Part III - Configurations and Telos

8 Tacit Directionality Processes, Teleology and Contingency in Global History^*

Jan C. Jansen

These are hard times for teleologists. No one wants to be part of their club. Coined in the early eighteenth century by German philosopher Christian Wolff as a term for the explanation of things in view of an end, goal, aim or purpose, ‘teleology’ was rarely used, for most of its existence, outside of the secluded intellectual worlds of philosophers and theorists of history and the natural world. It nonetheless became the cornerstone of a powerful tradition of thought that reverberated across the world.¹ Since the 1980s, however, its use has proliferated, and in the following decade it entered the vocabulary of historians. Largely absent from research articles published in the American Historical Review until well into the 1980s, eight times more authors used it in the following decade, a number that then doubled again over the 2010s.² This increase was not due to a sudden popularity of teleological views of history, but rather to its opposite. ‘Teleological’ stands for an understanding of history (or of a discrete sequence in the past) that those who use the term do not embrace, and in most cases reject. ‘Most historians are allergic to teleology and the idea of an end’, fellow historian Holly Case quipped, ‘even if it already occurred’.³ Along with ‘essentialism’, ‘teleology’ counts among the cardinal sins a historian (and, by extension, a social scientist⁴) can be accused of today.

It is not easy to say how and why ‘teleology’ came to be associated with bad historical practice. It certainly has to do with the oscillation in twentieth-century philosophical and social science theory between periods in which human agency took centre-stage and counter-reactions leading to periods that shifted away from human agency.⁵ In the historical profession, the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s–1990s revaluated ideas of contingency, fragmentation and discontinuity.⁶ From quite different backgrounds and traditions, proponents of microhistory (especially in the tradition of Italian microstoria and German Alltagsgeschichte) and post-modernist and postcolonial scholars agreed in their distaste of comprehensive métarécits. There is a correlation between the rise of the anti-teleological credo and the demise of two powerful progressivist ‘grand narratives’: Soviet-style historical materialism and modernisation theory – ‘the most teleological of the teleologies’ of the mid-twentieth century.⁷ Theorists and philosophers of history have argued that the breakdown of these totalising visions of the course of history also spelled the end for the entire Western modern concept of history as a coherent and meaningful process, although they disagree about what kind of regime of temporality and ‘chronopolitics’ would supplant it.⁸

Global history as a sub-discipline does not fit easily into the anti-teleology/ teleology divide. On the one hand, global historians have been quick to embrace an anti-teleological stance and position their approach at the vanguard of anti-teleology. They have credited global history with the mission (and potential) to overcome teleologies of the nation-state, of macro-concepts such as modernisation or globalisation and of ethnocentrism.⁹ In an influential statement marking the launch of the Journal of Global History, veteran global historian Patrick O’Brien defined the field as the antidote to ‘teleological chronicles designed to reinforce people’s very own set of values enshrined in canonical Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Confucian and other sacred texts’.¹⁰ At the same time, global historians have shown much less reluctance to engage in macro-historical reflections. It was precisely the reinstatement of the ‘totalizing project’, the launching of ‘enquiries into global issues and long-run material developments’ and the return to ‘generalization on a global scale’ that some early proponents found most liberating.¹¹ O’Brien combined his rejection of ethnocentric teleologies with a call for ‘cosmopolitan meta-narratives’.¹²

It is difficult to decide what to make of these statements about teleology in global history. This is largely due to the way the charge of ‘teleology’ is commonly employed. Its meaning remains elusive, and it has been used to critique a host of methodological sins ranging from determinism and anachronism to one-dimensional analysis and presentism. Charges of ‘teleology’ also usually have a polemical bent. They are often employed to discredit a particular version of the past, a particular ‘teleology’. British historian Herbert Butterfield famously dissected the progressivist Whig Interpretation of History (1931), but would himself not shy away from offering a unilinear (i.e. whiggish?) account of the history of modern science.¹³ Interestingly, historians usually remain mute about what would be the opposite of a teleological position.

Still, ‘teleology’ does not come down to a mere game of words, some form of sophisticated bad-mouthing or susurration of the zeitgeist. For ‘teleology’ raises crucial questions that every historian has to address in their work. These questions have been built into the modern Western concept of history as a coherent and directional process and carried into history as a modern academic discipline.¹⁴ Even if not necessarily under the umbrella-term ‘teleology’, historians have thus, for generations, theorised questions related to the directionality of history. In some contexts, their debates have crystallised around concepts such as ‘progress’, ‘Whig history’, ‘prehistories’, ‘presentism’, ‘process’ or the ‘openness of history’.¹⁵ There is, to my knowledge, no systematic discussion of teleology or directionality as a problem of history-writing, whether from a philosopher, a theorist of historical methodology or a practising historian, comparable to the sophisticated discussions of the role of concepts, narration, the relationship between structure and historical actor, temporality and so on, of recent decades.¹⁶ Nor have critics of teleology called for a new ‘turn’ or distinct methodology paralleling discussions of the micro- and macro-dimensions or materiality. I propose to map the sprawling debate on teleology in a slightly more systematic way. At the centre is the question of the directionality of history – that is, the question if (and when) a particular tendency, trend or process can be considered dominant for historical development and becomes part of the explanatory toolkit. A throng of thorny issues branches off from the question of directionality: How inevitable is the historical process (necessity)? How linear is it? How reversible is it? Such questions are inherently connected with debates about the form, position and role of history: of its narrative form or ‘emplotment’; ¹⁷ of historical responsibility for past wrongdoing;¹⁸ of its involvement in present-day politics or ideologies; ¹⁹ and of its societal relevance, its ability to provide orientation to present generations or to allow prediction of future developments or events.²⁰ And, above all, the fundamental question of human freedom and agency looms large over the teleology-in-history debate.²¹

Historians are more used to taking on such fundamental questions in practice, in the study of particular objects, rather than in abstract concepts. They nevertheless have engaged with them in theoretical terms – well before ‘teleology’ became a buzzword. Early generations of the nineteenth-century historical profession were anxious to drive contingency and chance out of their historical narratives.²² Still, they strove to salvage the openness of history and human agency against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s holistic – and teleological – system of history.²³ Despite being entangled in a view of history shaped by modernisation theory, Eurocentrism and nation, historians of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s did not shy away from debating how they construed historical processes and how they squared this with the autonomy or, as it was later called, the ‘self-will’ (Eigen-Sinn) of historical actors.²⁴

Remarkably, theorists of global history today seem to be even less inclined to think about issues of directionality and teleology than have previous generations and practitioners of other historical subfields. This is certainly not for lack of need. For global history stands out, at least in its prevalent theoretical form, by its intimate relationship to the processuality of history. Most definitions of global history as a subfield centre on the idea of long-distance interconnections and their ‘continuous, though not steady densification and consolidation’ in time.²⁵ In one of the most sophisticated theoretical surveys to date, Sebastian Conrad emphasises that global history as a distinct field ‘does … rest on the notion of global integration as a defining feature’.²⁶ Other historical subdisciplines may also have entertained a strong interest in particular processes – the emergence of capitalism in economic history, modernisation in social history, the polarisation of public and private spheres in gender history, to name but a few – but none of them has made statements about historical directionality as the foundation of how they defined their area of study.

In addition, global history is not just a statement about one particular historical process, but also about its relevance. Global history ascribes at least partial explanatory power to structures and forms of global integration, understood as regular and stable patterns of exchange and interaction. The term ‘integration’, however, remains conspicuously ambiguous. It designates both a particular historical process of growing interconnectedness reminiscent of what only a few years ago was called ‘globalisation’ and a condition or context of historical events (that may be applied to any period or event).²⁷ The most astute theoreticians and practitioners of global history take pains to make sure that it is not understood as a ‘teleological’ vision of history and gesture at the plurality of timelines and moments of disintegration.²⁸ But from their assumptions, global historians do privilege, or at least imply, one direction of history: the cross-border and long-distance interconnection and integration of societies across the world. Critics have hammered home this point and have asked if, limited to ‘a highly abstract designator of interconnection’, global integration would not ‘obscure considerably more than it reveals’.²⁹ Some of them have depicted the history of global integration as the heir of modernisation theory and its teleological pitfalls.³⁰ Global history, from this perspective, is no more than the master narrative of the globalised present-day world – or, rather, of how cosmopolitan elites conceive it.³¹ Some critics contend that, at its least reflective, global history is the heir to imperial worldviews or neoliberal ‘connectivity talk’.³²

Despite the embrace of integration as a defining feature by both its main theorists and critics, global history’s historiographic roots diverge on these questions. For global history as a subfield grew out of several, conflicting lines of inquiry, each with its own vision of how to deal with historical directionality. Postcolonial scholars, for example – one important reference in global history – usually exhibit a strong suspicion against any kind of generalist or macro-perspectives (despite, in some cases, following their own teleology of colonial ‘modernity’).³³ Their stance contrasts with global history’s other roots in the philosophy of history and historical sociology, a legacy that lowers the barriers to thinking about large-scale connections and contexts, at the risk of carrying along these traditions’ Eurocentric and teleological baggage.³⁴ Global history also took shape against the backdrop of a revival of neo- and post-Hegelian philosophies of history after the Cold War.³⁵ In short, the fundamental tension between the universalism and unity of the past, on the one hand, and particularity and rupture, on the other, has come to a head in the intellectual milieu of global history.³⁶

So why do directionality and teleology not appear higher on global historians’ theoretical agenda? I think the reason why global historians have been less likely to engage in reflections about historical directionality has to do with their epistemological preferences. Since the emergence of their profession, historians have entertained a close theoretical relationship with the category of time. Global history has shifted focus to the category of space, which for a long time was thought of largely as a neutral container of history. Global historians have devoted much energy to rethinking spatial relations and movements and to exploring synchronicity and spatial alternatives to the territorially bound nation-state (networks, oceans, etc.).³⁷ While they have produced, for example, fascinating insights into historical ‘moments’ and their global ramifications in space and into the global short-term contexts of the French Revolution, global historians have been less invested, if not outright disinterested, in thinking about change over time and the temporality of global integration.³⁸ This neglect has produced a lopsided reflection on teleology and directionality in global history centred on spatiality. I argue that there is a lot to gain from stronger reflection on the particular challenges of time and temporality in how global historians construe historical change.

This line of argument may also help move a rather unfocused and polemical debate in a more productive direction. The question of whether global history as a historical subfield is uncritically directional or even inherently ‘teleological’ is too general to move the debate forward. Any conceivable response would not do justice to the diversity of the field and the different, sometimes contradictory methodological orientations and complex operations of its practitioners. That question raises a host of further questions that quickly move discussion away from global history per se, such as: Is claiming a trend or dominant direction in history necessarily teleological? When does a linear narrative turn into teleology? And why would this be a bad thing after all? For want of a – much-needed – contribution from the philosophy of history addressing these questions, this chapter seeks to ask more pragmatic questions and search for answers related to the practice of (global) historians. Seen from this point of view, global history shares a lot of the theoretical challenges and choices non-global historians face, and global historians can learn from the responses of historians active in other – including much older – subfields. The chapter will thus delve into the theory of historical processes to develop more precise questions about directionality and teleology in global history. It will then move to the responses global histories offer or may offer to the teleological pitfalls of global integration. While the directionality/teleology problem poses some particular challenges for global historians, it also offers chances to explore new research avenues. Most importantly, it can help think about not the one-and-only master narrative, but the multiple ‘guiding scripts’³⁹ or ‘framing devices’⁴⁰ global historians may use, refine and variegate in practice.

This reflection on ‘guiding scripts’ has its own positionality. It is based on issues of teleology and directionality as seen from the concept of history as a coherent process that has shaped history as an academic profession, while also mobilising critical voices from within this (Western) tradition, such as critical theory. These issues may appear entirely differently when approached from the vantage point of other cosmologies, past or present.⁴¹

Processes and Teleologies: Theoretical Insights

What do we mean when we speak of a series of historical facts as a ‘process’? A process is not a thing, a substance to be found and explored, but an intellectual concept, a ‘framing device’ to integrate a number of events (or impulses) into a somewhat coherent sequence in time.⁴² One and the same historical action or fact can be considered as a discrete event or as part of a comprehensive process. ‘Process’ and other related concepts take the incongruity of intentions of human action and their results as their starting point. They are grounded in the experience that events and historical change defied the control or intentions of individual volitional acts, a foundational experience for Western modern concepts of both history and society.⁴³ The ‘processualisation’ of the past – that is, the conception of the past as a coherent and meaningful process – has been the basis for the emergence of modern (Western) historical scholarship.⁴⁴ Long before the post-modernist and postcolonial critique of ‘teleology’, philosophers of history, proponents of critical theory (such as Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt) and practitioners of historical research have debated the implications, techniques and limits of history-as-process(es). As is the case with all thinking about history, these debates have often been informed by everyday experience outside of academia. Thus, in the looming destruction of the planet Earth through human-made climate change, an unsettling, catastrophic experience of directionality has permeated academic inquiry and life outside of academia. Conversely, unexpected political and social upheavals (such as decolonisation, ‘1968’, ‘1989’ or ‘the Arab Spring’) have often been the source of recurring discussions about ‘the event’ in history and its relationship to structures and processes.⁴⁵ With their weak sense for time and temporality, global historians’ self-reflection about their ‘guiding scripts’ can benefit to a great extent from these debates among ‘non-global’ historians and sociologists of social and political change.

While theories of historical process vary, they all rest on the idea of directionality: ‘The most important and probably only common feature seems to be that an incalculably large number of impulses seems to constitute a somehow coherent, uniform process. We gain its unity from the fact that we draw an arc from some kind of end to some kind of beginnings.’⁴⁶ This direction does not need to be clear at the beginning of the process, and the process does not need to be caused by one telos/goal. In that way, teleology, in its classical philosophical meaning, would designate only a subset of processes.

Theories of historical process combine four further elements in addition to the core notion of directionality. First, processes divide the past into clearly defined sequences independently from the question of causation. While it may be used for periodisation purposes, a process per se is not equivalent to an epoch or period as processes may overlap. Second, a process is, to a certain degree, autonomous. It is neither completely controlled by individual intentions nor entirely contingent, but ‘possess[es] a relative necessity; [processes] have an autogenerative character and reproduce within particular conditions.’⁴⁷ ‘Consisting of nothing but the actions of individual people, [processes] nevertheless give rise to institutions and formations which were neither intended nor planned by any single individual in the form they actually take.’⁴⁸ Similar to social institutions, there is a crucial moment, a tipping point, after which a process is able to reproduce its conditions (which may be different from its original causes). Their autonomy, however, remains conditional to the contingent historical contexts that allow them to emerge; likewise, human actions or dynamics internal to the process may change the conditions to the detriment of the process. Conflating these two elements – the identification of uniform sequences and autonomy – may result in a strongly ‘teleological’ vision of the past.⁴⁹ Third, there is a mutual relationship between autonomous processes and historical action and events, the latter conceived of as being, to a certain degree, unpredictable and contingent. Processes only come into being through contingent historical action and events; in turn, they also shape and generate historical action and events. An event, while conditioned by structures and processes, nevertheless constitutes an interruption of a routinised sequence and yields lasting changes in the course of a process: ‘Every event produces more and at the same time less than is given in its pre-given elements [Vorgegebenheiten]: hence its permanently surprising novelty.’⁵⁰ Fourth, historical actors may or may not be aware of processes they are part of; they may seek to shape or change them, without determining the very existence of a process (autonomy).

A theory of processes helps generate a host of questions about how a particular historical process is construed. Theorists and practitioners of global history as a history of global integration need to address questions that include (but are not limited to) the following problems (in no particular order):

1. (1) Multiplicity and uniformity: Where does one process end and another start? To what extent are subprocesses aligned to each other (unidirectionality or even simultaneity)?

2. (2) Autonomy: Is a sequence a (conditionally) autonomous process or a mere trend that remains dependent on external and contingent conditions?⁵¹ What is the tipping point between trend and process? Which are the contingent historical conditions for the process to emerge?

3. (3) Interaction of processes: How do different processes overlap, interfere with each other and impact on one another? To what extent is their interaction shaped by contingency?

4. (4) Direction: How does the process relate to existing historical conditions? Does it change or reproduce them? Is it part of cyclical developments or ‘structures of repetition’ (Koselleck) in history?

5. (5) End point: What is the end point/result/outcome of a process? When can it be considered complete or discontinued?

6. (6) Relationship between processes and projects/historical action/intentions: To what extent do historical actors (from individuals to institutions) seek to regulate, steer or control a process? Do they participate in it wittingly or unwittingly? In what way do they imagine and anticipate its outcome? What relationship can be seen between intended and unintended consequences of their action?

7. (7) Relationship between process and event/moment: How does a process relate to contingent events? In what way are they conditioned by the process? In what way do they disrupt it?

8. (8) Causality: To what extent and in what way can the process as a framing device help explain historical change and historical action?

9. (9) Reflexivity: To what extent and in what way is the notion of a particular process reflective of particular mindsets, interests, ideologies or experiences?

Mapping questions that grow out of the concept of historical processes may appear as overly abstract and technical. Yet it is precisely this technicality that can help denaturalise the way in which processes – in global history and beyond – are being construed. They push global historians to consider ‘global integration’ for what it is – a framing device, no more, but certainly no less either. Following questions like these can also help address one (if not the) key challenge of a process-centred understanding of history as embraced by theorists of global history: teleology.

Seen from the theory of historical processes, ‘teleology’ appears as a particular way (or pitfall) of conceiving the past as a continuous, directional and conditionally autonomous sequence. A teleological perspective highlights to its extreme one process by streamlining the past in one direction and evening out alternative paths and contingencies. It puts emphasis on necessities and constraints rather than possibilities. Given the complexity of most historical (especially long-term) processes, a teleological perspective shows itself in degrees rather than in a clear-cut opposition (more or less teleological rather than teleological or not). Teleology then denotes the potential of a processual perspective to degrade

all individual things and events, every tangible and visible thing, into exponents, which have no other significance than to indicate the existence of invisible forces, and whose purpose is to fulfil certain functions within the over-all process … The process that degrades everything and everyone to exponents has acquired a monopoly of meaning and significance, so that the individual or the particular can be meaningful only if and when they are understood as mere functions.⁵²

It is this potential that has prompted some scholars to reject concepts of process as ‘dangerous’, for they ‘impede rather than enable the grasp of social processes, because they always pretend to know tendencies of long-term historical transformation or homogenise and disambiguate heterogeneous and contradictory changes’.⁵³

While the potential of teleological alignment is inherent to the very notion of process, one may distinguish at least two versions of it. In its philosophical tradition, teleology stands for a view of the direction and meaning of history as such. Teleology with a capital ‘T’, as we may term it for lack of a better alternative, conceives history in its entirety as one coherent unidirectional process. Teleology with a capital T may project its telos well into the future and usually posits the present as an important step in this broader process. It provides history with a higher meaning or purpose.⁵⁴ More common to the practice of historical scholarship is a slightly more modest version of teleology: a description of discrete sequences in the past (teleology with a lowercase ‘t’). This form of teleology usually refers to an endpoint/telos in the past, and explains (or rather implies) why a sequence of the past had to result in the outcome we already know. To be sure, this challenge is common to everyone making sense of the past in hindsight. For, in contrast to the participant’s or witness’s perspective, the retrospective view knows what happened.

While some critics argue that global history does indeed tend toward a teleological vision in the mould of the philosophy of history,⁵⁵ the idea of a unidirectional process driving history as a whole is probably as foreign to most global historians as it is to most other contemporary scholars of history. Things lie differently with teleology with a lowercase t. As a sub-discipline that attaches itself so closely to the concept of a historical process – global integration – global history is in many ways prone to teleological alignment. Due to the ambiguous meaning of global integration in global history scholarship – as a process and as a condition – the challenges are twofold: the risk of overemphasising inevitable directionality while describing the process of global integration itself, on the one hand; the risk of streamlining the past while describing and explaining historical sequences or events from the point of view of global interconnection, on the other. Turning to the practice of historical scholarship will reveal various ‘guiding scripts’ global historians use or may use on both these levels. A theory of global history will considerably benefit from reflecting on these practical insights.

Processes and Teleologies: Practical Insights (i)

How strongly do historians of global integration offer a unidirectional vision of the past? Are they aware of the inbuilt pitfalls of teleology that come with the concept of process, and if so, how do they deal with it? Two of the most fruitful debates that helped global history take shape have been triggered by the critical adoption of concepts from the social sciences – two ‘dangerous’ processes, as some would have it: (1) the debate about the emergence of ‘modernity’, largely understood as a model of European origin, with a strong focus on the origins of industrial capitalism (transformed into the so-called divergence debate);⁵⁶ (2) the social science concept of ‘globalisation’, initially meant to underline the uniqueness of ‘global’ modernity of the 1990s, and then increasingly extended into earlier periods.⁵⁷ Conceived as historical master narratives, both concepts do have a strong teleological bent, and many historians operating with these concepts are well aware of their pitfalls. The strategies they use vary, and range from playing with different scales, multiplying processes and timelines, and including disruptive and disintegrating forces. Some of their responses may help us think about how to complexify directionality in global integration as a process.

(1) Scales: Teleology has often been cast as a problem of scale, a distortion created by a macro-view that prefers the big picture over the detail, the whole over the fragment, abstract concepts over concrete individuals. An approach that puts the question of scale on the agenda, although with a preconceived opinion, is so-called microhistory, which has been considered by some as a way around global history’s methodological impasses.⁵⁸ Proponents of ‘global microhistory’ often cast their case in terms of bringing back the human dimension into global history, but they also touch upon teleology. Italian and German national microhistorians had already turned to the local, the quirky, the intractable with the precise aim to question and counter the grand narratives of social history, especially modernisation theory and Marxist orthodoxy. Yet we should not consider ‘global microhistory’ as the high road and the once-and-for-all solution to teleology. In historical fields other than global history, scholars have already turned to smaller scales precisely to find a full miniature version of macro-processes.⁵⁹ Global commodity or object histories, for instance, have rarely been written to counter established narratives of the rise of capitalism and its global production chains.⁶⁰ Moreover, proponents of ‘deep’ or ‘big history’ (or of a renewed form of world history) have claimed that extending historical scales to their largest possible extent was the best way to overcome the teleology of modernity.⁶¹ Likewise, some of the most holistic social macro-theories, notably Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, are emphatically anti-teleological.⁶²

While there is no innate relationship between the macro-teleological and the micro-anti-teleological, consciously playing with scale (jeux d’échelles) is certainly a promising, and tested, way to deal with issues of historical directionality.⁶³ Even outside of the field of microhistory, global historians have used scale as a means to temper and complicate the notion of global integration. Global integration can thus be explored as a multi-scalar process, including how historical actors navigate and move, or even ‘jump’, between different scales – a particularly promising but still largely uncharted avenue of inquiry. Following their prevailing interest in space, global historians have mostly turned to reflections on spatial scale by showing that ‘globalising’ forces played out in clearly confined geographic bounds and that global integration was in fact an uneven, polycentric and partial process across the world. One example of this kind of analysis is Vanessa Ogle’s history of efforts to standardise world time since the late nineteenth century.⁶⁴ Instead of presenting time standardisation as a prime example of growing global uniformity, she shows how diverging regional interests and strategies shaped the process as much as top-down efforts by Western officials or international organisations. The standardisation of the clock remained incomplete well into the 1940s, and the notion of a universal time was never fully realised (related attempts to unify calendars went nowhere). Ogle is one of a growing number of global historians who cast doubt upon the directionality of global integration by questioning its uniformity in space, but few global historians have actively played with global histories’ timescale. One of the few exceptions is Kenneth Pomeranz, who has reflected on the different timescales of the ‘great divergence’ between Europe and Asia. Pomeranz proposes a model of ‘fuzzy periodisation’ out of a mix of (very) long-term and short-term time scales as a way to complicate the notion of a straightforward, linear process.⁶⁵

(2) Multiplicities: Pomeranz contends that construing the timescales of the ‘great divergence’ explicitly does not call into question the directionality of the process that unfolds within these time scales. The same applies to two strategies of gaining a closer idea of the temporality of global integration/globalisation: first, the idea of multiple timescales of different subprocesses (economic, political, cultural, etc.) that counters the notion of a homogeneous macro-process where all dimensions move in lockstep; and, second, concepts of historical conjunctures of globalisation, including aborted globalisation projects, that put capitalism-centred nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalisation into perspective and undermine its alleged uniqueness.⁶⁶ All these strategies are laudable as they inject temporal categories into the discussion of global integration, but they do not reflect on the directionality of the historical process itself.

A related strategy may precisely question the uniformity of direction. On closer inspection, historians of global integration do work on a variety of different processes that only at a cost are lumped together into one allegedly coherent macro-process of interconnection or integration. A fruitful line of inquiry consists in dissecting these multiple processes and looking at how these processes interfere. A set of more precisely defined processes like expansion, transfer/reception, densification, universalisation, convergence, polarisation, hierarchisation or standardisation (each with their own direction) may refine the vocabulary of integration.⁶⁷ It remains to be seen if the interference of, say, processes of global socio-economic polarisation (or divergence) with processes of densification of communication exchanges results in a uniform direction of integration.

(3) Interruptions, Reversions, Dialectics: The way global historians tend to deal with events – the conceptual antipode to processes – is emblematic for their neglect of temporal categories. To be sure, global ‘moments’ and ‘events’ have become a highly productive subfield of study in global history.⁶⁸ Yet they largely serve to expose synchronous effects and responses in space, and thus to illustrate global interconnection. Events’ position as an interruption of continuous flows – the particular temporal structure ascribed to them by theorists of history – may transpire in the opening and closure of different paths, their multifaceted meanings and ramifications across the globe, but they tend to get lost to the gaze fascinated by spatial synchronicity.⁶⁹ Studies about the undoing of globalisation or moments of ‘deglobalisation’ in particular places or at particular points in time largely work without making reference to the concept of the event (or global moment).⁷⁰ Keeping up with these proliferating efforts, one may define a counter-process to each of the multiple processes one could dissect global integration into: expansion/contraction, hierarchisation/equalisation, convergence/divergence, densification/diffusion and so forth. The study of countervailing processes helps to demonstrate the fragility and reversibility of global integration; it has no implications for the directionality of globalisation or integration itself.

Things look different when we consider forces of disintegration as an integral part of global integration as a historical process. The idea that global integration and fragmentation are not mutually exclusive and pertain to discrete historical processes, but are more often mutually constitutive, has been present from the start in historical scholarship on globalisation.⁷¹ Studies on a wide range of topics, periods and geographies provide us with a number of categories and a wealth of empirical data to rethink integration as a process in less teleological terms. They can be used as a starting point to think about what may be called the dialectics of global integration.⁷² Over recent decades, historians have used a variety of concepts to capture this dialectical character, including:

1. – Bordering: historical border and borderland studies show how processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation impacted everyday life in borderlands; they show that the making and unmaking of borders was not a mere reflection of a global standardisation of nationhood (as some global historians would have it), but also involved complex and disruptive processes of disentanglement and re-entanglement.⁷³

2. – Control: historians of migration and mobility show that the increase of migration movements and infrastructures that facilitated them across the world went hand in hand with increasing attempts at control and forms of forced immobility; the acceleration of transportation and migration was offset by decelerating measures of quarantine, identification and regulation.⁷⁴

3. – Isolation: historians of social discipline and punishment have pointed to the fact that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw globalising efforts to physically isolate people as a means of social hygiene, from the emergence of prisons and convict settlements, to therapeutic institutions and quarantine, to spaces of exile and refugee camps; in forms of convict transportation, mobility became inextricably connected with carceral immobility.⁷⁵

4. – Unmixing: historians of forced migration and nationalism have pointed to the fact that the movement of people in many instances did not serve the emergence of an interconnected world, but the creation of homogeneity along ethnic, racial, national or political lines.⁷⁶

Using concepts such as bordering, control, isolation and unmixing to highlight the dialectics of integration might help spur global historians to take disruptive and disconnecting forces more seriously. It may also help them avoid the trap of conceptual overcompensation that would lead them to replace teleologies of integration with teleologies of disintegration.

Processes and Teleologies: Practical Insights (ii)

The previous section focused on global integration primarily as process, and the ways in which historians may avoid getting trapped in too narrow a version of directional movement. These questions are certainly central to the self-understanding of global historians, but only marginal to the many historians working on particular topics. Most historians do not deal with macro-processes (or their local/regional ramifications); rather, they address discrete historical events or processes. How does the global historian’s emphasis on interconnection affect their work in terms of teleology? What does examining and explaining an event or historical fact – for example, the ‘age of revolutions’ – under the condition of global integration do to the space of historical possibilities? Does the focus on synchronous interconnections streamline the historical process more strongly than locally or nationally framed histories? With regard to the two aforementioned examples, I see a tendency in that direction, but I will also argue that this is due to a rather one-sided use of global history’s methodological toolkit. Global-integration-as-condition can also help build new arguments for a more contingency-sensitive – less teleological, if you will – understanding of history.

Given the variety of research topics, a general answer to these questions is not possible. I would like to turn to one example related to my own work: the late eighteenth-century ‘age of revolutions’. The topic stands for a momentous transformation and a time of upheaval that was transnational if not global in scope, but it has been largely studied in a national framework (e.g. as the history of the American Revolution, the French Revolution …). Over the past two decades, however, the field has become part of the global history debate and, as a consequence, has been fundamentally reshaped. Hence, the particular revolutions in the Americas and in Europe are no longer seen in isolation, but as part of an interconnected era of upheaval that was Atlantic if not global in scope.⁷⁷ Researchers have stressed the mobilities of people and ideas between different areas of the revolutionary world around 1800. In doing so, they have placed strong emphasis on the historical actors who drove these events, as if interconnection or mobility were the sole attribute of those who may appear as the drivers of change (or even ‘progress’) in a highly volatile historical situation.⁷⁸

In that sense, the global interconnection or integration argument (as it is being largely used) tends to streamline developments that local and national histories have described as highly uncertain, embattled and contingent. Each of the great revolutions around 1800 has been depicted as a violent civil war, during which the outcome of the struggles did not reflect what had been initially debated; similar to what could be seen in mid-twentieth-century decolonisation, these revolutions did not strike a straightforward path from empire to nation-state.⁷⁹ Furthermore, large exile communities of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ sought to carve out alternatives to the revolution and worked to undo the demise of the monarchy, the independence of a colony or the overthrow of slavery even decades after the fact.⁸⁰ Against the complexities of their local, national and imperial histories, many histories of the revolutionary era produced under the condition of global integration appear blatantly less complex and more teleological.

Is this the price one has to pay for an analytical perspective less devoted to localness and particularity? As already noted, I do not believe that teleology is purely a question of scale. It is a question of reflection on time and temporality (or the lack thereof), and it occurs to me that there are paths not properly taken by global historians. The question of how historical actors experienced and organised temporality – past, present and future – has been a common theme in social history. Their foremost theoreticians, Reinhart Koselleck above all, centred on the idea of a divergence of the historical actors’ ‘space of experience’ and their ‘horizon of expectation’ due to the experience of an ‘acceleration’ of history; this gave way to the twin concepts of uncertainty (the unpredictability of the future) and possibility (the feasibility of history).⁸¹ An entire research agenda has sprouted from this idea of ‘futures past’, uncovering imaginations and expectations, plans and projects, many of which never came into being.⁸² In recent years, following a general trend towards contingency in the social sciences, historians have questioned the close connection of this agenda to European ‘modernity’ and turned it into a more generally applicable theory of how historical actors coped with – and sought to benefit from – historical uncertainty.⁸³ Even if they only rarely relate to these concepts directly, local and national historians of the revolutionary era have tapped into the same ideas and uncovered the many alternative visions and projects that were on the historical actors’ minds and that made alternative futures appear to the latter no less likely than the actual paths taken.

There is no reason why history, as seen under the condition of global integration, would have to do without the historical actors’ concerns about uncertainty and their ways of imagining and coping with the future, even more so as many prognoses and predictions partly motivated their historical action.⁸⁴ To capture past experiences of uncertainty and imaginations of futures past, global historians do not even have to renounce their interest in connectedness and turn into local or national historians – although they would always do well to ‘muddy [their] boots in the bogs of “micro-history”’.⁸⁵ In the histories of revolution and state-building mentioned earlier, scores of connected histories of alternative futures and failed projects await them. The era was shaped by numerous efforts at revolutionary state-building, stake-claiming, imperial renewal or geopolitical reordering that ultimately failed or were thwarted by others.⁸⁶ Likewise, the enemies of revolution and their ideas were no less mobile than the revolutionists. The revolutionary era saw the emergence of exile as a transnational – or, more precisely, trans-imperial – political space. In a context of high geopolitical uncertainty, revolutionary alternatives and alternatives to revolution were fiercely debated and translated into projects that in many ways resembled the ones actually undertaken.⁸⁷ Taking this connected sphere of alternative imagination and failed initiatives into account is probably less a question of historical justice. After all, they were not always part of Walter Benjamin’s disruptive hidden tradition of the oppressed – the unrealised hopes and expectations of justice and salvation.⁸⁸ Many of these interconnected alternative imaginations during the revolutionary era came from enslavers, monarchists, racists or staunch imperialists. Uncovering their ideas and projects can, however, help global historians see the outcome of historical processes as much less certain than it may appear at first from a perspective of global interconnection. Whole centuries can be (re)written from the perspective of failed projects, of unexpected and unpredicted developments and of ‘questions’ the contemporaries sought solutions for.⁸⁹

Does giving futures past a more prominent place in global historians’ toolkit mean that teleology will be replaced by unrestrained contingency? The fact that historical actors experienced a process as open-ended and the future as uncertain does not mean that the actual outcome is unexplainable in hindsight. After all, many expectations and plans failed, and the upheavals of the late eighteenth century ended in results only a few had initially foreseen or even sought – the quintessential experience of process.⁹⁰ The fact that it could have been otherwise cannot absolve historians from explaining why it eventually led to a particular result. Yet past imaginations push (global) historians to search for better explanations and to go beyond unidirectional explanations. They point to the horizons of what was imaginable and sayable at a given moment, and how global integration may have affected them. Seen from this perspective, historical processes are marked by spaces of possibilities that are shaped by both opening and constraining dynamics; the outcome stems from a shrinking of this space.⁹¹ And an important argument that global historians can make is that one such factor both of constraint and of uncertainty is to be found in global integration and interconnection.

As a consequence, historians of interconnectedness might realise that the argument of global integration may in itself hold the key to a less teleological global history: entanglement as a source of uncertainty, as the particular global history complement to the classic notion of ‘acceleration’ of history. Such an idea was expressed well before the advent of global ‘modernity’, and well before the formation of the modern historical profession: by the Greek historian Polybius, usually represented as an early thinker of historical determinism and cyclical history, but writing himself in a situation of heightened consciousness of interconnection.⁹² Revolving around the rise of Rome’s Mediterranean empire, his Histories were in fact very much a history of large-scale entanglement and integration. Describing it as an ‘enmeshment’ or ‘interweaving’ (symplokē) of spheres, Polybius considered this process of expansion and integration as a source of increasing complexity, uncertainty and unpredictability for the historical actors.⁹³ Borrowing from historian David Bell, one may translate this idea into the vocabulary of twenty-first-century global history with the term ‘connections by disruption’.⁹⁴

***

So how should global historians move on from here? Do they have to absolve themselves of their inherent teleology, or can they simply carry on as if they do not consider themselves affected by a purely polemical debate? What is certain is that they should move beyond what appear to be stale alternatives. Revealing branching and contingency in every past development is no more intellectually satisfying and convincing than the idea of a unidirectional past pervaded by anonymous necessity. While it is hailed by some as the golden path to a re-politicised academic practice, there is nothing inherently more critical in the notion that things may have been otherwise; it may even serve as the basis for complacency.⁹⁵ There is thus nothing inherently good or bad to thinking in terms of comprehensive directional processes or contingency. While a stronger attention to contingency may help break up reified ideas of historical unidirectionality, fetishised and unbounded contingency may end up in unrelated microhistories driven by local cultural determinism.⁹⁶

This is not to say that global historians should shelve teleology as a polemical and helplessly abstract issue. Quite the contrary. They should carve out what is hidden in a seemingly ideological debate and turn it into a serious debate about their theoretical and methodological foundations. Seen from a less dramatised point of view, the teleology question raises serious issues that have been engrained in historical scholarship. The idea of the past as a directional and coherent process is an element of – and theoretical challenge to – all historical scholarship, at least in its modern Western mould. Yet it poses itself in a particularly acute way for a sub-discipline that contains a processual notion of history in its very self-understanding. While no historian can do away with issues of directionality and processuality, global historians have wedded themselves to it in a particularly strong fashion.

What about excluding integration (i.e. process) from the ‘official’ self-definition and closing the chapter? The actual practice of global history would defy such a parlour trick. In a variety of ways, the idea of global integration/interconnection – both as a process and as a condition – has strongly informed global history scholarship over the past two decades. In fact, it contains a wealth of ideas and approaches that a more self-reflexive global history can draw on. The result will certainly not be a new grand theory, but rather the theoretical identification and refinement of guiding scripts that inform global history scholarship. One of the greatest needs for the theory of global history is to study such guiding scripts for historians of ‘globality’ or ‘global integration’ – similar to the efforts that have been devoted to national histories.⁹⁷ Such guiding scripts would reveal more clearly how global historians construe historical change. They would be intrinsically situational, and would vary depending on whether someone is writing a textbook, conceiving a research article, pitching a research proposal to funding organisations or explaining to students or a broader public why global history matters. These scripts would avoid reifying ‘global integration’ teleologically, by injecting temporal categories into global history’s theoretical reflection. They would allow space for interceding and countervailing processes, dialectical developments, tipping points, uncertainty and, yes, the interplay of necessity and contingency. And they would devote great attention to the historical actors’ experience of time and historical change – their reflections, expectations, hopes and fears and the ways in which their plans and anticipations did not capture the actual outcome. Global interconnections can thus also be revealed – in their dual character – as both unlikely outcomes and sources of uncertainty.

9 Distance A Problem in Global History

Jeremy Adelman

The Problem of Distance

The problem of distance occupies a central yet obscure place among global historians. For a field that seeks to explore social connections and cross-cultural exchanges, uneven and unfair as they might be, the space that separates actors from each other (our placeholder definition of ‘distance’) is intrinsic to the art. Most often, it is treated as an independent variable exogenous to human action, a physical or cultural geography that has to be overcome by encounters and contacts powered by technologies and social pressures. Global historians may disagree on how far we have overcome divides. But, just as global history came of age under the umbrella of the globalisation that gave it such significance, there has been an underlying presumption – to be unpacked herein – that the demise of distance was a secular, unavoidable propensity, culminating in a sense of spatial proximity (thanks to the workings of social media) and tight economic coupling (thanks to elaborate economic supply chains). The sense of being emancipated from distance also has its darker side, thanks to the same forces, as our screens fill with images of refugees fleeing Kyiv or megaships jamming the Suez Canal.

Still, there is remarkably little reflection on how distance functions in global history, in part because it is implicitly treated as a given, an exogenous condition of human life which human curiosity, ingenuity or greed strive to surmount. The result is confusion – indeed, so much confusion that global historians often find themselves invoking two seemingly incompatible narratives at once. One narrative focuses on the arc of global history as the demise or eclipse of distance. Drawn to stories of technological change, it emphasises communications and transportation breakthroughs that shrink the time needed to travel or convey messages. According to this narrative, the space separating humans has been shrinking for centuries; distance has been in decline since 1492 (a conventional marker for global history), a process that intensified with the advent of steam-based transportation and accelerated once more after 1945 under the flag of Pax Americana.¹

A second grand narrative arrives at a very different conclusion. Instead of stories about closing gaps, some global historians find themselves accenting the persistence of distance, and even its heightening. The compass, steam and satellites may have shrunk the world, but they did not dissolve the gulfs that separate humans. They did not yield the one-world idylls that have often accompanied technological euphorias, from railway manias to Silicon Valley’s (now faded) magical thinking. Indeed, the same instruments could be used to dehumanise in atrocious ways. Greater proximity, in effect, is not a sufficient condition for togetherness; it can often induce brutality. What is more, distance can be made intimate. Even as spanning and connecting technologies produce more togetherness, social and cultural interactions can yield chasms.²

In considering the problem of distance, this chapter argues, global historians need to be more mindful of the tricks that distance can play. If global historians often proclaim their ability to produce narratives that stand above methodological nationalism and other parochialisms, to break the ramparts of bounded collective myths, at times even touting the epistemic virtues of thinking ‘big’, ‘broadening horizons’ and aligning new perspectives with global needs, this chapter urges not just more humility but more awareness of the complex and often fraught ways in which more interdependence can also produce more conflict, more chasms.³ Distance is not just an independent variable outside human interaction but has also been its effect. To understand this, we need to treat distance as more than just a physical determinant but as a social process.

Ghost Ship

On 7 March 2020, the Bahamian-flagged cruise ship Zaandam set sail from Buenos Aires with 1,241 passengers and 586 crew for an extended luxurious trip ‘from the end of the world’. By the time it reached Florida three weeks later, 193 on board had flu-like symptoms; 4 people had already died. Port after port rebuffed the vessel as its tiny infirmary filled up. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, one of President Donald Trump’s avid cheerleaders, declared that the vessel would not be permitted to dock. With about 250 Americans aboard, DeSantis’s decision to turn citizens into pariahs provoked outrage. Even Donald Trump had an outburst: he didn’t want the Zaandam to become a ‘ghost ship’. DeSantis relented, allowing only the 49 Florida residents to disembark. The rest, Canadians, Europeans and others – including non-Floridian Americans – were lumped into the unwanted. For twelve days, the Zaandam floated offshore. Four more people died; hundreds more became infected. The president of the Holland America Line, Orlando Ashford, invoked principles of a fading era: ‘The international community, consistently generous and helpful in the face of human suffering, shut itself off to Zaandam leaving her to fend for herself.’⁴ Eventually, a deal was struck: the passengers could disembark. Given face masks, they were whisked out of Florida. Hundreds melted, untested, into the airports of Miami, Ft Lauderdale and Tampa Bay to board flights to New York, Toronto and London to infect people there and beyond.⁵

The tale of the ghost ship illustrates some of the challenges of grappling with distance in global history. Vacationers had come from all parts to gaze at a shrinking planet and its disappearing icebergs, only to be swept unawares into a pandemic that had started a few weeks earlier in Wuhan. Then, they discovered that this overheating global village was riven by fault lines and lethal differences between the rhetoric of the ‘international community’ and the legal walls of national ones. The ghost ship revealed how globe-trotting passengers got internally differentiated by gubernatorial edict, and how movement across any border doubles as an action that collapses distances while signifying differences.

Nor was the fate of the Zaandam peculiar to ways in which states doubled down on differentiators to sort people into those who deserved care and those who did not – and, lately, those who get vaccines from those who cannot. Citizens were made pariahs, persecuted and expelled, in their millions in the lead up to the outbreak of Covid-19. Even before the pandemic, strangers were persecuted across the world as nativists sought to ‘unmix’ nations that the world had mixed up. Their paroxysms were triggered by globalisation’s blurry borders, merging markets and mixing peoples, thereby provoking what Arjun Appadurai prophetically called the ‘anxiety of incompleteness’. By this, he means an affective condition of a nation’s sense of beleaguered majorityhood. One can add the campaign and attempted putsch in the United States to assert minority white rule in the name of a shrinking white majority or, in extremis, the purification efforts in the borderlands of Russia and Ukraine. The question of who is entitled to be a citizen, or to have a state in the first place, enmeshes millions into webs of tribunals, census-takers, border-police, fencing and camps that regulate and invigilate the human flow.⁶

Indeed, as this chapter will show, it has been in the efforts to draw lines and borders to separate, to distinguish, that we can see the most acute evidence for the complex interaction between how technologies collapse spatial distancing and how mixing and merging produces efforts to enhance social distance.

What does this mean for global history? We global historians have tended to treat flow as a process that dissolves conceptual divides between majorities and minorities; it’s a trait of Marxists looking for signs of international class solidarities, of (neo)liberals who see self-interest and comparative advantage as welding markets across borders, of cosmopolitans committed to ethics of care and curiosity for strangers. Some of us, the confidence in our guidance systems humbled by recent events, oscillate between all three. Either way, there has been a tendency to think of closing spatial distance as bringing in tow intervisibility, recognition and a sense of cultural proximity.⁷

For the first few decades of efforts to transcend the limits of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism, global historians, myself included, leaned on the vocabularies of integration, with words like ‘connection’, ‘entanglement’, ‘convergence’ and ‘exchange’ – not to mention ‘globalisation’. Of late, they have been under assault, criticised for obscuring place and particularity. The call to ‘re-scale’ our narratives back to the natural units of comradely togetherness in the form of the nation is now in full flight; by restoring place over fluidity, belonging over mobility, the urge to reclaim patriotic narratives appears to correct for everything that de-bordering dismantled. The world financial crisis of 2008 ripped the halo off what was left of globalisation; the nationalist wave of recent years has given way to dysphoric talk of deglobalisation, splinternets and bunkering behind epistemic walls.⁸

Yet these efforts to re-order the world into parts and hierarchies are themselves responses to the effects of how societies have managed distance, how closing spatial divides can yield to new detachments and separations. This chapter is about the ties between global flows and global fencing and the multiple, contradictory meanings of distance. It argues that global integration and ethno-racial categories have gone hand in hand; the first gives new significance to the latter; the latter offer instruments to cope with the former. The chapter points to some underlying currents in global history: the affect of incompleteness in our times, the urge to separate friends from foe, neighbours from strangers, have been recurring features of integration and responses to the collapse of spatial distance.

Until recently, we have not reckoned with how integration produces distance, how erasing spatial distances sparks efforts to separate and conceptual schema to sort – and alienate. We have tended to bracket the separating and distancing reactions to global fusions as spasmodic ‘backlashes’ of provincial have-nots who have been drained, as one British economist has aptly put it, of a sense of ‘belonging’.⁹ Instead, we might explore how incompleteness and distancing can be seen as part of integration, not its accidental side-effects.¹⁰

Confronting the way distance-effects are endogenous to human efforts to bridge physical and social gaps has an important ethical implication for our narratives. To start, we can draw out some continuities from imperial modes of amalgamation to latter-day globalisation to reveal interlocking patterns of integration and hierarchy and to explain why, in particular, imperial modes of sorting and organising what got fused together have such lasting appeal even after empires were on the run. Imperial progeny like ‘civilisation’, for instance, continue to be coordinates for ranking cultures. In this fashion, the creation of colonial subjects in earlier times and the mass production of stateless people in ours appear not just as side-shows when things go wrong. Rather: interdependence produces the need to stratify and separate. We might even understand the condition of statelessness not just as the by-product of Afghanistan or Venezuela’s ‘failure’, but as consequences of other states’ refusal to welcome strangers who have lost – as Hannah Arendt put it – their right to legality. As she noted in the 1967 preface to Part Two of her Origins of Totalitarianism, this ultimate form of political distancing, relegating peoples to the condition of living without rights to have rights, began when the expansion of empires in the nineteenth century fused with new racial modes of thinking and distinguishing. Fast forward: refugees exist not just because some states turn citizens into strangers but because other states rely on social categories to legalise their exclusion and turn to the underfunded and much-maligned international community to make up the gap and bear the brunt.¹¹

This chapter points to the complex and fraught ways in which global historians have understood distance in two registers at once. It is about how distance is what gets shrunk by growing interdependence between societies; it is also about how interdependence triggers efforts to sort, to rank and to place conceptual distance between interdependents. It shares some thoughts about how we might understand the interplay between distancing and solidarity and the moments that push greater differentiation and those that pull to more solidarity. Not only will this enable us to have richer, more complex accounts of globalisations past; it may help us understand the knife edge we face in the age of climate change, a migrant crisis and ghost ships.

The Demise of Distance?

Distance is intrinsic to global history. It is to the field what water is to fish – at once perspective and subject. Looking at the past beyond the conventions of Eurocentrism, beyond the substrate of methodological nationalism and beyond the endogenous explanations of social life are key features of global history. Going ‘beyond’ implies distance and perspective, looking at societies from the outside-in or tracing dynamics across their boundaries. We – global historians – need and observe distance simultaneously. The combination of needing and observing distance produces tricks. We reach for an illusion of epistemic virtue of being global and unmoored from bounded attachments of place or communal affinity; we are distant. At the same time, there is an urge to underscore the importance of distance as the subject that needs explaining. One solution, as Sebastian Conrad has noted, is to be more cognisant, more disclosive, of our positionality as historians writing from specific perspectives and locations even as we often slip into Olympian perches gazing down at humanity’s exchanges.¹² This can be pushed one step further to note how historical subjects manage distance by comingling necessity with separation, how the distance-collapsing activity of trade or migration also produces the need for social categories that distinguish between insiders and outsiders, over heres and over theres.

It helps to reckon first with the ways in which global historians thought about distance as something that markets, technologies and environmental pressures surmounted and overcame. Indeed, this was the signature of what distinguished global historians from other branches – because they looked at how societies were bridged, connected and mixed (though not always voluntarily). The theme of bridging and entangling, transcending spatial and social distance, yielded a variety of overarching narratives. The first, and until recently the most common, underscores the importance of integration across locations and reducing the distances between them. It is perhaps best exemplified in Conrad’s field-marking What Is Global History? Written in what we can now see as the sunset years of post–Cold War globalisation, What Is Global History? made the multiple ways and meanings of integration the leitmotif of global history. New technologies, social actors and wider – world-spanning – imaginaries created a growing sense of connection and fusion. To be clear: Conrad was reflecting back what a lot of us were practising in the code-wording of transnational, international and what became baptised in the early 2000s as global history. There were caricatured versions that looked back upon the past as a long voyage of human merging and mixing. An extreme variation of the integration narrative, common to the technological determinism that runs like a current through global history, turns distance crossing into distance collapsing. It is perhaps best captured in Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man of 1962, which underscored the transformative power of media technologies from the rise of moveable type to what he called the electronic age and the global village. Though many subsequent readers (if they read the book at all) tended to interpret The Gutenberg Galaxy as a celebration and missed McLuhan’s disquiet about homogenisation, repeatability and amnesia (oral cultures, unlike print in his view, were committed to active memorisation), there was no denying the image of world shrinkage. The metaphor would catch on again after 1989, especially with the end of history prophecies and the rise of homo digitalis.¹³

In this mode, distance was the global subject precisely because it was the feature of social life that changed as distance became a relic of pre-digital, pre-typographic, pre-steam, pre-compass times. We might quibble over when this process began – was it the Renaissance, the one-world prophecies after 1492 or the global enlightenment of the eighteenth century? – but there is little denying the importance of a cluster of technical changes from the eighteenth century that enabled humans to see distances differently, indeed to see distance as something that could be mastered and trained. Microscopes, telescopes, photography, telegraphy and electrical clocks triggered human capabilities to observe and watch more carefully across a wider range of distances, from close-ups of the cell to the nebulae in the skies, making visible what the naked eye could not see either because it was too far away or too near or small. By the 1880s, astrophotographers had pushed surveying beyond continental hinterlands on Earth to map the Moon’s craters to bring its surface closer. The Director of the Paris Observatory, Ernest Amédée Mouchez, launched the Carte du Ciel project in 1887 as a network of the world’s main observatories to identify all the stars. Now the Earth had been shrunk to a glittering speck among specks.¹⁴

Distance-smashing rhetoric – which had grown across Eurasia in the wake of 1492, upsetting the authority of traditional texts and supercharging a zeal for discovery that went well beyond Europe’s Renaissance – acquired new energy with eighteenth-century commercial integration.¹⁵ But it was with industrialisation and a new international division of labour that European champions declared a final triumph over distance. Steam, wiring and government policies facilitated long-distance communications (creating post offices, reducing levies on cross-border flows, abolishing censorship) and slashed the cost and delay of movement. A horse-drawn wagon or coach, crawling at about four miles per hour, would take at least sixteen days to travel from New York City to New Orleans. The arrival of the steam locomotive cut the travel time tenfold. One British observer marvelled in 1839 that the advent of the train would collapse the vastness that separated interior continents from coasts. ‘Distances were thus annihilated’, he exulted, bringing about a collapse of times and spaces into a common, industrialised, accelerated and shrinking merger.¹⁶ The celebration of the telegraphic cable gave rise to even more exultant prophecies – not least because the effects were more instant; it took much longer for steam engines to revolutionise the political economy of shipping. Once gutta-percha, a Southeast Asian gum capable of insulating cables from corrosion, was discovered, there was a rush to submerge the telegraph; by 1871, a line finally lay across the bed of the Pacific; by 1900, around 350,000 kilograms of underwater cable interlaced the world, so stock and commodity prices, news and travel plans could circumnavigate the planet in sixteen minutes to create a single market, especially for business news. Yrjö Kaukiainen is correct that we may read cable boosters too literally; the costs of information flows were falling even before the ‘telegraphic revolution’. But the telegraph did mean that, by 1870, news that once took 145 days to go from Bombay to London now took just 3 days. Two avid news readers in London at the time – John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx – would make collapsing distances at the hands of steam and cables the inescapable drivers of capitalism and European civilisation.¹⁷

For good reason, global historians rely on ‘integration’ across distances as a keyword. Indeed, global history was imagined as a style of storytelling and analysis fit for the post–Cold War era of globalisation, in which market integration was celebrated, in Margaret Thatcher’s immortal words, because ‘there is no alternative’. Global historians did not necessarily echo the euphoria or endorse Thatcher’s flat-world certainty. But the demise of distance was nonetheless a precept for the field to spotlight the collapse of expanses that could not be explained or understood by local narratives or methodological nationalism.¹⁸ The instant spread of Covid-19 through the sinews of overnight travel – and, indeed, the global spread of cruise-ships for the world’s vacationing (and now vaccinated) middle classes to see the ‘end of the world’ from their gunwales – demanded a style of history that demoted the significance of distance. Among historians, the result was a tendency to see the leitmotif for global history in the enclosure of the world into a single, jet-fuelled survival unit.

Split Worlds

If integration, shrinkage and the demise of distance have been a strong narrative current among global historians, they often obscured a counterpoint – one that has placed the accent on differentiation and separation. While observational and communications technologies enabled people to see more clearly and to convey more instantly across distances, they also re-signified distance and yielded urges to separate, to detach, to mark off and to create new distances, especially in social connectivity. Just as the world’s astrophotographers were cataloguing the Moon’s surface and shrinking what we thought about Earth, governments were forging new systems of surveillance and distinction. Legal systems of segregation and categorisation grew up in order to sort what was being mixed.

It was above all at borders that the tensions between a decline in spatial distance and the drive to produce more social distancing was clearest. Visas, passports and border controls all proliferated alongside the intensification of world shipping and migration. Around the time of its first centenary of independence, the United States, the land of immigrants par excellence, was girding to erect a monument to a myth of welcoming: the Statue of Liberty, to pose in the harbour of New York to ‘enlighten the world’. If one stopped the story there (as many textbooks do) one would miss a basic counterpoint. Just as the Statue of Liberty was being erected, American legislators were promulgating new systems of exclusion and selection. The most notorious was the 1882 prohibition on Chinese immigrant workers, a pattern of racially informed migration policy to keep out the unwanted which, as Erika Lee has recently explained, was all about creating and enforcing social distances between peoples, a tradition that runs through the history of American migration from colonial days and the foundations of settler capitalism all the way to Trump’s infamous border wall.¹⁹

The United States was simply an extreme case of the more general combination of heightened mobility across distances and the sense of urgency to manage and separate the mixing that ensued, especially in imperial spaces from Canton to Cape Town. In effect: integration in the nineteenth century summoned the need for separation and segregation, perhaps most visibly in the polyglot worlds of New York, Buenos Aires and the Cape Colony. These global hubs were also the site for large-scale ‘city-splitting’. In Rio de Janeiro, as Brazilian historians have shown, shantytowns in the centre of the city got pulverised to make way for Parisian boulevards, pushing cortiços northwards or up the moros, giving the poor a distant perch over which they could watch the Haussmannian beautification below and, ultimately, the southward spread of suburb beachfronts along Copacabana and Ipanema. It would fall to the forensic anthropologists of the day, such as Dr Nina Rodrigues with his skull-measuring devices, to sort out the links and lines between races and to create a legal code, inscribed in the language of scientific impartiality, that would uphold what the real estate developers were creating on the ground.²⁰

The combination of the demise of distance with exclusion and city-splitting was, moreover, made visible. Indeed, the contradictions and complexity of the tricks of distance can be seen – literally – in how they were represented to viewers, as recent work on the history of nineteenth-century photography has shown. The contradiction between proximity and alienation became the staple subjects of new recording devices that intensified the sense of global merger and local segregation. Consider the effect of the camera, the instrument of accelerated global intervisibility from the 1850s onwards. The daguerreotype, for example, was not just the instrument for creating ‘realistic’ imagery of the Egyptian pyramids; Maxine Du Camp’s portrait of the Sphinx buried up to her shoulders in sand in 1849 brought the wonder home to viewers in Paris, first in a gallery and a few years later in an album of travel photos of the world, collapsing the distance between fascinated viewers and grainy viewed – and creating a frenzy for the travel industry. Du Camp’s travel companion, on the other hand, was bored to tears by the rubble and the endless sand – and resented Du Camp’s immediate celebrity. For those who campaigned against slavery, the possibilities of ‘shooting’ imagery of enslaved suffering were immediate; they used photographs of human bondage to stir sympathies far away. Slaveowners also saw the potential: they countered with pastoral, feel-good images of plantation domesticity.²¹

The war of images that prevailed over the contested ground of distance – how far apart were free and unfree, migrant and citizen, tourist and spectator? – could also be intimate, unfolding within divided households and split cities. It was in lower Manhattan that the Danish-born reporter Jacob Riis catalogued and photographed the city’s tenements structured into Italian, Irish and Jewish ethnic enclaves of squalor. Experimenting with the use of flash technologies to capture the nocturnal city (he started with flashlights and then found a German innovation of mixing magnesium with potassium chlorate an effective way of illuminating while shooting – ‘carrying your light where you carry your camera’), Riis shocked the sensibilities of New York’s well-heeled, who preferred to keep the urchins of their city out of sight and thus out of mind. Now, togetherness became visible, splashed across the pages of newspapers and magazines, and yielded a rising sense that perhaps the welcoming creed had gone too far – or had at least exaggerated its own triumphs. Riis’s images had contradictory effects that I will discuss shortly, of attaching and detaching at the same time. They also informed a model that would be picked up worldwide by socially reforming journalists, armed with their new, ultra-mobile (for the time) Kodaks, by the end of the 1890s.²² Perhaps the most infamous was this image of three boys – barefoot – sleeping on Mulberry Street (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Jacob Riis, Children sleeping in Mulberry Street, New York City, 1890. Public Domain.

What disturbed the gentry was not just the indigence. It was the sensation that worlds were merging in their city but classes were diverging; it was that the differences and disparities were brought close, nearby: those hungry, needy kids from Italy or Galicia were underfoot. This was an affront to the prevailing Gilded Age narrative of welcoming at the height of nineteenth-century integration. Closing distance cast light – literally and figuratively – on widening differences that became the obsession of social reformers. The result was a recognition that, for all that steam and cables wired the world into one survival unit, it was a world of strangers. Moreover, it was seen – and hence the importance of lens-based media – as a world divided between the familiar and the strange, the civilised and the barbarian, the haves and the have-nots, sharing one, divided, planet.

The presence of the stranger provoked a welter of responses, from whitening myths of racial harmony in Brazil to panic about ‘Asians’ in America or, for that matter, a backlash against Euro-American missionaries in China. The mobility of peoples and the presence of migrants created a – perhaps the – signature of modernity: the society of strangers, replete with its champions and critics.²³ Collapsing distances created the need for new tools and concepts to sort, arrange and separate, to govern difference in a new, scientific, key. In this fashion, closing the distance between strangers while keeping them contained and unmixed helped define modernity.

The need to make sense of this duality of integration and estrangement has been stitched into the history of the modern social sciences and is a growing field of global intellectual history. Lately, historians have shown how governing difference required making sense of social distance. This is clear in the way demographers, geographers and ethnographers served in empire-building from the 1870s, often carrying with them skills developed in field work on peasantries and native people at home; as Alexis Dudden has noted of Nitobe Inazo, they laboured to make empires of strangers knowledgeable.²⁴ One who thought about the implications of enclosing strangers was Georg Simmel. He was working on a general text in 1908 when he felt compelled to reckon with the sociology of space and wrote an excursus about ‘the stranger’ in history. For him, the stranger is the figure who comes from afar to live in a group – call it ‘society’. But the stranger was no wanderer, drifting from place to place; the stranger joined society without being of society and was thus always a potential wanderer. And so, the stranger remains ‘distant’ – Simmel’s word – from the group’s ‘natives’. For Simmel, what was so potentially unsettling about the stranger was ‘the unity of nearness and remoteness’, at once intimate and objective, near and far ‘at the same time’.²⁵ It was a prophetic little essay, capturing the zeitgeist of an era in which the promissory Victorian rhetoric about the unstoppable power of technology and self-interest to break down walls seemed to give way to a more apprehensive sense that new walls were rising in their place. A bit like nowadays.

The unity of nearness and remoteness is thus worth considering as a compass for global history. The demise of spatial distance coincided with, and one might say motivated, the creation of social distance. The society of strangers that collapsed distances created the need for mechanisms for sorting and selecting people, drawing on categories of distinction and exclusion to manage the affect of integration, which included unease and panic around the nation threatened or rendered ‘incomplete’ by the presence of strangers.

A good example of how heightened migration ignited greater urgency to distinguish and to separate was and is the passport and its sibling, the visa. When physical mobility over distances was arduous and expensive, the cost and hassle of moving functioned as natural filters. But as migration soared and elites and governments became more anxious about crowding – and diseased – cities teeming with newcomers, there was heated debate over border controls and identifications. The First World War added military security and suspicion to the mix and stoked an urgency for states to monopolise the documentary control over movement and identification. In 1914, the British government passed the Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, issuing booklets to separate citizens from strangers. Passports became the norm for crossing borders across Europe and fanned out worldwide. When the war finally ended, the new League of Nations sponsored an international conference to begin the process of standardising practices of state vigilance and the creation of national and transnational bureaucracies to surveil and monitor who could leave and who could enter the nation-states. And as passports and eventually visas became documentary evidence that permitted movement across borders – so long as they did not exceed the rising number of ‘quotas’ that were attached to certain nationalities and races – so too did the need to come up with solutions for those who had no state at all. In effect, no sooner did the passport become a standardised instrument for monitoring the human flow than institutions such as the League of Nations had to create instruments for the new category of the stateless, like Russians expelled during the Revolution and civil war, or Armenians driven from the nationalist crusades in Turkey. One effect was the Nansen Passport, funded, in the absence of a budget for the League Secretariat, by private contributions, direct purchases and stamp sales in Norway and France (Figure 9.2).²⁶

Figure 9.2 Nansen Passport with Stamps, c.1930 to 1940. League of Nations Archives.

Original Source Citation, World Digital Library

What was and remains important to consider is that international mobility and circulation were linked to and inspired national systems of social differentiation. If global integration implied the creation of an enclosed and synchronised sense of capitalist time, it also created new forms of geographical distance marked by borders, barbed wire, walls, visas and elaborate mechanisms for sorting and selecting what and who gets to cross distances. Modern global integration, in effect, did not make distance less relevant. It created a bundle of spatial and social sensibilities, at times converging and diverging at others, of simultaneity and estrangement – which has been a source of difficulty for modern social theory and global narratives alike. Integration did not so much do away with distance as re-signify it.

Familiarity

If we can see that convergence gives new meanings to distance and does not just make it some exogenous feature to be overcome by new technologies and institutions, we can start to see that this complexity itself has a history that predates the technological and modernising euphoria of pre-nineteenth-century Victorians, their steam, their cables, their free-market credos and their print technologies. Indeed, there is a genealogy of complex thinking about the problem of distance that we can recover once we set aside some of the modernisationist conventions that have governed world and global history.

The first aspect of the ambiguity of integration is the effect of making strangers at once more familiar and more detached as part of the connecting and integrating process. Historians of the pre-industrial world of exchange and discovery work with a different conceptual vocabulary; instead of one-way integration, they invoke a pluralist world of intervisible parts governed by mores of learning and curiosity, as well as exploitation, that treat distance as that which has to be understood rather than conquered. In a lovely book, Quelle heure est-il là-bas?, Serge Gruzinski examines the ways in which exploration and cosmography made distant cities like Istanbul and Mexico City and their lettered elites more aware and curious about each other and created a sense of immediacy and ubiquity, even if a lot of it was illusory or functioned through a series of mirror games that made distant events seem imaginable. At the same time, closing the gap had the effect of running up against inherited and incumbent ways of doing things, of making far away people seem strange and exotic, as well as loathsome and scary, ‘defamiliarising’ them. When Eurasian states came into contact with each other as a result of the ways in which travel, trade and exploration were closing geographies, they created systems of translation and decipherment – inscribed in texts or paintings – to render strangers more comprehensible. When vessels began to connect Mexico City to Manila and thereafter to Istanbul, the systems of representation spanned the globe. They also ensured that the violence and conquests were also, therefore, clashes and exchanges of symbols.²⁷

Gruzinski’s story is part of a wider effort on the part of especially early modern historians to chart the ways in which societies, as they came into contact with each other, struggled to produce what Sanjay Subrahmanyam described as commensurable values and to create cultural repertoires to manage encounters.

This ‘early modern sentiment’ might be recovered for global historians and pushed into the making of the modern world to avoid some of the traps laid by proclamations that distance has been demolished, such as one finds in abundance when global history is unreflexively harnessed to the history of globalisation(s). Terms like ‘mobility’, ‘familiarity’, ‘exchange’, ‘liminality’ and, most of all, ‘connection’ (as opposed to ‘integration’) cleared ways to explore routes between and across units without dissolving the sense of – indeed, the discovery of – social distance. For instance, Subrahmanyam’s Three Ways to Be Alien follows the travels and adventures of three men in the seventeenth century who operated between cultures. The Portuguese took an Indian prince captive. A Venetian merchant winds up in India for six decades. Subrahmanyam’s purpose was to break the lock that national and regional (area studies) histories had on familiar bounded subjects and (though he exaggerated somewhat) the tyranny of comparative history, by tracking how his subjects moved across localities.²⁸ Natalie Zemon Davis’s Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds told the tale of Leo Africanus, aka Al-Hasan al-Wazzan. His was a story of ‘entangled values’, ‘double visions’ and ‘multiple repertoires’ that reflected the agonies and artistries of crossing pre-national, mainly devotional, borders. Raised in Fez and winding up in Rome, Al-Hasan would go on to write, translate and broker the epics of African history for European consumption.²⁹ These are just a few examples of how working across units and exploring connections and entanglements liberated actor-focused narratives from their places, just in time to catch or to echo the cosmopolitan sentiment, multicultural ethos and pluralistic values that (many) institutions of higher education had committed themselves to inculcate. In this way, strangers could become more familiar without being less estranged.

Distance, seen in this way, did not yield to proximity; this was not yet a shrinking world. There was no claim in Subrahmanyam’s or Davis’s protagonists to moving about in a Braudelian unity in travelling and trailblazing, and certainly nothing bordering on a shared ecumene. Indeed, it is fair to say that connectivity and entanglement tended to reinforce the view of ecumenes as largely locally driven, reproduced and kept apart. In a wonderful recent study of Renaissance cultural diplomacy, Natalie Rothman illuminates how ‘encounters’ between strangers before they became interdependent created ‘trans-imperial’ spaces, ‘interstices’ or ‘borderlands’. But while Ottoman and Venetian translators, missionaries, traders and migrants widened the scope for mutual regard, understanding and tolerance, they also serviced empire-building projects of marking territories and drawing boundaries between regimes. The concern remained, resolutely, focused on subjects within domains, not on the systems that crossed them.³⁰

Contrast this style of multicultural effort to create more complex world narratives about how actors wrestled with the cultural dimensions of distance with the multicultural styles that have tended to prevail of late. In recent years, globalisation euphoria and the accent on circulation and networks have tended to emphasise the familiarisation that came with contact and interdependence – as if falling short of becoming one-world denoted the incompletion of some liberal, internationalist or capitalist dream. Or for that matter, socialist. Modernists tended to presume that closing the geographic gap meant closing cultural ones, turning strangers into ever more familiar fixtures of life and, eventually, homogenising them. Or, in extremis, exterminating them. This is a signature of Marshall McLuhan’s stadial account from oral to print to telegraphic modes of co-existence and merger, which remains a staple for how world-making has been plotted over the centuries. At the time, he was observing the ways in which television was creating a new mode of intervisibility and commonality through communities, networks and values that crossed and erased borders.³¹ By the 1970s, ‘global thinking’ was becoming hot – not because so many senses were being aroused by hot media, but because the world was becoming more crowded, unstable, running up against its limits. With it came more and more talk about Coca-Cola-isation, multinationalisation and, after 1989, lots of flat-earth talk about liberalism and networked society (for those who thought globalisation was good) or Americanisation, neoliberalism and hegemony (for the dissenters). If early modern hubs featured mediators and translators of cultural difference, the high-water mark of late-twentieth-century globalisation was dominated by outsourcers and supply-chain builders.³²

In the years following the end of the Cold War, there was a growing sense of attachment across nations that accompanied the lowered borders between them. Even the diffusion of the term ‘global’ was part of the lexicon of merging world parts and peoples into one new, scalar mode of living. An ethnography of Wall Street conducted in the late 1990s captured the bravura about a borderless, flowing world seen from its commanding, financialised heights. From such a perch, togetherness meant a simultaneous and synchronised market rhythm, a form of hypercapitalist time in which actors converged on the bankers’ schedule in a common urge to be flexible, nimble, mobile, unshackled from the past, ‘responsive’ (as the terminology of the time liked to say) to the future. Unbound by place or location, money men sought to ‘serve the needs of our clients across all geographic borders’ (as one 1994 Merrill Lynch report put it). The world’s places, like its factories, were becoming ever more liquid.³³

In an early wave of global history, there was a tendency to presume that scaling-up made distance irrelevant; just-in-time global delivery systems, instantaneous messaging and network society were delivering a sense of collapsed and accelerated synchronicity. One author called for a new field of study and discipline to capture this destiny and called it ‘connectography’.³⁴ His timing was unfortunate, for just as his futurism about ‘global civilisation’ rolled off the printing presses in 2016, British voters elected to secede from the European Union, Donald Trump was on his way to victory and the confidence in things global dissipated quickly. Distance, as Gruzinski would have noted, may have been bridged but this did not make it any less significant.

Estrangement

Not everyone saw the triumph of flatteners and distance-busters in the same way. For some, physical distance may have collapsed, but social distance had not. If anything, the end of the Cold War had created a semblance of unity and convergence – which overlay chasms. Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes (1994), a survey of the ‘short’ twentieth century, saw the fall of the Berlin Wall as the signal eclipse of an industrial working class which had anchored socialist alternatives. But if the ideological standoff was over, Hobsbawm worried that the collapsing post-socialist and postcolonial order would trigger more violence between estranged peoples within states. Marxists were not the only ones concerned. Francis Fukuyama declared the end in less materialist terms in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), a book which did not have the same ebullient overtones associated with his 1989 essay, and its nuances, like McLuhan’s, got lost in the clichés. Here too there was an ideological patina of unity, but Fukuyama worried that liberalism unchallenged would grow flabby and let more worrying (for him) tribal affinities prosper. Despite their differences, Fukuyama and Hobsbawm were unambiguous about the era-ending moment that dawned with globalisation. Both, however, were wise enough to disparage the rage to forecast and predict the inevitable one-world triumph, and worried that a post-ideological world might be no less violent than its precursor. Looking out at the carnage in the Balkans, Rwanda and elsewhere, they worried about a new type of violence between strangers released by the collapse of imperial and post-imperial states.³⁵

Others saw deeper global cleavages revealed and took the paradox of integration one step further, arguing that it was the very forces of integration and globalisation that would produce, not erase, more estrangement and alienation between cultures; the demise of physical distance could intensify social distance. Few works captured this more trenchantly than Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). An epistle aimed at one-worlders whose connectography missed the ways in which interactions between peoples reinforced the sense of estrangement, it had more influence in the domain of public policy in making sense of the ‘West’s’ relationship with Islam. Nowadays, it has been dusted off to explain the abrasion with China and the feud with Putin. Historians like to dismiss Clash of Civilizations for essentialising cultures into civilisations, and for good reason. But a second look reveals some important insights that overlap with global historians’ interest in the production of ‘commensurability’ – with travellers, translators and mediators of an earlier era performing the function of making cultures intervisible. For Huntington, the modern era powered integration by markets and universalising liberal ideas. It also created an ever greater difficulty in understanding social differences and bridging social distances; instead of togetherness around liberal values and market forces, Huntington saw endemic difference and potential violence. Huntington’s analysis of distance was more cunning than his critics appreciated. What perpetuated distance between civilisations was precisely the dynamics unleashed by integration, first by European empires, then European cosmopolitanism and cresting with European world governance girded by human rights and private property. So it was that the demise of physical distance sired triumphalist unity rhetoric and aggressive expansion by the victors and set off a ‘clash’ between the interconnected cultures.³⁶

For global historians, the emerging challenge in the post–Cold War era lay in resolving the tension between greater connection and estrangement, in understanding how interdependence could coincide with and even create social divides. Without necessarily taking a Huntingtonian approach, global historians did in fact turn to the paradox of integration and distance, especially in explaining why some societies grew rich and others languished or ‘failed’. Market integration, especially after 1820, had spawned greater material divides between people; all the one-world talk was simply papering over the chasms in GDP. Comparative economic historians like myself plunged into the challenge of explaining why some grew rich and some did not. The most famous and debated was Kenneth Pomeranz’s account of the ‘great divergence’: how parts of northwest Europe broke out of their Malthusian trap while parts of riverine China did not. But he was not alone; there were others studying China and Latin America who posed similar questions about how collapsing physical distances and market convergence yielded to divergence.³⁷ By 2008, the ‘what went wrong’ story-seeking was a cottage industry to explain global dividing. Needless to say, global economic historians concerned with diverging directions of society did not necessarily subscribe to the cultural fixities of ‘us versus them’ that marked Huntingtonian analysis. Indeed, most comparative historians tended to explain divides in terms of grubby variables like factor endowments or policy decisions. What is important to note is that the happy convergence narratives that accompanied globalisation did have dissenters for whom distance was not just a physical condition to be overcome with new technologies and institutions.³⁸

As long as globalisation appeared to lace the world together with on-demand supply chains, cheap flights and cruises, social divides tended to pale beside the euphoria of those that prospered. Backlashing was left to protestors in Argentina, disgruntled French farmers and ethno-nationalists who seethed about the dismantling of their nations.

This ability to see social distances has, not surprisingly, come out of the shadows in recent years to replace talk of global citizenship and the dividends from liquidating everything on world markets. The fracturing of globalisation is now clearing the way for a different retrospective vision, flagged in the brutal (from the perspective of earlier human rights warriors) headline of a piece in The Economist commemorating the 70th anniversary of the UN Convention Against Genocide: ‘Never Again, Again, and Again’. Human rights had, as Michael Ignatieff has noted, become the moral global guidance system to accompany market globalisation, lending it legitimacy and creating an infrastructure to manage those whose estrangement turned to abuse. Didier Fassin has called this ‘humanitarian government’.³⁹

The result has been a sceptical turn among global historians about humanitarian rhetoric and proclamations – and, indeed, all modern universalisms that masquerade as distance-busting credos to match the power of markets and technologies when in fact they often behave in the same ways as the imperial civilising missions they were designed to replace. David Rieff was among the first to call into question the conceits of humanitarianism. In its modern incarnation (there is a dispute over where to start human rights movements), it was connected to the failure of developmentalism and the demise of Third Worldism in the late 1960s. Just as the promise of closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots faded, according to Rieff, humanitarians offered new hope and championed new treaties and international laws. ‘Those the gods wish to destroy’, Rieff noted acidly, ‘they first allow to set international norms.’ Writing in the aftermath of the bloodbaths of Srebrenica (where Rieff was a reporter) and Rwanda, he reminded readers that ‘no century had better norms and worse realities’.⁴⁰

The urge to capture the history of how global ideas and norms created the illusion of breaking down distances has transformed not just the history of humanitarianism and the governance of and for strangers, but global intellectual history tout court. Leading the way has been Samuel Moyn. In the wake of the declaration of war against Iraq in 2003, Moyn turned his sights to the history of human rights as a movement to replace the disenchantment with self-determination and decolonisation. In his view and others’, a short but intense arc of events – from the war in Biafra to Prague Spring and the Helsinki Accords, to atrocities in Argentina and Cambodia – stripped nation-states of their halo as rights makers and saw them as rights takers. Movements mobilised lawyers and activists to appeal to a higher normative order, what Moyn has called the last utopia.⁴¹ It took time for this post-national vision of a global world of networked activists working in the service of a post-national idyll to take shape. In 2003, Aryeh Neier, the founder of Human Rights Watch and later head of the Open Society Foundations, reflected back on four decades of ‘struggle for rights’. He noted how the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe had been resisted by the Ford administration in 1975, even as it was going to subject the Soviet bloc to the scrutiny of human rights activists. It was only much later, in the 1990s, that the flowering of the treaty’s significance for the new human rights regime became clear. He was shocked ‘to discover years later that the CSCE [Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe] had yielded benefits beyond our wildest imagination’.⁴² To Moyn, this was the kind of self-serving retrospective that celebrated the angels of history while obscuring the effects on strangers they thought they were rescuing. Ever since, the history of world ‘humanitarian government’ has been seen as an effort doomed to recycle past illusions about helping strangers while separating and dividing them and creating a new global hierarchy.⁴³

Strange Interdependence

Distance, as should be clear, is not just tricky; it plays tricks. Technologies and organisations that claim to close gaps often create new ones that are not always seen as the result of efforts to connect and merge. At heart, this chapter has argued, growing interdependence has produced deeply mixed responses of integration and estrangement, new models of belonging together to some new, often abstract idea of a world community, while making the divides between peoples at home and far away not just deeper, but more visible.

Earlier in this chapter I detoured to earlier modern global historians in part because they worked with a vocabulary that was more accommodating of the greys and ambiguities of what it meant to close the distances between peoples. One reason is because early modern thinkers in Mexico City, Delhi or Paris were not yet tethered to the one-world, modernising narratives that would govern capitalist storytelling habits and the technologies they wielded from the nineteenth century onwards.

Let me conclude by recovering the idea that we need more complex approaches to the distance question that accommodate the ambiguities and contradictions produced by integration and closure. Before the triumph of world capitalism, before the pulverising effects of free trade and steam technologies (what Marx and Engels would call ‘heavy artillery’), this was easier to appreciate. In Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, Carlo Ginzburg has reminded us of a moral experiment conducted by the eighteenth-century philosophe, Denis Diderot. Do we cease to feel compassion if a person in distress is far away; does distance ‘produce the effect on us that the lack of sight produces on the blind?’ Diderot asked. Presaging our current debates about drone bombings and missiles, Diderot speculated that many people would find it easier to kill a man at a distance if he ‘appeared no larger than a swallow’. Distance, the appearance of things being smaller, created an illusion, a kind of trap. The eighteenth-century world had sewn its parts together through exchange and scientific curiosity and made its parts more visible to each other – more visible and yet at the same time diminished by the tricks of distance. At its extreme, it made foreigners more familiar but less human.⁴⁴

The concern about the tricks of distance was not just ideational. Indeed, two prophets of commercial capitalism, Adam Smith and David Hume, worried about the moral consequences of closing the material gaps between strangers. It obsessed them – and set off, as Luc Boltanski has noted, an urge to ‘symmetrise’ the spectator and the far-away spectacle, including the spectacle of suffering strangers.⁴⁵ For Hume, commercial nations were ‘both the happiest and most virtuous’. In an essay he wrote in 1752, and which deeply influenced Smith’s thinking about trade, Hume explained that ‘industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are more commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages’. It was from trade among strangers and the spread of consumption that people learned the habit of ‘conversing together’. Interdependence exposes peoples of the world to different goods, tastes and desires. It ‘rouses men from their indolence; and presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the nation with objects of luxury, which they never before dreamed of, raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed’.⁴⁶ Being exposed to luxuries, goods and services beyond one’s reach, especially when they came from exotic places, motivated peoples’ pursuits, civilised them and made them more other-regarding. Smith was more troubled; he doubted whether sympathy might march in lockstep with self-interest. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the Scottish moral philosopher wondered if a gentleman would worry more about a pain in his finger than the fate of thousands of Chinese people swallowed up by an earthquake.⁴⁷ Here were two societies connected to each other by trade and science yet separated by sentiment. Did distance diminish the capacity to identify with another’s pain despite mutual interests? Even more, did the commercial contact that brought the two peoples together create the illusion of a sympathy that did not keep pace?

More than two centuries later, the same tension, the same trickery, is at work. Yes, there were voices, even at the dawn of modern globalisation, that worried that markets and cameras had created an illusion of closure. In an important work on the history of capitalist thinking, Albert O. Hirschman excavated a different story about the history of self-interest and world-making. His Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (1977) was an effort to see markets in less triumphal ways, more open to moral considerations at their root, and to draw the reader’s attention to the limits of self-interest in connecting strangers. In the same year, Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) meditated on the complex tricks of the camera. She questioned the celebration of ‘photographic objectivity’ and the heroic photographer as the impartial witness to history that brought distant events home and closed the gap between strangers; most especially, she questioned the very notion that the image of others’ suffering might make the viewer feel more attachment and empathy. In fact, a world saturated with images of strangers in distress was as likely to foster detachment as attachment. The lens, now mounted on our phones, the latter-day instrument most responsible for closing the distance between strangers, was equally an instrument for making those distances all the more intractable.

Sontag and Hirschman picked up where the eighteenth-century penseurs left off and opened trails for us to examine more ambiguous and contradictory effects of proximity, to see that closure creates new social divides. The sooner we can dispense with narratives that imply a singular logic or an inevitable shift from a world of villages to the global village – whether through the ‘fix’ of capital or the finesse of new media, whether in a mood of dysphoria or euphoria – the better.

10 Materiality Global History and the Material World^*

Stefanie Gänger

Global historians have been among the most prolific apostles of the material turn since both fields’ inception in the 1990s and early 2000s.¹ Global commodity histories, accounts of the ‘global lives of things’² and popular histories of the ‘world in objects’ – Benin brass portraits, Aztec double-headed serpents and Mughal miniatures that ‘tell of the world for which they were made’³ – are only the most visible tip of an iceberg comprising global environmental histories,⁴ world histories of consumption⁵ and global histories of human waste,⁶ fashion or, indeed, epidemic disease and ‘contagion’.⁷ Materiality evidently is en vogue among historians adopting a global perspective – as object of study, as a prism, directing the historian’s gaze, as source material or, indeed, as illustration, ‘material embodiment’ and evidence of world-making, the global scale and connectivity.⁸ This is in some measure paradoxical, to be sure. For matter and material cultural have long been, and remain to a degree, associated with proximity, the concrete and the ‘lower order’⁹ in the modern imagination: the ‘micro’ rather than the ‘macro’, the contingent rather than the universal and, indeed, the local rather than the global.

This chapter seeks to uncover a series of implicit, often unspoken assumptions that guide and inform global histories that canvass aspects of the material world. Its particular interest is in the grounds on which historians associate matter and material culture with a particular scale, context or level of observation – the global, most importantly, but also, and seemingly inconsistently, the concrete, the particular or a ‘lower order’. The very words ‘object’, ‘substance’ and ‘matter’ suggest intransience, obduracy and self-evidence. An object is that which, literally, throws itself before and puts itself against us, with ‘the self-evidence of a slap in the face’;¹⁰ a substance is that which ‘stands under or grounds things’ – the ontologically basic, fundamental entities of reality and ‘facts of nature’.¹¹ And yet, matter and material culture tend to stand for something other than themselves – mud for dirt, antiquities for the past, pears for food – on account of humans making sense of them in particular ways.¹² The humanities’ now nearly three-decades-long interest in the ‘agency’ of things, posthumanism and the ‘ontological dignity’ of matter has let semiotics fade into the background, but, with all due humility,¹³ it is still humans – and, in this particular case, historians – who endow matter and material culture with meaning. Matter, the chapter holds, may temporarily become inextricable from the global scale – because certain forms of matter affect the entire planet, for instance, or because a global material event would have been evident as such to men and women in the past – but materiality as such has no ‘natural’ scale, level or context, no self-evident, obvious place in any order.

In its attempt at understanding the criteria practitioners apply to connect matter and material culture with a particular scale, context or level of observation, the chapter is concerned with the entire range of matter surrounding humanity in the modern era, from plants, viruses and oxygen to chintz, plastic and pesticides. One of the most pervasive dichotomies in the Western intellectual tradition is the opposition between man-made, or artefactual, material objects on the one hand, and natural, seemingly inert material objects on the other – presumably a remnant of the Aristotelian hylomorphic model, according to which things are compounds of matter (hyle) and form (morphe).¹⁴ Scholars have for some time now problematised that dichotomy: even the most natural-looking flower, human body or river course may be the result of human ingenuity, while even the most abstract expressions of human thought and culture – Japanese sericulture and economic growth, or Western mass democracy – could be argued to arise also from the ‘material world’.¹⁵ This chapter shares the conviction that differences between artefactual and natural objects of the material world are gradual rather than dichotomous, and a belief in the historicity and contingency of the dichotomy. It remains, at the same time, acutely aware of the import of the differences between various kinds of material objects. Not only does matter have properties that artefacts do not – it is divisible ‘without requiring a change of name’, for instance, and it can endure within other sorts of matter¹⁶ – artefactual material objects also bear many of the cultural associations the chapter sets out to uncover precisely on account of the longevity of the hylomorphic tradition. The chapter reflects on the material world surrounding and comprising human beings in its entirety, because it is only thus that one can comprehend the sum of the historian’s relation to it.

A chapter concerned with materiality, globally, could have dealt with a series of other topics, to be sure. Possibilities for emphases abound; there are various ways one might approach the relationship between global history and the material world. Some might suggest it would be better to consider the materiality of the field as such – global historians’ particular dependence on airplanes, digitisation or archives in places where humidity threatens the paper records.¹⁷ Others might think it pertinent to discuss, instead, the field’s material – both organic and physical-mechanical – language: its jargon of ‘circulation’, ‘international pressure’ and ‘flow’.¹⁸ Another obvious choice might have been to study the materiality of some of global history’s favourite subjects: the transport infrastructure at the basis of the global economy¹⁹ or the submarine cables, breech-loaders and doses of quinine that made high imperialism – ‘a more territorial form of [imperial] domination’ – possible.²⁰ In centring, instead, on global historians’ association of matter with a particular scale, context or level of observation, the chapter opts for a theme in line with the volume’s general impetus of understanding the conceptual basis of our work as global historians; of exposing the tacit assumptions that guide our work and of holding them up for careful inspection.

Signs of the Global

Most commonly, forms of matter and material culture are seen to ‘reveal a world of movement and interaction’²¹ when they themselves have moved – or, more accurately, have been moved about the world, for matter is rarely automotive – at some point during their ‘biographies’.²² Commodities, in particular – by definition moveable and implicated in patterns of exchange²³ – have come to signify world-making, the global economy and ‘connections among people … distant and unfamiliar to each other’, because, owing partly to the impact of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, their biographies are often told through world-spanning chains of production, processing, marketing and consumption.²⁴ So have diplomatic gifts,²⁵ contagious germs²⁶ or medicinal imports, many of which were exchanged across boundaries in the early or late modern era and are at present regarded as ‘tangible manifestations of … global connections’, a ‘global age’ and a ‘global shared culture’.²⁷

While these things’ movement and implication in worldwide connections is undeniable, one ought not to forget other features of their biographies: the circumstance that their ‘globality’ and movement would often have been unknown to, concealed from or – particularly from the late 1800s onwards – irrelevant for our historical subjects;²⁸ the fact that these materials’ movement across large distances would have been short in comparison to other, less mobile stages of their biographies: plant growth, or museum display, let alone gemstone formation; and the fact that contemporaries would sometimes have condemned the things’ global movement as inappropriate, erroneous or extrinsic to their nature, as in discourses about medicines, plants,²⁹ or, indeed, antiques. As the current, virulent debate about restitution exemplifies, to many in the present and the past, some artworks, though they may have lived decidedly ‘global lives’, remain firmly associated with the particular context of their origins or ‘ancient seat’, as Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, put it during the Napoleonic wars, when ideas about the proper place of art first (re-)gained currency.³⁰ Already during the 1790s, driven by their opposition to the French revolutionaries’ looting of the Italian peninsula, writers such as Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy had argued that the best art, though it could not be possessed, belonged in its original setting. They condemned the displacement of artworks from ‘where nature had placed them’, their ‘sequestration from their native country [l’enlévement à leur pays natal]’.³¹ From that moment, at least in some strands of modern thought, many artworks were regarded as intrinsically inalienable and immovable. This is not to say that Jingdezhen porcelain, Saint-Domingue sugar or Potosí silver may not justifiably be regarded as ‘physical evidence for sustained cultural encounter on a worldwide scale’.³² It is merely to lay bare that present-day global historians’ foregrounding of such objects’ globality has as much to do with the possibilities that their biographies offer as with the historians’ own research interests – in global integration, connections and cosmopolitanism.³³

The other, more important question is whether these forms of matter and material culture ‘reveal a world of movement and interaction’ or whether what they really reveal is ‘movement and interaction’ in a world of isolation, stillness or, at the very least, shorter-range (e.g. (cross-) regional) movement – whether they are ‘likely to offer a distorted view’ of the past, as de Vries put it in relation to the ‘unusually cosmopolitan individuals’ many global historians like to study.³⁴ Indeed, few economic historians, including those studying ‘commodities that transcended national borders’, would deny that ‘the vast majority of economic activity in the world before 1945 was still dedicated to home and local production’.³⁵ Even though the integration of global commodity markets certainly began in the eighteenth century, long into the nineteenth century world trade accounted only for a small share of economic activity and material possessions, even in Western Europe or East Asia.³⁶ By convincing metrics, even in the late twentieth century the bulk of the world’s economic activity remained national or regional.³⁷ Historians of migration have for some time now tempered our image of modernity as an age of unchecked mobility since only a small share of the world population migrated across oceans and continents, even in the nineteenth century – 0.36 per cent in the 1850s, 0.96 per cent in the 1880s, 1.67 per cent in the 1900s and 1.58 per cent in the 1920s.³⁸ The same applies to the material world: in most societies in human history the bulk of foodstuffs, tableware and medicines would have been made, or harvested, close to home. Ceramics, plants and fertilisers leading global lives were exceptions rather than the rule, unusual in their cosmopolitanism. They certainly reveal ‘movement and interaction’ on a global scale, but not, or at least not necessarily, a ‘global age’ of art, trade or consumption. Critics of the wider field of global history have in recent years again and again posed the question of whether the ‘global talk’ of the present-day is ‘a sui generis response to events “themselves”’ in the past or a discourse that, prejudiced by the historians’ global present, sculpts historic realities.³⁹ Practitioners in the field ought to exercise due care – weigh their evidence carefully, keep a sense of proportion and remind their readers of those proportions – in order not to fall into the latter.

This is not to say that global scholarship ought to cease to deal with the material world, only that there is no material foundation for a field based purely on what critics have come to call ‘connectionism’.⁴⁰ Indeed, matter often became temporarily – in certain periods of history – inextricable from the global scale not because it was traded or bartered across distance, but for other reasons, such as the fact that certain forms of matter came to affect the entire planet. The pollution of air, for instance, which for half a million years – since humans first harnessed fire – had been a local issue, grew ‘so comprehensive and large-scale’ with high modernity that it came to upset ‘the fundamentals of global atmospheric chemistry’.⁴¹ Indeed, substances may become ‘global’ – as in, relate to or involve the whole world – not necessarily because humans move them about but because they happen to occur in various places at the same time. Substances such as oxygen, fresh water and clay are distinct from things precisely by virtue of their peculiarly mobile, or, rather, diffuse disposition: the propensity of stuff to exist within another, dissipate and occur at the same time in different places.⁴² The same applies to less appealing sorts of matter, which have likewise come to affect and involve the entire world. While the issue of refuse is as old as humanity, the massive Cold War–era chemical manufacturing of synthetic materials entailed waste that, from the 1970s at least, was publicly recognised as hazardous, toxic and global in its implications.⁴³ The disposal of plastics, pesticides and synthetic fibre has become inextricable from the global scale because exports of hazardous waste to poorer, non-OECD countries became an international business in the 1970s,⁴⁴ but also because chemical waste matter, instead of fully deteriorating, dissipates and accumulates in a finite world – in landfills and open dumps and, as microplastics, heavy metal or trace chemicals, in wildlife, oceans, human foetuses and the lithosphere alike.⁴⁵ The study of plastics, pesticides and synthetics certainly lacks the romance that comes with the study of coffee, calicos or combs, but it is, in many ways, more forcibly tied to the global scale than the latter.

To be sure, the global scale of some material events emerges only in hindsight. Studies of historic climate records for the years 1788–94/5, for instance, retrospectively reveal a global, connected climate crisis: flooding on the Peruvian coast; droughts and famines in the Caribbean, Western Europe, South Asia and southern Africa; and heavy rainfall, high temperatures and epidemic disease in North America.⁴⁶ For most contemporaries, however, these would have been unconnected, local climatic stresses, confined to their own area. The same applies to contagious disease. Historians have argued, largely based on retrospective diagnoses, that the 1790s marked the beginning of ‘a great epidemiological upheaval’, a ‘Victorian Age of Pandemics’ in which diseases such as yellow fever, plague and cholera first affected all continents simultaneously. It was only after a series of cataclysmic disease outbreaks over the late 1800s and early 1900s, however – the Russian Flu of 1889–91, the plague wave of the 1890s and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic – and owing to developments in bacteriology, medical statistics and, not least, reporting, that the connectedness of local disease outbreaks as pandemics (that is, global catastrophes) became part of contemporaries’ common awareness.⁴⁷ This relates to a broader debate about the justifiability of the historian’s declaring an event or moment global in hindsight, without reference to contemporary experience.⁴⁸ In the particular case of material histories, however, it also involves a discussion about the justifiable role of present-day scientific knowledge in historical scholarship: the bringing to bear of evidence from epigenetics, climatology or biochemistry on historical inquiries. To many historians, even the most ‘carefully measured use of the sciences’⁴⁹ is associated with the danger of anachronism – of posing ahistorical questions, or wrenching past experiences into a present-day lexis and explanatory repertoire, in ways that would distort their understanding of the past.⁵⁰ Few would deny the potential of a closer dialogue with the sciences, however, wherever they conceive materiality, nature and the human body as changing, versatile and historicizeable.⁵¹ The field is in urgent need of novel forms of ecologically sensitive history-writing that engage in ‘the plotting of human relations with matter, nature’ or animals over the long term, as Sujit Sivasundaram has argued, and that reflect on co-evolution, mutation, adaptation or, indeed, causation at the interspecies frontier, including the global history of cultured evasion and taxonomic ignorance behind zoonotic disease transfer.⁵²

Other material events, processes or experiences came to be regarded as universal or global, in that they hinged upon the finitude of the globe, in the eyes of men and women in the past. As early as the late 1700s and early 1800s, for instance, the advent of ‘specifics’ in medicine – medications that worked ‘universally’, that is – entailed ideas about the modern body as physiologically alike, interchangeable and universal, regardless of temperament, gender or origin.⁵³ Human beings in the past may not necessarily have been connected to one another on a material level through the exchange of foodstuffs, tableware or textiles, but many would knowingly have shared a ‘material existence’ – as beings that endure sickness, possess a sense of smell and have a limited lifespan.⁵⁴ Much of the material world became inextricable from the global scale to contemporaries during the Cold War era. Resources came to be seen on a global scale from the mid-twentieth century onwards, for instance, because, given the post-war global imaginary of the world as a closed planet ‘with finite material potential’,⁵⁵ their abundance or shortage became, by definition, global.⁵⁶ Whereas the nineteenth century was all about expansion into an ostensibly ‘endless’ material world – vast tropical woodlands,⁵⁷ infinite mineral ores^, yet more oilfields – along ever-advancing commodity and settlement frontiers that moved on ‘once resources were depleted in any given area’,⁵⁸ the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries were marked by many contemporaries’ sense of the world’s inexorable material finitude. By the 1970s the exhaustion of fossil fuels, fresh water and ores ‘on the global scale’ had come to be seen as, if not imminent, then within sight.⁵⁹ While into the mid-1900s the history of petroleum, for instance, was that of a moving frontier – from Upper Burmese, Sumatran and Bornean to Venezuelan, Caspian and Persian oilfields⁶⁰ – apprehensions about the ‘geological limits on the world oil supply’ surfaced from the 1950s and had become commonplace by the early 2000s.⁶¹ This is not to say that changes in the biophysical environment, and awareness of it, had not well preceded the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, naturalists expressed unease about the possibility of anthropogenic resource exhaustion and species rarity as early as the late 1700s.⁶² It was only from the Cold War era, however, that the view that humanity inhabited an endangered planet ‘with finite material potential’ became a majority discourse.⁶³ From that moment, resource shortages and scarcity were by necessity canvassed on a global scale. The way the term biodiversity – that is, species diversity – was used from the mid-1980s, as reinforcing ‘the global nature of the conservation problem’, is another case in point. What was at stake was no longer ‘particular wild places or even individual endangered species; the threat was to the diversity of life on Earth itself.’⁶⁴ The very issue of extinction, indeed, is inextricable from its global dimension. The concept and possibility of species extinction, which was first discussed after Georges Cuvier completed his studies of living and extinct elephants between 1796 and 1806, invariably was contingent both on accurate botanical knowledge – of discrete, fixed and stable ontic unities that could appear or vanish forever – and either certainty about a species’ endemism or the ability to contextualise globally. As a matter of fact, the vast swathes of poorly explored territory, where supposedly extinct species might still be found undetected, furnished – other than ideas about the mutability of species – a key argument against Cuvier’s reasoning in the early nineteenth century.⁶⁵

Idolatry and Fetishism

In some global material histories, objects are seen not merely to illustrate or supply evidence of world-making, the global scale and connectivity, but as the ‘signal’, ‘material embodiment’ of and agent or ‘actant’ in processes of global integration. The tendency is palpable in the motif of the object as storyteller, telling ‘tales of other places and unknown lands’, which has become almost a topos in the field. In MacGregor-style ‘histories of the world in objects’, which have enjoyed uncommon popularity even among a wider, non-academic public, a slave drum will ‘speak for millions’, Spanish pieces of eight would ‘tell us about the beginning of a global currency’ and an early Victorian tea-set will speak to us about the impact of empire.⁶⁶ Artefacts are regarded as ‘signals from the past’ that communicate messages across time and ‘tell of the world for which they were made’.⁶⁷ Readings of past material culture as signals of past worlds are by no means limited to popular forms of history-writing. In the most learned, nuanced and academic of historical writings, global or not, ‘the objects that move and the objects that are left behind’ are imputed to have ‘stories to tell’, sometimes particularly about contemporaries’ experience of warfare, migration and displacement.⁶⁸ This line of argument is firmly in the tradition of the early 1980s material culture studies, which was marked by the idea of representation – that artefacts reflect and reveal the ‘patterns of mind’ of the cultures that created them.⁶⁹

Whereas in these studies material culture is a carrier, a projection of the more profound, immaterial beliefs lurking behind it, to the more recent scholarship in the wake of agency theory, ‘the matter is the mind’.⁷⁰ Indeed, often where historians have adopted theories about the agency of things and the ‘ontological dignity’ of matter – its properties and affordances and the ways in which they act on human practices and discourses⁷¹ – we find yet another common trope: that of the commodity, diplomatic gift or artwork connecting people, creating global spaces and bringing about worldwide integration.⁷² Global material histories make reference to forms of matter and material culture contributing to the ‘creation of long-distance social and economic connections’, ‘t[ying] together continents and fuel[ing] commerce’ and as ‘key agents of social cohesion and transcultural systems of value in the emergence of a global political community’.⁷³ Indeed, the language about pots and plants occasionally bears a striking resemblance to that commonly applied to the ‘unusually cosmopolitan individuals’ critiqued by Jan de Vries, who are seen to reveal the global at a human scale, ‘as they overcome barriers, dissolve misunderstandings, … and create spaces of tolerance’.⁷⁴

Practitioners of global material history have commonly applauded the embrace of agency theory for the study of all societies as a way of correcting ‘forms of global cultural subordination that sustain themselves on the … derogatory function of the term “fetish”’ – a close associate of the ancient idea that the ‘barbarian’, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘savage’ are closer to nature, and to base matter, than those who claim Christianity, civilisation or modernity for themselves.⁷⁵ As a matter of fact, the term fetish (feitiço) surfaced during Iberian expansion and came into its own in the eighteenth century, in enlightened ethnology and critique of religion – be it West African or Catholic – as a term designating an inanimate object irrationally reverenced for powers merely projected onto it.⁷⁶ The concept made its way into the realm of the economic in 1867 with the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, into psychoanalysis via Sigmund Freud’s 1927 writings on fetishism and thence into everyday language, invariably in close company with the charges of irrationality, inferiority and immorality.⁷⁷ Particularly given the concept’s pejorative associations, one would certainly not wish to crudely accuse modern material historians of fetishism, as well as its close associate, idolatry.⁷⁸ The sense that material histories exhibit a certain affinity with fetishism in their understanding of objects as ‘material embodiment’ and as possessing powers they may exert over us is hard to refute, however. ⁷⁹ A hint of it at least is present both in the idea of ‘representation’ – the circumstance of the thing or matter standing in the place of a society, with the authority to speak on its behalf – and, more plainly, in that of ‘agency’, as its early proponents well knew – the ability of the thing or matter to act on its environment.⁸⁰

One might object that in referring to gifts as agents in the emergence of a global community, or to a tea-set as telling us about empire, historians are either employing a Latourian idiom that has become commonplace in the humanities or, indeed, speaking metaphorically, employing nothing more than a figure of speech to denote that objects convey stories. But metaphors are not concepts; rather, they are prior to them, as historians have argued. They conjure up a vague feeling, without specifying the exact meaning of a historical event or process.⁸¹ One would hardly deny that some forms of matter invite desire in far-away places or become a necessity to distant societies more easily than others, both on account of their imbrication with cultural attributions and their peculiar material affordances – their functional, sensorial and technical capacities, or their particular aesthetic, olfactory or resilient properties. ⁸² Nor would anyone deny that material objects permit and encourage us to ask different questions, occasionally even to defy established chronologies or reframe established narratives, including that of ‘connectivity’.⁸³ Surely, action arises from a conglomeration of things and persons. The crux of the matter is how to determine the share of material things or affordances in the making or breaking of a global community or commercial link, in relation to the many other factors that would also have gone into it: political momentum, extant economic structures or, indeed, sheer human will.

This necessary distinction is complicated further by the fact that most references to things that talk or bring about global ties are about man-made, commodified or otherwise artefactual objects: tea-sets, cotton or suitcases. Such things are already imbricated with human subjectivity in ways that further obscure the boundaries between human and non-human factors in global historical processes. However, it is precisely their close vicinity with humanity as well as their humanisation – by means of a language about tea-sets that resembles that employed to describe humans – that allows the historian to conjure up the sense that these things were our accomplices in global processes, when in fact these, and they, are at least in part our creation. That language implies that there was a congregation of objects that all tended toward integration and cohesion or exhibited a willingness to speak of foreign places, shared in our curiosity about them, when in reality, curiosity, wanderlust and free will are some of the last preserves of humanity. As philosophers of action have long argued – incidentally, a field largely unresponsive to and aloof from actor–network theory and the new materialism, as Andreas Malm observed – human agency is qualitatively different from that of matter in its intentionality. Fossil fuels, the morning light or a steamboat undeniably have effects, but they do not form intentions or own actions as humans do, including the causal reverberations that outrun our capacity for foresight.⁸⁴ Matter and material culture, though they certainly set constraints and offer possibilities, do not actually talk, nor do they willingly help bring about global integration. Rather, global historians may sometimes be reading their biographies, under the influence of their own time’s fascination with agency, global community and cosmopolitanism,⁸⁵ to make them seem to be doing so. They really may sometimes be revering material objects for powers they themselves have projected onto them.

The Pull of the Particular

In many ways, the association between matter and the global scale is, of course, downright counterintuitive. Indeed, historically, materiality has long been, and remains to a degree, associated with immediacy, proximity and the ‘lower order’.⁸⁶

Histories of matter, and material culture, will often begin with a narrative of absence, and loss – how for more than a century after its inception as an institutionalised discipline, history was largely purblind to matter and material culture.⁸⁷ The observation is in some measure accurate, to be sure. Not only did a large part of the field, in the tradition of historicism, rely principally on written sources; its understanding of history, broadly speaking, was one in which there were no material – that is, environmental, physical, natural – constraints on human agency or thought.⁸⁸ Modern historians’ oversight was expressive of a broader astigmatism of industrialised societies at large that likely had a religious substratum:⁸⁹ the theological premise – present in many of the world’s principal religions, from Buddhism and Hinduism to Christianity and Judaism – that materiality, not least our ‘body as the core of our sensuous existence’, is that which ought to be transcended, the merely apparent ‘behind which lies that which is real’.⁹⁰ Indeed, ‘fear and contempt’ of matter was particularly prominent in Protestant ontology – formative to historicism – which defined the value of the human in part through ‘its distinctiveness from, and superiority to the material world’.⁹¹ In the dominant Victorian use of the term, materialism – different from materiality in being prescriptive and abstract rather than descriptive – was the object of a Protestant critique of Epicureanism, lust and gluttony.⁹²

It is the very association of materiality with immediacy, sensuousness and the ‘lower order’ that may account for some of its appeal to historians, global or not, and to a general public. For one thing, to global material historians in particular, matter and material culture carry the promise of opening up a window onto the little, least-understood details of daily life – eating, dressing, lodging – a sympathetic history that will seemingly bring us closer to our historical subjects, especially the ‘indigenous’, the non-European and the ‘subaltern’ who have not left written traces.⁹³ A drum formerly owned by an enslaved person or the contents of a maidservant’s tie-on pocket not only ‘speak for’ men and women ‘who were unable to write their own story’,⁹⁴ moving in their very mundaneness, smallness and intimacy. To many historians, objects convey the human, individual dimensions of past lives; they ‘mediate distances of time and space’ in ways words and images cannot.⁹⁵ Though historians rarely work with the objects themselves – usually, they rely on inventories, accounts or testaments – material remains ‘carry a special credibility’ and authority for many scholars, partly because they could be verified through the senses.⁹⁶ Like curators and visitors of museums that offer a ‘more fully embodied experience’ – where people are made to smell food, feel the sun on their head or take their place in a cattle car – historical writings are a reflection of the contested, yet deep-rooted, phenomenological belief that the touching, smelling or feeling of things lends proximity, ‘a more immediate sense of connection’ and understanding than would a history told in words.⁹⁷

This is treacherous, to be sure. As any sensory historian will tell you, material remains cannot be verified through the senses because the cultural and historical context overwrites physiological factors and because physiological factors change over time, partly in response to cultural and historical context.⁹⁸ What is more, the notion that contact with historical materials entails some sort of proximity or superior understanding is culturally contingent, and in some measure irrational. As Ruth Klüger, a Holocaust survivor, once put it in relation to memorial sites on former concentration camp grounds, it is ‘superstition (Aberglaube)’ to think that the ghosts cling to things or to the places where they departed from this life. Immediacy does not result from being in the same place but only from being in the same place at the same time (Zeitschaft).⁹⁹ Still, the appeal of materiality on account of its association with sensuousness and the promise of immediacy is pervasive and all but inescapable; unwittingly, global historians may be affected by it.

Materiality is commonly associated not just with the tangible, the intimate and the mundane, but also, along those same lines, with particularity, ‘specificity’ and singularity.¹⁰⁰ Though by now heavily theorised, things intuitively promise stability, warmth and relief from theory, as Bill Brown put it in a 2001 article.¹⁰¹ Indeed, materiality, or materialism, is widely seen as ‘an aspect of a relation between the abstract and the concrete’,¹⁰² invariably falling on the side of the concrete – the ‘micro’ rather than the ‘macro’,¹⁰³ the contingent rather than the universal or, indeed, the ‘local’¹⁰⁴ rather than the global. Untranscended materiality has often been placed in opposition to theory, ‘order’ and structure and, conversely, attributed an affinity with, as Peter Pels put it, ideas about ‘transgression’, ‘fancy’ and the ‘fact’¹⁰⁵ – the ‘apparently noninterpretative (numerical) description … of particulars’ rather than the systematic claims derived from it.¹⁰⁶ Indeed, the value attributed to non-artefactual forms of matter, as a natural fact and source of certainty on which to build human knowledge, is a hallmark of Western modernity.¹⁰⁷ Even though, somewhat ironically, it was largely through sociohistorical processes of abstraction – the abstract space of the global market, statistical enumeration or naturalist taxonomy – that our modern ‘inclination to associate the material with the concrete’ came about,¹⁰⁸ the association is a formidable and a tenacious one. While the relationship with singularity for late-modern material culture may be more tenuous – with changes in manufacturing and the rise of industrial production affecting material culture post-1800 – that with particularity is not.¹⁰⁹ More recently, digitisation, especially digital surrogacy, in purporting to supersede matter and bringing it into focus, may well have further exacerbated the pull of materiality as well as its long-standing association with tactility, particularity and ‘originality as authenticity’, as various material historians have suggested.¹¹⁰ Walter Benjamin’s argument, first made in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, that the aura of an object is tied to its ‘unique existence’, and consequently lost in reproductions, is at present widely, if controversially, applied to digital surrogates.¹¹¹

Global historians may cherish the material world as they do because materiality’s close relation to the particular, the authentic and the concrete somehow assists their cause. It certainly helps them avoid the accusation of a penchant for ‘macro-perspectives’, ‘totality’ and structuralism still sometimes levelled at them.¹¹² It also furthers, however, what has, for better or worse, been their most fundamental argument: the contention of a growing and more or less continuous global integration. For if even the most intimate, mundane and singular aspects of life speak to world-making and connectivity, who could deny global historians having won their case entirely? At any rate, an inquiry into the hidden premises underlying present-day global material histories – our enthusiasm for the particular, the singular and the ‘auratic’, and the awe of matter that permeates it – is, so the chapter holds, just as worth our while as that into Protestant historicism or enlightened ethnology. Scholars have studied for some time now how specific, local conditions affected and altered the writing of global history in various parts of the globe.¹¹³ It may well be that modern historians’ association of matter with sensuousness and immediacy, their evident enthusiasm for the particular and the ‘authentic’, is in some measure owing to the socioreligious (especially Protestant) and cultural texture of Northwest European and North American societies. There is no reason why historians from these parts should not, just like West African or East Asian ones, be influenced by local, contingent circumstances; it is their continued ability to set trends on a global scale, however, that may well account for some of the pull of material histories globally.

Orders and Storeys

This chapter is not the place to engage in debates about the genealogy, the constructedness or, indeed, the aptness of the idea of scale, of ‘upper’ and ‘lower levels’ and of ‘a layered order’,¹¹⁴ nor to question whether historical processes are indeed located at the level of certain storeys and whether distinct ‘levels of observation can reveal different aspects’,¹¹⁵ or ought to be assigned fundamentally ‘different heuristic potentials’.¹¹⁶ It is the place to argue, however, that the association between particularity and materiality contributes to the latter’s attraction: for the firmly entrenched notion that there is such a thing as ‘a layered order’, alongside deeply rooted dichotomies of original and copy, materiality and ideality,¹¹⁷ practice and theory,¹¹⁸ would have played a part in drawing historians, global or not, to the material world. The chapter is also the place to observe that materiality has no natural scale, level or context, no self-evident, obvious place in any order. It can be both intimate and intricate in atmospheric chemistry, cosmopolitan at one moment and parochial the next, both of a lower and of the highest order. Global historians have been at the forefront of critiques of scholarship that, in framing national objects of inquiry, has participated in naturalising them.¹¹⁹ It is precisely in the knowledge of their own rich deconstructivist tradition and of the equally rich ‘biographic’ tradition in material history that global historians ought to approach the material world. Critically aware of their own times’ socioreligious texture, global imaginary and discursive habits, they will be able to see the world of matter and material culture in all its changeability, elusiveness and polysemy.

11 Centrisms Questions of Privilege and Perspective in Global Historical Scholarship

Dominic Sachsenmaier

Centrisms and Centres in the Global Historian’s Toolbox

In fields like political theory, the term ‘centrism’ has recently received quite some attention. In an age of growing social and ideological polarisation in many societies around the world, some schools understand ‘centrism’ as a political programme that can help the political cultures of entire countries overcome ideological divisions and extreme factionalism. It is supposed to offer a possibility of bringing a society together by first focusing on concrete problems shared by most of society and subsequently working on bipartisan approaches to solving then. Such neo-pragmatist approaches are particularly prominent in the United States, with its strong tensions between the Democratic and Republican parties.¹ To be sure, these visions of political moderation remain highly controversial in parts of the social sciences (and in the body politic), but they are certainly under discussion.

In history departments, there is no definition of centrism that would come close to the political visions mentioned here. Certainly, historians in general and global historians in particular intensely debate various kinds of centrism, but in striking contrast to some other academic fields, the term (however it might be understood) carries hardly any ecumenical meaning in the sense of standing for a vision to bridge the gap between rival worldviews. The most prominent ‘centrisms’ – Eurocentrism and Western-centrism – do not evoke any programmatic hopes for historians and their messages to a wider public. On the contrary, these terms carry distinctly negative connotations and express disciplinary suspicion. Other well-known centrisms – such as Afrocentrism – are meant to provide the specific experiences of suppressed and subalternised parts of the global population.² It would almost be absurd to expect that they would reach out to Eurocentric perspectives and find a common ground between them. Rather, they are based on clear visions to overcome the long tradition of hegemonic perspectives.

As I will discuss in more detail, the growing importance of global history and allied fields can hardly be fathomed without the mounting criticism of Eurocentrism and related forms of centrism. Yet before turning to this and other topics, we should pause and differentiate between the place of centres and centrisms in our current historiographical practice. While historians have made an effort to distance themselves from many forms of centrism, centring techniques have certainly not disappeared from the historian’s toolbox. Academic authors usually define the focal points of their own research, whether they are writing monographs or project proposals. In other words, if historians want to meet expectations of high-quality academic work, they need to be clear about the centres of their analyses, and they also need to specify what issues and themes are relevant for their studies but are situated at the margins of their analyses. The structures of dissertations, research monographs or journal articles still resemble a drawing with a clear vanishing point; rarely do they look like an abstract painting in which perspective has been abandoned. In other words, historical research usually remains centred in terms of its overall composition and the methodologies that come with it.

To be sure, the nature and function of centres in historiography have not remained unchanged over the past few decades, let alone the past century. Likewise, it would be misleading to assume that within the current landscapes of historiography, there is a standard practice of setting centres in historical inquiry. The different subfields of global history – social history, cultural history and diplomatic history, for instance – tend to use specific centring techniques. Data-based research areas like economic history have ways of defining their objects of analysis and zooming in on them that differ significantly from global historical scholarship that investigates topics such as ideas of citizenship. In terms of centring, there are also big differences between different genres of global historical publications that range from case studies, at one end of the spectrum, to epochal syntheses, at the other end. Some influential works in the latter category have abandoned the idea of trying to view an entire epoch from a singular narrative vantage point. Instead, they focus on specific themes in single chapters, and the concrete objects of inquiry (and their underlying timeframes) are largely conditioned by these topics and vary from chapter to chapter.³ Such chapter-specific centring techniques in larger historical syntheses are not uncommon in similar works that are more regionally defined than global history, like European or Chinese history.⁴

To be sure, the focal point of historical research can be set on very different scales of analysis; these can vary from a single historical individual or event to a larger transformation such as the emergence of a new political ideology or the collapse of a trading system,⁵ but on these different analytical scales, the criteria for successful global historical research and more locally focused historical scholarship are remarkably alike, and centring techniques are among these commonalities. To put it in a different way, when it comes to ways of defining analytical or narrative centres, the field of global history has hardly strayed beyond the boundaries of what is common in historical research. These and other congruences might be a reason why, as a designated subfield, global history has gained so much recognition in history departments (and beyond), and it was probably a precondition for its unexpected growth over the past two or three decades.⁶

Yet centring is not only a normal, commonly accepted aspect of writing global history; it is also widely acknowledged as a means of overcoming privileged perspectives. This is the case, for example, with the wide range of literature that is centred on the experiences of women in various global and local historical contexts and that has become an important voice in the mounting critique of both male-centred perspectives in academic literature and male-dominated history departments.⁷ Similar things can be said about histories from below – that is, works that are centred on the under-privileged parts of society, which are meant to overcome elitist biases in the cultures of historiography.⁸ In all these schools, primary source-based research, case studies and, more generally, centring techniques are not at stake when it comes to outlining the parameters of a new historiographical culture.

In the 1990s, when global history was still more a postulate than an academic reality, not everyone anticipated that, in terms of its centring techniques and other methodological devices, global history would move in line with the main body of historical scholarship. At that time, some scholars envisioned global history as a project that would start thinking globally in an extreme manner, without regional emphases. For instance, in his introduction to the edited volume Conceptualizing Global History, published in 1993, Bruce Mazlish wrote:

The starting point for global history lies in the following basic facts of our time (although others could be added): our thrust into space, imposing upon us an increasing sense of being one world – ‘Spaceship Earth’ – as seen from outside the earth’s atmosphere, … nuclear threats in the form of either weapons or utility plants, showing how the territorial state can no longer adequately protect its citizens from either militarily or ecologically related ‘invasions’, environmental problems that refuse to conform to lines drawn on a map, and multinational corporations that increasingly dominate our economic lives.⁹

To be sure, during the 1990s not all the early advocates of the term ‘global history’ shared Mazlish’s view, yet many expected this intellectual project to be centred on the present understood as a global condition. Many scholars envisioned global history operating on planetary scales; they hoped it would study facets of an allegedly new global reality that they saw as shaped by new technologies and global institutions (most of which stemmed from highly developed countries) and as facing new kinds of crises, including environmental ones. In this view, global historical research would break with mainstream historical research by operating on spatial dimensions in which archival work and local case studies would only play minor roles. In contrast to detailed historical studies, global historical methodologies were supposed to move closer to fields like macroeconomics or computational sociology – fields where the study of detailed local contexts was largely irrelevant. By implication, Eurocentrism seemed only a minor concern for this specific academic project; rather, the priority was to move beyond conventional historiographical centring techniques that usually implied a strong attention to local and regional contexts.

In hindsight, we can say that global historical research has moved in a different direction, and that already around the turn of the millennium, the term ‘global history’ was related to very different academic hopes and expectations.¹⁰ Rather than operating with planetary data, during the past two decades global historical work has been very much shaped by academic currents that emphasise local historical contingencies and are decidedly critical of Eurocentrism and many other kinds of elite-centred, privileged perspectives in history-writing.¹¹ Jürgen Osterhammel portrayed this trend in the following manner:

The old hierarchy where Westerners were in charge of the general, and the Others were reduced to re-enacting their own particularity, came apart. Flattening all barriers of ethnocentrism, orientalism, and exoticism was a strong and almost utopian inspiration behind the first flowering of global history around the turn of the millennium. It involved the expectation that in a massive reversal of perspectives, non-Eurocentric takes on world history would gain equal acceptance, and that such histories would be written from a variety of novel vantage points.¹²

The main force underlying this development was the growing influence of regional studies expertise on the field of global history. No other branch of historiography has assembled such diverse regional expertise and such a broad spectrum of language competence as global history: the field has become a meeting ground for academic knowledge on very different world regions. The global history research community brings together scholars trained in Latin American history, European history, East Asian history or other regions and languages. If one checks the author list of important disciplinary forums like the Journal of Global History, it soon becomes evident that it includes scholars who work in very different languages and localities without necessarily operating on a global level. As there is no regionally defined entry ticket to the field, there is no shared space, no regional centre that global history is to investigate per definitionem.

Yet the global understood as a holistic space above and beyond all regional contexts has also not become an analytical level where the diverse groups of global historians meet. On the contrary, the levels of the local and the regional remain crucial for the main body of global historical scholarship, and the centring techniques that are most common in the field remain loyal to them. The growing involvement of regional studies expertise in the field of global history even accentuated a disciplinary culture that prioritises regional case studies and primary source work. While there are obviously great differences between transregional and global historical scholarship, on the one hand, and locally defined research, on the other, the two sides remain connected at these points.¹³ Both pay attention to historical details and distrust universalising narratives or perspectives that lose sight of local specificities.

As a meeting ground of different kinds of regional expertise, the realities of global historical scholarship are quite decentred, and the fragmentation into different regional focal points fits well with some of the field’s most important self-definitions. Today, the bulk of global history stands more for a set of loosely related border-crossing perspectives than any kind of holistic, technology-centred interpretation of the world. This in turn is closely tied to a wider set of intellectual and political agendas: generally speaking, global historical scholarship is decidedly critical of Eurocentrism and other hegemonic traditions.

Eurocentrism and Ways of Moving Beyond It

Needless to say, not all research that is analytically centred on aspects of European history and its global entanglements is automatically Eurocentric. What counts as Eurocentrism and Western-centrism today are hegemonic assumptions about the global significance of European history or the Western past. These are not necessarily triumphalist accounts of the worldwide significance of Western civilisation; they can also be articulated as critiques of Western modernity or Europe’s roles in the world. Eurocentrism has been debated, problematised and criticised extensively, yet it is still not easy to define what exactly we mean by it. It is clear that today’s problem of Eurocentric perspectives is no longer tied to the geopolitical might of Europe – Dipesh Chakrabarty famously differentiated between the ‘hyperreal Europe’ and the actual Europe that after the epoch of world wars and the era of decolonisation is already provincialised in the sense of no longer figuring as the main global power centre.¹⁴

In the past, Eurocentrism had very different faces, and many of them remain – in one form or another – as challenges and problems in historical scholarship up until the present day. Among them is the idea that only the trajectories of European history are relevant for understanding the global past, which was directly reflected not only in Hegelian thinking but also in many influential historiographical works. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many world-historical overviews began their accounts with the ancient civilisations in Asia and then remained centred on European history, with the rest of the world returning to the picture only during accounts of modern colonialism and the processes it triggered in other corners of the globe. One such example is a work that is little known today but was an international bestseller: The Story of Mankind by the Dutch-American historian Hendrik Willem van Loon.¹⁵ Out of sixty-four chapters, van Loon devoted nine to prehistory and ancient Western Asian and Egyptian civilisations, followed by a staggering forty-nine chapters that exclusively deal with facets of the European and then North American past, discussing topics such as the ‘Medieval City’ or the confrontations between Russia and Sweden. These are intersected by only two chapters on Muhammed, and Buddha and Confucius, and the final part of this work contains one chapter on colonialism and two chapters that reflect upon the new world of the present and the future to come.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the presence of such crude Europe-centred world-historical works has greatly diminished, and a monopolisation of world history by European history à la van Loon would hardly be thinkable as a college level textbook today. Yet this does not mean that the notion of a given primacy of European or Western history has completely disappeared from the landscapes of historical scholarship as an academic research and teaching field. As I will discuss in the final section of this chapter, we can clearly see the after-effects of this worldview in the institutional designs of history departments (most notably the distribution of regional expertise in them) and the asymmetries of knowledge that come with them. We recognise them quite clearly when we start looking at historiography as a global professional field.

Yet Eurocentrism of course poses not only institutional challenges but also epistemological and conceptual ones. For instance, while there is a broad consensus that linear historical thinking has played an important role in Western-centric understandings of the past, it is less clear what other notions of time historians can use in today’s world.¹⁶ Another major aspect in the debates on Eurocentrism is the role played by European ideas and concepts as analytical tools in historical scholarship.¹⁷ During the early stages of postcolonial historiography, attempts were made to abandon terms of Western provenance such as class, rights, labour, economy and nationhood as analytical categories. This intellectual move was connected to the hope that it would be possible to unearth the conceptual worlds of subalternised communities in the Indian countryside and elsewhere, and then to develop historical narratives based on these concepts. A main obstacle to these projects was the global spread of modern concepts and their influence on the semantic worlds even in allegedly remote social formations such as the South Asian or Chinese peasantry. It became quite clear that conceptual worlds virtually everywhere had been widely shaped by global connections and cross-regional entanglements, and that there was no way to ignore this. We can detect a similar pattern in the current Chinese debates on China-centred historical perspectives, as I will discuss.

This speaks to the lasting tension between the critique of certain concepts as Eurocentric historiographical tools and their wide usage in many languages around the world. In recent years, as the field of conceptual history that originally focused primarily on Western European languages and societies has experienced a global turn, historians have addressed this tension.¹⁸ A growing number of studies explore the ways in which concepts such as ‘society’, the ‘economy’ and ‘civility’ started circulating globally and became well-established in very different languages around the world.¹⁹ There has also been an attempt to understand the local adaptations of translated concepts as well as the contradictions (conceptual, societal and political) that have accompanied such localisations. Some scholars are also interested in the ways in which global transformations impacted languages in Europe. Global conceptual history primarily seeks to understand how the complex local and translocal histories of particular globally hegemonic concepts unfolded.²⁰ Scholars in the field usually proceed based on case studies (that require extensive linguistic expertise and local background knowledge),²¹ and research is chiefly based on concrete inquiry, not abstract theoretical debates on how to overcome Eurocentrism.²²

Nevertheless, in the daily practice of historical research, balancing an interest in global conceptual transformations with sensitivity to local contingencies remains quite challenging. The challenge is not only conceptual, and it goes beyond the task of using the right terms (or definitions thereof) for the right types of context. As research in various fields has shown, the question of terms is often tied to normative assumptions that can often be understood as Eurocentric. For instance, labour historians have debated whether categories such as ‘worker’ or ‘serf’ are shaped by universalising assumptions that disregard locally specific sociocultural experiences and modes of societal interaction in the Global South.²³ Recognising that locally sensitive concepts alone will not solve that problem, labour historians have become increasingly cautious about positing non-Western workers as oppressed and passive victims awaiting liberation by the normative worlds of supposedly more advanced societies. Still, finding ways to convincingly combine global research agendas with sensitivity to local contingencies remains a major intellectual task. Similar things can be said about women’s history, gender history and feminist history once they move to a transcultural or global level of analysis: here, too, some historians have been charged with imposing particular understandings of liberation and emancipation on different cultural contexts.²⁴

In addition to problems of conceptual or normative hegemonies, in many other areas of global historical scholarship facets of Eurocentrism or Western-centrism are subject to ongoing controversy. The debates on The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz, an early classic of global and comparative history, are just one of many potential examples.²⁵ In this work, which was meant to help his field move further from Eurocentric traditions, Pomeranz famously distanced himself from earlier answers to the question of why sustained industrial growth first emerged in a European context and not China. He did so by arguing that according to some key indicators, Europe had not pulled away from China during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He maintained that in many crucial regards, the structures and outputs of the Chinese and European economies remained remarkably similar until the eighteenth century. Pomeranz’s work triggered strong reactions, with many scholars arguing that his strict focus on economic data excluded social, institutional and other factors from the picture, and, in this manner, they returned the debate on the differences between China and Europe to Weberian categories of analysis.²⁶ Others held that both his comparative approach and his measures of economic performance were based on Eurocentric concepts.²⁷ These disputes and others were part of a wider debate on whether comparative perspectives (far more common in the social sciences) are a fruitful alternative to Eurocentric vantage points or instead risk imposing similar categories of analysis on different historical contexts.²⁸

As a general pattern, however, the main stream leading global history away from Eurocentric perspectives is primarily formed by individual research projects rather than big, potentially politicised debates. The list of examples is very broad – almost as broad as a typology of global historical scholarship would be. There is research that problematises conceptions of history that see Europe as the centre of global flows or source of innovations without considering more complex cross-regional and global dynamics.²⁹ Other projects pay needed attention to the agency of groups living under colonial conditions and their capacity to build trans-continental networks and interest groups.³⁰ There are many studies that discuss repercussions of global entanglements for facets of the Euro-American past, and thus further erode the idea that globalisation is tantamount to Westernisation.³¹ Works that focus on particular commodities (such as sugar or cotton) are quite influential and help us understand how changing patterns of production, trade and consumerism transformed regions in and out of the West, albeit in locally specific ways.³² We could add to the picture such diverse examples as research on trading systems outside the West or attempts to view the history of world communism during the twentieth century from an East Asian vantage point.³³

This list offers just a brief glimpse of some current global historical literature, but the point is clear: in the main landscapes of global historical scholarship, Eurocentric models of history have primarily been replaced by a decentred pattern of individual case studies. At the same time, broader alternative models of global historical thinking are not entirely absent: for example, a small but growing number of historians are trying to rethink our current planetary conditions from perspectives that are less centred on human agents and put natural forces like climate change into the foreground.³⁴ Nevertheless, the main body of global historical literature remains centred on smaller facets of the past.

Sinocentrism and Other Forms of Centrism

The critique of Eurocentrism is a subject of concern to scholars all over the world.³⁵ Yet while historians in many countries are united in their opposition to Eurocentric traditions, there is much less consensus when it comes to defining Eurocentrism and specifying its alternatives. A frequent issue of contention is the question of how to regard the modern nation-state as a container when conceptualising the past. In many states, education systems emphasise national history, which impacts the ways history is researched and taught at the university level. No matter whether in Brazil, India or South Korea, it is not untypical for state education systems to portray national history primarily as the outcome of indigenous traditions rather than as the result of modern global dynamics. It is perhaps thus hardly surprising that a strong body of historians criticises Eurocentric traditions from strictly national or even nationalist perspectives. Against these currents, other groups of scholars argue that national historiography in and of itself can be understood as an imposition of European institutions and concepts onto a previously non-national indigenous world.³⁶ In this context, a standard argument points out that while national history today is a global phenomenon, it has its roots in global transformations that took place under the conditions of Western hegemony. These include transfers among academic experts and educational policymakers, but also forces such as nation-building processes, the global spread of the modern research university and the emergence of national education systems.³⁷ On that basis, some research tries to formulate alternative visions of a pre-modern past that leave national narratives aside and search for conceptions of history that are less distorted by ideas of Western provenance.³⁸

Some of the scholarship that takes particular regions outside of the West as its point of departure seeks to gain new kinds of global perspectives. Based on his studies of Latin America, Walter Mignolo developed the concept of ‘border gnosis’, understood as a conscious negotiation between concepts of European provenance and alternative epistemes as a way of first problematising occidentalist perspectives and then moving beyond them.³⁹ And the Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe suggests seeing the entire condition of humankind through the lenses of black historical experiences. He sees a ‘becoming black of the world’ in an increasing age of surveillance and objectification and in the loss of all human agency in the face of impending global crises.⁴⁰ When regions like Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America figure as enunciation centres for alternative global visions, the latter are articulated as intellectual perspectives from subalternised and marginalised voices in the world. In other words, such imaginations of a regional and global order beyond modern Western hegemony are usually not embedded in a context of concrete alternative aspirations for global power.

In the case of today’s China, the situation is remarkably different. On the one hand, intellectual debates in the People’s Republic are based on a historical experience with Western and Japanese imperialism that are shared with similar voices in the formerly colonised world and other regions at the receiving end of global hegemonies. On the other hand, for obvious reasons the position of today’s China differs greatly from countries in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. The PRC has become a world power that now clearly articulates global visions such as the New Silk Road or the Belt and Road Initiative. The Chinese government presents these programmes as alternatives to a Western-centric world order that could be brought about by China as an upcoming global power system. This situation is also new for China itself. About a century ago, there were many Chinese visions of an alternative order, some of which were also influential in the West.⁴¹ Yet such critiques of the West and its global hegemonies were still formulated from a position of powerlessness and lack of international agency, which underlined their utopian character. By contrast, in today’s China corresponding intellectual positions are inevitably measured against the reality of a changing world and a globally ever more influential China.

This is the case with efforts to promote the concept of ‘Under Heaven’ (tianxia) as a Chinese civilisational achievement that is of great potential relevance to our future world order. Ideas about the global implications of tianxia have a longer history but today’s most prominent thinker on this topic is the Beijing philosopher Zhao Tingyang.⁴² He envisions tianxia as a world system that differs from the current international order in having only internality and no externality in the sense of foreign relations. In this context, he expresses great doubts about the modern nation-state, international law and democracy as potential foundations on which a sustainable global order could be built. Rather than operating with modern theories (whose Western origins he critically emphasises), Zhao Tingyang formulates his scenario of a better future world from Confucian concepts. In line with the reversed eschatology that characterised many Confucian schools in the past, he maintains that during the early Zhou dynasty (starting about 1000 BCE), the principles of a tianxia system had already been realised, albeit only in one part of the world. According to him, this epoch of the early Chinese past (which various Confucian schools long treated as an ideal age) speaks to the present of both China and the world at large, offering an alternative to the current facets of international order.

Zhao Tingyang’s philosophy has found its critics, within and also outside of China. Many disapproving voices not only problematise the accuracy of Zhao Tingyang’s work and its power of persuasion, they also articulate concerns about its potential hegemonic qualities. For instance, the Korean scholar Baik Youngseo argues that the tianxia vision could be read as a philosophical programme for a revitalisation of the tribute system that had placed China at the very centre of a larger inter-state order.⁴³ This leads back to the specific contexts of our time, in which Zhao Tingyang formulates his idea: the vision of the tianxia world cannot merely be read as an anti-hegemonic programme that is formulated from the perspective of Confucianism as an ethico-political tradition, and it cannot merely be heard as a voice that had been marginalised under the conditions of Western hegemony. Even though in his main work Zhao Tingyang doesn’t make any direct connections with Chinese state programmes such as the Belt and Road Initiative, his ideas about a new world inevitably need to be related to Chinese public debates on similar themes. At a closer look, it turns out that Zhao’s philosophy shares many elements with government positions on topics like the Belt and Road Initiative or Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. These commonalities include the notion that an allegedly purely self-interest-driven and antagonistic Western-led system could be replaced by a worldwide order based on shared interest and collaboration, and that the latter would emanate from China.

Yet also in Chinese academia, such attempts to return to indigenous traditions and make them relevant for the Chinese and global future are more controversial than is often assumed in the West. Many scholars, including the prominent Shanghai (Fudan University) historian Ge Zhaoguang, have argued that there is no evidence for the historicity of the Zhou system as it is presented by Zhao Tingyang;⁴⁴ others note that his philosophy remains very vague about the main pillars of a radically inclusive world system.⁴⁵ On a broader level, like their colleagues in other parts of the world, Chinese historians are searching for possibilities to move beyond Western dominance in both the intellectual world and the world of politics. But in contrast to Zhao Tingyang, a broad return to Confucian terminologies or epistemologies is not an option for most historians, just as it would not be possible to seek to write the history of medieval Europe with a conceptual toolbox from the age of scholasticism.⁴⁶ Consequently, the vast majority of research heading in this direction is developed with methods (including centring techniques) that are very similar to the most common methodological toolkits in Western history departments.

Many important concepts that historians use in their own research do not differ profoundly from Western historiography; field designations like ‘social history’ or historical methods like ‘discourse analysis’ have their equivalents in modern Chinese historiography. It is certainly a fact that in contrast to the situation in India, Sub-Saharan Africa and many other world regions, colonial languages such as English or French have always played a minor role in China’s intellectual and educational worlds. Nevertheless, not only did the massive conceptual imports during the late Qing and Republican periods change the Chinese language, they were closely entangled with massive social, political, intellectual and other transformations.⁴⁷ This included the emergence of modern research universities and professional history departments, so in many regards the institutional settings and disciplinary cultures of Chinese historiography are tightly interwoven in a package that is the result of global connections and entanglements.⁴⁸

An example is the substantial body of literature that is dedicated to studying the Silk Road.⁴⁹ This research is connected with a term that was probably coined by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, and scholarship in the field hardly operates with traditional epistemologies. Nonetheless, some of the Chinese publications that deal with the history of the Silk Road try to view it from China-centred perspectives. They differ from the literature that takes the vast realms of exchange networks that are subsumed under the term ‘Silk Road’ as its own space of connectivity and interaction.⁵⁰ Rather, there is a strong tendency to emphasise the historical connections between China and the Silk Road, and even to treat them as extensions of traditional Chinese foreign relations. Also in this field, some of the academic literature is situated very close to the official government rhetoric.⁵¹

Similar things can be said about some of the other literature that seeks to rethink facets of the local and the global past from China-centred perspectives. For instance, a number of influential historians advocate new world or global histories that would be written from strictly patriotic vantage points.⁵² Some of this literature is entangled with publications that emphasise China’s allegedly unique character as a civilisation state– that is, as a form of political order whose boundaries are largely congruent with its cultural ones. For example, according to Zhang Weiwei, a bestselling author with close ties to the PRC political establishment, this marks a great difference between the main patterns of the Chinese past and Europe, and it will create huge advantages for China in the great power games of the twenty-first century.⁵³ These ideas are part of a lively debate on the impending decline of the West and the beginnings of a China-led world order that not only takes place in the Chinese media but also in academic circles.

Yet certainly not all the burgeoning literature on the matchless political, cultural and social aspects of the Chinese past is narrowly oriented on governmental policies. There is some important work that discusses the unique patterns of China’s history in ways that do not fit into chauvinist understandings of nationhood, and that are far detached from disputes about geopolitics and global power competition.⁵⁴ On that basis, quite a few historians are moving in very interesting directions when it comes to rethinking the encounter zone of Chinese and global historical perspectives.⁵⁵

Still, some of the neo-nationalistic literature in China can be categorised as Sinocentric. But there is a caveat: such publications can hardly be understood as expressions of centrism commensurate to the reach of Eurocentric ideas. In contrast to the attempts at Sinocentric worldviews mentioned earlier, Eurocentrism not only stemmed from particular historical interpretations but built on an entire global support structure that had been created by the worldwide spread of concepts and institutions of European origins. Compared with the wider hegemonic bases of Eurocentrism, there is something decidedly reactive about much of the recent literature that postulates new China-centred visions of global history from nationalistic viewpoints. In the Chinese case, many works are often formulated as a direct contrast to the alleged nature of Western civilisation and the global roles of the West. As part of this overall pattern, China has only recently begun to diversify regional expertise in history departments. Up until the present day, world history (a sizeable field in China) mainly connotes the study of the Western world, Russia and Japan.⁵⁶ There are still very few historians in China with a primary expertise in South Asian, Middle Eastern, African or Latin American history; concomitantly, the main theoretical debates in fields such as global history hardly take perspectives from these world regions into the picture. They remain centred on the East Asian and the Western experiences.

Centrisms and Global Hierarchies of Knowledge

Despite the vociferous critiques of Eurocentrism, there is an attention gap between the global historical debates in China and the Western world: while Chinese historians are usually familiar with the latest Western debates in their field, the reverse tends not to be the case, even when the relevant Chinese academic literature is available in translation. When we regard the contents of history education at high schools and universities around the globe, a very unequal world emerges. For instance, while most European students still primarily study European history, history education at Chinese schools and universities is not comparably Sinocentric. Here – and in many other education systems, particularly outside the West – the geographies covered by history curricula usually follow a binary logic. They emphasise the history of one’s own region (i.e. East Asia, in the Chinese case) and Western history.⁵⁷ Hardly surprisingly, the mental maps conveyed by history education have a deep impact on how large parts of society perceive historical events and thus the present.⁵⁸

Hence, while history education in many European countries is by and large limited to Western history, the geographies covered in history education in many parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere are bi-cultural. The ‘asymmetric ignorance’⁵⁹ resulting from this pattern of historical education has been debated, but we do not yet have a detailed enough grasp of such knowledge requirements. What we do know is that many aspects of historiography and its global professional realms remain surprisingly under-studied. For instance, we have barely begun to research the global and local sociologies of knowledge in university-based historiography. Almost no literature tries to relate the history of modern historiography to the history of daily professional life in national and international academic contexts, but it is exactly this daily academic life, with all its opportunities and pitfalls, expectations and inequities, that shapes the professional reality of most historians. Not much work has been done on exploring the transnational disciplinary cultures of historiography, including the field’s global gaps in the distribution of power and influence.

While historians have not paid much attention to the quotidian realities of academic life, other fields of study have. Sociologists have conducted research on the social realities at universities and how they frame professional and private interactions.⁶⁰ There has also been some excellent work situating the history of the social sciences within the context of empires, imperialism and nation-building. In other words, most of the scholarship on the lived realities of global academic life has not been produced by historians, and it doesn’t specifically investigate the realities found in history departments. Perhaps this explains why this research has had limited – or no – impact on the debates on Eurocentrism in historiography.

The lack of social and cultural understandings of modern historiography as a global field is not trivial. What is at stake is not our ability to write a detailed history of daily life in history departments, but our ability to explain how international power dynamics continue to shape our field – a theme that is key to comprehensively tackling problems related to Eurocentrism and associated historical perspectives. The shortage of scholarship on the global professional landscapes of modern academic historiography puts us in an awkward position. Critiques of Eurocentrism in history departments around the world have been mounting for several decades and many scholars have come to agree that the field needs to overcome its heritage of privileged and prejudiced perspectives. Seen from this angle, it is especially surprising that professional interactions among historians have not received the same levels of attention as their ideas. Thus far, the literature challenging the heritage of Western-centrism in history departments has focused largely on historiographical thinking, on concepts, narratives and ideas. By contrast, it has paid comparatively little attention to academic historiography as a social world characterised by specific professional networks and sociologies of knowledge. The result of this lack of attention is that when it comes to professional exchanges among historians, many of the older patterns of supremacy are not on the defensive: they do not have to be, as they remain widely unchallenged. In other words, while the ways historians think may have changed, the ways they act have not changed at anything like the same rate.

From this we see that it is premature to assume that we have already entered a post-Eurocentric age of historiography. Particularly when we regard them from global perspectives, much of the disciplinary structures and cultures of historiography remains metrocentric (in a metaphorical sense) in character. At the same time, nationalism is on the rise – not only as a political force in many parts of the world but also as a historiographical agenda, and, as the Chinese example shows, it can be closely connected with global power politics. It will take a lot of effort to work on a more decentred global landscape of academic historiography while at the same time critiquing the rise of historiographical chauvinism or neo-civilisationism in many countries around the world. Given these and other challenges of the current research landscape, global history as an academic field will likely need to face many tough new questions: about the directions of its research, its underlying sociologies of knowledge and its political implications.⁶¹ These will be hard to answer, and they may return the questions of centrism to the centre of the debate, perhaps in new and reinvigorated form.