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Globalizing Europe
European History after the Global Turn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2022
Abstract
This essay offers a reflection on the historical study of modern Europe’s entanglements with the wider world. It explores the ways in which European history can be integrated into global history, considering Europe as not only an engine but also a product of global transformations. Providing a broad historiographical overview, the author discusses the impact of the “global turn” on different fields of modern European history, including political, economic, social, intellectual, and environmental history. He argues that global history represents not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity for Europeanists to open up modern European history. This will ultimately help us reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe—and the field of European history itself. In other words, it will allow us to deprovincialize Europe. More generally, the essay also engages with broader questions about continents (and other spatial units) as ontological categories in historical studies.
Résumé
Cet essai propose une réflexion sur l’étude historique des liens entre l’Europe moderne et contemporaine et le reste du monde. Il explore les manières dont l’histoire européenne peut être intégrée à l’histoire globale, en considérant l’Europe non seulement comme un moteur, mais aussi comme un produit des transformations mondiales. À partir d’un large aperçu historiographique, l’auteur discute de l’influence du « tournant global » sur différents domaines de l’histoire européenne moderne et contemporaine, notamment l’histoire politique, économique, sociale, intellectuelle et environnementale. Il soutient que l’histoire globale représente tant un défi qu’une opportunité considérable pour les européistes d’ouvrir l’histoire européenne moderne. Cette approche nous aidera finalement à remodeler notre compréhension des frontières de l’Europe – et du domaine de l’histoire européenne lui-même. En d’autres termes, cela nous permettra de déprovincialiser l’Europe. De manière plus générale, l’essai aborde également des questions plus larges sur les continents (et d’autres unités spatiales) en tant que catégories ontologiques dans les études historiques.
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Footnotes
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I would like to thank Paul Betts, Houchang E. Chehabi, Christof Dejung, Geoff Eley, Richard J. Evans, N. Piers Ludlow, Kiran Klaus Patel, Pascale Siegrist, and Paul Stock for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
References
1 Lucien Febvre and François Crouzet, Nous sommes des sang-mêlés. Manuel d’histoire de la civilisation française, ed. Denis Crouzet and Élisabeth Crouzet (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012); for the context and information on the book’s background, see the “Avant-propos” and “Postface” by Denis Crouzet and Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, respectively pp. 7–15 and 295–392.
2 Ibid., 289.
3 Crouzet and Crouzet-Pavan, “Postface,” 335. On the UNESCO project, see Paul Betts, “Humanity’s New Heritage: Unesco and the Rewriting of World History,” Past & Present 228 (2015): 249–85; and Gabriela Goldin Marcovich and Rahul Markovits, “Editing the First Journal of World History: Global History from Inside the Kitchen,” Journal of Global History 14, no. 2 (2019): 157–78.
4 An abridged version was published in German in 1953; see Lucien Febvre and François Crouzet, “Der internationale Ursprung einer Kultur. Grundegedanken zu einer Geschichte Frankreichs,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Geschichtsunterricht 2 (1953): 5–31. Unpublished thirty-two-page French and English copies of this abridged version are stored in the UNESCO archives: Paris, UNESCO Archives, UNESCO/ED/TB/10, WS/031.101 REV, Lucien Febvre and François Crouzet, “Origines internationales d’une civilisation. Éléments d’une histoire de France,” December 18, 1951, and “International Origins of a National Culture: Experimental Materials for a History of France,” December 28, 1951.
5 Patrick Boucheron, ed., Histoire mondiale de la France (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2017). A more recent and equally important book on the subject is the more focused volume by Quentin Deluermoz, ed., D’ici et d’ailleurs. Histoires globales de la France contemporaine (xviiie–xxe siècle) (Paris: La Découverte, 2021).
6 Pierre Nora, “Histoire mondiale de la France,” L’Obs 2734, March 28, 2017; Alain Finkielkraut, “La charge d’Alain Finkielkraut contre ‘les fossoyeurs du grand héritage français’,” Le Figaro, January 25, 2017.
7 Éric Zemmour, “Dissoudre la France en 800 pages,” Le Figaro, January 19, 2017. More serious conceptual criticism was voiced by Sanjay Subrahmanyam in an interview with Gilles Wullus and Pouria Amirshahi, “Sanjay Subrahmanyam : ‘L’histoire nationale tyrannise les historiens’,” Politis, July 25, 2018; and in another interview with Charles Jaigu, “Colère d’un historien contre Mme Taubira,” Le Figaro, September 19, 2019.
8 Robert Darnton, “A Buffet of French History: ‘Histoire mondiale de la France’ edited by Patrick Boucheron,” New York Review of Books 64, no 8, May 11, 2017.
9 Andrea Giardina, ed., Storia mondiale dell’Italia (Rome: Laterza, 2017), which patriotically celebrates a global Italy.
10 Lex Heerma van Voss et al., eds., Wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland (Amsterdam: Ambo/Anthos uitgevers, 2018); Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, ed., Historia Mundial de España (Madrid: Ediciones Destino, 2018); Giuseppe Barone, ed., Storia mondiale della Sicilia (Rome: Laterza, 2018); Marnix Beyen et al., eds., Wereldgeschiedenis van Vlaanderen (Kalmthout: Polis, 2018); Andreas Fahrmeir, ed., Deutschland. Globalgeschichte einer Nation (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2020); Carlos Fiolhais, José Eduardo Franco, and José Pedro Paiva, eds., História Global de Portugal (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2020). A pioneering project that should also be mentioned here is Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational. Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprech, 2004).
11 Similar attempts have not been made for other countries, notably Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Poland, though noteworthy works in this respect are Martin Aust, ed., Globalisierung Imperial und Sozialistisch. Russland und die Sowjetunion in der Globalgeschichte, 1851–1991 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013); and Niall Whelehan, ed., Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History (New York: Routledge, 2015). Tehila Sasson et al., “Britain and the World: A New Field?” Journal of British Studies 57, no. 4 (2018): 677–708, offers thoughts on the global history of Great Britain.
12 Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Recent Trends in European History: The World beyond Europe and Alternative Historical Spaces,” Journal of Modern European History 7, no. 1 (2009): 5–25, was one of the first to discuss this problem. Other important interventions are Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, “Geteilte Geschichten. Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad, Shalini Randeria, and Regina Römhild (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002), 31–70; Andreas Eckert, “Europäische Zeitgeschichte und der Rest der Welt,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 1, no. 3 (2004): 416–21; and Christof Dejung and Martin Lenwiler’s introduction to Ränder der Moderne. Neue Perspektiven auf die Europäische Geschichte (1800–1930), ed. Christof Dejung and Martin Lenwiler (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), 7–35.
13 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 5 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987–2008); Christophe Charle, Histoire sociale de la France au xixe siècle (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1991).
14 Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (London: Allen Lane, 2014), which is reminiscent of Germany’s Far-Right leader Alexander Gauland, Die Deutschen und ihre Geschichte. Eine nationale Erzählung (Berlin: WJS Verlag, 2009). See also Pierre Nora, Présent, nation, mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), which follows in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel’s notorious L’identité de la France, vol. 3, Les hommes et les choses, deuxième partie (Paris: Arthaud/Flammarion, 1986) and its promotion of the idea of la France profonde.
15 Richard J. Evans, “What Is European History? Reflections of a Cosmopolitan Islander,” European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 593–605, provides an excellent brief overview of European history writing about Europe. William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 3 vols. (Dublin: W. and W. Strahan, 1769), was arguably the first European history, surpassing patchier earlier works, such as Pier Francesco Giambullari, Historia dell’Europa (Venice: F. Senese, 1566).
16 For examples of European histories which are more reflective, see Leopold von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1824); Gabriel Monod and Charles Bémont, Histoire de l’Europe et en particulier de la France de 395 à 1270 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1891); and John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton, Lectures on Modern History (London: Macmillan, 1906). At the turn of the century, Lord Acton, a cosmopolitan who distrusted nationalism, made a powerful call for a common European history in his outline of the Cambridge Modern History, published in thirteen volumes between 1902 and 1912; see Roland Hill, Lord Acton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 394.
17 Henri Pirenne, Histoire de l’Europe. Des invasions au xvie siècle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1936), written in 1917/1918; G. P. Gooch, History of Modern Europe, 1878–1919 (London: Cassel and Company, 1923); A. J. Grant and H. W. V. Temperley, Europe in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927); and Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961), were written under the impression of the First World War. Volumes that appeared following the Second World War included Lucien Febvre, L’Europe, genèse d’une civilisation. Cours professé au Collège de France en 1944–1945 (Paris: Perrin, 1999); John Bowle, The Unity of European History: A Political and Cultural Survey (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948); Oscar Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History (London: Sheed and Ward, 1950); Albert Mirgeler, Geschichte Europas (Freiburg: Herder, 1953); Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (London: Sheed and Ward, 1952); Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957); Carlo Curcio, Europa. Storia di un’Idea (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1958); and Geoffrey Barraclough, European Unity in Thought and Practice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963).
18 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Asa Briggs and Patricia M. Clavin, Modern Europe, 1789–1989 (London: Longman, 1997); Hagen Schulze, Phoenix Europa. Die Moderne, von 1740 bis heute (Berlin: Siedler, 1998); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998); Wolfgang Schmale, Geschichte Europas (Stuttgart: Utb Für Wissenschaft, 2001); Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Little, Brown, and Company, 2000); Harold James, Europe Reborn: A History, 1914–2000 (New York: Longman, 2003); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: W. Heinemann, 2005); Konrad Jarausch, Out of the Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); and Pío Moa Rodriguez, Europa. Una introducción a su historia (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2016), are among the most impressive accounts of modern European history produced since the 1990s. Other important examples of this wave were Jacques Le Goff’s series “The Making of Europe” (released simultaneously in five languages by publishers in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), which includes volumes by Le Goff, Peter Burke, Umberto Eco, Jack Goody, and Charles Tilly, and David Cannadine’s “Penguin History of Europe” series, which includes volumes by Chris Wickham, William Chester Jordan, Tim Blanning, Richard J. Evans, and Ian Kershaw. The most important European history journals created under this momentum were the European History Quarterly (1984), Contemporary European History (1990), the European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire (1994), Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte (2000), and the Journal of Modern European History (2003).
19 Michael Geyer, “Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanization of National History,” Central European History 22, no. 3/4 (1989): 316–42, provides an overview of the Europeanization of European history. Johannes Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer. Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 267, no. 3 (1998): 649–85, also discusses some practical implications. The contributions to Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004); Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); and Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds., Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches (New York: Macmillan, 2010), provide more detailed discussions of the Europeanization of the continent’s history. For a programmatic article advocating this historiographical shift from the perspective of German history, see Ute Frevert, “Europeanizing German History,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 36 (2005): 9–24, and David Blackbourn, “Europeanizing German History: Comment,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 36 (2005): 25–31.
20 Mazower, Dark Continent; Judt, Postwar; Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949 (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950–2017 (London: Allen Lane, 2018). The same holds true for most of the great surveys listed in note 18 above.
21 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962); Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975); Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987); Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: M. Joseph, 1994).
22 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden: Blackwell, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009).
23 Some pioneering historians have compared, for example, labor service in Germany and America, postwar memory cultures in Japan and Germany, or revolutionary activism in Russia and China; see Sebastian Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation. Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan, 1945–1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999); Kiran Klaus Patel, Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and S. A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
24 Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), offer an insightful critique of Eurocentric exceptionalism. The exceptionalist literature, depicting, based on selective comparison, the uniqueness of European historical developments, is vast, and includes Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Henri Mendras, L’Europe des Européens. Sociologie de l’Europe occidentale (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), which focuses on western Europe; Michael Mitterauer, Warum Europa? Mittelalterliche Grundlagen eines Sonderwegs (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004); and Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Penguin, 2011). Eurocentric exceptionalism, based on selective comparisons, is also widespread in the social sciences, going back to their founders; classical examples are, culturally, the “Protestant ethic” of Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20, no. 1 (1904): 1–54, and 21, no. 1 (1905): 1–110; economically, the “Asiatic mode of production” of Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Verlag von Franz Duncker, 1859), vi, and his later works, including Das Kapital; and, politically, following on from Montesquieu and Marx, the “Oriental despotism” of Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
25 James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 1–49, offers a compelling critique of Eurocentric diffusionism. The diffusionist literature, depicting a triumphant Europeanization (Westernization) of the world, is also vast and includes Frank C. Darling, The Westernization of Asia: A Comparative Political Analysis (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979); Theodore H. von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and, to some extent, Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together – and What This Means for Democracy (New York: Crown, 1995).
26 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II [1949], trans Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (1972–1973; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995–1996), 1:188.
27 Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); and the classic C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1938), are key works on Atlantic history. On Europe’s northern oceanic history, see Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Coping with Distances: Producing Nordic Atlantic Societies (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007); John McCannon, A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); and the contributions to Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, eds., A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices (Canton: Science History Publications, 2002).
28 Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
29 Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and, more generally, Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
30 Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: J. G. Gotta, 1847), 2:150.
31 Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg, Das nord-und ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia, in so weit solches das gantze Russische Reich mit Siberien und der grossen Tatarey in sich begreiffet, in einer historisch-geographischen Beischreibung… (Stockholm: Verlegung des Autoris, 1730).
32 Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte der Romanischen und Germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535 (Leipzig: G. Reimer, 1824), xxxix.
33 Karl Krüger, Weltpolitische Länderkunde. Die Länder und Staaten der Erde (Berlin: Safari-Verlag, 1953), 119–21.
34 Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History.
35 Davies, Europe, 9.
36 A. J. P. Taylor, contribution to the forum “What Is European History? Historians Grapple with a Difficult Subject,” History Today 36, no. 1 (1986): 46–50, here p. 46.
37 On (physical and sociocultural) concepts of Europe, see the contributions to Kevin Wilson and Jan van der Dussen, eds., The History of the Idea of Europe (London: Routledge, 1995); Bo Stråth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Hans-Åke Persson and Bo Stråth, eds., Reflections on Europe: Defining a Political Order in Time and Space (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Susan Rößner, Die Geschichte Europas schreiben. Europäische Historiker und ihr Europabild im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 2009), discusses ideas of Europe among European historians. Concise overviews are Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Fictions of Europe,” Race and Class 32, no. 3 (1991): 1–10; Gerald Stourzh, “Europa, aber wo liegt es?” in Annäherungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Gerald Stourzh (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002), ix–xx; and Paul Stock, “Towards a Language of ‘Europe’: History, Rhetoric, Community,” European Legacy 22, no. 6 (2017): 647–66. The chapters in parts 1 and 3 of Michael Wintle, ed., Imagining Europe: Europe and European Civilisation as Seen from its Margins and by the Rest of the World, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), provide a view from the outside.
38 Peter Burke, “Did Europe Exist before 1700?” History of European Ideas 1, no. 1 (1980): 21–29, here p. 21.
39 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978); and, tracing this image back to antiquity, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Gegenbild und Selbstbild. Das europäische Iran-Bild zwischen Griechen und Mullahs,” in Gegenwelten zu den Kulturen Griechenlands und Roms in der Antike, ed. Tonio Hölscher (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2000), 85–109.
40 Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 1058.
41 Kiran Klaus Patel, “The Making of Homo Europaeus: Problems, Approaches and Perspectives,” Comparativ 25 (2015): 15–31; and the contributions to Lorraine Bluche, Veronika Lipphardt, and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds., Der Europäer, ein Konstrukt. Wissensbestände Diskurse, Praktiken (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009).
42 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood, 1973); and, conversely, Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), are classics.
43 Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
44 William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Books, 1977).
45 Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
46 Cited in ibid., 312–13.
47 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
48 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “The Mobility Transition Revisited, 1500–1900: What the Case of Europe Can Offer to Global History,” Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (2009): 347–77, provides an overview. P. C. Emmer and M. Mörner, eds., European Expansion and Migration: Essays on the Intercontinental Migration from Africa, Asia, and Europe (New York: Berg, 1992); and Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1993), are more detailed accounts.
49 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984); Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016); Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (London: Oneworld, 2017); Tiffany N. Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020); Olivette Otele, African European: An Untold History (London: Hurst and Company, 2020); and Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (London: Penguin, 2020), as well as the contributions in Ulrich van der Heyden, ed., Unbekannte Biographien. Afrikaner im deutschsprachigen Europa vom 18. Jahrundert bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Homilius, 2008); and Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Reinhard Klein-Arendt, eds., AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland und schwarze Deutsche. Geschichte und Gegenwart (Münster: Lit, 2004).
50 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and the contributions in Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch, eds., European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), provide insights from different perspectives.
51 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), which provides a concise overview; and George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: H. Fertig, 1978), which remains one of the best intellectual histories of racism.
52 Peter Mandler, “Race and Nation in Mid-Victorian Thought,” in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 224–44, makes this odd claim.
53 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968); and, for a (European and global) comparative perspective, Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), part 2, argues that imperialism was not crucial for European industrialization.
54 Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
55 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015), offers a more general non-Eurocentric history of the rise of capitalism. Patrick Karl O’Brien, “The Deconstruction of Myths and Reconstruction of Metanarratives in Global Histories of Material Progress,” in Writing World History, 1800–2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67–90, provides a critical assessment.
56 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), is an outstanding example.
57 Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
58 William G. Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); for a good popular history, see Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996).
59 Jones, The European Miracle, and the other literature on European exceptionalism referred to in note 24 above. More balanced accounts, also considering the role of global interconnections and non-European crises in enabling Europe’s imperial expansion, are William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal about the Future (London: Profile Books, 2010); Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Philip T. Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
60 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, 50–213; and John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), elaborate further on these observations.
61 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56.
62 Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
63 David Motadel, “Qajar Shahs in Imperial Germany,” Past & Present 213 (2010): 191–235.
64 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964); Jacques Godechot, Les Révolutions. 1770–1799 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), published in English as France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965).
65 Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006).
66 Quinn Slobodian, Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Christoph Kalter, Die Entdeckung der Dritten Welt. Dekolonisierung und neue radikale Linke in Frankreich (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011).
67 Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien. Eine Geschichte politischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982); Mazower, Dark Continent; Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
68 Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution; Jacques Godechot, Les institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1951); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Macmillan, 2010); and Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), on the Atlantic Revolutions. Miles Taylor, “The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire,” Past & Present 166 (2000): 146–80; and Kurt Weyland, “The Diffusion of Revolution: ‘1848’ in Europe and Latin America,” International Organization 63, no. 3 (2009): 391–423, on the impact of 1848 beyond Europe. Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991 [2012], trans Allan Cameron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–42, on 1917 beyond Europe. A general account is provided by the essays in David Motadel, ed., Revolutionary World: Global Upheaval in the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
69 Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), contains chapters on this entangled history.
70 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and the essays in Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the 19th and 20th Centuries; A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), on Great Britain. On France, see Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., Culture coloniale 1871–1931. La France conquise par son Empire (Paris: Autrement, 2003). On the Netherlands, see Susan Legêne, Spiegelreflex. Culturele sporen van de koloniale ervaring (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2010). On Belgium, see Guy Vanthemsche, La Belgique et le Congo. L’impact de la colonie sur la métropole (Brussels: Éd. Complexe, 2007); and the contributions to Vincent Viaene, David Van Reybrouck, and Bambi Ceuppens, eds., Congo in België. Koloniale Cultuur in de Metropool (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009). On Germany, see Markus Seemann, Kolonialismus in der Heimat. Kolonialbewegung, Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialkultur in Bayern 1882–1943 (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2011); and David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). On Italy, see Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). On Portugal, see Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Ana Paula Ferreira, eds., Fantasmas e fantasias imperiais no imaginário português contemporâneo (Porto: Campo das letras, 2003). The chapters in John M. MacKenzie, ed., European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), provide a comparative perspective.
71 Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On individual countries, see Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Gert Oostindie, Postkoloniaal Nederland. Vijfenzestig jaar vergeten, herdenken, verdringen (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2010); Elleke Boehmer and Sarah De Mul, eds., The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism, and Multiculturalism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012); Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Britta Schilling, Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); as well as the literature cited in the previous note.
72 Todd Shepard, Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
73 Goody, Renaissances.
74 Sebastian Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 999–1027.
75 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007). More generally, see the contributions in Kapil Raj et al., eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009); as well as Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
76 Sandra Ponzanesi and Adriano José Habed, eds., Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Critics, Artists, Movements, and their Publics (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018), provides a good overview.
77 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); see also Nicholas Hewitt, “Black Montmartre: American Jazz and Music Hall in Paris in the Interwar Years,” Journal of Romance Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 25–31.
78 Panikos Panayi, Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
79 David Motadel, “The Making of Muslim Communities in Western Europe, 1914–1939,” in Transnational Islam in Interwar Europe: Muslim Activists and Thinkers, ed. Götz Nordbruch and Umar Ryad (London: Macmillan, 2014), 13–43.
80 Ruth Harris, “Rolland, Gandhi and Madeleine Slade: Spiritual Politics, France and the Wider World,” French History 27, no. 4 (2013): 579–99.
81 Valeska Huber and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits, 1870–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), provides important contributions about this phenomenon. Heidi J. S. Tworek, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019) is an insightful case study. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Translation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962], trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), offers the more general European context.
82 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Hajime Nakamura, Parallel Developments: A Comparative History of Ideas, ed. Ronald Burr (New York: Kodansha, 1975), argues that some concepts are similar across the world.
83 Dominic Sachsenmaier, “World History as Ecumenical History?” Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (2007): 465–89, convincingly stresses this need for consensus.
84 Celia Applegate, “A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1157–82, on diversity within Europe and within European nation-states.
85 Important reflections on the relationship between continental and global history have also been provided by historians of Africa, including Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213; Leslie Witz, “Africa (Not) in World History: A Review from the South (Part 1),” Journal of World History 27, no. 1 (2016): 103–20; and Witz, “Surveying Africa in World History: A View from the South (Part 2),” Journal of World History 27, no. 4 (2016): 669–85. See Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, “Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 1 (2010): 149–70, for some insights into the relationship between regional and global history; and, more generally, the essays in Birgit Schäbler, ed., Area Studies und die Welt. Weltregionen und neue Globalgeschichte (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2007).
86 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), here p. 1, is a path-breaking work, although I do not share the authors’ enthusiasm for area studies and the history of world regions, which also includes “Europe” as a category. On the construction of (subcontinental) “regions” as categories of study, see the contributions in Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi, eds., European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).
87 Jacques Revel, Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard/Éd. du Seuil, 1996).
88 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell, 1991), remains one of the most thoughtful reflections on physical, social, and mental spaces. The chapters in Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine, eds., Key Thinkers on Space and Place (London: Sage, 2004), provide a good overview of the works of major intellectuals on space. On more general reflections about space in historical studies, following the spatial turn, see Jürgen Osterhammel, “Die Wiederkehr des Raumes. Geopolitik, Geohistorie und historische Geographie,” Neue Polititsche Literatur 43 (1998): 374–97; Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 78–96; Iris Schröder and Sabine Höhler, “Welt-Räume. Annährungen an eine Geschichte der Globalität im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Welt-Räume. Geschichte, Geographie und Globalisierung seit 1900, ed. Iris Schröder and Sabine Höhler (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005), 9–47; and, more generally, Sebouh David Aslanian et al., “AHR Conversation: How Size Matters; The Question of Scale in History,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1431–72.
89 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, 2 vols. (Vienna and Munich: C. H. Beck, 1918–1922); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Ferguson, Civilization; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Said, Orientalism.
90 Elspeth Graham, “What Is a Mental Map?” Area 8, no. 4 (1976): 259–62.
91 Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018): 1–21.