Global History

Transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.

Moral Re-armament (MRA) was an international religious movement that caught the attention of politicians, industrialists, and union leaders around the world in the 1940s and 1950s, including three (future) Japanese prime ministers – Nakasone Yasuhiro, Hatoyama Ichirō, and Kishi Nobusuke. This article examines their involvement in MRA, showing that it provided them with an internationalist register – and network – to adjust older, prewar ideas about state power, national community, and Asian regionalism to the age of the Cold War and decolonization. In so doing, the article investigates the origins of the postwar conservative imaginary arguing that, far from being narrow nationalists, Nakasone, Hatoyama, and Kishi were in fact convinced internationalists of the right. By shedding new light on the political culture of key representatives of the Japanese ruling classes, the article adds to the understanding of the country’s negotiated transition from fascism and empire to liberal democracy. It also provides a prehistory to the politics of the Right in contemporary Japan.
Link to article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09555803.2019.1646785

Review of Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, Kären Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). Journal of History and Anthropology 8.1 (2010): 183-188.
http://schina.ust.hk/publications/Jour-E.html

The expanding sugar trade linking Portugal, Brazil, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries required enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that overseas agents would act honestly and diligently. While the recent literature emphasizes that multiple mechanisms were substitutes in addressing this problem, this article highlights that merchants chose different mechanisms to govern distinct types of transactions and explains why. A reputational mechanism relying on social and economic constraints within an ethnic diaspora governed more complex and higher-value arrangements. A different mechanism linking economic incentives to professional reputations across the diasporas plying this trade route predominated in simpler and smaller transactions. Finally, long-distance and transnational judicial enforcement supplemented these two reputational mechanisms. Capable of matching the value and complexity of transactions with the attributes of governing mechanisms, merchants were able to diversify their transactions, expand the market for agents, better allocate agents to tasks, and stimulate competition among them. The resulting decrease in agency costs was critical in such a significantly competitive market as the sugar trade. Evolving institutional choice thus reinforced the expansion of trade. These hypotheses are corroborated by data from a prosopography of merchants of Jewish origin, derived from notarial records from Oporto and Amsterdam, and from Inquisition files. A t the turn of the sixteenth century, Europe experienced rapidly growing urban populations and dependence on trade for supplies of staple products, while overseas possessions contributed to a surging output of marketable commodities, including sugar. Brazil was turned into the first large-scale plantation economy and became the world's main sugar producer, with Amsterdam emerging as its main distribution and refining centre. Most of the Brazilian sugar trade was intermediated by merchants in Portugal, and traders of Jewish origin scattered along this trade route played a prominent role in the sugar trade. The rapid expansion, growing complexity, and increasing integration of these markets required traders to be confident that the parties with whom they were considering working would not cheat, renege on, or neglect their commitments.

Most ―mainstream accounts of the West-East divergence gain theoretical inspiration from Max Weber and/or Karl Marx, and have therefore traced the ―rise of the West to the unique social processes that apparently fostered capitalism in Europe. Critics have labelled these accounts ―Eurocentric insofar as they imply the inherent superiority of the West over the East,1 and they have offered alternative ―anti-Eurocentric narratives which ostensibly avoid such analytical and normative pitfalls. These critics have succeeded in directing our attention to experiences in the non-European world. However, they have sought to validate these experiences by simply extending (in space and time), rather than transcending, the problematic concepts and assumptions that plagued the ―Eurocentric Weberian and Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism. This paper argues that a truly non-Eurocentric approach requires a definitive break with these assumptions and the adoption of an alternative historical materialist understanding of the origins of capitalism pioneered by Robert Brenner. While not explicitly conceived as non-Eurocentric, Brenner‘s concept of social-property relations offers the surest foundation for understanding ―the great divergence‖ without doing violence to history or succumbing to European triumphalism.

Early modern India was an economic core region producing manifold textiles for export. During the sixteenth century a new customer entered the stage and expanded its influence from the city of Goa – Portugal. From early times, the Portuguese had bought and commissioned textiles, among them large embroideries from Bengal and Gujarat, which are the focus of this study. By providing European prints as models for the professional local embroiderers they created a novel product that was successful in Portugal and beyond throughout the seventeenth century. The textiles were deemed valuable and rare enough to be included in different travel accounts, letters and inventories, enabling us to trace their place of production, their transportation to Europe and their reception. Their intricate iconographies reflect political problematics of the time and shed light onto the intercultural circumstances of Portuguese colonial life. Barbara Karl is Curator of Textiles and Carpets at the MAK – Museum für Angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst in Vienna. WEITERE INFORMATIONEN UND DOWNLOADS FINDEN SIE UNTER WWW.BOEHLAU-VERLAG.COM. böhlau verlag ges.m.b.h. & co. kg, wiesingerstrasse 1, 1010 wien, österreich, t: + 43 1 330 24 27-0, f: + 43 1 330 24 32-77 info@boehlau-verlag.com, www.boehlau-verlag.com | wien köln weimar

Development is a complicated word. In its most benign form, everyone can agree that babies should not die from malnourishment or preventable disease. In its more contentious form, development can be understood as a discursive taxonomy and hierarchy of states and ways of knowing the world that manifests as neo-imperialism. In this seminar, we consider how the modern notion of " development " as a contested discourse and practice came into existence. In particular, we will seek to better our understanding of how the colonial encounter in different parts of the world created the empirical and conceptual conditions, categories, and relations out of which the idea of modern development has emerged. We will consider the evolving colonial idea of "improvement " as it applied to peoples, places, and cosmologies, reading primary and secondary texts that will offer students of International Development Studies a strong intellectual foundation in the study and practice of "development."

The original intention of Charles de Foucauld was to prepare the arrival of the missionaries in the Hoggar, by composing a Tuareg lexicon and grammar. Then the collection of poems became for him a goal in itself. The six thousand verses he has collected are one of the few documents that allow us to hear the voice of the Tuaregs of the pre-colonial era.

The authors suggest to view the origins of Islam against the background of the 6th century AD Arabian socio-ecological crisis whose model is specified in the paper through the study of climatological, seismological, volcanological and epidemiological history of the period. Most socio-political systems of the Arabs reacted to the socio-ecological crisis by getting rid of the rigid supra- tribal political structures (kingdoms and chiefdoms) which started posing a real threat to their very survival. The decades of fighting which led to the destruction of most of the Arabian kingdoms and chiefdoms (reflected in Ayyãm al- 'Arab tradition) led to the elaboration of some definite "anti- royal" freedom-loving tribal ethos. At the beginning of the 7th century tribes which would recog- nise themselves as subjects of some terrestrial super-tribal political authority, the "king", risked to lose its honour. However, this seems not to be applicable to the authority of another type, the "ce- lestial" one. At the meantime the early 7th century evidences the merging of the Arabian tradition of prophecy and the Arabian Monotheist "Rahmanist" tradition which produced "the Arabian pro- phetic movement". The Monotheist "Rahmanist" prophets appear to have represented a supratribal authority just of the type many Arab tribes were looking for at this very time, which seems to ex- plain to a certain extent those prophets' political success (including the extreme political success of Muhammad).

This is the introduction to a collection of essays edited under the title Global History and Microhistory, which was published as a supplement volume of Past & Present in November 2019.  The whole volume is available open access at the following link:
https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/242/Supplement_14

Andrei Znamenski argues that socialism arose out of activities of secularized apocalyptic sects, the Enlightenment tradition, and dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution. He examines how, by the 1850s, Marx and Engels made the socialist creed “scientific” by linking it to “history laws” and inventing the proletariat—the “chosen people” that were to redeem the world from oppression. Focusing on the fractions between social democracy and communism, Znamenski explores why, historically, socialism became associated with social engineering and centralized planning. He explains the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and its role in fostering the cultural left that came to privilege race and identity over class. Exploring the global retreat of the left in the 1980s–1990s and the “great neoliberalism scare,” Znamenski also analyzes the subsequent renaissance of socialism in wake of the 2007–2008 crisis

In the paper, we express some doubts about one of the assumptions
of Robert Carneiro’s model on state (and chiefdom) formation,
namely the role of circumscription. In our opinion, the main flaw of
Carneiro’s original theory of state formation is that it implicitly
assumes that every community dreamt to conquer its neighboring
communities. We test the presence of various types of warfare (such
as conquest warfare, land acquisition warfare, and plunder warfare)
in societies with different degrees of political centralization.
Quantitative cross-cultural tests reveal a rather strong correlation
between political complexity and the presence of conquest warfare
suggesting that conquest warfare was virtually absent among
independent communities. Newer works by Carneiro propose a
model explaining how simple chiefdoms could appear in the absence
of conquest warfare. This model also includes circumscription, but
our analysis suggests that it is unnecessary.

Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers answers to these questions from a dynamic group of leading critical scholars. They challenge the theory and history offered by the most significant environmental concept of our times: the Anthropocene. But are we living in the Anthropocene, literally the “Age of Man”? Is a different response more compelling, and better suited to the strange—and often terrifying—times in which we live? The contributors to this book diagnose the problems of Anthropocene thinking and propose an alternative: the global crises of the twenty-first century are rooted in the Capitalocene; not the Age of Man but the Age of Capital.

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.

Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe’s self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers’ experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of “Europeanization.”

Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era—important cultural artifacts in their own right—and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.
ISBN: 978-0-271-07320-0

This article dispels the idea of incompatibility between feminism and religion. To that end, it argues that the intersection of feminism and religion mirrors the diverse ways in which religious folk interpret scripture, perform devotional rituals, inhabit religious institutions, and transform their societies. The first section addresses some key debates and methodologies. The next section examines how religious feminists have acknowledged certain problematic elements in their faith traditions, on the one hand, and how feminist scholars have studied the interplay among religion, power, and Western feminism, on the other hand. The third section discusses the provincialization of secular feminism on the part of historians, feminist theologians, and anthropologists of religion. The penultimate section sheds light on the centering of goddesses and female role models and focuses on the writings of Delores S. Williams and Vasudha Narayanan. The final section examines how feminist theologians appropriate religious authority through scriptural hermeneutics and women’s leadership in religious communities.

Stella Ghervas (2018). "The Black Sea", in Oceanic Histories, ed. David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 234-266.

Abstract of the volume:
"Oceanic Histories is the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water. Leading historians trace the history of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and the world's seas from the Arctic and the Baltic to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan/Korea's East Sea, over the longue durée. Individual chapters trace the histories and the historiographies of the various oceanic regions with special attention to the histories of circulation and particularity, the links between human and non-human history and the connections and comparisons between parts of the World Ocean. Showcasing oceanic history as a field with a long past and a vibrant future, these authoritative surveys, original arguments and guides to research make this volume an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike."

At the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru were among the countries participating in the most important world's fairs in Europe and North America. These mass gatherings focused on national self-images as well as technological development and commodities, but the Latin American exhibition organizers also understood them to be transnational spaces that contributed to the mobility of persons, objects, and knowledge. In this context, the scientific display of pre-Columbian 'antiquities' was regarded as being as important as the participation in archaeological and anthropological congresses. By understanding the world's fairs as 'spaces of global knowledge', this article highlights the agency of Latin American scientists, intellectuals, and collectors in the transnational endeavour to create a 'Latin American antiquity' at the fairgrounds. Although most fair attendees sought to study and display the pre-Columbian past in an objective manner, the older dream of reconstructing the splendour of America's ancient civilizations never completely vanished.

Power Point presentation in support of the
Seminar de Historia Global Prof. Dr. Guido Abbattista (Università degli Studi di Trieste https://www.units.it/) Rotte marittime globali. Un geodatabase storico della navigazione globale (1500-1900) martes 1 de junio 2012 h 10 am -11:30 am Lima time, 5 p. m. CET
Link meet.google.com/yxk-rirj-qre

This is a poignant moment to contemplate the sea, and mankind's relationship to it. The pressures of climate change and human activity—from large-­scale aquaculture to container shipping, from mineral extraction to deep-­sea exploration—have affected the oceans and the marine life on which we depend, usually not for the better. As Lincoln Paine conclusively demonstrates in this magisterial work, the seas are also a crucial, perhaps even central, point of focus in the story of human civilization. Paine opens the book by declaring that he wants to change the way we see the world--by re-orienting our attention to the three-quarters of the planet that is blue, and composing a longue durée history that places water, not land, at the center of global development and transformation. ...

Förord till Sebastian Conrad, "Globalhistoria: En introduktion" (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2015)

Globalhistoria har på senare år blivit en av historievetenskapens viktigaste grenar. I dagens globaliserade värld låter sig historien inte längre lika självklart som förr begränsas till behandlingen av enskilda länders historia. I stället har intresset för gränsöverskridande processer och globala sammanflätningar ökat kraftigt.

Men hur skriver man globalhistoria och vad omfattar ämnet? Handlar det om hela vår planets historia? Om den mänskliga artens? Om ”Big History”, tiden sedan the big bang? Eller handlar det snarare om ett visst perspektiv som kan anläggas även i en undersökning av en liten bys historia? Vilka frågor kan bäst besvaras utifrån ett globalt perspektiv och vilka samband hamnar då i förgrunden?

Sebastian Conrad, en av Tysklands mest välkända globalhistoriker, ger i den här boken en åskådlig introduktion till forskningsfältet med hjälp av konkreta exempel och presenterar centrala frågor och teorier samt viktiga teman och motsättningar. Han visar samtidigt att globala synsätt inte är något radikalt nytt – och inte heller något som har uppnåtts enbart tack vare västerländska tänkare.

Bokens svenska förord är skrivet av Johan Östling.

This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonialism during smallpox outbreaks in eighteenth-century Guatemala, when the state extended inoculation programmes to its predominant, culturally diverse Maya communities. Evidence from anti-epidemic campaigns shows public debates broadly comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis: debates about the measurably higher mortality rates for indigenous people and other marginalized groups; debates about the extent of the state’s responsibility for the health of its peoples; and debates on whether or not coercion and violence should be used to ensure compliance with quarantines and public health campaigns. While inoculations provided medical assistance and material help to Maya communities, and resulted in demonstrably lower mortality rates from smallpox, at the same time they functioned as avenues for the expansion of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of people in those communities, ch...

Fiscal history is a booming field of research that shines a new light on colonial state formation, the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and the political economy of colonialism in Africa. The fiscal history of colonial Africa has been interpreted on different levels: local, colonial, imperial and global. This case study on colonial taxation in the Congo Basin emphasizes the importance of an additional historical layer. I argue that trans-colonial and trans-imperial connections are essential to take into account in order to fully understand the fiscal histories of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo, and the French Congo. The two Congos continuously had to adjust their customs policies to fiscal decision-making across the border.

When looking back on the spiritual experiences of women in the Middle Ages, often times we seek to understand the experiences through a pathological contextualization - ultimately assigning a diagnosis to explain their encounters. Women such as Joan of Arc and Hildegard of Bingen both experienced spiritual revelations where in which they appeared to have been communicating with a higher power through auditory, visual, and sensory incidences, which could easily be understood as hallucinations. However, while their experiences may fit into a diagnostic model and possibly the criteria for mental illness such as schizophrenia, it is important to understand and contextualize their experiences from a myriad of perspectives. Therefore, this paper examines the spiritual experiences of these women from psychological, spiritual, and cognitive directions, while exploring their unique and individual experiences. Additionally, their childhood experiences and idiosyncratic personal histories are explored as an illustrative framework for the way in which these women’s experiences occurred, emerged, and manifested.

Evoking the painful failure of overcoming the fallout of centuries of slavery in the United States and conjuring up the specter of state-enforced apartheid in South Africa, “segregation” nowadays appears to be almost ubiquitously condemned, but at the same time seemingly impossible to eradicate. Looking at (primarily urban, spatial, ethnic) segregation from a global angle, this seminar will reveal that the phenomenon has indeed plagued a great many societies since 1500, albeit in varying degrees and changing forms. Starting from recent arguments by historians (esp. Nightingale 2012) that segregation was primarily the result of state action, this seminar looks beyond the classic cases of the U.S. and South Africa in order to ask to what extent we should understand segregation as a side effect of the history of increasing global connectedness. Moving from rarely studied examples, such as 17th-century Ayutthaya, to better-known cases of late 19th-century Atlantic immigration cities, such as Buenos Aires, the seminar thus seeks to tease out the reasons and consequences of urban ethnic unmixing through wide-ranging comparisons.

Kann ein einzelner Sammelband die historische Erzählung eines Landes aus global-
historischer Perspektive neu justieren? Dieses hochgesteckte Ziel setzen sich die Herausgeber:innen von Histoire Mondiale de la France, publiziert im Jahr 2017. 2019 ist eine englischsprachige Übersetzung unter dem Titel France in the World erschienen. Anhand von 131 nur wenige Seiten kurzen Kapiteln zu einzelnen Jahreszahlen von 34.000 v. Chr. bis 2015 n. Chr. soll die französische Geschichte aus globalhistorischer Perspektive neu erzählt werden.

Reseña a “De Yuval Noah Harari, De animales a dioses. Breve historia de la humanidad, México, Penguin Random House, 2018, 493 pp., en Letras Históricas, UDG, 2019, publicado en línea (http://letrashistoricas.cucsh.udg.mx/index.php/LH/article/view/7190).

In: Fabio Cozman, Guilherme Plonski, Hugo NerI (Org.). Inteligência artificial: avanços e tendências. São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Avançados, 2021, p. 225-260.


Em um tempo em que mais da metade da população mundial acessa a internet deixando registro de suas comunicações em trocas de e-mails, de seus pensamentos ou crenças em tweets ou de sua vida familiar compartilhando fotos online, dentre inúmeras angústias, surge uma menos evidente hoje: como pesquisar essas diferentes experiências no futuro? Como dominar a complexidade da construção de novas narrativas sobre o passado diante de tantos traços da experiência humana agora preservados?

Este capítulo busca fazer uma avaliação do que William McAllister chamou de “Big Bang documental”, sobretudo através do reconhecimento de como registros textuais criados, armazenados e acessados em formatos digitais desafiam pesquisadores das Ciências Humanas, em geral, e historiadores, em particular, em seus ofícios. Ao mesmo tempo, preocupa-se em identificar quais métodos (como Aprendizado de Máquina e Processamento de Linguagem Natural) e parâmetros podem ser aplicados ou desenvolvidos para um tempo em que suportes como Facebook e Twitter tornam-se tanto registros da experiência humana como arquivos históricos. Finalmente, com uma preocupação em transpor esse conhecimento para outras áreas de aplicação, como jornalismo, análise de redes sociais ou de mercado consumidor, procura refletir sobre como contornar os desafios tecnológicos para tornar o trabalho com documentos textuais em larga escala e não estruturados acessível a pesquisadores, formuladores de políticas públicas ou quaisquer interessados de uma forma abrangente e útil.

Texto base da apresentação “Arquivos e narrativas sem fronteiras” no evento Inteligência Artificial e suas Aplicações: Avanços e Tendências, de 25 de junho de 2019, da série Strategic Workshops do Instituto de Estudos Avançados da USP (Acesso online http://www.iea.usp.br/midiateca/video/videos-2019/inteligencia-artificial-e-suas-aplicacoes-avancos-e-tendencias-parte-1-de-2).

Come nasce il termine rifugiato? Come si è giunti all'attuale definizione di tale categoria migratoria? Il presente articolo ripercorre la storia della sua evoluzione, analizzando processi e avvenimenti che hanno reso questa figura ciò che è oggi. Frutto di un cortocircuito del sistema politico westfaliano, lo sviluppo del suo profilo contemporaneo rappresenta per certi aspetti il "negativo" dell'idea occidentale di libera circolazione. Ripercorrere tali vicende, contribuisce a mettere in luce le debolezze alla base delle distinzioni fra categorie migratorie.

How the term refugee was born? How did this migration category become what it is today? This article retraces the history of its evolution, analysing processes and events that contributed to shape this figure as we know it. The refugee's contemporary figure emerged from a breakdown in Westphalian international political system and then it developed to some extent in opposition to the western idea of freedom of circulation. The historical path of this type of migration highlights how weak are migrants categories' distinctions.

From an anthropic perspective, explorers, merchants, and imperialists were for a long time the visible engines of the worldwide breathing. The 20th century reactivated the environmental rights of both sedentary and nomadic populations against the speculative exploitation of the world to satiate a pernicious bourgeois curiosity. In the light of the heterogeneous local legacies, revisited by a globalscape (i.e. Sustainable Development), cultural landscape resists to maintain its identity.


2021, MANNISI Alban, “Other Territorilisation Regime”. In Carlos Tapia, Alban Mannisi (eds) ReciprociUdad, Design Diplomacy in Seville, Recolectores Urbanos, Málaga, 2021, pp. 27-45