German Historical Institute, 1986. 2 For English translations see: Dietrich Geyer. Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914. Leamington Spa: Berghahn, 1987; and Andreas Kappeler. The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. Harlow: Longman, 2001. 3 Wolfgang Reinhard. Geschichte der europäischen Expansion, 4 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983- 90. And more recently: Wolfgang Reinhard. A Short History of Colonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Entretien avec Jürgen Osterhammel 1

Jürgen Osterhammel est professeur d'histoire contemporaine et du temps présent à l'Université de Constance. En 2009, son ouvrage Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. ]ahrhunderts (La transformation du monde. Une histoire du XIX' siècle)' a connu un grand succès international. Cet ouvrage de !600 pages traite de l'histoire mondiale du XIX' siècle3• Jürgen Osterhammel a remporté en 2009 le prix de l'essai culturel décerné par le Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR). Il a reçu en 2010 le prix Leibniz, distinc tion scientifique internationale la mieux dotée (2,5 millions d'euros).

Monsieur Osterhammel, comment est née lïdée d'écrire un livre sur l'his toire mondiale du XIX' siècle et combien de temps avez-vous travaillé à cette œuvre majeure? En Allemagne, les ouvrages de ce genre paraissent généralement à l'initia rive d'un éditeur, en plusieurs volumes au sein d'une collection. Cela n'a pas été le cas ici. J'ai élaboré tout seul mon projet et n'ai jamais non plus cherché de financement extérieur pour le mener à bien, une pratique pourtant répan due en Allemagne. Le livre a trois racines. A l'origine, je voulais écrire une histoire des empires coloniaux européens au XIX' siècle, mais j'ai appris que l'historien néerlandais Henk L. Wesseling était justement en train de rédiger un ouvrage de ce type. J'ai donc en quelque sorte <

1. Entretien réalisé par écrit par Quentin Deluermoz et Mareike KOnig. Traducrion en français par Valentine Meunier. 2. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. }ahrhunderts, München, C.H. Beek. 2009. 3. Cf le compte rendu de l'ouvrage, par Quentin Deluermoz, dans le dernier numéro de la Revue d'his toire du XIX! siècle. SOCIÉTÉ D'HISTOIRE DE LA RÉVOLUTION DE 1848 ET DES RÉVOLUTIONS DU XIX' SIÈCLE SOCIÉTÉ D'HISTOIRE DE LA RÉVOLUTION Fondée en 1904 et reconnue d'utilité publique par le décret du 14 avril1933, DE 1848 ET DES RÉVOLUTIONS DU XIX' SIÈCLE la Société d'histoire de la révolution de 1848 et des révolutions du XIX~ siècle a été dirigée successivement par : A. Carnot, E. Levasseur, H. Moysset, Ferdinand-Dreyfus, E. Denis, M. Faure, H. Manin, E. Bourgeois, P. Raphaël, Ch. Schmidt, A.-M. Gossez,J. Godard, G. Bourgin, E. Tersen, E. Labrousse,]. Droz, J. Godechot, M. Agulhon, Ph. Vigier, A. Corbin, J.-L. Mayaud et Jean-Claude Caron. Sa présidente actuelle est Sylvie Aprile.

Ses présidents d'honneur sont: Maurice Agulhon, Robert Balland (t), Jean-Claude Caron, Alain Corbin, Jacques Droz Ct), Henri Dubief (t), Louis Girard Ct),Jacques Godechot Ct), Rémi Gossez (t),ErnestLabrousse Ct),J ean-LucMayaud,Michelle Perrot, Georges Rougeron et Fernand Rude Ct). Revue d'histoire Bureau Présidente : Sylvie Aprile du XIXe siècle Vice-Présidents: Raymond Huard et Pierre Lévêque Secrétaire général : Louis Hincker No 46- 2013/1 Trésorier : Christophe Voilliot

Conseil d'administration SylvieAprile,FabriceBensimon,BrunoBertherat,FlorenceBourillon,PhilippeBoutry, Claude-Isabelle Brelot, Jean-Claude Caron, Manuel Charpy, Frédéric Chauvaud, • Carole Christen-Lécuyer, Laurent Colantonio, Philippe Darriulat, Noëlle Dauphin, Nicole Edelman, Emmanuel Fureix, Jean Garrigues, Laurence Guignard, François Guillet, Louis Hincker, Raymond Huard, François Jarrige, Dominique Kalifa, Jacqueline Lalouette, Pierre Lévêque, Jean-Noël Luc, Judith Lyon-Caen, Gilles Malandain, Jean-Luc Mayaud, Paule Petitier, Natalie Petiteau, :i\1ichèle Riot-Sarcey, Odile Roynette, Jean-Jacques Yvorel.

Adhésion

L'adhésion annuelle à la Société de 1848 comprend la livraison de la Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle (2 numéros par an).

Membres individuels : UE : 38 euros hors UE : 42 euros Étudiants (sur justificatif) : 24 euros Institutions : UE : 42 euros hors UE : 48 euros

Règlement par chèque bancaire ou postal adressé à : Christophe VOILLIOT, Résidence du Tholon- Bât 4 36 rue Chaudot- 89 300 JOIGNY -France chèque libellé à l'ordre de: <> .

Siège social: c /o Centre d'histoire du XIXe siècle, Université Paris-Sorbonne 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 PARIS ANCIENNEMENT 1848. RÉVOLUTIONS ET MUTATIONS AU XIX' SIÈCLE Revue publiée avec le concours du Centre national du livre PUBLIÉE AVEC LE CONCOURS DU CENTRE NATIONAL DU LIVRE 138 REVUE D'HISTOIRE DU XIXe SIÈCLE Entretien avec Jürgen Osterhammel 139

histoire sociale et histoire culturelle me semblaient par exemple obsolètes. l'émergence de structures nouvelles dans de nombreux champs de la réa J'ai travaillé pendant environ six ans sur ce livre - avec de longues pauses lité historique observable dans les années 1870 et 1880. I.:éventail va de la toutefois, car je n'ai bénéficié que de dispenses d'enseignement relativement soi-disant seconde révolution industrielle jusqu'à la concentration, par pous courtes. sées, des innovations scientifiques et aux balbutiements d'une avant-garde esthétique, en passant par l'extension et l'intensification du colonialisme. Vous faites ressortir dam votre ouvrage la particularité du XIX' siècle au Ces tendances- ce qui nous ramène à vos précédentes questions- ont essen regard de l'histoire mondiale. Pourriez-vous nous expliquer ce point par tiellement émané de «l'Occident», mais leurs lointaines répercussions, au rapport à l'histoire globale ou connectée du XVI' au XVIII' siècle, qui moins, ont été ressenties dans d'autres parties du monde, l'impérialisme, le insiste plus fortement sur l'équilibre entre les diverses régions du monde, colonialisme et le développement de marchés internationaux plus directe tandis que vous soulignez le poids particulier de l'Europe pour le siècle suivant? ment que d'autres. Mes propos sur l'importance particulière de l'Europe au XIX' siècle Vous avez mené cette entreprise de grande ampleur tout seul, alors qu'il ont en effet été critiqués par ceux qui nous exhortent à travailler toujours existe déjà quelques synthèses collectives d'une histoire transnationale, pour et partout sur la « provincialisation de l'Europe>>. Un tel point de vue me rester dam une forme un peu plus modeste. Pensom aux travaux de Tho semble dogmatique et anhistorique. r anti-eurocentrisme peut aussi se muer mas Bender sur les États-Unis ou en France à l'Histoire du monde au en idéologie. Le pouvoir relatif de centres militaires et économiques doit XV" siècle de Patrick Bouc heron. En France justement, il est quasiment être abordé comme une variable. C'est une lapalissade pour tous ceux qui impossible à un chercheur d'entreprendre seul une telle étude. Pouvez-vous s'intéressent aux systèmes étatiques et aux structures impériales sur la longue expliquer, pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas votre travail, en quoi réside durée; la situation mondiale actuelle en offre des exemples marquants. Le l'intérêt d'un travail individuel par rapport à une recherche collective? rayonnement de certaines civilisations se modifie lui aussi. Au XIX' siècle, •Je souhaite vous contredire si vous introduisez la catégorie morale de la c'est essentiellement l'Europe qui a impulsé le développement de grands sys modestie. Je ne crois pas qu'elle soit légitime aujourd'hui alors même que tèmes d'ordre et de communication. Dans de nombreuses régions du monde, nous sommes, enseignants-chercheurs et chercheurs, tous les jours poussés l'Europe occidentale devint un modèle à la fois admiré et critiqué. Dans par les hommes politiques et autres managers de la recherche à <

et essentialiste, ce qui a débouché sur d'autres formes, plutôt décomtruites, de place pour introduire des nuances. Je suis aussi issu de l'école des. clas d'historiographie (dictionnaires, encyclopédies, catalogues). Les synthèses siques de la sociologie, avant tout de Max Weber. Elle apprend la concisiOn. ont-elles aujourd'hui regagné du terrain, notamment au sein de l'histoire mondiale~ qui est souvent présefztée comme particulièrement « risquée» ? Une traduction de votre ouvrage en fiançais est-elle prévue? La «réputation» des synthèses en général ne m'intéresse pas tellement. Elle est en cours et devrait paraître en 2014 au Seuil. Les synthèses ne seront jamais que des produits dérivés. Mes deux travaux de Vous êtes titulaire du prix Leibniz, distinction scientifique internationale recherche précédents sont à mes yeux des contributions plus importantes que la mieux dotée (2,5 millions d'euros). Cette somme doit être allouée à des Die Verwandlung der Welt. Une synthèse n'est <

Vous avez adopté une organisation originale de la vaste matière de votre livre. Vous délaissez les structures spatio-temporelles habituelles pour pri vilégier des dynamiques et des thèmes spécifiques, dont la superposition produit une trame complexe, multidimensionnelle et singulière de ce qui a composé le XIX' siècle. Votre ouvrage se dérobe de ce foit aux grands récits et à leurs approches méthodologiques qui sous-tendent souvent ce genre de travaux (téléologie, «grands moteurs», perspective marxiste ou libérale, etc.}. Pourquoi avoir opté pour cette démarche? Vous venez de décrire à merveille la méthode ou en avez déjà pointé ses points forts. Le livre cherche à tenir une ligne médiane entre une pure pré sentation des matériaux et une interprétation close d'une époque. On a décrit sa forme par l'adjectif «modulaire», je préférerais «ouverte». Car l'ouvrage n'est pas avare en interprétations, mais il renonce aux procédés rhétoriques qui les imposeraient aux lecteurs. C'est d'ailleurs ce qui déçoit ceux qui cherchent une thèse globale, concise et univoque.

Votre œuvre, pour la comparer par exemple à des travaux similaires de Hobsbawm ou de Bayly, est également originale sur le plan stylistique. Le livre est clairement structuré (chapitres, sous-chapitres, 1, 2, 3), les phrases sont directes, le ton neutre, peut-être un peu ftoid même paifois. Autant d'avantages patents pour une lecture efficace (par exemple pour la préparation de séminaires). Pourquoi avez-vous choisi ce style «objectif>>? Je n'ai personnellement pas eu l'impression d'utiliser un style «objectif» ou de l'avoir choisi sciemment, mais je constate que vous touchez à quelque chose d'important avec ce qualificatif. De plus, le livre n'est absolument pas «narratif», bien que les éditeurs se plaisent dans leurs publicités à éveiller l'idée stéréotypée qu'on ne fait que «raconter» l'histoire. Il aurait fallu plus Itinerario, Vol. 40, No. 3, 357–376. © 2016 Research Institute for History, Leiden University doi:10.1017/S0165115316000607

Writing Global History and Its Challenges—A Workshop with Jürgen Osterhammel and Geoffrey Parker

MARTINE VAN ITTERSUM, FELICIA GOTTMANN, and TRISTAN MOSTERT*

On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely the conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. The central question was to what extent this fast- changing ﬁeld required adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses in particular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yet reconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities. In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have been ordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles proﬁting from peripheral spaces, for example —and imposed by certain groups of people on others, resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenous peoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples or areas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where does globalization end?

Keywords: Global history, history of empire, environmental history, Jürgen Osterhammel, Geoffrey Parker.

Introduction On a pleasantly warm and sunny day—somewhat unusual for Scotland—twenty graduate students and academics from the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews gathered in Dundee for a workshop on global history. Dr. Martine van Ittersum and Dr. Felicia Gottmann, members of the Scottish Centre for Global History, organized the event, which was co-sponsored by the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews, the journal Itinerario, and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. In three lively workshop sessions, the participants discussed the state of the ﬁeld—conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s)—with two of the most

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distinguished global historians working today, Professor Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Professor Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University.1 Geoffrey Parker, author of Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), was born in Nottingham in 1943, and grew up amid the destruction caused by World War II. “As I looked at the streets and noted the surprising absence of one or more houses, I remember thinking: ‘Great and terrible things have happened here, and I want to find out why’.” He went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to read history in 1962, and almost immediately had his first direct encounter with global history: “During my first term as an undergraduate, for the only time in my life so far, I thought I was about to die.” The Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, and Parker recalled how “After eating dinner together in the college hall on the night of 25 October 1962, my friends and I all shook hands and said goodbye. We rated our chances of seeing another dawn at about 50/50. When I read the accounts of John F Kennedy’s discussions with his advisers in the ‘ExComm,’ all of them apparently prepared to fight the USSR to the last European, I think we were a trifle optimistic.”2 Parker did not study global history at Cambridge (no courses were offered), but he became enthralled by Sir John Elliott’s lectures on the history of early modern Europe, and in particular by the question why Spain, the greatest empire of its day, failed to suppress the Dutch Revolt. Under Elliott’s supervision, and thanks in part to the generosity of Fernand Braudel, who opened the doors of several French provincial archives for him, Parker completed The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road,1567–1659: The Logistics of Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries Wars (1972). Four years later, while teaching at the University of St. Andrews, he received an invitation to serve as a scholarly consultant for the Times Atlas of World History: his first encounter with global history as an intellectual endeavour.3 Still, he has never offered courses on the topic for either undergraduate or graduate students, instead teaching early modern European and military history at St. Andrews, the University of British Columbia, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Yale University, and Ohio State University. In 2012, the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie voor Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) awarded him the biennial Heineken Foundation Prize for History. Parker’s current project—a biography of Charles V (1500–1558), Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain—took him in 2014 to the University of Konstanz. The University Library contains copies of no less than 120,000 letters written by or to Charles V. This led to a chance encounter between Parker and Jürgen Osterhammel, a professor at Konstanz and the author of the magisterial The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2009; English translation, 2014). Osterhammel explained that he, too, had never taught global history—a subject unknown under that label at any of the universities where he was employed. In fact, he considers himself less international than the younger generation of German historians—for example, he continues to write his books in German. When he began

his graduate work in the 1970s, the historical profession in Germany was still very Eurocentric. Historians who specialized in non-Western fields found themselves on the margins of the profession. Consequently, his Ph.D. thesis on the history of Chinese foreign relations (1980) was published three years later not as a work of history but in a Sinological book series.4 He never experienced a personal turn or conversion to global or world history. Instead, he has always taught courses on the history of China, the British Empire, and European colonialism. In his view, British and German approaches to global history make for an interesting comparison. Global history in Britain can be conceived of as a broadening and modernizing of the well-established field of imperial history. Germany, which never had much of an overseas empire and little imperial historiography, partly imported global history from abroad and partly profited from the influence of the Bielefeld School of comparative European history, now slowly establishing links with Aussereuropäische Geschichte, that is, “non-European history.” Jürgen Kocka, the great social historian, for example, has recently undertaken a global history of capitalism.5 Although Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World contains over 1,100 pages, he does not believe that every global historian should inflict big books on the reading public. Moreover, The Transformation of the World is based on secondary literature out of necessity, not as a matter of personal preference. Osterhammel feels that, given the scope of the book, he should have consulted a huge number of documentary collections—but there were no sabbaticals or institutional funding for extended journeys to archives. Some have wondered why, having focused on eighteenth- and twentieth-century topics before, he opted for the nineteenth century in The Transformation of the World. The reason is that the nineteenth century was perfectly positioned between his main research interests. He had no personal stake in any of the major historiographical debates concerning the nineteenth century, and so, crucially, could offer a quasi-ethnographic view from the outside. He has continued to expand his focus since writing The Transformation of the World. He is now pursuing his interests in decolonization, global intellectual history, and classical music. Together with Akira Iriye, he is editor-in-chief of a six-volume A History of the World, published jointly since 2012 by Harvard University Press and C. H. Beck in Munich.6 In 2014, the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (the German Academy for Language and Literature) awarded him its annual Sigmund Freud Preis für Wissenschaftliche Prosa for non-fiction literature. The workshop sessions that followed focussed on three questions:

a) “Does size matter?”, which explored the methodologies of global history. b) “Global history for whom?”, which addressed the thorny topics of politics and ideology. c) “Are we all global historians now?”, which speculated about the possible future directions that the ﬁeld might take.

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“Does Size Matter?” The first session analysed the extent to which global history requires adjustments to “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The focus of the discussion was an exchange of ideas on “How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History,” involving four historians from the United States—Sebouh David Aslanian, Joyce E. Chaplin, Kristin Mann, and Ann McGrath—published in the American Historical Review in December 2013.7 According to Osterhammel, this debate reflected the anxieties of historians in the face of big history, supported by digital humanities and big data. A case in point is the Big History Project, financially supported by Bill Gates.8 Should big history be regarded as a threat or an opportunity? Workshop participants pointed out that historians have always had the choice of taking either a horizontal or a vertical approach to their research topics, that is, to either cast their nets wide or drill deep. Moreover, it is essential to zoom in and out in order to construct a persuasive historical argument. As Jaap Jacobs, St. Andrews, noted, “seeing the world in a grain of sand” also belongs in the historian’s toolbox. Jürgen Osterhammel addressed the problem by asking “the size of what?”, and considered four different categories:

Publications In his 2012 interview with Itinerario, David Armitage mentioned the “crisis of the codex,” and seemed to dismiss big books as “dinosaurs,” preferring digital presentation or relatively slim volumes of at most 150,000 words instead.9 The standard length of articles published in scholarly journals is also getting shorter. Still, the robust sales of the recent global histories published by Osterhammel, Parker, and others suggest that the age of “dinosaurs” has not ended yet.

Geographical scope Osterhammel contrasted the immediate cause of the First World War in July 1914 with the outbreak of “Spanish Flu” in January 1918. The July Crisis of 1914, which began with the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, involved only a few dozen people, all of them residing in European capital cities. The crisis would have immense global repercussions. The mutual misunderstandings and miscommunications of the handful of monarchs, statesmen, generals, and high-ranking civil servants would result in World War I—but nobody knew that at the time. By contrast, the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918–19 was perceived as a global event from the start.

Time spans In Osterhammel’s view, not all global history has to conform to Fernand Braudel’s longue durée.10 The time spans covered by the Ph.D. candidates and postdoctoral

researchers working at the University of Konstanz range from six to sixty years, and this is probably the norm for historians—not just global historians—at many universities, largely because those who attempt to cover longer periods run out of funding.

Significance Are we talking about “big events” versus “small events” here? How do we judge that? The crucial issue is the future potential of an event. For example, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845–1923) discovered X-rays in his laboratory in Würzburg on 8 November 1895. Two weeks later, he made the very first picture using X-rays (of the hand of his wife Anna Bertha). These were local events, but with enormous potential, and, after some time, a global impact. Osterhammel confessed that he was not terribly interested in “deep history” (that is, the study of the distant past of the human species, stretching back 50,000 years or more), which he considers to be closely related to astrophysics and evolutionary biology. He gave two reasons for his scepticism: ∙ Deep history is apolitical, and does not even try to address the major political questions of the day, and ∙ deep history has no effective way of countering the claims of national histories—that is, histories of a far more limited timescale, which, contrary to Armitage’s optimistic claims in the 2012 Itinerario interview,11 remain a popular format among historians and the reading public. Osterhammel concluded that the question of size was of secondary importance. Ph.D. students must give very careful thought to the question of how they manage their global history projects. Conversely, for works of synthesis, selectivity—not “size”—is the essential issue, because syntheses, too, must be controlled. They have to be selective in various ways. John Darwin, author of After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000,12 did not claim to be comprehensive. As a specialist on Eurasia and Africa, he paid little attention to Latin America or the Pacific, for example. This in no way invalidated his contribution to global historical analysis. Perhaps to reassure the numerous graduate students and early-career scholars present, Parker insisted that a “big book” should rarely if ever be a historian’s first book. Such projects, he argued, take a lot of time and should be considered a career goal rather than a starting point. Nor did he consider the methodological issues raised by global history to be characteristic of that field alone. He identified five common problems: 1. the question of scales (jeux d’échelles), that is, the micro versus the macro problem 2. the question of explanation and causation (are there “laws” of history?) 3. the Braudelian issue of human agency versus structure 4. the comparison and analysis of connections and connectedness 5. the contested legitimacy of “grand narratives”

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All historians must address these problems: they are not confined to those who wish to write global history. Parker also noted the problem of finding an appropriate chronology when writing global history. Does a timeframe that works for one region (say Europe) also make sense for other regions? Parker found good reason to begin his narrative of the seventeenth-century “crisis” in 1618, since that year saw not only the beginning of prolonged conflicts in both Europe and China, but also a sudden drop in global temperatures. However, it proved impossible to find a single date for the end of the crisis—although most afflicted states and societies began to recover at some point in the 1680s. He recalled a detailed discussion of this conundrum by participants in the “Special Forum: The Afterlife of Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis” held at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., in January 2014.13 As for knowing how much detail to include, consider the July crisis of 1914. Despite hundreds of studies of how the Great Powers blundered into war, and thousands of surviving documents, only in 2012 did a historian manage to provide a definitive account of the process by which the British cabinet decided to declare war on Germany in the first days of August 1914.14 Once again, the challenges that face global historians face all historians. The workshop discussion now turned to contingency. As Parker pointed out, when it comes to differentiating between “big events” and “small events,” the role of contingency must not be underestimated. The old-fashioned historiographical consensus that big events require big causes is now balanced by the realization that small events can have immense consequences as well. Parker cited the example of the Hungarian theoretical physicist Leo Szilard, who first visualized how to create a “nuclear chain reaction” when he observed how traffic lights changed from green through yellow to red while waiting to cross a London street in 1933. When Szilard filed a patent for his idea the following year, he specifically mentioned that, with it, “I can produce an explosion.” He was entirely correct. But it took eleven years, tens of thousands of co-workers, and billions of dollars to produce the “explosions” that would abruptly end World War II.15 Jim Livesey, founding director of the Scottish Centre for Global History at the University of Dundee,16 sounded a note of caution at this point. More people than just historians are engaged in global history, he noted, and not all of them share the historian’s approach to the past. Economists, for example, do not accept the rules of contingency. How do we distinguish global history from global economic history? Livesey suggested that global history should be considered a perspective on a topic— an approach, rather than a conceptual understanding. The workshop then discussed different types of global or connected histories. Bernhard Struck, founding director of the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History at the University of St. Andrews,17 compared and contrasted transnational history and global history. In Struck’s view, the “transnational” operates at a lower level, on a continental rather than a global scale. Transnational history is the entangled history of nations and/or nation-states, such as, for example, Germany and Poland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Is it possible to trace the genealogies of global history in Britain? Workshop participants pointed out that the Warwick School prefers to focus on “connections”— usually between Europe or Africa and another region of the world—rather than “comparisons.” Certain examples of the “new international history” came in for criticism as being little more than twenty-first century repackaging of old-fashioned diplomatic history. However, workshop participants agreed that the fashion for global history had raised the bar for good practice in historical research. Parker suggested that the new “normal” in terms of epistemology requires a symmetrical approach: historians must always look at all parties to a problem, and at all the relevant sources. On any given research topic, they must become familiar with the existing literature in all relevant languages. One can no longer call oneself an “expert” on, let us say, Anglo-Dutch relations without examining sources and the secondary literature available in at least Dutch and English. Guy Rowlands, St. Andrews, drew attention to the practical problem of access to sources, which he considered a particularly pressing one for global historians. Digitization of archives is usually seen as an important step forward in making primary sources available to (potential) users. Parker provided the example of Spain’s Patrimonio Nacional, which has already digitized fifty million documents from various archives, almost all of them available on-line. He can consult them (and if necessary print them) in his office in Columbus, Ohio, whether or not the archive itself is open.18 Other workshop participants provided more instances of valuable digitization projects, such as those undertaken by the Indonesian National Archives and Dutch National Archives.19 Yet Livesey noted that digitization is understood as appropriation by quite a few subaltern historians in the Caribbean—scholars who can read documents at home may cease to visit the region they study. Many European institutions are also unhappy at the prospect of putting entire collections online. Parker then urged Ph.D. students to “muddy their boots” regardless, for two reasons. It is always better, he argued, to look in person at the places one studies, and not rely on, for example, Google maps. Visiting archives in person allows one to meet other scholars working on the same topic or a closely related one. Parker did not succeed in convincing the younger members of his audience—not initially, at least. They pointed to the growing importance of virtual forums, mailing lists, and dedi- cated social media platforms. Parker responded by emphasizing the importance of meeting local historians, who are not always active in such virtual forums and who can provide a local perspective that might be very different from one’s own. For example, while working on Global Crisis in 2002, Parker visited Shanghai and met a local historian to whom he explained his theory that climate change explained the collapse of Ming rule in Jiangnan (the lower Yangzi valley.) “Rubbish!” the local historian exclaimed. “The critical factor in causing the catastrophic famines of the mid-seventeenth century was the practice of partible inheritance, which created ever- diminishing landholdings per farmer.” Although Parker did not abandon his belief in the role of climate change, he gained important insights from this exchange of ideas, and he incorporated them into the argument of Global Crisis.

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Osterhammel concluded this part of our discussions by noting the confusing state of the ﬁeld of global history—although he stressed that this should be expected in a rapidly growing ﬁeld. Could somebody step forward to map and categorize the vast amount of empirical work done in a global history? None present volunteered, but all considered Sebastian Conrad’s What is Global History (2016) at least a step in the right direction.20

“Global History for Whom?” The second session of the day explored the politics of global history, or, the question of whose interests are served by the study of global history. The starting point of our discussions was Conrad’s What is Global History? Whilst favourably impressed with the book’s intent, scope, and execution, many workshop participants also had serious reservations, especially about the author’s conclusions in chapter 10. In particular, Parker considered it rather naïve to suggest, as Conrad does, that “gone are the days when history departments could be content with a focus on one nation alone.”21 It certainly does not apply in most British universities. As Parker put it, just look at the preponderance of faculty who study “national history” in Oxford and in some Scottish universities! The research produced in these institutions may no longer be nationalistic, but it still has a national focus. Recent ﬁgures support Parker’s sceptical view. Peter Mandler, president of the Royal Historical Society, noted in his July 2016 letter to RHS members that “only 13% of historians in UK university departments study the non-Western world; the equivalent proportion in Canada is 20% and in the US 27%.”22 Osterhammel did not share Conrad’s optimism either. He felt it was important to make two distinctions: a) between Europe-centred and Eurocentric approaches, and b) between national and nationalist history, which can, in fact, be easily camouﬂaged as world history. Chinese scholars often adopt a global perspective in order to reinforce the notion of Chinese primacy in world history. He questioned as over- optimistic David Armitage’s claim that “the hegemony of national historiography is over.”23 Global historians and their reading public constitute an autonomous sphere of “circulation”—and not a very large one at that. He estimated that the reading public for European history in Germany exceeded that for global history by a factor of ten. For example, 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts (2012), written by the German journalist Florian Illies and translated into English as 1913: The Year Before the Storm, has sold 500,000 copies in Germany alone.24 By contrast, it has become almost obligatory for German historians to situate their country’s history into transnational contexts. An early impetus in this direction came from the volume of collected essays, Das Kaiserreich Transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (2006), edited by Conrad and Osterhammel.25 Like most of the other workshop participants, Osterhammel endorsed the gloomy diagnosis of the late Christopher Bayly (1945–2015) that the prevalence of national— and often nationalist history—should not be underestimated.26 The majority of

historians in the world today are not free to write what they want, but are expected to create the “useable pasts” demanded by ruling elites, often via a kind of national genealogy (“our country in world history”). A whole body of literature exists about states and societies allegedly locked in a kind of Darwinian competition with each other. Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) can be considered the most elegant formulation of an argument of this kind.27 Do historians still have a moral responsibility towards their readers, though? Put differently, when do they neglect that responsibility? In What is Global History?, Conrad asks whether “twenty-first century global history [is] not essentially a hand- maiden of twenty-first century globalization.” His answer is that “one of the crucial tasks of global history is to offer a critical commentary on the ongoing globalization process.”28 Parker begged to differ: historical writing, he suggested, tends to mirror developments in society but does not shape them—nor, for that matter, does it shape the future. Osterhammel argued that the days are gone when Western historians considered themselves answerable to collectives and abstractions such as the nation, a class, socialism, and so on. Perhaps global historians could be said to have a duty towards “the human species.” While acknowledging this as a noble ideal, Osterhammel did not consider it particularly helpful. For many workshop participants, a thornier issue was that of language. Conrad criticizes the alleged hegemony of English as an academic language in the field of global history, and goes so far as to argue that “most global historians today continue to ignore scholarship written in other languages.”29 Parker totally disagreed with Conrad’s contention. In his view, it is the non-global historians who “ignore scholarship written in other languages.” Thus Bernard S. Capp, a specialist on mid- seventeenth century England, wrote an excellent study entitled Cromwell’s Navy (1989) based on extensive research in English sources, but completely ignored the previous study of exactly the same subject by German scholar Hans-Christoph Junge, published nine years earlier. Similarly, in his monograph The King’s Living Image (2004), about the mediation and delegation of royal power in the early modern Hispanic world, Alejandro Cañeque made no reference to a study in German published by Regine Jorzick six years earlier on much the same subject that cited many of the same sources.30 Parker quoted John Richards, another pioneer of “Big History”, who in The Unending Frontier (2003) observed that “in the best of all worlds, the author would be proficient in a half-dozen more languages.”31 He also pointed out that, if necessary, one can “pay to play” in order to follow Richards’ advice: find someone who can translate or summarize a text, be it a primary or secondary source, written in a language one cannot read. Workshop participants argued that there was nevertheless an issue with English as the lingua franca of global history. It is a factor that contributes to the worldwide dominance of Anglo-American scholarship. In communicating with readers, non- native speakers of English are at a disadvantage when they cannot articulate their research quite as well or quite as appealingly as native speakers of English can.

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True proficiency in a language exceeds the level required for a basic comprehension of primary sources, and involves a thorough appreciation of metaphor, usage, and historic linguistic change. That, of course, was also true when French and, before that, Latin and Italian had been the mediums of intellectual exchange in the Western world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The third and final discussion centred on the mantras of connectivity and mobility in the field of global history. Conrad is quite critical of this development: “The concern with globality and globalization has led many historians to privilege interactions and transfers, and to treat them as ends in themselves. Connectedness then becomes the only language that the sources seem to speak, as if this was their deep and true meaning.”32 Parker interpreted this as a critique of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s article on “Con- nected Histories” (1997) and of recent work by Subrahmanyam and others on global microhistory.33 Osterhammel disagreed, however. He considered it a swipe at anthropologists, who tend to use images of water and fluidity when referring to movement, thus misrepresenting processes that, in reality, are subject to many barriers and complications. Moreover, such a choice of metaphors ignores the salient question of global inequalities. For who is being moved? Who is doing the trading and shipping? As Osterhammel pointed out, networks do not always result in communities and certainly not in communities of equals: think of patronage networks, for example. In his view, sociological network theory offers several well-established ways to prevent such misconceptions.34 Staying with the topic of mobility and connectivity, workshop participants discussed the extent to which immobile communities were nevertheless affected by mobility—through the increased availability of consumer goods or information, for example. Jaap Jacobs brought up the “globalization of the mind”: a drip, drip, drip of tales told by people who had come into contact with individuals or groups living elsewhere on the planet. Livesey suggested that it might be more helpful to investigate whether there was a shared repertoire of behaviour as a consequence of increased global connections. Analogous to the “repertoire of empire” which Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper discussed in Empires in World History, one might re-conceptualize connectivity and mobility as being part of “repertoires of innovation,” available to different individuals or groups at different times. Parker considered this an attractive option for historians. Rulers of empires such as Philip II of Spain had a limited repertoire of military and administrative know-how at their disposal. There were limits to what they could do. In sixteenth-century Europe, although letters travelled faster than any other man-made item, they never travelled faster than one hundred miles a day, for example, limiting the ability of even the most powerful rulers to influence events, let alone control them. Although in theory rulers could learn new tricks, they did not always do so (as Parker shows in his Grand Strategy of Philip II).35 This brought us to the topic of microhistory and historical biography. In an age of global history, does it make sense to write about individual, perhaps totally unex- ceptional human beings? Most workshop participants shared a belief in the power of

human agency and in the unique opportunities offered by individual stories to reveal wider pictures, and they concluded that biography and microhistory would continue to be valuable historiographical genres.36 Of course, many open questions remain regarding the way global history can or should be written. Attacks on the methodology of an emerging ﬁeld are nothing new either. Recent dismissals of global microhistory reminded Parker of the criticism which John Elliott had levied at Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980) in The New York Review of Books.37 Elliott wondered “how many Menocchios” there had actually been in European history, and whether their stories were worth telling. He made a similar point in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford in 1991, remarking that “there is surely something amiss when the name of Martin Guerre becomes as well or better known than that of Martin Luther.”38 In 2014, Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre (1984), responded to Elliott’s criticism. In the journal Common Knowledge, she argued that both the Protestant Reformer and the obscure French peasant are part of the same universe of historical inquiry. Knowing about Martin Guerre brings understanding of the peasant world, which is also important for the trajectory of Luther’s Reformation. Knowing about Martin Luther brings knowledge of major religious change, essential to understanding Martin Guerre’s village world and what happened in it. Themes of “imposture” and “dissimulation” and the fashioning of identity are central to social conﬂicts and social and personal aspiration across the spectrum in the sixteenth century: they are found in the actual lives of both men and in Martin Luther’s sermons, as well as in the Martin Guerre trial.39 This took Parker back to the question of what is “good” and “bad” global history. Which criteria do we use for inclusion and exclusion? Where does one stop? As always, there are more questions than answers!

Conclusions: Are We All Global Historians Now? A concluding session allowed participants to exchange their experience of actually writing (global) history. Do you use index-cards? Do you work from generals to particulars? What are the advantages of single and joint authorship? At the request of various workshop participants, both Osterhammel and Parker offered some insights into the making of their respective global histories. Geoffrey Parker began.40 In 1976, he listened to a BBC broadcast featuring the American solar physicist John A. Eddy, 41 who suggested that there might have been a causal link between the so-called “Maunder Minimum” in the number of sunspots and the so-called “Little Ice Age” in the seventeenth century. Eddy speculated that the prolonged absence of sunspots had resulted in global cooling. Average temperatures in seventeenth-century Europe had been a degree centigrade lower than normal. Eddy’s research was perhaps the ﬁrst application of solar physics to early modern history. Parker, who had long suspected that there was something missing in the Past & Present debate about “The General Crisis,”42 immediately got in touch with the

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American solar physicist, who gave permission to include his essay in The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (1978), a collection co-edited by Parker and a former student, Lesley Smith.43 Then, in February 1998, shortly after completing a revised edition of that collection, Parker awoke from a dream convinced that he should move beyond a volume of essays and write “an integrated narrative and analytical account of the first global crisis for which we possess adequate documentation for Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.” Penguin and Basic Books gave him a book contract for “The World Crisis, 1635–1665,” to be delivered in 2003. Parker soon discovered that the project was far more complicated than first expected. The study’s proposed start and end dates had to be extended back to 1618 and forward to the 1680s. More important, his decision to combine material from the “natural archive” of the period (climatic proxy data such as tree-ring size, precipitation records, and glacier advances) with data from the “human archive” (chronicles, letters, “weather diaries”, art, and archaeology) resulted in a 1,500-page typescript, submitted four years late, in 2007. After six months of total silence, Parker’s editor at Basic Books curtly rejected the work as “too long and too late.” Parker’s editor at Penguin, by contrast, first lost the typescript, then reconstituted it from electronic files in the wrong order, and finally criticized him for writing a typescript that did not “flow”—responses which, to put it mildly, did not motivate him to pursue the project any further. With the benefit of hindsight, Parker eventually realized that the double rejection had been a blessing in disguise. By the time he regained his enthusiasm for the project, far more material from both the natural and the human archive had become available, while the contemporary debate over the impact of climate change had intensified. In 2010, he signed a new contract with Yale University Press. The typescript was cut by more than one-third by three ruthless graduate students from Ohio State University—Sandy Bolzenius and Kate Epstein from the U.S., and Mircea Platon from Romania—and an equally ruthless visiting scholar from Australia, Rayne Allinson. At the same time, they unearthed much new material that strengthened his argument, while Kate Epstein forced him to abandon his original title. First, she noted that “The World Crisis” had been used by Winston Churchill as the title of his history of World War I. When Parker hesitated, she reminded him that A. J. Balfour had waspishly dismissed that work as “Winston’s brilliant Autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe.” Parker duly changed his own title to Global Crisis.44 How does one select and present a representative selection of material that tells a truly global story? Parker explained that his friend Robert C. Cowley, a historian with extensive editorial experience, had advised him to enliven the text of Global Crisis by including at least one “Gee-whiz” fact per page, in order to keep the reader engaged. He sought to follow this advice by identifying one contemporary source for each of the regions afflicted by the “fatal synergy” between natural and man-made disasters. For example, the Swede Karl Anders Pommerenning was the only resident foreign diplomat in Russia during the traumatic upheavals of 1648-49, but he

described and analysed those upheavals in his dispatches for the benefit of his home government. He also sent home copies of documents, mostly of originals now lost. Enomoto Yazaemon, a salt merchant living northwest of Tokyo (Edo), left an autobiography that included a vivid record of the extreme weather experienced during the 1640s. Both sources were suggested to Parker by specialists in (respectively) Russian and Japanese history, and he obtained English translations which he quoted extensively in his book.45 Parker secured a sabbatical leave for the academic year 2011–12, and spent it implementing the many helpful suggestions of his ruthless editorial quartet, as well as those supplied by other experts in areas where his own knowledge was weak. In May 2012, he sent Yale University Press the revised typescript, a tight 1,200-pages, reflecting the research and reading undertaken over the thirty-six years since he had heard the radio interview with Jack Eddy. The Global Crisis appeared in both Britain and the United States in spring 2013; in December, The Sunday Times of London proclaimed it “The History Book of the Year;” and in 2014, it won a “British Academy Medal,” awarded for a “landmark academic achievement in any of the disciplines supported by the Academy, which has transformed understanding of a particular subject or field of study.” The book may still be “too long,” Parker reflected, but it may not, after all, be “too late.” Jürgen Osterhammel then discussed his own magnum opus, The Transformation of the World. This was a product of the sabbatical year spent at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in 2001–2002. Osterhammel had gone to NIAS with the intention of writing a comparative study of European overseas empires in the nineteenth century. However, upon arrival at NIAS, it turned out that Henk Wesseling, the institute’s director, had just submitted his own book on the topic to the publishers. What was to be done? Osterhammel felt that he had two options: either write a research monograph or “hazard a Flucht nach vorn [to take the bull by the horns] and attempt something even grander,” meaning a comprehensive portrait of an age, of which empires would just be one facet. He opted for the latter. He spent his time at NIAS drawing up various outlines for the book, both in terms of contents and argument. His conversations with Peer Vries—soon to move to the University of Vienna, but a resident fellow at NIAS at the time—were crucial in this respect.46 Following the publication in 2004 of Chris Bayly’s masterpiece The Birth of the Modern World,47 Osterhammel again shelved his own, very similar project for a while. When he overcame the “Bayly shock,” as he calls it, he managed to write the bulk of the manuscript in 2006 and 2007. A sabbatical year in Munich sponsored by the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation made it possible for him to complete the book.48 Discussing the place of his book in the field, Osterhammel started out by noting that even generalists are specialists most of the time—beware of full-time generalists! There are many different styles of doing global history, most of which he considered legitimate. Following Isaiah Berlin, he distinguished between what he called “the fox approach to history,” which concentrates on one big problem, such as Pomeranz’s’

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The Great Divergence and the entire debate about Western exceptionalism, and what he called “the hedgehog approach to history,” which deals with many small problems. The writing of syntheses is, in quantitative terms, a very marginal genre. As J. R. McNeill noted in his book review, The Transformation of the World is not exactly a textbook written for undergraduate students, but rather a collection of analyses aimed at professional historians.49 Osterhammel quoted the Qing dynasty philosopher Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801): “Literary skill, learning, and insight—to possess any of these is not an easy task, but to be equally proficient in all three is even more difficult.”50 When asked, Osterhammel found it difficult to compare the historical interpretations offered by The Transformation of the World and Global Crisis. It was far easier and more appropriate to do that for The Transformation of the World and, for example, Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World. In his review, McNeill agreed that The Transformation of the World and The Birth of the Modern World were “kindred spirits.” However, McNeill also saw important differences. In his view, “Bayly’sis more tightly focused, less sprawling, less abstract, less influenced by the traditions of German historical sociology, which Osterhammel finds especially useful in his discussions of the state and of social hierarchy.”51 Osterhammel was glad to hear from people close to Bayly that the author of The Birth of the Modern World did not believe such differences precluded useful comparisons between the two books. Carla Pestana notes in her contribution to the American Historical Association’s special forum on Global Crisis that Parker and Osterhammel have “a somewhat similar approach to writing history on a grand scale.”52 A case in point is the attention paid by both authors to time and chronology.53 In Osterhammel’s view, both Global Crisis and The Transformation of the World can be characterized as global portraits of adefined time-period. Like most works of historical scholarship, both books speak to the present as well as the past. In the twenty-first century, human populations around the world are unevenly affected by globalization and man-made climate change. There are notable differences, of course. According to Osterhammel, Parker successfully combines the “fox” and “hedgehog” approaches to history, making Global Crisis a much more thesis-driven work than The Transformation of the World. Another striking difference is the ingenious use of primary sources in Global Crisis. Apparently, the editor removed all quotations from The Transformation of the World, on the grounds that an even longer book would never see the light of the day. As noted earlier, The Transformation of the World is based entirely on secondary literature—as many or even most syntheses of comparable scope tend to be. Osterhammel emphasized the pleasure of reading first-rate monographic work. Why should specialists only find a response among small circles of their fellow-experts? Even so, workshop participants asked, how had he selected his materials for a global history of a “long” century (c. 1760 to 1920) and succeeded in covering almost all major aspects of the past, from politics to religion? Osterhammel replied that relying on the secondary literature is actually a boon. It provides a coherence that a highly

selective employment of primary materials could not possibly guarantee. Too many topics would have to be left untouched. Finally, the workshop participants gave some thought to the possible futures of global history. Jürgen Osterhammel saw the need to integrate global and international history. Currently, many “global historians” ignore the fundamental conditions of war and peace. “Environmental studies” is another promising avenue of research, of great relevance to the modern world. Parker praised Braudel’s “problematic imperative”: “The framework of research is the problem, selected with full independence and responsibility of mind, beyond all those plans, so comfortable and so tempting, that carry with them as an extra dividend, the warranty and blessing of the University.”54 And what problem could be more “imperative” than environmental studies? Yet global history, Parker claimed, to murmurs of agreement, faces a tenacious and powerful enemy: the increasing imposition of metrics to evaluate research, such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in Great Britain. This, he asserted, would have prevented Braudel from completing either of his two masterpieces—The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and Civilization and Capitalism—because each took decades to complete.55 Despite this gloomy prediction, the junior scholars and graduate students present seemed undeterred. The workshop itself was an illustration of the breadth, relevance, and appeal of global history today. On that cheerful note, the workshop participants relocated to the Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre for drinks, dinner, and convivial conversation.

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Notes

* Martine van Ittersum is Senior Lecturer 6 Jansen and Osterhammel, Dekolonisa- in History at the University of Dundee. tion: Das Ende der Imperien. English She is the author of Proﬁt and Principle: translation, Decolonization: A Short Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories History, forthcoming. Three volumes of and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East the History of the World series have Indies, 1595–1615 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). appeared so far in English: Reinhard, She has published widely on the history ed., Empires and Encounters, 1350–1750; of international law and on the theory Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting: and practice of Western imperialism and 1870–1945; and Iriye, ed., Global Inter- colonialism, particularly in the early dependence: The World after 1945.A modern period. Felicia Gottmann is the fourth volume on the period c. 1750– Leverhulme Early Career Research Fel- 1870 is so far only available in German low in History at the University of (2016). The American version will be Dundee. She is the author of Global published in 2017. Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of 7 Aslanian, et al., “How Size Matters: The Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles Question of Scale in History.” in France 1680–1760 (Basingstoke: 8 https://school.bighistoryproject.com/bh Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Tristan plive. Mostert is a Ph.D. student at the 9 Ittersum and Jacobs, “Are We All University of Leiden, researching the Global Historians Now?” political, diplomatic, and military 10 See, for example, Braudel and Coll, interactions between the Dutch East “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue India Company and the Sultanate of durée.” Makassar. 11 Van Ittersum and Jacobs, “Are We All 1 Interviews with both Geoffrey Parker Global Historians Now?” and Jürgen Osterhammel have appeared 12 Darwin, After Tamerlane. in Itinerario: Roozenbeek, de Jong, 13 Parker e.a., “Special Forum: The After- Blussé, et al., “‘I End Up with the life of Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis.” Question “Why”’”; and Weber and 14 Lambert, Planning Armageddon, Gommans, “‘You Turn a Page’.” chapter 5. 2 For more on Parker’s historical roots, 15 Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic see his essay “‘A Man’s Gotta Know His Bomb, chapter 1 and p. 214. Limitations’.” 16 See https://globalhistory.org.uk. 3 Barraclough, The Times Atlas of World 17 See http://standrewstransnational.wp. History. In 1993, Parker himself st-andrews.ac.uk/. edited the third edition of the Atlas,and 18 See the Portal de Archivos Españoles in 1995 also The Times Compact Atlas of (PARES), http://en.www.mcu.es/archi World History. Parker’s other books vos/CE/PARES.html. include The Dutch Revolt; Europe in 19 See the Indonesian National Archives Crisis, 1598–1648; The Spanish Armada; https://sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id/, and The Military Revolution; The Grand the Dutch National Archives: http:// Strategy of Philip II;andImprudent King. www.gahetna.nl/. All have been translated into Spanish, and 20 Conrad, What is Global History? most into Dutch and other languages. 21 Ibid, p. 206. 4 Osterhammel, Britischer Imperialismus 22 Peter Mandler, “RHS Letter Regarding im Fernen Osten. the EU Referendum” (12 July 2016), 5 See, for example, Kocka, Capitalism: A available at http://royalhistsoc.org/rhs- Short History. letter-regarding-eu-referendum/. In his

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letter, Mandler cites the ﬁgures produced See, for example, Schilling, “Did Quiet by Clossey and Guyatt in their article Sun Cause Little Ice Age After All?” “It’s a Small World After All.” 42 See Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of 23 Van Ittersum and Jacobs, “Are We All the European Economy”; Trevor-Roper, Global Historians Now?” 16. “The General Crisis of the 17th Century”; 24 Illies, 1913: Der Sommer des Kossmann, “Discussion of H. R. Trevor- Jahrhunderts. Roper”; Hobsbawm, “Discussion of 25 Conrad and Osterhammel, Das Kaiser- H. R. Trevor-Roper”; Hexter, “Discus- reich Transnational. sion of H. R. Trevor-Roper”; Mousnier, 26 Bayly, “History and World History.” “Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper”; For an obituary, see Drayton, “Sir and Elliott, “Discussion of H. R. Trevor- Christopher Bayly.” Roper.” 27 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. 43 Parker and Smith, eds., The General 28 Conrad, What Is Global History?, 210–212. Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. 29 Ibid., 219. 44 Churchill, The World Crisis, 5 vols.; and 30 Capp, Cromwell’s Navy; Junge, Flotten- Egremont, Balfour. Winston Churchill politik und Revolution; Cañeque, The served as Liberal MP for Dundee in the King’s Living Image; and Jorzick, period 1908–22. Herrschaftssymbolik und Staat. 45 The colleagues were Paul Bushkovitch 31 Richards, The Unending Frontier, 3. (Yale) and Ronald P. Toby (Illinois.) By 32 Conrad, What Is Global History, 224. On chance, since completing Global Crisis, p. 226, Conrad also critiques global articles about both Pommerenning and history’s alleged “obsession” with mobi- Enomoto have appeared: Romaniello, lity and movement. “Moscow’s Lost Petition” and Roberts, 33 Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories.” “Name and Honor.” Cf. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of 46 Weber and Gommans, “’You Turn a Babylon.” Page’”, 14. 34 For a recent overview of different historio- 47 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World. graphical approaches to network theory, 48 Weber and Gommans, ‘“You Turn a see Innes, “‘Networks’ in British History.” Page,” 15. 35 Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World 49 Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox; and History. McNeill, review of Jürgen Osterhammel, 36 Ghobrial, “TheSecretLifeofEliasof The Transformation of the World. Babylon” is not only a prime example of 50 Zhang Xuecheng, On Ethics and ‘global microhistory’, but it also raises some History, 16. of the connectivity issues addressed above. 51 McNeill, review of Jürgen Osterhammel, 37 Elliott, “Rats or Cheese?” The Transformation of the World, 38 Elliott, National and Comparative 1440–41 (quotations on p. 1441). See History. also Osterhammel, “Global History and 39 Davis, “Martin Luther”; and Davis, The Historical Sociology.” Return of Martin Guerre. 52 Pestana, “The Afterlife of Global 40 See also Parker, “The Genesis of Global Crisis”, n10. Crisis.” 53 Ibid., p. 175. 41 For Jack Eddy’sreﬂections on the public 54 Quoted and contextualized in the impact of his work, particularly among wickedly perceptive article by Hexter, historians, see “Interview with Jack “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Eddy.” The debate on the connection Braudellien.” between the absence of dark sun 55 Braudel, La Mediterrané é et le monde spots and the “Little Ice Age” of the mediterrané eń; and Braudel, Civilisation seventeenth century is far from over. materielle,́ economié et capitalisme.

Draft, preliminary and uncorrected

Do not cite or circulate!

Jürgen Osterhammel

Debating Global History*

May 2018

There was a time when programmatic reflections on what global history was supposed to be seemed to outnumber attempts to put all those ambitious recipes into historiographical practice. Today the situation has changed. A solid body of work is available to demonstrate the strengths and virtues of global history but also to expose its difficulties and its fragility. The present stage of semi-consolidation of the field is a propitious time to attempt a survey, with special emphasis on debates and open questions.

Yet the dramatic expansion of global history does not really facilitate such a task. At the moment, the most diverse kinds of historical writing dress up as "global", sharing nothing but a vague resolve to overcome national history and Eurocentrism - two bogeys whose despicability is too often taken for granted. Adopting a strictly nominalist view and abstaining from any kind of value judgement, one might austerely catalogue and classify these practices. In this sense, global history is what people choose to call by that name. While pursuing, up to a certain point, such a track of historicization, the present essay will not entirely avoid normative issues. An intellectual field loses shape and coherence when it abandons the quest for a consensual minimum of shared methodological requirements. Debates, apart from their usual side-purpose of jockeying for academic power and influence, ought to serve a search for such common standards.

Success and its perils

* This article has benefited enormously from comments by the members of the Konstanz-based Leibnizpreis Research Group "Global Processes", funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). 2

The extraordinary ambition to practice history-writing on a grander scale than usual invests the rise and future fate of global history with uncommon drama. Can this ambition be sustained? Are wide-ranging programmatic visions matched by historical analyses that convince the experts as well as a wider public? Is it possible to embed rare virtuoso performances by experienced historians within broader routines of research carried out in monographic projects by scholars in the early stages of their careers? How closely does global history reflect ongoing "globalization" in the real world? Do crises in that real-world globalization -- the resilience and re-emergence of nationalist politics and mentalities, the upsurge of inter-religious conflict, a partial disintegration of the world economy -- weaken the intellectual foundations and the credibility of global history?

The present chapter does not offer answers to all these questions. It starts out from the premise that global history, so far, has proved an ambivalent success. While it has attracted much attention and enthusiasm and has produced an impressive library of outstanding work, in many ways it remains a field in search of itself. It would be premature to celebrate global history as the one historiographical perspective most suitable for our time and the global historian as the avatar of the present age. Such naive and self-serving avantgardism seems to be out of place. The primacy of a global approach in academic historiography, in school curricula and in the public marketplace is far from assured, and global historians should take seriously the warning by one of the greatest of world historians, the late Sir Christopher Bayly, "that evolutionary nationalist historicism remains, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dominant form of historical understanding across much of the world" (Bayly 2011: 13).

Global history emerged, along with a more modestly conceived "transnational" history, in the 1990s as one among several new fields that arose in a general atmosphere of an epochal break. This was the heyday of "post"-discourses: postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism. Still, global history, by its very nature, occupied a special place and evolved under unique circumstances. Other sub-disciplines of historical studies emerged in the course of the differentiation and division of labour that is to be expected from expanding fields of scientific knowledge. Some of them were launched through carefully orchestrated "turns". Sometimes emergent fields caught on and solidified into self-sustaining discourses, in other cases they failed to develop the way their proponents envisaged. 3

Global history evokes a more complex and contradictory image. In the shape of "world history", understood as a trans-tribal reflection on the past that reaches out beyond one's own polity, social group or religious community, it has an old pedigree going back to the beginnings of historiography (Subrahmanyam 2013). At the same time, global history represents a mere intra-academic development to a lesser degree than other sub-disciplines. World histories have always appealed to a wider public and have exuded an aura of grandeur and importance. With the rise of scientifically-minded historical studies since the time of Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Leopold Ranke they lost their academic reputation and were banished to a shadowy world of irresponsible speculation, nevertheless continuing to cater to a considerable public demand. Such a bifurcation between popularity and respectability was still evident in the world-wide fame of Arnold J. Toynbee who, towards the end of his life, was probably the best known historian on the planet while few academic historians -- for several reasons, not all of them justified -- took him seriously any more.

It is one of the major achievements of the “new” global history to have bridged the gap between the narrowly specializing professional and the generalist amateur. But the gap has not entirely disappeared, and global historians, more than anyone else, continue to be torn between the expectations of different audiences and constituencies. The recent rise of global history cannot be explained by reference to its intrinsic merits alone. It would have been impossible without the active support and commercial interest of publishers who opened their lists for monographs, textbooks, multi-volume works, book series and new journals that only a few years before would have kindled much less enthusiasm. Popular and academic global history and world history have grown in a kind of interactive co-evolution within the parameters of academia and the culture industry.

This solid and sustained growth cannot disguise the fact that global/world history always verges on the impossible. Although global historians almost unanimously reject the view that they are in charge of everything, this is exactly what the public demands of them. And, indeed, in a media-conscious age the temptation can be hard to resist - and not entirely without reason. Even if it would be a vulgar misunderstanding to think that world historians aim at knowing everything, they still have to know an extraordinary amount. Since they always have to keep a great number of people, places, periods and systematic aspects in mind, they are often condemned to patchy and superficial coverage. It is easy for any regional specialist 4 to fault the world historian on points of detail. Not even the greatest masters of world history are exempt from Edward Gibbon's verdict on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the outstanding polymath of early modern Europe: "... even his powers were dissipated by the multiplicity of his pursuits" (Gibbon 1972: 401). No other sub-discipline of historiography is to a similar degree endangered by hubris. None has a greater responsibility towards a non-expert reading public. The larger the generalizations offered by historians, the more these generalizations have to be taken on trust.

The rise of global history has been geographically uneven. Focussing exclusively on historiographical developments in the English-speaking world tends to distort the picture and to undermine the cosmopolitan credentials and aspirations of global history. If its subject matter is "globality" in all its many facets, then its inherent universality deserves to be taken seriously. It is undoubtedly true that historians in Britain and the U.S. have been at the forefront of the new global history and that English is the only common language shared by the global history community. Many global historians in non-Anglophone countries prefer to publish in English; everywhere in the world a book under contract with one of the most prestigious university presses or trade publishers in the U.K. or the U.S. is regarded as the pinnacle of a global historian's achievement.

Even so, there are considerable communities of world historians in a number of non- Anglophone countries, and rich literatures in languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, and German deserve a place in the overall picture. One of the best surveys of world and global history has never been translated from its original Italian (Di Fiore and Meriggi 2011). The enormous influence of a small number of canonical British, U.S.-American or Indian authors whose works have been translated into numerous languages does not mean that writings in a global history mode form a discourse of seamless universality. Locally specific traditions of world history writing have not been completely erased just as the particular kind and degree of institutionalization of global history varies enormously (Stuchtey and Fuchs 2003; Sachsenmaier 2011; Inglebert 2014).

Is it the rule or rather the exception for history departments to include at least one position in global history? Is global history merely regarded as a pedagogical necessity or does it include a research perspective? Do universities offer the broad range of supporting area studies and language tuition facilities that is indispensable 5 for providing global history with a firm empirical basis? Do young scholars receive career incentives to take up global history topics? Is global history taught at secondary schools and colleges and are universities involved in training the respective teachers? For many countries the answers to these questions are likely to be in the negative or carefully hedged. Only a precise mapping of global history activities around the globe would provide clear answers and identify trends over time. Such a mapping is likely to reveal highly uneven development, distinctions between centres and peripheries and sometimes stagnation and reversal.

Paths towards global history

There are three different narratives to account for the growth of global history. All three are basically plausible or even accurate but they have to be combined in making sense of specific trajectories.

Story number one sees the new global history of the 1990s and after as just the latest among several universalist episodes in the history of historical thought and writing. According to this view, global history continues a long tradition of world history or general history which can be found, above all, in Europe, China and Islamicate civilization. Before the discovery and early colonial settlement of Australia in the late eighteenth century, such world history did not encompass the entire globe. Rather, the intermittent resurgences of world history should be seen as attempts to arrive at the largest picture possible under the practical and cognitive constraints of a given time. In this sense, it is legitimate to speak of Herodotus, Sima Qian or Ibn Khaldūn as world historians within the paradigm of their respective epochs. Following this line of reasoning the new global history builds on precursors in the eighteenth century (Voltaire in France, William Robertson in Scotland, or August Ludwig Schlözer in Germany) and also stands in some sort of uneasy genealogical relationship to universalist approaches in the early twentieth century as diverse as Max Weber's cross-cultural comparisons, Eduard Meyer's comprehensive history of the ancient world or Marxist theories of imperialism. Chinese world history, to give a second example, could build on the historiography of the eighteenth-century Qing empire that was diverse enough to include a plurality of historical experiences within a vast multi-ethnic imperial system. Global history, on this reading, belongs to a longer development of "transnational challenges to national history writing" (Middell 6 and Roura 2013). Formally speaking, the entire history of historiography might be construed on the model of the antagonism between Thucydides and Herodotus, as a see-saw between the local and the universal, the micro view and the macro perspective: a tension that will never disappear but is now being eased in scholarly practice by a new global microhistory (for example: Andrade 2010; Ghobrial 2014).

Story number one sounds somewhat antiquarian: It establishes an impressive pedigree for global history but one that is of limited consequence for the practice of global historians today. Story two, by contrast, is set within a radically shorter time span: it sees global history as the third step in a progressive sequence of historiography's advance since the 1960s. Social history was the dominant and most exciting tendency in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s which in turn was succeeded and superseded by global history from the late 1990s onwards. If served without the necessary pinch of salt, this self- historicization easily takes on the flavour of a teleological "Whig history" of unbroken progress. Social and cultural history serve as mere forerunners of a triumphant global history.

Thinking in terms of such neatly demarcated "paradigms" imposes welcome order on an extremely complex historiographical landscape and energizes the frontier spirit of those who see themselves in the vanguard on the march towards intellectual hegemony. At the same time, it may occlude the extent to which global history profits from those earlier innovations and inherits their methodological achievements. In contrast to story number one, this alternative narrative considers global history resolutely as a stage -- certainly not the ultimate one -- in the post-1945 modernization of historical studies. It gains in persuasiveness when it also acknowledges semi-autonomous developments in the various regional historiographies. Until around 1950 or even 1960 empirical world histories -- as distinct from philosophical constructions of history -- were condemned to some sort of Eurocentric bias. Not enough was known about many parts of the world. Only a huge burst of effort and creativity since about 1960, documented above all in the numerous Cambridge Histories (including the Cambridge World History of 2015) that now cover virtually every corner of the globe, laid the foundations for the work that has since been accomplished by global historians. The structural antagonism between area studies and global history, probably more pronounced in the U.S. than anywhere 7 else, should not conceal the fact that global history is greatly indebted to region- based research and in more than one way dependent on it.

Finally, story number three connects the rise of global history to that of globalization studies in the social sciences. Not counting a few early swallows, these studies really took off in the early 1990s: after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the Soviet Union, after the invasion of everyday life - and the working habits of scholars - by the internet, and after the incipient emergence of parts of Asia, above all China, from Third World poverty and economic stagnation (Selchow 2017). The optimistic 1990s, when visions of a glorious "global age" proliferated, were the decade when the foundational texts of globalization theory were written by sociologists, economists, anthropologists and cultural theorists. Global history, this narrative maintains, was the large-scale application of this kind of theory to the past: network theories, world society theory, world system theory (dating back already to the 1970s), theories of communication, of identity, hybridity and cultural encounter, of motion, flows and circulation, and so on. The crucial point about this interpretation is the contention that the new global history signifies a deep break with the historiographical past. It owed its existence to the theoretical innovations of the 1990s from Anthony Giddens via Arjun Appadurai to Manuel Castells and thus has no filiations back to older traditions. But it is derivative and dependent on theoretical inputs from outside the discipline. Since globalization theory has engendered a huge literature and has passed through numerous fashions and metamorphoses that historians rarely have the time and energy to study with the necessary comprehensiveness and care, global history has relaxed its ties to social theory and has developed its own somewhat simplified idiom (Osterhammel 2016). According to this narrative, global history is not necessarily identical with the history of "globalization" but owes its intellectual foundations to theories of globalization, even if their practical relevance for historians may have declined in recent years.

The third story is intuitively perhaps the most convincing of the three. Just as sociologists and political scientists reacted to experiences of the end of international bipolarity, the annihilation of time and space through digital communication or the explosive rise of China, so did historians. But in placing developments in historiography squarely in the context of present-day concerns, story number three misses something important. Global history has, in an eclectic way that is fully legitimate, absorbed impulses not just from the social sciences but also from the 8 innovative social and cultural history of the post-war decades. It can also fruitfully be seen as a revitalization of Enlightenment thinking that highlighted cultural relativity, tolerance and the moral unity of the human species. Thus, each of the three narratives contains a kernel of truth.

Varieties of large-scale history

So far, it has been left deliberately vague what global history is after all. This vagueness reflects common practice. Numerous suggestions have been made to distinguish between various forms of large-scale history. It is astonishing that they have not caught on. There is plenty of evidence of a semantic confusion to which very few people seem to object. Especially in the English-speaking literature "world history" and "global history" are often treated as synonyms. The Journal of World History and the Journal of Global History carry the same type of article without any visible attempt at mutual differentiation. Multi-volume series such as the Cambridge World History (Wiesner-Hanks 2015) or A History of the World published by Harvard University Press (Iriye and Osterhammel, 2012-) commit themselves to "world history" as the more comprehensive concept, basically meaning a "general" history of socially organized human life on earth since the beginnings of archaeological evidence. Many chapters in those works, however, employ a decidedly "global" perspective that looks for lateral connections.

The picture is further confused by the intrusion of "Big History" into the realm of world history (Christian 2004; Hesketh 2014); it is sometimes even seen as identical with global history (Clavin 2005: 436). Popular audiences these days expect speakers who are being introduced as "global historians" to be knowledgeable about the Big Bang and anything that resulted from it. Big History evidently satisfies a need for the largest possible picture that used to be traditionally met by religion and theology. Made popular by the French priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin long before the term "Big History" was coined and rose to prominence in the U.S., the issue of the position of life in the long-term evolution of the cosmos has long since fascinated reading audiences. It stretches the competence of conventionally trained historians who lack sufficient expertise in astrophysics and the theory of biological evolution. Big History is an interdisciplinary sub-field of its own and will not be considered further in this chapter. Still, its obvious popularity cannot be ignored. 9

When professional global historians prefer to leave it to a small group of devotees the reason is only partly a lack of competence and a distrust of generalizations that are not based on sources. In addition, such a quasi-metaphysical approach distracts from the mundane concerns of the politically conscious citizen and is liable to lead to a de-politicization of history. What kind of relevant insight do we gain from a contemplation of billions of years?

In spite of early initiatives by Bruce Mazlish and others (Mazlish and Buultjens 1993), there has hardly ever been a true debate among world historians about finer points of the internal classification and mapping of the field. While this neglect has blurred the contours of the historiographical landscape and allowed anyone with the necessary self-confidence to claim credentials as a global historian, it may have contributed to the new sub-discipline's success. Struggles for and against old and new orthodoxies have been avoided, in-fighting has been reduced to an unusual minimum. The policing of the epistemic boundaries has been laissez-faire und almost negligent, sparing us discussion about the purity and contamination of doctrine. Everybody can claim to be a world historian. This comes at the price of indeterminate criteria of judgment. To this day, there is no widely shared consensus about the standards for successful world history writing. This absence is not just a problem for intra-academic tasks such as assessing students, reviewing books and evaluating manuscripts or applications. Criteria are also needed for keeping a distance from a kind of popular world history that may be deeply influential in society but often shades off into unsupported speculation and fantasy.

A simple attempt to circumscribe, or even define, the terms most commonly used might look like this:

Universal history is a philosophically or theologically informed and vaguely fact-based reflection on major dynamic patterns and regularities in the development of humanity over extended periods of time (Inglebert 2014). It is often based on the assumption that history is a unified, though internally differentiated process with a clear origin and a discernible goal. For the twentieth century, Karl Jaspers's book title The Origin and Goal of History (German original: 1949) expresses this programme succinctly (Jaspers 1953). It is closely connected to theories of long-term societal evolution (Sanderson 2014). This kind of discourse is the domain of philosophers and 10 sociologists (Gellner 1988); professional historians tend to avoid it (but see Cook 2003).

World history is the study of human communities - often but not exclusively conceptualized as large-scale "civilizations" integrated by religious belief systems and basic social practices (Eisenstadt 2001) - and their social and cultural creativity in different ecological settings, putting additional emphasis on contacts between those communities (an excellent example is Vanhaute 2013). It is usually based on the - more or less implicit - assumption that "globality" is not constituted by real cross-boundary activities of a "networking" type but through the existence of a limited number of general challenges to which the various communities find answers varying in space, time and societal framing. These answers can be meaningfully compared to each other, making comparison - at various levels of explication and formality of design - a preferred tool of world historians. In contrast to universal history, world history puts a premium on difference and rejects holistic concepts such as "mankind", "humanity", "world society" or "world system". Whereas global history treats mobility and boundary-transgressing connectivity as primordial phenomena, world history focuses on the internal dynamics of communities and societies. During the nineteenth century and at least up to Arnold J. Toynbee's deliberately ecumenical work of the 1930s, world history used to follow the master trope of the "rise of the West". This Eurocentrism lingers on but is now widely considered a problem and seldom defended on grounds of principle.

Transnational history has not evolved from traditions of world history and is not predicated on any notion of "globality" or a closed world system. It rather is a refining extension of the insight that territorial states (with the modern nation-state as a special articulation of the territorial state) are embedded in wider contexts. This embedding takes places at different levels. Where the leading actors are governments wielding the tools of diplomacy, military force and managed economic relations ("mercantilism"), we are at the level of international relations revolving around power, war and peace. Whenever societal actors are involved, relations are transnational. They assume the form of "entanglements" of varying intensity and stability. Entanglement frequently occurs between spatially contiguous societies but also between imperial metropoles and their distant colonies (Margolin and Markovits 2015; Lowe 2015). A more attenuated form than a dense histoire croisée (Werner and Zimmermann 2006) is the histoire connectée that also looks for first traces of 11 emerging contacts (Subrahmanyam 1997; Gruzinski 2012). Transnational history exposes myths of purity and autonomy while emphasizing the persistent relevance of borders and boundaries. It aims at "a history with nations that is not a history of nations" (Saunier 2013: 8).

Global history is a perspective for considering all kinds of cross-border mobilities and their consequences, especially within vast and multicultural spaces; it focuses on connections and connectivity (or connectedness), with special attention to empirical connections that are uneven and have a transformative impact on the interconnected social and cultural units (Belich, Darwin and Wickham 2016). From the point of view of a given social or political unit, global history is less interested in endogenous dynamics (as world history is) than in forces impacting from the outside. At a systemic level (which is absent from transnational history) it makes two assumptions. Firstly, it ascribes separate agency to actors operating at that level and "causal relevance" to "factors that do not lie within the purview of individuals, nations, and civilizations" (Conrad 2016: 89). Secondly, even if most global historians do not invoke and need such a strong assumption in their daily practice, leading theorists of global history assert a long-term world-historical process that bundles and aligns the colourful chaos of relations and connections in the direction of increasing global integration (Conrad 2016: 102). In this sense, global history shows a closer affinity to universal history with its inbuilt teleology than do world history and transnational history.

My own preference, though not supported by a broad consensus among scholars, would be to leave global history more loosely defined as a history of transformative connections and reserve the pointed requirement of integration for the history of globalization. This should be seen as a subfield of global history concerned with the construction of institutionalized and robust networks of planetary extension that jointly, though not without contradictions, contribute to a progressive integration of societies, states and cultural arenas on the globe, especially since the technological advances of the mid-nineteenth century (Conrad 2016: 92-100; for a critical position see Lang 2014).

This typology helps to gain a contrastive understanding of the characteristic features of global history. Global history, as the term is used here in a fairly narrow way, is one among several types of large-scale history. It presupposes a direction in history 12 that is vaguely described with terms such as "integration", "convergence" and "homogenization", moving in a dialectical rather than a continuous and steady way. Additional a priori assumptions about the overall shape of history are not required. Whereas universal history - and, even more so, big history - has long time-spans in view, world history is a history of human societies since the earliest palaeontological and archaeological evidence, and transnational history limits itself to the last 200 to 250 years, global history does not have to be long-term history. The temporalities used by global historians do not derive from a given epistemological programme but are freely chosen according to specific purposes of investigation. Few global historians are likely to go further back than c. 1500, although exciting new work has been done on the global significance of that caesura (Gruzinski 2004; Boucheron 2009). However, very few research-based studies cover several centuries. Analyses of complex connections such as migrations, commodity chains or the transfer of ideas between different civilizational contexts have been most effective whenever they have dealt with shorter periods.

Since its key feature is the focus on connections, global history, in contrast to simplistic but widespread forms of world history, is never merely additive and mosaic- like. It is never content with the collection of anecdotes, isolated data and distinct regional case-studies. Global history has been most persuasive when it managed to discover hidden or unexpected connections that presented familiar phenomena in a new light. Typically, aspects of a national history, sometimes graced by claims to uniqueness and exceptionality, were shown to be influenced by external factors or to form part of larger historical trends (here global history overlaps with comparative world history). These detective-like qualities have contributed strongly to the attractiveness of a global approach. It does not just "widen" the picture, as is usually thought, but deepens it by uncovering background factors. Seeing familiar things in a new light and understanding the constructed nature and variability of temporal horizons and spatial framings is the central pedagogical purpose of global history (Pomeranz 2014: 19; Grataloup 2011: 131-74). In this sense it is always analytical and never encyclopaedic as world history tends to become.

The "thought-style" or cognitive habitus of global history works against exceptionalism and special paths. It rejects the privileging of particular historical normalities or yardsticks -- like "the West" or "the transition from feudalism to capitalism" -- against which different trajectories are profiled as aberrations or 13 manifestations of backwardness. It prefers "externalist" to "internalist" explanations and ideally combines them both. Methodologically speaking, global history is not defined by its object of study or its subject matter in the way that economic history is about the economy and legal history is an investigation into law and its practice. Global history is not about "the globe". Rather, it should be seen as a particular mode of inquiry: the search for lateral and boundary-crossing connectivity, preferably over long distances. Thus, most kinds of conventional historical research are suitable for being reframed in a global way. "Global" as an adjective can be added to nearly all existing fields. Economic history becomes global economic history when it addresses planetary flows of goods and money or discusses the distribution of income, wealth and productivity between different world regions. Legal history, conceived of as global legal history, studies the entanglement and mutual impact of various legal traditions in conditions of colonialism and inter-cultural encounter. A "globalized" history of music establishes connections between the study of the Western "great tradition", ethnomusicology and a media-based approach to the world-wide dissemination and modification of popular musical idioms. Other examples of such "double hyphenation" come readily to mind: global intellectual history, global social history, a global history of consumption, and so on. Many sub-disciplines of historiography lend themselves to this kind of "globalification" (Osterhammel 2015). It does not render established approaches obsolete but adds a new perspective to them.

Non-debates

International relations theory knows the model of “hegemonic war”: a rising power challenges the incumbent hegemon who in turn struggles to defend his position. Several episodes in the history of historiography more or less conform to that model. The rise of social history in the 1960s was accompanied by vehement polemics against political, diplomatic and military history and also against a history of ideas that was deemed old-fashioned at the time. Two decades later, the victorious social historians found themselves provoked by similarly vitriolic and dismissive cultural historians who celebrated their own successful toppling of the reigning paradigm.

Compared to those stormy quarrels, the ascent of global history took place under much more irenic auspices. Widely respected historians of an older generation, 14 foremost among them William H. McNeill and Fernand Braudel, lent respectability to the parvenu field. The general zeitgeist of the 1990s was globalist and allowed global history to look like the obvious and natural way for historians to respond to the demands of a new age. Whereas in the 1950s Toynbee had been attacked as a megalomaniac dilettante by leading lights of the historical profession, hardly any major historian denied the legitimacy and feasibility of global history. Those who may have remained sceptical kept their reservations to themselves. Many leading journals opened their pages to global topics. The fact that an increasing number of manuscripts with some kind of global thematic passed the acid test of peer reviewing testified to the viability of the emerging trend.

How can this low level of conflict be explained? In addition to the generally supportive atmosphere of the time, it should be noted that everywhere national history was so deeply entrenched as not to be unsettled by the newcomer. The writing and teaching of history within the framework of the nation-state has remained indispensable for civic education even in those countries – certainly a minority – where shaping a national outlook and a national memory did not explicitly belong to the duties of historians paid by the state. Archives continue to be organized on a national basis. Most historians in the world prefer to express themselves in their mother tongue. Moreover, only with a little effort could national history be expanded to accommodate “global" issues such as migration, colonialism and inter-cultural exchange (Bender 2002, 2006; Boucheron 2017; Conrad and Osterhammel, 2004; for China: Osterhammel 1989). In practice, global history was not necessarily seen as a fundamental threat to national history. Openly nationalist attacks on the cosmopolitan thinking of globally orientated historians were very rare, at least in academia.

Criticism was mainly voiced by those who were doubtful whether global history would meet the general methodological standards of the historical profession. The questions of sources and of language skills were raised time and again. They could not be resolved in a general way. A growing number of convincing monographs and articles put many of those doubts to rest. A kind of unspoken consensus emerged to the effect that topical research in global history should be based on sources in all the languages indispensable for the project at hand.

Surprisingly, one major issue was largely left undiscussed. It touched the basic legitimacy of global history. The new tendency had prospered, generally speaking, in 15 a postmodernist atmosphere. It took on board certain tenets of the postmodernist and postcolonial critique, for instance a strong aversion to “essentialism” and “othering” and a sensibility for the precariousness of language and meaning. In other words, it shared a constructivist epistemology. Where global historians parted ways with other adherents of postmodernism is in the question of master narratives. Classical postmodernism, especially in its French incarnation, had radically rejected any kind of grand récit. Global history, however, even if it emphasizes the specificity of locality, place and individual voices and identities, can never entirely avoid making the kind of general statement that had been roundly condemned by influential theorists of postmodernism. This inherent contradiction at the heart of global history has never been sufficiently discussed.

Debates: explanation, comparison and circulation analysis

Another debate that did not really unfold was that about description and explanation. The historiographical mainstream of the 1980s and 1990s celebrated the boundless plurality of identities and individual voices and achieved impressive feats of colourful description. At the same time, issues of explanation, so important for Marxist or Weberian social history, retreated into the background. Foucault-inspired epistemologies of "archaeology" and "genealogy", immensely influential as they were on both sides of the Atlantic, were difficult to reconcile with conventional notions of explanation. Still, advancing from questions of "how?" to questions of "why?" remains at the core of any scientific inquiry and forms the strongest bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences. If the "widest possible horizon" is not seen as an incontestable value in itself, then a global approach requires justification in terms of its analytical or explanatory surplus. It has to be shown in specific cases how a global re-contextualization of a given issue improves historical understanding.

To give an obvious example, our insight into the "Age of Revolution" in the decades around 1800 has been immensely enriched by adding the Haitian revolution to the canonical pair of the American and French revolutions and placing the events into the context of a vast Atlantic arena of interaction (Canny and Morgan 2011; Klooster 2009; Polasky 2015). It has gained even more by extending the gaze farther to encompass the revolutionary struggles for Latin American independence and turmoil in Africa and Asia from Egypt to the Qing empire (Bayly 1989, 1998; Armitage and 16

Subrahmanyam 2010; Wills 2014). But does this shed new light on standard topics of history? Does it, for instance, deepen our understanding of the French Revolution? Drawing attention to developments that occurred simultaneously with the revolutionary events in France is not the same as establishing causal connections which show in what way external factors helped to trigger the revolutionary cataclysm in Paris. Fortunately, longer chains of causation have now been suggested and conventional explanations of the revolution have been refined to combine endogenous and exogenous elements (Campbell 2013; Hunt 2013). These attempts have to be discussed individually and on their own merit.

A general debate should address the question of the significance of explanation in the overall methodology of global history. A concomitant question concerns the relation between cause and effect which is best discussed in economic or ecological terms (Parker 2013). A local event can have distant or general - in other words: "global" - causes; in the early modern period, to give just one example, certain crises in purportedly closed Asian economies can be traced back to changes in the supply of American silver (Flynn and Giráldez 2002). Inversely, the ramifications of a local event may affect far-away parts of the globe. The eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora on 10 April 1815 is a dramatic case in point (Wood 2014). In many other instances, effects made themselves felt much more slowly. A global approach is probably of little relevance in accounting for the July Crisis of 1914. Yet the war that began on 4 August very quickly evolved into a true world war. Intra-European causes set free global effects. This cannot be shown by simply stringing together chapters on the different theatres of war (Jeffery 2015). It requires precise analyses of concrete interactions combined with a sense of the multi-locational escalation of the conflict (Winter 2014).

One of the debates that was relevant for global history, without being conducted afresh within the new framework, was that about comparative history (Kaelble and Schriewer 2003; Haupt and Kocka 2009; Berg 2013; Olstein 2015: 59-97). It is closely related to the question of explanation since comparison is one of the most powerful explanatory tools available to historians. By the early 1990s, the methodology of historical comparison, pioneered by classical authors like Max Weber, Otto Hintze or Marc Bloch and elaborated by the historical sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s, had taken account of "cross-cultural" comparison in the social sciences and had started to reflect on comparisons between cases from markedly 17 different cultural contexts. The debate centred on questions of comparability and on the difficult issue of nomenclature: is it justifiable to impose a unified social science terminology of Western origin on historical situations outside Western modernity? If not, how do "emic" and "etic" vocabularies relate to one another? Would a strictly "emic" language, i.e. one grounded in the self-perception and self-expression of the historical actors, leave any room for the semantic commonalities that are a precondition for comparison?

The next stage in the debate juxtaposed comparison with the study of relations and transfers, or to put it differently: the comparative assessment of "pure" cases with the assumption of ubiquitous entanglement, hybridity and métissage. Everyone agreed that at least from the late eighteenth-century onwards, pristine, uncontaminated and unrelated cases - such as Marc Bloch's distinct feudalisms in Western Europe and Japan - have been the exception rather than the rule. Comparison must always take into account the possibility of external influences on the units of comparison - sometimes mutual influences, in other cases determinants from a third position. A radical position, probably endorsed only by a minority of scholars participating in the debate, claimed that comparison was artificial, ignored the realities of ever-increasing connectivity and should therefore be abandoned altogether (Werner and Zimmermann 2006; Cohen 2001; Cohen and O'Connor). There is probably a tacit consensus among global historians that comparison is not entirely useless but has a somewhat old-fashioned feel and is associated with an old-style world history of "great civilizations" as it nowadays survives in historical sociology rather than in historiography proper. In any case, the analysis of relations, movements and connections has gained unchallenged precedence.

Thus, an anti-comparativist stance chimes in with the principles of global history. Yet paradoxically, one of the most spectacular success stories of global or world history is quintessentially comparative: the debate about the Great Divergence (surveyed in Vries 2013). It is impossible to summarize this debate in a few sentences. It was conducted mainly among economic historians from the early 1980s onwards but has to be seen within the even wider context of the world historical role of Western modernity and, if one accepts the premise of the theorem of "multiple modernities", of analogous developments elsewhere. The results have not been conclusive but the debate was conducted at a very high level of sophistication and methodological 18 awareness and has proved the fruitfulness of "inter-cultural" comparison, in this case especially a comparison between Europa and China.

Significantly (and seldom remarked on in the discussion), connectivity and flows - the hallmarks of global history - played only a marginal role in the various explanations put forward for Europe's and North America's exceptional economic success since the late eighteenth century. Very few discussants invoked imperialism, colonialism and a politically engineered "development of underdevelopment" as the principal causes of the economic backwardness of the Global South - factors that had been prominent in world-system theory and Latin American dependencia theories of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, in terms of the typology suggested above, the debate about the Great Divergence falls under the category of comparative world history rather than that of global history understood as the study of transformative connectivity. The original reasons for the Great Divergence were usually seen in endogenous factors such as geographical opportunities and ecological constraints, state structures or culture and mentality. Only the further widening of the gap between rich and poor countries that took place during the nineteenth century was widely attributed to some kind of malign connectivity: the colonial exploitation of the South by the North.

A track still to be taken in the international debate refers to a different sense of comparison: comparison as "a process of relational self-definition" (Seigel 2005: 64; Epple and Erhart, 2015). Individuals, communities and entire nation-states form mental connections by comparing themselves with others. Europeans of the eighteenth century compared themselves with Asia. In the nineteenth century, Asian countries from the Ottoman Empire to Japan took Western Europe (and increasingly the United States) as a model to be emulated. "World society" as a "real" social formation of world-wide classes and strata has never come into being, but as an "imagined community" it began to be created in the nineteenth century through mutual observation and recognition in a mode of comparison and competition, adaptation and rejection (Wittmann 2014). Conceptualizing comparison as a cognitive activity of historical actors easily incorporates the global level since during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries global standards - from "world power" to "world championships" – increasingly served as benchmarks of reference. Another way to bring in the global is to take a more dialectical view of integration and homogenization at a world level (as pioneered by Bayly 2004). Spinning the "human web" (McNeill and McNeill 2003; Northrup 2015) ever more densely does not mean 19 that everything on earth is getting continuously more similar and, thereby, less suitable for comparison; economists are now coming up with more nuanced concepts of convergence (Baldwin 2016). As Nile Green has argued, it is precisely the method of comparison that helps "to demonstrate how common forces and parallel processes operating at a global level can lead to distinct cultural outcomes at a local and regional level" (Green 2013: 519).

Whereas the uses of comparison will always be controversial, "connectivity" and "circulation" enjoy a secure position as the twin master concepts of global history. Much of the enthusiasm surrounding global history derives from a fascination with fluidity, unimpeded mobility and endless opportunities for "hybrid" re-combination. However, it would mean an abdication of intellectual responsibility if the perceived shapelessness of a dynamic reality were to be reflected in a deliberate fuzziness of analytical categories. Fred Cooper's well-founded warning against the false contrast between "a rhetoric of containers and a rhetoric of flows" has had little impact, and his question whether it is possible to "develop a differentiated vocabulary that encourages thinking about connections and their limits" has largely been left unanswered, at least at the general level of methodology (Cooper 2005: 112).

The virtues and charms of a semantics of motion are obvious. An impressive array of studies has shown how spaces of interaction and widely dispersed communities have been created through the movement of people, commodities and knowledge (Sood 2011, 2016). Yet the observation of realities in the early twenty-first century makes it difficult to ignore the fact that mobility stops at fences, walls and border security desks, that economic flows produce winners as well as losers and that ideas and information can get distorted and manipulated in their passage through less than transparent circuits. The mirage of a world of flat barriers and limitless permeability deserves serious reconsideration. Global historians are likely to engage with the critique of their own "mobility bias" that has been voiced by anthropologists (Rockefeller 2011; Sedgewick 2014) as well as in a recent thoughtful article by the Swiss historian Monika Dommann (Dommann 2016, also Gänger 2017). This may also lead to the debate, suggested by Fred Cooper in the early 2000s, on how to arrive at a better understanding of various forms of connectivity within their historical settings. Such a debate will link up with the problem of causation: connections differ in their impact and transformative power. They also operate within different framings of space and time. Global history has been most successful in a synchronic mode 20 that limits the field of observation to relatively short time spans. Incorporating long- term dynamics without jeopardizing source-based precision is one of the greatest challenges ahead.

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