These are curious times. Global history is booming. This wide-ranging anthology is one of many that have appeared in recent years. There’s global intellectual history, global conceptual history, global economic history, global ancient worlds, and global crises of the seventeenth century. A casual observer might fairly wonder if globalists are storming the discipline. If they are, it might be a long struggle. Recent evidence of foreign language training shows that the Angloworld is becoming more, not less, monolingual. American universities may not be platforms for Nation-Firsters, but they are becoming more parochial. Area studies are being downsized. What counts as social theory depends ever more on evidence from one country.
The editors of The prospect of global history do not address the anomaly squarely. What they do do is confront the complicated and even contradictory ties between global history and globalization without assuming that the latter is as monolithic or irreversible as many of its champions once supposed. One might say that the introduction by the Oxford trio of Belich, Darwin, and Wickham maps out a prospect for global history not by severing the field from triumphal (or, more recently, tragic) narratives of globalization but by rescuing globalization from the present. The introduction explores the fissures between an older tradition of comparative history and the more recent turn to connected approaches. But just as comparative studies could seldom disentangle the units being contrasted, and had to concede to embedded or reciprocal strategies, so connectedness covered for a lot of different ways of understanding the tethers across societies. These range from contact, interaction, and circulation to the most intense form of connection, integration – when the parts of the global whole become co-dependent. The prospect of global history will have to rely on more nuanced and complex terminologies and typologies.
The essays that follow take a look at some of those nuances and complexities to reveal variations in intensity of globalization. For instance, Nicholas Purcell shows how incense got traded across the Swahili Coast, India, and the Mediterranean. But this was hardly a case of muscular integration, even though the use of aromatics became a shared ritual. On the other hand, according to Purcell, the meaning and value of incense consumption were not of a piece and adapted themselves to local mores and norms. By contrast, Linda Colley’s essay on the diffusion of constitution writing shows how modern thinkers and scribes relied on charters to legitimate their states in a global political order that increasingly required regimes to have constitutions to get recognition and access to trade and financial markets. To be rescued from the present, we are going to need a wider repertoire of understandings of what we mean by globalization, from softer notions of ‘influence’ or diffusion to dependency.
Once globalization is not synonymous with our post-Cold War age, the debate over its rhythms and timing gets the spotlight. If the decontrolling of markets associated with neoliberalism was not the main turning point, what was? Robert Moore’s essay, for instance, makes the case for a shift around 1000 with the turn in urbanization, suggesting a global middle ages of interlinked urban hubs increasingly capable of absorbing and storing surpluses. By 1500, there was no turning back. If there have been previous globalizations, is there a way to understand how and when they worked and when they did not? For this, Jürgen Osterhammel recommends looking at a sometimes-forgotten ally: historical sociology. He lays out five strategies for mutual betterment – which from the global historian’s perspective help us get beyond the temptation to catalogue links and connections all over the place, and get closer to reckonings about the durability, causes, and declines of global integration. In this respect, the book is more suggestive than illuminating – and one can take the problem of periodization as an invitation to a coming research agenda and great debate.
Going global does not mean dumping comparative histories in favour of entanglements and connectedness. Indeed, a recurring theme for the field is the xylophone of convergence and divergence. It is laid out in Kevin O’Rourke’s confessions of an economist, which chart the ways in which historical evidence can illuminate economists’ quest for insights into when and how societies broke out of traps and lunged ahead of others, or slipped behind. He makes the case – which more global historians should heed – that prices can tell us stories about the pace, depth, and unevenness of market integration. Included are ways to understand better the winners and losers.
At the same time, as essays by Matthew Mosca and Francis Robinson show, comparative histories can carry unwanted baggage. Mosca demonstrates that the ‘new Qing history’ is trying to break away from old normative assumptions about the deep origins of Chinese ‘decline’ in its putative isolationism compared to the West, to look at the Manchu turn to Central Asia. Robinson also challenges ‘clash of civilization’ commonplaces, which implied essential, unchanging features to Islamic societies. Instead, Islam was ‘connected’ from the start, and by the eighteenth century echoed what he calls a ‘Protestant turn’ which emphasized consciousness and personal responsibility in a new sense of self – which does not exactly conform to stereotypes of Islamic involution and secular decline.
The two concepts that this book most focuses on are how to think about global circulation and the means of mobility through networks. Rescuing globalization from the present means thinking beyond market circulation. James Belich, for instance, argues that it was the movement of viruses and diseases after the Black Death that re-sorted global demography and spread Europeans. This volume looks at print media, soldiers, travellers, and other non-economic actors as makers of a world economy. It also highlights institutions beyond the political fare of states or the economic staples of markets. Networks appear to occupy a large, if slightly unbounded, middle tier between formal political structures and private exchange mechanisms. In this sense, Anthony Hopkins’ essay about the American ‘empire’ as a regime that was less bent on conquest and colonization in order to integrate, but rather relied on more informal means to lace the world together, highlights different enabling structures for movement, exchange, and integration. He does not label the American global style as networked, but he easily could have. He ends with a claim that could be better posed as a question: if empires have passed, where are the informal networks that once sustained global integration going to get their buoyancy nowadays?
This is a small book packed with ideas, insights, and suggestions for future research and debate. These may be days of anti-globalization. But The prospect of global history shows us why they may be fertile ones for global history.
