13 - Afterword

Summary

This is a book about connections, which is hardly a surprising thing in a collected volume bearing the title Globalized Peripheries. This is a volume creating a place for itself in the buoyant field of global history, and in doing so, the concept of connections is one of the first tools to be picked out of the historian’s toolbox. This is hardly a new feature in global history. In his very influential The Birth of the Modern World (2004), C. A. Bayly added the subtitle Global Connections and Comparisons, and in his first paragraph, he stated that the ‘revolutionary age’ began in the 1780s and that this had to do with ‘the interconnectedness and interdependence of political and social changes’. Four years earlier another mainstay of global history, Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, had been published – and its first chapter featured the concepts of comparison and connection in the title. Pomeranz strove to both compare and relate China to Europe. It is fair to say that these ‘double Cs’ have figured prominently in all global history since the Millennium, even if some writers have preferred to use synonyms – like integration or interaction – when debating whether continents, countries, regions or other places belonged together. Global history has hovered over the question of belonging, and who or what belonged to whom and what.

The present volume fits nicely into such a setting, of a ‘double C paradigm’, with its ambition of linking, connecting, Eastern and Central Europe to the Atlantic World, through ‘trading practices’, ‘commodity flows’, migration, financial systems, et cetera. But connection is a tricky concept, as are its various synonyms. A first problem is to decide what to connect – something that is seldom too obvious. Most global history has proceeded along a macro level, linking ‘global’ places with other ‘global’ locations, while others have attempted to integrate individuals and a micro perspective to their ambitions. Bayly, for instance, wanted to begin his treatment with ‘bodily practices’ before ascending to a more familiar macro perspective. This volume builds on this existing scholarship, but also considers the epistemological baggage that shaped it.