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Long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history from a global perspective: institutionalization, postcolonial critique, and empiricist approaches, before and after the 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Katja Naumann
Katja Naumann*
Affiliation:
Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Reichsstrasse 4–6, D-04109 Leipzig, Germany
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Notions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts.

Keywords

anthropologyarea studiesEurocentrismglobal historyhigher education in the USAhistoriography
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Special Issue 3: Historicizing the global: an interdisciplinary perspective , November 2019 , pp. 335 - 354
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank everybody who made this research possible, in particular Matthias Middell, Michael Geyer, the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library. I also want to thank Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Geert Castryck for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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