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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2022
The historical profession emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of the nation-state. Historians of the modern period in particular focused above all on the political history of nation-states and the diplomatic history of relations between them. Global aspects of European history were covered mainly in terms of Europe’s impact on other parts of the world, as in Hobsbawm’s “dual revolution” (the worldwide repercussions of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution), or the history of Europe’s colonial possessions overseas. And yet there were demonstrable global influences on many key developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, from the liberalism of the Latin American revolutions of the 1820s to the economic impact of the cotton-growing slave economies of the American south. The globalization processes of the late twentieth century have brought these into sharper focus and powered an approach that places Europe’s history in a broader global context of mutual interaction. Yet the nation-state is not dead, and national governments are vigorously promoting a return to national histories in the service of patriotic education. Global history is here to stay, but its place in the educational system, particularly school curricula, remains heavily contested.
La profession d’historien est apparue en Europe au xixe siècle, en même temps que l’émergence de l’État-nation. Les historiens de la période moderne et contemporaine se sont surtout concentrés sur l’histoire politique des États-nations et l’histoire diplomatique des relations entre eux. Les aspects globaux de l’histoire européenne ont principalement été abordés sous l’angle de l’influence de l’Europe sur d’autres parties du monde, comme dans la « double révolution » d’Eric J. Hobsbawm (les répercussions mondiales de la Révolution française et de la révolution industrielle) ou l’histoire des possessions coloniales de l’Europe. Pourtant, de nombreux développements clefs dans l’Europe des xixe et xxe siècles, du libéralisme des révolutions latino-américaines des années 1820 aux retombées économiques de la culture du coton adossée à l’esclavage dans le Sud des États-Unis, furent manifestement sensibles aux influences mondiales. Les processus de globalisation de la fin du xxe siècle ont permis de les mettre en lumière et ont alimenté une approche qui place l’histoire de l’Europe dans un contexte global d’interaction mutuelle. Pourtant, l’État-nation n’est pas mort, et les gouvernements nationaux encouragent vigoureusement un retour aux histoires nationales au service d’une éducation patriotique. Si l’histoire globale n’est pas appelée à disparaître, sa place dans le système éducatif, en particulier dans les programmes scolaires, reste fortement contestée.
1 Otto von Bismarck to Eugen Wolf, December 5, 1888, in Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke (Berlin: Stollberg, 1924–1935), 8:646.
2 For a fairly random but typical example of good, reliable textbook surveys, see Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2007) (only brief mentions); Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), (one short chapter out of fifteen); Jonathan Sperber, Europe 1850–1914: Progress, Participation, and Apprehension (London: Routledge, 2009) (brief sections, including one entitled “Eurocentric Diplomacy”); Derek W. Urwin, Western Europe since 1945: A Political History (London: Longman, 1968) (one short chapter out of twenty-two).
3 See, in the present issue, Richard Drayton, “European Social History: A Latecomer to the Global Turn?” Annales HSS (English Edition) 76, no. 4 (2021): doi:10.1017/ahsse.2022.8.
4 Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, eds., Connections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012).
5 Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 15–20 and 63–65; Munro Price, The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions, 1814–1848 (London: Macmillan, 2007).
6 Evans, The Pursuit of Power, 351.
7 See, in the present issue, Sven Beckert, “Making Europe: The Extra-European Origins of the Old World,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 76, no. 4 (2021): doi:10.1017/ahsse.2022.5.
8 Price, The Perilous Crown, 85–113; Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); David I. Kertzer, Family Life in Central Italy, 1880–1910: Sharecropping, Wage Labor, and Coresidence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), for a regional study of sharecropping, a system of exploitation common in the American South, colonial Africa, and the Indian subcontinent as well as southern Europe. See also Jonathan J. Liebowitz, “Tenants, Sharecroppers, and the French Agricultural Depression of the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19, no. 3 (1989): 429–45.
9 As Peter Burke remarked, “Europe is not so much a place as an idea”: Burke, “Did Europe Exist before 1700?” History of European Ideas 1 (1980): 21–29, here p. 21. Note, however, the caveat of Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London: Allen Lane, 1993), 1 and 209, that “Europe is both a region and an idea”: “By saying Europe is a construct we are not saying that it is a purely metaphorical creation.”
10 See, in the present issue, Abigail Green, “Religion and the Global History of Europe,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 76, no. 4 (2021): doi:10.1017/ahsse.2022.9.
11 Evans, The Pursuit of Power, 53–55.
12 Richard J. Evans, “What is European History? Reflections of a Cosmopolitan Islander,” European History Quarterly 40 (2010): 593–605.
13 Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (London: Little, Brown, 2019), 397–404, 474–79, and 535–44; Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1962); Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975); Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987).
14 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), 432–38.
15 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994); Perry Anderson, “Confronting Defeat,” London Review of Books 24, no. 20, October 17, 2002, 10–17.
16 See for example the excellent textbooks by John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996); and Gildea, Barricades and Borders.
17 Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War (London: Profile Books, 2020).
18 Ian Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950–2017 (London: Penguin, 2018); Martin Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
19 Robert Tombs, This Sovereign Isle: Britain in and out of Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2021), 160–62.
20 See, in the present issue, David Motadel, “Globalizing Europe,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 76, no. 4 (2021): doi:10.1017/ahsse.2022.2.
21 Patrick Boucheron, ed., Histoire mondiale de la France (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2017); “Histoire mondiale de la France : le livre qui exaspère Finkielkraut, Zemmour et Cie,” Le Nouvel Observateur, February 1, 2017.
22 Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (London: Allen Lane, 2014).
23 Julian Göpffarth, “How Alternative für Deutschland is Trying to Resurrect German Nationalism,” New Statesman, September 28, 2017; Michael Bröning, “The Rise of Populism in Europe: Can the Center Hold?” Foreign Affairs, June 3, 2016.
24 Richard J. Evans, “The Wonderfulness of Us (the Tory Interpretation of History),” London Review of Books 33, no. 6, March 17, 2011, 9–12; Evans, “The Folly of Putting Little England at the Heart of History,” Financial Times, February 8, 2013, 11; Evans, “The Rote Sets In: Michael Gove’s New History Curriculum,” New Statesman, March 15–21, 2012, 60–61.
25 Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), 13–27 and 173–81.