Rethinking Global History
Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history’s theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history’s most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these chapters provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Stefanie Gänger is Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University. She is the author of A Singular Remedy. Cinchona Across the Atlantic World, 1751–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Study of pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Jürgen Osterhammel is Professor Emeritus of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. His books in English include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014). With Akira Iriye, he is the general editor of A History of the World (6 vols., Harvard University Press, 2012–24).
Open access