The Aims and Achievements of Global History

Interview with Sebastian Conrad

Marek Tamm

[This interview was made in March 2018 and published in Estonian in the Estonian edition of Sebastian
Conrad’s What is Global History?: Sebastian Conrad, Mis on globaalne ajalugu? Tallinn: Tallinn
University Press, 2018, pp. 243–256. This is the original English version of the interview, made
available with the kind consent of the interviewee.]

Global history is probably one of the most rapidly developing forms of history writing in
contemporary academia. It is easy to explain this phenomenon by referring to the
globalisation of present-day spatial experience – “global spatiality implies global history”, as
Prasenjit Duara and his colleagues have observed.1 But does the popularity of global history
respond mainly to a new social demand or can we find some explanations for its success also
from the internal developments of the professional history writing?

The process of globalization – not only economically, but also socially, culturally etc. – remains
the major background condition of the emergence of global history as a field (further
facilitated by the rise of the internet and digitization). It is hard to conceive of a global turn
like the one that we have been witnessing without the breakdown of the Cold War order and
the rise of globalization. That said, there are also factors internal to scholarship and to the
discipline of history that have helped bring this change about. Some of the approaches that
global history can build on, such as comparative history (and in some ways also microhistory
as an early form of challenging the thinking in national containers), date back to the 1970s
and 1980s and thus predate the rhetoric of globalization.

Global history emerged very much in reaction to national history, out of the need to move
beyond “methodological nationalism” that took the nation-state as the natural and constant
unit of observation through all historical transformations. You open your first book, “The
Quest for the Lost Nation”, with a quotation from German historian Hermann Heimpel who
declared in 1959: “There can be no doubt, that the era of a historical perspective based purely
on the nation-state has come to an end. Historical studies must take a leap into the planetary
future, even when examining the past.”2 However, British historian Christopher Bayly has
written some years ago with good reasons “that evolutionary nationalist historicism remains,
at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dominant form of historical understanding

1
Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, Andrew Sartori, “Introduction”, in Ead. (eds), A Companion to Global Historical
Thought, Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2014, p. 1.
2
Sebastian Conrad, The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American
Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. p. 1 (German edition: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen
Nation. Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan, 1945–1960, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1999).
across much of the world”.3 How would you evaluate the impact of global history on
contemporary history writing and on historical culture more generally? Have we made any
real progress in contesting the confines of national history?

In general, I agree with Bayly’s assessment. We have many statements of the kind uttered by
Hermann Heimpel – not only in the 1950s, but much earlier. Not all of the historians asking
for broader (and global) perspectives, however, had in mind the kind of global history
approach that I would champion. Frequently, the call to go global was not a call to move away
from national paradigms – but rather a call for a broader framework, a grander stage for the
nation. But apart from such difference in approach, the current vogue of global history is still
very much the agenda of a small minority. In many countries, global approaches have hardly
arrived at all; but also in Europe or the Anglophone world, institutionally speaking, the more
traditional approaches still prevail.

Global history, taken seriously, challenges most of the Western historiographic concepts. If we
really want to move beyond the Eurocentrism in historical research, then it means that we
have to give up an important part of our historiographic vocabulary, not adapted for a global
use, but even more, we will need to develop new ways of periodization, because the early
modern invention of the three-part temporal classification (Antiquity, Middle Ages and
Modernity) is not necessarily pertinent in global historical research. Do you have some ideas
how do develop a new conceptual toolbox for a truly global history or is it possible at all?

This is an interesting question – and indeed, the model of periodization was very much the
product of a particular reading of the European past. In many other societies beyond the
West, historians struggled to come up with analogues periods that were able to accord with
this Western chronology.4 How to move beyond such a Eurocentric paradigm? One strategy
would be to opt for many local chronologies – at the price, however, of making it difficult to
speak across fields and regions. Much more common, however, are attempts to delink the
conventional periodization from its European origins, and from its teleological narratives.
Instead of BC (before Christ), we now read BCE (before the common era) – a symbolic shift
that however leaves most of the problem unaddressed. More interesting are the attempts to
establish a global early modernity, roughly from 1400 through 1800; this periodization is
invested less with a sense of an early and fledgling (but not entirely achieve) modernity, and
instead focuses on links, connections, interactions.5 The respective volume of the Cambridge

3
Christopher Bayly, “History and World History”, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), A Concise Companion to History,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 13
4
Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1995; Thomas Keirstead, “Inventing Medieval Japan: The History and Politics of National
Identity”, The Medieval History Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (1998), 47–71.
5
Lynn Struve, “Introduction”, in: Lynn Struve (ed.), The Qing Formation in World Historical Time, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 1–54.

2
World History, for example, is called: “The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800”.6 In a
recent volume of the History of the World that I have edited together with Jürgen
Osterhammel, we selected 1750-1870 as the cut-off dates, as we felt that from a global
history perspective, the 1880s (and not, as is common, the First World War) are a major
turning point.7 None of these chronologies, however, get us completely away from some of
the assumptions that we would like to see challenged.

Does global history have chronological restrictions? I have in mind that global history has
normally limited its field of observation to relatively short time spans (maximum one or two
centuries). But one could ask whether it would be possible to integrate the long-term dynamics
into the practice of global history. Do you see a possibility for a global longue durée history,
without jeopardizing the source-critical approach (i.e. falling back to traditional universal
history)?

There are various different ways to do global history – and some of the most acclaimed
studies – such as works by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Victor Lieberman etc. – do
span many centuries.8 Some colleagues, such as David Armitage and Jo Guldi, explicitly ask
global historians to develop longue durée perspectives, and to move towards studies that
expand their temporal scale.9 But ultimately, these long-term studies tend to be of a different
kind, a different genre when compared to scholarly monographs. Once we go “deep”, chances
are that primary sources will be less relevant, or more precisely: that it will be difficult to
systematically work with primary sources. These long-term perspectives need not be
universal histories of the old-fashioned kind, and need not imply a teleological narrative. They
are nevertheless a different genre within the larger field of global history.

The success of global history is party explained also by a favourable political situation in late
1990s-early 2000s, when the globalisation was “the only game in town”. American historian
Jeremy Adelman has recently published a virulent (and much debated) critique of global
history10, asking “is global history still possible or has it had its moment”. He finds that “to
some extent, global history sounds like history fit for the now-defunct Clinton Global Initiative,
a shiny, high-profile endeavour emphasising borderless, do-good storytelling about our

6
Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (eds.), The Cambridge World History, vol. 6:
The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800, 2 parts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. See also
Charles S. Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010.
7
Sebastian Conrad, Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), An Emerging Modern World, 1750–1870 (A History of the World,
vol. 4), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
8
Jane Burbank, Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010; Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.
800–1830, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003–2009.
9
Jo Guldi, David Armitage, The History Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; David
Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
10
Jeremy Adelman, “What is global history now?”, Aeon Magazine (2 March 2017): https:// aeon.co/essays/is-
global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment (accessed 11 February 2018)

3
cosmopolitan commonness, global history to give globalisation a human face. It privileged
motion over place, histoires qui bougent (stories that move) over tales of those who got left
behind, narratives about others for the selves who felt some connection – of shared self-
interest or empathy – between far-flung neighbours of the global cosmopolis.” How would
you comment Adelman’s rather pessimistic diagnosis of the perspectives of global history in
an age of resurgent nationalism, populism and anti-globalism?

Jeremy Adelman is a good friend, and we regularly collaborate, organizing summer schools
and workshops in global history. For that reason, I was somewhat surprised to read his text
that some have read as an obituary to global history. I do not think he meant it that way, and
that much of the gloomy mood of that article can be explained by the moment in which it was
written, immediately after Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections in November, 2017.11
But in my opinion, the very rise of nationalism including slogans like “America First” cannot
be written off, as it may appear in Adelman’s article, as the opposite of globalization. Since
the nineteenth century, nationalism has developed in close relationship to transnational
global forces; in many respects, nationalism has been one of the effects of increasing trans-
regional interactions. The return of nationalist agendas in the post-2008 present is thus not a
sign of globalization’s demise, but rather of its continuing grip.
Moreover, there is the suspicion that the current backlash against globalization may also be
a verdict on global history as the study of mobility, flows, entanglement. But that, too, would
be short-sighted. Global historians may have been infatuated with movement and
connections, but many accounts of global processes are highly critical, and point out the social
cost of market integration, colonialism, and the unevenness of development. The critique of
globalization – from the left or the right – is not to be equated with a critique of global history
as an approach.
Finally, the appeal of populism in politics, and the rise of xenophobia, can hardly be
understood by focusing on internal conflicts and domestic forces alone. Seemingly
paradoxically, populist movements influenced each other across borders, in spite of their
staunchly isolationist rhetoric. Moreover, it is hard to explain the synchronous rise of populist
movements without recognizing the extent to which they were responses to global
challenges. Many of the transformative events in recent years – from the financial crisis to
the Arab spring and now the populist surge – unfolded as transnational processes. In other
words, to make sense of the present age, we need global approaches more than ever.

For quite a sometime the programmatic reflections on what global history is supposed to be
seemed to outnumber attempts to put all those theoretical recipes into historiographical
practice. Now the situation has changed, we have seen the publication of many ambitious
empirical studies into the global history, like, for instance, Jürgen Osterhammel’s Die

11
See also his more careful stance in Richard Drayton, David Motadel, Jeremy Adelman, David A. Bell,
“Discussion: The Futures of Global History”, Journal of Global History, vol. 13, no. 1 (2018), 1–21.

4
Verwandlung der Welt12 or Patrick Boucheron’s Histoire mondiale de la France13. Would you
present briefly some of the recent examples of global history writing you find particularly
interesting and innovative?

It is true that discussions in the field were dominated by programmatic and theoretical
contributions – and in a way, my own book is part of this state of affairs. But as you rightly
point out, there are now many fascinating empirical studies that are beginning to define the
field anew. I am less thinking of works like the ones that you have mentioned – which are,
after all, mostly based on secondary literature, and are thus mainly works of synthesis. There
are many studies that could be mentioned. I learned a lot from Vanessa Ogle’s analysis of the
establishment of world time; her book is particularly impressive as she is able to ground her
analysis in different historical contexts that require expertise in different countries and
languages.14 Michael Goebel’s study of interwar Paris as a meeting point for anti-colonial
activists from across the colonized world is, I think, a magisterial study that in interesting ways
links discussions about anti-colonial nationalism, and thus forms of ideology, to a social
history of the nationalist actors, and thus to a history of migration. This book not only sheds
an entirely different light on interwar Paris, but also brings a decidedly global perspective to
bear on the history of nationalisms that all have their own, separate, national
historiographies.15 I have also learned a lot from the works by Andrew Zimmerman, both his
earlier book on Togo and now his work on the revolutionary Atlantic.16 But there are now
many exciting new fields, such as global intellectual history17 or the history of “1968” in a
global perspective,18 and many more.

Next to global history, another most rapidly developing form of historical research is
environmental history. You briefly mention in your book that global and environmental history
have much in common, but would you elaborate on the perspectives of global environmental

12
Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, München: Beck, 2009
(English edition: The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014).
13
Patrick Boucheron (dir.), Histoire mondiale de la France, Paris: Seuil, 2017.
14
Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
15
Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. See also Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and
Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015; Daniel Brückenhaus,
Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
16
Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of
the New South, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
17
Samuel Moyn, Andrew Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013;
Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014; Cemil
Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2017.
18
Quinn Slobodian, Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012;
Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c.1950–
1976, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

5
history? One could argue that the global history becomes truly global only when it will englobe
not only humans but all forms of life into its field of study. But as much as I know, there are
not very many examples of a genuine cooperation between global and environmental
historians.

Environmental history seems like a natural ally of global history, as environmental

developments hardly stop at national borders; one would therefore think that they force
scholars to write environmental histories beyond the nation-state. But strangely enough, that
is not really the case, as much of environmental history nevertheless is written from a national
perspective.
But there are interesting developments in that field. The debate about the Anthropocene is
one such field. Whether one embraces that term or is sceptical, the discussion that has been
generated recently does open up new vistas.19 Very stimulating is also the work by sociologist
Jason W. Moore who brings a Marxist perspective to bear on environmental change, and sees
the exploitation of nature as one of the ingredients of the history of capitalism. For him, the
over-use of natural resources is one of the ways in which capitalism outsources its own
production costs and relies on the appropriation of what he calls “cheap nature” that does
not enter the balance sheets of companies and investors. Drawing on the work of Bruno
Latour, he also claims that the analytical difference between society and nature (what he calls
“Cartesian dualism”), as you suggest, needs to be overcome, thus moving the debate from
human history to the “web of life”.20

In search of new partners, I believe that next to environmental history, global history can learn
also very much from digital history. What do you think of the possibilities that the digital
history can offer to global history in terms of sources, both in access and in analysis?

Digital history, which very often is essentially digitized history, certainly has a lot to offer, and
it will help revolutionize several subfields in the discipline. At the same time, we need to be
careful not to get swayed by the enthusiasm with which the new gospel is spread, as the
digital turn may promise quantifiable insights that upon closer scrutiny are not at all self-
evident; they require, in other words, careful contextualization. My sense is that the
challenges, if not outright dangers, of digitized history become especially apparent in
transnational and global studies. As Lara Putnam has recently pointed out, the digitization of
materials makes them accessible for anyone, even without any expertise in that particular

19
See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Politics of Climate Change is More Than the Politics of Capitalism”,
Theory, Culture, and Society, vol. 34, nos. 2–3 (2017), 25–37.
20
Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso, 2015; Moore, “‘Amsterdam is Standing on
Norway’, Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire, and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648”, The Journal
of Agrarian Change 10 (2010), 33–68; Moore, “‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, Part II: The Global North
Atlantic in the Ecological Revolution of the Seventeenth Century”, The Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (2010),
188–227; Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature,
and the Future of the Planet, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

6
region and thus without the ability to contextualize these sources.21 Digitization and global
history may look like natural allies, but there is the danger that they are false friends.

How global is the global history? In other words, is the global history mostly a Western
phenomenon, or can we speak about the emergence of the global history all around the globe?
In your book, you seem not to believe yet in the global impact of global history, e.g.: “We must
first admit that well into the twenty-first century, global history remains primarily a domain
of the industrialized and economically privileged parts of the world.”22 Rather, you point
toward a danger to turn the global history into a new form of intellectual imperialism.

You are right, and I am afraid that the above statement is still true. The situation is of course
very different from place to place, but a quick summary could be that one has to be able to
afford global perspectives. On one level, this refers to the material conditions of scholarship
– a PhD with a global perspective requires extended language studies, archival trips to far-
away places, and libraries with holdings that cover more than the national history of that
place. But it also refers to the politics of global history – the approach seems to have more
resonance in places where the nation-state is firmly in place, and where scholars can safely
challenge national myths without endangering the life of the community (or, alternatively,
use global history to project their nation onto a global stage). By contrast, such an
intervention may seem less urgent in places where national historiographies were less well
hedged, and where national identities seem less stable. Global history therefore may not be
equally important to everyone. And finally, at present it is indeed a scholarly fashion that is
most prominent in well-off countries of the so-called “West,” and that fact alone may create
unease and skepticism.

You have been over the last few years in charge of building a joint MA programme in global
history at the Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. What is your
experience so far, both in positive and negative terms?

The joint MA program has been a fantastic experience. The program started with a small
cohort in 2012, but by now we have 200-300 applications every year, close to 80% of which
from outside of Germany. We are very fortunate to be able to attract wonderful students,
and teaching in this program has been a treat, both personally and intellectually. The only
real challenge that we face is to be able to recruit more students from countries outside of
Western Europe and the North Atlantic world, as that is where most of them come from.
Programs in global history and global studies are now emerging in many places, but what we
see as our specific agenda is to link a global approach with area studies expertise. Our
philosophy, if that’s what you can call it, is not to train historians who know something about

21
Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,”
American Historical Review 121 (2016), 377–402.
22
Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 215.

7
everywhere; but rather, to convey an understanding of global developments and then
encourage students to link them to one particular place – a country, a city, a region. Global
history requires a deep knowledge of one place, including its history and its language.
One of the great things about the program is the very lively student culture and student
community that has emerged. Apart from the seminars and workshops, the students have
organized an annual student conference – organized and run entirely by students, and all
papers are given by students who come from around the world to Berlin for that purpose.23
Another such activity is Global History: A Student Journal, again organized and run entirely
for, and by, students.24 This way, students are taking global history into their own hands, are
hijacking it for their purposes.

Academic history, since its inception in the early 19th century, has been defined by the source-
based research and close textual reading (the famous Quellenkritik). Global history tends to
favour the practice of distant and second-hand reading, because of its scope and the variety
of possible source materials. How do keep alive the traditional strengths of historical research
also in global history writing? What kind of skills the global history demands from its
practitioners?

You are right to point out that global history, in the larger public, is frequently associated with
the large synthesis books that are essentially based on the mining of the secondary literature.
At the level of research, however, these works do not really represent the dynamics of the
field. Much of the good work that is produced today, by PhD students and beyond, are case
studies that link very concrete issues and events to larger structures – but without giving up
on the standards of the discipline. A PhD in global history will have to use primary sources,
and be attentive to the nuances and ambivalences of the sources, just like any other historical
work. True, a transnational or global approach may require scholars to use archives in
multiple languages, and will thus pose particular challenges; but global history should by no
means be “history light”.

You start this book with a quotation from Christopher Baily, “All historians are world historians
now, though many have not yet realized it.” This leads me to ask whether you believe that in
the long run, the very label of “global” could become superfluous? You point toward this
perspective at the end of your book, writing that “the gradual disappearance of the rhetoric
of the “global” will then, paradoxically, signal the victory of global history as a paradigm.”25
Your colleague Dominic Sachsenmaier has made a similar point a few years earlier, arguing
that the term “global history” may eventually no longer be used, but, he adds immediately, “it
hardly seems possible that historiography will revert back to a state in which many of its

23
https://globalhistorystudentconference.wordpress.com
24
http://www.globalhistories.com/index.php/GHSJ
25
Conrad, What is Global History?, p. 235.

8
spatial categories remained largely unchallenged”.26 Would you expound a little your vision
for the future of the “global history”? Shall we become indeed all global historians, even
without realizing this?

Indeed, this is, I think (and hope) what will happen. At the current conjuncture, the label
“global history” remains necessary to effect important changes in the discipline, both
intellectually and institutionally. But once it has been accepted that historical processes do
not necessarily stop at national borders, and once curricula and syllabi have changed, we will
arrive at a moment where the main distinction will be between good and bad history, instead
of global versus parochial. This will also imply that at some point, it will no longer be necessary
to prove that everyone and everything was globally entangled. Instead, the focus on
specificity and local particularity will become much more important – no longer as
uniqueness, but as specificity within the framework of global processes. The other major
frontier of global history will be to be more inclusive, and to overcome the “Northern” and
“Western” bias of much global history writing today.27 While currently the subject matter has
been globalized, the protagonists of such global history writing are still predominantly based
in the industrialized world. In some ways, then, we will all be global historians, but what the
“global” means is bound to change.

26
Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 245.
27
See the recent overview in Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Global History, Globally: Research
and Practice around the World, London: Bloomsbury, 2018.