Among the various genres of historical exploration, global history is among the most complicated in terms of evidence, conceptualization, and methodology. Writing comparative or parallel studies on subjects like war or empire have a clear focus as well as a global reach and may be quite difficult to do in terms of their complex narratives and multiple sources. Yet the same rules of evidence apply as with other fields of exploration. Archival materials, common notions of state and society, and even general understandings of how the various elements of complex stories can be convincingly integrated all apply. In contrast, global history must identify and analyze phenomena that are unrestrained by contemporary political, socio-economic, cultural, or temporal boundaries: the global phenomenon of population growth, for example, or its corollary, the very physical nature and emotional content of scarcity, loss, or migration that can demonstrate certain global commonalities in the human condition and situate local histories in a global context.
Alessandro Stanziani is a deft practitioner of his craft. His extensive work on the varieties of bondage across time allows us to situate such diverse (and first rate) studies like Richard Hellie's Slavery and Edward Cohen's Roman Inequality in their broader global contexts.Footnote 1 His exploration of labor and interdependence on Russian estates broadens the Russian context into the whole Eurasian area between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. His several critiques of European statistics and their relation to Russian social dynamics after emancipation has helped differentiate sources and data, and detailed in his own terms for Russia what Karl Polanyi called the “economistic fallacy”: the substitution of quantitative data from the actualities of lived experience and the social construction of data itself. With remarkable range and language competence, he has also brought the commonalities of servants, wage owners, and migrants in China, Southeast and South Asia, and Europe into global focus. For Russianists, his important contributions to understanding Russian serfdom, the problems of oral history, and the relationships between the global economy and revolutionary Russia have helped “deconstruct” the institutionalized disciplinary distinctions between historical, anthropological, social, and economic exploration in favor of tightly interrelated global as well as regional phenomena.
The premise of this important new study is that the crisis post-modernism brought to social history, the concurrent assault on post-modernism by neo-positivist approaches, and the unbridled emergence of neoliberalism have largely defeated efforts at globalism in favor of the return to political and national history as well as nationalism in politics. Stanziani argues cogently that knowledge and its teaching have reinforced disciplinary fragmentation: “scientific” economists against sociologists and historians, for example, as well as specialized concentration on specific socio-cultural regions or nations. In his view, the need instead is the globalization of knowledge and teaching “in the sense of strong interaction between disciplines and worlds” (200–201).
This noble task, however, requires an understanding of the conceptual and methodological tensions between global and “national” or “regional” studies, my scare quotes here as a way of emphasizing that even the concepts “national” and “regional” can compromise global perspectives and understanding. Stanziani groups these tensions into four related categories: those relating to archives as a source of contested contextualities; the social life of data; the idealized fragments of social worlds commonly identified as peasants, workers, slaves, or, more recently, simply consumers; and how all of this can compromise understanding of contextual commonalities and differences and their implication for identify formation and social action. Together these “tensions of social history” are Stanziani's point of entry into questions not just about “the construction of modern knowledge about societies . . . but also the ways in which these discussions have interreacted with the structural transformations of societies themselves” (3). Even conceptualizing this archeology of social knowledge, as he describes it, is no mean task, never mind relating its complexities to the ways good global history should be done.
As he explores these complex questions, Stanziani engages a huge literature in extensive notes that are themselves worth the read. These are in English, French, Italian, German, and Russian. They include earlier as well as recent articles and books focused on Europe, Great Britain, Russia, Africa, South Asia, and East Asia, as well as (although less so) on North America. Along the way Stanziani takes up contesting perceptions and practices of revolution and their relation to concurrent revolutions in the ways archives were structured; how archives related to the emergence of the nation as the subject of history; and the very interesting questions of archival “reconstruction” confronted by great social upheavals in France, Russia, and especially South Africa, where Jacques Derrida's Mal d'Archive: Une Impression Freudienne had a particularly strong impact on the development or post-apartheid archival theory and practice. Historians of Russia will be rewarded here with the analysis of what Stanziani calls “totalitarian” archives, although he may be underplaying the ways even national archives with open access have also structured “authoritative” history through their acquisition policies and purposes. When Herbert Hoover dedicated US National Archives in 1933, for example, it was so that the “romance of history will have living habitation here in the writings of statesmen, soldiers, and all the others, both men and women, who have built the great structure of our national life. This temple of history will be . . . an expression of the American soul . . . [its beautiful building a durable] expression of the American character.”Footnote 2
Stanziani's expertise in statistics underlays his further discussion of how statisticians themselves “made use of ‘scientific’ notions of time not only to impose urban academic values on peasants’ attitudes but also to project their own social and political utopias” (70). Thomas Piketty has a place here, along with Stanley Engerman, Eric Williams, Mary Poovey, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii, and Iulii Ianson, Professor of Statistics in late nineteenth century St. Petersburg. The social effects of how statistics on climate, weather, and the environment more generally are also structured directly or indirectly around social and political imperatives, as the contemporary world, perhaps too late, is finally beginning to understand. After looking closely at the tensions inherent in the analytical fragmentation of social worlds into social, economic, and cultural identities (among others), Stanziani concludes with a discussion of the quest for universality in values and theories, and how “interconnected local, regional, and global socio-economic and political dynamics” interacted with the construction and use of sources as well as social categories themselves (196).
For many, Tensions of Social History will not be an easy read. Rather than a top down analysis designed to make the goals and methods of global history accessible to students across disciplines, the book might better be understood as a prodigious bottom up meditation on the inherent analytic tensions within discreet or comparative social histories, perhaps especially those focused on the complexities of eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia, which Stanziani knows well. If the quality of scholarship depends in large part on the questions it asks, Tensions is a stunning piece of work. Stanziani asks so many thoughtful questions and raises so many complex issues that one often has to stop and consider them before being led on too quickly to the next. His grasp of theory and context across a broad swath of diverse literatures is sometimes hard to keep up with. While not, alas, for undergraduates, and despite the difficulties some social scientists will have with engaging it, Tensions of Social History deserves a wide audience, one willing to think more carefully about the conceptual tools and evidentiary sources of their own studies, grasp the tasks and difficulties of global perspectives, and join him in trying to “shape a world made of encounters rather than confrontations between ‘civilizations’” (201).
