This chapter deals with various aspects of centrism in global historical scholarship. It firstly inquires whether as a research field, global history has developed distinct ways of defining narrative centres. Within an eye on longer academic transformations, it secondly contextualises the growing critiques of Eurocentrism in different parts of the world. On that basis, the chapter thirdly investigates various efforts overcome the long tradition of hegemonic perspectives that characterise different branches of global history as a research field. It then turns to the lived realities of academic historiography, considering it as a professional field that is comparable to other global professional realms. Doing this brings a very obvious inconsistency to the surface: our concepts have changed, our global thought has become decentred, and there has been a growing consensus when it comes to criticising Eurocentrism and other forms of hegemonic thinking. However, while this marks a great change in our disciplinary cultures, many of the hierarchies in the worldwide patterns of historiographical knowledge production that emerged during the nineteenth century are surprisingly intact today. This poses a particular problem to historical scholarship operating on a transregional and global level

This chapter addresses the key question that should guide all social research, namely, what is it for? It argues that all research serves human interests, whether technocratic, hermeneutic, or emancipatory. Traditionally, technocratic research interests have been dominant. But, this chapter argues, a pragmatist approach to methodology foregrounds emancipatory research – which enables people to increase the domains of possibility within their lives.

This chapter, set in the first half of the nineteenth century, and starting from Hindu–Buddhist and Islamic sites in Java, focuses on site visits and encounters, between European antiquarian-collectors and Javanese elites in search of knowledge, as they miscommunicate or exchange knowledge at Hindu–Buddhist sites that were being rediscovered, cleaned, and documented between 1800 and the 1850s. The second part of the chapter focuses on the huge restoration of the mosque of Demak in the years 1842–1848, the first to be officially supported by the colonial government. It reveals how various networks of knowledge, interests, and administrative and military power came together at one site, and kept the balance in fragile post-(Java) War times. Throughout, the chapter shows how the hierarchies of knowledge were not fixed, and how heritage and knowledge exchange helped alter old loyalties or forge new ones in the context of the violent regime changes of the early nineteenth century.