This essay analyzes a recently discovered French play, Les esclaves livournais à Alger, authored by François Gariel in Livorno in 1786. The protagonist of the piece, which is full of allusions to contemporary Tuscan and European events and subtle references to classics of French Enlightenment literature, is a virtuous, Algiers-based Jewish merchant who preaches toleration for all peoples and religions and greatly admires the grand duke of Tuscany. Important context for understanding Gariel’s play and the Jewish question in Livorno is provided by the relocation in the 1780s of prominent Algerian Jewish families who had built their fortunes on the ransom of captives, as well as the active but contested Jewish participation in the Livornese theatrical scene. Once the play’s many allusions are decoded and its layers are peeled back, Les esclaves takes us to the heart of Tuscan political debates about Jewish participation in the public sphere and illuminates widespread anxieties about Jewish power, intertwined with ambivalence about the prominent role of Jews in the commerce and ransom of captives. Livorno’s historical ties with the Maghreb are thus central to assessing the public discourse about the Jewish condition in Tuscany. A Mediterranean perspective in turn complicates our understanding of minority-majority relations as Enlightenment debates on toleration and Jewish integration flourished in Western Europe.

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.

The article considers the global historiography of Europe from two angles. First it outlines the difficulties, both historical and epistemological, that Europe poses as an object of study, especially after the historiographical transformations prompted by the events of 1989, the rise of postcolonial studies, the growing critique of Eurocentrism, and, most recently, the “global turn.” The conceptions of Europe that emerge from these currents have often been based on a rather homogenized vision of the continent, centered on the great nation-states of western Europe and their imperial policies. They also perpetuate, even as they criticize it, the legacy of a conception of modernity that positions Europe as both its historical center and the agent of its expansion on a global scale. The second part of the paper proposes to limit the blind spots inherent in this kind of vision by shifting our gaze to the eastern and Balkan margins of Europe, where the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires intersected over the “long” nineteenth century. This change of perspective displaces the history of Europe’s connection to modernity, revealing the great diversity of local actors, the importance of multicultural and pluriethnic societies, and the particular role of transnational populations such as Jews, who, while negotiating their own relationship to a European modernity, escaped the grip of national movements.

Over the past decades, the writing of European history—in both its incarnations, as the history of Europe, and as the histories of nations in Europe—has seen fundamental transformations. Though it has been adapted in different ways, the global turn has deeply affected the historiography produced in many European countries. On the one hand, crucial watersheds of European history have been reinterpreted as part of larger configurations, and as responses to global challenges. On the other, it is now clear that Europe’s claim to unity and cohesion was reinforced, not least, by observers from without. In the late nineteenth century, in societies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, contemporaries began to refer to a “Europe” that was less a specific location than a product of the imagination; the result less of geography or culture than of global geopolitics. What emerges, then, is an understanding of the history of the continent that places it firmly in the context of global conjunctures and repeated moments of re-territorialization.

This article reviews how historians and economists have thought about the economic history of Europe. It notes that internal explanations that paid little attention to the non-European world have been dominant for more than a century, and reviews some of the reasons for that Eurocentrism. Such navel-gazing, however, has also been increasingly challenged for some time now, at first especially by non-European scholars and activists. The latter parts of the article explore current debates within the discipline and its increasing acknowledgment of the interactions between European and non-European economies. Two areas of discussion that have played a crucial role in this evolution are detailed in particular: the question of the role of slavery in European economic development and the rich debates taking place in the relatively new field of global labor history. Overall, efforts to write the economic history of Europe confined to its own ill-defined boundaries might serve particular political needs, but they are, in fact, historically inaccurate.

The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This essay distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe, and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations—and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.

Abstract: The global turn is central to the study of Europe’s many migration histories—outwards, inwards, and internal—and encompasses transatlantic, imperial and post-imperial, and other global arenas. Benefitting from a wealth of pathbreaking scholarship that often focuses on macro-level histories, this article advocates zooming in on individual interpretations and experiences. By doing so, it argues, historians can open up nuanced perspectives that risk becoming submerged in studies where, rather paradoxically, actual migrants are displaced by an emphasis on overarching migration phenomena. Taking the late-modern era as its focus, it traces the global dimensions of two lives spanning almost two centuries to open out broader questions, not least about race and ethnicity. Jacob Riis (1849-1914) and Gérald Bloncourt (1926-2018) were both leading documentary photographers who shared a deep commitment to social reform and the amelioration of working-class conditions. Each recorded migration histories on camera and in writing, thereby enabling an analysis of multi-media representations emanating from the same source. That both were of migration backgrounds themselves—Riis having moved from Denmark to the United States and Bloncourt from Haiti to France—renders the images and texts they created particularly resonant. Their own origins and mobile lives proved crucial to their interpretations of the wider flows of people that have connected Europe with different global settings—and continue to do so today.

Why did European history come so late to the global turn? Europe’s past had of course always been constructed relative to its Islamic or Mongol peripheries, and later its colonial offshore. But only recently has it been understood that European and extra-European history are in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence. Intellectual and economic history recognized this before social history, which in its post-1960 flowering took it for granted that European social forms were both more advanced and categorically different from others. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a generation after political decolonization, new work began to explore the impact of peripheries on the European core, and to measure Europe from the outside. After 2000, a globalized European social history became visible. Its evasion of the constraints of the national paradigm has opened up striking new pan- and trans-European historical projects and methods. These are provoking new questions of how we might reconfigure European history in ways which understand eastern and central Europe in their own terms, rather than simply as the retarded extensions of “advanced” western European phenomena.

European history has been defined as a field by a notion of Europe—its borders, values, civilization, and nationalities—that is structured by Christianity and its secular legacies. Rather than seeking to globalize the history of Europe by considering the impact of European Christianity on other parts of the world, and how it was impacted by them, this article challenges that narrative. It asks how the historiography of Europe can be integrated with the historiographies of Europe’s historic non-Christian populations, namely Jews and Muslims. These are historiographies with their own rhythms, conceptual frameworks, and geographies in which Europe carries quite different connotations. They shift our attention from the north and west to the south and east, enjoining us to think differently about Europe and the diversity that has always existed within it. Separately, these historiographies speak to very different experiences. Taken together, they help us to think differently about the interface between Europe and the world, and to write the history of Europe itself against the grain.

This article argues that recent global histories of Europe represent just one quite specific mode of global awareness in a long history of European global historical and social scientific consciousness. There is no doubt that our understanding of the European past would be more than ill-served by misplaced isolationism or the simple rejection of the massive scientific gains made by global history. Yet recent shifts in the structures, technologies, and modes of the globalization inherited from the post-Cold War world push us to reconsider how that global interconnectedness was achieved. European history after our most recent “global turn” must take into account previous modes of global consciousness and examine how globalization itself has been shaped by this knowledge. Indeed, past understanding of global interconnectedness did not necessarily lead to more open borders, increased interdependency, or growing cultural fluidity. Dis-integrating and downscaling modes of social organization were invented and reinvigorated in response to perceived global forces. There were also conscious attempts to channel the fruits and accumulations of global processes based on an awareness of their potentially enriching and destabilizing impact. These efforts to take control of globalization did not stop it, but they did give it a specific shape in particular moments. As a case in point, the article argues that the half-century following the French Revolution witnessed what might be called a deglobalizing globalization: a moment when the global integration that many considered responsible for the upheaval of the Revolution certainly did not stop, but was redirected in the service of a sovereign nation through the birth of new modes of social science and history writing.

This contribution seeks to evaluate the influence of the “global turn” on medieval studies, with an accent on the European Middle Ages. Developing global perspectives for the premodern period constitutes a real challenge. First, the very notion of the “Middle Ages” is a Eurocentric concept and its application in non-European contexts can be criticized. Second, while the observation of far-ranging contacts and networks of exchange has opened important avenues for research in premodern history, the quantitative significance of those contacts remains difficult to evaluate. Third, there is an ongoing tension between different visions of (medieval) history’s function in society. Despite these problems, recent contributions to the “global Middle Ages” have opened up new approaches to phenomena that are equally pertinent for European medieval studies. While the global turn might not entirely reshape the history of medieval Europe, it certainly adds important layers and new perspectives to subjects that not only resonate with contemporary interests but have long been a concern of European medieval history, such as migration, commerce, and religion. In spite of the difficulties and challenges (methodological, linguistic, etc.) that it poses, the global turn has the potential to contribute to the development of new thematic approaches and new forms of cooperation in the field of medieval studies.

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.