Long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history from a global perspective

Institutionalization, postcolonial critique, and empiricist approaches, before and after the 1970s

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12876357
AutoresKatja Naumann (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen14
Número3
Páginas335-354
Fecha de publicación2019-10-21
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Global History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1740-0228 • E-ISSN: 1740-0236
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1740022819000159
OpenAlexW2981732272
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas41

Notions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts

Conceptual history · Dialectic · Empiricism · Epistemology · Eurocentrism · Field (mathematics · Historiography · Institutionalisation · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Presupposition · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · World history · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy